Surviving College 101 Section: FTA

After I read the monologue posted by one of my classmates, Kun Chen, I was inspired something about the word “fate”.

First of all I must apologize to him because I usually made jokes on him for no reason. He seemed to never get mad about my behaviors. He was unique, intelligent, knowledgeable, I felt embarrassed for my disrespect to him. Sorry, my friend, actually I’ve discovered that I’ve learned lots of things from you, things that initially not belong to me.

Go back to my topic, I agree with a sentence written in Kun’s monologue, it said that “The world is a stage and every human is an actor or actress”. Playing a role in our lives seems unchangeable, it is like our fates, we have to do certain things, just for survival, make ourselves further away from death.

Why were we born? Why dose human reproduce? People think it is natural, it was the way of living since there was human being. Furthermore, why are we educated? Why do we find a job after graduation? What is it for? I don’t have to give those answer, everyone in the world should have known them already. We are all different people, but in some ways we are so similar, we were doing the same things since we were born, eventually we met each other here, we’ve became classmates, even friends. I believe that is my fate, my fate leads me to become what I am.

I don’t know whether my fate makes me a good person or not, I don’t believe god before, but now I’ve found one, which is my fate. My fate led me to write this monologue, to love someone, and to do the things coming up in the future.

I believe life is a choice. Life can be different depending on what choices I make. I may make a wrong choices but I will not regret it. It is just another experience to take me one step closer to being an adult.

In everyday life, I make choices. In the morning, I chose to eat breakfast, which caused me to be late for the morning class. If I had chosen not to eat, I might have not been late to that class. During the lunch time, I made a choice to buy the salad instead of sushi. It tasted horrible. I couldn’t even finish the half of it. If I had chosen to buy the sushi instead, I might have eaten it all and be full. I don’t regret buying the salad though, because now I know that the salad taste horrible and I won’t ever buy it again.

I was hesitating about which school I should go between the Baruch College and Stony Brook University. Now this is a big choice because my life depends on it. I chose to come to Baruch College. I think I made the right choice. I enjoy being a Baruch student. I like my new friends I made here and the school. But who knows what could have happened if I chose to go to the Stony Brook University? It could have been better or worse.

I have made choices for my whole life. I am still making it. Tomorrow, I could make a choice that will bring me a big change. I just have to make sure that I am making the right choices.

I remember my first day of high school, energized and excited to meet my new classmates and teachers. Having been accepted into Bronx Science, my parents had high expectations of me and expected me to do well, pushing me harder in order to get me to complete my assignments and study for the tests so that I can be successful in school and in life. But where did I end up? After the first few months of high school I realized a truth about myself and I was forced into closing myself off from others and avoiding new friendships. Is this how I will pass my time in high school? The same daily routine everyday? Wake up, go to school, attend class, go home, go on the computer, and lastly going to sleep.

Here I am now, in college, hoping to further my education and get a job in the future. I wonder about my future every day, not knowing where I will end up, what will become of me, and wishing for something to happen that will totally change who I am. I hope that during my time in college, I will be able to find something of interest to me and attempt to pursue the goals that I may have.

I am not sure if someone else came up with this quote already or where it comes from but I felt in a sense that I do this sometimes. “When all else fails, try the unthinkable.” When I think if this, it kind of relates to “thinking outside the box” where you try to solve a problem by looking at it in another perspective or trying something you would normally believe to have not worked.

Because of my many insecurities, I am not able to see very far into my future and where I will end up, but instead, all I can think about is what is going to happen tomorrow and what are we going to do in class.

I  keep asking myself,who am I and what should I do ,but I still do not know the right answer.I am who I am, maybe  this answer is the only one that i can tell.I am eighteen years old.I am no longer a innocent child but a young adult who has responsibility to start  learning  what is the real world and how it works.More things I learnt ,more rules made by this world are needed to follow,and more and more people head into this world named ” adulthood” which is  competitive  and cruel and these people start to fight for MATERIALS.Even though the world goes like this-rules by rules,I have never stopped thinking of my own life out of these rules.

I am no longer a innocent person who cried for everything.Instead ,i will smile to everything i faced whatever it is happiness or adversity.I keep asking myself,do I know well about myself.The answer is still ambiguous.If I know myself well,then this monologue should be done in 10 mins.Why do I take so long to flash back all things happened in my life and still get no answer to any of my questions.I am so confused like I dont know what to write right now,but one thing that im so sure about is faith.Maybe I can not remember every single important thing that ever happened in my life so far and get no idea who am I,but I got my faith,the only thing pass through my life so far.I have been passed through many many many hardships and some of them are may no longer to be  kind of hardships.By using the vision of future which i call it The faith,there will be no hardships anymore,the only thing left is the experience which you gained from overcoming that situation.

