“The only unchangeable certainty is that nothing is unchangeable or certain”, so said John F. Kennedy once. Every now and then, one passes through an anniversary of a significant event and is forced to reflect on life, and its many unusual twists and turns. I haven’t lived in Australia (which I still consider “home”) for just over two years now. Those who know me well, know that I sometimes harp on about living life “on one’s own terms”, but looking back, I can’t help but notice that many of the most significant changes in my life were brought about by chance events, over which I had absolutely no control, most of which I could not have possibly predicted.

Whilst studying at university, I was once asked at a party by a very attractive young lass for course and career advice (can anyone else see the irony here?). As I had consumed a small amount of alcohol, I am a little fuzzy on the precise details of the conversation which followed. I do remember making an effort not to be distracted, and in so doing gave a rather unsatisfactory answer – the truth (and we were both, ultimately, left unsatisfied). The truth, as far as I’m concerned, is that in this day in age, it is almost impossible to really have a “plan for life”. Even planning for the unexpected is futile because the unexpected is, by definition, utterly unpredictable and therefore impossible to plan for. In an unusual flash of insight and honesty, I told her that for at least the last 6 years of my life, there has not been a single year in which my direction and outlook on life had not changed very significantly. My advice was therefore not to worry too much about long term plans, but to follow her heart and passions.¹

It is difficult to trace the origin of my particular meandering brand of life to any single event, but the beginning seems like a good enough place to start. I was born, it is believed, on the 5th of December 1981 somewhere in Taiwan. The reason I say “it is believed” is because I was adopted and I have yet to trace my precise origins. Although I probably wasn’t aware of it, it is easy to see how my life was, from the outset, already steeped in uncertainty. But far from being merely a bridging-paragraph to introduce the reader to the deeper story by way of a cute but somewhat superfluous anecdote, this story has further substance. I was originally meant for adoption by a Canadian couple. Although I am sitting in a motel in Calgary writing this, those who know anything about me know that I am not Canadian, but ended up being adopted by a couple from Hong Kong when the paperwork from the other couple fell through.² (of course, I didn’t know any of this until much later in life, but that is another story entirely).

There’s something almost romantic about arriving in a new place to begin a new life with nothing except your bags. But by the time you are doing it for the third time, it gets old. The first time this happened, my move from Hong Kong to Australia, had been a long time coming. Most of the move was arranged by others as I was young at the time, and I had known that I would move for a long time prior and had plenty of time to become mentally prepared for the move. The other two instances – the move to New York, and the Netherlands, both happened very quickly. For the New York move, I had all of four months to prepare myself while the lead-time for my move to the Netherlands was an even more ridiculous 6-weeks.

What kinds of circumstances can prompt a person to just pack up and move to a completely different place? War, famine, and civil unrest come to mind. Thankfully, I was never forced to move for any of those reasons. Quite the opposite, in fact. To move me to New York, I was offered admission to a masters degree program at Columbia University – not the kind of opportunity that a person of my lowly academic record passes up. An education at an institution like Columbia as well as the chance to live in New York, along with all the career prospects there was just too good. It would take something incredible to tear me away from a place like New York, but as it happens, just such a thing came up. The opportunity for a chance (albeit slight) of speed skating at the 2010 olympic winter games (and having all expenses paid for in the meantime).

But what is change? It is the opportunity to grow as a person, to learn, possibly to reinvent yourself. It is often a hard pill to swallow. The circumstance of my move to Melbourne were met with some resistance because I first moved into boarding school. It is not an experience I would wish on anybody yet I would be the first to acknowledge that I learned a lot from the experience. I did not learn discipline (as was the intention of my parents) but instead learned more useful skills such as how to pick locks, evade security guards, and avoid gangs of racist redneck farm-boys. I also learned a valuable life-lesson to do with reinventing oneself. When you move to a new place, few people know you, and sometimes nobody knows you well. You aren’t weighed down by the burden of your past life or reputation.

So what though? You make little (or big) adjustments to your exterior, but it shouldn’t make a difference to what’s inside. This of course presupposes that what is “inside” is unchangeable and is not affected by what goes on “outside”, which is clearly not the case. This is, in my belief, one of the most valuable things you can get out of a change of place. You have this perfect opportunity to not only realize that you can reinvent your image, but also to realize that the terms by which you define yourself and your whole personality rest on similarly shaky and superficial grounds. So the funny thing is, by simply changing your location, you can realize your potential to change yourself.

That being said though, escaping from oneself is not always so straightforward. When I lived in Australia I was very heavily involved with Amnesty International. During my involvement, I accumulated a bit of a reputation. It wasn’t a bad reputation – quite the opposite, but because it had grown so large (even larger than my ego) it annoyed me. It bothered me how people knew of me before they knew me. I would get special treatment, I would get a lot of attention. People would judge me, and form opinions of me based on what I had done, and not on who I was. When I moved to New York, I decided that I would continue involvement with Amnesty, but since I found my reputation burdensome, I would make an effort not to tell many people about any of the things that I had done.

The plan seemed simple enough, but it did not go as I intended. It seems that, even though limiting the people who saw my CV was easy enough, all the things I had learned could not be unlearned. My extensive experience in many aspects of governance, event planning, campaign planning, and the like all somehow managed to make themselves known to the world. Although I carefully shied away from any important formal positions, I have a suspicion that my standing in the social hierarchy of the group was much higher than I wanted it to be. Certainly much higher than I intended it to be. It seems that it is more difficult to escape oneself than I originally thought. As Popeye so eloquently put it – “I am what I am”.

