The Sticky Note Letter

Sometime during my first week of college, I put a sticky note on the exterior of my dorm room window. (Read it about it here.) Now, after two semesters, the sticky note hasn't fallen off yet. Truly amazing.

I wrote a letter to the future residents of my room in an attempt to preserve this sticky note's life and maintain its legacy Below is the letter in its entirety.

_______________________________________________________________________________

To whom it may concern:

In August of 2014, I put up a sticky note on this window. Now, in May of 2015, it has not yet fallen. It was pink, once, resplendent in youth and eager to see the world -- perhaps to remind some cubicle worker of a 10AM meeting, perhaps to bookmark some profound book passage, perhaps to serve as an impromptu grocery list. Little did it know, it had a much higher purpose.

A sticky note's life is not long. They are made to be discarded, transient and immaterial, popup windows in real life. Yet this one lives on in spite of all this, clinging to life, spitting in the faces of gravity and time. This one perseveres. This one is not some quick aid for human memory; it looks up to the great glory of Rome, the endurance of Shackleton, the courage of Armstrong. Yet Rome, Shackleton, and Armstrong are dead, and this sticky note is not.

I implore you to pass this letter on to the future residents of this dorm room, that they may witness and attest to the legacy of this sticky note. What we have here is more than a withering, yellowed piece of paper. What we have here is a national treasure.

If you have any questions, or if you would like to tell me more, please email me at sunwn0290@gmail.com.

Sincerely,

Weiliang Sun

________________________________________________________________________________

Now all I can do is hope someone reads the letter and emails me. If they do, I will notify you all immediately.

In Celebration Of My Sticky Note

I put a sticky note on the outside of my dorm window in August. My dorm is on the 7th floor. The sticky note is still there.

It endures through bitter storms and gusting winds and plagues of insects. Once pink and joyous, it is now pale yellow, shriveled, and hangs perpendicular to the window, like it is mid-jump, a tap away from plunging down into the abyss. Even as everything around it -- weather, gravity, time itself -- tries to bring it down, it persists, ruthlessly, unflinchingly, indomitably.

It is dying, but it will not die.

You thought Ernest Shackleton was cool. You've marveled at the glory of the Roman Empire. But Shackleton and Rome are dead and gone, and my sticky note lives on.



UPDATE: I've written a letter about the sticky note! Read it here.

My NBA Experience

I went to an NBA game with my cousins this past Saturday. It was a lot of fun. Here are the most memorable parts of my experience.

Advertising

The advertising at an NBA game is like a parody of itself. Every timeout, of which there are many, is a KeyBank™ or RedBull™ timeout, ripe with the chance to win a $50 KeyBank™ sponsored gift card, or a RedBull™ coupon or something. These gift cards and coupons would literally descend on us from onhigh, floating gently down on little parachutes, giving the impression that KeyBank is located in heaven.

Before the game had even started, two large King Soopers™ blimps were aggressively flying around the stadium, casting King Soopers™ shadows over the audience. Every free throw is a Sierra Mist™* free throw. What does that even mean? The scoreboard, the banner encircling the court, any downtime whatsoever -- if you could fit an ad into some unit of spacetime, it was already there, desperate for your attention. The stadium itself was called the Pepsi Center, for God's sake. It was too much.

Refreshments

Pricing of food and drinks at these things always surprises me. I don't know why, I mean it makes sense for the NBA staff to confisicate my water bottle (which they did) so they can charge over 500% normal price for a can of soda (which they did, whistling a merry tune while doing so). I'm not being sarcastic. The NBA makes a lot of money doing this, and people are okay with it. Probably excited for the chance to recoup the massive amount of money they will inevitably spend on popcorn and soda by winning a KeyBank™ gift card!

We bought one Mountain Dew™ and one Gatorade™. The vendor took the caps off for us before we even got to touch them, then hid the caps away in some unseeable void. The reason all drinks had to be uncapped was because apparently people had been throwing the caps onto the court, and it had become a big problem.

I found this a little strange, because if you want to throw a cap, and then someone takes the cap from you, don't you still have a Sierra Mist ™ bottle you can throw? Like, if someone really wants to throw something, taking the cap from them doesn't seem like it will fix much. Listen, NBA: Either you tell your valued customer to cup their hands and then you spray the Sierra Mist™ right in there from a hose, or you don't sell drinks at all.

