Are you working hard to achieve your vision or just trying to hide from the abyss 🙃
🐈⬛ Life
Hi friend! How’s the week going for you?
I decided to check out all the libraries near my place and spend a day working at each one. I’ve always loved libraries, especially the ones that have their own personalities.
My two favourite libraries:
University of Toronto Robarts Library. It’s supposed to look like a peacock but everybody agrees it looks like a turkey. 🦃 Legend says that it sinks a bit every year from the weight of the books. It’s open 24 hours except on the weekends and I’ve spent many all-nighters wanting to cry but not having enough time to cry because need to cram for morning exam.
University of Pennsylvania Fisher Fine Arts Library. The sunlight through the stained glass and the warm brown tones are so beautiful. I did math homework here a lot. Idk why but math made more sense at Fisher.
Come to think of it, I’ve never actually borrowed books from either of these libraries... Do you have a favourite library? One day I’d love to travel around the world and visit as many libraries as I can!
(๑*ᗜ*) Anime
I finished watching Laid-Back Camp and now I want to go solo camping. It’s a really relaxing anime about high school girls who spend all their free time either camping or working to earn money to camp. One of the girls, Rin, initially only did solo camping but slowly started to also camp with some of her classmates.
Nothing particularly exciting happens, but it made me feel that magical blend of appreciation, nostalgia, and longing that is unique to the best slice-of-life anime.
It’s a beautiful anime and I highly recommend it!
📖 Books
This week’s book is called Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling. As its name suggests, it’s a book about personal storytelling ie. stories about your own life. I’m listening to this book as an audiobook and there were times when I felt like the stories tugged on my heartstrings.
There have been a few gems in the book and one exercise that I’m looking forward to trying out is what he calls Homework for Life. It’s a method to find and document the stories in your life, which not only helps you discover new stories to tell but also helps you remember more of your life. Personally, I’m more interested in remembering more of my life since I feel like the days go by so quickly and I barely remember any of it.
The Homework for Life only takes 5 minutes/day and you write down the most storyworthy moment of your day in a sentence. He recommends using a spreadsheet to limit the number of words and also to be able to look and sort the stories easily.
Want to try it out with me?
🌻 Learning & Productivity
I’ve been thinking a lot about hustle culture and how complex it actually is. You see, I’m one of those people that genuinely felt compelled to work myself to death (kinda still do tbh). Like I literally felt empty when I wasn’t doing anything and I had to somehow fill up that emptiness with things to do that made me feel accomplished. Idk if that makes sense?
Anyways, like most other people, the wake-up call for me was when I burnt out really bad and finally asked myself “what am I working so hard for?”. When I was in my undergraduate, it was to get into med school. When I was doing my master’s, it was to get a good job. And now that I finally got that good job…welp
So I thought about it a lot, but unfortunately, it wasn’t like I had the epiphany to fuck hustle culture. There are certain values that are deeply ingrained in me that make me want to work hard. And I think there’s nothing wrong with that? In fact, it’s one of the traits of our species that has allowed us to progress so much: an insatiable desire to improve. Besides, most people don’t have the privilege to just fuck hustle culture. What if you have bills to pay? What if there’s a future that you’re working towards?
In any case, I’m afraid I don’t have enough brain cells to articulate a nice neat answer, but I suspect it has to do with sitting your ass down more and being honest with yourself if:
You have a vision you’re working towards
It is your vision or your parent’s vision
Your hustling helps you achieve that vision or are you just trying to hide from the abyss or some shit. 🙃
👨💻 What I’m Learning
100% honest I’ve been pretty disappointed in myself because something always seems to come up that I absolutely have to deal with during the study streams. Many of the things were definitely preventable if only I hadn’t procrastinated the night before.
This week, I PROMISE I’LL MAKE PROGRESS! Y’all hold me accountable k?
💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)
There are two tables with user activities. The 'google_gmail_emails` table contains information about emails being sent to users. Each row in that table represents a message with a unique identifier in the `id` field. The `google_fit_location` table contains user activity logs from the Google Fit app. Find the correlation between the number of emails received and the total exercise per day. The total exercise per day is calculated by counting the number of user sessions per day.
google_gmail_emails:
google_fit_location:
Head on over here to answer the question!
*Btw if you’re prepping for data science interviews or just want to keep yourself sharp, Stratascratch is a great platform with 10k+ real interview questions on SQL and python coding, probability, product sense etc. You can use my code ‘tinahuang’ at checkout for 20% off ❤️
PS: Reply to this email about what you’d like to see in future editions of Boop’s Keyboard! I’m super new to writing a newsletter and I know there’s a lot for me to learn. ALL constructive feedback is greatly appreciated :)
-Tina
I see that we both follow Liah Yoo for skincare advice XD
Jokes aside, really enjoy your channel and your perspective on things :)
Since this title has "abyss" in it. Have you watched Made in Abyss!