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Mitt Romeny, on a video from CNN:

I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor, we have a safety net there, if it needs repair I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the ninety-, ninety-five percent of Americans who right now are struggling… My campaign is focused on middle-income Americans.

His claim and his belief is that you can categorize the middle 90-95% of Americans as middle-income, and that the top 5% are “fine”, and the bottom 5% have their “safety nets.” Here are some facts:

• - The U.S. poverty threshold for a single person under the age of 65 is $11,161.
• - 14.32% of Americans over the age of 25 who earn an income make less than $10,000 a year.
• - According to U.S. Census Bureau data, the nation’s poverty rate rose to 15.1% in 2010.

The poor in America are much more numerous than Mitt thinks, and the safety nets that provide them with basic food and healthcare aid are under so much stress.  The United States has budgeted $881 billion for Medicaid and Unemployment/Welfare spending for 2012, or nearly a quarter of the total budget. In contrast, Sweden is projected to spend 16.8% of their 2012 budget on ALL healthcare-related costs and “financial security for families and children.”

In fact, if we extend past the poor and look at spending on all entitlement, the contrast is even wider. The U.S. is due to spend 57% of its 2012 budget on entitlement programs (which include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Unemployment/Welfare). Sweden, a socialist state according to some, is due to spend just 34.4% of their budget on entitlement programs (which include healthcare, financial security for the elderly and children and families, and student financial aid).

While these entitlement programs in the U.S. are essential programs, their costs are too high. They need to be reformed. Obama gets this. Romney needs to get this, too.

I read a couple of articles today, both written from the reports of people reaching the twilight of their lives, that got me thinking. You can find the articles here and here. Both articles highlight the key, generalized regrets of these older people, and, reading them, I realized just how difficult it is to convince yourself to follow their advice. And the problem isn’t with the advice – it’s with us. It’s so hard to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term happiness.

Studies have shown that lower-income families are generally happier than higher-income ones, for a variety of reasons, some of which can be found in those two articles. The mindset, especially of Yalies, of ambition, of working our hardest for that better tomorrow, seems ingrained in our psyche. There’s an endless drive to be better, to be richer, to be more beautiful. But it seems that once we set ourselves upon this path, our standards of happiness rise and rise and we end up never really happy. We’re constantly looking forward, living in the future, never really satisfied with the present.

Many of us are guilty of exactly the things that Ware talked about. It takes great courage to make an unorthodox decision to pursue happiness at the expense of income, to prioritize our personal relationships at the expense of getting ahead, to choose upheaval in the name of greater happiness at the expense of stability. All of those things that might be sacrificed – money and status – are the very things we seem to be wired to want more and more of. But when you pay for it in happiness, is it really worth it?

I also discovered this response to the question “What is most surprising about humanity?,” which is popularly attributed to the the Dalai Lama:

“Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.
And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present;
the result being that he does not live in the present or the future;
he lives as if he is never going to die,
and then dies having never really lived.”

The truth of this terrifies me. In our endless pursuit of wealth and status, how much happiness do we lose? Are we forsaking opportunities of present happiness for supposed future gratification? I think we are. But the scariest part is that this decision just seems so difficult. How do you justify the branch of happiness of happiness when it seems like such a nebulous concept, especially when the alternative is concretely better.

I know that I, along with the rest of the Class of 2012, will be faced with decisions like this many times in the next few years. I can only hope that we make the decisions that make us happy.

I got a new camera over Thanksgiving break! It’s a Panasonic GF-2, a compact interchangeable lens cameras, and I’m pretty excited to use it over winter break and the coming years. It certainly beats the cell phone cameras I’ve been using for the last two years. Anyway, here’s a few first shots that I took with it in my room.

There was an interesting article last month in New York Magazine that profiled Mitt Romney and described his past as a consultant and businessman. It’s a fantastic article, a great read, and I definitely recommend it. It was particularly interesting to me due to my recent interest in Romney’s candidacy. In the past year, I’ve definitely become politically independent, mostly due to disillusionment from the inability for Democrats in Congress to do, well, anything. It’s been incredibly frustrating to watch Obama try, and fail, to get anything of worth through Congress as the Republicans and Democrats refuse to compromise. At this point, I wonder if Obama really is faultless – is his inability to push anything through congress due to his own leadership deficiencies?

