The power of being pretentious

People’s motivations do not just come from inside of themselves. They are often shaped by environmental cues which one often consider "trivial".

For example, when I stay home, it’s very hard to work efficiently. I dress sloppily, with messed up hair, dirty T-shirt, and barefooted. But if I go working in a café or library, I have to fix up myself to a socially acceptable level, at least trying to look nice and maybe putting some makeups on. Then before I go out I look at myself in the mirror—a different person, I look refined, presentable and hardworking with a serious looking backpack.

Guess what? When I get to a café, sit down, and even though nobody is particularly paying attention to me, I will try to “live up to” my looks by working harder. Who would play a video game in a café when you are pretending to be very hardworking and very important?

When I pretend to be an important person, it only makes sense that I open my work documents on my computer instead of Facebook. I found myself sending much more confident messages on Linkedin and during job searching, pretending that I have a lot of options, thus with higher return rate.

Being pretentious has its power, because when you pretend, you also try to live up to that pretension with actions, which brings you closer to the person you pretend to be. If you pretend to be a smart person, you will try to read complicated stuff and do challenging puzzles to demonstrate that, which in turn will make you smarter. When you pretend to be an important person, you will say things and do things in a self-valuing and authoritative way, and do things more diligently and with more confidence, which in turn enhance the outcomes of your actions.

At TED talk, Amy Cuddly, a sociologist, talks about her "imposer" experience: (http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are.html):

She grew up as a smart kid, but she got into an accident during college, which resulted in brain damage. Doctors said with the damage it will be nearly impossible for her to graduate from college. However, she stuck to her education, and ended up graduated spending four more years than her peers. Then she got “lucky”, and got accepted to a prestigious PhD program. While in the PhD program, she lived her days feeling like an imposer  that she didn't “belong to” where she was. She wanted to quit, but her adviser told her to just pretend to be very smart. She did pretend, and successfully graduated and became a professor at Harvard. One day one of her “bad” students came to her office and said that he didn't belong/he was not smart enough for the material of the class. She told him, for the next class, just pretend you were very good and very smart for that one class. And he did, then he ended up impress his classmates with his “intelligence” and got a high score but actually he just prepared a lot. 

Imposer turns into “real” if you pretend long enough.

Correspondingly, some girls will describe their boyfriends as “Deep inside he is a very nice person, he is just a jerk because (he is scared/he was hurt before, fill in the blank….)” However when one pretends to be a jerk, one has to do a lot of mean things to fulfill that role, then because he does all those mean/hurtful things, he ended up being a legit jerk no matter what he really is.

Or I claim that “deep inside” I am a tidy person, but I just don’t like to clean up my room for now. However, the definition of being clean or not is not that deep, you are clean only if you clean up, which is just an action. If you want to pretend to be clean, the only way is to succeed is to actually clean, which makes you a clean person. There is not much difference between what you pretend and what you really are.

This epiphany is counter-intuitive. Because first of all, all the dramatic Hollywood movies teach us that one honest and nice person always is shrewd, calculated and cruel at the crucial point, and a jerk tends to end up as a self-sacrificing hero. Secondly, in this individualized society where a person's "will" is highly valued, one often ignore environmental influences/cues, instead, people tend to think that you first determined your goal, and then you make actions towards it until you reached the goal. However, things also really work the opposite way: if you identify yourself as one type of person, to live up to that role you “have to” do the actions associated with being that type of person, and because of those actions, you slowly turn into the kind of person.

In short, we are products of self-filling prophecies. We are what we pretend to be.

some contradicting desires in writing

I want to be detailed and convincing as in an academic paper, yet I also want to be easily understood and redundancy-free.

I want to write in an eloquent and fancy way, yet I want to make sure I am bullshit-free.

I want to be a great story teller to pull the heart string of the audience, yet I want to be scientific and being all cool and analytical.

How do I resolve these contradicting desires, or I am just not yet good enough to be able to do all of them at the same time? Or am I good enough to do at least one of them yet?

People, please give me feedback, criticize me and make my life horrible. 

Perfect Job

For most of my life I have been holding a belief that there is a perfect job for me at some corner of the world, which will match all my personality, and will utilize all my capability in every possible way. After I get that job, I will be the happiest person in the world and I will never need to worry about money or unfulfilled aspirations.

