Thoughts from March 2025

Thoughts, Stories, and Life Updates from March

Last Edited: April 5, 2025

I have never been the kind of person to journal consistently, but I’ve gotten into the habit of jotting down quick thoughts on the Notes app. I have since then realized that I would benefit from a monthly compilation of thoughts and life updates. Would help when asking for advice + giving friends useful life updates/new thoughts + seeing how I change every month (+ college essay material?)
Let me know if you want to read the full, unabridged version - the sections I’ve excluded are almost as long as the sections I’ve published here. They have more personal stuff and specific stories from friends, which feel less publishable. I will send it to you if you are a trusted friend :)

School

- School started, and I’m a high school senior now. This is supposed to be the most stressful year in school, maybe even beyond, but it’s been surprisingly manageable. It also happens to be the first time in high school that I’ve felt like there’s something enriching in school - nice friends and high-quality conversations. The best year content-wise too, because econ, bio, and physics this year are a blast.

- So what caused the change? This year, school is a lot less homeroom-centric. I have talked to only half the people in my homeroom, and because I never stay there and constantly move around for classes, I stick with friends I care about. But even then, my initial expectations were quite pessimistic; the more ‘cracked’ and ‘cool’ people you meet, the higher your standards for friends get, and the more pessimistic you get about school friends, who tend to be somewhat toxic and only interested in college admissions talk. I was fairly confident that I would be talking less with friends this year and studying whenever possible. Apparently, I was wrong. My theory is that the more stressed a group of people gets, they start to drop their insecurities and are able to be more vulnerable. They also seek more human connection. And there’s one friend I’ve been talking to a lot every day, I’ll talk more about this in a later section but the consistent deep conversations also contributed to my sense of enrichment.

More School

- First mocks happened! Mocks for the CSAT, the college admissions exam. I did surprisingly well, and by ‘well’ I mean that my teachers were happy. This adds another dilemma to my life, which is whether or not I should try my best in studying for the CSAT. I’ve been thinking I should get good grades in school (just two more rounds of exams and I’ll be done) and do US college apps after the summer, just do the bare minimum for the CSAT. But if my CSAT scores can get me into a better college (or department within a college) than my regular school grades, it may be worth a shot? At least in school expects me to do this. But with less and less interest in actually attending the Korean college I get into, this seems like a waste of energy. My mom thinks that grinding hard for a big exam will be good for me in the long term, but I really am not sure. Also one aspect that people are ignoring about Korean school is that the more you study, the more stressed you get, especially since you know that everything is ranked and you become less and less confident in yourself. I would rather not opt in for additional stress, but we’ll see.

Running

- I was worried that I would stop running consistently with the start of school. Fortunately it was an unfounded claim; I’ve been going on 5k runs roughly every two days! Because I try to stick as close to home as possible (no parks or rivers, because I would have to take the bus back home), I just run down the street and run back up. The uphill course is at the end of the route which makes this extra hard, and this may be bad for my knees too? I’ve been thinking more about running form, but people give two opposite opinions on Reddit so I’m not sure where to find the right guide.

- Speaking of running, I really should get back into app development. I need a more solid UI/UX design before doing more coding, and maybe I’ll chatgpt my way through this.

Books

- This month, I read The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton and Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. The dialogues in Jane Austen novels never cease to please me. I doubt I would have gone very far in 19th century Britain, but knowing that people actually spoke like this at some point in human history delights me. The characters in both books are incredibly skilled at guarding their thoughts and emotions; Ellinor Dashwood is portrayed as a character of sense and Marianne of sensibility, but even Marianne seems skilled at controlling herself in public. I’ve been told that I can be very hard to read at times, but even then I can’t lie and I can imagine how hard it would be to be on guard (even in front of family!) at all times.

Questions on Music

- I’ve been thinking more about music. I usually listen to music whenever I’m studying and have one on-repeat song or playlist playing in the background. These are usually just whatever ‘I vibe with’, but this definition is not sufficient for me. I list a few artists or songs when someone asks me about my music taste, but now I want to specify it more. So I decided to look more into music, the music industry, psychology/neuroscience, aesthetics, and maybe music theory. I’m currently reading How Music Works by David Byrne. So far, Byrne talks about how culture-driven, context-driven music is. I would really appreciate any reading recommendations in this realm, since I’m not sure how good GPT recommendations are. And if anyone would like to read along and help me maintain accountability, that would be awesome, since I’m so bad at consistently reading nonfiction.

- Another side question: How much of music is audience-driven? Did every country have a composer like Mozart at some point in time, and does every country have a hidden Taylor Swift? Maybe every country has a songwriter who writes songs very similar to Taylor Swift, but country pop / synth-pop / pop rock is not as popular in their country. So much of music, especially popular music, seems to be driven by the aesthetic taste of the general population. I wonder whether a specific country’s history of music is not a history of its songwriters but rather the audience.

Side Quests?

- I should limit the number of side quests in my life, but having a based physics teacher piqued my interest in physics for the first time in my life. So I want to get good at physics! I may distance myself a bit from the computer systems grind and move on to physics. Unironically this will also help a ton in preparing for the CSAT.

- I’ve also been wondering how cities actually work? Upon coming across a rainwater harvesting system during a run, I noticed that I have zero understanding of how the water supply network works. Also what does it take to optimize road traffic and the public transportation system? And I also learned just today that traffic lights are hackable! I really need this for one traffic light in my running route. A lot of this seems to be related to urban planning, I would gladly check out any reading recommendations for this too.

Let me know if you want to read the unabridged version of this post, I’ll probably send it to you if you’ve read this far :p
I’d love feedback, thoughts, or advice! Reach out via contact.