It’s not going to be easy to attempt to set this out, for I haven’t exactly kept detailed notes as I’ve gone along, and I imagine much of it is boring and repetitive. I will thus start with the most pressing issue. In my life I have pretty much one thing that I see as ultimately and self-evidentially valuable, and that is my academic study. Whether this psychological condition is correct – the way that I see everything else as merely distractions in the grand scheme of things, tossing aside friendships and other pursuits and experiences so easily – is another question, but this summer has made it abundantly clear to me that at the deepest level it is what I seem to believe. Why? Well, this summer I haven’t been studying through school, and have been almost completely incapable of studying on my own, and thus my self-esteem has dropped far off the scale and I have been miserable with the combination of desperately wanting to be able to do something and yet being too lazy to actually do it. My mother extends this lack of motivation to include a great deal else. She notes that since I got in to Oxford I immediately stopped caring about it; I see this as a symptom of the clash of my meta-desires and my desires. She spent the summer harrying me to go and get a job but I don’t really know how to do this, and while I did hand out plenty of CVs, I didn’t have any success. So with my lack of self-worth stemming from my lack of academic activity, my motivation for pretty much everything else also dried up, leaving me wasting the time away on easy things, rather than challenging ones. And then there is of course a spiral of other issues stemming from this which is what I don’t think I am capable of concisely and lucidly describing here.

So of course I have attempted to analyse this down somewhat more, remaining a non-academic over-thinker at all times, and have perhaps worked out a few things. The first and most obvious problem is something I have been aware of for a long time, and that is my inability to read at a good pace anymore, unable to grab the meaning of a whole sentence and move on rather than hyper-analysing it and imagining the scene in every possible way. Reading is not really very enjoyable due to this: every time I sit down to continue with a book, I have to force myself past my dislike of how much of a struggle it has become, and this is surely something of my own making. I can’t believe that my lack of recreational reading in the sixth form, due to time constraints, could have possibly led to an actual decline in reading speed at a basic level because I’ve been reading in lessons and for homework out of textbooks and novels (the latter for Philosophy…). So instead maybe it simply comes down to being unable to change my reading style to be less obsessed with nuances of meaning when trying to read a whole book rather than a small section. I don’t know. But my messed up reading is probably the biggest component of all of this.

There has been some solace in computing activities this summer, which I seem to have got into a great deal more. This is likely because they are easy: I’ve just been streamlining, rewriting for efficiency, adding simple new features, sysadmining. The fact though that, despite the activities being easy, I have been doing them continuously and solidly to produce something worthwhile was fantastic for me as something constructive. Perhaps then I have simply forgotten what academic work is supposed to be. I am poor, perhaps, at doing things that are supposed to be difficult and that tend to be better for this in the end. My old Philosophy teacher once said of me that I do the subject ‘because he knows it is good for him’ regardless of the whirlpools of confusion one can be drawn into, struggling to tread water to understand, struggling for clarity. Perhaps I need to re-learn to live like this. I have no idea how I will slot in academically at university; I only hope I can sort things out so I have something constant to rely on, as that is how humans tend to work. This is all I have to say. The problem and my basic and current thoughts on it have been stated, and wallowing in this any more would not be helpful. I have a fresh start at Oxford tomorrow.

I decided to commence preparation for ‘going up’ (despite it being to the south) in September, which essentially means working on Maths. I feel that after doing an A-level in Philosophy I have the background reading for that side of my course (although I have been enjoying a fantastic book on logic, which I am really looking forward to), but my Maths ability has flown away over the summer as it is apt to, or it certainly has for certain topics. Oxford have provided a number of worksheets to help one prepare and I have done a great deal of them, but my ability varies quite a bit. I can fly through the calculus and the messing about with polynomials and other simple functions, but there are certain techniques, such as most forms of differential equations, that I have completely forgotten, and others like matrices that I  have never done before. I should then have allowed myself more time to get to grips with them. A friend who is going to Oxford for Physics this year was invited to go and spend an extra week before Freshers’ Week going over A-level Maths, and the various bits our particular course didn’t cover, and I really wish I’d been able to do this too. I will thus spend a great deal of Freshers’ week trying to get up to speed because Maths is my weaker subject out of the two I am studying and yet it is something I must avoid falling behind on.

