Author: nancyhua

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On Ambition, then Criticism of High School Nancy

Next year is my 10th high school reunion. Looking at people I went to high school with, I’m stupidly surprised by how normal they are. I guess I had never internalized what normal people are or where they come from. Consulting Facebook: the prettiest girl in school cut her hair short and married an unphotogenic fat man. The track star is fat and unemployed. This one kid I could’ve sworn would be a CEO has a baby and is obsessed with golf of all things. I guess we’re all still young and maybe people take another 10 years to really get going, but I’m still… disappointed. How is everyone so freaking comfortable? Was I the only one who watched Fight Club 100 times when skipping school?

A thought flashes through my mind: what a fool I am for trying so hard, for being discontent. I should have some babies, learn to cook. Everyone else is doing it and they’re happy. Why can’t I be normal, make my dad happy? Why do I want to rule the world when it’s so much easier to just do what you’re supposed to do? Marry a nice boy from a nice family, buy a house.

My personality has changed a lot in the past 10 years. These days I can’t understand why anyone without a family would be risk averse or unambitious. Literally nothing bad can happen to us, so why not shoot for the stars? Worst case, we go get mindless corporate jobs. Absolute WORST case, we go live with our parents like the Italian or Japanese youth.

Looking at my attitude now, you would’ve expected childhood me to have been hacking into FBI databases (well, maybe I did and was never caught!) and selling powdered milk to my obliging neighbors. But I wasn’t an entrepreneurial kid. I didn’t work that hard because everything was easy. I applied to stuff and got into selective programs of my own volition- my parents had no idea what the SATs were or anything about the USA school system and probably thought most kids were out helping on the farm during the summer- because I’ve always had the instinct to try to get into whatever the most exclusive program was. I probably got that from centuries of Chinese breeding, along with the lack of inclination to bend the rules or start something up.

I wish I’d taken more risks as a kid, especially since kids can’t go to jail or get sued. I think regret is part of why I feel so drawn to risk now. I don’t want to look back in 20 years and wish I’d taken more chances back when I didn’t have 3 kids. But I wonder, Would I be happier if I were less ambitious? Not to suggest I’m not happy. But I have so much work all the time. Normal people do not work that much towards something with such a high chance of failure. Why am I making things so hard for myself? Do I really think that one day I’ll achieve even a fraction of what I’ve dreamed? Ambition: virtue or folly?

I think I want to prove that I’m getting better. That this passage of time isn’t a waste of time. That at reunions I’m always a different and better person. High school Nancy was an idiot, especially senior year because that was a total waste of time. I’m glad I’m not her anymore.

High school and Pittsburgh are the same tangled knot of neurons. Senior year I was late > 30% of the time (you were late if you arrived before 4th period, anything after was absent) and missed 20% of my school days. I forged my notes and ignored a summons to a truancy hearing (nothing ever happened). At home no one spoke to me and I spoke to no one, taking my meals alone in my room. There were 4 chairs at the dinner table- not enough for me and I wasn’t about to go get one. My mail was dropped at my closed door. I wish I could say I occupied myself building an industry-transforming technology like Sean Parker, or even systematically devouring the collected works of Shakespeare, but I wasn’t. I was useless and watched movies on cable. School was wretchedly easy and I shamelessly did my homework during class, garnering the resentment of the nerds who actually tried and took everything seriously. I never talked to my mom, who had abandoned me to travel the world, telling me, “Now is my time,” to which I ungratefully replied, “Good, I don’t need you.” This was true to my feelings- I didn’t think I needed her. I was going to college soon, plus my dad bought a new house in which I occupied the entire wing of the first floor. When I left for MIT, my dad, stepmother, and stepbrother promptly moved in, shoving all my junk upstairs. Everyone was sick of me. First my mom had gotten sick of me, then everyone in Pittsburgh, and I was sick of Mt. Lebanon too- chicken and egg.

