When I'm Happy

Introduction

    There's a tendency to journal or write blogs only when I'm feeling particularly shitty. Some tragic event must happen to me for me to go "Oh yeah! I knew writing about my feelings is cathartic!" 

    This time I hope to balance things out more. This has been a great week for my friendships, my self-image, and the dissonance I felt. It's all got me feeling jiggy and warm inside!

    There should be some semblance of a memory of a state I have for me to point to and say "I felt this unfamiliar happiness then. I want to feel like that for the rest of my life." This hopes to be that.

    This previous year and a half have been very different. I learned a smidge about a lot of things: about everything from how people think to analysis of media to politics and rhetoric. I fear I'm not ready to share anything about those yet. So I'm going to talk about the few things that are improvements to my mental schemas I'd like to carry with myself into the future from here.

Affection is Great 

     I saw something a while ago that altered my perception of things like affection and love completely: A French Lesbian Romance film. If you're reading this, you probably already know what I'm talking about — it's Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

    My parents are not expressive of their "love" each other. They never were. Plus being told to be weary of your affection, sexuality, and desires from early childhood (Growing up Male) mix together to form a very damaged relationship with those ideas.

    Love and Affection were things I felt and knew when I felt but showing other people even when I liked them was something I had no experience or understand of. It affected my friendships a great deal. I didn't know how to hug someone. In fact, the idea made me physically uncomfortable and tense up. 

     It was not as if I did not want to hug someone, it was just there was a thick layer of fog between that feeling and that action. It felt like seeing a picturesque scene but all I have is a shitty Android phone camera. It felt like having a great idea for something creative but lacking the skills to execute it.

     The road to fixing all of that began with films of all things. I saw what Love looks like through an empirical dramatized lens of a movie. It made my brain and heart go "This is what turning what's in here into what's out there looks like." 

    Kissing your partner, Hugging your friends, Snuggling up together when you're all tired, and sitting close to the people you appreciate are things I'm very new to.

    Fortunately, with the people I've befriended and attracted, I think I have plenty safe space to experiment.

Friends aren't Far

    This part is somewhat connected to the previous one. I mean, all the things I've faced are all sort of "connected."

    Meeting and speaking to people you think you'd get along with is one of the greatest and underrated experiences there is.

    Since middle school, I've been good at making new friends but keeping and kindling friendships was not among any of my expertise.

 I've never been very close to any of the friends I've had. There were a lot of things about myself I was always too scared to share. For the most part, keeping to myself was a safety thing than a trust thing.

    This year was different. I met people I had never even imagined existing in a place like this. I've been having a great time with them. They are my best friends. They are here to stay. 

    They are my friends. 

    They are my friends.

    They are my friends. 

    They are my friends. 

There's too much I don't Know

     When I started just saying "Hi!" to random people and dropped that malicious sense of judgement that led to my social anxieties and troubles, I met lots of people much smarter than I am.

    I met people whom I couldn't understand even a word of. It was overwhelming.

    I've always seen myself as an "Engineer." I had no interest in media, art, literature, cooking, fashion, music, culture, politics, and what have you! 

    It was not that I had tried all of these things one after the other and come to conclusion that there were only a handful of things I found interesting and others boring. I literally didn't even know "Fashion" was a thing I could do.

    Growing up in a middle class household where infantilization promoted "Ask an Adult" and discouraged and villainized "Figure it out for Yourself" led me to add two ideas into my "decision making" that I regret:

1. What I do must make money or it is useless
2. Mother knows best because I love her

    Gruelingly, I spent the next few years slowly and successfully pulling these out of my brain. It was not overnight like the film thing (This even led to the film thing!).

    After a long time I've come to the conclusion that there's no human with just science. Art in every form is equally if not more important. I enjoy the human experience and want to learn more about it. I want to understand others. I want to create art I am proud of. 

Conclusion

    I want this stupid little blog to serve as a very primitive foundation for the kinds of things that interest me and what I want from my art.

    From a more personal side, I want to look at this blog post twenty years from now and think "Wow...drunk-cuddling with friends for the first time was life changing." 

    I could talk about a lot of things right now — like how watching Superman 2025 (a very "Hopecore" movie in my eyes) and adopting some ecosocialist rhetoric happened literally days before I could properly see the beauty and magnificence behind my fellow human's eyes — but I think some conversations are just for myself.    

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T

    Pick for a second, an arbitrarily small unit of time like the second. How much can you do in one second? What does your body do in one second if you do not consider involuntary tasks to be your doing? What can two people do in one second? What can eight billion people do in one second? What can more than eight billion people do in two seconds? In a day? In a year? In twenty thousand years? Forget people. What can a near infinite amount of atoms and molecules do in 13 billion years?

    They can do today, right now.

    You stand bare, in front of you is a large jagged structure with medium-large bright-colored spheres dangling off of each branch. Your stomach makes a familiar pain. You are starving. You pick off a sphere, and it is plump and coarse. You, out of necessity, take a bite. It is bitter and hard, but your teeth reach it’s soft and sweet innards. You eat it. You do not know your name. You do not know where the orange tree came from. You do not know the names of the things you see. You do not see anything but the prickly ground you stand on for miles.