This is pretty much my only concern about going down: my academic situation with regard to Maths. I imagine lots of others will be in the same boat but that doesn’t make it acceptable to have not started as early as I should have and got better prepared. But I am trying to convince myself that this is not something I can now affect and should instead leave alone as something I can try to make some headway against during the first week. Otherwise I am very excited about what everyone says tends to be a new life. I am really looking forward to being very poor, because I’ll end up even less materially concerned than I am now (which isn’t much). I imagine I’ll fill up my spare time with societies, because that’s what I did at school through all my lunchtimes, since I seem to find plenty of motivation for those sort of group activities. I have ringing, debating, computing, gaming (i.e. pen and paper RPGs) and philosophy on my list thus far but, without compromising my time spend studying, I think I could potentially add to this.

And then there are the subjects. Once I can get over initial difficulties and even myself out with everyone else, I feel like I am essentially starting what in the past year or so I have chosen to dedicate my life to. The scholar of theory, for that is my only concern, is often piled high with scorn; yet I seek nothing else as already described. The regimentation of an actual course should sort me out somewhat. To think, freely; to learn about the fantastic ideas of others and perhaps suggest a few simple fancies of one’s own, all the time remaining firmly atop the shoulders of those giants of history past. To be so so aware that we know nothing, and how that is a fantastically rich state of mind. As it has been said before, philosophy (and any subject really) is a conversation with the greatest minds of today and the greatest minds of the past. I’m not one of those greatest minds, but I’ll be around some of them down – sorry, up – in Oxford. I imagine the social side of things will take a while to get going for me though. If the crowd is anything like that I met while down there for interviews, I will sit quietely and get on with things and not worry, like most freshers, about trying to make as many friends as possible. Such things are better left to happen by themselves.

So it is probably clear that while I have written off the summer, I have now finally got excited about going to university. I am actually making use of a term I have never really had any use for before with regard to myself, and that is that I am making a fresh start. It is worth however writing a little about leaving school for I now remember once more the poor state of things on this site. Exams and revision were the usual mess they are for me. I can’t revise and I spend my time fed up with the ridiculous system I am in, and then because of this don’t care one bit about my actual results unless they are below what I need for the next stage. While I noticed a few interesting module results on results day I didn’t look at anything in detail once I had worked out that I had what I needed, as they are just not important. My folders of A-level work are my achievement, the thoughts had and essays written and problems solved, not the revision or exams in any way at all. My last exam though, in the highest pure module of A-level Further Maths, was elegant and doable so I had a fine finish.

The Sixth Form is a rather short phase of education and life in general but I feel it has been pretty significant for me. The most obvious and important thing was my discovery of the subject I now want to spend the rest of my life on, which needs no further mention or elucidation. My chronic brevity at GCSEs switched over to a horrific capability to produce waffling text and I actually started to appreciate language itself, which is not something this blog tends to see. I’ve realised many prejudices I had and developed many more, but with slightly more awareness of these than before. For the first time since maybe primary school I was fully involved in my education and relishing every opportunity to learn something new. Others will probably say that I opened up and integrated or whatever, having far more school friends than I had before. This is probably the case. But I never lost my willingness to be as different as is necessary to achieve those goals that my reason leads me to. Fundamentally, the biggest thing that seperates me from most people I know is this. I am never self-concious, never afraid to do what seems to be right. And whatever mistakes I make and whatever time I waste, I am proud to have this at the end of it all.

The worrying thing about all of this is that at the end of the day, I am faced with the arguments from pure utilitarianism that in fact any claims I make to be doing something with any kind of meaning and worth could always be derived from the positive emotional state that I seem to gain from such pursuits. It is depressing to consider the possibility that all of these high-minded claims we all try to make to living what we like to call rich and fulfilled lives in which we flourish potentially all collapse with startling rapidity into mere attempts to release certain chemicals in the brain. But I’m not sure this argument is quite so deadly as it sometimes seems. Perhaps happiness can be equated with something being ‘good’, as merely a definitional reaction to certain events which we see as either worthwhile, fun or interesting. I’m not going to try and develop this argument now as I’m not entirely sure why I sat down to write this post at all, but it is something to consider. I maintain my scepticism. I don’t know anything but merely work on through life according to my nature, and try to examine it as I go for if I did not, it would be just another life, even less significant on the scales of history than it already is.

So is there a useful conclusion from these considerations? One is, I believe, simply to keep such considerations in mind. When an event or person or idea overcomes the senses and dominates the mind’s thoughts as it twists through the day’s considerations, stepping back is a useful tool. Take things slowly, get other opinions, recognise the deficiencies of one’s own intellect as something that, when it cares, can let emotion get the better of it. Recognise unnecessary desires as something that experience shows will be fleeting but don’t destroy them, merely add them to an ever-growing list of considerations and ideas to be tried if life offers such opportunities. For you never know where you’ll go next, who you’ll meet, or what you’ll be doing – and if it will perhaps seem, at the time, to be of the utmost significance.

