Expanding Chaos

I started this blog over a year and a half ago, during a seemingly uneventful summer before the start of university. The title of the blog was inspired by a photo caption that suggested that I was looking "pensive, as usual", and of course, it's also a reference to Harry Potter, where a Pensieve is a magical basin where memories can be stored. Looking back, I thought the idea was at least somewhat original at the time, though a simple search would've revealed plenty of other blogs titled Person's Pensieve. Oh well.

Since then, I've played with much of the site: the sidebar widgets come and go, and I frequently tweak the main site template - fiddling with borders, and more recently, centering all page elements - and I've managed to pick up so html knowledge along the way (though it's still quite limited). Something that has stayed constant, has been the Haiku below the title:

"COLLECTION OF THOUGHTS / TRAPPED IN EXPANDING CHAOS / INSPIRED BY YOU"

My goal is to stay true to these seventeen syllables - more or less a vision statement, if not a definition of what this blog is meant to be. 1) This site is a means of writing things down - whether it's because I have some free time, have something on my mind, or have something to share. Posting it here is a lot like a Pensieve - wand to my mind, I can come back later and see what I was thinking now, or perhaps what I put here can come in handy to those who stumble upon this site on the world wide web. 2) Okay, I admit, "trapped in expanding chaos" is a whole lot of poetic nonsense, but as poetic nonsense, there are plenty of metaphors that can be drawn from that line. As for now, I'll let that line stand for the openness and wide variety of topics I can talk about. 3) This one's complicated. I never said my vision was 20/20.

It's with these thoughts in mind, that I started the "Resources" page, alongside the "Taiwan" page that highlights my 2010 trip to Taiwan. Back in the high-school days, I had a reputation for making summary notes for most of my classes. Lesson learned: summary notes on pdf files spread among high school students faster than gossip. While at first I made an effort to get "SAVE THE TIGERS!!!" and the occasional pro-Taiwan motto on the notes, I spent most of Gr. 11/12 keeping notes to myself / close friends.

Extensive note-making has been a habit I've more or less dropped after entering university. The sheer amount of material made the idea of typing up summaries for lectures and readings daunting, but perhaps most importantly, I realized that taking the time to fully comprehend and conceptualize as many ideas as I could would be a lot more efficient than dealing with my formatting perfectionism involved in typing notes.

Of course, making study aids is still an important part of keeping up in school, whether its the post-it note amino acids decorating my room, or the self-created sporcle quizzes used to help link texts' to their authors. As someone who enjoys making tests and puzzles (aside: I once wrote a rather puzzling clue as a password hint to a rather important website. nts: spending an hour trying to decrypt a message when you desperately want to access your files was not as fun as I had expected), making study aids has often become more of a time-consuming challenge compared to some actual productive use of study time, but it gives me the opportunity to have some fun, and search for ideal ways to visualize concepts - and visualizing and sharing these ideas is what my blog is about.

Thus, the resources page is a space where I will post some of these study musings, taking a screenshot of thoughts and ideas at this current point in time. Back to Harry Potter, I'll pay a tribute to the swirling threads of memories with my first addition to the page - the swirling mess of lines and boxes that is the first term organic chemistry flowchart.