It Isn't Just a Cookie

I'm a minority. Asian, to be exact. I'm also female. And I go to Berkeley. Got in fair and square.


There was a protest and subsequent counter-protest on campus today against and for affirmative action (respectively). If you haven't heard, California's governor, Jerry Brown, will be making a decision on whether or not to veto Senate Bill 185 (SB 185), which, if passed, will allow racial background, economic background, social-geographical background, among others, to be allowed into consideration (just like extracurriculars) in the admissions processes at UC and Cal State campuses. As a protest against this bill, a club called the Berkeley College Republicans decided to prove a point by holding a satirical bake sale, and advertising it in an equally satirical way. They said they will be holding said bake sale across from an Associated Student Union sponsored call-center booth that would be helping students call the governor's office to urge him to sign the bill. BCR advertised that they would be selling their baked goods like the way affirmative action would work: $2 for whites, $1.50 for Asians, $1.00 for Latinos, $0.75 for Blacks, and $0.50 for Native Americans. All women will get a $0.25 discount. Now, I didn't have any issue with what was written. To me, when I read it, it was just a bunch of angry, unsatisfied kids, lashing out at people around them since they aren't good enough and aren't hard working enough to try and be better. But many other took this to offense. Even the Associated Student Union (acronym is ASUC) unanimously condemned it as did the chancellor of the school, BCR decided to go ahead with the event. Many people, of all ethnicities, found that such a comparison was trivializing legitimate struggles of many minorities. While a good amount of people remained level-headed and argued their case, other conversations got heated and turned ugly.


As a result, a counter-protest was organized. The counter protest wasn't so much against BCR, but moreso against prejudices and rallied for SB 185. I guess my roommate happened to walk by the plaza this was happening in while it was in full swing. When I got back to the apartment, she immediately asked me about it wondering what it was. At least a couple hundred kids had gone out in support of the counter-rally, dressed in black, and laid down on the very plaza BCR was holding their bake sale. I explained the situation, to which she replied, "What a waste of time, and space. They're just annoying. It's not going to matter, nothing's going to happen except maybe a bunch of kids getting some sunburns." I didn't like that she, just like BCR, trivialized the initiative the protestors took, and considered it a waste of time. After all, all that protesting did bring Berkeley, briefly, to the top of Google news, and brought news reporters from all over flocking to our campus. That's hardly "nothing." My roommate then went on to say how affirmative action is just bad since it's using race and that's not putting people on equal footing. I, again, tried to nonchalantly explain to her that affirmative action, or SB 185, was not purely based on race. Even if race was taken out of the equation, those same races would be treated the same way. I explained that this is so much more than just an issue on race. Proponents and opponents of SB 185 don't see that. It's not just race. If anything, it's looking at an economic issue, a social issue, a historical issue; it takes geographical location into consideration too. It's such a complex issue and 9 out of 10 people (both for and against) just don't seem to see that. They only see race.


But she just waved me off and said whatever. I don't think I can ever understand her apathy.


So why did I type that first line of this blog? Go ahead, you can scroll back up and read it again if you forgot. If not, that's fine too. I said it because I agree with SB 185. I think it should be signed into affect. And if people have so much issue with race, then get rid of the race part, but still consider the rest. I mentioned all those things about me because I would benefit from SB 185 in some ways, and I wouldn't in others. It may even be bad for me in other cases. But the point is, I'm already in. I'm already at the school, no thanks to affirmative action and the like. I have absolutely no stake in this argument. Nor do the kids that are for and against it. At least, not on a personal level. If anything, I'd be against SB 185 because if I could do it, well then you can too! But that's not the point. We're all in one of the best universities in the world already. It shouldn't "matter" to us anymore. Yet people still fight for their beliefs, because of what they believe their fellow human beings should get. And I love that. I love that these kids, despite what all the media and many adults say about them, they keep on proving them wrong. We, as a generation, keep going. Because contrary to what Mr. So-and-so may say or what someone like my roommate does, we do listen, we do act, and we do care. And there's nothing anybody can say or do about it.

Rant 2.5

I originally posted this on my DailyBooth, but I figured might as well repost it here. It's definitely long enough.


I'm resisting the urge to rant about my roommate right now. And to think, she went so long without pissing me off; I was even considering possibly not moving at the end of the year. But she just renewed my bubbling annoyance that is growing into dislike for her.