I like to read literature. Through these literature works, a formula claimed  by a Chinese writer interested me the most——- The formula of happiness:  Happiness = happiness  having today + the future value.Base on this formula, if people only focus on today’s happiness ,they will have no future ,or instead if people only live for the future ,they will suffer in pain of missing something important sooner or later.Who am i again? After learing this formula ,it turns into a easy question.For now,i am a college student.In the future? Only god knows.

When I was seven, I thought life was like a fairytale. I kept telling myself that if I needed help, my fairy godmother would show up and resolve my problems by just saying Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo. I kept wishing upon a star hoping that one day peter pan would appear in front of my window and take me to Netherland. Most of all, I was convinced that one day I would find my Prince Charming. Not just any prince charming, but a Prince that would confront me with lollipops and candies. It wasn’t until my tenth birthday that I realized fairytale was not reality. I stopped expecting a magical woman to show up or an immortal boy to fly in my house. Regardless of my realization, I sustained the belief that my Candy Prince was still yet to be found. Fortunately for me, I think I might have found him.
It was a cold winter night when I saw him again. I was in the process of mailing out salvation boxes when my club president realized we were short in money. I volunteered to bring some home for safe keeping. Due to the weight of the boxes, I called up a friend for help. He said he was busy at the moment so I decided to call up a boy that I had just recently started to talk to in school. I didn’t expect him to leave his cozy house but he showed up 20 minutes later. He took the boxes and started walking. On our way back to my house, we started a conversation regarding to our likes and dislikes. He told me how much he loved skittles and offered me some. I wouldn’t say that was my complete fairytale story but doesn’t it sound like a prince coming to rescue the princess. More importantly, doesn’t he share similar characteristics to my ideal candy prince? What makes him a potential prince is his ability to ask me to be his princess. Of course, marriage is beyond the question. I was talking about his creativity of asking a girl to the prom. Every girl hopes that the way the guy would ask her to the prom would be memorable. I, for one hand, experienced something that was unforgettable.
One night in February, I heard a knock on my window. When I opened the shade I saw my candy prince. He was standing outside my house, next to his horse, to be exact it was his bike. Because my family was asleep, I was unable to invite him in. As a result, we talked for hours outside my house until 1 a.m. Finally, before he left, he asked me “would you go to the prom with me?” I was caught by surprised. Without hesitation, I said yes. YES. YES. YES. It felt like I was living a fairytale life again. After that day, I knew he was more than just a person I see in school; he was a potential candy prince.

I like best about myself is that I have a good family and I love my families. I like lest about myself is that I just can not speak English well.

I am the person who is unconfident. Because of the unconfidence, I am much dependent of the other people who I think are better than me. I always seem to be in two minds on important matters. I always want to get help from others.

I am afraid of death. even though no one can escape from death, but I still feel afraid of death. It is hard to accept that  my families leaving  me forever. I am afraid of death, because I don’t want to go away from my families and friends forever.

My family is the most important to me. I have my parents, my grandmother and all other families in my family. Anyway, I don’t have any reasons to think my family is not the important to me. I know many people have the same idea to me.

“Struggle to learn, learn to struggle.” is my personal motto. I like it because it remains me to study hard even I will face much difficulty. the college courses are more difficult than the high school courses. I have so many kinds of challenge in the college. I have too much reading material to read; the material is more complex; much writing should be done. I am now feeling struggling with the college, but  I will do my best and struggle to learn.  

“I love you ,  or at least I like you” if I had said these words to other, my life would be much more normal, sound or at least not painful. The cause of my downfall is nothing short of that I adore myself instead of other, thereby isolating myself more and more away from other. The story of Narcissus tells that those who indulge in them must pay for the high price of hubris, as he drowns in lake after his image on it. The world is stage and ever human is an actor or actress. I accept my role as a foil and should be doomed to suffer. But there must be some heroes and heroines who deserve happiness, so that the play might be carried out as the play should be. Never listen to any impulse to punish your urge to connect with other. Doubt those who claim they know the truth and nothing is phonier than those are assumed to be authentic. Let us live as if play a game or play, where someone will be loser or winner. Lastly I never fear death but be afraid of lives since under the death, we are not divided. Nonsense make more sense and appearance is truer  than the truth and there is not “the” but “a”. Be a superman , just love your fate , and accept your fate.If you think I am crazy, you might be the really crazy one.

