And more about me

Last update in Oct 2024.

I am a romantic, the unapologetic kind.

I dance, quite a lot. Not sure when, I started to realize that the granularity of my emotions was far beyond my oral communication skills. I often find myself struggled to describe how I actually feel, until dance gives me the language. No matter whether there is an audience or not, I always see the stage as a safe place to show more shades of my personality. It is also one of the rare places, in the current world, whose boundaries fairly protect all of us: Both the dancer and the audience know, from the very beginning, that “this will just be a performance”. Emotions, feelings, illusions, and everything around it, there is nothing personal. At the end of the day, what happened on the stage will be left on the stage.

I run, as long as my knees permit. I used to play football, and recently I tunnel more of my energy into marathons. Both sports are ruthless mind game: I may hold up until the end, I may not. I must accept the uncertainty, at the same time, be all in. In my day-to-day life, my mind moves way faster than my body. While running, my mind slows down, and my body takes control. Both perfectly tune into the mode for processing wandering thoughts and feelings. It is ironic that, even though I know, there is absolutely no logical reason for running such a long distance, still, I want to keep putting my foot in front of the other one. Irrationally giving the whole heart to something absolutely nonsense, isn’t it romantic?

I do research, despite most of the time I just get it wrong. Initially, I wanted to do something “good”. Then, I realized that most of the time I do not know what “good” actually means. So for now, I aim to have some fun. I like the research where science and engineering are well-blended. To me, science has the beauty of possibilities while engineering represents the honesty towards reality. I like the researchers who admit the inherent subjectivity of research. No matter how hard we try to deny, reality is plural. It is one thing to state a well-evaluated argument from what we have understood so far, it is another thing to deny all the other potential paths we could have taken.

I believe that all people will be blamed, which is an unavoidable destiny of human being, for either of the two reasons: We didn’t do anything; Or we did something, but not perfectly. Personally, I feel more comfortable to take the latter blame. I know, indeed, at the end of the day, nothing matters. The things we have fight for can vanish; The answers we search for may not even exist; As shown by the history, we fall into the same mistakes again, again, and again. But somehow, I have failed denying my feelings – an impulse. I just cannot deny them, and I do not want to.

"The answer must be in the attempt."