Let me write this down.

Don’t know where to put this yet. But it will definitely be put somewhere.

“Some people needs a streak of insanity to make their lives worth living” – Lee Ai Ling.

Insane moments in soccer: the scorer runs wildly shouting nonsensical words, adrenaline rush.

When I looked back, the moment I joined soccer as my CCA seemed to be one those most insane moments.

I knew the stakes of doing so. I have thought for long about how I wanted to focus mostly on my academic matters for the last 2 years in Singapore. I wanted to go to a big university. To me, for a long while, to get into a good university is the most important goal for next few years of my life. My parent’s goal. My peers’ goal.

And the moment I joined the soccer team, it’s like I threw away those dreams. I knew that I would have to endure the strenuous trainings. I remembered the nights when I returned to my room at 9pm, shoveled my cold, packed dinners, took a shower, took the attendance in my boarding school before falling on the bed and slept like a dead log. I knew with all the training loads alone, I would probably doze off during a few periods in school. And yet I enjoyed being in the soccer team. I enjoyed soccer enough to stay on and to put in extra training time.

But when I think more closely, I realize it’s not one of those insane moments that I have had. To many people, what I have done might probably anything close to insanity. I have never been to some isolated corner on Earth. Singapore was my first overseas trip, indeed, a first trip to a distant place without my parents. Indeed, my life can be nowhere qualified to be the closest to “insanity”. Soccer team stood out because it was a long process, long enough to make me think about being insane.

Many things I did that I now consider as “insanity” were sometimes just unintentional fumbles or veering off the track. With the soccer team, being insane means I, normally considered as quite a geeky boy, to joined a bunch of much more care-free …. boys. Sometimes, I would choose to read a book while my friends are all geared up for exams, not because I don’t know the importance of the exam, but because something in the book kept my attention, just a sudden, vague feeling that what I read is important to me. War stories, war movies, animorphs …

My friends tell me that I sometimes think too much, too far for my age. When I tell my mom that I may want to work as an entrepreneur with a start-up companies, I thought she would say something like “you are still a kid, no need to think of such stuffs”, but instead she said “yah, it’s about time you should think about working”. I’m nearly 20 years old, by this time, Bill Gates …. Steve Jobs … would have … For me, I would probably have been shielded off from the insanity of the world for too long, so coddled and protected that I thought simple things that I have done as “insanity”. “Some people need a streak of insanity to make their lives worth living” – insanity may be just be the very things that I normally sway from. But they make lives worth living because they sometimes give me a chance to see beyond that sane life that I have had. I only just made a full sense of that lately. It is definitely not early for me to realize that. People tell me that when I get older, I won’t think about crazy ambitions anymore. Probably because by then I will have a lot more burden and responsibilities that I cannot recklessly do insane things. May be I will be like that, maybe I won’t. I don’t know. But realized that as I am who I am now, at my age now, I have too much energy that such insane dreams are the only way to help me get loose of my energy. But I’m also not too childish anymore to just blindly do crazy things, I realized that I could actually make sense from my insanity.

(Not I need to answer the question about Why Reed? Well, the first thing I found on google when I searched Reed college is about pot smoking in the school. May be probably that happens everywhere, but somehow the thing that the school is open enough to let the people know about such thing is quite something. I read that it’s because Reed is full of young people who carry too much energy and enthusiasm in them and such insane behaviours are just an elongated part from their search for an identity in this word. Well, I guess I want to see more insanity in this world to figure it out.

Sometimes by taking those insane paths, we got a chance to look back at the very world that we have been living. To think of the why we have been there? Sometimes by trying to figure that out, we got a chance to realize how wonderful that world has been, to appreciate its value more. Or to decide to leave the familiar land behind and take a new path. Sometimes being a bit insane, knowingly or willingly, we unintentionally put ourselves in a whole new perspective.

