There is a definite difference between rationally deciding upon something – whether it be an opinion or an action – and psychologically totally accepting it. I find it is when the latter occurs that something special has happened and yet telling others about such things is never quite the same. I may have been preaching an obvious opinion for years but then when I truly realise it it is an excitement that is very hard to get across to others. I don’t know if this happens to others but I imagine it does. The other day it was exam results day and I experienced one of these moments on the bus in. For a great deal of time I have railed against our exam-focussed culture and have claimed that what matters is the expansion of one’s mind through education as opposed to the completion of certifications of various forms. Exams have only ever been for me a challenge in getting certain grades as opposed to something that actually matters – or so I tell myself. In reality I have long been concerned. Posts on here show that. However, finally on the day of this round of results a few weeks back I finally realised that I no longer cared. Now that I have my university place and the knowledge that as long as I don’t do anything stupid I will meet the grade requirements for it, it is very easy to say this. But it really was a wonderful moment when I finally realised that the results meant nothing more to me than a gateway to this next advancement. And I thought it was worth writing about here. It is wonderful to know that I can truly enjoy the intellectual aspects of my subjects (aside from the intolerably dull Medical Physics) without being concerned hugely by exams, especially given the low percentages I need in the summer to get straight As. I do not mean to sound too comfortably secure here – the lack of enthusiasm I was able to show for friend’s results a few weeks back annoyed me. But I’d really like to think that were I not in this comfortable position regarding results, I would have eventually come round to this opinion regardless.

I’m not, and haven’t been for a long time, very good at listening to music. By this I mean that I have a very specific problem: at any one time I listen to a small selection of tracks over and over again and then feel very dissapointed that they no longer sound as good after I’ve heard them a ridiculous number of times over a few weeks. And then thereafter they are never really as good at they first were. This is not something I myself have really identified; my family have been telling me for years. I seem to do this in many areas of life: I get very very into certain things for short periods of time and then move on. It’s not something that I consider a positive trait in any way and I would much rather develop interests into deeper understanding but as per usual as soon as something becomes any real challenge I lose most of my interest in it. I’m not convinced that there is a lot I can do about this because if I am no longer interested in something then I’m not going to pursue it very successfully as I’ll be going against what I actually want to do. I don’t know if this is, though, me just holding my behaviour up to ridiculously high standards which I then inevitably fail to meet – something else I do very often. Friends tell me they have short attention spans and can’t believe how long I can spend on particular pieces of work, or certain specific interests which I do maintain. So maybe this is not too much of a concern.

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.

I have long been a fan of the saying to the effect that it is entirely fruitless to cry over spilt milk, meaning that if one has no control over something then there is no point in worrying about it. This seems at first thought entirely obvious and I imagine most try to follow it, but very often fail: psychologically it is very easy to worry or to fool oneself into thinking that one has some modicum of control over something enough to justify said worrying, or maybe that by worrying one creates some kind of control. I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist, but the saying in itself seems to hold a fair amount of merit. This week I’ve decided to try to make a renewed push in my own life to follow it. While this is all too easy to say and far more difficult to follow, I think I’ve been succeeding in it lately. This half term holiday has not been brilliant in several ways so far, and yet I have managed to remain very positive and rational. Firstly, it is already Thursday and the amount of work I have got done is not fantastic. More importantly, I have completed a large integration exercise over several days and yet did not achieve a fantastic score (since improved upon by fixing silly mistakes). Crucially, I found myself starting at certain problems for an hour, requiring help from a friend for one and being forced to work backwards from a computer-generated answer for another, and also being unable to see how my numerically identical answer can be rearranged into the form in the answers in the back of the textbook for another of the seventy-eight questions. So I’ve been dissapointed: I imagine others in the class will not have spent so many hours (I reckon about fifteen but several of those were with heavy IM distractions. Still far too long) on it and will not have found certain ones so hard, and may have even done the one I had to work backwards on. However, I am not letting this bother me. As I have written about many times before, I have a constant tendency to be unhappy with my academic performance unless everyone else is doing far worse than me, something I am ashamed of. But this is just an irrational circular argument. So I intend to ignore it, for there is no use metaphorically crying over it. So far I am succeeding. Now I merely have to reconcile my usual cynicism with such a policy.

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.

