To be or not to be...

First of all, can I get props on the title? Do you get it?! it's got a double meaning... see what I did there? Nice.

I’m a back-to-back champion now in the Pac Rim West Covina league. But I’m a little bitter. I showed up to every game, without a miss, early. But in this most recent championship game, I only got played like 2 minutes. At first, I was ok, just happy that we won, but when I started to think about it, it’s pretty messed up. I practiced by myself, everyday during the week leading up to the championship game. My coach took me out because he wanted me to get out of the way of our point guard who was getting double-teamed. I heard coach tell me to move and so I did, into 3 different spots on the court. And I’m wide open, my defender is not covering me, and the guy with the ball is getting double-teamed. I still don’t understand what I did wrong. But for the most part, my experience with this team for the past two seasons has just been so-so. Don’t get me wrong—it felt really good to win for once. But I’ve played out of my position all the way through, because I’m taller than anyone on the team. I was playing 4 and 5, when I’m really at my best at the 2 or the 1. I played tough, but I know there were times when I looked lost. It wasn’t so much that I was lost, I was trying to get the ball, but these cocky high school kids never really looked for me. It’s good they have their teams to play on for the winter. It looks like I’m going to play in the Pac Rim Eagle Rock league with old teammates (the old St. Dominic Fab 5?! We’ll see).

Another quarter has come and gone at Cal Poly. I took FRL 201 for the second time, IBM 301, Bio 110 online, and TOM 302, Managerial Statistics. Perfect scenario for my second go around with FRL—the teacher broke his arm and missed 3 classes + 2 furlough days. He skipped an entire section of the class and made the final super easy. I replaced my D+ from last winter with an A! IBM 301 was lame. I got this teacher who was really funny with her personal examples and she was really engaged with the class. But she graded so damn difficult and made the tests hard. She also had a condition in which if you had one of the top ten grades in the class on a group project, you can present your project instead of taking the final. My group (err, I) came up with the idea of a shopping cart that scans items as you put them in and take them out, and you can pay with the cart with its built-in credit card slider. Apparently our project wasn’t good enough (because she graded so hard), so we didn’t get picked for a presentation. The final sucked and I got a B in the class. And from the presentations we watched, we had a better idea than almost all of them. The worst thing is that when we registered, we had a teacher that was described as the easiest teacher on campus but he quit and we got this lady. Bio online was easy because Andrew had taken the class last year and had all the answers already, hahaha. Managerial Statistics was seriously the worst class I’ve taken at Cal Poly. This incompetent fool was the worst teacher I’ve had in my life. Like, 8^th grade Nabavi was bad, but she’s teaching grade school, what do you expect? This dude needs to step his game up—you’re a fucking college professor! ugh, sure he’s willing to help you, but we shouldn’t need help if you’re doing your job. Oh, and the sound of my typing is louder than his voice was in class. The book is horrible at explaining things, too! Bad experiences with math + bad teacher + bad book = worst class ever = D+… here’s to retaking another class. It was an interesting quarter—for the most part, I felt like I worked my ass off in these classes and didn’t see the results I expected…

So get this, I work at the bookstore for 2 rushes, last winter and last spring, and I’m all jovial and brown-nosing and working harder than everyone else—because I wanted that job so badly. This fall rush, I basically don’t give a shit (but still work hard) and I get hired for the whole quarter. Life can be awesome, and work has been easy. I hope I get hired for the rest of the year.

