Running Dreams.
//I might hide a bit from this dream, too.
They say writing clear code is good so you yourself can understand it when you look back at it later on. I want to do the same with my posts, for if/when I read back on this.
The run was from Eastwood to home, beginning at the roundabout. I remember running the path twice, actually. There must have been two parts to the dream. The first run, “I remember jumping over swayths of clovers”. [Firstly, it’s in quotations because I remember narrating this in the dream. 5 days later, I can’t remember if the ‘I remember’ part was part of the narration or whether I added that afterwards. Secondly, I spelled swayths incorrectly because I didn’t know whether it was even a word in the first place, I just remember it in my dream. Microsoft word is autocorrecting it to swathes, so maybe it’s that. I don’t even know for sure what swathes actually means, but what my dream self meant was larger clusters of clovers and their flowers.] I remember jumping over these swathes while running. They were long jumps, 5-10 metres, because I was running really fast. Is this a result of sleeping not-standing-up which changes how I sense gravity and balance?
There were bees at some of the clover stretches that I jumped to. I was scared of hitting them, either for their sake or for mine. I can’t remember. [I can’t remember right after I woke up. For some reason this particular detail is just gone]. I only remember making it about two thirds of the way down the hill. Then something happens, I don’t know. My dream does a rewind, or a control-z back to the start of the run, which happens to be that place where the car beeped me and came really close to hitting me, that time I was upset. I only realised the significance of the location after I start writing, after waking.
This time I look before jumping over stretches of clover, and I don’t jump into bees [I have marked this paragraph on the paper with “possibly fabricated, mind making narrative from incomplete memory fragments”]. Did I mention how it was just a few bees, not a swarm? They were big, though. .
As I go down the hill, I narrate that I was even using my arms to shield myself from any spiders. I think this was meant to reinforce how careful to not hurt any bees I was being. But … there weren’t even any spiders in the dream. But now that I mentioned spiders, ...
Now there are. Not many, some webs here and there. But then there is a huge web, like 1m diameter, maybe a little more. It’s on the path, but perpendicular to it. So it looks like a l rather than an O. I almost run into it, but I don’t. Sidestep, and as I look at it, flying past, there is a big spider, except was it even a spider, I remember it looked like an enormous grasshopper. I can’t remember if it scared me or not. Like before, this is only about two thirds down the hill. End of dream.
Today is five days after that. I mentioned Microsoft Word autocorrecting, because that’s what I am using to write this. I’ll copy and paste it to notepad, then I’ll copy and paste from notepad into blogger. The notepad medium is necessary so I can leave this calibri font, and all of the html tags that copying from Word adds.
My internet is down. It’s going to be down for a while. Apparently builders dug through the phone cable or something like that. But it’s nothing to be bitter at. When will this be fixed? I don’t know. Telstra, please save us? Soon, I hope. Is it harder without water or without internet? I’ll find out soon, I guess.
Without the internet, I can’t access reddit, newsfeeds and things like that. Things which I never gained anything from reading. I guess I stopped caring about politics, world news and humanitarian crises a while ago. I can’t play online games. That’s a shame. But I never needed to, anyway. I think many people would think I’m addicted to games just because I’ve had consistently probably like, 90 hours a week in-game (note that a decent proportion of this is spectating/idle/alt-tabbed, but still a lot]. Hm, I could finish all of my learner hours in a week if I spent that time driving. … is 90 an exaggeration? I’m trying to figure that out right now. Maybe 90 hours at the computer, then. At least 90 hours. Anyway, the point was meant to be, no games isn’t going to be a problem. As long as I have something else to do, I can live without games, news and IM.
What else can I do. I am out of books that I haven’t read before. I wanted to get more, but that needs the internet. I don’t go to the library. I think I used to have a library card, but my mum always held it, because this was a very long time ago, probably mid-primary school. I don’t think she has it now. I guess I could get a new card, but … I don’t feel like it. I don’t know why I like owning books. I’m not going to read them again for a very long time, but I just like having them. I don’t even have space to put them anymore, so they’re just on my desk. Maybe one day I’ll have enough books to have my own library of books that I’ve already read.
When I get a job, I’ll spend all of my money buying music and books. My parents wanted me to be a private tutor. I think I could teach any level of maths pretty easily, but not any other subject. I don’t really know.
I don’t really know … about anything.
I said that I feel nothing towards uni starting soon, but that’s not really true. I’m dreading it. Wait, am I? … I don’t know. I’m certain that I’m not looking forward to it. So it’s a not-positive, at least.