And so, reading the article about Mitt Romney, I find myself impressed by his history as a businessman and, of course, as a consultant. He seems like the kind of leader our government needs: an objective thinker with a huge appetite for data. While I can’t agree with some of the social policy areas that he is forced to endorsed due to his party affiliation, I really do like his way of thinking and executing, which may be more important with the economy as the focus of the 2012 election. While I haven’t done enough research into his positions on key issues (besides healthcare), his character (apparently he’s a flip-flopper), or his ability to be the leader of the free world (which is becoming more and more an antiquated exaggeration), what I’ve seen so far has been impressive. While I still Obama as a man, I, like many others, have become frustrated by the inaction of the government as a whole over the last few years. I’d certainly like to see Romney win the Republican nomination to see how he stacks up against the charisma of Obama. At the very least, he isn’t as ideologically repugnant to me as the other Republican candidates.

Three years ago today, I wrote a post recounting my first eighteen years. I talked about my childhood, and what I thought I knew about myself at the time. Remarkably, I was pretty close. But what I didn’t realize was just how much I would grow in the years since. While I can’t say if college has been the most transformative period of my life, I do know that I’ve learned more about myself in these most recent three years than in the prior eighteen. I’m still not quite done with college, but I do stand on the verge of the next chapter of my life. And so once more, I look back and reflect.

With the power of hindsight, I can confirm that my initial, tentative ruminations about high school were a bit exaggerated. I literally grew up, but not as much as I thought. Three years ago, I thought I’d come pretty close to the person I would be in adulthood. High school certainly brought me out of the awkward shell of middle school and treated me to experiences of responsibility, leadership, pride, love, loss. But what I realize now is that the experiences only provided the framework for future experiences. At 18, I still had no idea who I wanted to be, what I liked to do, and exactly who I was.

At 18, I wanted to be a doctor. Heck, since I’d been a little kid, I wanted to be a doctor. I thought that that was the life I wanted, to help people feel better and to make a difference in the lives of as many people as possible. And so I embarked upon that path quite seriously, choosing courses that were only really useful for pre-med students. But I realized pretty quickly that my motivations in choosing this path were less grounded in fact and more in some deeply-held fancy. By spring semester of freshman year, I still had not committed to any of the pre-med obligations that required more effort. I didn’t want to do research, and I didn’t really want to do any other extracurricular involving science. I justified this by doing something I actually liked, teaching, which I chose as my summer experience after freshman year.

I thought that my love for teaching was a sign that I was meant to be a doctor. Since high school, I’d been tutoring and teaching as a side-hobby. Even to this day, helping others by teaching is something I enjoy. It was natural to think that that love was perfectly transferable to a career in medicine. But the summer after my freshman year, which I spent teaching several SAT classes, I realized that there was one major practical similarity between teaching and medicine that I couldn’t stand – I realized that I didn’t like repetitive tasks. One week that summer, I taught the same math class about geometry three times in a row, and it was dreadful. I taught a total of five classes that summer, all with identical curriculum, and that experience almost robbed me of all my love for teaching. While I liked helping others, I definitely did not enjoy doing so in a overly structured, repetitive way.

And so I returned to Yale in the fall with serious doubts about my chosen career path, but it wasn’t until a weekend at home that I finally decided to change course. That October, I went along with my parents and my brother to his pediatrician, who spoke to me briefly about her career. She told me two things: one, that, as a Yalie, I had the opportunity to truly pursue as many paths as I wanted and two, that her career choice included a long and difficult journey, and that if I wasn’t absolutely sure I wanted to be a doctor, I’d only be miserable several years down the line. Her second point resonated with me, because I really wasn’t sure at that time. Her reminder of the seven years of further schooling and training that awaited me filled me with dread. I knew I would be unhappy if I forced myself through that. Shortly thereafter, I dropped the medical career from my mind.