Well guess what? There is no such perfect job. I am a complicated person with diverse interests, while the job market is created by the industry, which makes sure one person could be replaced by another like screws in a machine, so the machine doesn’t depend too heavily on one person and could run smoothly with employee replacement. Also for maximum efficiency, labors are highly divided and specified, so that each person will keep repeating one small skill set until they are super familiar and fast in what they do. All these characteristics of industry is preventing me from being satisfied by a single repetitive job, because I am multi-faceted, curious and adventurous, and repetition/boredom is my most hated enemy.

Then what about academia? That’s exactly the route I put most of my hopes on a few years ago when I started my graduate school application. Then the first discovery is that academia is even more specified and detailed—nobody is doing research on “curing cancer”, what people do is: “protein 1789 enhances the potency of protein 5902 to Inhibit protein 4009 in signaling and tumor growth”. A lab that uses HPLC and yeast system will keep doing so for years. Repetition is one hallmark of my graduate school life, my advisor even told me that I should focus only on enzymatic assay but not anything else because that will makes me a highly proficient worker in enzymatic assay, even though I am easily capable of mastering 10 other techniques at the same time. And what’s worse, you lose the direct edge of your motivation when you cannot generate directly revenue from what you do and you have to apply to grant and funding and be subjected to fierce competition of your equally highly specified peers.

Enough complaining, in a word, I find myself in a world where there is no perfect job for me. Big surprise. Ma’am, there is no such thing as perfection. But what if all the options are even far away from basic satisfaction? What about all the choices you can make in front of you, all lead to a life you see as wasted and pointless? What about your wildest dreams? What about changing the world? What about solving poverty? What about fighting inequality? What about shaking up human being’s mind?

One choice is to go home and see your therapist, and talk about controlling the grandiose/unrealistic manic episodes. But then you realize the bullshittiness of psychotherapy when DSM-V is considering to put in laziness as the disorder of “sluggish cognitive tempo disorder”, and tantrums as “temper dysregulation disorder”. From when psychotherapy started to suppress the diversity of human spiritual existence by identifying a broader spectrum of personality traits as disorder, there will be no genius or extraordinaire, only the norms and again, bore.

Or alternatively, (and finally I come the point I want to make in this article…) if a perfect job doesn’t exist yet, I should go and create it myself. I am the only person that could do this because nobody else knows me well to create such position in the society waiting for me to fill.  And there are different levels of creation, I can create a basic way of financial security for myself or I can create a mini-society or cooperation that benefits tons of people. 穷则独善其身，达则兼济天下 (when you are unsuccessful and underappreciated, you focus on making your own life comfortable and nice, if you are successful and influential, you can reach out to the land under the sky to make it a better place. //god English is redundant, look at how long this sentence gets after translation), and right now I certainly should focus on the former for the obvious reason. 

After this particular shift of perspective, the way ahead gets much clearer:  Molly is going to be the entrepreneurial, scientific artist and humanitarian activist. One thing at a time, I will keep writing in my silly blog, attempting to get financial security with minimum bullshit, enjoying life in the process, I am 25, young, pretty, ambitious and smart, life is long and time is short. 

11-14-2012

密歇根湖边的萦绕于芝加哥大风的哀鸣，

可曾也是北京的春天人行立交桥上的夹杂着沙粒的呼啸？

加勒比海的蓝得发绿绿得发青的白沙海滩和带墨镜的胖子美国人的街道，

或者一样给你在成都的流汗麻辣串串摊边一颗一颗冒出来的湿疹疙瘩？

波士顿那个著名麻省学校圣诞节刺骨的大雪，

真要高贵于四川乡镇生产队后面的那片枯死的豆苗上一夜积累的冰渣？

斯德哥尔摩几近极昼的夏天深夜永远徘徊在天边的一丝血色的夕阳，

有异于温江县回响着共产主义广播的高中操场单双杠上面的深红的黄昏？

在学了几句所谓中文就四处耀武扬威的满脸雀斑的白人，

就赢过了卖鸡杀猪满地泥泞的街头点头抽烟喊“welcome”的出租车司机？

纯黑贴身西装配条纹衬衫讲用一百万刀堆出来的PPT的商业策略咨询师，

就好过奶奶最信赖的修鞋摊上兼职看手相的算命王麻子？

民主党最新连任的黑人总统千篇一律敷衍众生的就职演讲，

如何比得过红卫兵父母虔诚热烈的毛主席之忠心

为什么一生的探索和追寻，

却一再的重新寻到那些发了霉的童话真理?