    Recently I saw a comment on a YouTube video I saw after playing Dredge. It talked about how Lovecraftian horror is often done very poorly in media. It said that all we really have now is fearing the unknown, and we are never explained it. It used the example of an ant that comes across a microchip and does not fear it because it is new, but for a moment it understands the wires and structures and can never go back because it has realized there is so so so much more to the world than pheromones.

    Regardless of if I agree with this random comment, I thought “Wow! That must be a really difficult kind of media to write! You would have to present a world as absolute and complete, then rip it all away and put you back with a semi-complete knowledge of just how utterly flawed and incomplete your life was. Worst of all, there’s nothing you could do to continue living on that higher level of what-ever.”

    Then it dawned upon me that I had had a very similar and much more personal experience. That this experience this random YouTube comment called “Lovecraftian horror” was something that happens much more often than I thought. Not with technology but with cultures and ideologies and entire lifestyles and worldviews. It is the experience of the apostate, the deserter, and the rebel under tyranny. It is also, I thought, the life of the artist.

    If I were to die in a car crash tomorrow, I do not want the life I live to be one where my last thoughts before nothingness would be “Damn! I really wish I had the time to learn how to make a nice front-end with React and TypeScript; had the time to learn more about H.P. Lovecraft’s terrible mother affected his self-image and writing; had the time to learn about the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire(s); had the time to learn about how Isaac Wood's departure affected the Band’s music; had the time to learn about how John Carmack’s work in ID Software in the 1990s influenced the next decades of games to come; had the time to learn about how the goddamn Krebs cycle works.”

    I wish to do these things because I feel like the ant now. My only wish is for more time worrying less about the grades and the schools and university and the food and the money and the time, oh my god, the time. I turned 18 this year! Happy Birthday, me. Time to invest in the S&P 500 like you always wanted to, but oh wait you need to do a million other different other things first!

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being bad at "making" things

    In the Markiplier episode of Chuckle Sandwich, near the end of the podcast, Mark goes into this monologue about his relationship with making things. I just want to cement a manual transcription of it:

 I was about the same age when I had the same thing. I was about 27. I hit my goal. I wanted to be a big YouTuber. I hit it. Then another year goes by and you're like, "Okay. Now what?" I'm not saying it's the same situation, but before I started doing any other kind of project — cause you gotta remember that for me that was still 8 years ago. There were many years after I hit my goal where I was happy that I hit my goal, and then I got progressively sadder because there was no where left to climb. And it took me a very long time to realize that it wasn't that I wanted to make movies, it wasn't that I wanted to make a choose-your-own-adventure. It's that thought back to why I actually started in the first place. And why I actually started was not to be a big YouTuber. It's because everything in my life was out of control, and every single thing that was going on in my life before I started YouTube was out of my control. I had nothing to hold onto. I got laid off my job, I had a terrible relationship, I had my appendix was removed and during that they found a tumor in my adrenal gland — like all these things were out of my control and I felt miserable that I had nothing to show for all the years I had been alive for up until that point. It was like, “If I don't find something, I will never be happy.” and that's why I started YouTube. Even after I hit my goal on YouTube and I had kind of thought about — this is still like 3 years I'm condensing a lot into a very long period of time — But even that started with baby steps like “If I want to make something and take control of my life and do something that I feel is fulfilling, what is that?” So I just did the same thing when I started YouTube. I didn't start with YouTube! I tried a bunch of things. I tried making a comic, programming a game, I tried learning new different languages, I tried y'know making art — I switched majors from engineering to art school to see if it would make a difference. I tried again and again. I started wanting to do Freddie W. stuff and Corridor — didn't work, didn't know how to do any of that and then but with what I do now it started because my brother said hey some people like to watch people play video games, and I was like alright I'll try that, don't think it'll go anywhere. It wasn't like I had this burning passion for reacting and play games — I love playing games and I like doing that stuff. But it was about hey this is something that I can do and at that point I could do nothing so I might as well start here. And then, the same kind of adventure started again when I realized I had hit that goal. Very long time horizons. Lot of time to self discovery, but it's like yeah that's what led me to here. Just constantly trying to find that thing I could hold on to.

    That was probably incoherent as fuck for a multitude of reasons, most of them being my terrible grammar, but woah. The best part of this episode was that that wasn't even the coolest thing he said. This time, I'm not going to quote it directly so I can jog my noggin a little and make some sense, but he says something along the lines of:

    I have sat in a studio dripping with sweat and crying my eyes out in a studio alone for days, but I would go home after that day and go back to the studio the next day. The fact that I had a bad day has nothing to do with my goal, but obviously I can't always ignore it. I believe that this idea needs every ounce of energy I can produce, or it won't be as good as I want it to be. It deserves every ounce of my energy because I know what it's like to have the ability to make stripped away from your being.

