Never Grow Old

do you ever read back on posts from months or years ago, and cringe? and think, "did i really blog that? was i out of my mind?"

sometimes i think about posts from technically the same day, and i get that feeling.
ahahaha, roaches.
ah, roaches.



I had a dream, strange it may seem, it was my perfect day. Opened my eyes, I realised, this is my perfect day.

I had a dream where I woke up, and we were underwater. It was so strange.

still can't swim btw. i don't know why, but every swim school since the first ones in primary have been hell for me. like, i just can't swim. it just doesn't work. maybe my body is just built to sink. skin and bones. also, i noticed (my dad noticed) that i can't really take deep breaths. since my lungs have terrible volume/capacity. which is probably why i can't swim. i'm a bit worried because the last time i checked which was probably 2 months ago, i posted something about it, my heart is pretty fail as well. i don't think it's too serious though, i mean, i'm still alive.

whatever. that was an unintentional tangent which i couldn't be bothered with much, i wanted to start the post about my realisation.


you might know how i don't like tutoring. kind of. i realised that it's not just "i don't like tutoring", it's "i don't like people who pay zero attention in class, and then do tutoring to catch up". it doesn't make sense. tutoring is meant to ... exalt (?) your schooling, not replace it. i guess this is just something that stemmed from not liking how people don't listen in the first place.

keeping this short. 12:46, meant to sleep at 1am. probably going to be 1:20. we'll see


so you have a probability of something, a fraction, that isn't zero, to occur once. if you have infinity attempts, you're going to get infinity times the fraction, which is infinity results. so the probability is 1.

and that's kind of the reasoning behind parallel universes. i don't really understand the physics, astronomy, or anything about universes, but there are infinite parallel universes out there, where the tiniest particles in the universe are arranged in the exact way that they are in our universe, with the same velocity etc etc. and there are infinite parallel universes with things slightly different. you could be the ruler of the world in infinite of those universes. isn't that comforting. rabbit hole.

personally, i think no, that's a theory, which goes under the assumption "it must be because you can't prove it isn't". i don't really think we know enough about universes, or anything to be able to conclude that. and anyway this point is probably going in a very bad direction.


what made me wonder is, what about thought and memory, in those parallel universes? if all of the atoms are arranged in the same way, does that mean that all thoughts and memorise of all the organisms are maintained? does that mean that every emotion, thought, and memory i've ever had are just particles arranged and moving in this configuration?

seriously? that sucks.

i hope not. but if it is, every hope of an afterlife, or spirits, is also void?

whatever. something pointless to chase after. my year 10 speech. this post isn't going right.


my mum made kind of a tribute to her mum. she took the words from a poem called "when you lose your mother" or something along those lines, and typed them onto some photos of flowers which she took with a camera (these photos go back a long time, to before august. i don't know why, she randomly decided that she really wanted to take photos of everything, because i guess every little detail pretty). And I suggested she put it into a powerpoint.



yeah, not my perfect day today. not my day. oh, 1am now.

Do you ever have times where absolutely everything goes wrong, and you can see it happening before your own eyes, but you can't really do anything, and you realise that you have no idea what you're doing?

well, apply that to starcraft. not in the zone. just lose lose lose. i dropped from like rank 46 to 90 (out of 200). sigh. i don't even know what was going on. it's like living on the fly. winging it. no plans, no goals. just see what happens. it's a good way to screw up, unless it's year 9/10 engineering.

yeah, i hope you weren't expecting that. do you think it's sad how starcraft revolved my life seems to be? well, you should. i don't know. like, i only play it because i have nothing else to do. what do you spend your time doing?

...

i don't even know what i'm trying to say. not in the zone for blogging, either. ... sentence three goes here?





Sometimes, when you feel disappointed, you need to stop for a moment and look back at where you've come from. Because sometimes we get so worked into the mindset of "I have to be the best, things are only fine when I'm improving", that we forget how far we've gone in the first place.

This goes hand in hand with the standard of living "happiness" thing I've been on about before. yawn.

You could say happiness is a result of things getting better, and unhappiness a result of things getting worse. So when things get better, or you improve, you get satisfaction. But when things get worse, or you ... get ... worse, you get disappointment. But you can only improve so much, until it's out of your realistic capabilities to improve even more. And then you get your disappointment, because you aren't improving.

Starcraft players are sorted into leagues, which represent their "skill" in relation to every other active starcraft player. The bottom quintile is "bronze" league. The second from bottom quintile is "silver". the middle quintile is "gold". the second highest quintile is "platinum", and the top quintile is "diamond". but then the top 2% of all players are "masters", and the top 200 players in a region are "grandmasters".

When I first did my 1v1 placements for starcraft, back in the late december/early january, I placed into silver league. I guess I was pretty happy with that. Not bronze, yay! After a short time, I worked my way into gold. Yay! Time to tell my brother. he's like "oh, yeah, gj, totally paying attention"Then after a short time, got into platinum. time to tell my brother. "oh, yeah, gj, you can probably make it into diamond". Then I got into diamond. was very happy with that. told my brother, i think. don't remember his reaction, probably the same as above. Then I got into masters. And I was so surprised. I wasn't expecting that at all. was very happy with that.

I think my goal for master's league before i got in was also "by the end of 2012". and then I realised I really wanted to get into grandmaster, also "by the end of 2012". but as soon as possible. Near the end of season 2, it was the holidays, and i think we were meant to be preparing for half yearlies or something, but i wasn't. I was playing, playing, playing. Because after season 2 locked, there would be no promotions to or from grandmaster. I felt that I was so close, I was versing grandmasters and beating them sometimes, I was dominating diamonds and massacring masters. I tried pretty hard.

