"The Best Is Yet to Come"

I really enjoy the experiment on TWITTER because it is a strong connection for friends. I love to know what they are doing because people just too busy to talk about themselves and we are too busy to listen. Put aside the benefit of receiving information from the others, I did affected by the peers writing. Professor’s two hours sleep time was truly impress me. That was the time when I thought I would never make up my heavy load of homework and tried to give up. Her dedication and inspiration remind me the reason to come to Baruch – to push my life to the next level. No wonder she can accomplished many things in her early age. Her motivation will inspire me to fight for the laziness for the rest of time. Maybe it is unintentional, but people do affect to each other in many ways. I remember an experience on the train. There was an African American lady with her son. The kid said some “mamamama” words to his mom. And just as usual, I thought he was cute and asked “he only knows one word “mamamama”, right?” I had never thought this question would offend this lady that much. She was very angry in answering my question, “no, he knows many words!” I felt so bad at that moment. It made me feel miserable for the rest of the day. I imaged that she would conclude how rude Chinese were and treated the other Chinese badly. I believed the careless mistake not only gave her a bad impression but also caused her a negative feeling towards my race. Therefore, it would be totally my false if the next Chinese got an unfair treatment because my unintentional sentence. It was so unanticipated that one sentence could upset me for that long time – and I remember it still. There are countless interactions between people. See a friend online and google talk for more than one hour and forget what I supposed to do; send greetings to everyone to make them happy; talk to someone sits next to me and gain a friendship…
I’ve happen read one of the Goosebumps books before. It was fun because each time you read can have different endings. A coin is needed when you read the book. At the beginning, you pick three different tools. Having a special tool or not is whether you can solve the problem you face in the book, which will lead you to the different situations. In one problem for instant, picking a banana or a flashlight in the beginning also result different endings. Coin toss is used to determine your luck in many occasions. Basically, this illustrates the two types of elements affect our lives, the random chance and the tools (or skills) you acquire. For example, you meet a friend on the street. He mentions a nice job opportunity. This is a random chance you meet a right person in the right time. The chance you meet him may be the result of you miss a train or he leaves office too early. And then, you go to interview. Evaluating your excel skills and networking knowledge, the manager puts you into an appropriated department. One might argue that this is a stellar time because the “intermingling scenarios that affect our daily lives”. However, I believe this is a completely science analysis. Chance the coin toss is 50/50. Whether you meet your friend is also 50/50. Having a skill ready for your interview is a critical element for your success. That is why we should keep studying more to strength our ability. I think I should be the only one who still believes Teleological time in the whole class. In The Matrix, even full of Descartes’ philosophy thinking, it suggests the purpose of life as well. The key maker is decided to open the doors for the one; the one is decided to create a “new” world; you cannot see the ending if you haven’t made the choice… All of these are linear time concept. One more thing I want to mention that, there is no use to think about all those interactions too much. Missing one opportunity is the way to lead you to a better one - “The best is yet to come”. Giving up the stuff in hand is the way for you to grab the others-you have to empty the water in your cup in order to get another cup of tea.

Mobius strip

1. discuss what type of time most influences yours and others' lives based on TWITTER. Were you at all affected by what your peers were writing? Did anything unanticipated happen that ruptured your daily construct of living?

Based on Twitter, I persist that chaos time most influences yours and others' lives. As I logged on Twitter account and followed my classmates' posts, I followed what their posts meant to be. For example, when Jessica posted that there was snow outside in the early morning, I first looked at the outside through the window. Moreover, when Prof. Dana posted that BBC and BAPE are on sale, I did not know that what BBC and BAPE were. Therefore, I researched those on the web. In my opinion, these two cases can not be anticipated. In other owrds, both happened utterly in random. I did not even guess not only Prof. Dana posted for the sale of BBC and BAPE but also Jessica posted about snow outside in the early morning. They might have more other words to post than those above; they could post their favorite movie star, study, or food eaten in dinner. l had certain events which were completely random. When I walk on the street as usual, my left ankle was suddenly sprained. Moreover, on the last few weeks, the U.S. dollar rate was not stablized; it kept horribly increased.


2. Spend about 15 minutes playing with the hypertext reading of Borges' text. What do you think the designer intended for us to learn through this hypertext activity? Did you find yourself running in circles? Were you attracted to certain words more than others? If so, what do you think this says about you?