Where does that leave us? Is it possible for a person to change? Yes. But it takes effort. You are what you are, but what you are is partly defined by what you do, and that is largely in your hands. When you move from place to place a lot, you are often asked where you consider as “home”. To overuse a cliché, home is where the heart is. Where that is will vary for many people. For some, it will be to follow a passion be it fishing, mountaineering, or speed skating. For others, it is with family, or close friends. Sometimes a person’s heart can simply belong to one other person. You don’t really know until you’ve had to go without. If moving from place to place has taught me anything, it has taught me about what is and isn’t truly valuable in life, and to appreciate it.

Finally, as evidence that change on the inside does indeed happen, and on a fundamentally profound level, I present this aerial photograph of the Columbia University campus which I took on my first ever trip to New York in March 2007. This photo is unusual in that it elicits a strong emotional response in me. What’s more, is that that emotional response has varied enormously over time. When it was taken, I had been rejected from a PhD program that I had applied to. During that trip, this was as close as I could bring myself to the campus, and every time I saw this photo, I would whisper to myself “so near, yet so far”. A mere two months later, I was unexpectedly accepted to a masters degree program there and the emotion quickly changed to a combination of disbelief and excitement. When I finally arrived in September, even my lofty expectations were greatly exceeded and the experience really changed my life. The emotional response to this photograph continued to be disbelief, but the giddy excitement and anticipation that had been there before was slowly replaced by a sense of belonging and, dare I say it – achievement. By the time I left New York, the feeling of belonging, possessiveness even, was accompanied by pride, as well as that strange feeling you get when you sense that something great is coming to an end, like the end of a roller coaster ride, and a feeling I had felt previously towards the end of my time at Melbourne University. Now, I look upon this and feel a sense of longing, for I miss the Columbia Community and all that it stands for. I also miss the student life and all the amazing friends I made while I was there.

Change can be jarring, it can be traumatizing. But you can use it to realize a change in yourself (for the better, one would hope), after all, we could all use a little change.

Yesterday was the end of “zomerijs”. Zomerijs is the curious practice of opening the ice track at Heerenveen for three weeks in the middle of summer. Obviously, it is very expensive to refrigerate a 400m track for three weeks in the middle of summer, but this year they did it for five weeks. Why? Because the Olympic games are in February. Zomerijs ends on Saturday night with the Zomerijs Wedstrijd – literally Summer Ice Competition.

Unfortunately on the day of the big race, the air pressure was high. In speed skating, even slow folks such as myself can get up to 50km/h. The top guys can get up to 60km/h in a sprint. At those speeds, air resistance becomes a significant factor. That is why all the world records are set at Calgary or Salt Lake City because those tracks are at altitude. The difference can be as much as a second per lap.

Obviously, we weren’t expecting too much. Our team began learning how to ice skate in October last  year, and are consequently still very much on the steep part of the improvement curve. However, it would only be realistic to compare our results from this race with those of previous races held at sea-level. Even so, the air pressure was very high. To add insult to injury, the conditions in the facility itself were on the warm side. Warm ice is “softer” than colder ice and this means that one’s blades won’t glide as far as they otherwise would.

When all was said and done, the races were a spectacular anti-climax to five hard weeks of training on the summer ice. We had made great progress with our technique and were starting to look the part of elite speed skaters. Alas, the stopwatch did not reflect the progress that we had made and we will have to wait until the “proper” ice of the winter season starts up before we will be able to truly measure progress.

On a more personal note, although it is one thing to have your hopes of a fast time crushed by variables totally outside of your control, it is entirely another to add to that by shooting yourself in the foot.

The 500m, which is supposed to be the event that I am best at, did not go well. My sea-level personal best stands at a laughable 44.01 seconds. After 5 weeks of intensive technique work during the summer ice, I felt much more confident on my skates. In practice, earlier in the week, I had done a test-race and hit 42 seconds, and I didn’t even feel particularly good on that run. Somehow, when the gun fired, I managed to forget everything that I had ever learned about ice skating. I must have looked like a dog with slippery socks on a highly waxed floor because I certainly felt that way. All my preparation, all my repeating to myself of “just relax, and skate” had come to naught. I basically panicked for 44.63 seconds – my worst 500m on ice EVER.

I could console myself with the fact that the ice was slow, and the conditions were poor, but I knew that I could go faster, and I was eager to prove to myself that I really had improved as a skater. I still had a 1000m to race and I went to task on psychologically resetting myself for a better race.

My result in the 1000m serves to reinforce the notion that the psychological aspect of competition is an important one. From start to finish, I (counterintuitively) thought about nothing except skating well. I have a bad tendency for overthinking my skating and letting my head get cluttered up by too many thoughts. I didn’t think about skating fast, I didn’t even think about pushing hard (although perhaps I should’ve). Just one step at a time, glide, wait, fall, push, next step, etc. When I came across the line and looked up I noticed two things. First – that my time was not next to my name, second – that my legs weren’t particularly sore.

In my rather extreme tunnel-visioned focus, I had managed to line up and start in the wrong pair. One of our skaters had been injured so there was a empty slot which I absent-mindedly stepped into (it didn’t help that the withdrawn skater’s name was also Daniel). That my legs weren’t sore was a point of slight annoyance. Ordinarily, at the end of a 1000m race, one has difficulty standing up because of the lactic burn in one’s legs. The fact that I experienced almost none of this indicates that I almost certainly could have gone much faster.

My time was 1:24.58, a full two seconds slower than my Calgary time, but also about four seconds faster than my previous sea-level best. In fact, I was the only person in our team to better a previous sea-level best, although I was still annoyed that I’d skated poorly in the 500m and that I could’ve easily gone faster in the 1000m. Now I have to wait until mid-September before I am able to get onto the ice again to work on the technical problems (and there are many) with my skating.