I hadn’t told my parents what colleges I was applying to. To my mom, I said, “I got into MIT but I’m probably going to Princeton because of my boyfriend.” He was my first boyfriend. Who isn’t completely fucked up by their first relationship? Who doesn’t fuck up their first relationship? Anyway, I told the same thing to the Princeton admissions people, including the part about always wanting to go to MIT, and didn’t get in. Funnily, my mother had moved to Princeton, “to be close to you, Nancy.” I’m not sure how accurate that is. She was tired of globe hopping and probably realized Princeton was the most homey, non-cosmopolitan place she could imagine.

At MIT, my high school friends kept messaging me but I forsook all things Pittsburgh. My dad, stepmother, stepbrother, and all my high school best friends were still in Pittsburgh; I was the one that had left. When I came back, we had all diverged. Now that there actually was drama, my best friends and I no longer knew the dramas of each other’s lives, we who had spent hours on the phone together, hours whispering in the darkness at sleepovers. It’s still a shock to realize they are now people who go to clubs and party and drink. I’ll always imagine us frozen in time, girls in shorts on the grass in our backyards wondering about the world.

When I go back to my dad’s house now, I devolve into my senior year self, eating in bed and reading Robin McKinley and getting crushes on stupid underage boys who I don’t even know. To get out of the house, I try to channel my pre-senior year self, who spent all her weekends at the library taking out 20 books at a time and sneaking the rest through the security system, ate at Lulu’s noodles in Oakland, sketched dinosaur bones at the Carnegie Museum, saw inscrutable movies at the Denis theatre, drank Izzys at Uptown Coffee in Mt. Lebanon, laughed so hard with her friends our abs would be sore, inhaled my friends’ parents’ ethnic cooking, went swing dancing downtown. All those happy times in Pittsburgh- I have to dig for them, whereas the sad stuff bubbles up unbidden.

Beyond my circle, I barely knew my classmates, aghast whenever Anjani would casually mention so-and-so’s eating disorder and so-and-so’s boyfriend. I had no idea who was dating or eating what. I always felt separate and different, which I was in a lot of ways but I should’ve been able to get to the places where we were the same. I got asked to 4 or 5 different proms (but I only went to the Fox Chapel prom in addition to my own) and could make friends easily in certain settings, but during senior year the desire to relate to others drained from me. Having befriended the seniors who were the previous keepers of the photography club clique, upon their graduation I became the new photography club president, but I didn’t go much, didn’t amass a new clique. Mentally, I had already left Pittsburgh. Moral: don’t stick around bodily if you’ve already mentally checked out- you can ruin years of good memories that way. But who ever learns from the moral of any story?

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Questioning Your Beliefs

Another thing we discussed at this CFAR alpha testing ages ago is that we’re supposed to question our beliefs. A way to do this is by hanging out with people with beliefs different from our own. My first reaction to this was that it’d be hard to do because 1) I don’t know any idiots, and 2) I don’t want to hang out with idiots.

The instructor gave an example of hanging out with vegetarians to understand what vegetarians actually ate and to help deal with the discomfort of thinking about the morality of meat. Another example was to hang out with grad school dropouts and people who were never in grad school to understand what the rest of the world thinks of academia and the importance of PhDs.

After some reflection, I realized most of my friends disagree with me on some things, but probably not on the big things, or if they do, we don’t talk about it because we don’t want to argue. I generally suck at arguing because I get annoyed and start insulting and punching the other person (figuratively…).

This idea of engaging with people who think differently precipitated my beginning to participate more in internet communities. People don’t hesitate to disagree with me on the internet, whereas they are often quiet in real life, I guess intimidated by someone as wise and serious as I am.

Some topics where I discovered my beliefs are very different from the beliefs of most people:
1) HFT.
2) Politics.
3) Money.
4) Diet.
5) My own greatness.
6) Charity.
7. Olivia Wilde.
8) Patents.

I haven’t really modified any of my beliefs yet so I don’t know if any of this is working to make me more rational. However, I think I am understanding the opposing beliefs better. So here’s my modest goal for now: be able to describe what others’ points of view are on all topics where I have abnormal beliefs.