I don’t know how good a model this is for humanity’s collective number but I shall work with it for now, for I have a great deal that I wish to write about this evening that has been brewing away in my head for a while and is finally at a stage where I am prepared to let it loose upon that small section of the world that will read this. Bear with my seemingly unrelated thoughts in the hope that they come together at the conclusion of this text. I’m coming to the end of my two week Easter holiday and overall I have not had a fantastic time. I have gone to bed late successively due to not being able to put down and cease participating in interesting activities, few of which have actually had any real value. And following this I have got up far later than I ever normally would, ruining my sleep schedule. Losing this time in the morning has messed up my ability to get things done and as a result the holiday has been incredibly unproductive. And this has got to me a great deal. I seem to be naturally wired up to be fairly lazy and yet conciously crave more fulfilled time. Every night I have gone to my diary and written about how useless I have been and how I will try to make the next day more useful but overall this has been unsuccessful. It’s very easy to say such things before bed when you can’t be more useful that day, and far harder to put them into practice the following day when there are distractions to be had.

I have realised, coming clear in my mind over recent weeks with the aid of some others but also added to greatly this evening, various things about myself that I don’t like but that I wasn’t really aware of too. I have long known that I have an inferiority complex and, horridly, am rarely happier (in the sense of glee) than when I outdo someone close to me or they fail through their own devices. I am also aware and have long been told by family that I have a tendency to be fairly lazy and to not follow up suggestions of things that I then find to be worthwhile and interesting. These are the things that I am already aware of and have written about on here before. But then there are other things. Internet colleagues who I get on well with on a personal and social level express their frustration with the fact that I tend to pick up jobs and interests fanatically, only to swiftly get bored of them but remain unwilling to let others in to take up the reins because, cynically I am unwilling to give up power, and more optimistically I am unable to recognise when I don’t have the time or willingness to continue to carry something through. Recently this has manifested in a steadily brewing mess over something I can’t really talk publically about yet which, in general terms, has other people at each other’s throats due to my negligence that I am now attempting to fix. This is something that I intend to work my hardest against allowing to happen again. I am going to rectify this particular mess and then continue in my role only if I genuinely have the time to and interest in doing so. But this is a general tendency I need to try and avoid – for my sake and more importantly those others it affects.

Perhaps more seriously in the context of my proclaimed philosophies is the fact that I have realised how dependent I have become on the opinions of others compared to how I used to be. The vast majority of this kind of thing is not, I believe, generally something that others are likely to notice although I imagine I have friends who are more perceptive than I am. But I have caught myself, with yawning horror, feeling from time to time as though I am missing out and want to be part of the common (that is numerically common) culture around me with all the activities that people tend to get up to, and as part of this, seem to have found myself caring more and more about what others think of me and how they see various aspects of my activities and personality. It seems I am in the middle of a crisis of self-confidence – that last sentence was difficult to write as it sits so juxtaposed with every other thought I hold dear. Essentially it seems I want, subconciously, to be more included – and this is the very antithesis of all that I believe in terms of the way one best lives one’s life, which is by no means an anti-social life, but one that is not in any way controlled by such interactions. More conciously speaking I remain outwardly confident of virtually everything and inwardly confident of everything except my own academic abilities and my lack of ability to use my time well as before. But this realisation, expressed not-so-fantastically here, has deeply shocked me. I do not wish to publically admit specific examples of what I describe here most generally.

Only one side of the story has been shown here as too often when anyone tries to analyse themself too far. While I might be someone who says strange things in an expression of the above subconcious social concerns, I am also someone who, I am told, listens to the views of pretty much everyone and tries to take them onboard intellectually as much as is possible. I have a hefty dose of rationality and employ it fairly successfully in the abstract sense, even if I fail hard at things of a practical nature in the real world, which fortunately concerns me little. I can pull out masses of enthusiasm and energy for certain things, even if it may trail off given time as described above. I think, I believe, fairly well – but I recognise that such a thing is never perfected in a life and I withhold my absolute assent from anything – even this. In these terms I have recently been described as a pyrrhonist by a friend and I am proud (after learning the meaning of the term) to have been addressed as such, and I intend to blog at some point in more detail about this world view. Conciously I am in a situation that I am content with. It seems that I need to reconcile my less concious self with these thoughts so that I move away from my recognised faults, and perhaps find others to be corrected. I don’t know how far the above recognised issues have infected my concious self.