I may still be a considerable distance away from a world cup or Olympic qualifying time, I remain optimistic that if I can still take large chunks of time from my personal bests, even when racing conditions are unfavourable, then there may be hope, however slight, that I may make it to Vancouver.

The team has recently moved into our latest, and (hopefully) most permanent accommodation yet – flat oranjewoud. This move has caused me to reflect on my recent, rather nomadic existence. So I present a feature article on the various places I have lived in recently.

They say that a man’s house is his castle. I haven’t lived at “home” with my parents since I was about 14 years old when I moved from Hong Kong to boarding school in Melbourne. Accommodation took the form of dormitories shared with progressively fewer people as one advanced in years. While at Melbourne University, I lived in a three-bedroom apartment overlooking the Royal Exhibition Gardens. This is easily the nicest place that I’ve called home.

It was host to my 4-times-a-year solstice and equinox parties which took place on the saturday night closest to the spring/autumn equinox or winter/summer solstice. These gatherings were attended by a very diverse group of people and often included singing, dancing, and jamming on various musical instruments including, of course, the piano. Oh, there was also alcohol at these parties. I should probably mention that.

Possessing three bedrooms also allowed it to provide accommodation for visitors. For long periods of time, I would host a friend or two just for a bit of company. At parties, it was not unusual for people to spread themselves out over the living room floor.

After living there for seven years, I moved to New York. I lived on the upper west side of Manhattan on 86th street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave. Because rent in Manhattan is kind of ridiculous, I lived in a ground floor studio apartment with no natural light.

I lived there for about a year and slept on a couch (which I eventually sold to a friend, and crashed on it many times in subsequent New York encounters). There was actually another chair in the room which folded out into a stretcher-sized single bed (you can just see it in the foreground).

Even though this accommodation was considerably smaller and less glamorous than my Melbourne apartment, I still hosted many visitors who would visit New York. I think the fact that New York is a fairly major tourist destination helped a bit, and the location on the UWS was pretty darn good. Not that you ever really have to worry in a place as densely populated as New York, but the apartment was close to everything…

Except a speed skating track. So after living there for just over a year, I moved to the Netherlands. Now my choice in accommodation was non-existent here because it was all provided for as I was now a heavily-sponsored elite athlete (supposedly). Our first base was the “city” of Enschede, and our resting place was Resort Bad Boekelo, which used to be a giant water park but had since been converted to a complex of serviced apartments which were actually quite pleasant, even though they were a long way from everything.

Between two and three people shared a two bedroom apartment, and I had a bedroom for myself.

Although I did struggle a bit to fit everything in; that’s what she said.

After living there for most of the winter, we moved to apartments much closer to the city center (Bad Boekelo was a 40 minute bike ride from everything), although initially, we had a shortage of furniture.

These apartments were in a new housing development and lacked basic things like curtains, lights, and any furniture. For a week or so, I slept of a sheet of cardboard.

We eventually furnished these apartments and they turned out to be very spacious and liveable. They were also a 10 minute walk from the town center, which was very convenient. Unfortunately this was to be short-lived, because as soon as we came back from Calgary finale, we had to move again, to our current base of Heerenveen.

We lived at a hotel called the Heidehof for almost two months (we were told we’d be there for three days) before we finally moved into our new apartments at Flat Oranjewoud. It’s an old people’s home, which goes some of the way to explaining the smell. On the plus, I now have my own apartment, although the bathroom smells so bad that I don’t really ever want to go in.

Hopefully we’ll be here all the way until after the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. The old people are nice and the view is extremely relaxing. Location-wise, it isn’t bad – we’re about 5 minutes by bike from Heerenveen’s town center, and about 2 minutes by foot from Thialf, one of the world’s most awesome ice skating tracks (those who have been following my facebook photo albums should note that this is the same track where all those competitions that I shoot take place).

Jeff Widener/Associated Press

June 4th 1989 is a date that will forever be remembered in infamy in history. It was the day that the Chinese government cracked down violently on the pro-democracy movement began by students, but eventually growing to include a broad cross-section of the population of the world’s most populous people. That day, tanks rolled in to the capital to (quite literally) crush what was, in effect, a peaceful social movement with legitimate grievances and legitimate demands.

On the same day, unbeknown to most of the world, this date had a profound impact on the short history of one seven-year-old living in Hong Kong at the time. Seven years is not a long time to have lived for, but it was plenty a long enough time to die for, and in that context I was able to understand what was happening – that people were dying. It was a powerful lesson in political realism – two groups of people disagreed, the group with tanks kills the other group and wins by default. The brutality and injustice of this event so traumatized me that I remember crying. Twenty years on, the memory of it still traumatizes me.

Obviously nobody likes injustice. No reasonable person would dream of saying that they would prefer to see thousands of innocent people killed over such an event not happening. Yet many people are content to go about their daily lives without contributing the slightest effort towards alleviating the unimaginable suffering of others. This particular case of the brutal and unjust slaughter of innocent people was one of many, and I understood that at the time, but for some unfathomable reason, after June 4th 1989, I was a very different person, and was now destined to choose a very different path.

When discussing complex events in world history, the lines of cause and effect are often blurred. After all, who is to say what the cause of any given event is? World War I is the oft-cited example as it illustrates the point very well. Simple-minded folk often point to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary as the cause for the war, but to see it this way is like saying that electricity causes computer viruses. Many different things contributed to the start of World War I, such as the unification of the German-speaking peoples into a single nation-state, the creation of the Von Schlieffen plan, even the formation of numerous alliances in balance-of-power politics can be cited as causes for the first world war.

