2013 was 10 years ago…
It’s 1:04 AM CST right now.
I was brainstorming for a title when I happened to read my friend’s status on Discord, and I thought it perfectly describes how I feel right now.
2013 really was 10 years ago. Wow.
I’m not sure where I really want to go with this — I have so many thankful, regretful, and nostalgic thoughts that I want to express, and I’m not sure how to do it, and I’m not sure if this is the right medium (heh) to do it through. After all, if anyone reads this, what would they gain from it? Instead of sharing my thoughts on a public website should I just save them in a journal? Should I have a purpose in mind before writing?
Most of all, I’m thankful. I’m thankful to my family, friends, and everyone I’ve met this year. After spending my first year of university at home because of Covid-19, my first in-person interactions with my peers began during the Fall of 2021. However, I didn’t really go out and meet people; I saw people who I’d been chatting with online, but never really got close to them. This continued until the Summer of 2022 when I started meeting people who would change my life in ways that I’d never imagined. I met great people from my operating systems class — we’d gone through a lot together but I’d never really gotten involved with them. When I realized they played Valorant, a popular FPS game, I joined them for hours of late-night fun during the summer. I got to know them better and came to the conclusion that it really isn’t too hard to meet new people and make friends if you approach them with an open mind and an interest in learning more about them. Also during the Summer, I joined the CodeRED team, which organizes UH CougarCS’s hackathon every year. Through it, I met brilliant, amazing people who inspired me to be better in every way possible. In the past few months, these two groups of friends — those from the OS class and the CodeRED team — have changed me to the point where I don’t recognize the person I was just 7 months ago.
Largely due to my interactions with my newfound friends, I’ve become a more emotionally mature person, I’ve had a lot of professional development from LinkedIn to resumes, I’ve secured an internship at Chevron, I helped organize a hackathon with 700+ applications, and become the president at CougarCS, the largest computer science organization at UH. Most of all, they’ve helped me realize how enriching meeting people and learning about them can be. It’s like my life has suddenly become more vibrant; like I’m able to feel colors (I’m colorblind lol).
I’m nostalgic. I remember the days when I was dreadfully shy and spent my days reading for hours and hours until my mom had to scold me to go outside and hide my books. I remember the holiday parties at my elementary school when we used to bring cookies, candy, pizza, and popcorn and watch Polar Express on the projector in a crowded classroom. I remember how my middle school math teacher used to make my class watch CNN Student News with Carl Azuz right before lunch. And how could I forget the hilarious shenanigans my friends and I were up to during lunch in high school? I’ll also never forget the days of Covid-19 when my high school prom and graduation were canceled, and I missed a year of my university life. These are memories that I never want to forget, and I believe that these experiences are what made me who I am today. I know I’ll never get those days back; I know that I won’t get to re-live any of the experiences that I’ve gone through in the past few months, so I plan to make the most of everything I do. Maybe I won’t be able to. But what if I do?
Last but not least, I’m regretful. I regret wasting my time by doing things inefficiently. I regret making my mom sad by being a petulant teenager. I regret not being the best that I could be in high school so that I could become the perfect child like my peers at Rice, Stanford, Princeton, and MIT. These are things that mattered 2–3 years ago. But I still regret them all.
I’ve done some thinking about what I want my overall goal to be. The goal that overshadows everything else in my life; a goal that guides me through the toughest times that I know are in my future. I think I just might know it, at least for now. I want to have no regrets. I don’t want to hold back, I want to give everything I do my all. When I finally kick the bucket, I don’t want to reminisce and think, “Damn, I wish I’d done that when I still had the time.” I know that there’s no way that I can have no regrets. But I sure as hell can try.
If you got this far, I question your sanity. Why are you even reading a random 20-year-old’s unorganized blog post about some obscure, nonsensical concepts? But honestly, I’m glad you did. And I hope you learned something, even if that something is that you shouldn’t read my stuff because I sound crazy. With that said, see you on the next one :).