So far I have expressed a series of realisations and opinions about my own, very human, faults and perceived strengths in what probably appears to be a very juvenile mental struggle traditionally associated with my age group, where I try to settle into one of the moulds that society has set out for me. So I should now set out the nature of this mould that I want to slot myself into; how I intend to try to work towards an improved state of being far removed from the problems I have now identified. How I can stop having holidays such as this where I waste my time away despite my claimed allegiances to mental activity and service. And what it comes down to is attempts to get into better habits and better subconcious processes in order to allow me to achieve what I conciously see as my goals as described at the beginning of this post. I need to slow down and think more carefully in common activities. I need to force myself to use my time better until it becomes something that happens naturally, given that I recognise that now it is a natural tendency towards wasting it that I seem to have acquired. I need to apply my reason even more commonly and liberally than I do now to be disciplined with myself. And I need to speak only when I have something genuinely worthwhile to say. And I suppose, additionally, following my various New Year’s resolutions wouldn’t hurt either. I have no desire to destroy my trademark intellectual faux-arrogance that is really pure enthusiasm, or to change from my forceful style once I have decided to pursue something. But by widening when I apply the essence of these and by more carefully selecting when to put forth their public fronts I think I can come closer to my various goals.

It’s very easy for me to sit here before going to bed and write roughly two thousand words on things that I want to do based on deeply held but assumed principles of what is valuable and ultimately meaningful in my life as I go forward. But I truly hope that by writing this kind of thing down I can take steps in this particular direction towards being more fully what I already hope I am in my better moments. I know I am never going to make a life entirely of these, but they seem remarkably few and far between these days and so maybe I can change that trend somewhat. And maybe I am just slotting myself into yet another pre-determined mould sat in by various other people who like to call themselves thinkers over history and am really just slumping into another mediocre life as with the rest of the world. But there is always the chance that I will transcend this, a chance that I know doesn’t exist if I don’t carry out this process of recognising and at least attempting to fix bad habits and practices that lead me astray and into despair over my inability to sort them out. If it’s all wrong at least I can move myself closer to a state from which I can head to a whole host of other destinations. Hopefully for once I have now made a firm step in a better direction.

To return to the originally intended subject matter of this post, I thought it might be nice to write a little about my music library. Since I got my iPhone, despite this forcing me to use iTunes which is possibly the worse piece of software ever, I have listened to a lot more music (although in the mornings on the way to school I usually listen to good old fashioned Radio 4 FM for the Today Programme) on my frequent and long bus journeys to and from school. This has meant that my library of music has tended to become a bit repetitive since it’s not really very big and it doesn’t get added to very often. Until a few months ago, my music consisted of soundtracks and computer game music with very few exceptions. While I still have all this music, it is a pretty static set. Unless I play a new game that I think has really good music, or see a good film that releases its soundtrack (my favourite music remains the Lord of the Rings film scores by Howard Shore, truly fantastic), it won’t expand, and I end up stuck with a small selection of tracks that means that they lose their appeal for the above described reasons. So I’ve since added to the collection a bit from old CDs in my parents’ collections, things that I can remember growing up hearing and liking: the likes of U2, Savage Garden, Gretchen Peters and the Lighthouse Family. I’ve also got a few other things like a couple of Brent Simon songs, and most of Jonathan Coulton’s lyrically powerful music. But this leaves me without a source of good music that I can draw from to keep a good flow of new material.

This has changed recently. On one boring Friday afternoon in Physics, my friend Tom and I exchanged lists of music to lookup and play. I suggested various tracks that can be found on YouTube for him to listen to, and he gave me some things to look up from his personal area of interest, Drum and Bass music. A complete departure from my usual content, I was told repeatedly that I wouldn’t at all like it and I didn’t really expect to, but was interested in taking a look. At first, the various computer generated tunes failed to appeal as anything more than background sound while working which I could definitely appreciate. But now, after listening to more ‘chaones’ (== tunes) and mixes, I think I should probably admit to the world, however much it pains me to do so, that I’ve become quite the Drum and Bass nerd. I’m not bothered about the clubbing (obviously, I don’t see why anyone would want to go to such places) and insufficiently restrained volume controls that tend to come with such music, but simply the actual creativity that goes into tracks. Finally I have something that I can add to and collect and enjoy. My vocabulary and knowledge of the big players and classic tracks is very much lacking at this point, but I seem to be leaning more towards the liquid subgenre which is melodic, tuneful work that is very much reminiscent of the soundtracks in my collection already. My two current favourite tracks that I would be happy to include in a classics playlist are Hurt You by Chase & Status and Beautiful Lies by B-complex, an unreleased track from an unknown artist that has really set off some shockwaves.

