Open

“Do you ever get weak like Monday morning?” — Dominic Fike

Taytay

As a listener of Taylor Swift for 11 years, I believe that I can be considered a veteran swiftie. However, I’ve only started listening to the non-megahits recently.

Brother activities

My sister has listened to Taylor Swift for the same amount of time, and has always been a big fan. So, as an older brother, I have pretended to be a hater the whole time. I’m not sure, but I think a lot of brothers also do this. I do think that there is some justification for being a hater though, since obsessing over celebrities is very unhealthy.

Favorites

I have some favorite songs and albums like every swiftie, and I would definitely say that I am a big fan of Speak Now. I also like 1989 as an album.

My favorite songs are probably:

• I Can See You
• Better Than Revenge (old version)
• The Story of Us (found today)
• Never Grow Up (found today)
• Enchanted
• Love Story
• Don’t Blame Me
• Lavender Haze

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I’ve always been sort of ambivalent about Taylor Swift’s music, but someone recommended their favorite songs to me, so I listened. And they were good. So, I guess that’s how I was converted.

College Fears

I’m sure that everyone has fears or doubts about going to a new place and meeting new people, from home to daycare, daycare to grade school, and so on.

Title IX

A few weeks ago, I received an email from the Title IX coordinators on campus that there was sexual misconduct in the bathrooms where an unidentified person tried to record someone showering.

Jax and Fizz

There’s an app called Fizz which is a Reddit-like social media app for individual colleges which is supposedly run by students. There is one for Caltech and a lot of new students (pre-frosh) following the Instagram account, which posts the most popular posts on the app for advertisement.

The posts just propagate stereotypes that would only be able to trick people who have never actually been on campus. For the new students, following their Instagram just creates more fear.

For example, almost half of the houses’s male seniors have been memed as predators in some way. This is clearly implausible. Also, for a pre-frosh girl, it must be really scary to be in that situation of going to a new place and just having the worst expectations for the people there.

Opening Up

A lot of people are afraid to be open about their opinions in public. That’s makes sense. It’s not a good idea to turn half of everyone against oneself. And maybe they’ve been embarrassed before.

Some people are afraid to be open about their opinions to their friends. That is a strange thing to think because they probably wouldn’t care too much. But, maybe they had one too many jokes made at their expense.

A few people are afraid to be open about their thoughts to their close ones. Maybe they keep their enemies closer than their friends. It’s probably because they were hurt before.

It’s important to know the right time to be open, with the right people about the right things. Sometimes we misjudge these times or people or things.

But, after misjudging, I think it’s not good to let that change my mindset in a fundamental way. That would be results-based thinking, an ideology denounced by Mr. P and then me.

Edit from like an hour later: yup, I overreacted.

Floating Possibilities

In quantum mechanics, an electron can be in an infinite number of positions until observed. In League, you can still win unless your base has blown up. Life imitates art, so obviously even if you are down a lot you can still make a comeback.

Pessimists and optimists both skew their guess at the future in their direction, but I believe that optimism makes more sense.

When an event that is out of our control (which can be good or bad after the collapse of the event) is still in a floating state of uncertainty, an optimist will assume implicitly that it will end well, and will not stress about the outcome, but wil be unprepared when it goes wrong. However, a pessimist will prepare for the worst case and be stressed until it happens, and will have wasted time stressing if the worst case doesn’t happen.

What’s more important is what happens between events though. The optimist will have to do a lot of work to fix the situation, but the pessimist will not look forward to the next day with hope.

Also, trying to prevent bad things from happening will not always work, since more can just pop up even when the right choice is made. So, it’s more important to make things right after just making a decision.