However, I'm not going to stop myself ranting about another subject. There's a club on campus called the Berkeley College Republicans. Next Friday, they're protesting Affirmative Action right across from an Affirmative Action phone bank. They'll be selling baked goods, with pricing based on your ethnicity. Except the satirical piece they wrote to promote this event was extremely, and utterly racist and narrow-minded. To be honest, when I read it, I didn't think too much of it. It was just a bunch of insufficient, angry kids, who are unsatisfied with themselves and too lazy to do better, and thus wanted to take their anger out on everybody around them (i.e. everybody better than them). But their post incited a lot of anger, and while a good amount of people were stating how wrong their actions were in a very level-headed manner, there were those who just outright either cussed them out, or called them names. And that doesn't help, does it? I don't understand why people do that. I can understand if you're doing that, and you're a little kid. I know I definitely did that when I was younger. But c'mon, you guys are supposed to be a bunch of young adults, going to one of the best universities in the world. Surely, you could form more coherent thoughts?


And going along that line, same with all the Facebook complaints. The moment when Facebook updated again, I cannot count the number of friends who posted statuses complaining how horrible the new Facebook was. It was like the end of the world had occurred or something. Everybody knows that you're only hating on Facebook's changes to be "cool," and you'll be used to the changes within an hour or two of them taking place. People have to understand that things like Facebook are companies, products, and technologies. You cannot expect them to remain stagnant. They will develop, grow, and advance. Yes, sometimes, they don't work out, but most of the time, they do. So please, just shut up.

How Does it Look? (Edited)

Have you ever written or said something and unbelievably regretted it afterwards?

I certainly have, and while you may think this is one of those cases, it is not. I don't "unbelievably regret it" but I do somewhat regret it, and am a bit embarrassed about how I worded the post. And as such, I have deleted it and replaced it with this drivel.

If you're curious about what the original post entailed, it was an uninteresting rambling of appearance, and my habitual over-detailing of said appearances and not really getting out what I meant. Really, you didn't miss out on much, if anything at all.

Braincrack!: What If You Could Create a Memory?

After that long ass blog post from yesterday, I wanted to write this down too, but figured I should space it out a little.

So Wong Fu Productions recently released a video called Shell. The premise behind the short film was something along the lines of "What if you could create a memory? What would it be?" The lead male character, played by Chris Dinh, is comforting the lead female character, played by Mimi Chao. Their relationship, up to that point, appears to be that of close friends. Chris's character picks up a large shell and listens. Handing it off to Mimi's character, he talks about how the sound, or memory, of the ocean is captured in that shell. He then asks the question. She doesn't quite follow his train of thought and says that the memory would be fake, but speaks her thought process and say you wouldn't know it'd be fake. She then asks him what his memory would be. As he explains, we see his created memory taking place. He doesn't say, but we see that he likes Mimi's character, and his memory would be that of a relationship with her. But he stops short, before the memory shows the two kissing in the sunset. She realizes what he's saying and turns the pseudo-memory into reality, albeit in a different location and under different circumstances.

The short film was really well made. It was shot in the classic Wes cinematography style, and I love his style. But I had a thought while watching this. So what if you really could create memories? I know for readings I've done here and there that your brain sometimes does create false memories. So even if what you're saying is not true, if you're misremembering, you can still truly believe the memory is real. But what if, in some not so distant future, a technology gets introduced that allows you to literally create a scene, a memory, of anything, and put it into your brain? What if this new, and very direct, form of entertainment (like an exhilarating memory of base jumping even though you've never been, or the memory of the fun you had on a trip you never took) goes awry? What if people flood their brains with too many false memories that you can't tell what's real and what's not? What if rash decisions were made? What would happen to the world?

I think it'd be a cool basis for another sci-fi film. If I had the resources and confidence to make something of it, I would, but alas, I'm even too nervous to shoot a simple cinematography centric video I've had planned out for over a year showing a day in Berkeley.

Changing Tides

It's interesting how our opinions shift over time.

Sometimes, it's something as simple as food preference. For example, when I was a little kid, I hated onions. Absolutely abhorred them. If I got them in sandwiches, or found them in dishes my mom cooked for us, I'd pick them out and make a little pile on the sandwich wrapper or a napkin. And my mother and eldest brother would chastise me for this. While my mom would explain the health benefits of onions, my brother would say the same but add "onions are tasty, how could you not like them!?" But no matter how much they tried to convince me otherwise, I just couldn't bring myself to liking the bulbous things. But all of a sudden, when I was in high school I think, I started liking them. When given a choice of yes to onions or no to onions on burgers or sandwiches, I'd just say yes. And given a hotdog, I'd have to put onions on there (relish too, and I used to dislike relish as well); to the point where if there weren't diced onions on my hotdog, it wasn't complete.

But the kind of changing opinions that prompted me to write this blog post wasn't my taste preference for onions. No, it was how my career choice had changed over time, and accompanying those career choice changes were also a very strong set of opinions. I've always been praised on how dead set I am on my career path and how specific I was. From since I was around 8 years old, I declared I wanted to be a doctor, an MD, work in a big hospital, maybe on the East Coast. And while I still hold true to that (I've since added more to "locations I want to work," still a big hospital though), the specialties sure have changed.

