Workload, Stress, Etc

New season of GoT started, so I've been watching that. for some reason I don't really feel like I've missed the show for a year- in fact these days I get really confused about dates. There was a moment yesterday where I thought it was 2014, and we were in spring going on to summer. Then I realized I was actually half a year ahead of where I thought I was, and I just felt ridiculously inadequate. Exams are coming up and all that, and I've technically finished most of the practical components of my work...

Anyway I've been having a bad time lately. I drank the last sips of my tea and then my mug rolled off the table somehow, and I snapped the handle. It's almost like an omen of some sort... I've had the same mug for years and I feel kind of sad how I broke it on carpeted floor...I also have a bit of a global headache, and I suspect that's why I haven't written the last 100 words of my assignment. It's ridiculous and embarrassing that it took me 4 days with no classes, and I still haven't finished an 800 word assignment. I think I blogged/ posted more than 800 words of stuff within that time.

So yeah GoT has been a huge distraction for me- it was basically one hour of bliss in my long and dreary work hours. Every night I go to sleep, telling myself I'll wake up early in the morning, and every morning I switch off my alarm and refuse to get out of bed. I think bed just kind of signifies not having to face real world problems and responsibilities. Like I literally have nothing to worry about in life other than school, and if I get school right I'll probably just have nothing to worry about in life, period. Yet school itself is so boring and stressful and I'm not sure I can justify the importance of everything I'm learning. Sometimes I just want to run back to the little country towns I stayed at during work experience, and fill my lungs with fresh air once again. I feel like the beach would do a great deal to lift my spirits, but with the burden of unfinished assignments and such, I don't think I can justify spending an afternoon outside.

I am somewhat disgusted by my lack of progress in terms of work, and utterly ashamed of how stressed I feel at the moment. The assignments are short, I have an abundance of time, but I'm sort of dangling on a cliff's edge for some odd reason. Then sometimes I feel tipping over and splashing into the ocean might not be such a bad idea- it's so stuffy and hot up here.

Did I mention how I spent like $200 buying random shit on the internet? Well, half of that was on textbooks I'm probably not going to read through, the other half was on game merchandise. I think I default to spending when I'm in a bad mood, and for some reason internet shopping gives the satisfaction of buying things without giving me any guilt and regret for spending money. I think I need my own stable stream of income to support these shitty habits of mine. Funny how I think of it that way, huh? "I should go make more money" as opposed to "maybe I should change myself and find a way to control my spending". Hahah I treat myself so well- I often said I wished there would be a clone of me, and I'd literally just fuck myself. I'd be the most generous partner, anyway.

Ok I think that's probably enough procrastination in terms of blogging. Let me try finishing this assignment off one more time, yeah?

What I think of professional gaming

Professional gaming is a new thing- it's pretty much like... people pay you for being good at playing games and they pay you to play. Sounds like a dream, right? I guess it's something I thought was cool when I was 12-16, but as I get older and older I start realizing what a terrible idea it all is and it's actually such a hard life to lead.

The event which prompted me to write this post is the retirement of my favourite LoL pro-player, Hai. I started playing League of Legends back in 2013, which is pretty much around the same time he went officially pro. I can't remember why the team Cloud9 became my fav team, but I've basically been a fan since their debut. I watched a lot of LoL matches because of them, and watching LoL sort of became the evening relaxation thing for me- you know, the same way people watch football with a beer in hand- I kinda do the same thing but I drink water/tea instead of beer.

I found Hai's personality remarkable- he was only slightly older than me, but here he was in a completely different world. His camera personality was highly likable, and he seemed way too mature for his age, and way too mature to be the kind of person who'd go down the pro-gaming path. Anyway I  cheered for him and his team and I was felt so sad watching the team decline since last year, leading up to Hai's retirement this year.

Pro-gamers do this thing that athletes do, where they practice for a stupid number of hours a day, just to play an hour or two of games per week. You don't need to be a doctor to know that playing games for 10+ hours a day is bad for your health. They say being sedentary is the new smoking, after all. I don't even know what damage it's doing to your eyes, but I spend a shit-tonne of time in front of the computer screen as well, and my vision's been declining over the years. Then all that time you're spending playing the game is time you're not spending socializing with the larger community, it's time you're not getting world experience. Now I just sound preachy, but that's such a dangerous life to live, when you dangle your career on a game. What happens when the game falls out of popularity? What happens if the company randomly goes bankrupt? What skills do you have to show then? "Yo I'm really good at League of Legends, so I think I'd make a perfect candidate for flipping burgers at McDonalds". You'd have to go back to university or start some sort of vocational training, if you want to compete on the job market- but then everyone is sort of ahead of you in terms of career, and you're just there, fucked over with life experience of a 16 year old but other people are laying down deposits of their first house.

