synergy's blog

Some Words before I Leave for My New Job

It's time to move on.

Guang is my colleague, a doctoral student in our faculty. He came to McGill three years before me.  When I started my campus life in 2003, after a 10-year interval, it was him that gave me a lot of help and encouragement to follow through the difficult beginning stage of my doctoral study. Not only is he a very caring person, but his optimistic and easy-going personalities are also very pleasing, which I don’t see very often among Chinese here.

 

I ran into Guang this afternoon in front of his office. He told me that he has accepted an offer as a new faculty member in a Chinese university. In November, he and his wife with their newly born baby will move to Hangzhou, one of the most beautiful cities in South-East China. His home town is also very close to it. His wife, who finished her two-year post-doctor research after receiving her Ph.D. in our Aerography Department, has also obtained a tenure-track faculty position in the same university. I feel so happy for them: they have got the jobs they like and they are so confident and satisfied with their decisions!

 

Life seemed to make game of me. After a long-time irresoluteness, I finally found out that going back to China and working as a professor in a Chinese university would be more suitable for me than working in a North American school. Before I went to the job market last August in Washington D.C., I tried my best to prepare myself for those faculty positions in Chinese universities. Unfortunately, among all the 37 universities I applied, none of those Asian schools even gave me a second chance, including two in Beijing, two in Shanghai, one in Xiamen, two in Hong Kong (and one in Singapore actually)! I don’t know whether I just had bad luck or something else.  

 

In the following two and half months, I received quite a few campus interviews in succession: from Maine to Massachusetts, from New York to Oklahoma, from Pennsylvania to California … Finally, I received six offers. I would have been very happy if this had happened 8 years ago since U.S.A. was one of the countries I mostly wanted to live in. But now, the more I have travelled around that country, the less I feel like to settle down there. I mean it is interesting to visit those American cities, towns or countryside, but, living there seems to be another story.

 

I’ve been working on the decision-making research for five years during my doctoral study. However, it was a very difficult decision for me to make which offer to take. I have to say some offers were quite attractive. But working is just a part of the life. I didn’t actually learn this lesson until recent years after experiencing a lot of things. When I felt be up the pole, one the two Canadian universities I applied gave me an offer. I had the chance to have a campus visit and stayed in that city for a week before I decided to take the current tenure-track position.

 

Yes! In six weeks, I will leave for Halifax to start a new canto in my life.

 

Life is interesting. An optimal choice for a task is what we are always working on. More often than not, suboptimal solutions are what we can work out. Well, a suboptimal one can sometimes be turned into an optimal one if one can find out alternative methods adapting to the new environment or conditions. Attitude probably is the key in my project?

 

Wish me luck!

Some old stuff... Before New Year's Eve 2004 in Boston

Ski Party - Enjoy the Winter!

When it's ok to use the F word ...

Vox Hunt: A Fair Representation

Show us a photograph that best represents you.

Texas, 2007

Back

It's been some time since last I decided to blog again. Being back in Montreal is interesting. Did the whole meet my friends and parents thing, kinda cool. Now it is the challenge of re-memorizing where i am and start working, and getting to know new people. I am curious about finding and meeting more people and seeing what develops. Maybe find a friend with bennies for a while, always good to see what happens from there.

 

High Flight

By John Gillespie McGee, Jr. (1922 - 1941)

John Gillespie Magee Jr

 

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

 

Of sun-split clouds — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — and wheeled and soared
And swung high in sunlit silence.
Hov'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along,
And flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.

 

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew

 

And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God

Transitions 2 - What is Unchangeable and What Must Change

Some things come and go in our lives. Some people come and go. Some things change....but all too often we forget some things never change and some people stay for a long time or for a lifetime, and some things never change....

Not everything flashes by...

It is true that we need to learn not everything and everyone will stay for a long time and definitely not for a lifetime.

However, it is naive to think everything changes and that people always come and go. Sometimes people find solace in this because they have failed someone and need to justify it. Others think this way to find consolation that a painful change had to come. Both are naive people and desperate thoughts....we can no more prevent change than to force it upon the unchangeable people, truths, and things in our lives.

Can we ever remove thoughts of our mother or father from our lives? Or the truth of who we are in the present, were in the past, or the age/color/birthplace?

We can change these permanent things no more than we can prevent the things that must change -- we age, our children grow up, our family die, our friends move on.

Transitions 1

I ran across a show I watched a lot during the darkest times of my last breakup. I cannot say it is over inside even now...it is never over completely for those that have loved fully...and it is not as over as it can be yet. I know that. Still, I look back and remember how bad it was for a very long time and there are things, people, and objects that were definitely part of those dark past times.

accompany

And like what those who knew advised me, and I believed, there are many of these things and people I just don't want to know anymore....they remind me too much of those times.

It's interesting. My parents, friends, and long time associates were there. I never forget what they did for me, and I never see them as reminders of those dark days. That's because I knew them beforehand.

There are objects and things I got to know during those bad times, and I don't necessarily want to dis-associate from all of them.

However, there are some people and items that somehow are irrevocably tied to and trigger my memory instantly to the events and pain of those times. Those things I try to avoid...like this TV show, a particular restaurant, even a particular person I met during one of the worst days. They bring back the terrible feelings and force thoughts on me...thoughts that I remember well enough without these object's ability to also bring back only the pure negative emotions and negative thoughts.

What's going on

Sometimes it is almost random which people and objects are able to do this. Psychologists label the people and objects that manage to do this to us as "memory triggers". As others who have experienced this can attest to, there are those we meet during this time that we can never forget and will become life-long friends with...but there are some people who somehow become a negative trigger and transition in/out of our lives as we move past the terrible event in our life we are dealing with (whether it is a broken relationship, death, or some other loss/traumatic event).

For me, as I flipped the channel to avoid this show, I suddenly got to another show I watched a lot during those bad times, and I loved the show before, during, and after the bad times. And then I thought of calling the person that hurt me so badly, whom I also associate with many good things other beyond our bad breakup....negative memory triggers are funny this way.

Some people and things become things to avoid at all cost. Other things and people we continue to keep as part of our lives.

I like being wrong!

Right or wrong? It depends.

Nobody likes contradiction, because they are under the impression they face an opponent who absolutely wants to be right and prove them wrong. They take it personally and feel bad if they cannot defend their standpoint. But if you give it a second thought, you'll realize there's no reason for feeling upset when someone contradicts you...

When is someone "right"? We tend to think, and this is what the Oxford Dictionary says, that somebody is right when he/she is correct in their opinion. I firmly object to that definition which may wreak havoc among people.

In fact, an opinion is never wrong, as it is the expression of someone's pure subjectivity, of, according to the Oxford Dictionary, "your feelings or thoughts about somebody or something, rather than a fact". Nobody has a right to tell someone their feelings are wrong, or their thoughts are wrong. We can only question the facts these opinions are based on.

There is a win-win solution to any contradiction between two people: simply work to find out what the facts are. Let both parties use books, ask reliable info from an expert, and soon they will be looking together for the truth. Once they have found it, they will necessarily share the same opinion, and neither of them will feel frustrated, because both of them will have learnt something.

That's why I like being "proved wrong", in the usual objectionable sense of the phrase. In reality, someone will have helped me to know the facts better, and I will be happy to have learnt something new.

After all, we only learn when somebody challenges what (we think) we know...