(originally posted on medium.com, https://medium.com/@ernesttravels/facing-evil-part-1-664bb515c6f5 )
It’s only been when time has passed, I’d gotten done what I had set out to do, removed that uncertainty, and removed myself physically that I’ve been able to reflect and externalize my experience. Some people, like Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew say that in high-adrenaline situations, the body pumps up a lot of adrenaline so someone’s head could easily forget a traumatic experience. Not for me. I still can recall that instinctive fear, that same instinctive fear that a deer feels for his life when being hunted down by a sharp-toothed tiger in the jungle. Twice. I also still could hear Gabriel Maurer’s blood-curdling insults like how someone would never forget his first Hitler Youth rally. It had bothered me a lot subsequently after my semester finals (exams). I was afraid I needed therapy. But living in Prague helped a lot. My friends in the Czech Republic helped a lot. Being around Ivana helped. Finishing the degree signified that I can overcome, in a real, true way, and finish what I started, no matter what. Sunny Los Angeles allows me to externalize it in writing.
It was the middle of January 2013 and it was yet another record bitter cold and blizzard snow filled winter in Munich and all across continental Europe. Naive Californians, born, bred, and stationary in California all their lives think snow can be fun. Snow is not fun. People go stir crazy with too much snow. That’s why domestic violence and suicides go up in Nordic countries during winters. People die in the snow.
It was two weeks to finals and then a first week of two exams I desperately needed to pass: Differential Geometry and Topology I, and it’s hard enough that these were classes for graduate-level math majors, being a physicist. In fact, I needed all four classes I was taking that semester, or otherwise, I ran out of semesters before my thesis work and I’d get kicked out of the Masters program. And the usual course load was two for the Masters program.
But what really changed my life, changed the direction of my life, for good that Winter 2012-2013 semester was that I decided. I was listening to YouTube videos called “TGIM-Thank God It’s Monday” by Eric Thomas and the speeches he gave. And success, for Eric Thomas, came down to one simple fact: You got to want it as bad as you want to breathe.
You got to want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe.
(Když chceš uspět tak moc jako chceš dýchat.)
I really took to heart that principle and all that it demanded and entails, as Thomas, literally, preached: if you’re going to be successful you gotta be willing to give up sleep. You gotta be willing to work with 3 hours of sleep, 2 hours, if you really wanna be successful. Some days you're gonna have to stay up 3 days in a row. Because if you go to sleep you might miss the opportunity to be successful. That’s how bad you gotta want it. And I took to heart sacrifice: To be able to sacrifice who you are, to become who you want to be. Giving up the friends I had and I was around who were holding me back, giving up old habits; it was beyond motivating or psyching myself out of procrastination or out of work-life balance - it was about a total drive towards getting the maximum amount of studying done and passing all the classes I needed in order to move on to the Masters thesis work, and nothing else: I wanted to succeed as bad as I wanted to breathe.
My Bavarian roommate in Augsburg, Gabriel Maurer, didn’t like that I was putting in all the extra hours at the university studying and pulling all nighters. There’s a whole backstory and conversation there; I’ll refer to my tumblr post I made late November when I was utterly desperate and had collapsed from exhaustion. (cf. http://ernestyalumni.tumblr.com/post/36834738363/100-today-was-one-of-those-days ) The gist of how I understood our status from late November 2012 was this: I told Gabriel Maurer explicitly: I have to pass all four of my math and physics classes this semester. I am not wasting time cleaning up after the apartment and your things and after your weekend parties. If given a choice between time I could spend studying and time spent doing the chores around the apartment this semester, I will choose studying. Gabriel Maurer told me I must leave. I told him, fine, I will leave at the end of January (2013) and I will clean up at the last week of January and I want my deposit back of 460 euros so I that I can pay for 2013 school semester fees.