Oh yeah, I forgot the second option is ridiculous because it doesn't make you any money.

Employees

All the employees seemed incredibly sad, tired, and unmotivated. It was not a good atmosphere for them, mindlessly collecting tickets and standing there, or watching for security concerns, while a lot of other people have fun. It occurred to me that their situation is still much, much better than the workers who assemble iPads, and I think about those iPad workers less, yet I use my iPad more. (I don't actually have an iPad, but you didn't know that. Err, until now. Stop asking so many stupid questions.)

The Game Itself

Nuggets down by 6-24 by 10 minutes and it did not get much better from there. Nuggets were not good that night. Still, I really enjoyed watching the talent and athleticism of the away team (Clippers).

I'd never seen the NO ONE SITS UNTIL WE SCORE thing before. It took a long time for the Nuggets to score, so I got this funny image in my head (as I'm sure everyone there did) of a group of exhausted Nuggets fans standing for two hours while increasingly demoralized Nuggets players attempted worse and worse shots. I guess most people did sit down before the Nuggets scored during a timeout. (I didn't.)

Overall, I really did enjoy the experience. But KeyBank™ sucks.**






*Sorry, I don't actually know when using ™ is appropriate. I even tried to look it up on Google™. Forgive me, all you Trademark experts who read my blog.
**Yeah! Take that, KeyBank!

On Skiing

Went skiing with family for New Year’s. Below is the wonderful tale of that experience.

Waiting

If you like waiting - mostly in line, but also on chairs - then skiing is the sport for you.

The first wait was in line to rent equipment, which was a long one. There was this lady behind us who gave us instructions while we were in line. She mostly told us to “scoot up” when the people in front of us moved forward. On one of these cues, I moved forward less than 6 inches, and that was apparently satisfactory. Turns out when you’re in the middle of a long line, scooting up does very little to save time. If we had not scooted up at all, we would have arrived at our goal no more than one second later.

I exited the equipment rental to find another line at the ski lift.

Skiing

The last time I skiied was over two years ago, which means it was basically my first time. I had an instructor back then — his name was Scooter or something like that — and the one thing I remember is that this guy hated the pizza. The pizza is when you ski down a slope by making a V shape with your skis. It looks absolutely horrible, and is the hallmark of a novice skiier. What you’re actually supposed to do is slalom down, skis parallel, moving in the shape of an S, left right left right, cutting tracks in the snow, controlling speed, shredding powder.

Riding the lift up, looking down, I found that it’s pretty much impossible to look uncool while skiing (so long as you’re not doing the pizza). Every person coming down the slope looks great — but that’s probably because they are better skiiers than I am. Some of them are crouched for speed, so aerodynamic, chest touching their knees. Some of them are standing all the way up, aloof, totally chilling out. Some of them bounce up and down as they slalom. They make it look so easy, and I’m sure I’ll look just like them soon enough, despite the fact that I actually have no idea what I’m doing.

Something about the skiier/snowboarder aesthetic reminds me of ninjas. There's something innately cool (no pun intended, seriously, you gotta believe me) about it, the tinted goggles, the no-part-of-your-face-except-maybe-your-mouth-showing, the multilayered clothing like a soft armor, the ski poles like twin katanas. Even the people who are like me, who have no clue what skiing even is, look like the most agile assassins as they fall.

At the end of the lift, my skis hit the snow, I go into a left turn, and promptly fall on my side. Ouch. Falling the instant you dismount the lift is not something I would describe as a good omen. My confidence drops a little, but it’s fine, I’ll just copy the people in front of me.

I start downhill. The guy in front of me is crouched down low, back of his hands on his butt, poles sticking straight back like two long quills. He really looks like he knows what he is doing, so I copy him. The acceleration is strong, but man, what an adrenaline rush. It feels good.

I decide I need to slow down, so I attempt a slalom by shifting my weight mostly to my left ski. It doesn’t work that well. I find it really hard to keep skis parallel and end up doing a slight pizza. Somewhere many miles away, Scooter winces and doesn’t know why. I will never really figure out how to get my skis parallel by the end of the trip, although I will get better at it. 

The course is blue, which means it’s probably beyond my level. Still, I feel the incredible rush as I attempt my slalom, going way too fast, unable to control my speed. A memory of the last time I skiied enters my brain: Going down a steep hill, I lost all control and ended up faceplanting into a tree at high speed, arms and legs splayed out on either side, cartoon-style. The adrenaline coursing through my system was so intense that I felt no pain; I shrugged it off, and made it down the hill no problem. It is a good memory.

