Re: Life / on haikus, plasma, and new dreams

Welcome to Re: Life 👋 !

I’m Aaryan - a rising junior at Stanford diving headfirst into a world of microbiology, hardware, and mild sleep deprivation.

You just stumbled on the weird corner of the internet where I chronicle my life. In every post, I share three quick updates from my life, two links to noodle on, and one idea to reflect on for the week.

Let’s begin.

// For the past month and a half, I was an exchange student at Tokyo University developing wearable optical biosensors.

Notable experiences include: teaching myself electromagnetism in a week, developing early-onset scurvy (why are apples in Tokyo so expensive?!), tinkering with cutting-edge plasma deposition machines, and watching Enoshima’s summer fireworks bloom against the Pacific Ocean. (Now that I think about it, this probably deserves its own post…)

I’m supremely grateful to the UTRIP team, my fellow UTRIP researchers, as well as the Goda Lab and Kitahama team for making this experience possible.

// Every morning in Japan, I would force myself to waddle out of bed and write five haikus. (As you might expect from me by now, there was precisely no reason for this — just another way to spice up life.)

Somewhere in that timeline, I got carried away and ended up with a few hundred poems (!), which I’m now compiling into my second book. I’ll save the details for later, but look forward to it!

// Back home in Canada, I’m currently wading through a deluge of missed emails, wandering town with high-school friends, and writing down my stray thoughts. Returning from Japan feels like someone turned my head upside down — nothing feels obvious anymore and I’m brimming with questions.

I’m restless again, and that’s a good thing.

When in doubt, the best words are often the simplest.

Sharpen your thoughts to their essence, and they become most potent.