Tangled Web of Lies

 

 Credit: nikki-ns (deviantart)

I miss being a kid sometimes. All that time to free play with very little oversight and structure. As an adult there are way too many rules to follow and not enough time to do things that are truly worth while. But the main reason I want to be a kid again is to meet people that still has a sense of vulnerability and innocence in their lives. To connect with another person without ego boosting or white lies of superiority.

People, at least children have a capability to be truly honest and forthcoming about their struggles and difficulties. As adults, we tend to hide and bury things that effects us to make it seem that we are "normal" and not a person with real problems. I have meet many people that have huge egos and always are showing their good side to others. When I ask about possible problems or troubles, most just deflect my queries or just out right deny they exist. Image is so important that any hint of shame or fear would be devastating to people that might judge them.

As a child, image and looking cool is much less important and isn't such a dominating factor. It allows for kids to be friends with other kids at a much simplified level. Haven't you ever thought why you were able to make friends a lot easier in school than you do now? It is that ability for children to be vulnerable and unassuming that allows the freedom to connect with another person.

I have trouble connecting with others these days. I have several theories on why this is. Maybe I have a condescending tone, rife with a heavy dose of pragmatism and moral judgements. Or it could be my difference in what I do on my off time, such as singing and writing, causing me to have difficulties in finding similar people of my mindset. And maybe I just smell weird. All these reasons and more has made me look at both internal and external factors that might exist and maybe I can reason with it.

I think that it boils down to a society in which there is no room for error in our social lives. One mistake feels like it is worse than death itself. People fear what others think of them and they live their lives in a sort of isolation, never wanting to let their guard down. Maybe there is a strong sense of protecting their image because they feel like they are imposters who just had a bit of luck, who are fearful of the tumbling house of cards if they are found out.

Whatever the reason it, there is a problem that I see with people not being open and honest with each other. It makes it really hard for people to truly connect with one another in times of need. I wish that everyone can let go of their fears and doubts and let others in with open arms instead of skepticism and caution. A world with vulnerability and innocence might be better for us all. Or maybe I just need to smell better.

Year One

Yesterday, marked the first day at my job. It was a low key event that was celebrated by my coworkers and I out for a simple lunch. Although it was just another day for them, for me it was something very notable in my life, specifically it has been a freaking year already since I last was living in LA. I can't begin to describe how quickly everything has been moving by already.

 I think that every year that passes, I question whether or not I am accomplishing anything in my life. This happens quite frequently around my birthday. Awareness of growing older and feeling helpless to stop aging is something that I have to ultimately get used to. I always think that somehow I will invent a time machine or learn the power to stop time and either relive some of my past or pause moments in my life.

In life there are just a few moments that warrant remembering and are worth cherishing. I think for me the move up to SF and the start of a new life signifies something note worthy. I have finally gotten used to living up here and creating a new network of things to do and people to meet. Hopefully, I can report on my yearly progress and look back at each year to reflect on years past.


Summary of Goals:

Tutoring: Not expanding, I'm only working on one family
Singing: Picked "I've gotta be me" for my final song
Side photo gig: Blogging for their site and creating a social network for it
E-book: floundering!
Non-profit: Still waiting on meeting with city planner, need to convert SI to english units for first house, might have found a marketing/organizer/board member for my team
Fitness: Tennis/Running/Badminton

Teaching the world one person at a time

I have begun tutoring people in math, science, and other subjects. It is a great way to strengthen my skills as well as providing a service to kids who need it as well as others who want to do better in their classes. I never imagined how difficult it would be to be an instructor. There so many things you have to be aware of and know to be able to tutor a person effectively.

One of the most difficult things about tutoring is to connect with the student. It is trust that the student must have with their instructor that makes all the difference whether or not they can learn the subject quickly and easily. I think back to how I got tutored and the most crucial aspect was the belief that the person teaching me is competent.

I now have to convey that as best as possible to the people that I am tutoring. I think that as I get more practice in creating lesson plans and figuring out what their problem area are, I can be more effective.