The reason I bring this up is because I am often asked about how I got into Columbia. If I am at a party, I will often answer with “I don’t know”, or something similarly vague. (If I am being “hit-on” by someone in whom I have no interest, I will often reply with “I majored in mathematics” which will kill almost any conversation, but that is another story entirely). The truth of the matter is that my path to Columbia University was a meandering and complex one, and one that is difficult to explain in a short time. Until recently, I don’t even believe that I had a good answer to the question, but reflecting on my life, and in light of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, I now feel comfortable in finally giving the long form of the answer.

My path to Columbia was not a conventional one by any stretch of the imagination. I was not a distinguished student as an undergraduate. In fact, my academic record prior to graduation was very poor indeed. At the University of Melbourne, my alma mater, there is a body known as the “Unsatisfactory Progress Committee” or UPC for short. The role of this body is to interview and review underperforming students and determine a course of action which is in the best interest of everybody, supposedly. One’s first appearance before the UPC is ordinarily fairly tame, with a slap on the wrist and a “change your study habits or else” message of some kind. The second visit is far more serious, and it is not uncommon for enrolment to be suspended temporarily, altered in some way (full-time to part-time study), or in some cases terminated. A third appearance is a rare occurrence, and one which ordinarily results in expulsion from the university. I am one of the very rare students to have emerged from my third appearance with my enrolment intact. But to understand how I managed this magic trick, we must first reflect on my past.

Just prior to commencing my first year at university, I attended, somewhat reluctantly, a speaker’s night hosted by Amnesty International. Although fairly liberal in many aspects of thought, I would have considered myself a centrist at the time, and looking back, I had slightly conservative leanings in certain areas due to my schooling and upbringing. I didn’t pay much attention to what was said, thinking Amnesty as just another left-wing organization with good intentions but no real substance. If I joined, it would likely disqualify me from any kind of high-paying employment in the type of large corporation that left-wing organizations typically take issue with. One thing that was said, however, did stick in my mind – that Amnesty may be ineffective, but if it accomplishes even 10% of what it sets out to achieve, then doesn’t even that small amount of good amount to something significant. I toiled with this in my mind for weeks but could only ever answer it with “yes”.

This eventually spurred me to join the Amnesty club at Melbourne University, but that was not the only reason. New York Times writer James Traub was a guest speaker during my Contemporary Diplomacy class at Columbia and, when speaking of the role countries played in the United Nations system, articulated it well thus, “you should not always insist that people do the right things for the right reasons”, an invaluable lesson in international diplomacy. And so follows my confession of the second significant reason that I joined the Amnesty club – there were a lot more girls than there were guys. After many years of involvement with the Melboure University group, I should add another important life-lesson to be learned from my experiences – increasing your odds does not always guarantee success.

Fast forward to my second (or sophomore, for you American folk) year, and I am now a regular member of the club. The annual general meeting had come around and it was time to elect the new committee. A new president was found quickly in Alice Pung (yes, the author of the book “Unpolished Gem” which I highly recommend) and it was now time to elect a secretary. I had no real intention of running but I decided that it couldn’t possibly be very difficult and that the experience would be educational. I seriously thought that! So a quick glance at Alice, and I got the nod, and with it the nomination. After joining the club partly for the favourable male-female ratio, all I could think about was the potential for self-improvement as a committee member.

The next year, I was elected president of the group. The election was a very close one involving a tied vote. In the end, I probably won out because I was the more charismatic of the candidates, and possessed a greater skill at public speaking. At the time, and because I was good friends with the person whom I defeated, I felt that these attributes had contributed to an unfair advantage. In retrospect, they were advantages, but they were not at all unfair. As president of a group, especially a volunteer-driven movement such as amnesty, it is very important to have a charismatic leader who is also a good speaker.

My tenure as president was something of a watershed period for the group, and I would only realize this years later. More out of laziness than anything else, I began having regular board meetings so that I could delegate tasks to people. We would have brainstorming sessions where all manner of audacious ideas would be dreamt up and planned out. Our membership grew, as did the number of regular attendees. Our presence on campus also expanded and I organized and MC’ed the first in a series of trivia nights which would eventually become annual fund raisers for our group. At the time, none of this seemed out of the ordinary to me, and it was only brought home to me years after I left when the group went through a particularly low period.

Of all the crazy things I envisioned, there was one whose significance was immediately apparent to me – “Stand Up For Your Rights”. The process of conception to fruition of this defining event is something of a microcosm of my life. It was an unquestionably audacious plan – fill a theater with a thousand people and have some stand up comedians perform for free as an amnesty fund raiser. I had gotten the idea from the DVDs to the Secret Policemen’s Balls (which I got for my 21st birthday a few months before), a series of similar events held in the UK, also for Amnesty International, and my ideas for the process had come together over the course of some very random meetings and telephone calls with complete strangers. At the time that I began organizing this, I was just naive enough not to know how difficult it was going to be. I’m not going to lie, it was very difficult. To cut costs, we would try to have volunteers run everything. Of course, if the plan is so ambitious that nobody believes that it can be done, nobody is going to volunteer for it. I’ll give you one guess as to who ended up doing most of these jobs.

The process of such a large event necessarily brought me into contact with the state, and eventually, national governing bodies of Amnesty International Australia, supposedly one of the younger, more dynamic country sections of Amnesty International, the global organization. The initial reception was cold, to say the least. I was literally laughed off – ironic. I continued to badger them, along with those in the comedy and theatre management industries. I don’t know what gave me the energy to do this. In three weeks of Melbourne International Comedy festival, I saw over 50 hours of stand up comedy. I made it policy to personally ask all the comedians and their managers to be part of my comedy gala.

