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Exams' End, More Music, Fleeting Friendship

6 years ago2,028 words

I've spent most of my time recently revising for the final exam of this Psychology degree - I just finished it today, though there's one more little thing to do before it's all completely done - and I've also spent a lot of time with a friend, which is unusual for me, and which will also be over soon. I've also composed some more music!

It's a strange feeling, to be done with exams perhaps forever. I'm not eager to return to academia, at least not immediately. While I find the content fascinating, I find the systems infuriating; the very idea of exams, where you have to regurgitate memorised information with various handicaps (lack of access to the internet or notes, a time limit, a stressful room you can't escape from when you need to, etc), seems so outdated in this age where we're all essentially cyborgs of a sort, with phones (why do we even still call them 'phones' when that's such a minor feature?) and computers and Google and such acting as peripheral augmentations that we rely on not much less than whatever's actually stored in our heads. Institutions like exams come from a time before all this, where learning was done from books in libraries and had to be stored in one's head, but they linger on because of inertia. And assignments aren't much better. I'd rather do work which could be directly applied, rather than spending months and months learning things you immediately forget after the exam anyway because you no longer have any use for them, or writing papers for no purpose other than to show that you can. It's so different to things like programming, art, etc which I taught myself and then made use of as I went along...

Exams, I think, are the Western equivalent of tribal rites, more than an assessment of skill or intelligence per se; the fact that you can do them shows the tribe - society - that you're able to adhere to their customs, and the degree you get - not massively different from the tattoos, bone piercings, etc that more 'primitive' people might be branded with to show successful completion of a rite of passage - is generally more a sign of social fitness than anything else. I could go on about all that, but for now I'm just glad to be finished with it.

There's just one more thing left, an oral presentation about my dissertation project, saying what we did and found and etc. I've got to perform it next Wednesday and haven't even begun thinking about it yet. But I doubt it'll take long or go badly, so I'll spend the next few days doing that. Then I'm done... and can finally start spending my time doing many things I've been wanting to do for a long time. Creative stuff! I want to compose more music! Thanks to those of you who commented on the music in the previous post, by the way; it's really nice and motivating to hear such things!! I want to respond to some of those comments specifically - and to some on the post before that one too - but I'll wait until after my presentation, when my time is truly free.



For now, though, I want to share three little piano pieces that I composed last week, when the muse was still with me. I started on a Ramble 27, but didn't get anywhere with it - I'll probably return to or restart it next week though - so, annoyed at that, I decided to try to compose some shorter, simpler, looping game-soundtrack-like pieces, what with my familiarity with that format and all.

I decided to try to compose background music for a personal project of sorts I've got going in the background - a thing where characters just talk to one another, an outlet for myself that I'd not want to share because it's embarrassing and very much designed to meet personal needs rather than other peoples' interests - but since I don't intend to share that, I didn't want to put time or effort into the music for it. It'd be more like practice, I thought.

So I composed three short piano-only pieces, each meant to have a different kind of mood which fits their title; they took like half an hour each, so they're not elaborate or especially interesting really. But I thought I'd share them anyway, so here they are:

∞ Extroverts ∞
∞ Introverts ∞
∞ Calm ∞

While I consider Ramble 26 one of my better pieces that I've been listening to loads over the past few days (I'm listening to it right now!), these ones are more like "not bad". Still, it's always nice to make things like this out of nothing, to pluck melodies out of the aether and give them some form of form... or whatever.

Also, I feel like I should create an account on one of those sites like... Soundcloud? Is that what it's called? Somewhere specifically for music creators, where I can put mine (and where it'll be overshadowed by everyone else's work, but oh well). I know I already have Bandcamp, but that feels like it's more for finished soundtracks, so I wouldn't want to upload things like this there.



On another, more personal note, apart from exam revision, the other reason I've been busy recently is because I've been spending a lot of time with a friend. I'll call her... X, I think. Yes. She's the person I went out walking with on Valentine's Day - I say because I remember posting about that here, but don't know if I've mentioned her since then - and our friendship has been a thing that's developed at a sort of exponential rate. With the other close friendship I had, with B, we were close quickly, within weeks, but... well, there are a whole bunch of factors and reasons why I have to say had rather than have. I've talked about that often enough here. With X, though, we talked while working on the dissertation project together, but rarely; we didn't meet up or message each other outside of the project. Well, not for months, at which point we went for walks at a rate of like one a month or something.