Skylon

I wish that we can travel to space as quickly and easily as we do on planes. There are so many opportunities to commercialize space and yet we don't dedicate the resources and the manpower to make it happen. I think that we must have a significant push to try and get people and governments to understand the need for developing spaceflight. The ramifications if we don't might be disastrous.

The spacecraft above is from Reaction Engines, British aerospace company that is trying to get a vehicle from ground to low earth orbit in one shot, without stages. This is revolutionary due to the ability to take off like a plane and travel to space and back with as little mass as possible. The need for a huge liquid oxygen tank is gone, which is the biggest mass (oxidizer) penalty that every launch vehicle has to over come.

The engine acts like a jet engine in the atmosphere and then uses a heat exchanger to cool down the air as it goes faster and faster. When it reaches the limits of oxygen in our atmosphere, it changes to rocket mode and blasts off the rest of the way. Truly, amazing stuff! For a better description, I'd highly recommend a browse through their website.

Seeing stuff like this really gets me excited about the possibility of space travel. It give me great hope that one day people will travel among the stars. I want to follow in the great pioneers of people who had crazy dreams and stuck to it when no one believed in them.

Mars, here I come!

What can One person do?

So I want to help people. How do I go about and doing that? Well, one thing that I feel very passionately about is wealth inequality, specifically how to help the poorest in this country. It goes without saying that there are many people in this country that cannot call a place their home. Many are homeless on the street due to various circumstances beyond their control. There is a huge problem with providing affordable housing for all those that need it. So I want to help them by starting a non-profit organization and build small (1m^2) houses for those that need it the most.

It is a crazy idea, but I think it might just work. I have contacted architect Van Bo Le-Mentzel in Germany, that first designed this house and he has been really supportive of my initial efforts to help the homeless in San Francisco. He is trying to get the word out to people that, this new kind of dwelling is great for the minimalist as well as people that just need a simple shelter for the night. Currently, the plans are completely open source and everyone can build these houses, all Van asks is that he is kept in the loop on what you do with the house, by sending him pictures.

I've always wanted to help people but I didn't know through what medium I wanted to do this in. Providing shelter for people is one of the important things that we can do for those who are in need. What I have learned so far is that many homeless people do not like to live in homeless shelters due to pride or lack of personal autonomy. My plan is to give those people that cannot reach a shelter or don't want one, their own personal "house." This way they can retain their autonomy as well as provide them a mobile home that doubles as storage container and protection from the elements.

I don't know how hard it is to start a non-profit. I imagine that it will take a lot of time and energy before I get to help people on a massive scale. I can only try to do this in tiny steps until I can achieve something great in the end. I want to do this a sort of great contribution to humanity that can help the disadvantaged in our cities and community. I can only hope that when the time comes, all those who are reading this can support me in some small way.

Networking for the Future

I've noticed how difficult it is to meet people that are like minded people up in the bay area, it is just hard to seek them out consistently. I've been on a networking frenzy to try and meet as many people as possible, with mixed results. I think that it will be a significant effort to keep trying new things until I find something that I can stick to.

I don't personally think that I am shy or introverted but truth is that it has been a difficult year after graduating from USC, where the constant parties and group events made the prospect of meeting people extremely easy. Now finding people that are similar to me are very few and far between. I have to cast my net far and wide to find the right group of people. There is no easy button anymore.

I guess in some sense this a good thing. Forcing me to become as extroverted as possible is a great way to broaden network of friends. No longer are my friends in the same age range or same school, now the whole world of people are available for me to befriend. Although, one of the hardest things that I will need to overcome is patience. The process will be akin to finding needles in a haystack.

I wonder about all the others that are in my position after moving to a new city and how they deal with going out and meeting new people. I have to think that they have the same kind of difficulties especially if they just graduated from school and moved to a new city like me. I guess that is why most people tend to stay close to home and have a built in social network rather than tough it out in a new city.

For me the only option is to tough it out and do as many things as I can in hopes of building the network of people, just like in LA.

Ignorance is bliss?

Sometimes I wonder if ignorance is really bliss. Throughout my life people have always told me that you must get an education and learn as much as you can in this world. Education, they say is the path to enlightenment. But lately I've been questioning if I really want to know more about the world. 