What am I looking forward to? Is there anything?
At this exact moment in time, I can say with absolute honesty, the only thing I am looking forward to is playing Swan Song.
Last year we went to a temple, and I remember every time I was meant to make a wish or prayer, I would just say that I wished for nothing. I wonder if the wish was taken literally. We went to a temple this year, too. This time, I said “do as you see fit”. Because nothing kind of sucks.
... so that’s why I won’t have any books to read. What else can I do instead\ I guess I’ll have time to make a lego clown fish or solve some puzzles. That’ll be nice. And there is still the whole “learn Swan Song” thing. Maybe the loss of internet is perfect, then. I’ll have time for that now.
I stayed up late yesterday redoing Coto. I don’t know how I managed to learn the song from the sheet music, because it was some of the most inept sheet music ever. I fixed the notes and notation, so now I need to add dynamics-don’t-overdo-them and tactical-readjustment-for-page-turning.
And there’s still this post. Apparently it’s at 1346 words as of typing that number, and when did I start typing this … it’s still an unsaved document, so there's no timestamp. It’s been definitely more than 45 minutes and definitely less than 80 minutes. I think around 70-75. That would be pretty quick if I was trying to write a novel really fast.
It’s at 1.4k and I’m not close to done. Dinner was ready a while ago, and I have a feeling that after that I’m just going to go play Swan Song and forget everything. Well, that’s okay too.
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At the temple, I saw one of the people in my first dream. Isn’t that such a strange coincidence? I don’t even know this person well, we just went to the same school. I thought maybe the universe might want to play a joke on \or a game with\ me, and I looked around to see if the other person was there. They weren’t, of course.
I had dinner and went to play Swan Song. But everything just felt wrong. I would reach for notes and hit the wrong ones, as if I had muscle memory amnesia or something like that. I felt so … disappointed. But it went back to normal after a while. Must have been badminton or basketball.
My mum is playing the piano now, so I’m back here. She doesn’t play the piano often, she usually plays that Chinese table-harp thing that I can’t Google at the moment.
Sometimes you can just give people the answer they want, tell them what they want to hear. I noticed that I don’t do that.
Then my mum said to me (in Chinese) “so, when are you going to teach me piano?” and I didn’t tell her "whenever you’re ready".
Happy 10:37. I stopped for a while to think about what to say next. The digital taskbar clock ticked over just as I touched the keyboard.
The computer is kind of a sad and lonely place without an internet connection. It’s like, there used to be a sea of cables flowing out to forever from behind the monitor, but they’ve all been hacked. Like, cut. Now there nothing left but the monitor. It’s like how the door at the back used to lead to the verandah [don’t tell me there’s no h in verandah, Word] and the backyard with the brick-tiled path and the two separate areas of grass on different elevation and that something-tree which had pink rose-like flowers, the tree’s name started with a C I think but I can’t check, was this tree in that really random-what-was-the-point-again photo I took before going skiing in 2010 because I didn’t really have anything to say other than "brb skiing", the clothes-line which we pretty much never used and I never walked under it because I saw cobwebs on it this one time. I wish I took a photo of what everything looked like. Now the door just leads to a 4-5 metre drop into a dirt field.
I’ll forget what it looked like after they build the new whatever-it-is. Like all unrecorded memories. I wish I kept the backyard, though. At least the Jacaranda tree is still there. It’s next to the fence, away from the kill-zone.
The day after last post, I went to the Jacaranda tree that still had that one cluster left. I was wrong, it was gone. The last tree, which held so many flowers while the others gave up. No more.
Then the next day my mum woke me up to go to the temple, my Dad took a wrong turn one minute after we left the house. It wasn’t a wrong turn, I guess, but just the longer route. But we drove past one, two, three and then four trees still with flowers. They’ll die too, and I won’t be there to see it.
I’m already feeling tired this early. Is it because the internet is gone? Probably just because I didn’t get enough sleep, and didn’t nap. Yesterday I felt tired from re-noting Coto, but I didn’t want to stop halfway through, and it was after 3 when I quit. I couldn’t bear looking at the screen any longer.
And then I couldn’t sleep. Do I have insomnia? Huh, a Latin word. I can’t google the exact definition without the internet. I think I don’t. I just can’t sleep sometimes. Sometimes I’m compelled to sleep earlier so I don’t disturb anyone else trying to sleep. Those times, it usually takes a long while to sleep, but sometimes it’s easier than I would have thought. That’s a start.
