Conversation 16

My mum got a new phone except she didn't want to use it and decided someone else should have it, and I decided no I don't really need it, I barely use mine anyway, and my brother doesn't need it because he already has a smartphone, and my dad doesn't need it because he really loves his ancient dysfunctional phone or something.

So it has kind of just sat there for a week, and it was a waste and no one likes that, so now I have it. I kind of already miss my nokia touchscreen-brick because at least I knew how to use that.

How am I meant to do any things, nothing makes sense. I was trying to figure things out, and on my ipod the way things work is, you slide your finger from left to right to close things, and I tried to do that and it made me call some directory and I had no idea how to hang up. felt bad.

Then I spent a while going around and disabling things and twitter told me it needed to know pretty much every personal detail stored and I thought what, no you don't, and then I thought oh well, no harm in this.

Oh, I really want to use swype and I promise this time I won't troll crazy people with it (man that was a really bad idea, why did I do that)

I think it will just end up being another way to access the internet that isn't my netbook.




Last night I was kept up by what I identified as feelings of worthlessness. And I thought it was strange because it was completely unexpected. If I haven't already explicitly said it, this first semester has been without a doubt the best everything I've ever had. Yesterday I was screwing around and just having fun (and maybe ruining the game for the 9 other players while at it), which I rarely do. I normally take games very seriously.

But I still had these feelings. The thing that surprised me the most about it was the way that I dealt with it. Every time I thought of something negative, I would immediately think of something positive to neutralise it.

"I'm worthles- no, you know that isn't true. ... Well actually, it is if you think about it from this particular perspective, but in that case, everyone else is worthless too"

"I could just fall asleep and never wake up again* - You know you don't really want that. In 5 years you'll be glad you aren't dead"
*it's implied that this is because I would be not alive, not because of a coma

and so on.

By the end of it I was trying to suppress the non-negative self talk but this didn't really work because I knew what I was trying to do. And it was all a bit disappointing because ...

I think I mentioned it once, a long time ago. When I was sad, one of my favourite things to do was to feel sad. It sounds stupid, but that's how it was. You would naturally relate happiness to good and sadness to bad, but it isn't really true. In a way, I enjoyed sadness. I was addicted to it. I was well aware that I could stop being sad all the time if I tried hard enough, but I didn't really want to.


And then I decided I should listen to something so I could stop thinking and go to sleep.
I can't remember when, but I stopped always listening to music while trying to sleep a while ago (now I only do it some of the time). I think it was because I started staying up late every day, so I was tired enough to fall asleep and didn't need anything to banish boredom while I waited. And also because I usually sleep on my side, and I don't want to listen to only one earphone because that would cut out one or more instruments.


I actually forgot, but the other day I stayed up watching videos about the 4th dimension, which is
both very interesting, and unsettling. Like, a 2D creature can see everything in a 1D world. A 3D creature can see everything in a 2D world (think about reading maps or games with a birds-eye-view camera). And presumably, a 4D creature would be able to see everything in a 3D world if this pattern continues. Happy 10:37. And this was what I was thinking about at what, almost 4AM. It wasn't easy to sleep, but I ended up being okay with it when I thought about how the 4D creatures should be aware that the dimensions go on, because from their POV they can see 3D creatures seeing all in a 2D world, and 2D creatures seeing all in a 1D world. So if they exist, they would be aware that there are 5D creatures and beyond. And then as you abstract up dimensions, you would care less about the smaller dimensions. Like, we don't really care about things in a 1D world (points on a straight line).

Anyway, other people can explain that better than me.

I think I ended up there because I was reading about this autistic kid who is actually a super genius, like he snuck into university lectures when he was 8, and is 14 now, and published a paper about astrophysics, "Jacob Barnett began work on an original theory of astrophysics at the age of 9-yrs-old"


He gave a TED talk and one of the things he was saying was that, Isaac Newton couldn't go to uni because of the plague so he didn't, he stopped learning and started thinking instead, and came up with things like calculus. And Einstein couldn't either, so he stopped learning and started thinking instead and came up with relativity. And then he used himself as an example, he had to go to special education units where he literally could learn nothing, so he started thinking about astrophysics instead.

It made me wonder, when is the right time to stop learning and start thinking and creating? Newton and Einstein, if they had access to uni, would have been really good at learning whatever it was and been honours students, but would they have advanced science as much as they did?
...
Actually, thinking about it now, yes. Maybe even more, just a little bit later.


Today I remembered that last night I also had some dream, and the only thing I remember was that there was something like a weather map, and it was forecast to rain non stop for 3 months. And I thought that was pretty bad, but then some other places had non stop rain for 6 months. But it wasn't like a rain, it was more like a sea.


I also remembered that I forgot to talk about this word, "forget", and I remember saying I would get around to it some months ago, but I never did.

I don't think I'll do it now either.


There is a revision tutorial and lecture tomorrow for computing and I forgot about it, I probably won't benefit that much from going but I think I will anyway. And then the buses are going to drop me off at not uni, but what can you do.