I have been reading and watching documentaries about what is going on in this world. Topics have range from financial disasters to understanding human motivation and and other topics in between. The take away from all this has been that we are all stuck in a culture and society that is fundamentally broken. The overall message has been that we need to change dramatically if we are to live with some semblance of freedom and happiness. 

It is always my choice if I want to believe them or ignore them, but what I can't ignore is that I am starting to see how it really effects our daily lives and how much better it could be. One example is the banking system in America is so tailored to the elite of this country that it is almost impossible for the average working person to benefit from all the tax breaks and loopholes that the rich have. Or another example is the systemic consumerism in our culture that has people buying as much as they can even when they don't need it. 

I have learned much about what is going on in this world, but I fear that it is only a fraction of what is truly happening now. Sometimes I get pessimistic about the future and what it will bring. It seems that if we were to fix some of the world's pressing problems we should have started decades ago. Instead, problems are mostly ignored. There is a part of me that wishes that I didn't know so much, but if we all close our eyes and ears, one day there won't be a world left at all.

Universal Questions

Have you ever thought about what lies beyond our universe? I know. By definition that the universe is everything, but for me every now and then I wonder if there are defined boundaries outside of our bubble. There can be many possible answers but unfortunately none of it can be validated right now.

I have always been fascinated by what I couldn't see but imagine. Since there are so many theories on what the tiniest of our worlds are, I wanted to think about and postulate about what could be on the outside of the universe. 

I have always thought that the universe is like a bubble. From the beginning of the big bang it has expanded into the universe that is today. But what is the bubble expanding into and how can 3d space continue to grow near exponentially over 14 billion years? I have a hard time understanding a physical entity without limitations, in this case it is the universe. 

The only thing that I can come up with is that this reality is one of several dimensions that we are unable to fully comprehend. Just like how the jump from 2d to 3d is more complicated, i think that from 3d to 4d and beyond is insanely complex with the only way we would be understand it is through mathematics. 

I believe that we are creatures that are inhabit one of many dimensions blissfully unaware of more complex structures and worlds beyond our own. It is kind of like an amoeba with its limited scope trying to comprehend a human. The universe is a vastly interesting place with a lot more questions than potential answers and I hope to learn them all one day. 

Or maybe its all someone's dream...

Climbing towards a better world

 One of the things that I have been considering doing is rock climbing. It always fascinated me how people can climb vertically on shear cliffs and rock terrain. It's an activity that has numerous benefits and it also happens to be an excellent way to get your upper body in shape. More so, I think we can all benefit from being able to climb.

Modern day people don't really need a reason to have the skills to climb, hell, we don't even need to be able support our own weight. What was once a fun activity to do when you were a kid, now it really isn't cool to climb something unless it is within a narrow band of things. I used to love climbing trees and certain buildings, although it wasn't necessary safe.

I primarily want to learn to climb better because of the challenge and the exercise, but also being able to save yourself in a dangerous situation is a plus. I also yearn to do something more primal to man, which is to conquer its surroundings. So for now I will start to plan some rock climbing days into my schedule.

Simple Life

I've always wonder what a simpler life would be like. You know, just disconnect from the world of technology and lead a life that is much more grounded to Earth, almost like a hippy. I mean maybe it is because I don't want all the responsibility of an adult yet or maybe it is something else entirely. Sometimes I dream of a life of carelessness and true freedom.

I think that most of the stresses in our lives comes from all the pressures and expectations that everyone imposes on each other, which forces us to work harder to keep up with our neighbors. Sometimes we're just not able to meet peoples expectations and then inevitably we fall into a depression about where we are at. I think it is all quite crazy and maddening that technology was supposed to relieve our lives but instead, I think it has brought us closer to judge one another. 

A simpler life that I want to live, is one where all of us has freedom and time to become true individuals and discover what our purpose is, either spiritually or emotionally. I think all of us should be allowed to have complete freedom of expression, without the judging or criticisms of deviating from the normal. It takes true strength of character to be someone unique now-a-days, it is too easy for people to not what to stand out for what they believe in.

