Sometimes it’s really hard to wait for something, especially if you’re in the habit of being a little bit nervous. I think I’ve gone down that path a little bit too far this summer.

Image by: Kuba Bożanowski from Warsaw, Poland, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Like cool-looking desk setups — although I’ve already moved a lot of the furniture out of my apartment, I bought a new laptop case with a built-in stand, a new mouse, and upgraded to the macOS 26 public beta. Now I have a cool workstation as portable as flipping some magnetic folds and a switch on my mouse. Pretty classy!

This past week has been good: I cut caffeine just after writing my last blog post, so it’s been an entire week that I haven’t had any coffee, tea, or anything caffeinated like that. I think I’m fully over the withdrawal now, so I feel pretty good. That was just on my personal list of things to do over the summer.

I’m also almost done the major overarching projects for my summer internship. That involves the business-proposal project thing that was required by the class that me and every other summer research intern in our department got forcibly placed into. It also includes the presentation for the process project I’ve been working on with solar cells and our cleanroom’s usual methodologies for making them.

At least I’m somewhat proud of the second one. The first one will be nice to get over with.

And so I like to think it’s with those projects nearing completion that I’m cleaning up my responsibilities and personal schedule a little bit. Once this week is over, I’ll be moving out of my current apartment permanently and into an Airbnb for a couple of weeks, but it seems like a nice one in a decent location (I’ve driven by twice now).

Besides, with the extra free time that I never really didn’t have, I’ve been able to hang out with people outside of work, which I think is making up most of the highlights of the year. I loved traveling in May because I think having all those friends around and doing things all the time is just satisfying, you know, humans are social. But it doesn’t take the exact same hard-to-attain circumstances to make that happen more regularly.

So me and my coworkers have been getting up to things lately and becoming more of a friend group, which is always for the best. I’m hoping that in the future I can have such a good group of people to work with at all my other jobs, but I’m not really sure how reality is. Anyway, doing things with friends on afternoons and weekends aside, I can even bite the travel bug a couple more times before the summer is over.

Two weeks from now, I’m planning on going to Chicago to visit a friend and help him move back to school here. While we’re at it, there’s probably going to be plenty of subway-riding and tourist-attraction-gawking (he’s not from the city, so it won’t just be me looking for guidance, we’ll get to be decent tourists as a group. At least, that’s the plan).

Image by: Acediscovery, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Although I wanted to ride the Amtrak to get there — holding up my end of the self-promise to ride more trains this summer — it took me too long to figure out that the Amtrak website doesn’t handle round-trip bookings very well and to just book two one-way tickets by searching for one-way tickets in and out of the destination, and with all that waiting, all the ticket prices are very high now. Besides, all those trains are regular, slow trains.

So, earlier today, I revisited the plans that came out of my choosing the wrong embassy to get my visa at that I’ll need for my planned internship in Taiwan this fall. I wanted to go to Washington, so I decided to make that happen. And with all the Internet’s love for the concept of a Boston-to-DC HSR, I finally thought that it’s now or never as far as booking those tickets.

Since I don’t live in Boston, I need some way to drive there and park for a reasonable price and somewhere reasonable to drive. Since I know the Boston’s metro system serves as a commuter rail system pretty well, I thought it might make sense to park at a commuter rail station and ride in to the main train station, South Station, on one of the metro lines.

It seems like the Red Line is the most reliable for this early in the morning, so I’m also going to plan to ride the Red Line into the Amtrak station. Riding the metro to the big train station and taking HSR several hundred miles to another major city — sounds like good railways to me! It’ll just be annoying to have to get down to Boston by car. There is a bus from my hometown/region to Boston, but I might as well drive. I’m from Concord, NH, so I’d like to take a short opportunity to complain about the several-times vetoing of the plan to extend Boston’s MBTA commuter rail to Manchester and Concord — in whatever far-away universe that there “wouldn’t be enough ridership” you could probably afford to take some lanes off of Interstate 93 and reduce the speed limits and tolls, too.

New England conservatism sometimes rears its scraggly head at the dumbest possible times.

Regardless of my hometown’s lack of metro connections, I will be able to make this trip and you can already bet I’m looking forward to taking as many pictures as is reasonable and blogging all about it — I’ll be gone for only a few days, but I’m sure that will be enough time for me. I’m going to be riding plenty of Washington metro, too, and might as well get some gifts for those people I worked with on the (much more fun) business proposal project with for the one-week Taiwan program in May. I forgot to bring anything when I visited the first time, so it’s only right that if I’m going to my own country’s famous capital I seize the opportunity to share the tourism with others.

Image by: Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

And since the train out of Boston is the new, next-generation Amtrak Acela — mind-numbingly expensive to book (more than a plane ticket!) but not much more than the non-HSR alternative train — I’ll be able to review the recent attempt at a Boston-to-DC HSR and judge if it fills the quality train void that I hear our nation might still have. I don’t know — I won’t declare anything until I can put my money where my mouth is. For the time being, I’ve put more than enough of my money where the Amtrak tickets are. I’m hoping it’ll have been worth it.