I’m not entirely sure what it is about DnB that appeals to me, but I have been known to laugh at those who attempt to pin down, particularly in classical music, any kind of specific meaning in work. Uncharacteristically, I shall simply state that I like certain bits, certain notes of songs and leave it there. With few lyrics in this genre and with track and artist names that are essentially whatever sounds vaguely memorable, there is very little else to go on. So I’m trying to add some more variety to what I listen to, and I think I’m succeeding, aside from finding myself playing certain favourites over and over as before. And I very much enjoy laughing at the culture and vocabulary: ‘massive’ and ’shout’ and other such nonsense that I’m not convinced anyone actually buys into. I would also like to add some more classical music to my library, so I need to find a friend to feed me suggestions. Maybe instead of getting better at listening to the music I already have, I’ll just get as much as possible and feed the roaring furnace of consumption of it in my mind. Excellent.

Another multiply dissapointing thing that has occured this holiday is repeated crashes from various causes of Warcraft III roleplaying games, run over a VPN with a few friends. Warcraft III, as many will know, is a strategy game at heart involving various traditional fantasy races battling it out. It’s an old game but is still incredibly popular despite there now being many more fantasy games out there without the limitations of the engine. This is primarily because of the huge number of custom Warcraft III maps/levels available, since the game’s included world editor is supremely flexible; these then get distributed through playing online. There is Defence of the Ancients or DotA, with a massive cult following, that is used in international tournaments. One struggles to find a game of DotA where you don’t find yourself being automatically kicked for not being on their list of safe players (these are people who won’t disconnect and ruin a game since there is no way for players to take the slots of those who leave). There are various other quick-fire games of some skill: in Sheep Tag, some players as sheep construct farms with narrow passages between them that the other players, the wolves, attempt to destroy in order to catch the sheep. If the sheep survive for a certain length of time (as long as they are not all captured, captured sheep can be released by teammates) then they win.

Then there are the roleplaying maps, my favourites. There are some fixed maps with clever methods for saving heroes so that games can be continued, featuring the usual simple quests and collectable equipment and skills. But it is the entirely flexible RP maps that I most enjoy. These have gone through several generations of names and improvements but the most commonly played at the moment seems to be Secrets of the Depths RP, or SotDRP, though they all work pretty much the same and in fact use much the same terrain or actual playing environment. In an RP game, the player uses various commands to create cities, towns, camps, armies, navies and heroic adventurers with no limits on resources. The game then has two clear aspects. The first, which is probably the one I prefer, is constructing bases and camps and other such niceties to set a backdrop for the story. By rotating, resizing and making invisible structures, intricate and attractive creations can be wrought. Then the actual roleplaying begins, which is effectively like DnD or Exalted with props and effects. The system allows you to name and speak as characters, and while it may seem like an odd way of telling a story it actually turns out to be a great deal of fun, especially when it is with people you couldn’t conveniently meet up with otherwise. The crashes, then, stem from the limitations of Warcraft III as a game. Because RP maps are such a massive hack, Warcraft III’s saving of multiplayer games (a feature absent from many other games which is a shame) doesn’t work fantastically well. And if someone disconnects, that is it: there is no way to get them back in. So the dissapointment stems from losing all the building done, which can take several hours. But I intend to push on with the recurring plot a friend and I have established.

One reasonably major change that happened recently is that I’ve stopped living at my father’s house during the week. Since my parents split up about ten years ago, my sister and I have switched between the houses with a very complex system that no-one else seems to understand, spending time at both during weekdays and then alternating over weekends – and carrying or sending piles of stuff (mainly school books) back and forth. For years I have got on poorly with my father and have tried to get away from living there whenever I can, and now that I’ve turned eighteen my mother says she isn’t going to stop me anymore and is happy for me to live more at her house during the week. So now I only go to my father’s alternate weekends. I’m obviously not entirely happy with this turn of events: it’s a bit rubbish that I dislike living with one of my parents and my sister thinks I’m being very selfish. I don’t think this is a very fair assessment. I’ve done it because the general atmosphere in the house is rarely pleasant as my father and I clash continuously over trivial things and this is especially true on week nights when I’m dashing off to ringing, coming home late due to after school activities and trying to get homework done. My sister and I have an even worse relationship (always have) so to me it makes sense to try and defuse this situation where I can by spending less time together. You may well disagree, and as I say I don’t think it’s ideal. But given that I think in the long run people will have a pleasanter time during the week, and it’s not as if I’m leaving entirely, it makes sense to me.

