smallchou.com/blog

i really love this time of year and it’s not just because i’m going to be hitting the big 2-5 in a few days. i think it has to do with the holiday ambiance. for those of you outside of the bay area right now, don’t laugh at me when i say weather, because it has honestly been very cold for california this week. i’m talking like down into the 30′s at night. bizarre, huh?

anyhow, 25 seems like such a round number. as a former math wizard (read: marginally good at math), i automatically think of 5×5 when the number hits my brain. so i thought i would do something fun and think back on my last 25 years in groups of five. namely, what was i like at 5, 10, 15, 20, and now 25 years old?

5 years old
when i was five, i was growing up in san jose spending a lot of time watching sesame street and transformers. my main concerns were figuring out how to tie my shoelaces (i wore a lot of velcro shoes up to that point) and deciding how to split up my stuffed animals into teams to play baseball. in fact, that was probably my favorite pasttime: putting my hordes of toys into teams so they could play made-up baseball games against each other. i had one superstar (a stuffed bear in a red-and-white t-shirt with my dad’s company’s name on it) who ended up winning every game, usually in a walk-off home run. my most terrifying moment to that point was getting my right middle finger run over by a skateboard, resulting in my fingernail coming off (you laugh, but think about that happening when you’re FIVE). my favorite color was green, favorite food was apple sauce and favorite drink was milk. my life dream was to be an architect. yes. no joke.

10 years old
when i was 10, i had moved to los altos and was going to school at santa rita. by then i had met some of the same jackasses that i hang out with now. i rode around a lot on my bike, though i was forbidden from going downtown or even down to new foodland (which is about, uh, 100 yards from santa rita). i remember my crowning achievement was one day defying my parents and sneaking down to the am/pm on my bike to buy an 89 cent slurpee. i was so excited that when i started back towards home on my bike, the slurpee slipped out of my hand, splattering onto the street. for a moment i contemplated crawling on the ground and sipping it up. i had a shitload of baseball cards (i wonder where those went…) and i dreamt of someday selling them for a small fortune so that i could purchase more baseball cards. at 10 my biggest concern was trying to be not fat. as mrs. chen would say, somehow i grew horizontally in that time, and even then i knew that the world looked down on fat people (kidding).

15 years old
now 15 was a strange time. i had gone to junior high, started to realize that i was pretty good at schoolwork, and spent (literally) 100% of my time thinking about sports. every morning i would get up at about 6:30 am and read the sj mercury news sports pages from front-to-back. and when i say front-to-back, i really mean it. i would even read the high school sports box scores on the back page that are written in 8pt font. somehow this didn’t seem strange to me. i also listened to a lot of rap music, which didn’t seem strange to me either. i wasn’t worried about being fat anymore (cuz i wasn’t by that point), but i spent most of my time thinking about how to make the basketball team. in retrospect how could the coach NOT pick me? i mean, i was 5’9″ with the quickness of eric montross and the toughness of mike dunleavy jr. i did well in all my classes and school was pretty easy. the activity of choice back then was watching movies at shoreline (the same place i work 300 yards from today) and figuring out how to convince my parents to let me drive. good times, high school. oh, and strangely, i hated stanford.

20 years old
by 20 i had graduated high school and moved a whole… 5 miles away to go to school at stanford. my largest concerns by that point were three-fold: what was i going to major in (undecided at that point), what i was going to do with my life, and where could i find alcoholic beverages. all were equally troubling and some were easier to answer than others. actually, in the year after turning 20, i probably had the craziest fluctuation in weight ever, as i finished up a sophomore year of having a fully-stocked bar in my room, noticed that i was friggin beefy, and spent all summer and fall running my ASS off. i went from an enormous 220 down to a slightly disturbing 170. frankly, i will never be able to hit that weight again. 20 was a great year. full of hopes, dreams, good friends, and copious drinking… all the while being secretly scared shitless of the real world. 20 was also the year when i took cs106b, the class that made me decide to go with a technical degree. i think 20 might also be the year i started writing in an online forum. i think they’re all still here: http://www.xanga.com/smallchou

25 years old
and that brings me to 25. technically i’m still four days away, but unless something crazy happens in the next few days, i’m pretty aware of how i am. i’ve spent a few years working and i’ve even switched jobs. i’ve traveled to new continents and found a new favorite pasttime. i think i’m more mature. i’m more confident than i was at 20, but not nearly as confident as i was at 15 (and CERTAINLY not 18). i’m more aware of my strengths and much more aware of my weaknesses (and there are many). i spend a lot more time thinking about how to be a better person and a lot less time thinking about how to be impressive. i’m a lot more traveled, a lot more calm, and a lot less cocky. i think i’m a man, when i’m pretty sure that i wasn’t one at 20 (though i thought i was then). i’ve also found that concerns get bigger as you get older. finding alcohol is no longer a problem. in fact, i’ll go grab a paulaner out of the fridge right now… (fun fact: i’m drinking it out of the same glass that’s in the little collage at the top of the site). instead, all my concerns now are related to the next 50+ years of my life, when at 20 (and 15, 10, and 5) they were all about the next two or three years. they’re larger in scope and hazier in clarity. that’s the funny thing about poker (or life in general): the better you are at it, the more you realize how far you have to go.

30 years old
i could’ve told you (with some level of accuracy) when i was 5, 10, 15, and 20 where i’d be five years later. some of the facts would be different, but it’d be pretty spot on. 30? no clue. i was having dinner with an old college friend in the cafeteria tonight and i realized that as i get older, i get less and less sure about everything. luckily i also get less and less concerned about my uncertainty. funny how that works out. who knows, maybe i’ll still be writing here at 30 and i can revisit this. wouldn’t that be fun…

see you at 30 (and 35)…

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