More frequently than I would like, I randomly wake up early. Some time between 5 and 8. Hopefully it’s because there’s more-than-before sunlight going through the window. If something is grammatically incorrect but colloquially popular enough to convey perfect meaning, is it wrong to say it? Should it be the speakers to fix their habit, or should the language itself shift to accommodate the new word?
Between not being able to sleep and having my sleep disrupted, I wake up late consistently. That sentence is beyond redemption. I don’t mind waking up late, but I wish I could just get to sleep. I think I know how I can do it. Meditate myself into sleep. Even if it doesn’t work straight away, meditation is good enough rest anyway. I think it will work … but never even try to do it.
I thought of another thing I can do without the internet. Go back and finish the plan for that game that realistically in all likelihood is never going to be made. I’ll probably look at it one day and think “what is this rubbish”, anyway.
I don’t feel like doing anything. I guess this means cutting out internet doesn’t mean you’ll be more productive. Maybe I’ll just … go and not be able to sleep.
It's before 12. Wow. At least now I’ll be able to remember when the last time I tried to sleep before 12 was.
-----
And so began the war on bamboo. I think I spent a few hours trying to make it, but only managed to get to this part twice. I don’t know how I’m going to eat that mango, but I’ll do it. Sleep was difficult last night.
I woke up some time early in the morning, and I either heard or dreamt my mum talking to Telstra, and they said that they would come at 2pm. It must have been a dream because they didn’t. There’s a crazy dragonfly-looking-like thing in my room who was here last night, too. I guess it likes rooms that have lights on.
I also had a normal dream. In the dream there was a book, which was set in a really interesting world. I was reading it while waiting for the bell to go, because the dream (or at least the first part I remember) began at the front stairs of school. There was a crowd of juniors waiting, it must have been a Wednesday. But I was wearing the junior jacket myself, and the hat, leaning against that tree to the right of the top of the stairs, reading.
Silly dragonfly, why are you here? I played a game called “The Plan”. You're a fly and it’s 10 minutes long, maximum, and free on steam and whatever the developer’s website was. I recommend either a play through or a watch of a play through on youtube. Actually, don’t watch it on youtube, there’s something about the ending that you can’t understand unless you’re playing. I can’t guarantee that it’s not scary, but I have a fear of spiders and still thoroughly recommend.
There were a couple of people I knew on the bus. There were some interactions which probably have something to do with memories. I decided to write about the book so I wouldn’t forget about it when I woke up.
Who am I, Virolimi? Is that how her name was spelled? Whatever.
I woke up (without the stuff I wrote down in the dream) and thought, maybe I should actually write about the book/dream, in case I forget about it. Then I wondered, maybe, like her, I’ll remember it anyway. I went back to sleep and forgot most of everything when I woke up again.
The book probably wasn’t that interesting, anyway. I just thought it was because my dream-creator told me to find it interesting.
I wonder where the dragonfly went. Not outside, because the door is closed. The door is closed because I don’t want to wake anyone up.
A few days ago I went for a walk and found another Jacaranda tree who(m?) still had flowers. Today I found yet another. Why won’t they go away? It’s like they’re saying to me, we’re still here, you idiot.
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I’ve slept for over 12 hours three days in a row. There’s no need to wake up. I could sleep forever. Preferably not forever, though. I could hibernate until the internet returns.
I leave the curtains open and I wake up earlier, halfway through my sleep. This way I can go back to sleep and wake up really late. Kills time.
I can’t finish the bamboo puzzle. I don’t know why. I’ve tried so many different approaches and perspectives, and they all lead to the same outcome – one piece can’t fit. Except each time, that one piece is a different one. You try so hard to be complete, but there’s always something missing. Do you just accept it? You’ll never have everything, it’s part of life? I guess that’s what I do. Whatever. That’s fine.
Finally finished it! Never going to take it apart again.
I spent a few hours today replaying a single player game. I wanted to listen to a song from the soundtrack, and since I don’t have internet access, I figured this was the only way to get to it. That sounds like the sorriest excuse, doesn’t it? Well, I made it two days without games.
I wonder how the world is doing. Has anyone noticed I’m gone? Maybe the people who would expect to see me playing Dota. Is there something important about uni that I’m missing? I could go to o-week instead of being at home without internet. I think I need to update something about my student ID for legal concession tickets? Something like that. … but I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go back to uni.
How’s TwitchPlaysPokemon?
