Finally, I've made it. Midterms are over, and somehow, I've squeezed through. For a moment after my final exam, it felt like the world hit pause. No formulae looping in my head or deadlines chasing after me. So I did what anyone recovering from a particularly brutal case of midterm-itis would do: I touched grass.
After weeks of living on problem sets, I finally played football again. I remembered what it was like to move for fun without scheduling every step like it was office hours. That same night, I went to a Morgan Jay comedy show, and for a few hours, it felt nice to laugh at something that wasn't a grade. (Yes, I've been testing that line in my head all weekend long.) For two days, life felt simple again. But as far as I'm concerned, simplicity is the last word in a university student's dictionary.
Now the calm's gone, and everything's back in motion, coursework, organisations, meetings, all demanding their share of attention. It's crazy how life goes back to full complexity the moment you start feeling steady. Managing weeks without exams somehow feels harder than surviving the ones with them. When people say complex, they often mean "difficult". But in my opinion, complexity isn't the chaos itself, it's what happens when that chaos starts to make sense. Lately, it feels like the whole world's learning that lesson too.
Dataland, the world's first museum of AI-based creativity is set to open in Los Angeles with a billion dollar backing, late this year. It's powered by its own AI model for artists, built with help from Google and NVIDIA. William Latham, the artist behind the "Creative Machine Exhibition" in London a decade ago, called it "survival of the aesthetic." That phrase stuck with me. It feels like the perfect gist of the world right now. A world growing more complex by the hour.
AI is no longer generating data, it's generating culture, redefining the definition of what human creativity even means. Tools like Sora have turned "creating" into something almost otherwordly in its scale. We are learning faster than ever. The challenge now isn't to resist the technology, but to understand it, to work with it rather than feel undermined by it. Coming off that, I believe that complexity is learning to let technology amplify what makes us human, not replace it.
As I ease in from midterms and the high of this weekend, the norm of the semester is returning. My head still has a billion tabs open, but atleast now there's variety: ideas, projects, classes, this blog, all fighting for it's own space. It's about to get real busy again, but like I said in my last blog, that's the part where everything feels alive. Somewhere in all that noise, sunshine still finds its way through, steady enough to remind me that the warmth never really leaves.
Four midterms down, I can finally breathe again. The calm won't last long (I know that much), but that's okay. The gears are moving, and it feels good to be in motion again.