Tim Xu

A couple of months ago, I read a book called “Letters to my Son” by Kent Nerburn. I pulled a group of quotes from the book that especially hit me deep inside, which I rediscovered when I was searching for something else in Gmail. Here they are, with some thoughts attached to some of them.

“Strength based in force is a strength people fear. Strength based in love is a strength people crave.” — Strength based on love is stronger than any force possible. Though I wonder: how does one know that his strength is based in love rather than force? Is it the strength of a parent while his child is sick? Is it the strength of a man or woman who sacrifices everything for his family?

“Measure your greatness by the length of your reach, but also by the gentleness of your touch. For now, the world needs hands that love, not hands that conquer. Let your hands be among them.” — This sounds like something Barack Obama would say.

“Care for those around you. Look past differences. Their dreams are no less than yours, their choices in life no more easily made.” — I believe very strongly in this statement, although I may not always live by it. However, recognizing and embracing differences in opinion, differences in character in everyone is something worth striving for.

“Find the few pieces of your life that help you live. Value them for the way they help you give. Never forget that if you just accumulate possessions as the logical outcome of pursuing your desires, you will lose your wings to fly.”

“Remember that you can’t choose love. Love chooses you. All you can really do is accept it for all its mystery when it comes into your life. Feel the way it fills you to overflowing, then reach out and give it away. Give it back to the person who brought it alive in you. Give it to others who seem poor in spirit. Give it to the world around you in any way you can.” — Perhaps my favorite quote of all of these. There is so much depth in this one quote. The ideas: that love cannot be forced, that once you have it, you ought to share it.

“Money is nothing more than a commodity, an agreed-upon abstraction of exchange. It is the spirit of that exchange that animates money and gives it meaning. Great givers, rich and poor, use money to close doors between us all. Be a giver and a sharer. In some unexpected and unforeseeable fashion, all else will take care of itself.”

“The true measure of your education is not what you know, but how you share what you know with others.” — Truer words have never been said. I love to teach, and this is why.

“We have the power to create joy and happiness by our simplest acts of caring and compassion. We have the power to unlock the goodness in other people’s hearts by sharing the goodness in ours.” — Unfortunately, Former-President Bush did not get this message. Although it wouldn’t have worked, it certainly would have been better than his idea.

“The truly lucky people are the ones who manage to become longtime friends before they realize they are attracted to each other. They get to know each other’s laughs, passions, sadnesses, and fears. They see each other at their worst and at their best. This is ideal but not often possible. You need to look beyond your sexual attraction for other keys to compatibility. One of these is laughter. Laughter tells you how much you will enjoy each other’s company over the long term. If your laughter together is good and healthy, then you will have a healthy relationship to the world. Laughter is the child of surprise. If you can make each other laugh, you can always surprise each other. And if you can always surprise each other, you can always keep the world around you new.”

“Choose a vocation, not a job, and you will be at peace. Take a job instead of finding a vocation, and you’ll be waiting for retirement. We all owe ourselves better than that.”

“Though there are many good reasons to fight, there are no good fights. Someone always gets harmed, and when one person is harmed we are all diminished. Rise above your passions and fears and you will be able to avoid most fights.” — I’m not sure my predilection for avoiding conflict is based on such poetic terms, but it’s a good sentiment.

“Death should hold no terror, and we should embrace our dying as a momentary passage into the great harmony of eternity.”

Male or female, all of you should definitely look into reading this book. It’s got so many nuggets of great wisdom about growing up and being a truly good person.

Well, I think I’m pretty much settled into this new semester. It’s definitely pleasant to have this happen three weeks into the semester. I’m quite busy, with five classes and a lab, along with a plethora of organizations and clubs and the job, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I still have time to be (somewhat) social, to get my work done, and to relax and watch a bit of TV when I need to take a break.

I’m quite happy with life at this point. I’m rarely bored, and there’s a good mix of fun and work. Of course, stress happens occasionally, but what’s life without excitement?

In other news, happy birthday to Daniel and Tasia! I hope you guys enjoyed the party (and the gigantic card) last night. It was certainly fun to plan. Also, my Obama HOPE poster came in! It’s quite the backdrop to my workspace. If I ever need inspiration while banging out the last hundred words of a paper, I just have to look up!

And yes, I am working on a paper as I write this post. I’m just taking a break! Seriously!

Here’s my tentative schedule for this semester, pending a few lotteries and whatnot. I’ll know what it is for good by the end of the week.

