Jose's Blog

The Chinese-American freestyle skier Eileen Gu is a freak of a human being. The 24-year old reminds me of what Sherlock Holmes would sound like if he were a woman. Eileen is a prodigy: a scientist, model, politician, student, and athlete.

In a recent interview she was asked, “can you take us into your brain?” Eileen revealed that she is a very introspective woman. She journals. She has an analytical lens to her own thinking, breaking down her own thought process–like an engineer who breaks down a machine and tries to put all the components back together to really understand its inner mechanics. “You can control how you think, and therefore you can become whoever you want.”

Eileen approaches her brain like a scientist: experimenting with it. She enjoys monitoring every thought, tinkering with her thinking patterns, and leveraging neuroplasticity to improve herself. She does all this optimization so she can become the younger person of herself would be proud of.

Now that is powerful.

A quote from E. B. White I am pondering today:

The quiet mind, the youthful heart, the perceptive eye, the racing blood—these conflow to produce wonder. Manhattan Island, entire, can sometimes cause such a confluence.

I suppose I try to write every day to encode a little bit of the flux of reality as it unfolds in the river of time. It helps me interpret little moments, and in doing so, to understand my decisions in the past so the decisions I take in the future are a little bit wiser, a little bit more informed.

The river of time moves forward, and it is futile to go upstream, but I get to choose where in that downstream I find myself in. Writing and reflecting everyday is as if I am knitting a little mainsail that helps me navigate the streams, circumvent obstacles, and maneuver the wind.

In writing about the flux of reality of the present, and reflecting about my past, I am enabling a future of freedom.

Today I made a trip to New York City to visit friends and attend a professional event. I was so glad I took the day off for this side quest. I had coffee with a colleague-turned-friend in Borough Hall, and drinks over dinner with another friend in Chelsea.
Friendships require nurturing, and that nurturing begins with your initiative to reach out. Friendships do not exist in a binary state of existence/non-existence, but rather dwell on a continuum. They either deepen or start to fade. Today I feel I have deepened these treasured relationships.

Today I had two unexpected interactions while running errands. The first occurred when I was heading back to work from a break. I encountered a swim mate from the city’s Master’s swimming club. He was heading to the University’s gymnasium. I was heading back to work. We were both surprised we shared a secondary affiliation on the other side of the river –him as a PhD student, myself as an alumnus and now staff. We were interested in hearing each other’s areas of study: he was studying physics, while I was studying conservation of buildings. My mind was trying to find common areas of interest. We both seemed desperate to carve more time from the serendipitous moment of two people having a conversation in a busy sidewalk. I think were both trying to escape the drudgery of everyday life.

The second unexpected interaction occurred on my way home after work. I was waiting at the City Hall station for the underground train. In the crowd of everyday Philadelphians, I stumbled upon a friend who was heading north for volleyball practice. He had joined the competitive and social league. He asked me how was my apartment painting going. I replied with details about the project.

Both serendipitous interactions added color to what would have otherwise been a gray boring day. Such are the joys of making friends and encountering them in the most unexpected places.

Everyone needs a friend who can point us the metaphorical spinach we have in between the teeth. Everyone needs a mentor who believes in a hidden potential that we cannot see. Everyone needs people whom you can trust so you can grow as a human being. If they are not around, it may be time to find a new field before you start rotting.

It is good to remember that everyone has an ego, in the true Jungian definition. Some are more cognizant of their egos —and others less so. When working with others, it is good to remember everyone is carrying an invisible shirt tag that says “I want to be recognized.” I think this is a good heuristic, for it makes you think twice before how you decide to interact with others. A good example is when providing feedback. Think of the sandwich method: ||| positive || room for improvement || positive |||. It is not about sugar-coating criticism, but rather about reframing your position. It is about removing yourself from the pedestal of a court judge and putting yourself in the shoes of others. You begin to work with others, not above others.

Yesterday I went to New York City to club with a friend at Knockdown Center in Brooklyn. It was Valentine’s Day. We started the night by going to a local gay bar to enjoy some espresso martinis and take in the bar’s atmosphere. We met a young professional who had recently moved to New York from Washington D.C. and was exploring the nightclub scene in Hell’s Kitchen. As the night progressed, my friend and I headed into Brooklyn. Once at the club, we met new people in the dance floor, including a marine officer and a Yalie —the dance floor attracts the highly accomplished. I was energized from the few espresso martinis we had in Hell’s Kitchen and the Red Bull I was holding with my hand. I wondered if having too much caffeine was a wise decision.

As the night progressed, the venue got crowded. Very crowded. It was almost impossible to move around in the dance floor. The main room felt like a giant container of sardines. At some point my friend left, and I was still in. I was dancing near the D.J. booth and was eyeing someone I had a crush on, someone I had expressed interest for quite some time now. He was with his friend group. I thought it would be difficult to break in a clique —a feature of the New York City gay club culture. Then I remembered the lesson that I have learned from a friend I met at the dance floor in D.C. a few weeks ago. He taught me in the way he expressed his energy and how he interacted with people the following: as long as you feed into your own corporeal energy and are enjoying yourself, the attractive people are going to come after you. You don’t have to chase them. So I danced for myself, forgetting that judgmental self-consciousness that sabotages everything. I remembered the lesson that one of the lead dancers of Bob’s Dance Shop taught in a Flash Bob in Central Park the summer before: you need to believe your own delusion. The confident and ridiculous are sources of strength. At some point we made eye contact and read each other’s energy. We hit it off. It was pure bliss.

A quote I’m pondering today from the East-European dissident Václav Havel:

Life rebels against all uniformity and leveling; its aim is not sameness, but variety, the restlessness of transcendence, the adventure of novelty and rebellion against the status quo.

This characterization about life (variety, adventure, spontaneity), in contrast to death (uniformity, discipline, sameness), is related to the “erotic” of Esther Perel in Mating in Captivity and the “quality without a name” of Christopher Alexander in A Pattern Language. Perel says that the erotic is the antidote to death. Alexander proclaims that the “quality without a name” manifests in the flourishing of chaos within rigid structures.

Both Perel’s “erotic” and Alexander’s “quality without a name” share a rebelious and subversive character, apparent qualities of that which is alive. To be alive is to be free. And to be free is to be alive.

Today I had a 6-month dental appointment early in the morning before work. The dentist hygienist was very happy with my teeth. At the end, she applied a poultice of pumice on my teeth, and I learned that pumice is used as a micro-abrasive that effectively removes plaque. I shared with her my research on the role of pumice as aggregate in acoustic tiles. I showed her some photomicrographs of pumice rock as thin sections under the microscope, explaining the geology of pumice, its mineralogical closeness to obsidian, and how the flow of lava was visible in the direction of the vesicles. She could see how the angularity and the overall morphology of pumice grains made it an effective material in cleaning teeth. I talked to her all these curiosities about pumice, and she seemed impressed about the depth of knowledge I had about a seemingly boring rock. She wondered if I studied elsewhere besides Penn. It seemed to have brightened her day.

I came to realize that you can develop a depth of knowledge in any subject if you just keep feeding your curiosity, regardless of what people may think. That curiosity cannot be manufactured –it can only come from within, and one must nourish it as it presents itself.