Something else that has happened is that I’ve been asked to leave freenode’s staff team because I clearly don’t have the time these days. I think I should have voluntarily given up the responsibility given that I knew this myself, but I just loved the place and the people too much to do that. So now I’ve been retired and told that if I do have more time in the future, I can always reapply. I’ve had a fantastic time with freenode. I’ve met some great and dedicated volunteers who I am definitely not going to lose touch with, and I’ve learnt a great deal about dealing with the more difficult users of the network. I do hope that I’ve been useful in the other direction and freenode has benefited somewhat. I will be sticking around the place and I am still on the network for SilentFlame and Wikimedia channels. I am going to try and focus more on my Wikimedia responsibilities with the extra time: I have jobs that are ideal for the amount of time I have and I shall very much try to do them effectively.

Far more exciting than the above notes is that I received a letter yesterday to inform me that I’ve got a place at Oxford at the college I wanted (Balliol) to study Maths and Philosophy for four years starting from October 2009. I just need, of course, to get the three As at A-level required but assuming I don’t do anything really stupid I think I’m on target to get this. This is fantastic news for me – I feel like I can do anything if I’ve managed this. After going down there to stay for three/four days to be interviewed about ten days ago, I really could imagine myself having a great time there. All the students looking after us were very nice, even if the sixth formers were loud and constantly trying to show off a lot of the time (I befriended two quieter Maths and Philosophy students and lo and behold all three of us got in!). The environment is of course very impressive in terms of the buildings, and the college library is such an amazing place to learn in. Accomodation is basic but fine and the food is okay but is served in a hall of epic proportions. The Balliol tutors who interviewed me were also lovely and I can imagine learning a great deal from them. And of course there are things such as the Oxford Union Debating Society, THE place for debating; all the usual university societies such as gaming and lots and lots of ringing; and it’s not at all a bad city to live in. After such a long time of waiting around and wanting to know I can finally imagine myself there with reasonable surety that it’ll happen.

The interview experience as a whole is a very convoluted affair. The amount of variation between Oxford and Cambridge and between the individual colleges is pretty astonishing at first. I stayed from Sunday evening until Wednesday evening and the vast majority of this consisted of sitting around and reading or revising material for interviews. Everyone gets an interview at the college of choice that they applied to and then at least one other at another college in order to try and give no disadvantage to applying to particular colleges which may, in any individual year, find themselves oversubscribed compared to others which may not have ‘enough’ applicants. The problem is that such extra interviews are arranged in a very haphazard way. When I arrived, the noticeboard holding interview details was about a metre wide and hadn’t extended too far with sheets of paper covered in names and times for various subjects. However, with people arriving and departing all the time and more and more interviews being arranged, the board spread out to the right rapidly, filling the common room’s noticeboard gradually across – including duplicates making it necessary to read everything to ensure you didn’t miss something aimed at you. I was also rung up when further interviews were arranged. By the end there was a dismissal notice up for all the maths and related courses but there was a special section at the bottom asking me to stay a bit longer to be interviewed again.

I ended up being interviewed by three colleges, but two of these had seperate interviews for maths and philosophy so I was interviewed five times in total which was rather a lot. Interviews themselves varied very widely. In maths, in one I was asked reasonably difficult but not exactly brain-mashing questions; in the second I merely chatted about recent topics studied and about the entrance test (which apparently I did pretty well on but I wasn’t told my percentage score); and in the third I was guided through a very hard problem (attempting to define a function of n that would tell you the number of zeroes on the end of n!; got there too). In philosophy, I was asked several technical questions relating to the problem of induction, and some interesting political and linguistic questions that I probably shouldn’t share on the web as they do like to reuse them.

And now it’s Christmas day and thanks to the above I have the best present possible. It’s been a very eventful year and it’ll likely be an equally eventful January, but I’m enjoying the fact that I have an absurd amount of family members over for Christmas right now before I start thinking about such things. In our tiny little three bedroomed semi, we have fifteen people: two grandparents, three aunties, two uncles, five cousins, one father and one sister to give their relations to me. My father’s girlfriend’s house is being used to house some and others are staying in a local bed and breakfast. I went ringing this morning while they all strained at the leash of present opening (I pointed out upon entry that calling people to worship is the whole point of the day *nods*) and now I’m at home writing this and am going to put the turkey in the oven for the non-vegetarians (i.e. the other fourteen people) while they’re out for a walk, which after walking all the way up to and back from my mother’s (fifty minutes each way) to get my Oxford letter yesterday and walking all the way to the cathedral this morning (about an hour) I think I’ve done enough.