After many months, people finally started to come around. My relentless passion seemed to be rubbing off. During this time, I learned many important lessons about politics, such as the importance of controlling the flow of information, and the art of diplomacy. Curiously, despite being 21, I suffered from a severe lack of credibility. Everybody seemed to doubt the one thing that I was actually confident about – my numbers. Did they really think that, just because I was 21, that I had somehow made a mistake? There were many heated arguments over this, but I was shrewd enough to keep my opinions on others’ negative attitudes to myself.

I asked myself, “why am I doing this”? I realized that amnesty may have been one of the only organizations that I would have done this for. Early in my tenure as secretary of the Melbourne University group I invited Saskia Hunter, at the time a board member of the state branch and co-convenor of the Asia-Pacific campaign to speak. Instead of giving a boring, depressing, technical exposition of the human rights situation in the Asia-Pacific region, she gave a moving speech about the founder of Amnesty International – Peter Benenson. I’ll leave his story for the interested reader (and I encourage even the not-so-interested reader to look him up, the story is extraordinary), but the point she emphasized was never to lose the belief that one person could make a difference in the world, and the example of Peter Benenson founding Amnesty International was obviously a powerful one. The real answer was that I was doing this for me, because I had to convince myself that, even in this cynical world, one person can still make a difference.

The committees cancelled my comedy night over some cold feet. But I would not relent, and brought it back to life with some creative mathematics and an iron will. When the 25th of October came around, Stand Up For Your Rights became a reality, and a resounding success. I cried. It seemed so trivial, but it was also so significant in my mind. Wave after wave of applause punctuated by deafening roars of laughter filled the air while I briskly walked to and fro backstage. I could not believe it. I could not believe that it was happening, and I could not believe that I was almost solely responsible for making it happen. We ran substantially over time, but nobody seemed to mind. Right from the bump in, through my strange motivational poem for the volunteers, right to the final curtain, the air was electric because, for once, I wasn’t the only person who realized the significance of that night.

It was the single largest expenditure in the Australian section’s history. I have always felt that that said more about the Australian section’s spending habits than it did about the cost of my night. It made almost ten thousand dollars in profit, but more importantly it changed the organisation. It made people believe that it was worthwhile to dream big, and to be ambitious. An organization like amnesty should not be afraid of organizing big events. It deserves to and, if it has any plans to continue to be relevant and keep its reputation, it really has to. I organized two more occurrences of Stand Up For Your Rights, and it has since become an annual event. I also joined the state’s governance committee and enjoyed being active in policy formulation and in continually stirring the pot by challenging accepted norms and ways of thinking.

Halfway through 2005, during the 6th year of what is normally a 5 year degree, I got the call. I was required to appear before the unsatisfactory progress committee for the third time. Shit. As I sat outside the room, waiting, I thought about what I might say to justify my lack of progress. The girl who exited the room immediately before I went in was sobbing uncontrollably as she came out. I went in and sat in the now-familiar intimidation/interrogation room. There are four large desks set in a roughly semicircular fashion with a single chair with no arms in the middle. Behind these four large desks sit three senior academics and one student. I wanted to stay standing in the middle, but was instructed to sit.

What happened? I explained. Why has it happened? I explained further. They didn’t seem very sympathetic to my cause. They told me that they had good reason to terminate my enrollment. At this stage, I had already accumulated enough credit to obtain a Bachelor of Arts, so to quit would simply forfeit my Bachelor of Science degree which I was one semester away from obtaining. In my daydreaming, I briefly considered this option until something that one of the academics said caught my attention and jolted my back to reality in a very uncomfortable way. “We cannot allow you to continue as it would damage the reputation of this university”. This made me very angry and I made a point to ensure that those to whom I was speaking knew that this made me angry.

Are you out of your mind!? I am at this university, taking on some of the hardest subjects that it has to offer, and sure, I fail a few every now and that, but you have the audacity to tell me that I would be bringing this university into disrepute!? (at this stage, one of the academics tried to say something, but I cut him off) There are drop-kick idiots out there who come here and do bullshit degrees in commerce, leech off their friends in group project subjects, learn useless managerial double-speak, and then leave with very decent academic records but having not learned a thing, and you’re trying to tell me that I am bringing this institution into disrepute (I think I was shouting by this stage). Now listen to me (at this point, one of the academics made a very concerted effort to interrupt me, he may have even stood up, but I stared at him, and he was quiet again, so I could continue), I am going to finish my degrees. I am going to take these four subjects next semester and I’m going to pass all of them, then I’m going to do honours in mathematics (one of the academics chuckled at that one, but I stared at him, then he looked away sheepishly), after which I’m going to graduate school. You can worry all you want about the reputation of this university, but there are better things you can do with your time, than try to intimidate me in this room, and kick me out. (my memory is strangely vague on the details, but throughout this paragraph, I may have used stronger language than this)

I was allowed to stay and finish my degree, and I did. The next year I went on to do honours in mathematics.

In early 2006, the Law Society of Victoria (the state of Australia where I live) opened the “Human Rights Law Resrouce Center” with a fancy gala dinner to which amnesty’s National Executive Committee was invited. As the youngest member of the state committee at the time, and having gained notoriety within the national governance bodies of Amnesty Australia, when word of a few extra invites surfaced, quite to my surprise, I was one of those who was picked. Perhaps it was out of convenience because I was a student with a lot of free time, or perhaps someone thought it would be amusing to see how out-of-place I would look at a law society dinner, nevertheless, I accepted with enthusiasm having been to boarding school and having quite an overinflated appreciation for free meals.

