I’ve gotten a little bit lost on the blogging lately.

I’d like to write more, but I’ve definitely been working more this semester than in past ones. I’ve also had more free time with others, which is nice. Regardless, I have less time to write on the Internet, which is sad. I enjoy it, but a lot of the time I’m too tired or too brain-fogged to get something good out.

This week is our spring break week, so I’ve found time mid-day on a Thursday to sit down at a coffee shop downtown and settle this a little bit. The campus-city connection buses aren’t running this week, though, so I had to walk off-campus to a bus stop and then walk from the transit center to the neighborhood with the coffee shop. The friend I usually do this with is also away, but at least that means I have some alone time to blog again.

I visited him (the friend I usually walk around Rochester with) near where he lives over the weekend. I actually got a lot of good pictures (in Manhattan, where living’s pretty convenient). I did lots of train videography, but can’t fit the videos on my blog. Images of scenery will have to do.

Whenever I visit somewhere else, I get a lot of ideas about my future. I do know that I’m more of a city-lifestyle person than not, so I wanted to tour some inspirational college campuses while I was there. I saw both a dream school (SIT, in Hoboken) and a less-inspirational backup (City College, which I don’t know much about and probably won’t actually apply to, but I was close to the campus so I might as well have seen it) although City College could easily be a stand-in for the number of other public universities in the New York area (there seem to be a number of options).

I did hear from my friend’s sister, who’d gone to Hunter College, that Hunter College has rats in the library and City College has raccoons. Maybe we can all learn to coexist (or stay out of the library after 10 PM). Funny or not, Hunter College seems like a decent contender for somewhere to consider in the future. While I say SIT is a dream school, walking around the campus did give me a lot of “stuck-up private school” atmosphere, and I’m a fan of public colleges by principle. Besides, my friend’s sister who went to Hunter College seems pretty successful, so the education is probably not bad.

Any way it goes, I plan on casting a broad net with those graduate-school applications I’m already excited to start filling out. I’m in a pretty different place in life than when I did my undergraduate applications, so it will be a different experience. I could even throw in some applications to other degree programs, ones that might interest me more viscerally than electrical engineering does (but ones that might be related at least a little bit).

I could also turn in some applications at places like NCCU, NSYSU, aspirational universities on an island much warmer than New York, and for tuitions so low it would be much less of a concern. But I won’t hold out too much hope.

I do have two years remaining in my undergrad, but I have other things going on now, too. I’m going to go soon to apply for the visa I need to return to the lab in Taichung that I was working in last fall. I’m also planning on bringing two other people that I know from Rochester, although none of us have our visas or housing yet.

So far, I’ve been tasked with most of the administrative work to do with the process, because I’m the contact and the whole exchange plan was my idea. I’ll be impressed if everything goes smoothly from here on out. This is experience that I think builds my resume well. Helpful for graduate school applications.

Over the past three days, it’s been summer temperatures outside, a lot warmer that it has been for most of the past semester. After walking around with no jacket on in New York and Boston, I’m back to watching snow outside through the window.

It’s putting me back in the mid-semester mood a little bit. At least it’s nice that the warm weather perfectly coincided with the days I chose to do nothing at the beginning of spring break week. I got to travel in warm weather without going too far. Whenever I see snow, I know that it means it’s time to get out Microsoft Word and finish some lab reports.

At least, that’s what I wanted to do today, but I’m a little tired still from an adjusted travel sleep schedule and I might want an extra day to recover. I’ll be okay with myself if I don’t do that today. I’ll see.

Speaking of summer in March, it seems like most of my family are considering moving south. It came as a little bit of a surprise to me earlier this year, but my dad was the first to start planning, and said that my grandparents and aunt are also thinking about it. I guess that’ll make returning home a little bit nicer.

They’re also moving to a town with a good bicycle path network, and my dad’s even considering buying an e-bike. This is what I think I can call a “Greta Thunberg moment” (at least, the part where my dad plans on using an electric bike for his everyday transportation).

It also makes me feel a little bit nicer that he’s planning on cleaning out the house and selling or giving away a lot of our things so that we can move out with a fresh start. It seems like a pretty good try at spring cleaning. The only downside is that the train ride from Rochester to Orlando is 31.5 hours long. But, hey, I’m sure there are stops and some nice views. The ride back from Boston yesterday was 10.5 hours long, so I’m getting more used to it.

Considering all the change over the past few months, whether it’s been internships, friends made, lifestyle changes, or my dad moving south, I feel like a lot of the change I could feel coming sort of happened all at once. At least the future’s getting a little bit clearer so that I can handle it (something that I’d argue most people these days can’t say, especially about politics).

Now that my dad is talking about electric bicycles, maybe I’ll try to get one sometime, too. Especially a foldable one that I can take on the bus. The city buses are much more frequent (coming every half hour) than the campus connection buses (coming once an hour), so it’d be much more convenient to have a foldable electric bicycle that I can take onto the city buses to go downtown than it has been to rely on campus connection shuttles. Especially for times during break weeks, when the campus connections don’t run, and for the future if I move to an off-campus apartment. I guess I have the rest of break to think about it (but probably not act, because all of my money is still held in New Taiwan Dollars).

We’ll see where I end up in a few more months, maybe. For now, I think I need to get back to work.

I still appreciate the read!