With the sentence from hypertext "he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times.",
I think that the designer intended for us to learn through this hypertext activity emphasizes an infinite series of times.
In fact, when I Saw the words "infinite series of times" and "that fabric of times", one thing is just flashed on me. That is Mobius strip. It has many similarities with the definition of times he mentioned in hypertext; it has a number of straight lines and converging and diverging curves.
I feel that I am walking on the Mobius strip over and over. It will be stopped only by the death.

Life with purposes

I believe my life is teleological time type, which means a cause leads the result. The different purposes are the main topics in our lives. For what I am thinking, if my father never came to United States for his American Dream, my life would be a huge difference from today. I would be someone like my elementary schoolmate, who dropped out of school at her sixteen years old and began to work in a manufacturing factory to support her family. She then has an early marriage since her early twenty. The cause is my father’s decision to go to United States, and the result is my family immigrated to United States and I was able to go to college for my education. People live under different purposes, such as most students wrote on the Twitter, they are paying lots time to study midterms, isn’t it the purpose of being good students, good student can result in you have a good looking resume and degree. It is for your future job purposes. For myself, I major in finance, because I want to get a job in financial institutions. However today’s economy rupture my purpose of seeking my future job. Therefore, it is hard to say that the life under purpose is better than other, because our lives can be affected by other situation, too.

I think the hypertext reading of Borges ‘text is very creative, it attracts my attentions to predict the next coming words, although it is always out of my guessing. I am not sure that I am in the circles, because I am so confused by the reading. Surely, this is a great piece of reading with challenged.

Complicated time.

In this life, nobody was able to get everything done smoothly as they expected. They have to struggle with many difficulties in order to solve their own problems. I think that stellar time affected my life most and others’ lives as well. For instance, my day often begins with going to work in the morning. After finishing working, I go to school until the late evening. Later, I finish my day by having dinner and preparing some things for the next day. This routine is repeated the same every day without changing. However, this schedule doesn’t work well everyday, sometimes, I was interrupted by the work and couldn’t handle works at the same time. Being a full time student and working, I was too tired to balance both working and studying together. One day, I planned ahead to finish my reading papers for my class, however, I couldn’t finish it. Since working the long time made me so tired, I just want take the rest at the end of the day. As a result, I couldn’t finish what I had planed before. Sometimes, I want to stop the time flying in order to finish all my works. Time is money, and it’s true especially when I live in New York which is always busy with the crowds outside the streets. Looking back the past, I realized the time flied so fast that I missed many opportunities to achieve some goals in my life. Playing around the Twitter, I found some people very similar with my life. They always change their lives, and some unexpected things might happen to them which they never know. For example, through this website, some people might suddenly found their friends after a long time they didn’t see each other. Or they planned to go on vacation, but finally their works turned to be busy in which they had to delay their plans. Even though we have the plans ahead, we cannot finish them as we expect. In my life, when something unanticipated happened, I was very hesitated to decide which one I should do first. A few days ago, I got a phone call from my cousin inviting me to his wedding party this week. However, I have a midterm exam and go to work at that time. I couldn’t decide whether I visit my cousin or I have to move my exam earlier and cancel my work. I think that most people also dealt with all obstacles the same time which was not easy to solve. For these above reasons, I believed that the stellar time had an impact on our lives especially when we live in this complicated society.
From the reading, I ‘m almost lost the direction in which I cannot follow what will happen next. When I click each word, it comes out many different possibilities. I think that the author wanted to attract the readers’ curiosity since the text is so chaotic that they have to follow next to read. This way is very creative and doesn’t make it boring when they read a long story. To me, when I like to click the new words which I don’t understand the meaning, it appeared the definition very detailed and its some synonyms. Through these words, it might evaluate about my personality. For instance, if I’m a curious person who always wants to know something new, I will click any new words in the text. Anyway, it’s little confusing with this new activity, I found very interesting to play with it.