The dinner itself was good, as one expects from the well-heeled law society. The guest speaker was even better. Tim Costello, a baptist minister, brother of the then-treasurer Peter Costello, lawyer (of course), and CEO of world vision in Australia, gave a stirring speech about the need and neglect for economic, social, and cultural rights in favour of civil and political rights. Ordinarily, I am a very shy and introverted person (can’t you tell?) but the experience of years of approaching comedians after stand up gigs emboldened me to approach the night’s keynote speaker for a chat. I told him a bit about my background and that I was in the business of saving the world, and asked him if there was anything I could do. He asked me what I studied. I replied that I was a mathematician completing my honours year. He seemed genuinely excited, and he told me about a book I should read called “The End of Poverty” by the whiz kid Jeffrey Sachs. I did.

Towards the end of 2006, I was in a bind – I was applying for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. The scholarship was started by Cecil Rhodes in order to educate future world leaders (at Oxford, of course) and required the recipients to be particularly well-rounded. Part of the application process involves composing a “personal statement” of about 1500 words detailing why you wish to pursue whatever it is you are studying. I couldn’t get my statement to click. I was applying for the D.Phill in mathematics and every time I tried to write a statement, I couldn’t make my area of study gel with my life goals (if you’re wondering about those, maybe you shouldn’t be reading this, or my website for that matter). Then I had an epiphany – I wasn’t very passionate about mathematics. I mean, I really like it and all, but as far as passion was concerned – real passion, the passion that you suffer for – it was for saving the world. So I, instead, applied for the scholarship in international relations.

Needless to say, I didn’t get it. I still maintain that it is their loss (no, really, that isn’t just something I tell myself to make myself feel better). As an afterthought, I thought about applying to a few institutions in the United States, but where? I checked the inside cover of Jeff Sachs’ book – Columbia University. Ok, I’ll apply there. Where else? Harvard and Yale sound nice, ok done. In a very strange way, I never expected to get into any of these places.

Taking advantage of the 9-month gap in academic years between the northern and southern hemisphere, me and a friend who had completed honours in the same year, Nick Sheridan, went on a 5-month odyssey through Latin America backpacker-style. Nick had also applied to several institutions in the US and, along with me, would be eagerly watching our inboxes for acceptance/rejection letters. Unsurprisingly, I was rejected from Columbia, Yale, and Harvard. What was I thinking? Three appearances before the unsatisfactory progress committee probably isn’t part of your typical ivy leaguer’s life experience. We eventually went through the US so that Nick could visit all the places he had gotten into (which further drove home the significance of what I had missed out on). Curiously, when I visited New York City for the first time, of all the items on my “list of things to see in New York”, the only one that I didn’t get around to seeing was Columbia University – it would have been too painful.

Then a very strange thing happened. Just as I was about to leave Boston for Quito, Ecuador, I received an email from someone at the Earth Institute at Columbia saying that they had seen my application, was sorry that I wasn’t accepted, but wanted to know if I wished to be considered for a similar masters degree program which was also run by the earth institute. Initially hesitant about going through the whole emotional roller coaster of waiting with hope, only to be rejected, I reluctanty informed them that I would like to be considered for the program.

By the time we were about to leave Peru, I had lost hope. It was past the date that they said they would inform me of a decision, and I had received no news. I even began discussing options with Nick’s dad (who is an academic) about possible courses of action, people I could talk to about other graduate schools etc. Nick and I split briefly because we wanted to do slightly different things while traveling, so I kept traveling through Bolivia and Paraguay, and it was in Paraguay where I heard the momentous news – I GOT IN. (the experience is described briefly here)

Those who know me very well, know that I suffer from low self-esteem, and have issues with self-worth. One of the reasons I believe this to be the case is because I routinely get rejected from things. It is a little-known fact that, on finishing high school, I applied to Cambridge University only to be rejected. Even my comedy night was rejected many, many times… that is, until it actually happened, and when it did, it gave a small part of me hope that perhaps I was worth something to the world. Rejection from Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, while devastating, wasn’t surprising at all, I had come to expect it. When I was finally accepted into Columbia, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Being rejected so many times made me truly appreciate how significant this was, and how fortunate I was.

So that is who I am… what I am. While it seems impossible that the admissions office at Columbia could have extrapolated that from my academic record (which I maintain went missing at some stage in the process), CV, and 500-word personal statement, I feel sure that the events I have described contributed significantly to my admission. I am the guy who’s out there trying to save the world. Willing to endure failure after failure after failure. If history teaches us anything about success, real success – the kind of success that is significant, it is that it comes not to the most talented, or well-connected, or anyone like that, but that it comes to the most persistent, and it comes to those who are willing to put it all on the line. Twenty years ago, in Tianenmen Square, thousands stood in front of tanks and were crushed, or shot. But one man stopped a column of tanks in front of Jeff Widener’s telephoto lens, and that image is the one that endures in the collective consciousness. That image reminds me to this day that it is still possible for one man to make a difference in the world. That image, and everything that surrounds it, changed my life.

Maybe someday I’ll change the world.

This is a facebook meme; one of the few that I took the time to actually do. I thought I would include it on the site because it actually says something about me (not like those “which Bold and the Beautiful character are you?” memes)

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose at least 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

2. I am very shy and am terrified of meeting new people.

3. I can pick locks; I used to be very good at it.

5. I am adopted.

7. I get crushes on people all the time; I’ve probably had a crush on you.

11. I was utterly useless at mathematics (seriously, if a sum came to more than 10, I was in trouble) until grade 5. Now I am a bit less useless at it.

13. I didn’t understand that the object of a running race was to win the race by crossing the finish line first until grade 6, at which point the “maths nerd” (recently crowned) was suddenly the fastest runner in the school.

17. My favourite food is truffles and I resent being labelled a rich, arrogant snob because of it (there are many other, far better reasons).

