Category: Uncategorized

I could see brown rice porridge in the pot. I wasn’t trying to make porridge, and I don’t remember using brown rice. It tasted like sludge, and there wasn’t enough community Sriracha hot sauce left over to mask the flavor. Rookie mistake, sure – but at the moment I thought it was unforgivable because it wasn’t my rice to burn.

“I’ll still eat it,” say the unfortunate souls who agreed to let me cook dinner. I would eat it too of course, but this was embarrassing. I promised two new friends that I would cook for them, eager to show off what I had learned after hovering over their shoulders as they made stir-fry the past couple days. “Are you sure about cooking dinner?” “Oh, absolutely!” Two hours later they were greeted with so many apologies that the word “sorry” lost its meaning. It was a simple pot of rice, and yet, I still took it personally.

“Wesley, don’t be sad. We weren’t expecting much anyway, and I’m happy that you made us dinner.”

Blunt truth and gentle encouragement – more comforting than sugar-coated compliments and forced “mmmm”s and nods of approval will ever be.

They weren’t even that focused on whatever I was cooking anyway – they had more pressing concerns, like not being homeless for the year after realizing that the landlord had tried to scam them by advertising apartments already filled. And yet, for all that time (or at least for that hour I was cooking), I had felt that the whole world revolved around me, what I felt, and whatever I burned inside that pot. Me, me, me. Now that’s embarrassing.

This example is a tad melodramatic, but you get the point.

~

Say a loved one cooked something shitty, and everybody in the room knows it. Saying it isn’t bad won’t make the food taste any better, and it won’t preserve their precious ego either.

So the best thing you can do in a situation like this? Tell them to cook again the next day.

The instructors for our Dutch Culture & Language program have been very kind. Along with teaching us about Dutch culture, they’ve been treating us out to drinks nearly every other day, especially when we go out on field trips to big cities. Drinks after visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Drinks after touring the Parliament in Den Haag. Drinks in Café Broers in Utrecht to start off orientation, and drinks once again to end orientation.

I’m not saying that they’re turning us into alcoholics, or that I’ve learned more about a country’s beer more than the actual country, but the professor’s gesture of paying for his students’ drinks is always appreciated. Order a fancy five-euro cocktail though and you’re on your own – gotta be reasonable, y’know.

There is a nine-day break between the end of the Dutch Culture & Language orientation and the actual start of the school year, and the landlord has just kicked us out of the temporary housing to make room for incoming students. Up until this point, only students from the UC campuses were living in the dorms – the other international and Dutch students hadn’t moved in yet.

Getting kicked out isn’t too bad. At least it gives us the excuse to travel and have sleepovers in other people’s rooms. Even the common living room is full of stranded students.

I’ll be out of the country for a week, but I’ve scheduled a few posts in the meantime.

 

Whereas the professor is obligated to read through ten pages of whatever crap I scrambled together three hours before the deadline, you, the reader, do not share that same obligation. If whatever I’m writing has moved through my bowels twice, the reader can just move on and carry about her business.

So while I don’t get graded on this, it does mean I need to be more vigilant about what I post — first, so I don’t waste the reader’s time, second, so I don’t feel guilty about wasting the reader’s time, and third, so I can enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done (however I choose to define that).

Even though computer science is a requirement for cognitive science majors at UCSD, I still find it intimidating. Especially how missing a single semi-colon or bracket can make the entire code go haywire — or even worse (depending on how you look at it) — when the code works, but not the way you want it to. If anything, it helps me appreciate how the human brain is capable of making so many decisions and predictions with incomplete information. Sure, it’s error prone, but at least it won’t collapse like the computer. Still, just as how a blank screen in Microsoft Word reveals the holes in your concentration, broken or messy code can hold you accountable for the flaws in your own logic.

Luckily, there’s a whole slew of resources out there in the internet to make the process of learning programming more approachable (the number of accessible choices can be overwhelming), and there’s one I want to recommend today: Jessica Hische & Russ Maschmeyer’s Don’t Fear the Internet. It’s a fun seven-part video series on the fundamentals of HTML and CSS, featuring lively narrators, cats, and hamburgers. It’s the best presentation I’ve seen on the subject, and is perfect if you’re just getting started.