For many students college life can be a really frightening experience. However, on the other side of the coin it can also be the one of most rewarding and best experience in your life. For it is in college were you begin to explore who you really are and begin to express your opinions and views. But, nevertheless what I want to get across is regardless of how you view college, whether you find it exciting or scary in the end it is your own choices and decisions that shapes and forms the experiences that you have in college.

I remember my first few weeks in Baruch College how I made a promise to the  bronze statue of Bernard Baruch and to myself that I would do my best in order to excel in my school life and would try my very best to not commit the same grave errors that I did in high school. So far the only thing that I have excelled is in, finding out firsthand the difficulty in breaking a habit. Although I have not done the best that I could possibly do, I feel that it’s not the end of life for I know that the mistakes that I made today can be corrected by the success of tomorrow. Even though it sounds utterly ridiculous, I apologize to Mister Baruch using the words of Tyron Edwards- “Right actions in the future are the best apologies for bad actions in the past.”

With that said, hopefully I will able to learn from my mistakes and errors and try harder to make the right decisions. Whether it’s a small decision such as spending my time re-reading the work in order to better understand the material when I could’ve have spent it by playing computer games or eating. Or if it’s an important decision such as studying for a midterm or final instead of hanging out with friends or eating I could instead open up a textbook and start studying. Regardless of whether I make the right choice or not, all those decisions will shape and form my experiences in Baruch College.

My personal motto is “practice makes perfect”. It is a very common saying that has already been overly used yet it is very true. Most of the things you do need practice, for example playing the piano or dancing. There are very few people who are born with natural talents and only need minimal practice. Most of us need lots of practice in order to perform better. I do believe that a lot of things take practice in order to be good at it. When you practice thousands of times, you will eventually get familiar with the subject, so it becomes easier. After all, no matter who you are, someone with natural talent or an ordinary person, you need practice to achieve higher.

One of my personal examples of practice makes perfect is when I first learned English. Spelling has always been my biggest problem. I need more practice than anyone else in the class. So in order for me to achieve higher, I would write each word ten or twenty times. Practicing and writing out the words allowed me to memorize the spellings. During tests, I wouldn’t be afraid that I would forget how to spell a word, because having practiced many times; it gave me confidence that I know the spelling well.

Apart from all the hard work in school, I’ve learned that relaxing yourself at a certain point can also help you gain motivation to work a step further. Each person had their own ways of relaxing themselves. For me, sitting in front of the TV watching my favorite shows is what makes me feel relaxed. I feel that home is the most comfortable place for me to be because it separates me away from all the chaos that might be happened outside. My home is my little circle for me to be away from everything and relax. I’ve found that relaxing myself can help me maintain myself at a stress free mode. There are too much stress out there, doesn’t matter if its school, work, or personal issues, you have to part yourself away from stress first and let yourself prepare to face the chaos.

My family is my biggest support to overcome these obstacles. My parents are always supportive of my decisions. They also give advices when I face problems or fear. Sometimes I do not agree with the decisions they made for me, but in the end I know that what they do for me are always in my best interest. I try to do my best to accomplish what they’ve set for me because it is the only way to thank them for being always there for me.

 I really do not know what should I write for my monologue.  Then I read my free writing which is writing during Freshman Seminar Class, I think it might give me some ideas about myself.  Then I really find something that is inside of me, but I did not thought about it before.

 I am a “thinking person”, not a “action person”.   In another word, I like to think, to image, but I do not like to do, to try or to achieve.  For example, some of you might know StarCraft II, it is very famous worldwide PC game.  I decided long time ago about I am going to buy this game, and play this.  But I actually did not buy this.   I feel excited when I watched replay about this game on Youtube, I know I love this, but never play this at all.

 I also find out that I do not like to change.  Let me explain to make my point clearly.  My everyday is like one day, everything is the same.  I only go to same bakery to get my breakfast.  I only listen to same music on the way to Baruch College.  I only go to one barbershop to get haircut even when I move to different area of city, etc.  Once I like something, or get used to it, I will not change.

 I love to sleep.  I think Getting enough hours for sleep is the most important for me.  When I was in high school, I go to bed at 11 o’clock, and wake up 6 : 30 a.m.  When I was Freshman in College, I go to bed at 12 o’clock, and wake up 8 o’clock.  I always sleep more than 7 hours a day, that is the minimum of I can endure.  And enough sleep hour can give me full energy for next day.  By the way, I like to get a short time of sleep after I finish class every day.  And I need three alarm clock to wake me up in the morning.

 That are three things I find our from my free writing.  Free writing is a person writes continuously for a set period of time without regard to spelling, grammar, or topic.(Wikipedia)  And I think free writing is based on our subconscious, it might give us some idea we never thought before.  I will keep doing this exercise, and get to know myself better.