Why engineering

Sometimes I feel restless with my time. I feel that there's something missing. My mom always tells me that I always have too much energy to spare. I don't really like reading my school notes all the time. I always feel like doing something new with my time. Every time I read my notes, I would always find something new, but I still feel like doing something new. I like the time when I did a 3D modelling project in my secondary school. I stayed up for 3 days and only dozed off while waiting for the rendering. But I felt good. I felt tired but at least I felt like I have released my energy. When I was in junior college, I took up an engineering project. Days and nights writing the report. Days spent after training in the school lab to piece the prototype together.

I want to do engineering because I want to put things together. I want to see things work, rather than just learning on paper. I can be patient doing the prototypes over and over again. But I'm a bit impatient seeing my youth passing by. I want to learn engineering because I want to put what I learn, what I know in to making things, building things as soon as possible. I want to have a project-based study.

Ultimately, that's what I want and can do best to help my country. ... childhood dream ...

streak of insanity ... do what is hardest. How my parents and other people told me how difficult it will be to set up what I want. Vietnam has 2 international patterns out of the total 14 in the whole history. Emphasize that it is not a chauvinistic sentiment.

Especially civil engineering. Planning the dams, roads. Since the planning in Vietnam nowadays seems to exacerbate the damages caused by floods, drought ...

how I like architecture but I want, for undergraduate, the technicalities of the structure ...

From the experience with CREATE: I want to know about stress analysis, amount of wind entering the ventilation holes, the size of drainages needed to prevent flooding, how much water will be blocked by the road. how to make the geodesic dome spring up like a foldable structure. how to reduce the number of different shades needed to make the dome. how much vegetations can be put on a roof.

I left Vietnam at an early age. At that point of time, I never thought about the prospect that I will live overseas for at least another 10 years. Or I never know how I will feel when I have to live overseas for another 10 years. And suddenly the experience swarmed me like a gush of wind, overwhelmed me so much that sometimes I just want to let myself drift. It's so easy not to think and just let things flow its way.

I likes thinking about the reasons. I always want to find the underlying reasons for things that happened. I read books about war, I watched war movies. I tried to take a gleam at what make the people sacrifice, to throw themselves into dire situations for a reason. Sometimes the reason seems so distant, so foreign. Like to save the man next to one.

They are ordinary things that sometimes I take for granted. But they have somehow been imprinted deeply in my mind and my heart. I have never thought much about the weather ....

It's the joy, the pain, sometimes the hunchy scare that make home so dearly to me. At least, it's the most certain place that I have, the very place that I always head to.

Sometimes it's just a sudden rain, a change in weather, a morning reek with the smell of burnt leaves in Singapore or during a training camp in Malaysia that remind me of the little home I have

The night before the rain, the stars can't be seen clearly in the sky and the moon would be blocked now and then by of cloud. Before a rain, the air seem to become heavier and smell differently. When I can feel sudden gusts of cold wind blowing in the air, I know the rain would come within minutes. Sometimes the dark clouds in the sky can be an indicator of a rain, but they are the strong winds that actually the harbinger of the rain. When the first few drops of water fall on the ground, they seem to be the heaviest. There would be a sizzling sound when the drops hit and are quickly absorbed into the hot ground, just like the sound of a vegetable oil poured on a half-dry . Water expurgates the air trapped in tiny captivities in the ground. My mom used to say that don't inhale the air at the beginning of a downpour because toxic gases kept for a long time in the ground may be released into the space. I don't know whether she's right, but the air indeed smells different, a bit like the smell of crunched grass.

I like the rain. The surrounding suddenly make me feel like I'm at home.

The rain season ...

My father fetched me to school until I entered secondary school. During the rainy season, he would drive his motorbike all the way to the hall way of my primary school so I did not even have to walk out of the sheltered areas. He was the only parent who did that. I would hide under his big "bat raincoat" (a large rain coat that has an extruded tail with which the person sitting at the back seat on the motorbike can hide under). The tail of the raincoat is so big that I could not see much of the surrounding. But I had remembered the way home so well that I could tell where we were along the road from the limited view of the road and pavement along the way. It was like a game to me - hid under the rain coat, held on to my father's back with my eyes closed, and just felt the slight tilting of the motorbike to count the number of turns we had taken. The best part was when we rode up the slope leading to our home. I felt the motorbike slowed down the motorbike to change the gear, the hump when the motorbike hit the foot of the slope and the slight vibration of the engine when it climbed up the slope. And we're home.

