Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Drifting Sand, New Journey

Hello, reader.

My name is Crimz.  That is not my real name, it's an alias.  Ahem...  I hope to be referred to as Crimz.

Up until, well, now, I've made updates about my life and my thoughts on my Live Journal page, Duelist Domain.  Gaming was the intended theme, as most of the content was focused on the game of Go - one of my greatest passions.  Having just begun my literature course in the University of Toronto's Academic Bridging program and put Go somewhat aside, I've that decided a new blog befits a new beginning.  So there we have it, my new blog.

So you might wonder why I've named the blog 'Drifting Sand'.  I was thinking about the way my life's been going, with all the sudden changes and all of my supposedly whimsical thoughts about how it should be lived.  You've probably heard a ton of metaphors about the course of one's life, and an hourglass is probably one of them.  All the sand in the hourglass is initially concentrated in the upper half, but slowly funnels its way down into the bottom half.  I was thinking of that process as a straight and narrow kind of life, imagining the glass itself as the way we limit ourselves based on an understanding of our environment.  What would happen if the glass weren't there, one might wonder.  But of course, the sand would be carried off by the wind.  The thing to remember though is that many of us have full control over the direction and velocity of the wind.

As the whole thing explained above hopefully suggests, I'm one of those people who values their free will; their philosophy; and their dreams.  When it comes to choosing my paths in life, I'm pretty outgoing.  Up until around the beginning of ninth grade, I wanted to become a martial arts master!  I've always been an idealist, realism made the world seem dull.  I've always tried to view the world with a tint.  It's not as though I was overly naive, I just preferred to live inside my own imagination whenever it was mostly inconsequential.

During the first half of high school, I wanted to become a personal trainer.  You see, it all started in elementary school.  Because of my overly childish and clown-like behaviour, among other things, I didn't have a whole lot of friends.  I never conformed to things I didn't like, even if they seemed beneficial.  This way of thinking had a powerful connection to my own eventual discrimination at school, thus I was only able to befriend the kids that were in the same boat.  Things got a little better in juniour high because there were a great number of kids who loved to play video games and card games.  What can I say, I loved those, and still do.  Anyway, all the pent up angst of being isolated and picked on was still growing.  Something about all of that torment combined with stepping into puberty boiled together in a powerful way, invoking a lot of motivation for change in me.  I spent the entire summer before high school putting myself through rigorous physical training.  Back then, my will power was pretty unbelievable.  By the time high school had started, my physical fitness and strength seemed to have multiplied.  It wasn't long before I became known for my physical strength all around the school.  It seemed the only rivals I had in that respect were a select few of the seniours.  Yes, back then I was far stronger than my current, twenty-one year-old self.  However, I feel that those experiences have granted me a new level of will power inside.

That little recap above might as well be my life story, for it was one of my really amazing accomplishments.  However, little did I know that my life was about to once again change in a big way.  In the eleventh grade, I started playing Go.  Go soon became my greatest passion ever and completely took over my life.  I made a lot of new Go playing friends and the sands of my life were blown in a new direction.  I learned a lot of important things from my Go playing friends, and I was able to reflect on myself a great deal during my time in Limbo.  That is, the time I spent out of school after graduating.  I even traveled to South Korea by myself to join a Go school, an amazing experience that I will never forget.  I learned Go for about three years and reached the level of Fifth Dan in Canada, and I've currently been playing for about four and a half years.  I've learned all sorts of interesting things from Go:  Rationality, reasoning and logic are just a few.  I was always an underachiever in school, having failed a bunch of courses and gotten lots of fifties and sixties.  However, I was so passionate about the unbelievably difficult and amazing game of Go that I became quite studious about it.  That, in turn, affected me in a big way.  In my final years of high school I achieved mostly eighties and nineties with ease, something I had never come even close to in all my prior years of education.

I eventually stopped improving so quickly at Go and had great difficulty trying to make the transition to Sixth Dan, and I became impatient with the sluggish flow of my life.  It was as though I had become frozen in time, my clock had stopped ticking and I ceased to take any steps forward.  When it came to jobs, I could only get the crappiest variant, and I hated them.  So eventually I finally let go of my dream of becoming a professional Go player, which was unreasonable to begin with, and decided to go to school.  One of the many tools I've extracted from Go was the ability to make sacrifices for 'the greater good', so it was as though I was given this as a test in my life.  I'm not the type to give up on a dream easily, but I'm also not the type to let myself become blinded by the idea of 'fighting spirit' or anything like that.  I've finally realized that although that kind of value can bestow the power to persevere, it can also blind one's sight of the great plethora of paths that lay afoot.

I Just need to get 73% or higher to become a true student of U of T!

So here I am, here I am.  I truly feel like a transformed being, but of course still far from perfection.  Humans are so ironic.  We seek perfection, something so unthinkable.  Yet at the same time, our satisfaction is fleeting. No, it's not fleeting, we run away from it.

Signing off,

-Crimz

4 comments:

  1. Though 'Crimz' sounds a lot like some kind of Gansta Rapper (=D), I'm anxious to know how this (and you) will move one.
    After all being a student is just a great time for discovering a whole bunch of new things : )

    - SoDesuNe

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  2. Hehe, 'Crimz' is just a childish nickname I thought up a long time ago and thought was pretty cool. I even searched on Google to make sure it was original, and it would seem it was. Anyway, yeah university does give me a greater feeling of change than I expected. Things are going fine so far!

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  3. http://ygami.blogspot.ca :) It's Crimz!

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