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Exercise

I’ve been really busy lately. The only things I do are work, meet people, and exercise.

My problem with most exercise is it’s boring. Going to the gym like a normal person is the worst- setting up the weights, doing them, waiting for machines, whatever, everything takes forever and the only way I get through it is through elaborate fantasies usually ending in someone’s death, or I’m a secret agent repeatedly clinging to the edge of a cliff or on the wing of an airplane and need to haul myself up so I for once legitimately need to do a pullup (I guess I’ve always ended up falling to my death, although I don’t think about that part), or rescuing a princess from some savage alien culture where you have to behead her father before you get to mate with her (Ok, the fantasies all involve death).

Crossfit, though boring (I hate clamping weights or counting), is at least extremely time efficient. I sometimes enjoy the workouts if they don’t involve too much weight setup (yes, I’m too lazy to set up my weights to do my exercises) or counting. Sometimes I’ll compete with someone and fantasize about having hidden all our food and needing to defeat them in the hunger games. Part of the allure of crossfit is that everyone is so ripped, so usually in my fantasies I defeat them by being faster and befriending genetically engineered beasts.

Despite feeling good after exercising, doing it can be so annoying and boring that it can be hard to stick with it. Right now the main thing I’ve been doing consistently is yoga. One reason I like yoga is that I’m good at it because I’m flexible, but it’s still challenging (I inwardly third eye snicker when the men can’t do the poses). It’s not the most efficient use of time for pure exercise but it also has a meditative component where afterwards I feel full of love. I very rarely fantasize during yoga except during some prolonged annoying poses like horse. I also get a weird pleasure from hearing yoga instructors talk about massaging your intestines and thyroid- “That uncomfortable choking sensation is so good for you!” Another reason for yoga is the nice showers (In contrast, Brazilian jiu jitsu showers are the most disgusting places I’ve ever seen).

The thing about physical activity, even sports that are really fun, or cool skills like martial arts, is that at some point in the game you basically have to just do 1000 pushups to improve, and this gets really boring. This doesn’t happen as much in the more cerebral games/skills where even if you’re practicing something as boring as typing faster you’re still generally getting a high level of mental stimulation in return. If you can’t stand doing the boring stuff and only do the fun stuff, you’ll probably never improve beyond a certain level in your sport. This is my excuse for sucking at almost all sports.

Being on a team makes boredom much more palatable. Thinking back on the years of fencing, when my thighs were so big I couldn’t wear normal jeans, I’m amazed by what people endure for the sake of the team. I am super, super lazy and yet I would wake up before dawn for those bus rides to meets. I don’t think I fantasized about murder even once during all those hours of drills!

I miss it. I miss being on a team and everyone working out together, drawn together with an irrational school pride, clawing for victory as the underdogs against the division 1 teams that recruited foreign professional fencers, mercilessly whooping the club teams that couldn’t afford nice equipment by competing with each other for how few touches we’d have scored against us, having weird rivalries with the teams that were comparable and employing complex psychological strategies.

I fenced a little after MIT but couldn’t find the motivation to do it without a team around me or a coach I really loved and knew. Our coach Jarek, who’s celebrating his 20th anniversary at MIT, was a professional sabre fencer and I still think of Jarek as my coach even though it’s been 5 years since I’ve been on the team. One thing that’s not obvious about Jarek until you get to know him more, is that he’s better than you at every sport, not just fencing. This is because he’s European- in America, anyone with actual athletic talent is not going to become a fencer.

I want to do a team sport again! The problem is I suck at sports so much it’d be really sad for anyone on my team. So I’m going to make myself really strong and when I come back I’ll surprise everyone by suddenly being not completely pathetic! That’s the meta-fantasy whenever I’m working out and fantasizing about death. In the meantime, ignore my frailty and choose me for your apocalypse survival team because of my creativity and resourcefulness, etc.