This decision coincided with another major event, as I entered 2010 as president of the Chinese American Students Association. I’d mentioned three years ago that I probably wouldn’t find another activity or another group that meant as much to me as marching band did. CASA comes pretty close to that status. But more importantly, my year as president showed me the first glimpses of what kind of work I would really enjoy.

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On Friday, I was invited to be a senior volunteer for an event at our Asian-American Cultural Center called “What I Wish I Knew My Freshman Year.” And so to prepare, I came up with a list of ten things I had learned since freshman year. In talking about my experiences so far and answering the freshmen questions about those experiences, I discovered that I still don’t fully follow these tips myself. In any case, here they are:

1. Be true to yourself. Do what makes you happy, not what others say you should do.
2. Be genuine, be reliable. The relationships you form at Yale can potentially last a lifetime, so make sure they’re built the right way.
3. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. The fear of making a mistake takes away opportunities. Instead, make the mistakes and look back and learn from them.
4. Trust your intuition. Don’t stress about the details or over-think the possibilities. Life has its way of working out.
5. Learn how to say “no.” You can’t do everything, so choose the things that mean the most to you.
6. Don’t be too attached and insular. You don’t truly discover who you really connect with until later, so meet new people.
7. Ask for help if you need it. The people around you are more willing to help than you think, so don’t feel like you have to do everything by yourself. The opposite it true as well: don’t hesitate to offer help.
8. Get to know professors! They actually want to meet you, and do care about your life.
9. Party hard, but party smart. Fun times aren’t very fun if you can’t remember them.
10. Don’t forget your family and friends back home. You might want to rush forward with your life, but they’re the only ones who will catch you when you fall.

Mona Simpson, the sister of Steve Jobs, delivered the eulogy at his memorial service two weeks ago. The New  York Times reproduced that eulogy today, and you can find it here. This is one of the most emotionally powerful things I’ve ever read; I’m left absolutely speechless by it.

Even though I think there are reasonable historical reasons why chopsticks came to become so popular, I do wonder this every once in a while. Especially when I’m trying to eat peas.

After over a year of not writing here, and after several weeks of procrastinating, I’ve finally gotten around to updating my blog. Now that I’m entering the twilight of a major period in my life and standing at the doorstep of the next great chapter, I feel it’s appropriate that I begin recording my thoughts and experiences again. I also made some minor cosmetic changes to the website and updated some of the pages.

As a college senior without too many extracurricular commitments, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the future. It’s natural, of course, to think about my own future, but the state of the world these past few months has brought its future to the forefront of my mind. With the Arab revolutions, economic problems in Europe and at home, and the beginnings of popular uprisings here in the U.S., there’s a lot of uncertainty in the world.

And so I’ll be writing more often moving forward. I expect to write less about the happenings in my own life, and more about my musings regarding events that are tangential, or even unrelated, to me.

A mere couple of weeks after coming back from Hong Kong, I’m now on a family vacation to Canadia! These past two days we’ve visited the cradle of French civilization, Québec, and the former commercial capital of Canada, Montréal. I wasn’t anticipating just how French the place was (English isn’t even an official language in Québec!), but the first store we went to, a Subway for dinner, had no English at all. It was definitely quite the shock, but we got used to it and spent a day in the historical city of Québec, spending most of our time in the original city boundaries (Old Québec) and the government buildings outside the walls.

Our day in Québec city was an overcast, rainy day, although the rain always seemed to pour when we were inside, which was fortunate. It’s the only city north of Mexico with intact city walls, though after seeing the Xi’an city walls, these are pretty lame – no wonder Québec got taken by the British! Kidding aside, the Old City (Vieux Québec), was quaint but colorful. Narrow streets, open shops, stone-cobbled streets made it feel very much like a stereotypical European villa. It even kind of felt like a European city: most of the tourist attractions were churches. We did visit the Québec Parliament building, where the leaders of the “nation” of Québec – as they call themselves – govern. It also gave a glimpse into the curious history of French Canada, with its initial history under French rule, middle history under British rule, and now a very French region of the Canadian federation.