I think I have my ski boots on too tight, because they are uncomfortable, but loosening them makes the strap come undone and that can’t be right. I fall a lot more than anyone else. It’s all worth it for the rush.

Day Two

The second day is a lot better than the first. I feel more in control of my skiis, more adept at shifting my weight around, more cool. I ride the higher lifts. 

I go down a slalom course, decked out with flags and stuff. It's pretty steep. I don't fall; I adeptly swerve around every obstacle, perfect S, going fast, center of mass low. Damn, I look cool right now. I bet those people on the lift are thinking about how cool I look, and they could not be more right. I am one badass skiing hero. I feel the rush, embrace it, let it envelop me, kiss it tenderly. I am more than human in this place. I am a skiier.

I then go into the trees, which was not a good decision.

Trees

Going into the trees underscores my incompetence. There is no room for the the massive, course-wide slalom swerves I was doing before. There is no forgiveness or mercy in this place. There is, however, a lot of powdery, fluffy snow that my skis sink into. I fall constantly, getting snow all over my face and up my sleeves. I slam into trees. There is no rush here, because I am pizzaing so hard my right ski forms a 90 degree angle with my left ski. Scooter cries himself to sleep that night.

My falls put me in weird, Kafkaesque scenarios. How did my left foot end up pointing backwards, my right foot pointing forwards? Where did my skis go? How come the only way for me to get up right now is to lift both my skis over my head and attempt a backwards somersault? How do I even get up right now? How long would it take them to find me if I died here, cold and alone?

Next time down, I decide to go into the trees again. It’s even worse this time. My eventual, tortured exit is half-crawl, half-slide-on-my-ass, the least graceful thing ever. I skiied as much in the trees as I skiied on my way up, riding the lift. Worst ninja ever.

Pandas and Koalas: How I Learned That I Am A Horribly Biased Person (And Why You Are, Too!)

How do you get people to not like Obama? You give them nonbiased, factual information that shows Obama's policies helped the economy and improved the country.

There's this logical fallacy called confirmation bias where people prefer to read information that supports their point of view over information that doesn't. And by people, I mean you. I know, you're sitting there thinking "Yeah, confirmation bias is really bad, it's horrible, I hate that everyone else does it, but I would never do it, I'm a fair and balanced human being who carefully weighs the pros and cons of every option." Well, bad news: You're not. You are just as susceptible to confirmation bias as anyone else.

To make matters worse, there's another thing called disconfirmation bias where if you read information that doesn't agree with your point of view, you are far more likely to argue against it, see faults in it, think it's bad evidence, not pay attention to it, and so on. Again, you may think you don't do this. You are wrong.

Taking these options into consideration, the conclusion is this: The most politically savvy of us (so-called "sophisticates") also tend to be more biased politically. As you expose yourself to more information, the combined factors of confirmation bias and disconfirmation bias make you more and more keen to read the side you're leaning towards.

As we learned in political psychology, this leaves us in a lose lose situation: Either (a) You are informed, but extremely biased, or (b) You are not biased, but horribly uninformed. Almost everyone falls into one of these two groups. This, to put it as succinctly as I can, sucks.

A simultaneously scary and hilarious example of this was a political experiment wherein at the onset of the 2003 Iraq war some conservatives were asked if they believed there were WMDs in Iraq. About 30% of these people said yes, they believed there were WMDs in Iraq. Then, they were given a nonbiased, 100% factual investigation showing the extreme lack of evidence the Bush administration had re: WMDs in Iraq. The investigation demonstrated, in a nonpartisan, evidence-based fashion, that Iraq probably never had WMDs.

After reading the report, 60% of them believed there were WMDs in Iraq.

My response to this was slackjawed bewilderment. And this isn't a pocket case, either. Psychologists repeated the experiment with the Bush tax cuts (34% believed the cuts helped the economy, they were given nonbiased, factual information showing that the cuts did no such thing, then 60% believed the cuts helped the economy).

They did another experiment with vaccination, showing groups of anti-vaccinators several kinds of pamphlets: A story about a kid who didn't get vaccinated and got measles, scary pictures of kids with measles, and factual information that showed vaccines do not cause autism. In the former two groups, the opinions didn't really change much. In the final group, the one with factual information, people more strongly resisted vaccination. It's a situation that parodies itself.

