Category: What’s Important?

Picture this. 

After a long but dry winter slumber, you’re washing your face over the bathroom sink to start off your morning routine. Still groggy, you space out into the running water, only to notice the turbulent flow tinged with droplets of dark red. 

This is literally the worst time for a nosebleed! You run to the nearest box of Kleenex and desperately snatch up not one, not two, but a few tissues to cease the trickling loss of your life force, but the remaining droplets of hydrogen bonded H2O on your face tear through the soft, fibrous tissue polymers like a thousand degree knife through a trampoline.

I’m sure a regular knife would do the trick just fine.

Now, your only choice is to mar the pure, white towel you set aside to dry your face. Expecting freshly cleansed skin, the now scarlet-stained towel screeches out pain, suffering, death—

Okay, maybe that’s a little too far.

But you get the idea. To provide you with some New Historical context, that’s the story behind my Tuesday morning absence from Advanced Placement® Literature & Composition. Intriguing, right?

By the wise words of WebMD, bloody noses are “common.” About one in seven people in the U.S. will experience a bloody nose at some point in their lives (the ever-trusted WebMD, page 1 of 1). No way! That means 6 out of 7 people in this country won’t experience a nosebleed just once in their lives—that’s just over 280 million people, not a single nosebleed! You call that common? I must’ve had enough nosebleeds in my 17 years on this planet to make up for all of these people. Imagine living your entire life from birth to bloody-towel death without experiencing a nosebleed even once? I can’t!

Before I raise any further complaints, I should tell you a bit about myself. I have self-diagnosed myself with chronic epistaxis. Nasus sanguineus, in pseudomedical terms. While a normal somebody would need to suffer physical trauma, alcoholism, blood thinners, or cocaine (source) to induce the dreaded leakage of blood from their nasal cavity, I can simply blow my nose in the wrong place at the wrong time. Okay, maybe not that easily, but my friends and family can attest to my more often than usual bloody nose, so much so that a simple prolonged pause while I hold a tissue to my face can strike concern into the faces of those who know me best.

My nose has always been problematic. Like Josh Tong while breaking his 4:41 mile time, it’s constantly on the run. If there’s any record I’ll break in my lifetime, it’ll be for the number of consecutive Kleenex boxes used up in 24 hours. 

According to my family doctor, I have a weakened blood vessel somewhere in the bridge of my nose. So the same old two most common triggers in just about everyone—well, one-sevenths of everyone, I guess—cause bloody noses for me: physical trauma and dryness. I’m just more sensitive. To me, physical trauma is blowing my nose too hard, and dryness is a winter night. Though I’ve suffered from much more than my fair share of bloody noses in life, to say I’m not a fan of them would be the understatement of the century.

So I’d like to impart two bits of wisdom by the time you finish reading this post to keep you from suffering my same fate.

Piece of Wisdom Number One: How to stop a bloody nose according to my Asian mother.

Step one, plug your nose with a rolled up half-tissue. Apply pressure like a normal person? No no no, that’s not failsafe. This way, you can still use both hands to flip through a textbook while taking notes or type out your blog post for AP Lit.

 

Additional tips: 

1. Splash cold water on your forehead. This helps… somehow… just trust me.
2. Stick a pencil behind your ear on the same side as the nostril you’re bleeding from. This way, you can look like an architect and stop your bloody nose in style.
3. If you happen to have a hand to spare, point it into the sky. Curse the atmosphere for its low moisture.

Piece of Wisdom Number Two: How to prevent bloody noses according to my personal experience.

Have you suffered from too many bloody noses? Are you tired of it? I present to you: Aquaphor, a humidifier, and saline nasal spray.

These three tools are key because they directly counteract the two main causes of bloody nose: dryness and frequently harsh nose blowing. 

“Warnings: for external use only.” Go ahead and disregard that on your Aquaphor packaging. Aquaphor as advertised is perfect for dry, cracked, or irritated skin, just what the inside of your nose needs. Apply a little before bed to ensure moisture is locked into your nose overnight.

A humidifier! This is self-explanatory.

Saline nasal spray, a dream for those with clogged noses. This remedy will instantly alleviate your mucus problems like a magical artifact.

These precautions have helped me reduce my nosebleed frequency from thrice a week to a couple times a month, and I hope they’ll help you too!

According to WebMD’s failsafe statistics, this blog post will most definitely only be useful to about one-sevenths of you readers. Hopefully for the rest, my suffering has at least been of some meager entertainment. I’m jealous of all of y’all’s perfect noses.

For the other one-sevenths of you out there, follow these tips, and stay safe, kids!

Thay Yang’s Big Big Book of Paper Planes.

This book was the guide to my childhood, offering the instructions for the creation of fourteen marvelous paper airplanes. When I saw it on the featured-sales shelf at a sadly now-closed Borders, it’s safe to say: I was enthralled. After making that impulse buy, I spent hours folding and folding, meticulously practicing each recipe, producing tens, even hundreds of elegant paper planes in one sitting, each more perfect than the last, until my parents grew annoyed by the sheer number of paper reams I consumed.

But there was just one problem: though the cover advertises “SUPERSONIC Paper Flyers!”, they didn’t fly well; or at least, they couldn’t compete against a simple five-fold. But I had already fallen in love with Yang’s designs. They were simple, yet sophisticated, detailed and accurate replicas of real aircraft. So I began to experiment with aerodynamics, narrowing the fuselage here and there, saving more paper for the wings, altering their shapes and angles until they could really soar through the skies—or at least across my front lawn.