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F*ck Death

Someone died on the trail while we were hiking up the White Mountains in New Hampshire. They were giving him CPR for ages while his daughters leaked tears on a log nearby. When he was clearly and truly irreparably dead, we hiked past and I saw his pale, hairy leg with a scrunched up sock and hiking boot peeking out from the foil sheet. Hikers who’d helped give CPR later remarked, “I could feel his ribs cracking underneath my hands.” It was a sobering incident although a few hours later I still made a joke about the hike being a death march due to my vibrams.

Death is gross and terrible. I told my dad we should get cryogenically frozen and he said he’d look into the paperwork- my good old dad. I feel immense guilt it never occurred to me to freeze Mom even though I knew freezing existed. I think I was in a state of denial about the likelihood of her death since she’d been getting better for a long time and got worse quite suddenly so my dumb brain didn’t weight the new information correctly. Dying, like, goes against her identity as a cool Mom, right? The brain doesn’t handle affronts to identity very well.

Dying is deeply disgusting. Picture ragged roadkill or other dead animals you’ve ever seen flopped over stiff and grimacing- that’s what people are like when they’re dead too. I’d like to imagine death as one peacefully drifting off, looking as though one were sweetly asleep, but death is not like that. Death is ugly and repulsive. Mom was probably seriously dying for a good 6 months or so and I wish I could erase all of that from my memory. Is it wrong that I wish I could have frozen her before her organs started to rot inside her still-breathing body? I don’t want to think about her like that- I didn’t then and I definitely don’t now. But I did, and I do. I think about her and her death all the time. I wanted it to stop, and although she’s dead now it hasn’t stopped for me because it still happened- Mom being dead never stops.

Although Mom believed in heaven and her church friends were always with her, she didn’t want to die. She wasn’t in peace; she was in pain. I feel bad we didn’t try everything. I could’ve done more research but I didn’t want to get closer to it. I wanted it to stop and leave, a weak and contemptible reaction that proves I’m shamefully unworthy of stuff, like being a great samurai, or being a good daughter.

If I found out I had incurable cancer, I wouldn’t get the haphazard treatment that weakens you everywhere while you suffer and stall in waiting rooms that reek of poison, everyone pathetically shuffling around, or sadly staring, or desensitized and businesslike, or just normal- pragmatically ignoring doom. If I had cancer, I’d go to sleep on an ice floe and float out into the Arctic among the icebergs and the sea lions like an old, useless Eskimo. I’d wander alone towards my ancestral graveyard like an elephant matriarch and collapse on my knees in a pit of ancient bones. (Years later a lion king will play in my rib cage.) Or maybe there’d be some project I could do like fix a nuclear reactor that’s too dangerous for healthy people to approach, although they probably have robots or something for that.

It doesn’t hurt anybody for us to get frozen and the main reason against it is because people will think you’re weird. Whatever- the “weird” ship sails whenever it sails. Now that Dad said he’d do the paperwork, the main deterrent for me to do it was actually the clangy jewelry you’re supposed to wear at all times that says to send you to Alcor so they can put you in your freezing pod or whatever. Does anyone know if medical people will still realize it’s medical information if I get a cuter version made? I don’t wear jewelry typically and the thought of going from bare to ugly jewelry horrifies me.

Friends, let’s all get frozen. That way when I wake up in 1000 years in my robot body you’ll all still be there and we can all battle the evil Galactic Empire together and learn to control our psychic powers and flirt with hot aliens.

I hate death and maybe that’s why I think about it a lot. Animals are almost lucky because they can just die like it’s nothing, like it’s supposed to happen, an instinct encoded in their DNA. Animals live and die and nothing they do can be Wrong- their wars and murders, suicides and unstoppable sex, their patricide and eating of their cubs are all All-Right. I wish I could die by letting my million spider offspring explode from and then feast on my delicious, bulbous torso. Or I could die by having my ferocious mate bite off my puny head after sex- whatever, it’s natural, everybody’s doing it, it gives meaning to life, it’s a stitch in the tapestry of the universe woven by the Fates, it’s a poem, it’s destiny.