We were given a final dose of this when our professor brought up the issue of pandas vs. koalas. This is a pretty unimportant issue. I didn't care about it. She even told us not to care about it. Then she brought up information on why pandas are cuter than koalas, and koalas just sleep all day and do nothing, and pandas are great, there are movies about them (Kung Fu Panda), bamboo is awesome, etc.

As she was talking I started to really, honestly think that koalas are better than pandas. This issue that had been profoundly unimportant a minute ago, an issue I had been explicitly told not to care about, had suddenly become something I cared about. We even had a mini debate in class on which species is better. I put up a valiant fight. But why? Why did I so passionately defend koalas, a species which I now realize is pretty bad?

Because I, too, am pretty bad. But it's okay, because so is everyone else.

-Me

On Being Authentically Present

Here's something my friend Abigail said (not perfectly quoted, as my memory kinda like the Titanic: Seemingly invincible, but actually a complete disaster*) that has stuck with me: "Never miss the chance to let someone know that you are truly, authentically present with them." I dedicate this post to her.

I really like this advice, partly because it made me realize how little people are truly, authentically present with each other, and partly because it made me realize how important it is to try to . Cell phones, stress, multitasking, or just random, unrelated thoughts/priorities can frequently get in the way of truly meaningful human connection.

I think this is why I like board games. When you're playing a board game with someone, you are connected and present with them on some fundamental level. It's different from a video game because it's tactile, immediate, you're all looking each other in the eye; it's different from just hanging out because there's some aspect of the game grounding you all together -- you're all thinking about strategy or in-game events, not about your own individual lives.

One of my favorite high school teachers taught me that when someone is sad, oftentimes the most helpful thing you can do is to just be there for them. Just be present. There's no need to pry, to analyze, to say anything at all -- the mere act of being with them, distractionless, silent, can prove tremendously helpful and therapeutic. Just by being present, you are letting them know that they are a priority in your life; that you understand and respect their privacy; that whenever they want to talk, because this is about them, you will be there, waiting to listen. That's powerful. Silence can speak volumes.

I was on a camping trip when I and someone else sat at the top of a hill admiring the vast expanse of forest stretching out beneath and around us. It was a beautiful scene. We both sat there, silent, and in the silence we both understood that the other person was present, really, authentically present, that both of us had nothing on our minds but the forest in front of us. In that one brief moment we -- well, at least I -- experienced a deep, powerful connection. A connection not romantic, not familial, not even friendly; just human. The moment was as compelling as it was rare.

As David Foster Wallace put it, "Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am at the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most important person in existence." There's no way around this reality. But in those rare moments of true, authentic human presence, we can glimpse behind the veil, briefly grasp the fact that we are not at the absolute center of the universe, that there is someone right next to us who is just as human and vulnerable as we are. That is a beautiful thing.

I wish I felt it more.

-Me




*Also surprisingly vulnerable to icebergs.

Paint With All The Colors Of The Wind Song Parody

I don't think you're an ignorant savage

But I've been so many places, there is a lot I know.

Allow me to explain, to expand and help your brain

To let your people bloom and grow!

Bloom and grow

You really own whatever land you land on

The Earth is just a dead thing with no name

And I know ev'ry rock and tree and creature

Has a price, has a value you can claim.

I think the world's most valuable people

Are the people who give jobs to me and you

And if you walk the footsteps of an employer

You'll learn things you never knew you never knew

Have you ever seen a stock price climb to the moon

Or found a young capitalist to thank?

Can you harness the power of compound interest?

Can you take your painted colors to the bank?
Can you take your painted colors to the bank?

Come invest in the future of your people
Learn about the resources in the Earth
You'll be rolling in the riches all around you
And for once, you'll know precisely what they're worth

Free trade and exploration are my brothers
Profit and wealth are my dearest friends
And we are all connected to each other
By a medium of exchange that'll never end

How much wealth does this fertile land hold?
If you shut me down, then you'll never know
And you'll never know your people are doomed to fail
For whether we are white or copper-skinned
We all need the power of modern medicine
Your backwardness and ignorance, rescind

You can walk the Earth and still
All you walk is Earth until
You can take the Earth's resources to the bank