• 2025 Oct 10 *

The first day of fall was a few weeks ago, but to me, it isn’t really fall until a day like yesterday, when you step outside and get caught unawares by newfound bite in the air. That, to me, is the real first day of fall.

I am taking the coming of a new season as a sign that I need to return to write here. The time away has been neither relaxing nor rejuvenating; as much as I love my vacations, they are rarely either, likely by design. It has been good to me in terms of life lived per unit of time, which is really the main thing I try to optimize for.

I returned from a long trip to Asia three weeks ago. I have been calling it the trip of a lifetime, in the sense that (i) I had been waiting my whole life for it and that (ii, perhaps more conventionally) it turned out to be one I know I will remember for the rest of my days. So it has been especially hard for me to decide what to make of me writing absolutely nothing for the entire month surrounding it. I have been debating for weeks whether to view the break as healthy time away to fully focus on living life or another classic example of failing with abandon. I do wish I had written more (don’t I always), as my travelogues are the journal entries I enjoy rereading the most, but I also recognize that with the way I travel it can be hard to find the time and energy to write, especially when I am not traveling alone. Another voice in my head takes a different angle: does a writer need to write in the moment to make something of an experience? What more do you need than your memory, a pen, and time?

One thing that is certain is that my absence has not been for lack of writing material. Ideas and thoughts and memories have been swimming around my head for weeks. I’m sure some will bubble up into my writing eventually (or simply be lost forever), but I think in order for me to let them out, I need to release myself from the illusion of creating a recap worthy of the trip. I’m not sure I can do it justice anymore.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect. — Anaïs Nin

Anyway — some life updates:

I’ve been working more, both at my day job and outside it. I’ve been asking for more students for months, and I finally got them, so now I teach some five hours across four weeknights. Double that to include the amount of time I spend preparing and you end up with not so much free time during the week. I came across this Joan Didion quote the other day: Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone. I have not been doing a good job with the first two of those instructions.

Not included in that total is some unpaid work I’ve been doing helping one of the kids from my neighborhood with his college application essays. This exercise has given me so much grief that I am regretting offering my help. For one, either the level of writing and critical thinking has dropped significantly since the time I was in high school or I have simply forgotten how low they were back then. Worse yet, in interacting with him I am slowly starting to realize that I do not like the young adult he has become. It’s strange and disappointing, to think about how we could both grow up the children of immigrants in almost identical houses mere hundreds of yards and some years apart, only for one of us to turn into me and the other into an unabashed conservative. (In this day and age too.)

One of the other things that has come up is that many of his peers have used AI to write their essays. While by his own admission he has abstained from using these tools in at least the writing portion of the task, he has expressed that this is unfair. I can understand this; I imagine that their essays probably look more polished than his does as a result (at least on the surface), and that they are likely not ever going to face any sort of retribution for doing so, but I don’t find either of these convincing arguments for caving and doing the same. My thoughts were roughly as follows:

1. In the grand scheme of things, whether they use AI or not on their essays is likely not going to affect your chances of getting into any school.
2. Cheating is nothing new — there always have been and always will be people who find ways to skirt the rules without getting caught — but I like to think that there is value in doing things the right way, and that the world has a way of making things right in the end.
3. What is the point of worrying about what other people are doing if you haven’t even put 100% effort into your own work yet?

(Save for #2, these are not particularly nice to hear, and I lack the tact to make them palatable, so I kept them all to myself. Ironically enough, he wrote his common app essay about not cutting corners.)

Speaking of AI, I have been somewhat heartened by the strong public response to the Friend ads1 all over the subway and the small but vocal backlash to creators promoting Claude and other LLMs. I often feel that I am the only person at work who harbors any misgivings about the tools we are being pushed to use, and while I recognize that they are here to stay, I think it is still worthy to fight them, to resist, to raise awareness of the ways it is hurting the world.

The cynic in me thinks that the whole point of these ads is not to promote the product, but to stir up publicity, and I fear that the backlash is the product of a small but vocal minority. I think this product is unlikely to succeed, but would not be surprised if a better implementation takes off in the near future.↩

#english #wordvomit