puff river

the lack of updates has really been eating at me this few days. i keep clicking “new post” but then getting stuck. i wonder if it is really what i might have mentioned before, the lack of mental stimulation in berkeley? but that can’t be true, considering the fact that i am actually in berkeley. and i don’t want that to happen, just falling into reading and studying what i am supposed to read and study… i want to think. i don’t want to eventually fall into the rat race of adulthood, and eventually having the same reaction that so many adults have to philosophy – why think so much about things that are not relevant at all?

i hope i’m still thinking, and i think i’m still thinking. taking my daily little 15 – 20 minutes walk back home, i think i’m thinking. i wonder why i’m still playing the little game that i used to play when i was a kid – jumping over lines on the pavement, trying not to fall into the cracks. it is almost addictive. if i even look down on the ground, i would almost immediately start avoiding the lines on the ground. i would speed up when the lines are close together, and take bigger strides when the lines are further apart. perhaps i do that cause i’m bored. but if i’m bored it must mean i’m not thinking.

well but then again, i know i’m thinking. my psych 148 seminar on babies’ statistical learning is not easy at all, and definitely requires a lot of thinking. studying research papers requires lots of convoluted thinking, i realized. it is sometimes pretty hard to wrap your mind around it; definitely not as simple as A shows B shows C. but i know that this thinking is definitely different from what i did in the past. this thinking is so academic, so domain specific. it is not like the past, when i was trying to answer the big questions of the world, the questions that you may never have an answer to. or at least about human nature or the “unwritten rules” of the world.

i really hope i am not getting older. ki friends, if anyone of you still read this – tell me if you are still thinking what we had thought about 2 years ago.