Midnight Memoirs

By Jonathan Lam on 09/25/17

Tagged: brain-dump reflection

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Can you reflect on something while you do it? If not, then this post is void. But while I think hindsight is impossible in a reflection of the present, metacognitive insight can still be pretty powerful.

As with any desire, sleep evades me when I want it most. Sunday nights. The day before the SAT, or a cross country meet, or before a 36-hour hackathon. I got to bed at 9:00, ready, ready, impatient. Even my ceaseless daytime drowsiness can't reach me on those nights.

I used to tell myself that I could do anything. Be the most efficient person, never party, play video games, talk with friends outside of school— so long as I put my head to it. It could be anything with productive means— even running, or bowling competitively, programming an app for a fellow classmate, writing with my left hand, Rubik's cubing, learning to type with Dvorak, learning Vim or Batch or Python or Ruby or FORTRAN or C++ or C# or Objective C or F. No downtime, ever. Just letting the pride in my achievements carry me forward, farther in every new stride.

That's how the greats do it, isn't it? Like Elon Musk, who went with Paypal to Tesla to rocket launches. Or Steve Jobs. Or anybody with such an impressive résumé that you can't fathom any other way they'd got there.

But the truth is that even work is evasive. Those free times between classes always seem too slim to work, so it is better to chat with friends to ease the tension of classwork. Car rides are always too bumpy and better suited to napping. And prime homework time at home, quiet, with laptop humming in front and paper and pencil at hand, can too easily turn into a session of mass-viewing Facebook posts and iFunny memes.

And then there's the anti-work times. I just want to sleep right now, but suddenly all of these ideas popped into my head. I want to relearn piano, Chinese, write with my left hand, test out the five different pens on my desk (which I have done, paragraph by paragraph, on this essay so far).

Oh, and, by the way, it's exactly 12:00 a.m. right now.

Given the long weekend due to professional developmental days at school and the Rosh Hashanah holiday, I can say I have the rare luxury of having finished the entirety of my homework this weekend. But I still have college admissions to work on— namely the essay— and now seems all too perfectly the time to write it.

Except that it's not. It's past midnight, past my bedtime, but it's time to draft another two essays. I just wish it were easier to decide.


(This was actually written at around midnight last night, but typed up today at the posted time.)

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Einstein was a giant. His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. But those of us who are not that tall have to choose!

Richard Feynman