And more about me

Last update in May 2024.

I am a romantic, the unapologetic kind.

I dance, quite a lot. Not sure at which point of time, I realized 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. It does not 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 “it 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 faster than my body. During marathon, my mind slows down, perfectly tunes into the mode for processing those wandering thoughts. It is a bit ironic that, even though I know, there is absolutely no logical reason for running such a long distance, still, I just 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 just do not know what “good” actually means. So for now, I aim to have some fun in research. 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: they don’t do anything; or they do 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 truths we search for can disappear; As shown by the history, we fall into the same mistakes again and again. But somehow, I have failed denying my feelings. I just cannot deny them, and I do not want to.

"The answer must be in the attempt."