Everywhere is so different, yet so fucking the same. 

国王的勇士，

奔腾的名马，

陪葬于坟墓的能工巧匠，

骑着骆驼穿越沙漠卖盐的行商，

能言善辩的律师

拿着琵琶的美人头上的一点红痣

天上亘古的星空

地上不改的无知和迷茫

六十岁老人坐在星巴克里喝着黑咖啡

给你讲匆匆几十年的流水一逝的故事

无非是母亲的美味牛肝

年少马拉松长跑以后挑破脚底的水泡

酒吧里走来的尤物美人款款的眼神和大学男伴的嫉妒

十六年的残疾和换来的一张残趴症悬挂于后视镜上，

照出嘴角眼边蜘蛛网一样散开的皱纹

迟到的玉米地的香槟的深夜的公交车

带你回到了借居的寒冷阳台和床垫

再长的人生不过一瞬
再短这一瞬也就是一生

One of my favorite Chinese poem

当蜘蛛网无情地查封了我的炉台

当灰烬的余烟叹息着贫困的悲哀

我依然固执地铺平失望的灰烬

用美丽的雪花写下：相信未来

When cobwebs mercilessly seized my stove,

and the sigh of the ashes vaporize at the trival sadness of poverty

I still stubbornly spread out the ashes of disappointment

and with beautiful snowflakes I wrote down: believe in the future

You are not quite beautiful enough

You are not quite beautiful enough.

Even when you are listening to your best friend’s

Sad sad song

Even when you lean against the wall with your blue shirt

Your delicate face reflected in my computer screen

Under the dim light is you messy hair

Even when the slight wrinkles near your eye

Marks of aged memories

Resonating with the half-smiling

Corner of your month

You are not quite beautiful enough

Because you don’t see my beauty.

That sad sad songs,

Will also touch the string of another soul,

If you understand my stubbornness, my heartbreak,

And my brilliant star of a heart and brain

If you ever notice the sparkle of my eyes

My sorrow, my emotions

My all-encompassing passionate fire of a soul

If you ever wonder about the richness of my mind

If you ever read my poem

If you ever look into my eye.

No you don’t.

The world is about you.

Everybody else ought to have paid you more complements.

Thus you are not quite beautiful enough,

As you can’t appreciate my stunning beauty.

How to waste time on internet--inconvenient curiosity

Curiosity is a virtue. It is evolutionarily advantagious because it enables human beings to learn new things and to expand the horizon of their living situation. However it's becoming more and more of a hinder for human mind with the advent of internet. The problem is that internet provides too much information—so much that it diverts and distracts us from our task or goal, while feeding our brain with useless information.

Like the gold fish: Gold fish doesn't know what is to be full. If you have a tank of gold fish, and you keep feeding them, they will keep eating until they are so full that their stomach burst and they die, it seems that there is no "threshhold" in their poorly under-evolved nervous system to process what is being "full".

The curiosity of human mind is just like the appetite of gold fish, we will keep absorbing and reading, and getting to know more things as long as they are availble. This trait was very useful in acient times, when knowledge and new information was very scarce so our brains were evoloved to be very readily attracted to new knowledge and information and to get them all. At that time to miss a crucial information could be fatal, like missing the information of which area there are tigers and which area there are food. (and it can't be looked up on internet )

However, the mordern society and internet provides too much of knowledge for our poor brain to absorb for a life time, but the trait of being generally curious still get inherited till now. We still don't want to miss one single information even when there is waayyyy too much information already. That's why we can't drag ourselves away from facebook to get to work, or why we spend endless time jumping from one useless link to another. The reason you clicked on my article, is probably not because you believe there would be valueable source of information (which it is actually :) ), but more because of you see a link and your curious brain start to fire a natural instinct and you clicked on the link without being aware of what you were doing.

