A lot more problems than you might think are ones that can be overcome with only effort.

There are two things that I care about enough to call obsessions: studying Mandarin and nice cities. The first fell into my lap over the course of my education, and the second one was wired into my brain by the obligatory Internet sources (YouTube urbanists, other people with the same opinions…).

And I know for sure that language learning — and especially urbanism — are topics that a lot of other people are into, too.

So I wanted to point out a few things about today’s world that I didn’t realize until just after I got out of work today: that all the time that I spent lamenting my city’s lack of linguistic diversity and lack of non-car transit methods was just myself inflicting pain onto myself.

In the last hour of my day, our professor came down after his series of afternoon meetings, and since we didn’t have much to talk about, the conversation veered off a little quickly. Soon enough, we were talking about exercise, running and biking, and our professor — who seems to be pretty into jogging — mentioned that there’s a well-maintained bicycle path network that goes throughout Rochester. I’d heard about it from another friend before, but he biked all the way from here to Buffalo and tore something in his ankle doing it, so I assumed he was a little crazy and I wasn’t quite brave enough to go out looking for what he meant.

But after the conversation with our professor, I was certain that this was the right time: I just brought my bicycle back from home over this past weekend, and I was looking to test it out (and make sure a tire wouldn’t fall off after a few days of riding). So I got out of work, ate some food to load in the energy, and got on the bike with no particular destination in mind.

I went all the way downtown, I went to my favorite convenience store with the good soymilk, I found three different bike trails, crossed the High Falls bridge twice, and totaled two hours of exercise. Incredibly satisfied with getting all of this out of my system, I went back home and walked over to the convenience store near my apartment to buy a VitaminWater.

I was pretty satisfied with my ability to get around without gasoline. That’s a point toward being the change in the world I want to see (at least, the resistance to change — the one in the climate — and whatnot).

At least I know I can go to multiple Starbucks.

And as far as language learning, I was even able to get that down today — on my way out of work, I met a friend who I’ve already passed repeatedly several times over a few weeks. We were both walking out of work, so we stopped and talked. Somehow we managed to stumble into the topic of my love for learning Mandarin — although I’m not sure I got the magnitude of that love across to him fully well — and him being Chinese, after a minute or so he said he’d help me with a quiz.

The quiz ended up just being talking about what I had for lunch today for a few minutes in Mandarin, but the language practice felt good. And after all that KTV-ing to myself in the car and in my bedroom, I thought my pronunciation wasn’t too bad. I was happy, we talked about Chinese languages for a little bit — as it also sometimes turns out, Mandarin was a second language for him, too, since his first is Cantonese — and he drove me home because he seems to have felt bad that I live a little far from campus.

So all the time that I spend resenting not living in a place with good non-car transportation and a lack of multilingualism seems to have been moot — it was just a skill issue.

And I think, sometimes, when you think something strongly enough, you can act on it with whatever you have. It could always be better, but it could always be worse, and as they say about universities — it’s not about the school you go to, it’s about the effort you put in.

So whether I get this IIPP internship I want so badly or not, it’s not the luck or the opportunities that make the person. It’s the passion.

「不患無位，患所以立」

As an aside, I wanted to share these —

Some helpful Chrome/Firefox extensions I’ve been using for practicing my reading ability:

Pinyin Web — add Pinyin to Hanzi (parses words)

• Chrome
• Firefox

Zhongwen — hover over words to reveal meanings (and pronunciations)

• Chrome
• Firefox