But I don’t feel like an animal (I can’t rape or kill or psychotically eat my young). I don’t feel like death is natural for me or for any person. Is that feeling itself wrong and unnatural? Maybe that’s part of why (in addition to our need to explain and find patterns) humans have an instinct for religion, every culture comes up with their own brand of afterlife- it’s our human nature to deny death. If you believe in an afterlife or in reincarnation, you can avoid the gut knowledge that death is DEATH. I wish I could do that, be like Henry Ford and the many people who’ve found solace in reincarnation or in heaven. Even if there’s a Zen meditation out there where you inhale the sickness and death of this world and exhale acceptance, if I tried it, I’d choke.* Maybe I’d vomit and burst into tears. It’d be gross.

I wasn’t specially nice to Mom when she was on her deathbed. When Dad had cancer I promised I’d be nicer to him going forward, but I am not at all. I guess impending death just doesn’t make me feel nicer even though I wish it did and it’s supposed to. I wish I could be the type of person who was nicer to someone after considering we’re both going to die, but I’m not. My only hope is to try to grow into a nicer person period who’d be really nice to her parents and everyone else even if we never had to die.

Sorry I’m not enlightened. Looking at everyone who’s accepted death and thinks it can be beautiful and dignified, and everyone else who doesn’t think about it and lives life never knowing death until they, well, die, I’m sorry death hurts and repulses me. I wish I were like the others, that I could ignore it or think of an afterlife, but even the idea that it’s all a plan makes me feel terrible. My mom didn’t die throwing herself in front of a bus of school children. (I wish she had. (It’s hard to die well. Many people don’t.)) She died and suffered for nothing, like an animal, and I don’t find any meaning in it.

I’m probably just abnormal but I don’t think life OR death is for humans what it is for animals. Animals are born, they look adorable as babies, they stay adorable after they’re grown or they become terrifying/ disgusting/ delicious, they may or may not learn some things, they do some work to get their food and shelter, they eat and sleep, they do some work so they can reproduce, they do some work to raise their offspring or they don’t, they interact with other creatures, objects, or places, and then they die. I can’t live my life like that. I can’t be like an animal- I can’t live like one or die like one.

It’s one thing to be stoic and mature about something inevitable. Like when some injustice occurs and someone stronger enslaves you or your legs are gone so you have robot legs or your whole family starved to death in China, you don’t let that ruin your life: you are courageous and heroic by going on to regain freedom or win the Olympics or become a scientist and say, “Shit happens- I was branded sub-human, my legs are gone, and I’m an orphan. There’s no point in dwelling on it so I have to have a good attitude going forward and be amazing.” That’s awesome. But don’t tell this person that the world is better that these injustices occurred, that their lives are more meaningful now because of suffering, that it was all supposed to happen so people could be inspired by their challenges. That stuff shouldn’t happen and we should try to stop it if we can. That’s how I feel about death, about all injustice, all suffering. If it has to happen, then I’m going to be brave about it. But I’m not going to say the world is more beautiful because of ugliness.

For millennia people had other people as slaves. Babies would die left and right. Women would die in childbirth. Sickness and disease would have no solution and people would accept it as part of life because what else are you supposed to do? How else do you cope with it? (Well, you can solve it.) (Death is the one disease everyone suffers under and everyone copes with.) People would rape and pillage their neighbors or expose their unwanted babies on the mountains, stuff animals do, but humans stopped doing this stuff because we’re better than the animals. We stopped coping with diseases because we can cure them.

That’s the gift that we humans have over the animals. We can choose to be better. If there’s a choice between good and evil, between hope and despair, between progress and complacency, we can choose the light. We can choose life.

 

 

 

* Margaret Cho wrote, “there’s this Buddhist meditation where you breathe in the world’s suffering and breathe out compassion and I try to do it and choke.”