Train Wreck

By Jae-An Wang

This blog is kind of melodramatic.
Also, this picture is kinda terrifying.

I bumped into my elementary school band teacher at the station the other day. It was quite awkward and very strange.

Another thing that is very strange is that I have just a few days left at home. This is a fact that still hasn’t quite sunk in for me; there’s a portion of my brain that for some reason keeps insisting that I’ll never go to college and that I’m stuck in a purgatory where all my friends have left and I will live at home for the rest of my days. Alas, such are the struggles of students of the quarter system.

I suppose this sort of “imaginary delusion,” to put it one way, exists because I’m quite nervous. I’m super duper nervous. Why am I nervous? When I ask myself this, not a lot comes to mind immediately. In fact, these reasons came so slowly that I had to postpone this blog by several days.

Why Is Jae-An Uneasy?

• He doesn’t feel ready, in nearly every way possible
• He’s not sure if he will be able to adapt quickly enough
• Being thrown into new social environments isn’t exactly his forte
• Help will be slightly harder to find but he’ll need it a lot more, he thinks
• Aerospace engineering might not be for him
• UCLA might not be for him
• College might not be for him
• Generic cause of worry in majority of college students
• Other

Do you believe in fate? I think I do. Once someone asked me why, and I struggled heavily to explain. Let me try again here: How I perceive it is that everything that happens has a cause, whether we can identify it or not. And everything in the universe at this moment can be and is a cause for something that will happen in the future; this line of cause and effect can (theoretically) be traced all the way back to the birth of this world, or at least in the history of the universe that I happen to believe in. And all of these cause and effect interactions work around the laws of physics, both known and unknown. Therefore (I’m not even sure if this is a logical chain of reasoning or not) the tracks are already laid out for us, to put it one way. Every event in the future is already determined by factors that are in play now that were made that way by factors and conditions before and so on. What do you think (assuming this made any sense whatsoever)? Although I don’t think about it too much, this does suggest that my success or failure in the coming years is already determined based on the current conditions. This does bring up a number of philosophical questions about free will and such, one of which is: is it still my fault if I fail?

This blog is a train wreck too

I really can’t figure out where I’m trying to go with all this. I guess where I’m trying to end up is that what I’m most afraid of is making a mistake that I regret a lot later, but not knowing if it could have been avoided or not. This probably makes no sense.

I’ll be fine.

I think.