Well, I’m pleasantly surprised. I’ve been using Windows 7 Beta 1 for a couple of days now, and I have to say – Microsoft has redeemed itself after Vista. The new features aren’t superfluous, and are really quite useful. Despite the new taskbar being (unsurprisingly) very similar to Mac OS X’s dock, it still works well, and is aesthetically pleasing.

The intangibles are all there. Boot times, even on my MacBook, are nearly as fast as Leopard. Within the OS, everything is quite snappy. There really isn’t any of the sluggishness I experienced in Vista. When I open Chrome, it opens. It’s refreshing, especially when compared to Vista. Also, I look at the system resources, and Windows 7 is buzzing along at a mere 25% of RAM used, with a browser and IM client open. That’s really impressive. Altogether, it’s really a huge step in the right direction for Microsoft, and I really hope they can carry this success through to release. 90% of the world uses Windows, and it’s about time that Microsoft gave them something that works more often than not.

That said, I haven’t tried going through some of Windows’ usual pains. Networking, on the surface at least, has improved, with the wireless icon in the taskbar now no longer completely useless. Compatibility with hardware I also have not tried, but Vista SP1 seemed to have fixed many of the issues, and I expect that Windows 7 has kept that up.

For those of you who haven’t really looked at Windows 7 yet, here’s a run-down of some of the new features.

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They say college is a period of self-discovery and self-realization, of epiphanies and maturation. Yet yesterday morning, at approximately 10:45 AM, when I handed in my Chemistry final and ended my first semester at Yale, I felt no different than I had the day I first walked through Phelps Gate. But I soon realized that, though I felt unchanged, the first eighth of my undergraduate experience left an indelible mark upon me.

My first steps on this adventure were rather timid. Awkward hellos and hi-my-name-is-Tim’s were the theme of the morning when the FPC freshman gathered in Old Campus for the first time. Yet by the time we returned to Yale two days later, I had friends, a few of whom I anticipate will be familiar faces for the rest of my life.

To say the least, FPC gave me the confidence to introduce myself and to smile. And, of course to introduce myself again, after I had forgotten his name. The two days I spent at Camp Awosting truly represented a great prelude to Yale and its experience. But I cannot forget its most important lesson: that my roommate from Texas did not have a southern accent – and that this was normal for Yalies from the south.

The first month of school was, and, in my mind, still is a blur. I met people from different organizations and through different people. I spent time with some friends, then promptly abandoned them for other friends. It was truly a strange period of unrest during which I never stopped to think. I plowed forward, forgoing books for friendship, sleep for fun. My closest friends remained my closest friends, yet everyone else shuffled around me. I had forsaken my friends back home, caught up in this whirlwind of novelty and excitement. Yet, as fate would have it, all the disparate threads I sewed in that first month would interweave in short order.

If I had to pick the single moment that turned the page, it was a late night in early October. Myself and a few friends watched “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and then we talked. And talked. And after that, I settled. I found a group of friends with whom I could laugh, with whom I could be stupid, and with whom I could just relax and have fun. Then time began to fly.

At this point, I reconnected with high school friends, and the semester continued at a rapid clip. Looking back, all I remember is fun moments, great conversations, and, unfortunately, several late nights at the library. Nonetheless, I was comfortable and happy.

Of course, over the semester, there were a few down moments. I am certainly not proud of a few decisions, yet I realize that each one, each wrong decision, is but another block to build upon. And I don’t regret those moments. I don’t regret, for example, the nights I spent hanging out with friends instead of studying for that midterm. I don’t regret any decision that turned out poorly in the rear-view mirror because I learned.

And so here I am, a semester done. From FPC to late-night talks to partying to turning eighteen to The (freezing) Game to reading week and finals – it’s been a long three-and-half-months, yet I feel like it’s gone by in the blink of an eye. I’ve learned about myself, and learned about what’s truly important to me, but fundamentally, I am the same curious little boy I was before this all began.

So, past all the self-discovery, all the lessons learned and mistakes made, I can only count one real epiphany. The primary reason why I love Yale so much is not the history or the grandeur, not the beautiful campus or the wonderful residential colleges; no, the first and foremost reason why I love Yale so much is the friends and peers that embody its ideals, and who have made this first semester one of the best three-and-a-half months of my life.

Here’s to three-and-a-half more years.

I’ve been working on this for a few days…this is for the friends back home.

Bound by Time

Well there’s a voice outside
that sings a sad, lonely song
I never thought that I
would ever sing, sing along

Its tune is familiar
I know its melody
With every passing year
it beats inside of me

These are the words that I couldn’t say

This is our static
moment in time
I found a new life

And when the sky lights
our memories on fire
We’ll watch the sun rise

So this is our last
embrace with the past
We’re not looking back
We’re bound by time…
Bound by time.