Middle of January 2013, Monday, I already dread going back to my apartment even though I pay rent, money, for my room and it costs me and my family dearly. There’s a whole backstory there (keep reading and checking out my stuff online), but I was spending more time at the university studying and pulling all-nighters with Jad and for the first time in a long time, the momentum and the possessed work ethic felt good. It reminded me of being back at Caltech during my undergraduate days. And I miss Caltech very much.
After classes that ran from 8 am to 6 pm for me since I was taking on twice a full load that semester, and studying for a bit, I messaged Jad, a Ph.D graduate student in physics (who worked on transformational lensing, i.e. a real-world invisible cloaking device, no joke) on Facebook:
18:25 Ernest Yeung
I'm gonna go back to Augsburg tonight and change my underwear and do my laundry for the last time this month. I'll be running around. Don't hesitate to message.
(when you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, you give up time for personal hygiene; I squeezed out every minute out of that Winter semester for studying)
19:44 Jad
thanks bro... i appreciate you looking out. sorry i misunderstood you.
19:47 Ernest Yeung
no problem dude, we're men, not bitches.
19:47 Jad
hahaha, amen to that brother
(I (still do) listen to a lot of rap music, with all that its lyrics bring)
I’m so focused and possessed on my studies, and assured of my own preparation coming to finals as long as I continue doing what I was doing, I didn’t think of nothing of the ordinary of going back to the apartment or WG in Augsburg. I’ll go, start moving out all my stuff, laundry, start cleaning and clearing up my room, start getting all my clothes (and yes, underwear) in hand and out for the end of the month. I’ll catch a nap for a few hours and then head out the door by 5 am back to Munich by train.
There was a lot of snow on the ground, about at least half a meter high. Walking outside and walking to the train station was my only outlet out that semester and so I stopped and took a photo of expansive Munich on the way; my way of stopping to smell the roses.
Like clockwork, I've already timed my walk from the Mathematische Institute to the train station, accounting for enough minutes to buy a ticket on my Bahn karte, walk through the station to the platform, and find a seat on the train to Augsburg, which run on time, every two hours, without wasting a minute. I walk from the smaller, and airy Augsburg train station through a side street and directly down to Frölichstraße.
Snow blanketed the streets of Augsburg which made this already quiet Bavarian town even more eerily quiet. The lonesome street lamps lighted the silhouettes of falling icy snow.
Even though nothing of the ordinary from clockwork routine would’ve prompted it, somehow my intuition told me, as I walked down Frölichstraße, covered in hills of snow, that something was misplaced. I had my heavy, crimson Samsonite backpack on my back with heavy duty notebooks, pens, papers, and my MacBook Air, and electronic peripherals, a canvas bag in each of my hands, one black canvas bag from a generic Chinese brand that I could zip up, with a plastic, wide lipped mug my mom bought me that I used to brush my teeth in while I pulled all-nighters at the Institute that doubled as a drinking mug from which I sipped boiled hot water from, and a red canvas promotional grocery bag, casa uno, carrying even more notebooks and my textbooks I bought from Caltech, in particular my big phonebook of Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, John Wheeler’s Gravitation, that Federica and Alberto gave me in Genova, and I gripped each bag in my Madova leather gloves from Firenze (Florence), made with Italian cashmere lining and plush, generational Italian leather.
My intuition told me to set both bags down and at least take a photo of Gabriel Maurer’s car parked in the small parking spaces in front of the apartment building, and license plate, a cherry red Nissan Almera, A W 3972, in the case that he assault or mug me like how I was assaulted and mugged almost two years ago. It was ludicrous to think that but snow and winter does that to people; people do go stir crazy. It’d been snowing heavily since the first of November, coming in like clockwork.
When I pick up both my bags and start walking towards the apartment building, crunching the snow beneath my feet in my light wood-colored leather Timberland boots, someone in my apartment, on the ground floor, quickly turned off the front lights and the silhouette darted out from the front room. Which felt strange.
I open the front door of my apartment building, Frölichstraße 10 1/5, with my key, and walk up the start of the first flight of stairs to the door of my apartment, set my both of my bags down, get my key out again, and try to turn the key in the key hole. It can’t turn a quarter of the way. I try turning it again. It doesn’t turn.