(It’s essentially someone streaming a playthrough of Pokemon Red. People type into chat left right up down a b start, and that’s what the input is for the game. Imagine ten thousand people typing in random buttons, and another more-than-fifty-thousand people watching but not typing because one voice never changed anything. Chaos. But that’s why so many people watched it. It had like 70k viewers the last time I watched. 70k viewers watching Red walk around in circles opening and closing the start menu. This one stream was getting more viewers than most of the other games.)
I wonder how they are doing. Have people gotten bored of it, or are there now 100k watching? I wonder where they’re stuck at now.
Swan Song … progress isn’t as good as I had hoped. But it’s exactly as I expected. I can stumble through the whole song at less-than-full pace. This isn’t really that bad, considering I thought it would take the rest of my life to learn it.
Learning a song is like trying to traverse a mountain range. It’s hard.
…
Learning a song is like trying to navigate through a junk yard. The first time you spend a lot of time trying to find the exit. You find it eventually, but when you go back to the start, you’re just as lost as the first time. After some more tries, you get the general idea of the right direction, and you can slowly make your way through without being lost more than a few times. You keep at it, and you get better. You don’t get lost anymore. You know exactly where you are, and where you need to go. Except, for some reason you’re still slow. It’s because you keep having to slow down or stop at certain obstacles. And there are so many of these obstacles that you’re pretty much slowed or stopped half the time. You start to wonder, maybe you could just push this truck out of the way, or throw the pile of TVs off the path, one at a time. That sounds like a good idea. You do it. Then you realise that crossing out notes is cheating and takes away from the integrity of the song, and you drag the truck back and pile the TVs up again.
What an analogy.
It’s so easy to just keep playing through the whole song from start to finish, start to finish, but progress this way is so slow that it’s barely noticeable. And I might be playing a section sub-optimally, and not realise it, and then it’s going to be even harder later because I have to unlearn to change it. I should be grinding the sections that I get stuck on until I stop getting stuck there. Like taking the time to cut a path through a mountain instead of climbing over it again and again, hoping it will get easier.
That’s what I should be doing. “Should” implies I’m not doing it. I’m not doing it (all of the time) because it’s not as fun.
There is this one part that I’ve played over and over trying to get right. Still only halfway there. This part would be so easy if I just had three hands or something. I wonder what the proper glissando notation is.
I always found it weird how in both Ender’s Game series, characters would often compare themselves to historical/mythical figures/gods whenever they did something. What? Who actually does that?
Then I realised, I do that. I often compare myself with fictional characters. Why?
I guess it gives me courage. People have done things like this before, people have been in these situations before (even if it’s just fiction). I can do it too.
It’s comforting to know that everything I’ve thought and felt has already been thought and felt by millions of people before me, I'm just another, except they had it a thousand times worse... Why am I so apprehensive towards uni? I spent 2012 pretending to be happy so much that I believed it. I spent 2013 pretending to confident so much that I believed it. No, that’s not completely true. I didn’t believe it either time. I just ignored the converse.
When I go for a walk, the thing I hate the most is when I have to walk past someone else. I don’t want to deliberately avoid eye contact because that might be rude. But if there is eye contact, I break it immediately, sometimes pretending to smile in the split second before I look away. The thing I hate the second most is when there are cars.
Sometimes I want to go outside for some fresh air and sunlight, but not for a walk. I can’t go to the backyard anymore. But I don’t want to go to the front, because people walking or driving past will see me.
When I walk past the park, there is nothing I want to do more than to go on the swings or climb the rope construct. But I won’t because someone else is there already. But I won’t because someone else is in the general area. But I won’t because even though all is clear now, someone else will walk past later.
Actually, I don’t even bother walking past the park because I know I won’t do anything there.
Sometimes when I can’t sleep I feel ashamed of everything that I am. Forget, forget, forget. You’ll never see this side of me because he hasn’t spoken in a few years. But don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay. Or even better, I’ll be fine. I already know, so I’m not worried myself. When I’m happy, I’m not pretending.
That took me so long to write that I feel normal now, and I’m wondering whether I should just delete it. I won’t.
Before I thought I had a dream where my mum called Telstra, and I wasn’t sure if it was a dream or not. It wasn’t a dream. She did call, but what they actually said was that they would come before Monday. It’s an hour into Saturday now, and I’m assuming they don’t do weekends, so I guess unless they meant 'before Monday, inclusive', they lied.
I hope they can fix it in a day. Once uni starts I’ll actually need the internet. Well, not really. Not at first, at least. But I’m going to be so unsure about things like “when does uni start” “has my timetable changed even though I haven’t touched it”.
