It’s 3:16 in the morning and I want to know how my parents’ (and grandparents’ and family friends’ and so on) gentle emphasis on education when I was growing up has translated into my current sleep deprivation.

Ironically enough, after years of buying me several hundred-paged workbooks intended for use in the summer to keep my math and reading comprehension skills fresh during the middle of the school year, my mother now wants me to stop biting off more I can chew in coursework and sleep.

It’s an parent thing; nag until your child does something and then when they do too much, nag until they stop.

More often than not, I see students wandering around in the HUB and the dining commons and wonder, what if I take fewer Honors courses and ease back on the research and just sleep next semester?

And I’m disappointed in myself. I’m not athletic in any sense (other than my unnecessary competitiveness) and don’t have any stunning (or even mundane) talents. I’d rather throw my computer out a window than let someone read my writing and I clearly have don’t have much faith in my art if I forgo the common artists’ desire to keep their art to themselves since it’s so personal.

So yeah, I have to work my brain because I don’t have much else going for me. And as you might guess, that leads to staying up until 3:30 AM to finish up a blog post.

It’s kind of curious, actually. My parents, and most other Asian parents who I know, grew up in countries where grades were everything and “electives” such as art, music, and similar endeavors were deemed as fond pastimes and haha, just try making a career out of them.

I grew up with parents with a watered-down “haha elective” mindset. They emphasized learning arts (as seen when my father signed me up to play flute in middle without any consultation with the person who would be playing said flute, me) and my mother flaunts my frankly horrific art like with the same pride parents have when they stick art of questionable quality on the refrigerator.

Of course, I was never interested in pursuing a career outside of a science-oriented field, so I’m not too certain what their reaction would be if I suddenly switched over to a creative writing major, but I know they’d probably worry about my future prospects since all they’ve known has been that scientists and doctors and engineers make the money and does any other career exist?

I think I’ve fallen into the stereotype pretty well: growing up, I wanted to be a pediatrician because they made money without dealing with annoying adults. And then in high school, I realized that chemistry was probably the best thing ever but I would never want to teach uncooperative students. So with frighteningly little research, I decided to major in chemical engineering.

It’s going pretty well so far, with the exception of my overconfidence in organic chemistry, and I have no plans of moving out of the STEM field.

Yet sometimes, I walk behind students shouldering Penn State backpacks with the sports they play proudly embroidered in white thread, and I wonder if I were an athlete, would I stay up until the morning hours to perfect a serve, a hit, a kick?

I wonder when how much longer I’ll wait to get a violin, when my sketches of hands will actually resemble hands and not weird Mickey Mouse gloves, when my writing will have some semblance of emotion rather than my notorious habit of cramming the story with dialogue rather than descriptions.

And maybe I do need more sleep, but for the time being, I think I’ll continue to bite off more I can chew to see just how well I can incorporate my desire to learn art into my more traditional aspiration in the sciences.