The result of this inconvinient curiosity, is tons of time wasted on internet.

The way to deal with this problem, is to train a task-oriented curiosity to replace the general curiosity. So we should learn to be only curious about the information that is related to the goal or task that I have to achieve at hand, and be able to abandon or disregard all the information unrelated to our goal. At the same time, we need a clear perception of what our brain is tricking us to do and a strong will power to not do so when the result is not desired.

I am not sure if I am able to do that, but I can write it down in my silly blog and give my deepest sigh to the fragile and under-evolved human beings.

Poems writen during CW106

So I was taking a creative writing class last semester--introduction to poetry writing. The instructor was fantastic, kind and extremely humorous, the classmates were very young, talkative and apparently less bounded by social rules compared to engineering or science students. I was the only non-native English speaker, the only science student, the only Asian student and the only graduate student in the class, and I should've felt like an outsider in so many ways. Yet I only realized how intelligent, open-minded and friendly that English-major students are, and I felt fit right in there in that classroom. A room full of poets, where sensitivity is appreciated, messed-up-ness is common, cliches are ruthlessly condemned, and where I can safely express my darkest side while receiving compassion and reciprocation.

We wrote poems and then read and discuss each others poems. I shared some of my poems and got surprisingly positive feedback, along with kindly corrected grammar and  word spellings. So I decide to summon up my courage to put some of my poems here, while crossing my fingers wishing for my emotions and ideas to come through.

1.

Ideal Man

I go and save the world

You put away my dirty laundry

Scattering around the floor

I get depressed over the peace of the planet

You drag me into the sunshine

On a Caribbean boat

I go and break myself to pieces

You sew me up with clumsy stitches

We smoke and pray

We do drugs and yoga

We read my silly poems

that I scribbled down at the blood stained lines

of the old notebook in my battleship

You tell me how beautiful I smile

Over a pot of steaming Chinese tea

 2. 

Queen of Pain

Robe made of Self-Hatred

Throne made of Guilt

Jewelry made of Fear

Scepter made of desperately clinging to the unreachable

Crown made of viscous attack and judgment

I am the Queen of Self-Sabotaging

I am the Queen of Pain

3. 

4. 

Just friends

Perhaps love is lurking under

Frivolously oblivious

and

aged with emotions.

Shaped by denial

heated

attracted

complicated

entanglements

did not last through.

Label the uniqueness of ambiguous desire

black and white

When liberty refuses

a straightforward definition

5. 

Genomic Conversation

ATGCCTGACCCCTATA

we are the murmuring of 

a four-letter language

scarlet blood stream running through our veins

is the silent song of our creation

the rhythmic beating of our heart

is the cadence of the eternal whispering

God talks with our genome

6.

You better not

cry that loud

or pretend to cry

or place your pink chubby warmth

of a face

next to mine

and pout your lips

for a kiss

7. 

Adrifted

You are a sailor with wrecked ship

Drifted in the ocean with your tiny life raft
thousands of miles away from any land

Your life is completely empty
and open
as the ocean

it’s the first time you cry
because that is the state of your life.
 

from in front of the TV,
I said

That was my life too.

8. 