19. I have a long history of enjoying things that I’m not very good at, like playing the piano, making friends, and speed skating. This trend will likely continue into the future.

23. I won numerous medals for many years in both speed and artistic on rental skates from the local rink before my parents finally relented and bought me my own skates.

29. I love to dance; I used to do ballet and do not believe that this, in any way, calls into question my sexuality.

31. I was nearly kicked out of Melbourne University three times for failing subjects; even at Columbia, my academic record still contains a subject with a “CP” (credit pending) next to it.

37. The two biggest extra-curricular influences on my life are speed skating and amnesty international, yet I have never dated a skater or a person who I knew through amnesty (as of writing this).

41. I once organized a comedy night that featured 20-odd stand up comedians, and played to an audience of over a thousand people, raising tens of thousands of dollars for amnesty international… while I was a 21-year-old volunteer university student. (I also did it three years in a row, but I don’t like to brag).

43. I’ve been extremely close to death 3 times in recent memory, from a car crash (2003), almost drowning (2005), and a high-altitude snowstorm (2007).

47. I’m a bit of a freak at archery; like potential-olympic-freak, but for other reasons (like training for the olympics in speed skating) I never have enough time to train properly.

53. I cried my eyes out on June 4th 1989. I may have only been 7 at the time, but I still haven’t fully recovered.

59. The number of all-nighters I’ve experienced for *cough* recreational purposes *cough* is sadly, grossly (but not infinitely so, thankyouverymuch) outnumbered by the number of all-nighters I’ve experienced for academic purposes.

61. I can move my ears in two, linearly independent directions. I can also move the left one independently of the right one.

67. My first camera was a 35mm film(!), manual rangefinder which I took apart but was not able to put back together. This was mostly because my mother is obsessive about tidying up, and kept rearranging my room such that I was unable to find all the pieces of the camera. The fact that I was 5 years old at the time may have also been a contributing factor.

71. When I was 13 years old, I got a group of friends together to enter a roller hockey tournament… which we won, with almost no training, playing against established teams with uniforms, coaches, and occasionally, support staff. Moreover, the final was won in a penalty shootout, where I scored the game-winning (and only) goal.

73. I have really really really awesome friends who are collectively entirely responsible for me not being a penniless, homeless, welfare-bludging, sidewalk-sleeping, alcoholic dropkick who would have almost certainly put himself out of his misery with a rusty spoon by now. (if you got tagged, I’m referring to you).

79. I really wish they hadn’t given the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, because it makes me unsure of whether or not I ever want one and, if I were to be awarded it, whether I would accept.

83. I used to think “freedom” was a country, and one with a really awesome army because the “Good Guys” in TV shows and movies always seemed to be fighting for it. I will not disclose the age at which I realized that this was not the case.

89. I never believed the scenario from William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” would turn out the way it did… that is, until I went to boarding school.

97. For me, being on stage is both the most exhilarating and most terrifying thing in the world… but hey, all the world’s a stage.

101. I suffer from a lack of credibility

103. I like prime numbers

107. I am The Batman

Many apologies if you got tagged and didn’t want to be. It would have been prohibitively time-consuming for me to ask permission from each and every one of you.

I thought I’d wait a week so that the fact that I’m older really had time to sink in. How does it feel to be older? Well, it doesn’t feel very different really. I’ve been living in Holland for 59 days training for the 2010 Olympic Games. It’s not easy. As the previous post shows very clearly, I have a long way to go. I’m not going to lie, I’m a little worried that I won’t qualify – they don’t make it easy you know. So, not wanting to disappoint my loyal readership, I will construct a birthday post inspired by Janus from which we get the word “January” (and not “Anus”).

Looking back - A year ago, I was preparing for finals at the end of my first semester at Columbia University in the City of New York. Time does fly, dunnit? First snow was on the 2nd of December and I only had to pull 3 all-nighters during those final weeks. It’s funny the things you remember… breakfast at an ungodly hour of the morning following an all-night writing session, the beginnings of my New York karaoke obsession beginning in February 2008 and going until my goodbye party in October. What else… I got a paper published, spent some time developing my skill as a photographer, actually graduated on time, and worked at UNICEF. Not a bad year…

Looking forward - Where to from here? Immediate goals include getting faster and qualifying for progressively higher-level competition, culminating, of course, in the big O.G. Aside from that, however, my life lacks any real direction. I’d like to do some more reading and write some academic papers while I’m pursuing my quest. Eventually I think I may return to academia, this whole “real world” is a very strange place and I don’t feel like I really belong. I’d like to spend some time at the university here in Enschede, and get to know people outside of skating. This is the first time I’ve really only had one group of friends with whom I regularly interact, and it is very strange indeed.

Life lessons? I’m hardly the authority on that, I mean, I’m only 27. Two thoughts to take away though… “Never forget who you are”, and “Live with passion”. Whenever I have to make a big decision (and “big” means whatever it means to you) I ask myself who I am, and what decision would that person make. As for the passion, I don’t want to get to the end of my innings and look back on a life filled with easy-way-outs, “safe” choices and, dare I say, contentment. You only get one shot at life so you may as well get into it. Sure, I will probably have to endure a lot of heartache and disappointment if I’m always shooting for the stars, and flying by the seat of my pants with my heart in my mouth (I’ve got more clichés than you can poke a stick at), but I’ll be satisfied that I gave it my very best… and I’m sure Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson would have been well-pleased with that.