But this is the point. There have been a thousand eighteenth birthdays like mine, there have surely been equally as many who will have realised this and thought themselves to be philosophically superior. As Charlie says in my favourite passage of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, his friends sitting in a cafe arguing over some issue are merely replaying a conversation had a thousand times before by similar groups. There is precious little originality, and there is precious little variety left in our lives. We laugh at the same jokes and we slot ourselves into the moulds available in society: our education systems turn out doctors and lawyers and managers who then pick from a similar choice of family circumstances. And then we lose our fervour, and become dull and routine, never changing as we plod away at the lives we have chosen. It is oft said that the young are idealistic and unsettled, and that we have ridiculous, ignorant ideas of how we want to shape the world. But this is something we must keep. If everyone just does something that’s gone before and occasionally something new is thought up, why bother? If we settle for what is practical and easy and we don’t instead try our hardest to bring variety and difference and change then you might as well collapse all generations into one and stamp a historical label upon them all as a era of repitition.

The above is probably full of fallacies and I’m sure I’m a hypocrite in so many ways here. If what we have right now isn’t good enough, and never will be according to this model, what is it that we are trying to reach? Why have variety if actually it doesn’t turn out to be very much different for individuals? Maybe by sticking with a routine and what one has one has merely reached the ideal situation. And maybe it is all irrelevent anyway as we all die, and it all ends. Maybe instead of worrying about trying to strike out we should try to achieve that fabled balance between the extremes of progress and conservation, and be satisfied in the knowledge that we’re never likely to divine some sort of eternal meaning, but trying makes us understand things better.

The above is what goes round and round in my head on a day to day basis. When I see a tired looking worker on the bus or a bored school pupil, when I see a stereotypical student or teenager or toddler just going through their lives, I consider these issues. I’m not going to try to pick a side here on the question of what the answer is here. All I would like to hope and set as a goal is that I keep thinking. If we ever put aside questions as unanswerable, there isn’t much point in having the questions at all. And in this again I’m just another would-be philosopher who likes to play around with questions, just someone else who secretly thinks themselves better for doing so, but knows they’re really not. So I’ll keep trying to be original and new, and I know I’ll never likely be happy with how that comes out, and I’ll never be satisfied with the quest. But a life with no certainty and permenance and purpose is infinitely better than one of false surety and contentment. There has to be something more than mere happiness. I suspect I’ll always hold that belief.

I won’t be any different tomorrow morning, but this was worth saying, even if it was a bit garbled and unclear – but that’s sort of the point. Good night.

While it’ll take until then for places like Oxford to let me know whether they want me, I’ve actually already had two offers this half term. This is very reassuring as at least I know I am going to university at all – and as a friend points out, going somewhere I chose. York have offered me ABB as the A level grades they want, including an A in maths which I already have and so this is an ideal insurance offer, should my A levels go fantastically, superbly wrong. Nottingham have given me something less useful; AAB including an A in both maths and further maths as while I am likely to meet this offer if I do, I’d rather go to one of my other choices. The difficulty now is picking between these kind of places, and this I suppose comes down to the course content, something I need to look into more. Probably worth visiting them too, but this can wait until the time of picking between offers comes along, which of course could well be just between these two.

Speaking of this half term holiday, it’s not been going quite according to plan so far. I very much intended to get some non-school stuff done, catch up on some awaiting tasks and generally take stock of things after a solid block of weeks into the new year (note the lack of figure as I can’t be bothered to go and work it out). However I was shocked to discover, on Saturday entirely by chance from an Internet friend, that the Oxford entrance exam for maths is the Wednesday after the holiday, i.e. three days into the term, and as far as I was aware at this point school didn’t know about it. Fortunately I was able to get in touch with a maths teacher from school, and I borrowed text books to revise from as the test is on material we did ages ago (to allow non-further maths students to do it), and it seems the school will be automatically sent an exam paper since I have applied. This has meant that this half term has, after homework, consisted of preparing for this test. I did my first past paper this afternoon, and got around 70%. Adding on marks for silly errors I believe I would have fixed due to careful checking over in the actual exam, this gives me about 80%. This mark doesn’t mean anything however, because the Oxford website is not particularly helpful in terms of what it makes available. For the two specimen papers available, answers are provided but only general notes about how marks are applied, rather than them being split up for parts of questions. For the two actual past papers available, one is on a slightly extended syllabus so isn’t as helpful and neither have mark schemes, but instead average marks and average marks of successful applicants are shown – and they differ between the two years a fair bit. So on the specimen papers I can find out what I got right, but I can’t know if my mark is any good, and on the past papers themselves I can’t even start marking anything. Great.