When ...

I started looking at the weather more carefully and tried to predict the rain some time when I first started secondary school in Vietnam. She always has a headache prior to a change of the weather - a severe headache a few days before a storm comes, and mild headache every now and then before a small rain comes. At first we thought it's just because she's a bit too sensitive since a lot of people experience the same. But when I first started secondary school, sometimes my mother would have a black out and faint. The doctors don't know what happens to her. But since the first day when she suddenly fainted while swirling a cup of milk for me for breakfast, I started looking at the sky more carefully. I try to predict whether my mom has a headache because of a coming rain. I would tell her when I massage her head "Mom, I think it's going to rain" - I intend to reassure her, but indeed, it's more about reassuring myself.

I always want to travel home for holiday, but sometimes fearful thoughts would creep into my mind. I'm afraid to know if someone is no longer there when I come home. In fact, it happens a few times during my four years in Singapore. And the worst thought is whether my mom had ever fainted again; my parents always seem to hide such occasions from me whenever I ask.

To live in a different country, I started to learn to love things that I used to take for granted.

Sometimes that love does not always comprise of happy feelings. There might be loss at first, but eventually, that teaches me to appreciate many things which I used to take for granted.

Everyone has to grow up. It's just that some of us are forced to grow up earlier than others.

Eventually everyone will have to move on, over the shell that might have kept us safe. It's just that some of us are forced to leave the shell earlier.

My father left my grandmother's hands when he was sixteen to the university in the capital. He told me stories of how he has wandered on his own. He jumped on a train without a ticket, traveled half the length of the country to see my mother at the middle of their 2-years separated when he was doing his graduate study. Before I left for Singapore at the age of 15, he told me that he never expected to let me leave his protection so early. I have never been the adventurous type like my father. I have never seen the difficulties of my parents, who had to raise pigs, planted tomatoes in our own house to add in more into the ration received from the government during the central planning time. My father would have stayed in the capital to teach in the university, but he chose to return to my mother to teach in high school. Because for him, his home is the most important. Everything I have received today is mostly from what my parents have done for our little home.

Some changes to HOME

May consider putitng in either the first paragraph or the paragraph about the room.
If it is the paragraph about the room, emphasize the tranquility of the atmosphere.

Changes:

Sometimes when I come across the name "Vietnam" in books, I wonder how people are looking at me, a Vietnamese person nowadays. What have I done for the country? The country's triumphs in the past seem more like old, rusted trophies that remind me more of the long gone triumphs in the past.

Some friends call me lucky for all the unexpected events that have happened to my life: early achievements, a scholarship to the best school in Singapore. Sometimes I think they say that because they never know what I have gone through. But slowly, I do realize how lucky I am for all the unexpected turns I accidentally walk into, people that I have met and get acquainted with, and possibly the random events that somehow, somewhere shape my life the way it has been. But above all, I feel lucky because I have always been able to think that I'm lucky. And probably that the things that matters the most. I have fumbled times and again. I have let great opportunities slip through my hands. I have hesitated and doubted. I have given up many things that might have important to me. But I have also, fortunately, realized that many failures are not as important as what I have had. I have turned my head away from things that I deemed important, and sometimes, I find a new way. I'm fortunate because my life has been made by such moments when I randomly take a step into a different path, when I fumble and decide to change my way, when I fumble and decide to push ahead. I'm fortunate because of the homes that I have, the friends that I make. I'm fortunate because no matter what I do, I have a dream at the horizon.

A lot of people call me lucky for all the unexpected events that have happened to my life: early achievements, a scholarship to the best school in Singapore. I used to think that they never know what I have gone through. But now I do realize how lucky I am. I'm fortunate because my life has been made by such moments when I randomly take a step into a different path, when I fumble and decide to change my way, when I fumble and decide to push ahead. I'm fortunate because I have learnt to love my homes. Because that loves give me a reason, a dream to keep going.