A maze of words

I believe in the stellar time, because I feel that anything can affect our daily lives. For example, if you wake up late you'll miss your train or bus to go to work. Or if you had something planned for weeks and all of a sudden it's cancelled, it affects your life. On our twitter assignment there were plenty of times that just by reading everyones comments affected me or at least bothered me. For example, someone posted a comment saying that it was their day off. That just brought my mood off because my only day off is Sunday and I was so jealous at the fact that people have days off and could relax and I can't. There were a couple of unexpected things that occured over the weekend, I didn't expect go out on Friday night knowing that I had class on Saturday morning; which I would never do. And I still went to class on Saturday morning with a serious hang over. But I do feel that things do happen for a reason, no matter what unexpected thing happens, everything happens for a reason.

I feel that the hypertext activity was very confusing and made me read over at least two times. I think that it was really confusing and I guess you can say that you were going in circles. Also I feel that I was from several points starting from the middle of a story or the beginning or the ending. Just going back and forth or like I said before in circles.

My understanding from this activity, I feel that it's trying to tell us in order for us to understand things in life or get things right we have to go over them more than once. Even if you have to start from the beginning or from the middle or the ending.

Tweets and Mazes

1.) During the "Twitter Experiment" I really got the sense that time was stellar. Reading each post showed me how much I have in common with these people besides an English class. When Professor Milstein was talking about "Set It Off" and "Good Will Hunting", it made me go back several years since the last time I saw and enjoyed these movies. Her post made me think, "Should I reactivate my Netflix account so I can watch these movies along with so many others that I haven't seen in years?" I left a post about filling out my NCAA brackets and a couple of hours later I saw another post about brackets. Did my brackets affect his? Did the teams I picked factor into the percentages which factored into his choices? I don't know but it is certainly possible. Another post about someone going to Atlantic City made me laugh. I was supposed to go to Atlantic City for a Bachelor Party but couldn't make it because of work. I could have been at a Blackjack table sitting right next to this person without even realizing it. Maybe this person would have won or lost more money due to my presence at that table. Another post that changed my thought process were all the ones about snow. By the time I rolled out of bed all the snow was gone and the sun was shining. I thought to myself "Wow this weather is finally turning around." Then I saw all the posts and thought shit, this winter is never going to be over and I went from good mood to bad mood instantly. This experiment showed me how other people's actions affect my thought process and how I go about doing things which makes my sense of time stellar.

2.) This hypertext activity reminded me of these Goosebumps books I used to read. At the bottom of every page it gave you a choice of where the story would go next. For example, the story might say, "He approached the door at the end of the dark hall. If you think he opened the door go to page 15, if you think he turned around and left go to page 36." I used to love reading these books as I love solving puzzles and mazes. This hypertext basically reemphasized Borges' belief of different times. If you select a word you might get one part of the story first but if you picked another word you got a different part first. If you didn't pay careful attention you would be running in circles with no end in sight. I was mostly attracted to the one word links such as enemy, friend, revolver, omission, dead, and died. I felt these were more abstract then the phrases and I felt the one word links would deliver more surprising results than the predictable phrases. I guess this tells me that I like to think outside the box and that I like surprises. 

I believe in stellar time

My believe is that life runs on stellar time. Every action of every person affects all of us. What I feel like today may change another persons attitude. For instance, I work in pharmacy so if a patient ran out of medicine and we feel like being generous and giving them a couple of pills until they see the doctor that is our call. Therefore, say I woke up in a bad mood or another patient has mad us upset that may cause us to not give that person with the problem any extra help. Stellar time is very real because some of us can cause a change in another person's life and not even know of it. I also believe that people come into your life for certain reasons and change you personally for good or bad. We may think we meet these people randomly but I think due to stellar timing everyone comes into our life for a reason.
Twitter has allowed me to get out of my box and view other peoples views on personal life, school, and other aspects of life. Its was fun viewing the comments, at one point I was at work reading them and I just burst out in laughter from one of the comments. I also saw that it is hard for many other people juggling school and work. I think I will stay on Twitter as long as its still funny. It has also proved a little of my point about stellar time, by that one post that made me laugh my day was changed. Someones perspective about Costco made me have a good day.
From the reading I gather that the author wants us to also leave our box and view a text in a whole new way. He wants us to view the text in a way that is more surprising, we don't know whats going to happen next where it could take us. You can also find out a little about your personality because of the particular words you may choose to click on. For example if one chooses to keep clicking on the more violent or aggressive words you can see that you like action and hoping clicking that word will lead to others like it. I love to see or hear new words so I basically take to weird or new words.