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And then when I try to sleep properly a construction vehicle wakes me. The universe conspires to keep me from getting up early.
I took my computer outside to clean out dust from it for the first time since I got it almost three years ago. I remember a few months after getting it I asked my brother should I clean it because I could see a lot of dust gathering at the front. He told me no it makes no difference, so I never went to clean it, and the front of my CPU became white with dust.
Turns out he was right. There was dust, a lot of dust everywhere, but only on the edges of fans and things like that, nowhere where it would have made any heat difference. There was so much dust.
I thought my computer became louder after cleaning it, which was worrying. So I decided to ignore it, and it’s either back to normal now, or I got used to it very quickly.
The front looks much better when it’s not choked by dust, though. Maybe I’ll clean it more often.
I couldn’t completely clean some parts because I didn’t want to take it apart too much, in case I wouldn’t be able to put it back together. Knowing how to build a computer seems like a useful skill. I’ll add it to the list of useful things that I’ll never learn.
When I first got my computer it was noisy because the top of the PC case would vibrate. I fixed it by putting my pack of faber castell coloured pencils on top of it. It’s still there to this day.
Facebook events is really useful. I think it’s the only reason left to still use Facebook. Too bad it doesn’t work without internet.
I think Google will take over the internet someday. I wouldn’t mind.
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I have nothing to do. It feels horrible. There is no waste-of-time that I feel like doing. A family friend is over and I don’t want to play the piano. On the bright side, I don’t care if family hear me practise piano anymore. I’m not sure when I got over that, it must have been some time during Coto.
Today when I cleaned the computer, it was outside, at the front of the house.
Did I say I was afraid of going outside? Not this time.
Maybe I’m only crazy sometimes. Or maybe it’s because this time I had something to do.
I’ve had this chair for a long time. You know how some chairs have a lever that you pull to control how high the seat is? This chair has one. I used to be not heavy enough to make the chair sink, so it would be at max height all of the time. When I became heavy enough, I played with the chair for a while. Slowly sinking. Or everything in the world is slowly rising. And then again, and then again. It was very fun.
You get used to these things after a while and they’re no longer fun. I want to say that this is why some kids find everything fun. Because everything is new and interesting to them. But is that really true? The most fun I remember as a kid was playing games. And playing with chairs. New things? Whatever.
Part of year 8 P.E. was gymnastics. I really liked the rings. The ones that hung down from the top of the gymnasium and you could hold onto them to do backflips and if you’re crazier, front flips and things like that. I really liked the rings and I wanted some at home, but I knew it was impossible. If the new house could somehow have space for rings somewhere, this will all have been worth it. Or maybe the opportunity to enjoy rings has passed and I’ll get bored of them in a day.
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Had some more weird dreams. This whole sunlight waking me up at 8 is getting really annoying. The curtains don’t go down far enough.
Nevermind, they do. I just forgot that we tied a knot on the curtain string because … it’s complicated.
One of the dreams was a short film. At the end it said FilmSoc made it. Does FilmSoc exist, and do they make short … scenes? That wasn’t really a film. While ‘watching’, I thought, hey wait, isn’t that the musical theme from that game… no wait, it isn’t. Some of the notes are different. Apparently I can alter music in my sleep. Or maybe I can’t, and it's just because my dream-self was told what to think.
A couple of the dreams involved a lot of food. I ate snack food before I slept. Maybe my body is telling me to eat real food, instead.
One of the dreams was Counter-Strike (a first person shooter game). Interestingly, you say ‘an FPS’ instead of ‘a FPS’. And then you say 'a First Person Shooter' instead of 'an First Person Shooter’. Well, I do at least. I think it’s because when you abbreviate it you say “eff”, which starts with the vowel.
A lot of my dreams aren’t real life. Like, a lot of them are games. And then that one before was a short film. It highlights how much of my life is virtual.
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The internet is back.
http://www.freetoplaythemovie.com/
This is a documentary about Dota and eSports made by the almighty Valve, also known as Volvo to fans. The trailer looks really good. It’s going to be great.
On the second day my brother came home and told me he bought some single player games and asked if I wanted any, but none of them were the kind of games I would play. I told him don’t worry I’ll be fine and he probably thought I was crazy.
You know, I got pretty close to playing Swan Song (at an acceptable level). But with the internet back and uni and all of that, I probably won't have time to practise enough. I guess it can wait.
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