Parliament in Québec. Note how the renovations on the left side don’t interfere with your photography of the building. It’s not even see-through scaffolding; the image of Parliament is on the fabric itself. We saw this all over Montréal too!

Notre-Dame church in Québec, one of dozens in the city.

Afterwards, we walked around the beautiful narrow, winding streets of Vieux Québec and found our way to the Morrin Centre, now the home of the Québec Historical and Literary Society. However, the building, built in the early 1800s as the first jail in Québec. The building still has a basement room that is an unmodified, unrestored cell block from the original jail. It was a dank, dark place with scary stone walls and metal doors. I’m sure modern jails are any also stone walls and metal doors, but this just felt like a cave with chains. The building was then restored into a college for English speakers, and when the English-speaking population declined, converted into a library. Very cool place with a unique history.

The library inside the Morrin Centre. Hard to imagine this used to be a cell block in a jail.

Since everything in Québec seems to close around 4pm, we then headed out of town to the rural Île d’Orleans, a farm-heavy area primarily involved with fruit – vineyards, apple orchards, strawberry farms, etc. The pastoral scene didn’t seem like a huge contrast with the old stone walkways and old buildings in Québec city, and seemed like merely going into the countryside of an ancient European city. Quaint, but beautiful.

Montréal

The next day, we headed out to Montréal, which was, until Toronto’s rise in 1976, the commercial capital of Canada. I definitely didn’t get a favorable impression of this supposedly wondrous city. The problems started fairly early: the exit from the highway into the city advertised the visitor’s center, so we thought we could go there and grab a map to get a sense of where to go. Yet as soon as we got off the highway, there were no further signs for a couple kilometers. When a sign finally showed up, it said the center was about 9 kilometers away. We thought it’d be quick, so we just plowed ahead. Bad idea. Roadwork narrowed the street to only one lane, and there were traffic lights on every block. It took us about 30 minutes to travel 2 kilometers. We decided to turn around and go to the Botanical Gardens and not waste time sitting in traffic.

The gardens were actually pretty neat. They had plants and flowers from all over the world, including an area devoted to China, another for Japan’s banzai gardens, and more for areas like Russia and the Alps. Not a huge park, but definitely quite beautiful. No pictures for now, since I didn’t bring the USB cord for my other camera, but I’ll post them up later!

After a (very) late lunch, we decided to try to find that visitor’s center. Eventually, though, the signs became so scarce that we got completely lost in downtown Montréal. GPS is great, but only if you know where you’re going. The only place we knew was our hotel, so we gave up on the visitor’s center and ran head-on into Montréal’s strange road signs. At one point, the GPS told us to turn left, so we turned left. Suddenly, a pedestrian about to cross waved at us and pointed at a road sign. It was a green circle with an arrow pointing forward and another pointing to the right (example here) with text beneath it that said “7hrs á 22hrs”. I figured immediately that it was the equivalent of the American no-left-turn sign (a left arrow with a cross on it) but I couldn’t figure out why they just didn’t put that on the sign. It was hardly intuitive to tell someone you can turn right and go forward and not say anything about the possibility of left turns. I’m not sure what they were thinking when designing the sign, but it was frustrating because the GPS kept telling us to turn left, yet we couldn’t. And after we got out of the city, we hit rush hour traffic.

Later on, we went to visit the rest of the city, ending up in Chinatown and Old Montréal. Unfortunately, many of the sites (including the square in front of their Notre-Dame) were under heavy renovation, perhaps explaining the dearth of tourists in the city. My overall impression of downtown Montréal: poorly lit, low population, many homeless, and fairly creepy. The only vibrant, bright area in Old Montréal was one block. The rest was dark and shady. Not the best impression at all!

Notre-Dame in Montréal. Material and architecture looks kind of familiar…

In any case, we only planned one day in Montréal. Tomorrow is Toronto for two days, then Niagara Falls!