As per the schedule, I’m no longer on the tiny island of big dreams. I’ve been drawn back home by the inevitable pull, as happens every few months.

But I think I took some of the energy I earned over there back with me. That was the plan, too.

The past few months have been more than a little bit of a juncture in my current life. Maybe that sounds dramatic. It kind of is. But I’m still trying to find out what I think my future is going to look like (as everyone does in their early 20s).

I’ve been happy lately with my notable lifestyle wins. Like, as I’ve made relatively clear in all my past posts and writing, I sort of identify myself as one of those radical Internet urbanists. I obviously don’t have any kind of credentials or even much experience living in a city, but I guess I know what I want (and what I want is evidently to ride more buses).

I did do a lot of bus riding in Taichung (the 中興乾線: I would shout out the rest of the “small crowd” who frequently ride the wheels between Wufeng and downtown, but it’s really not a small crowd. Like, I’d imagine it’s one of the most efficient transit lines in the entire city, because I’m pretty sure in its relatively small citybus-sized footprint it carries at least 5,000 people per day over weekends).

And while I was gone, I convinced my dad to sell the family spare car, because by the time I left I was the only one using it (driving it between Rochester and home and everything). I decided that the best way to adopt the mixed-modal transport methods of the future was to just get rid of my car and make it work (I mean, Rochester has a bus network so dense it’s hard to read the map).

So I’ve got the habit and the means to become the biggest public transit aficionado in the Erie Canal-Northern New England corridor (the bar is low and the sprawl is high).

Anyway, it’s the small wins that count. Yesterday I took a bus down to Boston because I wanted to go to the Microcenter in Cambridgeport and get some of the electronics components I’d need to rebuild the project I was working on in Taichung (so I could have a copy here for video call troubleshooting purposes).

And while I was somehow even unable to find individual transistors at Microcenter – resistors and capacitors for some projects, I guess, but no TIP120s – as per request of a professor I met at the Taichung university whose last request to me before I left was that I send some nice winter landscape photos, I did get myself a nice pigeon shot on the bridge over the river from the Green Line station at Boston University.

And a photo from my front yard here for good measure (we have a nice winter snow going, it’s very “White Christmas”-ish but a little too late):

Anyway, I went to the Microcenter and stayed on the floor in the electronics section sorting through a stack of microcontroller boxes I picked off the shelf for about half an hour, and then I bought them and walked up Magazine St (a neat looking neighborhood) to Central Square station on the Red Line.

With my new reference for metro styling being the spotless and brand-new Taichung MRT, riding Boston’s metro system was a little different. But, I’m not going to lie, I think I prefer it. Maybe it’s blind patriotism, but I’m a fan of the “lived-in energy” – I forgot about how unbeatable and… vibeful American urbanism could be when done right. I’ll pull some comparison images from the archive:

You know, the Green Line wasn’t even screaming that loudly when I rode it yesterday. Either previous Green Line riding experience wore down that portion of my range of hearing, or they’re actually fixing things.

I’m finally becoming a little more familiar with the great city that’s been only about 90 minutes south of my hometown my entire life. I’m hardly a Boston native, but I am a proud New Englander, and the phrase “drive ’till you qualify” comes to mind.

Maybe when MBTA commuter rail finally comes to Manchester, that can become “ride the train ’till you qualify”. The future is nigh (2029, here I come!).

But during the past week that I’ve been home, I’ve had a good time working through the last bits of communication about the future of my internship work (the aforementioned troubleshooting of project over a video call), I’ve gotten some good rest in, and I’ve seen my dog again.

So in a few days, when I get to ride the Amtrak train from Boston to Rochester, I’ll be fully recovered from the jet lag and ready to get back to school for the first time since last spring.

Other than the one active class that I took just to fill my second “activity elective” (I will never understand why, after graduating high school and whatnot, forcing college students who don’t want to to play sports with each other is apparently such an important and necessary part of the curriculum), I have only classes I’m interested in (engineering ones, language, and hopefully getting back into at least one of the performing ensembles).

Now that I’m out of my gen-eds, I mostly realize that making students try things that they don’t want to and take classes in subjects they don’t like is definitely one of those cases where being somewhere you don’t want to be and having a severe lack of confidence is a shared part of basically everyone’s experience, and that it’s good for people.

Mostly, I feel grateful that I’m now able to recognize people who don’t ever step out of their comfort zone by the look on their face in a situation that makes other people uncomfortable (hello, many people over 30 and the one person in the introductory criminal justice class every year who chose this as a major).

So I’ll choose to feel good that I’m finally getting into the wheelhouse I chose for myself while simultaneously taking comfort in the fact that I don’t have to read any philosophy textbooks any time within the next few years or so. And this past internship has definitely cemented most of the skills I’ve learned so far, which does a good job at compounding the confidence.

I hope all this confidence I’m taking into the new semester is actually meaningful toward my class performance, but at the very least, I’ve never felt this good about my course schedule before, so I’m relishing it at the moment.

But I do feel more fulfilled with the lifestyle and career developments I’ve made over the past few months. The professor I had in Taichung seems interested in having me back, and I’m definitely interested in not having to stress about finding another internship in the near future, so I might take him up on that as soon as I can formally submit my application to return and keep progressing with something new, like data collection.

I’d love to go back to Taichung and get myself a real apartment (even downtown) – since I didn’t do the earthquake drill so the dormitory is no longer an option… – and maybe even come back with a friend who has some set of skills that makes my work easier (and we could share the apartment and have a good time together and everything: it could be excellent).

And although I don’t think I want to return to the lab for grad school, I do think that making career connections like this (especially ones that stand out on a resume, even just for their location, like having worked in Taichung stands out to most American employers), I think I should have an easier time finding other jobs or applying to grad school overall in the future (laboratory experience, especially, and a name on a few papers has to look good when trying to go past a bachelor’s).

So even though it’s been four days since jet-setting from Taoyuan, I think life experience sticks. Like, you’re just kind of going through life drawing in the environment everywhere you go. And that makes me feel good, because it gives me solid justification to keep going out of my way to have neat experiences. And I feel lucky to have the opportunity to have such good experiences.

Although I am back at a Starbucks writing a blog post, so some things don’t change so much.

I’m looking forward to Friday’s rail-riding. Amtrak trains are, apparently, as fast as the Tze-Chiang express trains in Taiwan – you can verify with this cool site I found out about yesterday, but the trip is still going to be something like ten hours because of the sheer distance between Boston and Rochester (it doesn’t look like that much on a map, but apparently that’s like the length of two Taipei-to-Kaohsiungs).

I’m sure I’ll post some pictures on my Instagram, too, which is fairly new and I don’t think I’ve promoted it at all yet.

Thank you for the visit!