Center of the world

Of course everyone pays attention to you

              & examines you in the utter most

details

of your stubbornness strand of hair

              that collide with your eye glasses

of the slight crookedness of glasses

             on your nose

of the crooked glasses standing on your nose

             that cover your smudged eye liner

of the meant-to-be-delicate-turned-out-to-be

             clumsiness way of your disposition

of the clumsy disposition manifested from

             short and chubbiness of your legs

of the chubby legs walking around betraying

             your ungraceful upbringing

of your pimple

of your fat-line

of your un-matching dress

of your accent and awkward word choice

            and idiotic expression when you open your mouth

            when people start to talk about a movie/band you've

            never seen

            or heard of

or perhaps you never watched a movie

or knew what a movie is

or what a "LOL" is

or what a "ROFL" is

or what a "FOB" is

or who "Elvis Presley" is

or who "John Wayne" is

or how to dance

           like the little lady in that black dress waiving her ass

or how not to be so tense

          to laugh with your body shaking and arms swinging

or how not to be so anxious

or how to initiate a conversation

         that last for more than 3 lines

         which does not end up in hmmm and hmmm

or silence

or a spilt drink

or all the endless/nightmarish parties

in which everybody despises you

                            hates you

                            envies you

                            pushes you

which reminds you as that little girl

with horrible hair-cut by your mom to save money

with greasy hair not washed for days for lack of shower

with oversized jean from your aunt tied at waist with a rope

         yet sweeping on the floor

with too outdated of a dress from your grandma's friend

         at the fish market

with a 5-buck a pair of shoes that's hurting your heel and toe

without a bra to cover your newly developed

         breast and nipple

         as your mom said you don't need it yet

without proper dentist attention that your tooth

         are yellow and cracked

without one single toy from your parents your whole life

         to play with

of course you hated yourself

of course everyone judges you

       because you are the center of the world

       jewels of the universe

       but your parents told you

       that you are short, dark, selfish and ugly

and you are all by yourself. 

Religion is being lazy

I walked by a church today, and saw “Jesus is the answer”

It’s a very interesting sentence, in that firstly it implies everybody is looking for an answer, and it also implies that misery and pain people felt in the search of the answer, and then it gives you an ultimate solution: Jesus.

But my meager experience and knowledge of the world tells me that there is no such thing as “ultimate solution”, instead, most attempts to solve complicated problems in very simple ways result in horrifying tragedies, like holocaust in second world war or cultural revolution in China.

We are troubled by the question of “what’s the meaning of life”, “why is there poor and rich, happy and miserable”, etc etc. And everyone lives their lives looking for answers,  trying out different theories, or practicing certain rituals believing they will lead them there. And, the process is hard work. Life is hard. What if now somebody just gives you an answer to all your questions and frustrations? That will be so enticing.

I remember in the hilarious sci-fi novel “hitchhikers guide to the galaxy”, in a distant planet where very smart aliens built a gigantic super computer as large as the planet itself to calculate the meaning of life. After thousands years of super computer’s calculation, the answer is out, it is “42”. Nobody knows what it means, and now an even bigger computer needs to be build to interpret this answer. The whole story is just as ridiculous as Christianity, where Jesus or bible is given as an answer and the whole Christian theology is built to explain why that is the answer.

Well, it is certainly an ease to just give up the quest and accept Jesus as the answer to everything. Like my Christian friends trying to convince me: “look at the world, the trees, the sky, they are so beautiful, delicate and complicated, how could they not be created from a higher intelligence?” Well yes the world is big and complex, and it’s extremely hard to figure it out. But that means we will have a hard time figuring it out that’s all, it does not logically lead to the conclusion that they are created from a higher being. In fact human beings have made a lot of progress figuring out trees and sky and such, even though merely a teeny-tiny fraction of all. By just exclaiming and say “shit this is too hard, it’s got to be GOD”, that’s called laziness (or stupidity...) in my dictionary.

Therefore I can safely conclude that religion is being lazy.

How to waste time on Internet--false starts

Would you go to the grocery and return half way because you lose interest midway?
Will you start a conversation with someone in person and stop in the middle for no reason, only to resume the conversation two days later?

Those behaviors don’t sound rational in real life, but that’s what we do on Internet all the time. We read emails without replying, we click on a link with intention to do something, only to be distracted to somewhere else and never finish it.

The problem with reading emails without replying, is that when you do reply, you need to read the email again. It’s a waste of time to read an email twice unless it’s super important. And the problem with clicking on a random link with out finishing the original task, is that the task will never be finished until you do it all over again.

We choose to do this kind of “false starts” online but not in real life, because compared to real life tasks/errands/chores, the price of abandoning a task halfway online is quite low, and we can pick it up very conveniently anytime anyway.

However, because we use Internet so frequently and we do false starts frequently enough that the accumulative wasted time is actually very high. I’ve never done any experiment on it, but just do a quick calculation based on email: if I have 10 emails everyday that needed reply, and I need 2 minutes to read each email, I will have 20 minutes wasted if I don’t reply them immediately, because if I reply later, I have to read the email AGAIN.