From as far back as I can remember, I hadn't wanted to become a doctor at all. I wanted to be a "fossil finder!" which was the only term I knew to describe it at the young age of 5-6 years old. I wanted it so badly, I even went and figured out the actual term was paleontologist, and forced myself to remember how to say and spell it from 6-7 years old. I loved dinosaurs. I even had books on dinosaurs. Not the kiddy cartoon kinds, but computer animated, scientific books. I gave that up at around 8 years old. Why? Well I can actually explain this one. Simple. Because my parents made fun of me. It wasn't in a menacing way. They just poked fun, saying things like "Your brothers want to be scientists and inventors! Your oldest brother is going to work with new technology and bring comfort into our lives. Your other elder brother is going to invent new medicines that will make our lives better. What will you give us? An old bone?" Whenever I bring this up now, my mom always waves it off saying they were just kidding. But at kindergarten age, how was I supposed to know that? In any case, I've let it go. I know I love natural history, and analyzing myself now, paleontology would still be a great path for me. I'm best at the subjects in school that directly relate to that, but it's okay.

Then I went straight for the medical career. Like the good little stereotypical Asian child. But I did genuinely want to become a doctor. It was in my field of interest, and it still played on my strengths. At the very beginnings of this career path, I had wanted to be a pediatrician. Or an "eye doctor" which I, again, researched and found out its proper name; an ophthalmologist. I can't remember now why I ever wanted to be a pediatrician. Perhaps, the pediatrician and the eye doctor were the only two types of doctors I knew at the time. In any case, by the time I dropped pediatrician, and decided on ophthalmologist, I had a solid reason. This was around late elementary, all the way through at least 8th grade. I chose ophthalmology because I had spent a lot of time at eye clinics. You see, my eyes are terrible. Cover my left eye, and I can't see past the 5th or 6th line on an eye chart. Cover my right eye, well, I can't even see past the third line. My glasses lenses are -5.0 for the right, and -9.5 for the left, and they're still not the right prescription. I've had 3 different types (yes, that's a three, it's not a typo) of contact lenses to help correct my eye sight and to no avail. Of course, the relatively bad astigmatism doesn't help either. The point of all that is: I've spent a lot of time talking about the health of eyes. So interest developing in the area is expected.

But again, in high school, all of a sudden, I lost interest in becoming an ophthal. Not completely, like the pediatrician, but I felt like it was too specific. Of course, all specialties are specific, but it was just too small a part of the body for me. I started gaining interest in neurology and oncology. I dropped oncology pretty quickly because I had reasoned with myself saying "You've got to be very mentally secure with yourself to be able to do this job. Because statistically, a good percentage of your patients will die. And you will have met and built relationships with not only the patients, but their families and friends too. And you will see them deteriorate. And it won't only be adults or older folks. It'll be young otherwise healthy people, single parents, or kids even. Can you take that for you entire career?" So I ended up choosing neurology. Plus, I had a big interest in neurology; just how the human brain worked interested me a great deal. I also had a small inkling interest of emergency medicine, but I was unsure.

I got pretty gung-ho "MD with a specialty in neurology" after I made the decision. I read up on it. Whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to do with my future, I'd say specifically that. And when I applied for colleges, if it was offered, I would apply for neurobiology or neuro science. I even looked up a couple schools for their neuro-based specialty majors. I even connected with a renown neurosurgeon from a prestigious university for an interning possibility. I had gained permission from him, but his administrative boss wouldn't sign off on it because of my age. But again, I changed specialties towards the middle or end of my last year in high school. I'm still interested in it, but maybe not as my medical specialty. This was partly because of talks I was having with an older friend of mine who was forcing me to figure out just why I wanted to be a neurologist, and I realized... there wasn't really a reason. So I changed again, but less specific. Now, I'll say something like, "Oh yeah, I want to get my MD, and specialize in internal medicine, don't know what sub-specialty yet, maybe infectious diseases or something, or emergency medicine. But I won't know for sure until I actually try them out. I do want to work in a big hospital though. Probably a teaching hospital so there will be more research opportunities." The one thing I do know for sure, I definitely do not want to be a pediatrician.

And through this long narration of my career choice sub-changes, I've realized how dramatically my opinions had changed. I had gone from wanting to work with small children, to absolutely despising them. I don't like children. I inch away from people cooing at babies, or toddlers. I get frustrated and unbelievably annoyed when I hear a crying infant. I so abhor them that I even refer to different stages of an infant, even while still in the womb, by their proper terms (fetus, neonate, etc.). And I definitely don't think they're cute. This of course, isn't the only change. There are others, but this has been the most obvious one to me.

Very long winded blog. Just something I had been mulling over in my head.