My feet finally returned to solid ground
from abstract worlds to which my maths had taken
me aloft and in many equations drowned

Relaxed anew, my mind it hath awakened
and to far-off lands I found my gaze renewed
my plans to travel, they could ne’er be shaken

So how to plan an epic? What to include?
so much there is to see and so much to do
so much of this choice would boil down to the mood

We start this in Mexico, to get a clue
on language, that is, to learn the Spanish tongue
or else we shall find our plans hard to pull through

In Guanajuato, short of breath, strained of lung
at Don Quijote we navigate our way
through verbs and nouns: language ladder’s first few rungs

After this, we trip through Mexico and stay
at some pretty ‘budget’ accommodation
all the while taking it all in, day by day

Highlands to lowlands, from station to station
we traversed the land, west to east by bus
then to Cuba with much anticipation

In Cuba things were different, it seemed to us
there was no hidden hand, à la Adam Smith
but now how to get around? by train? by bus?

No, a car we hired for the week and with
a sense of adventure we traversed the land
from town to town to find fact and dispel myth

As we drove, we gave to hitchikers a hand
and learned from them that Cuban life’s pretty tough
after this, to Venezuela we went, and

We had not enough time, so things were quite rough
but I was on a mission to come and see
the Angel Falls, and perhaps some other stuff

Following, we flew to the land of the free
the United States, ’twas but a short detour
from our Latin American travel-spree

The reason was that US unis would lure
my friend Nick and I into their hallowed halls
so we thought we’d visit, and receive a tour

Berkeley, Stanford, Caltech from the west coast calls
MIT, Harvard, Princeton rise in the east
and I to New York for Columbia’s walls

But Nick was accepted to them all, at least
and I was not, and sad was I for this fact
nevertheless, in New York I had a feast

But strange, just before I left, I had a smack
figuratively, of course, but still it shocked
me to find my application, still intact

And resubmitted – an M.A. to unlock
but I felt my chances were still very slim
and still the rest of my travels to concoct

Tired was I in Ecuador, on a whim
up to the equator I went to inspect
that red line that circles the globe – it was thin

To Peru, once again with Nick to connect
and so the long hike to Machu Picchu walk
and no walk in the park this, it needs respect

More than just a sight to see, one more to chalk
up on your list of places to travel to
the old Inca City lives up to the talk

Then, salt flats in Bolivia travelled through
to mines in Potosí where I felt quite ill
from the altitude, though it was nothing new

Through to Paraguay, through the Chaco to kill
my love of buses, for a fifty-hour
trip will make anybody’s guts want to spill

Not to mention the crazy girl who could sour
an already brutal transit through the heat
by hitting on me… all I did was cower

But Asuncion, Paraguay was pretty neat
for while there, I miraculously learned that
I was destined no more to accept defeat

‘Cause a place at Columbia for this brat
me, that is, was now on offer for a chance
to change the world, so to New York – where it’s at

So on to Iguazu falls I would then prance
in quite a deliriously joyous mood
while admiring the waterfall’s great expanse

Onwards to Rio, where some would dress quite lewd
for Carnival at least, and the beach so warm
and in Maracanã for a football feud

Then through Uruguay, the calm before the storm
it was May, and I was running out of time
so now a final plan I needed to form

Through Argentina and Chile, I would climb
at least one mountian, and a glacier see
and see how far south I dare travel this time

Of year, for winter approached and a degree
would be considered warm in some places here
so down I went, to Ushuaia the city

At the bottom of the world where I would fear
acute sea-sickness from all the boats I took
then northward went I, bigger mountains to near

Snow-capped cerros screamed adventure, begged a look
at three thousand seven hundred metres tall
Lanín would be the one written in my book

But alas, disaster struck and we would fall
short of the top due to inclement weather
the mountain, it knows how to make you feel small

Though we escaped, and lucky for our tether
of rope, but next through to Chile my bus went
where Nick and I would find ourselves together

But on one more adventure I was hell-bent
so in Coyhaique I flew a light aircraft
and lastly to Santiago – I was spent

We met and retold stories, we smiled and laughed
and marvelled that our trip’s months had numbered five
now set for home, to tell tales both smart and daft

So finally in Melbourne, we would arrive
but there was so much work that was to be done
if I was to have any chance to survive

My move to America, though it be fun
would be via skating world championships
so the pace of life, was still quite a brisk run

I had to pack up my home, pack up my scripts
and relocate my grand theatre of life
but without a clue, I would shoot from the hip

It surprised me, though, the emotional strife
that such a major life-changing move would bring
for this was not the first time in my short life

That I had moved like this, but nowhere to cling
to as home, yes – that’s the problem this instance
’cause home is where friends are – mine the world will fling

To its farthest corners, the greatest distance
and so my heart is flung, but I must hone in
on the making good of my small existence

So first, to Colombia to speedskate in
those darned championships where I have little hope
and in here, I witnessed one more deadly sin

Greed, it seems to touch us all so broad its scope
my laptop, camera, ipod some fool did steal
and sure was I of some athletes’ use of dope

Laptop’s loss was traumatic and hard to heal
but luckily’s New York is just the right place
to catch my breath, find my feet and keep it real

Semester starts, we must read at frantic pace
pity, for the campus has such scenery
but my uni work, I quickly did embrace

My research, location of much greenery
out of the city and upstate where we find
the heart of climate science machinery

But so much more on offer, we keep in mind
and so many new things in this place to learn
I must seize it all, lest I be left behind

But even our happiness takes time to earn
such life-shifting moves don’t come without a cost
to that intangible place – home, I oft yearn

Where is this place? I say, I do feel quite lost
in this big world, much of it I have explored
but my place in it, shrouded by winter frost

Though in this place, to mope, I cannot afford
I thank old frends, whose presence has been heaven
and new ones, and some like Cyrano adored

But now it’s finished, the hour reads eleven
’tis been quite a journey, more love and less hate
I bid goodbye to 2007
can I top this? Bring on 2008!