But then it was season 2 lock. No promotion. Still a master. And I was slightly disappointed. Because I listened to this song and it was pretty inspirational for some reason, and I just wanted to take a screenshot of that one promotion, and share it on facebook. and say "**** uni, I'm taking a gap decade to seoul". Yeah, I actually planned to post that a couple of months before I got in in the first place. some people think i'm funny, but i think of jokes and witty responses weeks beforehand. and now i'm listening to the song and man it's distracting, all i want to do is get into grandmaster now.

umm.

yeah, season lock. "Oh well, no need to be disappointed. I'm still improving. that's something to be happy about". "I'll definitely get in next season. I'm favoured against GGBinu, and he's a grandmaster."

and then season 3 started. They only open up the grandmaster league 2 weeks after the start of the new season. So I waited patiently and played. I'm not sure if I ended up studying for exams, but whatever. I think I studied the day before.

And then two weeks passed. And I went to play starcraft, and checked the grandmaster league. There were like, 50 people in. "oh sweet", I thought, "grandmaster league is open. and there's 150 spots left!". and then I played a game, and didn't get promoted. And then another game. no promotion. I wasn't a grandmaster. It was pretty disappointing.

And I tried again the next day. There were only like 100 spots left. No promotion.

The next day, only twenty spots left. No promotion.

The day after, there were still like 10 spots, and there were like 5 spots open for a long long time, which was pretty annoying. As if it was taunting me. "don't worry daniel, there's room in here! just kidding, it's not for you!"

So that was kind of disappointing. Because I wasn't improving.


and then one day i was practising a cheese build against some guy from the clan AZK or something, and my brother stopped by to watch the last 5 minutes and advise me on what to do. I didn't really follow his advice, and won anyway. and then instead of going to the score screen, it went to the "congrats you've been promoted" screen, and by reflex, not conscious thought, I clapped my hands and said "yes!!"

and I didn't have to tell my brother of the news because he was there to see it.


and then i posted it on facebook and some people liked it, and a random guy from ruse added me as a friend, so he could like it.


and then i was grandmaster. it was pretty cool. some days, i would play and have big win streaks. And it felt pretty good, but there wasn't any of the satisfaction from improving, because there wasn't really any other league to get promoted into. and some days, i would play have have pretty bad lose streaks, like today. and i would be disappointed and wonder why i have no plan and no idea what i'm doing in PvZ.


"oh no. why am i so bad?", i would think.


and this brings me back to the "Sometimes, when you feel disappointed, you need to stop for a moment and look back at where you've come from. Because sometimes we get so worked into the mindset of "I have to be the best, things are only fine when I'm improving", that we forget how far we've gone in the first place."


sometimes I forget, that once I was in silver league. Sometimes I forget, that some people follow and play the game as much as I do, and they're still in bronze-plat. It's like becoming a millionair, and being disappointed because as much as you try, you can't become a multimillionair.

Sometimes we need to stop wanting more and more, and just be happy with what we already have. Because we have a lot, we have things that some people can only dream of, which we take for granted. You can't have everything. and sometimes we (or maybe just I) need to remember that just because you don't gain something you want, it doesn't mean that you have lost anything. It doesn't make you any less gifted, or blessed.


perhaps it is my perfect day. birds in the sky. they look so high.


For economics, I got 56/70. And I was slightly surprised, in a bad way. I did the math in my head. I lost fourteen marks, out of seventy. seventy is divisible by seven and ten. I lost two sevens. so the mark I got was ... Five divided by seven. That's like... fourteen times 5. That's like... 70%... Seventy percent...

..

and then I realised I'm just dumb, and quickly worked out, it's just 80%. Which was still not as well as I expected. I felt that I did pretty bad. I still kind of do.

But 80%. What am I complaining about?

I remember in the grades before year 10, I would be getting like 77% for my math yearly report mark, and I don't remember, but probably around 80%'s for tests. And my halfyearly/yearly reports would average around 80%, and I would be happy if I got above average.

And in year 10 I randomly started topping my math class in everything, and I didn't even know why. probably because no one else payed attention in class. (although my reign of terror kind of faded at the end of the year). and I started being decent at english, and I started being pretty good at most subjects except PD and history.

and I've done pretty well by last year's standards for this year. I remember in the half yearly report, my economics mark was only a little bit above average, and i didn't like that. I don't think I was disappointed, but I wasn't satisfied.

What was I (not) complaining about? above average, I used to be pretty happy with that.

so yes. that's another situation where this kind of applies. results at school. if you're one of those people who get 100% in every test, you don't need to be disappointed if you only get 92% (which is actually a huge jump).


If I ever talk about this topic again, I'll be using the word "standard" a lot. Because it's your standard's that change, you raise your own standards higher and higher, and you expect so much of yourself. And when you feel disappointed, it's because your results dont meet your standards. But it's far from failure. You've still done very well. It's just that you've raised your standards so high, expecting so much.

yeah. it's 2:16 am.



whoops


only been overtime for an hour. not really as much content, though, unless i rambled more than i realised about starcraft.


that's negative progress from yesterday's 2am. and that's 1:16 away from my standard of 1am.

But I'm not disappointed. hope tomorrow's a perfect day.