As the first official blog post I’m writing for this site, I thought it would be helpful for any readers to cover some quick facts behind its creation.
Who
I don’t know how to differentiate between this section and my About Me page. In any case, I’m Daniel. I’m a fairly Chinese guy, both literally and figuratively. At the same time, I’m a pretty bad Chinese, considering how much I know about the language and the culture. If I had to describe myself, I’d say I’m really boring and introverted. I don’t like talking to too many people, so I spend a lot of time by myself on my computer. In fact, this blog now gives me an even greater incentive to stay on my computer and not talk to other people. Hurray! Anyways, I honestly don’t have many hobbies outside of school. I like playing ping pong and tennis, and I’ve dabbled in various musical instruments but I’m not proficient at any of them. I actually hope this blog becomes one of my hobbies, so we’ll see how this all turns out.
I’ve lived in Ocean Township, New Jersey my entire life. I attended Ivy Hedge in Oakhurst for preschool, Wayside Elementary for grades K-4, and Ocean Township Intermediate for grades 5-8. For high school, I switched to the Monmouth County Vocational School District, where I attended High Technology High School in Lincroft. Now, I’m an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. Technically that means I’m based in Philadelphia, but with the whole COVID-19 still running rampant, I’m back where it all began in New Jersey.
At Penn, I’m majoring in Bioengineering and minoring in Math and Chemistry. I’m obliged to mention that I’m premed, but I hold many grudges against premed culture so I somewhat cringe at identifying as one. Majoring in Bioengineering and being premed means I take classes in pretty much every subject - Math, Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Engineering, you name it. I particularly identify with the term: “jack of all trades, master of none.” In some ways, this has its advantages. I’m a person who is interested in basically all types of fields (except poetry and modern art - screw those), so I appreciate the vast breadth of knowledge which I’m able to learn. On the other hand, I unfortunately can’t say that there’s a subject that sticks out to me as the one I should pursue in life. I kind of enjoy chemistry the most, but I don’t think I’d ever be a chemist or a pharmacist in life. For now, I’m just focused on learning as much as I can about everything, and hopefully I’ll end up working at a job I love.
I should also mention that Christianity dominates a large part of my life. My mother raised me in the church from a very young age, and I attended Monmouth Community Christian Church all the way until the end of high school. Quick side note - it actually used to be called Monmouth Chinese Christian Church, but of course that name was a bit noninclusive since not everyone who attends is Chinese. Still, the church is probably 90% Chinese. Anyways, throughout high school, I served on its Youth Co-Worker and Worship teams. In the summers after both my junior and senior years, I was fortunate enough to join the missions teams which traveled to Kyrgyzstan to share the gospel. At Penn, I now consider Renewal Presbyterian Church and its College Fellowship my home. I’m also involved with Full Measure A Cappella, Penn’s premier Christian A Cappella group, which seeks to “to worship-fully compel others to know Jesus Christ more through music and our lives.”
What
What is this site? Frankly, I find myself asking the same question. I eventually intend to expand it to include more than just my blog, but that is many years into the future. For now, this site and my blog are essentially synonymous. I don’t envision there being a unifying theme to my posts - I really just plan on writing whatever comes to my mind. I don’t talk a lot with other people, nor do I post much on social media. I guess you could then say that this site exists purely as a means of self-expression. I spend a great amount of time in my internal monologue, which you’ll probably notice manifest itself in my writing style. I figured I might as well maintain a record of my thoughts somewhere, and an online blog seemed much more feasible for me than a physical journal.
When
This site was officially conceived on August 23, 2020. You may notice that there are some blogs that predate the site’s creation - don’t worry, I didn’t time travel. I had to blog a few times throughout high school for my English classes, so I transferred over the ones from senior year that I had posted on my Medium account. I actually wrote my first blogs during Ms. Gross’ class in freshman year on Edublogs, but I reread those while creating this site and my eyes literally started to bleed. Thus, I’m not going to transfer them onto this site, and I sincerely hope that no one ever unearths those abominations ever again. But as the kids say these days: if you know, you know. As for the rest of the blogs that predate August 23, 2020, I’m currently working on populating the site with some old reflections and pieces to make it not feel as empty.
Why
I should first mention some notable people who inspired me to follow through with this project. First off, I must shoutout Eric Zheng (Eric Zheng, if you’re reading this, I miss you ;~;), because I modified this site’s code from his own blog. I considered just using a template off of Wix or whatever, but I really liked the amount of ownership and control I could exert having my own code. Plus, I found all those fancy designs to be quite cheesy. This site prides itself on functionality. Anyways, I should also shoutout Grace and Joyce’s blog, which reminded me of how writing blogs can function as a form of therapy even if its about the most random of topics. Finally, I’m going to shoutout The Social Network, arguably my favorite movie of all time. I recently rewatched the entire movie and the scene where Mark Zuckerberg blogs his thoughts while hacking into the Harvard databases just seemed so cool. Of course, if you’ve watched the movie, you know that Mark’s blogs actually get him into a lot of trouble since he makes some rather lewd comments about his ex-girlfriend. I promise my blog will be different - I’m not going to bash on any particular people here. I’m simply saying that that scene from The Social Network gave me this sudden rush of excitement to blog because of how epic it portrayed the process to be.
I suppose the most influential reason for creating this site is that I just wanted to document my life and my thoughts. It saddens me to realize that I’ve lived 19.5 years on this planet now but cannot remember much from my past experiences. I wonder if this is because the strongest memories are typically tied to intense emotions and I don’t feel emotion, but perhaps my memory is just bad. Anyways, I’ve decided that from this moment on, I’ll do my best to live life consciously and not simply exist until death. I know some people maintain physical journals for this very purpose, but typing code is far more enjoyable for me. Right now, I primarily record my thoughts through my rants to a few close friends of mine. It’s quite impractical to have to scroll through countless messages just to look back at those thoughts, so this site serves as a means of compiling all my views and opinions in one central location. In the future, it’ll be very interesting to reflect on my older blog posts and see how much I’ve grown.
This blog also serves as a way for me to improve my writing. I’m a big STEM guy, so I don’t typically like writing in English classes and consider myself an average writer at best. But I actually enjoy writing blog posts because I can structure them in the format that I want and not have to submit to the oppressive expectations of my professors! This is my site - I can do whatever I want. If you haven’t noticed already, I employ a very “stream of consciousness” writing style. I essentially imagine myself talking aloud in a conversation while writing, so I hope you can hear my voice in these words.
How
I’m going to interpret this question in terms of the technical side of how this blog exists. The site is being statically generated with Jekyll and hosted on Github Pages. You can find out more by visiting the source repository. If you still have no idea how it works, I have great news: neither do I! I just know I can “beep boop bop boop” and bam! Working website! I adopted this site from my good friend Eric Zheng’s repository, so I’m pretty unoriginal myself. If you actually want to learn a bit more about how Github Pages builds this site using Jekyll, here’s a nice introduction playlist to the entire process.
A note on comments: since this is a static site, comments aren’t really a thing. For now, if you have any feedback, please send me an email.