Winter Break Update

Can your days be wholly uneventful and still pass by very quickly? Yes. There's something called online competitive video games.

I think I planned for winter break to be a time for me to relax and reset into the kind of activities I was doing before school started. During college application season, I used to game like 20 hours a week as a kind of coping mechanism for all the stress I was under, because having to shoot people before they shoot you was less stressful than writing about myself. It was a form of escapism, I acknowledge, and to be quite honest, I don't know why I wanted to return to that. I mean, I barely played anything when I was on campus, even when I had time.

I suppose it's because I don't have friends back home. My family moved after high school graduation and I don't really know anyone here except for a girl who's a year younger than me applying to college, and she's kind of busy now that it's college application season for her and I don't think we're the same type of people anyways. I've briefly texted some of my old friends but I don't really know what to say to them except traumadump on them everything that happened to me during fall semester, but I don't know how much they'd appreciate that. I mean, it's probably the monsters inside my head telling me that they wouldn't appreciate that, and I listen to those monsters fairly often because I don't know how to differentiate them from the normal voices in my head.

Anyways, I'm proud of myself, though, because I didn't just play video games all day. I suppose I never did just play video games all day. I'm getting into Go and I've been playing two games a day to get better. I play on the smaller 9x9 or 13x13 boards because they're more manageable and the big 19x19 is too scary for me. I seriously should push myself to play on the big board sometime, and I think that will probably happen when I go back on campus and find myself at Go club and I get convinced to play on the big scary board. I don't play more than two games a day because after a while I can feel myself get less careful. Something to do with the fact that there are many possibilities and you're supposed to analyze all of them and after a while my brain gets tired and I don't think.

It's just like what this Valorant YouTuber/coach Woohoojin says about Valorant: to play two games a day at your best abilities to rank up faster. It's about consistency and intention in your games if you want to get better, and it's easy to fall into the trap of playing more games suboptimally because you want to rank up. I'm still too scared of failure to even play the game, but I force myself into doing it. I saw a Tiktok this morning about someone who just says "I gotta lock in" whenever they need to do something but they don't want to do it, and then tell themselves "I'm goated" after they do it. I need to start doing that.

I also try to exercise everyday. My friends got into training for an Ironman during the last couple weeks of fall semester and I decided to join them for some of their trainings. Running is hard. It's all about mental willpower and I don't think I have a lot of that. It's okay though, I'm running because I want to train for that. I don't think I like running with friends (sorry guys) because that's when the demons are especially loud. My head gets filled with thoughts like, "your mental is so weak, just push yourself harder. You know that the only thing that actually hurts is your head," and then I think about how everyone else will silently judge me when I ask for a break or slow down. I think those thoughts tearing at me from the inside makes running harder than it should be and I end up going slower.

The one nice (I guess?) thing about running with friends is that I end up running much further than when I run by myself. Over this break, my routes have been about 1.5 miles, which is half what I usually run with friends. I try not to beat myself up over this (2024 is time for no more beating myself up over things!), and instead I celebrate the pace at which I've been doing them. I got pretty close to a 9 minute mile once! The last time I ran a mile and recorded the time was in middle school, and I think I was running 11 minute miles. And then I didn't exercise regularly in high school. Except I started going to the gym at one point in senior spring, but I was just forcing myself on the treadmill and going at super slow speeds too. Yeah fuck what everyone else thinks. I'm proud of myself for forcing myself out of the house and running everyday.

Today's a run day. I think I'll try looking for a route that's 2 miles long. It's kind of hard because I live in a suburban area but I don't really know the streets well. The first day I went on a run I planned a route where I ended up on the side of a big road and I was just walking in the ditch next to the cars that were speeding by. I really don't like running on terrain of any kind. It makes my feet hurt more. It's looking kind of dreary outside today, though, which does not help my motivation.

I've also gone rock climbing twice at the rock climbing gym not too far from where I live. They don't have a lot of bouldering options compared to the gym in the suburbs of Boston that the climbing club goes to. There was like one v2 and a ton of higher level climbs. I couldn't do the v2. This gym's grades are way harder than the gym in Boston. Their holds are not as nice and also I feel like their climbs have more dynamic climbing involved. That's okay though, because dyno is something that I'm trying to learn. My movements aren't as fluid as the better climbers (and boy are there a lot of good climbers there), but I've pulled off some of the moves so that's good.

They do have more auto-belay options and I've been spending a lot of time on those. I didn't really pay attention to the grades of the auto-belays in Boston but I've been doing 5.7 and 5.8's in this gym. The holds are again not as nice as the holds in Boston, but I've been pushing myself to try out the weird holds and getting more comfortable on them. Overall, this gym is a good gym for me to train on. I still like the gym in Boston more, because I feel like the climbs there are more a test of balance and positioning, which is what I think is so cool about rock climbing. I mean, I always feel super cool when I have to navigate my body into weird positions and scale the wall that way. Oh yeah, I also learned how to belay at this gym, because my two week membership came with a free belay course.

And the last thing that I've been doing everyday is the daily Leetcode. I think I still want software development or an adjacent, easy-to-get-into, high-money-making field, though it's beginning to look more and more like academia for me after graduation, but I want to keep my options open. I'm also going to be working on a coding project over IAP with some of my friends and I really don't want to be dead weight, so I've been challenging myself to work on the daily. They're not as bad as I thought they would be. They're also quite easy, and I feel like I should probably be challenging myself with harder stuff, but it's okay. We're working on consistency this winter break, not challenge.

I haven't really been doing any of the math that I said I'd do. I probably won't get to doing the math that I said I'd do. Maybe just some of it? It's really scary, and the need for instant gratification in me just wants to play Valorant and Overwatch all day (and I've only ranked up once in Valorant, which is super sad given the amount of time I've spent on it). I haven't really been pushing myself to do math, though, and I think that's the reason why I haven't been doing it.

I feel like if I really wanted to get stuff done, I would. The problem is, I don't want to get stuff done enough to set the goals and intentions of getting them done. I set the goal of running everyday and working on the Leetcode everyday and so I did those things. Since my dad's big on Go (and that's honestly the real reason why I wanted to get into it), I've ended up playing Go all day. I didn't really set any goals with math, except the vague "I should work on this over the break."

Maybe it has to do with the fact that the above goals are things that I feel like my immediate friends would judge me if I didn't do them? Maybe it is the demons that are motivating me to get stuff done? But still, I'm afraid that I won't be able to handle math. Those demons aren't as loud, though. Maybe that's why I don't feel as motivated?

I don't know. I'm trying not to be as hard on myself. Like I said, I think I wanted this winter break to be a time for me to relax and also think about my emotions or something. I had a friend talk to me about how MIT is a place where you don't have the time to process your emotions, and I couldn't agree with him more. So I'm giving myself time to process my emotions and hopefully come out feeling better and more prepared for the semester ahead.

I'm flying back on Saturday. I went to see The Boy and The Heron with my mom, because she wanted to go to the movie theatres and do something over the break. I might write a review on that. I don't feel too strongly either way about the movie so we'll see if I do end up writing that. I also thought of a haiku last night and I decided to publish it this morning. Poetry is cool. I want to get into it. Well, I've gotten into it, seeing as how I took a creative writing course in senior spring and I read a bunch of poems and thought about how to write a good poem, though I don't think I ever got much instruction on how to improve my poetry. I'm trying out fearlessly publishing things that I want other people to see. I'm trying to subdue the demon that tells me that other people will judge me if I output poetry. Fuck them. I'm a poet at heart, I think.