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The Making of a Dumb Datum

Imagine 10,000 years in the future. Two archaeologists are digging a site, and they find the remains of human bones. They take those remains to the lab, perform tests on them, and try to reconstruct the habits and lifestyle of that human. Say those bones belong to me. They are trying to find out my story, how I lived, what I ate, where I traveled, etc. Once they find all the info they need, they toss it into a museum where they store all other such ancient human remains they find. I was essentially one data point to them in trying to understand how humanity evolved over time. Or I can also call myself a “datum”, the singular form of data, literally one piece of information to solve a bigger puzzle. Honestly, I don’t need 10,000 years to become a datum. I am already a part of several datasets people use these days to study many things. So for that objective learner, I am already a datum. Now let me get to how I got the dumb part of it. I have had an interesting and eventful life so far...
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Bang Average

I had a counterintuitive thought today that me being average in all dimensions of life is probably my greatest advantage. This occurred to me after thinking about the Aesop’s Fable where a poor farmer finds a goose that lays golden eggs. Before finding that goose, farmer was an average and unimportant man. But once he found the golden goose, he is rich and important now. I am sure people around him started using words like intelligent, hardworking, handsome etc to describe him from that point onwards. This fed farmer’s arrogance and greed, and he got overly attached to his new found status. So, what did he do? He ended up butchering that poor bird to increase his wealth, and the same people who called him intelligent are now like “jeez, what a moron!”.   So, I think it’s a blessing in disguise that I am bang average at everything. I have no special skills, I am not very rich, I am not blessed with good looks, I have no famous acquaintances, and I am so damn forgettable. I once ...
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Fortune Cookie

My fortune cookie today said “your Sunday will be filled with laughter and joy”. I appreciate the sentiment, but I am not going to fall again for the tricks of probability. I know it’s purely random that this fortune note landed in my lap. I could have ordered some other cuisine and this fortune cookie would have been in the belly of some other human. If I assume that there’s a 50% chance this human believes in fortune cookies, 10% chance of this fortune actually proving to be true, and that these two events are independent, then laws of probability say there’s a 5% chance that this fortune cookie would have found its way to someone who actually believes in it and waits until Sunday to see it realize its potential. This is still 5% more than my belief in fortune cookies, which is zero.   
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No Nonsense November

1.      Yet another 23-year-old I know is getting married. What was I doing when I heard that news? I was discussing with my friend about using up the PTOs left for this year to go biking around the lake. I sometimes wonder if it’s me that’s holding back, or if it’s the world that’s rushing, to reach this milestone of becoming a grown up. Maybe it’s a bit of both. 2.      Whenever someone tells me they are worried about growing old, I wish I can explain why aging is just wisdom wrapped in a giftbox of wrinkles and gray hair. 3.      I remember this one incident last year where I mistook an airplane in sky to be a star, so I told my friend that I can see a star. He glanced at sky, and with an expression of “are you really this dumb?”, he burst my bubble that it is an airplane. But I fortunately had a quick comeback. I told him if he hadn’t heard of that song which goes like ‘Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are...
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Progress

I had an interesting arc in the race I ran today. It was a surprisingly hot and humid day in Dallas, but that didn’t stop me from being too ambitious and starting fast. In hindsight, I should have started conservative and pushed harder in the second half of the race. But I keep having this same hindsight realization from the past three races, so at this point I need to accept it as just how I am wired and plan around it. I can’t prevent that sweet rush of adrenaline from hitting me when I stand at the starting line of a race. Maybe because all of it feels like a wonderful dream, which gets interrupted when my mom wakes me up asking me to get ready for school, and I go back to being that skinny eight-year-old who was mocked in the playground for ‘running funny’ by other kids. So, I better run as fast as I can and give it my all, while I am still inside this dream. At mile 8, my left calf started protesting with a cramp. I underestimated 96% humidity and didn’t carry any sodium, so...
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Race

I ran my first half marathon race on Nov 2, 2025. It was a small race organized by Dallas Run Club around White rock lake. When I started seriously training for this race, I had this goal of finishing it under 2 hour 15 mins. But over the course of training, I learned a few things about myself – I don’t have the raw pace or any hidden talent, but I do have this capacity to suffer for an extended period of time. So, upon the suggestion of a friend who is an experienced runner, I changed my target for this race to a sub-2-hour finish time. I trained obsessively with this goal in my mind for almost two months. On the race day, I somehow lost track of the 2-hour pacer, so I tried to stick with the 1:55 pacer. There was this one tiny hill called T&P hill (named after Texas-Pacific Railway line) which comes around the 4-mile mark. I had not trained the muscles needed to run uphills, so I slowed down and saw the 1:55 pacer, surrounded by a group of aspiring 1:55 finishers, pull ahead. B...
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Bright Pink Lemonade

October is ending, and I see spooky Halloween decorations everywhere. If it was eighteen years ago, these decorations would have surely frightened me and made me run back to my mom in tears. My mom would have said “you are ten years old and you are still afraid of these things?” I would both be in tears and still shake my head to deny that I am afraid, because I was a little liar. I am no longer little, and I am trying to practice radical honesty. Therefore, I must admit that I cried a lot in the beginning of this October. I was backpacking in Colorado sand dunes with a friend in the first week of this month. It was an off-season, so there were only two of us who were crazy enough to drag our heavy backpacks up those dunes, where we sank a little into the soft sand with every forward step we took. I let my friend go ahead as he is a fast hiker, and as I was walking by myself, my brain had a lot of time with no distractions to bombard me with a lot of thoughts. Most of those thoug...
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Rage Lightly

I woke up today and for some reason I was reminded of this phrase “go gently into the raging night.” I told myself it doesn’t feel right, maybe it is “go raging into the gentle night.” I thought for a while, and couldn’t figure out what was the right phrase, and it drove me nuts. Maybe I do have a gold fish memory. Anyhow I gave up and asked my friend google, and the right phrase was “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Excellent, but I feel like this contradicts Aldous Huxley, who wrote “Lightly, child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.” This proves to me that wise people can’t come to an agreement on anything.
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