“Do no evil:

clean hands reflect a clean mind, which reflects sanity — that highest connection with reality, good, and evil.”

This quote has been irritating me since the day I sat down at this lab bench, and it’s taped in at least two places in my mentor’s office. I have no idea what it means, and I suspect the same of my mentor. Supposedly it is a reminder for readers to wash their hands while in the lab.

At this point, if anyone would like to offer suggestions as to how to interpret this quote, please let me know, because I’m not certain how clean hands reflect sanity, since so often very very clean hands reflect the opposite. The transitive property clearly does not apply here. “Clean hands reflect a clean mind, which reflects sanity” — “Sanity –that highest connection with reality, good and evil.” Sanity, as we define it, is the ability to see reality as most other people see it. We call people insane who think or see things that do not exist to other people. But is sanity the highest connection to reality? (What other connections are there?) Moreover, the quote relates reality to normative guides — or perhaps claims that sanity is a normative guide, which does not make sense.

See, this is what happens during my downtime. If I don’t stop compulsively reading that quote, I will be insane soon, whether or not my hands are clean.

Feel free to add any:

 #1: Connie

Connie 11/13/2005 11:07:31 PM ooo
Connie 11/13/2005 11:07:35 PM n00b
Connie 11/13/2005 11:07:37 PM newbie
Connie 11/13/2005 11:07:40 PM so that’s what it means

#2: Aniket

(during Biology)
Aniket: Red, green and blue are Christmas colors.
Us: Blue isn’t a Christmas color.
Aniket: Yeah it is! Some people have blue Christmas lights.
Us: That doesn’t make blue a Christmas color.
Aniket: I swear it is! Jewish people have blue Christmas lights. Blue is a Jewish Christmas color.
Us: …Jewish people don’t celebrate Christmas.
Aniket: Yeah they do! Then how come they have blue Christmas lights?

Aniket: I have a theory. No I have proof that smart people are horny.

(Later in the year) Us: Aniket, why are you going to UCLA again?
Aniket: Because I’m smart.
#3: Ms. Park

“Damn you! God is a just god. You’re going to hell, and there’s nothing you can do about it. So get on your knees and pray!”
#4: Alissa

“It’s my ‘I’m going to eat a piece of fruit tart’ siren…”

“When I saw that his was the newest post, I almost thought he would say like ‘you kids are BAD.’ Then I realised, we’re not!!”

#5: Ben

“Mgnarr.”

Heinz, to be specific:

Senior issue: I really wanted it to be perfect, but the truth is that not that many people cared enough to make it so. I had a perfect remembrance written, too (well, not really perfect — it’s more like tacky and sentimental — but better than I’d thought I could do in a couple of hours) and they used my half-finished first draft. Ack. I’m disappointed also in my page’s not being in color, and that I miscalculated the coloring of the twinkie’s Hawaiian shirt in the back and nobody’s name on it showed up well. Sorries! (Though I am proud of the CG artwork on the back cover, as evidenced by my huge signature on it. Hehe.)

For anyone who wants to read what my remembrance should have said:

My first instinct might have been, “four years is not long enough.” Those are the years I lived and learned from some of the most amazing people I have ever known, and I only regret that I have not been able to meet everyone. When I see who we are now, I cannot help but be impressed with whom we will become.

I have always wanted to leave having finished everything I set out to do in high school. As of now, I’m probably the closest I can get. There’s the trick: do everything – the good, the bad (but not too bad), and the stupid. When these four years have passed, we will have accomplished some of the things we set out to do, and fallen short in others. Either way, the challenges we’ve chosen to meet will have shaped who we are.

Though we come to find that we’ve outgrown high school, it’s hard to outgrow one another. And, in that way, four years has been just long enough.

[EDIT]Also, I forgot to add: You people who didn’t turn in wills and predictions are LAME. And I’m not talking about the media encoder, either. You are lame because you found writing shoutouts to your friends to be a chore. What’s wrong with you??[/EDIT]

Why don’t I post more often? At one point I believed the answer could be found in the simple laws of procrastination — the more concrete work I have to do, the more I blog. This is evidently untrue, as I am blogging on the evening following my high school graduation.

No. Here is what I now believe is the actual reason — or excuse, if that’s how you would like to think of it: I blog when my thoughts on the subject of the entry are clear. So many of the past month and a half’s events have left me bewildered that I was unable to formulate coherent enough thoughts to make them into a blog entry. Like news stories, blog entries must be timely, and so by the time I had decided what to think of a particular occurrence, said occurrence was already too dated to blog.

So… as I’ve just graduated, I think this is a good point for me to bring in anything I’ve overlooked — there’s a lot of stuff to catch up on, and I suspect it’ll take quite a few posts. Starting with the more current events:

Graduation: A high school graduation is a high school graduation — you’ve been to yours and you know what they’re all like. There were points that I wanted to stop listening so that I wouldn’t tear up too much, but forced myself to do it, because I would otherwise regret not even knowing what was said. The pictures and the hugs are actually a goodbye to all the people who have meant anything to me in high school as classmates — now we will all be tested. Without a common location, without classes with one another, without the same other people to talk about, which of us will remain just as close?

Baccalaureate: I don’t know what anyone else was thinking during the slideshow — in which every slide captured what were some of our best memories and nearly blinded us with one bright smile after another — but I was wondering, ten years from now, what colors the nostalgia would be tinted (other than green, of course). How would my then days compare to these? Will I remember these past four years as being better than what I will have and have had by then? No, certainly the best is yet to come — and if so, will that detract from the bests of high school? Perhaps it won’t, if I don’t allow it to? I’ve spoken with some of the people I used to be close with when I was an underclassman — now sophomores or juniors in college, and I’ve found that we’ve grown to be so different that we don’t really communicate on the same level any longer. That was only two years — what will I think in ten?

Coming up: Coverage on
Senior issue
Prom
Summer work
Naginata-related things
My rapidly changing list of summer and college resolutions
Other things that haven’t come to mind yet because they happened so long ago.