What my curious eight-year-old self didn’t realize at the time was that he was also embarking on a much larger journey—a journey that I would even continue to pursue for more than twice his lifetime. This of course is the journey of optimization. Whether I’m folding paper planes, time blocking my homework, solving an optimization problem for calculus, designing the day’s workout regimen, or, most importantly, rebuilding my Tiny Tower for the billionth time, I’m always trying to do better. In fact, optimization isn’t really a journey per se, with a clear final destination, but rather a constant process of improvement. Like the paper planes I used to fold, I strive for my every next attempt to be more perfect than the last.

Though I now seldom put dents in whole paper reams and instead choose to rebirth the occasional physics or econ scratch paper into a magnificent work of Yang’s origami, every time I fold a new paper plane I’m reminded of where it all began.

Optimization isn’t just about formulas and algorithms. Even in math, it takes a certain level of creativity to understand the varying concepts behind each problem. When tackling everyday dilemmas, there are certainly endless pathways that lead to resolution, but it’s up to you to discover and follow through with the most efficient one. 

For example, when trying to calculate the line integral of a vector field along a given path—groan as you might—you could opt for the default method by first rewriting your path equation as a parametric vector, then rewriting your integral in terms of t, then taking the derivative of that new parametric vector, and then dotting the vector field in terms of t with the derivative of that new parametric vector all to set it up before finally laboring through the arduous process of solving the integral you’ve just set up. 

For those of you not in MVC thinking this sounds like a lot of work and icky math, yes, it is. But with a little further analysis of the problem, you may just be able to uncover plenty of other ways to go about setting up the line integral alone. You could possibly notice that you’re working with a closed path and utilize Green’s Theorem to skip a few busy steps, or you could figure out if your vector field is conservative, meaning you could simply use a fundamental theorem to reach an answer. Take it even a little further, and you might discover that the vector field is both conservative and integrated along a closed path, releasing you from the burden of having to do any work at all; the conditions render the answer to a satisfying zero. Basically, with a little out-of-the-box thinking and problem-solving persistence, you can save yourself a ton of work and time.

You may have heard the age-old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” While following this advice may be a failsafe way to prevent your attempts at perfection from backfiring into demotivating setbacks, it’s certainly not a universal truth. No matter what you’re doing, there’s always room to improve. Though the setbacks you experience may seem drastic and make you want to give up in the short run, give it a few days of persistence, and in the long run, they’ll all iron out into a smooth upward trend. True perfection may be an asymptote, impossible to reach in a lifetime, but there’s no limit set on how close you can get.

Everyone loves food; it’s just a fact of life. And I’m sure many of you can agree that one of our wildest dreams is to be able to eat as much as we want, whenever we want. Now, for most, this is quite easy to achieve. All you have to do is continuously shove food down your gullet until your heart is content, but we all know the feeling of overeating that comes after. We feel tired and immobile, and we regret; we berate ourselves for lacking self control. Thus, our wish appears unattainable, and our dream remains lived in our dreams–that is, until we see the typical skinny legend downing eight slices of pizza during a class pizza party and still saving one slice more “for lunch.”

Our dream is not only a matter of indulging in the happiness food brings us, though. There’s also a more practical side: getting your money’s worth when a restaurant offers all you can eat.

When Happy Lamb Hot Pot opened two years ago, it was all the hype. Previous to this date, Naperville had never before seen a dedicated hot pot restaurant; regular hot pot outings were generally hosted at a friend’s house, and countless hours had to be spent to prepare all of the foodstuffs up for boil. Happy Lamb Hot Pot not only offered great convenience, but in my opinion, it also tastes infinitely better! The only minor downside is a somewhat hefty price tag of $22 per person for all you can eat.

I have been to Happy Lamb twice, both times over this past summer, both times with my brother. Both times, we were equipped with a $20 off coupon. What a steal. But even with the discount, we walked into the restaurant with only one goal in mind: to eat far more than our money’s worth.

And I think it’s safe to say we succeeded. The last time we went, together we ate a whopping total of 12 plates of lamb, our main target for each meal, as well as various side dishes. Afterwards, we walked happily out of the restaurant, our stomachs bloated, each three pounds heavier than before. No regrets.

So how did we do it?

Well, the secret is simple. It consists of just three words: hit the gym.

Complain as you may that that was no secret at all. Complain as you may that I am a liar. After all, when you crunch the numbers, it takes over an hour of sprinting at full speed to burn off a scrumptious, thousand-calorie burger from Costco’s food court, and no one wants to do that.

What’s often overlooked is the underlying mechanism behind the amount of food you can comfortably consume: your metabolism. Your metabolism works behind the scenes every day, constantly, whether you’re driving to school, dozing off during a lecture, or sprinting at full speed in a futile attempt to burn off the greasy guilt from that burger you just ate. In fact, it is often responsible for a much larger percent of the daily calories your burn off than the calories you burn through workouts. But people often play off metabolism as purely defined by genetics. That skinny legend in your multivariable calculus class? He can only live your dream because of the raging metabolism his parents gave him.

But this isn’t entirely true. Genetics isn’t the sole factor defining your metabolism. There’s also your body composition, which is arguably more important. Particularly, one must consider the ratio of fat cells to muscle cells that make up your body. We’ve all taken biology, right? So we all know that fat cells are simply dormant storage cells used to harbor lipids. On the other hand, muscle cells are lean, mean, calorie-burning machines. Whether they’re shifting your fingers around the keyboard or holding you upright in your chair while you type your blog post for AP Lit, they’re eating up the ATP generated by your mitochondria like there’s no tomorrow.

From there, it’s simple logic. If you maximize your number of muscle cells, then your body will require more energy to exist. Where does that energy come from? The food you eat. Bam. So hit the gym, not only with the focus of burning off the guilty calories from that last cheat meal you ate. Keep in mind the effects of muscle growth on your metabolism, and your dream of one day eating Happy Lamb out of business is no longer a dream, but a necessity for survival.