Now, though, we've been meeting up almost every day for hours, just walking and talking, and it's nice because we seem to be on surprisingly similar wavelengths. She's someone I noticed from afar a couple of years ago because I felt like she'd be 'my kind of person', so it's nice to see that confirmed now that we're actually talking (though of course I can't help but wonder how differently my time here at university might have gone had we known each other for the whole duration - we've talked about that, since from the sound of things it would have helped us both a lot). She's shy and introverted and has social anxiety, she's lonely and doesn't know many people, and she's open-minded about ~spiritual~ things, which is most of what we talk about; the simulation theory of the universe, what happens after death, psychology stuff we've covered on the course, our fears and feelings. It's lovely because we understand each other and nothing she says is boring or annoying to me, I don't have to hold back about sharing whatever 'out-there' things I've been thinking or reading about lately, and it's deeper than just 'having fun' together or something. More meaningful, it feels. I suppose other people are lucky enough to experience things like this fairly often, but for me it's rare.

We've also been able to relate about failed friendships, as she's been dropped by people she was close to too and had to go through the pain of that. It's probably really common, that, sadly. She said that I'm the nicest person she's met during her time at university, which is flattering of course, but also sad; it sounds like other people were just upsetting to be around for various reasons. (This just makes me wish this is how I'd been seen by others, like B, so then I might have enhanced their lives rather than casting a shadow on them... but that's not really how these things work, sadly.)

She's an international student whose first language isn't English, and while that worried me at first because I thought there might be communication issues or we might be worlds apart, it's actually been quite interesting learning about her culture and language and things, about similarities, connections, differences with and between hers and this one.

But I suppose the biggest thing is the feeling of not being judged at all, of being accepted as I am and understood because of who I am. Her experiences with social anxiety and fear of being judged mean she's especially sensitive to how that feels, and it makes me wish that other people were more understanding and considerate and less inclined to blame, judge, attack, denigrate, and all those kinds of things... None of us are perfect, of course, and we all see things in others that we don't like, but... well, I suppose feeling accepted has made me feel better about myself in general. I wouldn't say I feel happy or anything - such a thing seems alien to me - but on a day-to-day basis recently, I've been feeling okay. Relatively content. Not suicidally miserable. (Though I suppose I've been distracted, haven't had time to just dwell excessively in my mind.)

It's not going to last, though. She's returning to her home country on Wednesday, which is why we're spending so much time together now. We'll stay in touch from afar, of course, but that's never the same. It's such a shame how things are transient, how we have to let go... I wish I was someone who was lucky enough to always have someone who'd stay, who wouldn't be lost like this.

I've also been spending a lot of time recently playing some new mobile game. I won't say which one because I want to talk about it in more detail in another post, but part of it involves necessarily interacting with other players in order to earn group rewards, which means talking to them in a chat. And they're all very much 'gamers', which, as a group, has a sort of typical attitude (even if each individual has their own personality), and which I've never really felt a part of. It's such a contrast coming home from a nice walk with someone I can talk about my fears and dreams with, and logging onto this thing where people are just discussing strategic, technical aspects of the game and/or butting heads or boasting about their achievements or criticising one another for one reason or another. I don't mean that they're nasty people necessarily - if they were completely hostile, or 'toxic' as the popular word these days seems to be, I'd have left by now - but there's very much an underlying masculinity to their behaviour that just rubs me the wrong way. Perhaps it's inevitable when you build an experience that's essentially about conquest and competition, though; it's not like it's going to attract a bunch of softies who compliment each other and bare their souls. It's like joining a New Age crystal healing group and complaining that they're too airy-fairy, or joining a wrestling club and complaining that they're too aggressive. So it's not like I particularly want or expect them to be different. I suppose I only mention it because I often wonder what a group of 'my people' - somewhere I feel at ease, where I feel I belong - would even be like. I don't know, and I don't think I'll ever find it.

But oh well. For now, I'll just focusing on finally finishing this degree... I can worry about the other challenges of life once this one's over and done with.