That asshole Gabriel Maurer changed the locks on me on my apartment while I was studying at the university over the weekend. Which means he was insane and psycho enough to compel our other roommate, Nadja Büchler to go along with it, including getting a whole new set of keys.
I knew it was futile to try to open the door, so I rang the doorbell at 11 pm a good two or three times. I was furious. Gabriel Maurer opened the door with an insanely psychotic smile on his face. I gave him a look that Jad would give me or anyone, that says, “Are you for real?”
Of course I was furious and I commenced a furious back and forth. Always an insanely stickler of following rules, especially rules that fit him, he quietly told me to keep my voice down because of the neighbors (yes, in Bavaria there are explicit legal regulations on the exact amount of noise after specific hours in the day and night in residential areas).
“I don’t care if I wake up the neighbors. I want the neighbors to hear this. Are you nuts for changing the locks on the door while I’m gone?” I furiously retorted.
Same argument and logic that was already traversed since last November 2013; I said I was studying and staying over at the university because I wanted to pass my classes this semester, and I was staying over at the university and pulling all-nighters there because I didn’t want to be a bother to his weekend WG parties and all the friends he had over, but I wasn’t going to clean up after his stuff in the living room and especially after all the WG parties. He said he didn’t like that I was coming and going in and out of the apartment at such hours that I was and that if I wasn’t going to clean the apartment (the way he wanted it done) then I was going to have to leave. And pay for the new change of keys and locks as well.
There was no point in arguing or trying to convince Gabriel Maurer otherwise; we had, in my analysis a values conflict. I valued, as I had told him explicitly last November and I reiterated again, my scholarship and passing my classes this semester. You tell me, it’s important to clean the apartment, to stay in and spend time with the roommates (which ends up being where we all sit around the couch and watch the shows or go to the disco, YumClub, he wants to go to; I pity his friends he still do). There’s no values there, like I told him, now again; valuing is putting one thing of higher importance and value than the other. If given a choice, I’m going to go and spend all of my waking minutes studying and finishing the degree that I had set out to do when I started, over listening and doing what you want me to do.
Christ, I still get heated as I’m typing this up.
On the road to success, Eric Thomas would say, you’d have to give up the friends you had before that are holding you back in that some of them won’t like the changes and new work habits you’re making. I just didn’t think it’d come down to this.
One point, Gabriel Maurer brought up my blog post again from late November 2012, screeching at me, “Then why do you talk shit about me on Facebook?” I thought to myself, Christ, is this guy still not over that? You changed the locks on the door of my own apartment. And can’t I not have an opinion and express myself freely and exercise my freedom of expression? I didn’t like how I was being treated and I had felt frustrated and I honestly expressed those feelings, without cursing anyone out or slandering anyone. And why do I even have to justify how I honestly think and feel and express myself to anyone?
http://ernestyalumni.tumblr.com/post/36834738363/100-today-was-one-of-those-days
When he unlocked two new set of locks that I heard from outside and opened the door to the apartment, I remember him first warning me, telling me “Don’t play games with me. You cannot win.” All I could think of was, is Gabriel Maurer this psychotic? For the entire semester, I was just trying to focus on studying. I didn’t think nor had any notion that I was trying to outmaneuver nor “play games” with him. I wanted to exit from the apartment in the most considerate, quiet, and time-efficient manner.
After shouting back and forth and Gabriel Maurer had a propensity to pepper his scoldings with profanities, but utilized in a way that either was a mark of poor education (i.e. dumb people with poor vocabulary would latch onto a F-bomb that express themselves) or extreme vindictiveness, I said, resolutely, I’m going to go to my room and get my things and I’m moving out tonight.
“What things?” the psycho Gabriel Maurer said. “You don’t have anything in your room.”