    I, until now, have never even thought of that as an approach. I've had months when I sat in front of a computer for 7 hours from morning to evening working on a game, but once it was done, I didn't like it? Being a “smart kid” since you were young leaves you really miserable until you learn that cool stuff takes time and effort to really learn.

    I've always said that hey I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I have confidence in my ability to digest new concepts thrown at me and then using them. In the past few months, though, I've really had that ability put to the test. All that confidence turned into anguish very quickly when I had to face the inevitable: “Hey, maybe this is too much? I'm not having fun anymore.”

    School has also really taken its toll on me. I am not a good student. I hardly study even right before exams, and it shows on every report card. One could say I don't know how to study because I've never needed to, but that's a lie. I'm just terrible at giving tests: I get anxious, stressed out and end up with a migraine right before the exam, which isn't very helpful. It doesn't help that I resent every element of the modern education system, either. But I don't have much time anymore to complain. So what do you do when you don't know what to do?

    I guess my first advice to myself would be that you have nothing concrete you want to work towards in the next month or 6 months or even year. All your plans span over half decades and aren't even really plans, they're just abstract ideas.

    To that, I would say, well, what's the point of an objective that goes on so long? I've had many projects which I've put my heart and soul into only to ditch it the next chance I've gotten because I found something new. Why should I spend so much time and energy into something when I don't even know if I can do something with what I learn? Why should I waste my time?

    And finally, it's to THAT paragraph that Markiplier talks to: Please love what you do or find something you love to do.

    I think I've only realized it now, but it'll take time to learn to not run in the face of effort when I'm trying something new. Recently, I've been trying to learn Rust, and it has been a new fucking experience. This is easily like the third time I've tried to get into it, but the difference is that before I would come across a topic and go: “Oh I don't know what this is and don't want to read the paragraph carefully explaining it all, so I'll just go back to python.” I am happy to say that I am now on chapter 9.2 of the Rust book.

    This post is much more train of thought than previous ones (I don't know, the other ones I had like planned to write. With this one, I just sat down and thought: "I must write something"), but that's mostly because I just wanted to give myself a real opportunity to talk about stuff I am rarely comfortable talking to people about in a way that doesn't sound like I read too much. Also, I really like Chuckle Sandwich.

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the to-learn list

    Let's say, hypothetically, that I were to apply for an internship at something like Neuralink. The website says I need to submit a cover letter (whatever that is), a resume, and need to give at LEAST 3 examples of “exceptional ability” in the field you're applying in. If I wanna apply for the Software Engineering or Mechanical Engineering, my requirements for these internships are as follows:

Software Engineering:

Required Qualifications: 

• Ability to design and implement simple and elegant software solutions
• Proven track record of shipping software with real-world impact
• Enthusiasm for technology and software
• Understanding of how systems work at a fundamental level

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with Ruby, Python, and/or JavaScript
• Experience with C/C++/Rust
• Knowledge of container management and orchestration
• Experience with full-stack application frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django
• Understanding of web development
• Experience in infrastructure development
  

Mechanical Engineering:

Required Qualifications:

• Strong understanding of engineering first principles.
• Strong communication skills.
• Strong design skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 1+ years of mechanical engineering industry experience, including owning products from concept to production.
• Experience with conventional machining and rapid prototyping technologies.
• Experience with precision design and manufacturing.
• Experience with advanced imaging techniques.

    Obviously, these things I have nearly no understanding of at the moment, but one of the hires they have (I don't know which department) is Kognise.

    Looking through their website and projects gives me an idea of what I want to do and what I can do at the moment (mostly nothing, which is okay for the time being). Their website and projects show that they have that “exceptional ability” in the fields they are interested in. I only show that “exceptional ability” in the classroom where no one else really knows what they're doing, which is like a big fish in an absolutely tiny pond. I would like to fix this.

    My transition from a big fish in a small pond to a tiny fish in a big pond will not be enjoyable. I will feel like I know absolutely nothing about the fields of computer science, biology, physics, and chemistry which, knowing me, I will despise.

    Knowledge is like that, though. So I've made a quick and tentative list of things I would like to learn and understand beyond a superficial level:

1. Computer Science (Software)
   
2. Computer Engineering (Hardware)
3. Chemistry:
1. Undergrad Chemistry
   
2. Computational Chemistry
3. Graduate Chemistry
   
4. Biology:
1. Undergrad Biology
   
2. Computational Biology
3. Graduate Biology
   
5. Mathematics:
1. Undergrad Math
2. Computational Math
3. Graduate Math
   
6. Physics:
1. Undergrad Physics
   
2. Computational Physics
3. Graduate Physics
   

    I will learn these through not just reading, but doing. So my website can also have a 30 fucking item long list of complete and useful projects I've made. Plus, there are some cool books I've found that I would like to read from cover to cover and understand everything in them.

    I've found some cool places to cover all of them as well. There's this cool website called OpenStax that provides all the necessary literature for these science subjects for free! Which is like yay Open access resources!!

    Next time I'll talk about the Raspberry Pi 4 adventures and what I wanna do with the Pi I was graciously gifted :3

 

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