The distraction on Internet is huge, and if we don’t realize how much time false starts could waste, we will find our times slipping away without any ideas of how it happened. And a serious person as molly is pointing this out to herself and to you my dear blog reader.

Permannet job

So I was making plans for job searching. Then I have a sub-category called “temporary job searching”, meaning if I don’t find a satisfying job, I should have a backup plan to get a job to at least keep myself alive&sane.


BUT, there is a question of definition (like always): What is a temporary job? How do I draw a line between a temporary job and an ultimate/permanent one? A job to keep myself alive? or A job that is not satisfying but pays money? or A job that is not my ultimate dream but help me achieve that goal? How is a temporary job different from: A job that pays a lot of money or a job that gives me a lot of fame despite my dislike of the job? What about people that are stuck in a job which they consider as just a way of income? 


Most people in the world go through their lives going from one temporary job to another, only closer to what they wanted, but never quite there. To some extent, all job in the world could be considered as “temporary job”. As one’s understanding and experiences advances, the jobs that one originally considered as “ultimate goal” would drift and become a temporary job. And the definition of temporary job could only make sense if presented with an alternative--a “permanent job”. 


What would be my permanent job? The first idea, is that whatever job I do I will keep writing, I will be a writer of my own, that’s my permanent job. (The funny thing is, even though I assume temporary job is easier to get than permanent job, the fact is that I am already doing my permanent job, yet without a mean of sustaining my live-hood....) Then more ideas related to my permanent job as a writer flashed: learning all knowledge in the world, practicing perception capability to see past human flaws and rationalizations, experiencing the deepest love and compassion, helping people, revolutionizing Chinese female rights, spreading worthwhile ideas, facing up and downs in life calmly, building  deep relationships…...........


Those are my permanent jobs. Basically my permanent jobs will be trying to live a worthwhile life in which I lived it to the full extent AND providing value to this world.....in this sense the idea of permanent job is not accurate, because it’s not exactly a job, it’s rather an altitude in everything that I do.


Everything is temporary at the face of the the mortality of human being, the relentlessly passing of time and eternity. But at this particular moment where I am writing and you are reading, this moment will be permanent. And I am glad that I am doing my job.

Playful Imagination and Twisted Compassion of Richard Brautigan’s poems

Two poems of Richard Brautigan:

Romeo and Juliet

If you will die for me,

I will die for you.

and our graves will

be like two lovers washing

their clothes together

in a Laundromat.

If you will bring the soap,

I will bring the bleach.

Have You Ever Felt Like a Wounded Cow

Have you ever felt like a wounded cow

halfway between an oven and a pasture?

walking in a trance toward a pregnant

            seventeen-year-old housewife’s

            two-day-old cookbook?

Playful Imagination and Twisted Compassion

of Richard Brautigan’s poems

Molly’s response paper II, 4-24-2012

            What kind of person would describe Romeo and Juliet’s graves as two lovers washing clothes together one bringing the soap and the other bringing the bleach? Richard put the classical and over-romanticized love story into a lowly Laundromat, and the grandiose You-die-for-me-and-I-die-for-you scenario became mundane, trivial and funny. Yet, between the lines of soaps and bubbles, a not-often-seen gentle and tender affection leaks out.

The metaphor of soap and bleach reminds me of a Chinese poem: “把一块泥，捻一个你，塑一个我，将咱两个一齐打碎，用水调和；再捻一个你，再塑一个我。我泥中有你，你泥中有我”, translated as “Mold two statues of you and me with mud, break both of them, then mix our mud together, and mold another two statues of you and me, so you have me in you and I have you in me.” Likewise for Richard we can say “let’s mix together as soap and bleach”.

In the “wounded cow” poem I love the “pregnant seventeen-year-old housewife’s two-day-old cookbook” line, simply a one-sentence but life time of information about a girl. As casually as it seems to push all the intense combinations of words (17-year-old house wife, two-day-old cookbook) into one phrase, it also shows the author’s depth of thought and empathy towards the girl and the society (and the cow). 

His imagination and ridiculousness surprise me and make me smile. I don’t know if he was avoiding being overly sentimental by twisting his compassion into dark satire, but I believe his poems playfully poke at the softness of our heart.