Decision Trees

There is some justice in life.

How did you win that? It's so good that you know what you want to do. Wah, what you're doing is so interesting! How you so keng arr?! That's pretty cool. How come you so lucky?

Sometimes I walk down from Tembusu college and see people playing frisbee on the commons. There's a lot of shouting. It seems like a lot of fun.

And sometimes I read blogs from people of my age group, where the bloggers go out with friends, take pictures with each other in restaurants and on beaches and in cars. They go to church; they thank God for saving them from the latest weekly catastrophe.

That could be me, I think to myself.

Then I return to my work. On a given day I deal with at least 15 emails from 5 different people, minimum (still manageable due to the filters I have in place in Gmail). I code; I write, I do homework for school. Then, when it's late at night, I open a different set of editors and write code for external projects (Pandamian, NUS Hackers, contract work to finance my trip to San Francisco).



I wonder how things might've been had I had chosen the easy path - to study and go out with friends. Like how everyone else is doing it. This blog might get updated more often. I might attend big campus parties.

But I didn't. And so I don't.

In exchange, I am head of NUS Hackers. I'm invited back to San Francisco, for Books in Browsers 2011. I am a member of the private Reading20 mailing list. But I don't go out with friends much. And I don't party at all.

Today, my school gave me 600 dollars to fly to San Francsico.

"You're so lucky!" my friend tells me.

I am not lucky. Life just gives as good as it gets. It is — occasionally — fair.