I want to be unique among my peers and be known for being bold and crazy. Maybe that is egotistical, but I don't care. Life is too short to worry about what others think, I think their either jealous or not open to new ideas. Sometimes all we want is for people to accept who we are in this world, but how can that happen if we don't know ourselves.  

I for one, wish for a simpler life, one without judgement. And yes, one with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.

A five year plan

I recently realized that I didn't have a solid five year plan. I had a ten year plan, but it was very vague in going about it. I have a couple of goals that I would like to achieve but nothing that warrants creating a plan for that far into the future. I believe that it is impossible to know what circumstances will be a week from now let alone five years from now. I do think that I want to have a plan just for reference to see how much I changed. So here we go!

1. Have a successful blog with tons of viewers and followers ~100,000

2. Be good enough in singing so that I can join a choir or a band. Maybe start a youtube channel based on me singing covers.

3. Start a weekly or bi-weekly vlog on youtube, it will be based on my thoughts, musings, and perhaps some comedic routines.

4. Achieve mastery at my job, with enough information and knowledge to describe a satellite inside and out.

5. Have finished at least half of my novel that currently has 10 pages. My goal is to create a trilogy.

6. Be working a successful side-gig that allows me to tap into my creative spirits

7. Achieve a good knowledge of stocks and trading to profit from boom times.

8. Do at least one new thing every month

9. Be master of time and space

The last one will take more than 5 years, maybe 7 or 8. :)

So what will you be doing in five years?

Life as a dream

 Most of my dreams have been very vivid and detailed as far back as when I was a teen. I could remember certain small details like time on a clock or even whole cities during a flying dream. I think at an early age I started to realize that my dreams were a path or conduit into a world that never existed, if not in my own mind. Dreams I believe, when properly understood can help one understand themselves better.

I have often tried to interpret my dreams by remembering as much about the dream after I had woken up. This proved  difficult and challenging as in a foggy sleep-like state, there were very few times that I wanted to put it down on paper, opting usually to go back to sleep. But when I did remember bits and pieces of the dream, I would look it up online to see what the different meanings were.

I go to this "dream dictionary" and basically type in what I saw and it would tell me what it could mean in my waking life. It compiles the different means from a few sources and tries to put it all in one place. Now obviously it is not an exact science and there are many ways to interpret things in a dream, but in my case, I have found common themes in most of my dreams.  I have had several dreams of flying through the clouds and traveling around high skyscrapers.

In the dream dictionary, it says that flying "signifies a sense of freedom where you had initially felt restricted and limited." I find that quite amazing since moving out of LA and starting a new job has given me a greater sense of freedom in my life. It could be that moving to a new city has had a freeing effect on my mind. That is one way I could interpret what I saw in my dreams. Another would be that given my recent increase in traveling frequency, I could be dreaming that I am the plane passing over cities.

Whatever the reasoning is, I find it interesting to try and decode what occurs when I go to sleep. I really want to figure out what it means to dream and why does it even happen. I can only surmise what others have thought, which is that dreams are a way our subconscious mind tries to communicate with the conscious one. 

Keep dreaming my friends...

Budgeting on a budget

Going off yesterday's post, I have decided to share a tool that has helped me craft a budget as well as keep track of all my expenses. I have used Mint for a few months now and I have to say that the overall experience has been great. It is a great one stop shop that for all my financial needs. It keeps tracks of all your accounts in one location which includes credit cards, investment, and also my favorite student loans.

One of the best functions of Mint is the ability to check your account for any fees and unauthorized spending and it will text you if anything is suspicious occurs. With this, I have been able to hone in on my spending and watch carefully what I am being charged on a daily basis. The only downfall is that privacy is an issue with this tool as it does need the accounts and passwords of all your financial information. This alone is the only if not significant problem with the tool.

I would personally advise that a person trying out Mint for the first time start out slowly. Maybe start by adding your student loans and/or credit cards until you get comfortable adding other accounts. There are always risks in having in your accounts in one place so do take caution. For me not knowing what is going on my accounts on a weekly basis is worth the extra risk.

Happy Budgeting!

Can I get a house to go?

I've always wanted to own a home. It just seems like it would take me a really long time to try and save up for one, especially in the Palo Alto area where housing prices are routinely about several million. But I have a idea that might allow me to live in Palo Alto, I just don't have a lot of space.

