Brownian Motion

at eight forty seven
my phone pings with a
picture of a stuffed dinosaur,
the wordless acknowledgement
of my presence in your heart
and your presence in mine

Ambient air temperature: twenty-three point three degrees Celsius. Solar radiation is strong. Light wind in northeasterly direction, estimated three kilometers per hour.

The train out of Xiangshan is a mosh pit at a rock concert. Except there is no concert, there are no rocks, and everyone’s hands are clutching their phones instead of waving around in the air. That includes my hands, by the way, my fingers absentmindedly scrolling through Instagram as I lie ungracefully flattened against the door like an insect splattered across a windshield.

A script for a high school graduation reflection video

Remember to drink 3.7 liters of water per day to maintain adequate hydration.

Remember to brush your teeth twice a day. Your dentist says to do it three times, but we both know that’s not going to happen.

Remember to raise your hand. Ask stupid questions. Give stupid answers. Then, learn from them. Do things that you aren’t good at, so that you can improve. It’s better to look like an idiot than to actually be one.

Take a square piece of paper. Fold it diagonally, creasing with your fingers. Now unfold it… now the same thing on the other side… now collapse it inwards like an accordion…

Kayoko’s paper cranes were always better than mine: graceful edges that were rigid and soft at the same time; wings in perfect definition, fluttering like part of the wind itself. Mine could not get off the ground. In vain their stubby little arms flapped like those of an overcaffeinated hummingbird; pitifully they backflipped across the floor as if they were one of those cheap remote-controlled toys that were sold at the store for ten dollars each, the ones that came out of the box with half a rotor broken.

They say that eyes are windows into the soul. Yes, I know it is cliche to start off with a metaphor so old that it dates back to Shakespeare. Yes, I know full well that I am using a cliche metaphor to give an arrogant air of authority and make this essay seem more interesting and philosophical than it actually is. But like many cliche metaphors, it does indeed reveal a deep truth about human nature.

Fellow citizens!

The earthquake of April 5th, 2024 was the greatest to hit New Jersey in two hundred fifty years. Early in the morning (for me), and without warning, it struck. The Earth’s crust gave way and rattled us. Briefly, for about thirty seconds.

Written while procrastinating on linear algebra homework

Fish. Brine. The sound of waves rippling across midnight air.

They were rippling quite hard, in fact―the boat felt like it was about to capsize. But not too far away were the lights of the ports. Not too far away was home. Not too far away was my boy, who still thought his dad wrangled sea monsters for a living. I mean, he technically wasn’t wrong―the bluefin tuna I caught last week was quite a struggle. But it was nothing compared to the legendary Monster of Lake Tahoe, supposedly a hundred-ton tentacled beast that lurks beneath the waves. (Or something like that. The tale grows grander every time I hear it.)

Standard fare: 2½ cups white rice (plus a sprinkle of quinoa), 3½ cups water.

Written for the PHS Student Newspaper (again)

I’ll be honest: I’m not much of a superhero fan. The recipes for most superhero movies today all seem pretty similar: take some guy with magical powers (and the ego to boot), throw him into some conundrum with the Villain of the Day, and have him fight his way through. Mix in some witty jokes, manufacture some sort of emotional moment to give an impression of sophistication, and wrap the whole thing with a special-effects budget that could rival the GDP of a small nation. And then, apparently, watch the box-office money rain down from the sky.

Based on "A Little Cloud" by James Joyce; written with Aman Kapur

Andrew couldn’t sleep. He glanced wearily at the bluish light emanating from his roommate’s desk ― in the glow, he could just about make out the hands of his watch, its hands forming a despairingly early hour. Outside the window lay darkness and silence; within, the rhythmic machine-gun fire of a mechanical keyboard, rattling the cramped tenth-floor dormitory room, scaring the sheep from Andrew’s mind as he tried in vain to count them. Sam was up to something again.

Highlands. Dreary, windswept, moody. Yellowing grass smeared into cliff faces of imposing rock; petrichor mixing with fumes of moss diffusing across the earth (Scotland, probably, by the looks of it). A figure emerges through the fog―pensive, contemplative, a hood of cashmere effortlessly concealing a dark gash down the side of his temple.