Those were happy days
times of laughs, joy and tears
But now the echoes fade
replaced with this silence here

I’m looking ahead but I
can’t see through the haze
And this is the last goodbye
before we part our ways

Today commemorates the completion of the first eighteen years of my life, the first eighteen years after leaving the safety of my mother’s womb. Yet it also marks the beginning of the nineteenth year, and, by our culture’s seemingly arbitrary placement, the beginning of my adult life. Today marks my entry into the hallowed ranks of the grown, of the experienced, of the adult. It also means that my childhood is now, by all means, over. The innocent happiness, the ignorant bliss, the thoughtless giddiness is, by definition, gone, relegated to random moments of synaptic motion, to memory. And so, on the verge of this brave new world that awaits me, I look back, look back at the life I’ve led, the childhood of eighteen years that has, for what it’s worth, made me who I am. This is the story of my life.

I don’t remember much of my earliest years – everything I know has been told to me through stories. I was born in Xi’an, China, the eldest child of a young Chinese couple. My father was a graduate student in Northwestern University in Xi’an, my mother a manager in a local chemical plant. It was at this point that the first major incident happened: my parents left me. At the young, impressionable age of two, my parents obtained Student Visas and left for America. I, thanks to the wiles of the U.S. Immigration agent behind the counter, was not granted a Visa. And so, for nearly two years, I was separated from my parents by an ocean.

In hindsight, I realize that this separation was far more than just physical. I was deprived of the two people who have, for the other sixteen years, given me everything. Even if it was just less than two years, I think that deprivation has made the greatest impression on who I am. I’ve always felt a certain shyness with my parents. I don’t share with them my personal life, my social life, as much I should. I often feel awkward talking about life with them. They give me advice, and I take it and try my hardest to use it, but there’s always a certain disconnect, a certain emotional distance whenever we have the deep, life conversations.

My parents would often tell me a story about when I was two-and-a-half years old. They called me, and my grandmother, who was taking care of me at the time, picked up the phone. A few minutes later, my parents asked for me – they wanted to talk to their little boy. So my grandmother called me over to talk with them. I said no. Why would I want to talk to my stupid parents after they left me all by myself in China and were living the good life in America?

But a year later, I was here. My parents, who collectively had $180 in cash to start their new life, had more or less established themselves, and so I arrived into a relatively stable environment. According to them, one of the first things that I asked them, one of the first words I said to my parents after eighteen months of silence, was, “Dad? Where’s our car?” The car, it turns out, was in the parking lot of Detroit International Airport, outside the city I would spend the next five years of my life.

The apartment was called Deroy, 5200 Anthony Wayne Drive, a highrise on the campus of Wayne State University, where my parents were doing their graduate work. I went to nursery school, where I learned my first English word, “elephant.” My first, and nearly only, friends for these early years were two girls, daughters of my parent’s friends. We didn’t exact get off on the right foot. They were two peas in a pod, and I was the new kid who barely spoke English. I remember complaining to one of the their mothers that they were speaking English again, and I couldn’t understand.

Elementary school started too soon. I cried on the first day, I threw up my first lunch, and my father secretly came by the school four times to make sure I was okay (I wasn’t). But I learned, and I learned quickly. My English problem was soon not a problem at all. I memorized how to spell the most words in my kindergarten class. Mrs. Cameron held this game every year where each student had a ring of index cards with words he learned to spell, and the winner had the most cards by the end of the year. In first grade, the evil lady in the front of the room, whose name I cannot remember, gave us daily grammar problems. I graduated ESL in record time, and even passed into the advanced reading class. Like any young immigrant, English came quickly and easily.

And at the same time, I grew closer to the two girls, as close as three young children can get. My mind is filled with random memories – images that, for some inexplicable reason, stick out to me today. I remember the Lego pirate set we put together; I remember watching cartoons and playing house – I was always the father and the son (at the same time) – while our parents laughed and played cards in the living room; I remember playing with barbie dolls; I remember the rabbit we picked up from the park and the time I swung a golf club and hit one of the girls in the neck; I remember the Sega Genesis; I remember the Easter egg hunts and the birthday parties and the Christmases; I remember the playground outside of Deroy and the Chinese school and the brand new library down the stone path; I remember the myriad of toys in the basement of our godmother’s house; I remember Amber, another family friend’s cat; I remember the garage sales and church sales; I remember orchard-picking and the accident on the way back, where I cried as our brand new car lay smoking on the side of the highway; I remember trips to California and Florida and Northern Michigan, where the stars littered the sky, innumerable and starkly beautiful. These were memories I cherished, memories that defined my childhood.