For me, the day of real excitement and history with regard to Barack Obama becoming President of the United States was actually the day he became President-Elect: that was the point at which the country did something amazing and hope was kindled, in the words of Gandalf. I did however watch all of the inauguration last Tuesday, the bit of most interest to me being his inaugural speech. In general I was very impressed: the speech was blunt, honest and to the point, with some soars of most graceful rhetoric but also with clear guiding principles set out. It was on the level three of debate: it didn’t speak of creating x jobs or withdrawing y troops, but it set up ideals: Obama wants to restore America’s reputation (however little I may care about reputations he means restore a reputation of justice and fairness); cease to make compromises on liberty in the name of safety (for me this was the most important thing in the speech); and try to move away from the hold that superstition has over American politics by being more inclusive of more rational ways of thinking

Obama may have praised a regulated free market as a way to create prosperity and he may have called for patriotism to make the world better, but this is only the means by which he argues the goals that we in fact share should be achieved. While I may argue that only a socialist world can truly create peace and prosperity he disagrees, but still holds the same aims in mind. And the fact that he was happy, in his first speech when responsibility as well as expectation weighed upon his shoulders, to not shy away from what he had promised, to not equivocate and compromise unnecessarily makes me trust Mr Obama a great deal. Yes, in his heart of hearts he may be a no-good power-grabbing politician as they often are, but right now I am prepared to give him a chance, I’m prepared to believe that he may be out for the world. This world desperately needs a leader who can turn the tide of selfishness and greed and try to bring about a return to valuing liberty, and a move forward against poverty. Right now, Obama seems to me to be our best hope for that.

I’m not generally one to make any resolutions at the beginning of every year but whilst sitting at my desk this year I spontaneously decided to set a few in my beautiful notebook that I got as a prize in London and at that point had yet to use. So I now have a few things to try and do for the year ahead.

1. Read for at least half an hour a day (school work excluded)
   I want to read more than I do but I simply don’t prioritise it and then run out of time every evening and end up reading virtually nothing. So, on days when I can, I am to read every night in some regard. So far I’m generally doing this, with obvious exceptions for when I can’t, such as last night when I was out at the Oxford Union debating competition
2. Drink some milk and eat some fruit every day
   I often forget to drink milk (though I like it) and my fruit intake is close to zero so I thought this might be a good idea
3. Keep a diary in [beautiful notebook]
   This was another spontaneous decision. While I have this blog, there are daily details and moments that I would like to write down that really would be completely dull and routine to anyone reading this blog. While I must admit that the main reason I want to write it is that I love writing in my new purple-inked fountain pen that I got for Christmas, it’s a constructive thing to do. Moleskine notebooks are amazingly nice to work with
4. Don’t put off until tomorrow something that can be done today
   A common phrase but one that I think rings true: if everyone did this, the world would run a lot more smoothly. I’m particularly prone to putting things aside and then not actually getting them done at all due to my poor memory, so I guess I’m trying to remember this more clearly this year
5. Don’t take on responsibilities I know I won’t fulfill
   I have a tendency to get involved in far too much and find myself then unable to keep up with everything. I’ve hopefully learned from this and I aim to notice it when it happens and do something about it: delegate responsibility, recognise my mistake and pull away and prioritise
6. Don’t worry about taking a long time to do things
   There’s no need to rush. It doesn’t matter that I’m slower than those around me. Just work at things at a reasonable pace
7. Write a blog post at least once a fortnight
   I must admit, I’m really not convinced that this one is going to happen. My blog ceases to be interesting and continuous if I wait too long between posts though so I do intend to try and write here more often. Hopefully my third resolution will not detract from this
8. Improve my mental maths and learn my times tables by the end of the year
   Like everyone else in my class, my mental maths is atrocious: we find ourselves doing sums like 24/8 on our calculators as a matter of routine (and far simpler ones than that). I’m slightly better on things such as surd manipulation because I don’t have a calculator that does this for me and I am very practised, therefore, at manipulating things about in my head. But when it comes to actual numbers I am slow and make many mistakes. So I am going to try not to resort to my calculator when I obviously don’t need to, to try and get out of bad habits. Learning my times tables, which I have never done, also seems sensible
9. Interrupt people less
   I do this far too much. Let’s see if I can improve.

So there we have it, some targets for the year. Wish me luck!