In comes a brilliant idea from Jay Shafer, a guy who founded Tumbleweedhouses. It is like a mobile home but a lot smaller and a whole lot more pleasant to look at. One of these babies are only tens of grands rather than hundreds. They come pre-built or comes in a DIY kit for those who are crafty.

The whole idea is to be minimalistic while being cheap and mobile. It is excellent for people just starting out after college or people that want to take their vacation home on a vacation.

I just love the efficient and ergonomic design of these things, couple with the fact you can take your home anywhere and kind of life off the land. The roof can be outfitted with a solar array for power and rain water can be collected for use in the shower and toilets. There is even a fireplace that uses propane during those cold nights. The only downside is the lack of stable internet connection, a person would need to find a local hotspot.

My plan is to buy one of these things if it looks like the housing market is too expensive for me to buy into and I can't afford the rent in my apartment. Realisticlly it would be hard to give up running water and internet without substitutes. Also I would still need an area of land to tether myself to during nights, unless I can squat in a Walmart parking lot for a couple of months.

Some day though, I want to be free and take a journey like the person above with all my belongs to a distant and far away land. Until then I will only dream of owning a mobile home.

Space Miner!

I dream a dream and in that dream I am a space miner. But seriously, there is a new company out in Santa Monica, CA that is planning to mine the asteroids for their resources and bring them back to Earth. This is hardly the first time that a company has had this idea, where previously Planetary Resources had gone public with the backing of a couple of Google founders. This new company more or less follows in their footsteps and had a press conference recently to try to get the word out but also raise some investment revenue.

I have long dreamed about space and becoming an astronaut, I've taken many paths in life to know that it is a highly improbable goal. But I still want to be apart of the space community and help mankind into space. I think that we need more forwarding thinking companies that are willing to push the technological barrier and take massive risks in order to push ourselves beyond what we have now. It took a statement and money from JFK to put a man on the moon in under ten years, we can do better now with how far technology has advanced.

The idea behind the company is that resources such as platinum, gold, and other rare Earth minerals are running out or they are getting harder to find. Eventually we will run out, but in space there are millions of astroiods that are floating around between Mars and Jupiter that have several times more minerals than the Earth. There plan is to harvest them and either bring it back to Earth or use it in space to construct more spacecrafts/colonies.

I am looking forward to the future and hope that private industries such as DSI (Deep Space Industries) can bring us into a new age of prosperity and wealth, before our banking system takes down our country.

Below is there video...Awesome.

The future

Every time another year ends, I look towards the future and think about then next couple of months. It is a way for me to try and reinvent myself for the new year. I see big things happening in the year 2013, that hopefully can translate into reality. Here are some goals that I'll put down that will in some way hold me accountable.

1. Start a second side job
2. Develop Growth Unleashed into a semi-popular blog with stable visitors
3. Buy a bow and go hunting in the wild
4. Learn a foreign language and go visit the country

Modest and achievable goals for the new year, I might add to the list before the year is out.  

Time to meetup?

Well it is about time I met up with a group of people that I have never met before, kinda like the first day of work. I have been trying to find creative ways to occupy my time in hopes of filling my weekends with meaningful stuff.

There are more than a couple of groups that are in the SF bay area that are more than willing take on a lost soul. I wonder if I should just pick a random group each week or start to target groups that I want to participate in. It really doesn't matter what the activity is because your there to meet people and do new stuff anyways. But there is always a little intimidation factor that works itself into meeting a whole new group and people, kinda like the first day of school at a new school.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, that step is the hardest one to overcome. I believe it takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there for people to judge you. It takes some balls to walk into a new place and feel like you belong, yet I want to have that feel everywhere I go. It is a state of mind that one has to be able to do that all the time, if that is even possible.

People say that the best way to do something is to just dive right in and do, that has its good and bad sides to it. It is more impulsive and has the advantage of somebody more likely to go out and doing it. But, the consequence to that is that I think if you want to keep going it will take more long term commitment to follow through with these meetup activities.