I feel like this segment of my life, until I was eight, tempered me. Being with these two girls molded me, softened who I could have been. I was young, innocent, and curious – ultimately unknowing. There was no awkwardness to taking baths with them, to sleeping in the same bed with them. We were little kids who knew nothing of cooties and the pubescent awkwardness that would eventually have its day.

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As printed in my column “Technophiliac” in the Yale Daily News.

The pace of modern life has accelerated with time. As a society, we spend less time sitting down and more time moving from place to place. When we do sit down, it’s most likely in front of a computer. This is especially true for us students — the younger generation — who are now entering mainstream adult life. So where, then, does television fit into this equation?

We grew up watching TV. For me, at least, Saturday morning cartoons became a tradition. After-school shows, too, were hard to skip. Missing “The Magic School Bus” was almost as bad as missing the actual school bus. Yet today, few of us find the time to sit down and watch TV regularly. What was once a daily event has now dwindled to sporadic viewings, governed not by TV Guide but by our own schedules. I may say that I can’t possibly miss the next episode of “The Office,” but when Thursday night rolls around, I often find myself too busy to sit down.

I’m not alone in this sentiment; other Yalies interviewed expressed similar views.

“I don’t watch TV very often,” Santiago Correa ’12 said. “I don’t have time to adhere to its strict schedule.”

But perhaps that sense of busyness is a product of our circumstances. High school and college are certainly a great deal busier than the earlier years of our lives. TV is still filled with a lineup of popular shows, which would not exist if there weren’t a steady viewership.

That said, there’s no denying that television is losing its place at the center of domestic life. The computer, along with the Internet, is taking over. Families that used to huddle around the television set are now split across the house.

Now, just as television replaced the radio decades ago, the computer is replacing TV.

It’s only natural, then, that the next revolution — and, perhaps, the last — in television is at the hands of the Internet. Hulu.com, a joint venture by NBC and Fox, is a prime example of this web-based revolution. It offers nearly every show on NBC and Fox, along with some other channels, for free. Episodes are often released a day after they air on TV. There is no strict schedule to follow, no time to block off for a specific show. There are also shorter commercial breaks — fifteen to thirty seconds rather than the three-minute breaks on TV. Because it’s possible to determine exact viewership online, Hulu can sell concrete blocks of ads, which generates just as much, if not more, revenue as the traditional television commercial.

There’s a fast-approaching future in which TV shows become Internet shows, and we no longer have to get our weekly hour of satisfaction at a specific day and time. There are already “made-for-Internet” shows, such as the made-for-MySpace show “QuarterLife” and Joss Whedon’s serial Web musical “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.”

With the steady increase in Web speeds, the video quality of online content is also quickly eclipsing that of cable. In that future, televisions could stream their content not from cable or satellite providers, but from the Internet — straight from the source. When NBC streamed the Beijing Olympics live from their Web site, the first bell of death tolled for traditional television. As more made-for-Internet shows emerge, the ringing will continue.

The last bell, the death knell of TV, will ring when we are watching live events, newscasts, and even “Good Morning America” on our laptops or cell phones — whenever, wherever we want.

So I, feeling in a particularly nastalgic mood, browsed through my now defunct xanga. It was quite interesting, trying to figure out what I was thinking all those years ago. But then I came across this. I don’t remember who I wrote this about. But I wish I did.

“don’t worry. it’ll all be fine — i promise. don’t let guises and whims fool you. i’ve found what i’ve been looking for — you. i didn’t even realize it until recently, but there’s just something about you that makes me feel at home. with you, i can be something other than boring old me. i know the cliche is “with you i can be myself”, but it’s different. for good or for bad it’s different. i didn’t know what i wanted; i didn’t know exactly what i needed until you came along. you made it all right. everything clicked together; i stopped seeing life in black and white. you gave it color. i view everything i do with a new perspective and my motivation has changed. i’m a better person. you made me realize that there’s more to life than i subconciously made out in the beginning. heck, i don’t even know if you realize what you did for me; to me. thanks. i guess it doesn’t matter where life takes me and i guess it doesn’t really matter if you’re even there. but i will never forget what you did for me these few days. you changed me indefinitely without really meaning to. but i must give you credit, because it was you and you alone that did this for me. my life is forever changed; my vision; my view; my life: it’s better now. thank you for being there. thank you for being who you are. i love you.”

-September 20, 2005

As printed in my column “Technophiliac” in the Yale Daily News.