Written for The Princeton High School Tower Newspaper

“Why the hell should I care about fairy tales?”

Well, my dear hypothetical friend, you should care because they’re fun. When was the last time you fought a dragon while riding a flying carpet? The last time you were a mermaid seeking to find a world above the waves? The last time you crawled through a wardrobe door and talked to a goat? But they're also a reflection of our social values — what morals does a society think are so important that they’re woven into some of the very first stories we tell our children?

Fanfiction written for a European History assignment

WHEREUPON CANDIDE INDIRECTLY GETS ROUSSEAU MAULED BY A DOG.

Adapted from an article I wrote for The Tower, the PHS student newspaper.

The ocean is quite a poetic oxymoron. For hundreds of thousands of years, it has separated cultures with vast seas and treacherous storms, and yet it has also unified them in contemplating the same majestic waters. As they gazed, they thought of stories. What does the ocean hold, hidden beneath its seemingly endless waves?

Written after a very frustrating debugging session

Absolutely screwed.

After analysing my situation in great detail and considering all possible courses of action, that is my informed conclusion. Utterly completely positively screwed.

quarks, leptons, bosons ―
we are all
the same
inside

On the first day of school, bring a three-ring binder, a notebook with a marbled front cover, and exactly two-point-four ounces of snacks.

hailing winds of words reverberate through
the house, condemning every move, every
breath ― storms of expectation relentlessly
screaming, trembling walls with tempest each hour ―

Death is awoken by a phone call.

“Fine,” he says. Glancing wearily at the time marked on the hands of his pocketwatch, he tumbles gracelessly out of his cramped apartment bed. The work doesn’t pay well.

Adapted from an article I wrote for The Tower, the PHS student newspaper.

Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth, taken from a distance of six billion kilometers by the Voyager spacecraft. Described by Carl Sagan as “a mote of dust in a sunbeam,” our home planet barely takes up a pixel of the vast inky seas beyond. We think we have conquered Nature herself as we bend ecosystems to our will; we think we are masters of the laws of physics as we build spires that graze the sky. We have sailed the seven seas, we have summited the highest peaks, and we have mapped the farthest islands. But as that photograph shows, there is so much of the heavens we have yet to explore.

We are terrible at understanding large numbers. It’s a cognitive limit, a remnant of the good old days when humans spent their lives foraging for berries and lived in small nomadic bands of at most a hundred people Hunter-gatherers never needed to comprehend the phrases “I found 2,140,201 pounds of blackberries this year” or “the tribe population increased to 1,200,305 inhabitants in the spring season.”

The following is adapted from a lecture I gave to the PHS Math Team in February 2023

A combinatorial proof shows that $A$ and $B$ are the same thing by showing that they are solutions to the same counting problem. Usually induction or algebraic proofs can also be used to solve these problems, but combinatorial proofs are usually more insightful and elegant.

The heat death of the universe is inevitable.

The stars will blink out of existence in spectacular fashion, each putting on a final fireworks show for an indifferent universe, and the heavens will settle into a self-satisfied soup of thermodynamic equilibrium: a perfect entropy, a uniform chaos.

a.k.a. the most unrealistic action scene I could think of

Olivia Nishimoto fixed her piercing gaze upon the computer screen before her. On her desk, a Psyduck plushie and a row of neatly arranged mini cacti; on the wall, a poster of Metallica ― a reminder of halcyon days long past. She was truly an oxymoron of a character.

The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second. On paper, that is incredibly fast. In a mere 1.3 seconds, a photon of light can travel the quarter-million miles from the Earth to its rock-hewn satellite. But the universe is mostly made of nothing. Through the round porthole window, Earth is but a pinprick in the inkblot sea of black.

Each box had a story. That is, if you could even call them “stories.” Most were uncreative to begin with, and once you get through the first trillion star systems they become terribly repetitive as well.

I’m hungry. It’s intrinsic, some sort of internal voracious insatiable unquenchable craving for food, sustenance, nourishment, whatever you want to call it. For some reason, there’s no shortage of it here ― but perhaps paradoxically there is never enough to eat. Probably a cruel joke, played by the same unknown malevolent entity that put me here as entertainment, as a plaything.