Then, the fear struck me. A fear jolting and searing through me. That instinctive fear, that same instinctive fear that a deer feels for his life when being hunted down by a sharp-toothed tiger in the jungle. Fear of uncertainty. The same fear that seized me almost two years.
There were precious, irreplaceable things in my room. I loved the humble clothes that I had; I needed them to keep warm out in the Munich winter. I love my Valentino suit, that I bought and paid for myself in Milano from La Rinascente, the very last one before Valentino retired from his eponymous fashion house. There were irreplaceable memories from Prague, the Czech Republic, that I had associated with that suit. My Mac Mini, 2 GHz Intel Cored 2 Duo, 2007 model. I had written, in Python, a web scrapper that automatically, at the close of the markets everyday in New York and New Jersey, collected open, high, low, close prices and volume for call and put options for a given list of U.S. equities and then, automatically, inserted (hah!) each data point into a SQL database. I talked with a number of former classmates and colleagues from Caltech in the finance industry (sigh, all this knowledge and effort into training in the sciences and engineering, only to go to figure out how to move this set of ones and zeros from firm to another), they only knew of two or three firms offering call and put options historical data as a product - for at least ten thousand dollars a month per subscription. It was months and months of irreplaceable hard work that would be gone with my Mac Mini.
The fear of losing it all seared through me and adrenaline and testosterone kicked in.
"I want to get my things. I'm going to get my things,” I stated.
“What things? You have no things in that room. You have nothing,” Gabriel Maurer yelped.
"I paid in full for this month and those are my things in there. You cannot keep me away from my things."
I take a step forward towards my room down the corridor, with my heavy backpack on my back, my Italian no.1 casa canvas bag in my right hand, and my other black canvas bag gripped on my right.
And then it all happened quickly. Gabriel Maurer shoved me. That monster shoved me. I try to again step my way to my room and he shoved me again.
I had been here before. I’d been assaulted and mugged almost two years ago. And as again before, I immediately recalled what Sensei David Dow drilled into our heads: “Low center of gravity, bend at the knees, and don’t take the fight to the ground in a street fight.”
Even though I had two heavy bags on my side, and I needed to protect my stuff, I kept my knees bent and center of gravity low so that even though he was shoving and pushing me back, I wouldn’t get pushed down to the floor.
Seeing that he couldn’t push me down on the floor like a bully, Gabriel Maurer ultimately relented and I walked over to my room, swiftly turned the knob with my elbow and tried to slam the door behind me. At least he was too much of a woose to take a swing at me. “Where are you going?! Where are you going?” he kept taunting. “To my room!” I yelled back.
Before I could even try to close my door to my room that I tried to swing in to close, he caught it half way with his meaty hands, and cursed at me, with a blood screeching, poisonous curse:
"What you are doing is really fucking stupid. You are really fucking stupid. You are really fucking stupid,” Gabriel Maurer kept repeating to me.
"Ok, now you're insulting my intelligence," I adamantly rebuked.
I forcefully closed the door to my room, but I couldn't help but observe that he had the nerve to put on the most psychotic smile on his smug mug. This guy is psychotic, I thought.
Adrenaline was still rushing through me, but I consciously told myself to calm down, now that I was in my room, with my door closed, and I used my iPod Touch for the Skype app (I couldn’t afford a mobile phone in Germany) to call Jad so that I could call the police or that he could at least tell me the number to call the police.
Skype sounded the telephone ring, indicating Jad's phone was ringing, and he grumpily picked up - I knew that he was always grumpy about getting his sleep, even though I, for myself, placed sleep at a much lower value, but this was an emergency. He grunted as an answer.
"Jad, listen, it's me, Ernest. It's Ernest. Listen, I need to call the cops. You have the number to the police?"
Then, dial tone. I checked my wifi connection on my iPod Touch. And then the wifi on my MacBook Air. No wifi. Somebody cut off the wifi for the apartment. That asshole, Gabriel Maurer. I couldn't even call the police if I was in fear for my safety or in danger or in physical harm's way, as was the current case.
It was then that the fear really set in.
