the game to play

February 17, 2026

it is the unfortunate reality of an anxiety-ridden woman that she checks with compulsion her Fulbright application every two hours for the sole reason to erroneously tell herself that it's actually not so terrible it warrants rejection by the host country committee, even if there's no way she can do anything about it at this point.

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The past weekend was full of both aliveness and exhaustion. The exhaustion outweighed everything else today -- my first day back at work after the 3-day trip to Chicago during which I was essentially lugging a heavy bag and duffel around for hours on end while splurging on restaurant food inaccessible in rural Michigan -- but I can recall the luxurious richness of how the Dover Quartet sounded from the first chord they played. The four musicians sounded less like two violins, a viola, and a cello and more like a blended natural harmony, in the way you likely wouldn't extricate the wind from the waters below. They are all one. They do not cause each other. They are different from each other. They are together in the maximum sense of the term "together," and that pure unity was nearly physically palpable. I'm so lucky to have heard them play merely a few feet in front of me.

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I realize I'm curious about so much and I want to pursue that curiosity as a core part of my lifestyle, even if it is counter to the expectation of conventional stability. I don't deny that I am rather risk-averse, but I was meeting with an old friend today who was impressed that I, like her, am intentionally living the way I want (i.e. not pursuing economics and embracing the arts, humanities, and social sciences). Although I'm quite sure she has some things she probably needs to work through, I was informed that in this period of a sub-par economy and job market, those who pursued the so-called conventional fields against their own personal wishes probably have it worse off overall. It's too possible to fail at something you never wanted. I'd much rather struggle for something I want than something I don't.

The Score by philosopher C. Thi Nguyen raises pertinent arguments about the subconscious games ingrained into selves and societies. As someone who has studied games in undergrad, I found this perspective on the self-help genre intriguing. Games are not inherently bad when they are mechanisms to generate play and flow and unity. Games become nefarious when they are not seen as games at all, when nuances of human feeling and connection and experience become flattened into numerical data, when the only way to compare numbers is through their one-dimensional comparisons to each other. A number is either greater or lesser or equal to another. A school is better or worse than another due to its ranking (I, unfortunately, bought into that notion months out of college...); there is no factoring in the unique needs of a person. The question, then, of course, is whether that game is one you want to play.

There's still too much I want to say but I'm too tired. I just know that by talking about this here, on this tiny quiet blog, I'm refusing to play the game of likes and views and reposts that's far too rampant on social media.