These coming two trips, the ones for August, are then two and four weeks out. Not much time to wait, honestly — I only have one more free weekend before the travel starts. Then, I have just under two more months until the most exciting journey begins: I’m leaving for Taiwan on September 25th — the second time this year — and not coming back before the beginning of next year. It seems like a good plan. If all goes as intended, I’m staying in Keelung for a week and getting prepared — giving the gift bags, getting a SIM card, being a tourist enough to satisfy for a little bit — and then moving down to Taichung by train (obviously my favorite way to travel).

I’ve been reading a lot of news about Taiwan this past summer to try to stay up-to-date on current events there in an attempt not to be clueless once I show up. That worked well enough the first time.

And as horribly depressing as just the concept is of having to hold the Han Kuang military drills and air-defense protocol tests, the fact that a perfectly peaceful society has to live in existential fear every day because of an infinitely-larger bully directly next door, it’s hard not to be at least a little inspired by some of the things I read in that news.

There are a few Taipei Times articles that show the best and worst of modern-day Taiwan — especially recently with the magnitude of the 大罷免 and the first round of votes.

It’s unfortunate for those in the recall movement that they didn’t quite get their way on the largest batch of KMT lawmakers. But the fact that it made it this far in the first place is a pretty inspiring story of dedication to democracy and exercising civil rights.

This article is a good summary of all that went on.

My favorite short story from that article above is the one about the man getting an ambulance from a hospital to a local polling station at an elementary school so that he could cast his ballot. It seems like there really are no good excuses for abandoning civic duty!

The civic duty doesn’t just end yesterday, though. A new article came in to the top of the front page of the same magazine just today, reporting on a pretty infuriating angle.

This article is about a certain international take on the results.

If the phrase “the pot calling the kettle black” doesn’t come to mind, then maybe a more accurate way to put it is the “big heavy cast-iron pot calling the brand-new shiny silver kettle black”.

It’s that and every wailing, screaming tool they’ve sent to international sporting events to steal, shame, and get in the way, tear down flags and harass singing children. Xi needs to sit down at the lunch table and talk out his issues like an actual grown-up.

China is a great country with great people, an interesting, diverse culture, and a great history. I wanted to take a moment to point out how easily one man’s selfish ambitions can overshadow all of that and make it almost completely meaningless. Suddenly, Xi Jinping has reduced the Middle Kingdom’s great presence on the world stage to one of a wailing toddler. If you’re going to ruin lives, at least do it with professionalism.

So aside from my desire to clearly state my personal opinions on these politics and to ask people to educate themselves, I wanted to express my hope that everyone on both sides of this one-sided argument are at least safe. If Taiwan does someday become part of China, it’s better than it happen because some powerful deep-blue figurehead sells them out than because cities were run over by tanks and people killed. Toying with people’s lives en masse has never, ever, not once in history ever been a good, productive way to make change. As soon as the ones in the smoke-filled room start treating their own citizens and others like they’re all chess pieces, humanity and civility dies.

But there really aren’t too many societies in the world that I’ve heard of that have shown such inspiring commitment to, and respect for, their own civil rights, how easy they are to lose, and what makes them possible. A mental image of the ambulance zooming to the polling station keeps replaying in my head. Whether he voted for or against the recall in his district, I can only wish I had that kind of dedication. When that spirit dies, a little bit of the human spirit dies with it.

So all I can really do is wait patiently and hope that all that perpetual stress fades away into history. Maybe an odd source for a quote, but in one of the worlds in the video game Myst there’s a city that lives under gray clouds that never clear. The game tells the story of a war that happened in the past between the people of that city and some faraway aggressor: at the end of the war, the aggressor was deterred, but not defeated. The clouds over the city were the clouds of the war, and wouldn’t disappear without a definite conclusion. While the aggressors had been sent off and not returned for many years, so that the people in the city could live in peace, the clouds never faded away. Every day, these people wake up and look up at the sky so that they can be reminded of that war and at least be grateful that the past — and everything that’s happened since — is over.

I know somebody the other day who was talking about this to me. He had a particularly pessimistic view on it, seeming like it was certain that Taiwan would face the PLA within the next five years. What was worse was the reason that he cited — that, after all, the ROC had lost the Chinese Civil War.

The only thing I can do in response is to remind people to educate themselves — nothing is that black-and-white. Whether you believe that the ROC is still real or not, whether you acknowledge it as a convenient political compromise, a dying anachronism, or otherwise, remember that the people living under it today have already seen decades of unerasable horror. To sell out the people of Taiwan just because they still live under that banner is just as shallow as all of America’s uninformed hatred of the People’s Republic.

No matter green, blue, red, teal, or whatever shade of the world’s broad political spectrum, remember that if we can’t live in harmony, the least we can do is let each other be while we sit oceans, seas, or even just straits apart.

I understand that Xi wants the “rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation”. Start by winning hearts and minds, not wars. Perfectionism is the enemy of freedom.

And besides, the entire great Chinese nation has already been rejuvenated. The CCP is forcing this insecurity onto themselves — an insecurity that they seemed to have developed somewhat recently when compared against the long timeline of Chinese history.

I appreciate you reading all of what’s been sitting in my head for a while — I won’t get so political in the future.

Thanks again. I’ll be back next week.