The ideal would be a person that has confidence in themselves and are willing with doing new things with new people while being impulsive enough that they take on the challenge in the first place. Anything that we do in life depends on how we mentally view ourselves.

 

Working hard for the money

If it was easy then it would be done already, such is the case of life. I have been thinking a lot recently about how to make some extra money on the side, hopefully it can help offset the massive student loans that I am currently trying to pay off. The search hasn't been easy at all, all of the potential things that I can do requires a lot of initial time and commitment, sounds familiar right? I am trying different ideas in the hopes that I can figure out a way to generate an extra 1k a money tax free. The goal is well defined but the way I get there is a bit murky at best.

Some crazy ideas
1. Start a small tutoring business based on time management
2. Tutor math and science at local schools
3. Blog everyday and have a huge following (this means you)
4. Write a science fiction novel and publish it on amazon or as an e-book
5. Get good at singing and be a wedding singer
6. Start an archery learning class
7. Pan-handle
8. Donate blood
9. Be a test subject for hungry graduate students
10. Take out all my savings, fly to Vegas and bet it on on red

Now, I don't know how practical any of this is especially number 9, as I know those people will do anything to get a paper out. When I start to look into it more and realize the difficultly of legitimate ways to make money, it was very discouraging. I guess that's why it took so many years for me to find a job. It all takes a effort and a willingness to accomplish the goals that I set out to do, but I ask myself is it worth the extra time and stress?

  

Why Growth Unleashed?

   I've been thinking a lot about growth recently and how I could sustain it in my life. I have been on a tear lately in terms of learning and doing new things with my life. I enrolled in college and have been taking a bunch of classes just for the purpose of doing something new with my life. This leads me to wonder about how I can create a system for myself that feeds upon new ideas and goals in life.

   What I want to do is give myself the gift of knowledge. I often wonder about the times that I wasted as a child and thought about what I could accomplish had I not wasted that time playing video games. It could've amounted to 10,000 hours for the entirety of my childhood, which in Malcolm Gladwell's book, defines as the time it takes to master a skill set. Well I mastered some skills but on a whole, I wished those skills included a keen financial sense and also a mastery of the written/spoken language. These soft skills have had a tremendous impact on my life not only as a way to gain new skills but also as way to move upward. I am only now starting to discover how powerful and influental it can be. For example in engineering, most of the people there have specific targeted hard skills such as a heavy math and science background, but what gets lost in translation is that most of the key essential skills to move forward or upward is the ability to present oneself.

   An engineer with an decent ability to speak and write to others is rarity, often he or she is invaluable to a company, in general, with a growth potential to lead. Here is where I come in, I have a chance to become greater than what I am and all I need to do is to prove that I have the ability to grow and can take on new challenges. I see it as the only way that I can withstand any layoffs and downturns in the economy. I must prove to myself and others that I am not a one trick pony and can only do a certain limited amount of tasks. 

  Now here is the hard part, how do I accomplish this efficiently? Well, for one I can objectively look at my weaknesses and target them one by one. Maybe after that I can create a tree graph and list out some solutions that I can carry out. The big question is, how do I find the time to do all this and maintain sanity....
 
Growth, I want it... now if only I can grow taller as well.

Call me maybe?

The last couple of months have been one hell of a ride. I never thought that I would grow and challenge myself so much in such a short amount of time. None of this could've have been possible if I had not taken risks and let myself enjoy the ride. I have adopted a new philosophy in life, say yes to almost everything and do almost everything.  True freedom is so liberating, I'm not quite there yet but what I have experienced has been empowering. The ability to do whatever and whenever is something that everyone should have the means to accomplish.

In the past few months, I have audition for a musical, picked up Argentine tango, and started a new job. I have finally enough free time that I am venturing outside of engineering again to get back to learning something new. At my core, I am absolutely afraid of getting complacent in life and therefore I always want to learn something that I've never done before. The only problem is that it is hard to get myself to do new things without someone going with me. It still takes me considerable motivation to start something, hopefully I will eventually get over it.

I want to do everything I can before I die, I want to maximize my time. So, in the next couple of months I am going to start archery, stagecraft, and take voice lessons. I just have to make sure that I don't burn myself out.

Now for the in-flight entertainment.....