It’s been pretty ok at the dorms. There’s more space because it’s just Andrew and I this year. I’ve been keeping myself busy, setting little goals for myself to keep me from thinking too much. I’m learning how to play the guitar, doing some more skateboarding, and I saved up enough money through recycling and working to buy myself an $750 Olympus EP-1 camera (look it up, it’s nice). I thought it would take forever to save for it, but work helped a lot. Andrew and I bought a niiiice Samsung tv, and I won speakers! Ok, get this, every end of the quarter there’s a celebration in our building. In this celebration there’s a raffle with some prizes. I had a final to study for the next day, so I didn’t plan on going to the celebration. Besides, there are so few prizes that you really don’t ever win anything. The celebration and the raffle ‘Door Dollars’ that you earn throughout the quarter don’t mean anything. So I wasn’t gonna go, but I just put in my tickets towards the grand prize right as they were collecting the last of them all. I went on to eat dinner and study, telling Stephen to call me when the raffle starts. So people win sweatshirts and mugs—bookstore stuff I can get. And then for the grand prize, they decided to do something different. Instead of pulling out a single winner, the last ticket in the bag gets the speakers. So they start dumping out tickets, and I’m thinking that it’s over, I should just go back to my room. For the last five tickets in the bag, she even starts reading out “______, you did not win.” So yeah, I knew it was over, and I thought that reading people out like that was just mean.. but then.. “And the winner is…. Brian Ppp-A-G-G-A-O”! Life can be awesome.

And now, on a philosophical note, I want to describe my mind state. In the beginning, I approached this quarter with the same bitterness I’ve had. No doubt thoughts from the summer and the pangs of loneliness still haunted me. With everything I got, I still approached things with a grain of salt. Like things are good, but still suck. Or as good as things are now, it won’t last forever. At the same time, I made sure I took nothing for granted. And then I read this article—I still can’t find the website it was on—and it talked about something called a quarter-life crisis. This quarter-life crisis happens with people in their mid 20s who graduate from college and feel like half they’re life is over and they haven’t accomplished much, and they’re having trouble finding jobs and integrating themselves into society. So they’re full of anxiety and worry, and are fearful that they’ll never achieve what they feel they’ve deserved. That sounds a lot like what I’ve been talking about on this blog. The article goes on to talk about how this is natural, and there comes a point when you stop thinking about the past or the future and start living in the now. And you start living in the now by persisting through every obstacle, no matter what. It also talks about a book, ‘Zorba the Greek’ which is about a character that takes whatever he’s been given and lives through it with the absolute fullest emotion. Instead of worrying about the future, he experiences what he has with all that he’s got. If he’s angry he fully expresses anger; if he enjoys something, he’ll show his happiness. So I got the book to read over break, and I’m not too far along with it, but there are already golden nuggets of wisdom. Reading this article and reading about how the cure to this quarter-life crisis is to approach every little thing with passion has been getting me through. It’s opened my mind to a whole new way of thinking. In fact, there are some things I’m beginning to forget about my past—just because I haven’t thought them through for a while. I guess that’s what moving on is.

It got me to think about how we’re raised to believe that we’re all different; we’re all unique little snowflakes. But the truth is, we’re not as different as we think. We all want the same things: success, love, popularity. We may have different definitions for what those are, but my point is that we all desire similar things in life. But then, we’re raised to think that we’re so special so we deserve those things or that those things are supposed to come to us. And when we don’t get what we want, we don’t understand why. But the way I look at it now, success in life isn’t about achieving certain goals. A lot of the times we say, “I’ll be happy once ______ happens for me”. And while we may be happy for a time, it’s still about what we do with what we have. Success is not about getting something. Success is about being thankful for what you have. Put some gratitude in your attitude! Real success is about taking what you have and making it great. Lemons into lemonade; rocks into diamonds. Success in life is about consistency and persistence, and most importantly, consistently persisting. Write that down and quote me, I like the sound of that.

So that’s where my mind's at right now, and thinking about last year, I’ve changed a lot. I’ve made conscious changes and there have been unconscious changes to the way I act and think. I think I’ve even tried to show these changes on the outside—my hair is long, I gained 10 lbs. of muscle, and recently I’ve been making the effort to dress better. I needed to change. I needed to be different from who I was last year. I needed to become a better person.

And now, as if out of nowhere, someone from the past—someone from my past posts—is back in my life. I’m even more afraid now than I was in the beginning, but I’m optimistic and hopeful that things will work out this time. We’ll see :D

I hope everyone’s having happy holidays.