From what I have done, and through a little web forum searching and chatting to people, I’ve come to the conclusion that a mark of around 80% plus a good interview is what I need in order to have a fair shot at a place, and I think this is something that I can achieve. Most of the test is very approachable, with only a few super hard questions that I’m not likely to get, unlike the Cambridge maths admission test where getting half of it right would be a prodigy-like performance. The questions tend to focus on spotting something, a fact or trick or hidden axiom in a question, which then makes the rest of it pretty simple. I know that I’m not going to be able to answer some of the very hard ones in an exam situation, but I can get the more normal ones pretty well. And if I can’t, I’d like to hope that this means I’m not someone who should go to Oxford for any kind of maths course, and that I’d just find it too hard anyway. I’m trying to convince myself to put my faith in the test and interview process as an effective selection filter. Actually succeeding at said convincing is an entirely different matter of course.

My obsession for getting into Oxford is still a serious issue, especially considering the fact that it’s probably quite likely (assigning probabilities is pretty futile here) I won’t get in, and also that I may well not get into my second choice either. I’ve asked Oxford to consider me for maths should they not want me for maths and philosophy (they give this choice to all applicants) and if I were to get in for this, though unlikely since the philosophy is my stronger side, I don’t know what I’d do: give up my favourite subject or give up Oxford? it seems I’d give up the former at present. I seem to have this idea at the moment that if I don’t, I’ll be missing a mark of self-worth, and that if I do get in, I’ll never again have to worry about my own standards. This is silly. My abilities and more importantly who I am are not going to change because of this application, if I do get in I’ll be very far from the top in terms of ability, and plenty of bright people go to other places. It also doesn’t help how I cannot help but measure myself based on my academic success or failure. I would never, ever claim that ability is something to judge people on and I stick to the idea that choices and intent are what make someone who they are. But I don’t follow this in my own thoughts, that maelstrom of convoluted contradictions.

So with regard to university I shall see how things pan out. With regard to the non-school stuff that I was planning to do over half term, I’m starting to despair at my own lack of ability to actually do the less interesting aspects of my work for projects that I am so passionate and enthused about. It seems that my grandfather’s life-long comment that I’m inherently lazy is coming more and more true. But I think I’m finally accepting that I’m not going to override this natural tendency any time soon. Sure, I could force myself to do things as well as school work and have no leisure time at all, but I’d hardly be doing much of quality. I can’t go forever as some people I know can. So on the advice of a long-time colleague on the web, I’m trying to delegate more, and section myself down to things that I can manage and do and fit around everything else. I’m restricting my Wikimedia work down to jobs I know that I can do well and I’m going to stop taking on other things that I end up leaving hanging for ages because of school and the like, only coming back to them later. I’m going to keep at my role as user support on freenode when I can, working away at something I know I do reasonably well where I can properly and consistently put something towards a project that I care about.

This blog post is feeling more and more detached as I go through all these topics, a common symptom of not having updated properly in a while, and the quality of my writing is somewhat slipping. The other thing coming up pretty soon is my eighteenth birthday, and at the moment I have three parties planned for different groups of people. Party is a word I am loathe to use because of the connotations of such events for my age group. I am not going to be drinking alcohol or going clubbing or having hundreds of people round to trash my house as seems to be the traditional image. Instead, I am taking full advantage of having an inset day on my birthday, which is a Monday, and also one on the Friday before the weekend, giving me a four day weekend. On the Friday I am having a LAN party with Teh Geek Warriors, the usual group of geeks from school, and we intend to get some serious gaming done. The Saturday will just be filled up with leisurely pursuits, since I have asked for the time off work. The Sunday sees a fancy lunch for the family, something that is far more for them than me, since it’ll involve my mother’s boyfriend’s children, who I’m not exactly keen on, and my cousins dog, which I hate. And then on the evening of my birthday itself my friends of my own age (geeks are all younger) will be round for some form of meal my mother is cooking. I am at this point incredibly grateful to her for doing all of this, and will endeavour to do as much as I can to help throughout. I am looking forward to my long birthday weekend. I shall try to update this blog more often, and certainly will do so for those four days. Here’s hoping they are memorable enough that I won’t need to re-read the post to recall.