Isn’t this funny? It’s been precisely a year (give or take a few days) since I’ve last posted anything! It goes to show that keeping a blog isn’t as easy as some people make it look. Last year I wrote about resolutions. Let’s see how they held up.

Last year I discussed my observation that time isn’t created equal for us, and that finding and understanding what motivates the work I do was important to how productive I’d be. It was certainly helpful to be able to schedule my days in a way where I’d get more work done in the mornings, skip my afternoon classes to nap, and then work in the evenings before going to bed early (11pm, let’s say). It was pretty effective, this way - I found myself generally less stressed, with no impact on academic performance (though I didn’t really do any better than I always have). Overall it was a good end to four years.

Over the summer I took a trip with my mom and younger brother to China. It was a long awaited trip - last I’d been there I was only 3. We toured many cities (Beijing, Xi’an, Chengdu, Chongqing, Hangzhou, Shanghai, and my parents’ hometown of Changchun). It was wild. I saw many things I read in history books come to life before my eyes, and I met family and friends I never knew I had. My mother reunited with her three best friends from college - the first they’ve been together since they parted in 1992 - and two of them flew in for the occassion. It was like a dream, seeing these people who knew my mother so well, and who now had 25 years of career behind them - two were already retiring. Those were the kinds of careers my mother could have had if she didn’t come with my dad to America - Dean of the college music school, a piano instructor… they were all music educators.

Perhaps the most startling thing for me was seeing some of the tourist destinations and seeing just how real the events of China’s modern history was. I walked into the beautiful lush gardens of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, a massive 800 acre park full of bridges, lakes, and country roads. It was an estate fit for the emperor. There were signs at different locations that featured picturesque chinese architecture, like an artists rendition of a little pagoda situated on the hill that the sign marks. Except that there was no pagoda on the hill. It, along with all the buildings in the 800 acre palace was burned to the ground as an act of revenge by European armies. In Hangzhou, we visited the Lei Feng Pagoda, a beautiful towering structure that was the hallmark of the West Lake skyline. Except that the pagoda was constructed in 2002, a replacement for the original pagoda which collapsed in 1924 after a century of neglect and which had previously stood for almost a thousand years. These stories barely scratch the surface - I can recount countless stories of the kinds of cultural changes occurring within the country, which prides itself on its unbroken line of cultural heritage that dates back to antiquity.

In our last month in China, I got to see many relatives - my aunts and uncles on both sides (some of whom I hadn’t seen since I last been to China), my cousins, and my grandfather. It was unreal, to see people so excited to see me, who were proud of me, and treated me like their own. And for the first time in my life, I could talk to them, credits to four semesters of Chinese in college. I have lots more to say about China, but as this is a review I shall move on.

I began work in September, and went back to keeping discipline over my life. I kept a strict regimen of sleeping between 10:30-11:00pm so that I could get up between 6:30-7:00am, in time to have a good breakfast and some time to think before getting to work. Once I had set this routine, it was self-perpetuating. I found myself not needing an alarm clock to wake up, and I naturally became tired when the clock neared 11pm. It kept my life in good boundaries, and I wasn’t tired all day.

The interesting part was going to work and finding that the old routine I had started in college hit me hard. I found myself quite productive just before noon, when I would then break for lunch, and then found myself struggling to stay awake between the hours of 1 to 4 (my usual college nap time). Well, work can’t be skipped, and if I am to stubbornly refuse to drink coffee, I just had to power through it. Since work blocked out a huge chunk of my time I knew I needed to make sure I used my time outside of work productively. This meant an efficient routine of getting home, whipping up dinner within the hour, eating it while watching some online course videos, and then spending an hour on the piano. The remaining two or three hours were then for leisure.

I also began tracking my days in a small journal - keeping small thoughts, writing out goals for the day, and checking or X’ing out the goals to keep myself accountable for what I accomplished. A good day happens when I accomplish the important goals I set out to do. I always strive for more good than bad days and keeping this journal certainly helped to motivate me to get my goals in.

At this point I’m thinking about what my next move will be - adult life isn’t the same as life has been - I’m no longer waiting for the next grade, the next set stage of life or school. Now it’s up to whatever I want to do. I just have to make sure I make the best of my time.

Hope this helps someone.

~Roland