Obviously some people make it out, they make it big time and get 2 million dollar contracts to play, and 2 million is something people would make over 20 years, and that's pretty sweet. But for every one of those big names that make it, there's probs 100+ people who's just doomed to fail and wasting their life. If you gamble with the probability, you realize the odds are actually shit. Sure that's how you "chase the dream" and "succeed", if gaming is your thing, but the risk-benefit analysis is not in your favor. Hai's only 20-something and he's "retired" from his gaming career. He's lucky that he's able to transition right into another job, managing the C9 organization. Even then he's going to have a hard time with his minimal management experience backed up with no degrees or qualifications- it won't be an easy job either way.

I guess being a pro-gamer gives you a unique experience like no other, and it would be really fun for a while, being able to play a game for days on end and that's the only thing you have to do, the only thing you focus on. For me, I imagine I'd just get really fucking bored, and start hating my job--- because it was just a game, and now it's more than a game- it's a job, it's income, it's a career. And holy shit the stress that comes with that realization would be unreal. In terms of the experience- look, poverty and war both give you memorable experiences, and they say if you can climb out of true poverty or if you survive the war, you'll come out with resilience like no other. Yet who in their right minds would want to live in an era of poverty and war? Sheesh.

Anyway the retirement of Hai made me really sad, so here I left a massive rant about why being a pro-gamer is shit for your life, with the 0 social stability etc. I guess I'll miss my favourite player- but maybe it's better that he's finding a different path in life. He seemed like he was struggling with mental health and beginning to develop an RSI, anyway. I'm just bitter that you can "retire" at 20 something. I really, REALLY hope he's ok in the end- I only know him as a personality, but I don't think I've come close to liking anyone else as much.

TL;DR: Drop your pro-gaming dreams, it's one of the shittest things you can do.

The End of "Adventures"

It's been a week since I've returned from my latest work experience. This time I traveled further north for about 6 hours to some remote location that's pretty much forgotten by the world. I was surprised to find that there were shops and stuff there- I guess it's just a self-contained town. The town was beautiful, but there wasn't much to see if you're not into natural scenery. Definitely not much to entertain either- but I guess it was nice to take a break in the country. I mean, it was always one of those places I'd wanted to be on a warm Autumn afternoon.

So I had a good time in the country, but I didn't have internet for two weeks and stress was starting to build. I had a lot of work being built up but I couldn't really do much without internet. I don't really know how people lived without it- then again I don't think people before me had to be thrust into such dire circumstances... who the hell expects papers to be written while you're out in the country on work experience?

Now it's catch up time, but exams are only about a month away. I have to finish two assignments and a shit-tonne of paperwork before exams come around, so I can actually study. I think this year is just totally unaccommodating- as if life wasn't hard enough on its own, stuff just get piled on and on and on and there are some days where I just don't want to get out of bed. For real though, my biological clock is set for 7am, but I lie in bed, refusing to face reality until about 11 or 12. I don't know why everything is so HARD but I'm sure other people out there have it harder. I'm just personally going through a bit of a rough time.

Mmm, I don't know if there's much to say about work experience. It was pretty much the same as last time except nobody schooled me in philosophy this round. It was kind of depressing actually, the people I spent time with seemed rather cynical and washed up, but I don't know if it's because I'm too young to understand the futility of my struggles. In my mind it's never over until it's actually over, or until you give up trying. My opinion will probably change given enough time, but I'd like to retain the privileges of my youth for as long as possible.

Anyway the only good thing that's come out of all this is that I no longer have any other episodes of work experience for the rest of the semester- I think I'd had quite enough of travel and all that. I like being home, where I have a nice warm bed, as much tea as I want to drink and internet.

Let's just keep struggling forwards, yeah?

Models regarding transsexualism

This is a really controversial topic, I want to talk about it on this blog because non of my friends have the time to listen to my rants or the ones that do invariably reply something sexist to piss me off, so I'm gonna leave the rant on my personal blog. See I've always found psychology fascinating, and I guess I became more interested in the sexual aspects of it ever since I hit puberty and my brain went into over-drive about sex sex sex oh sweet sex. Staying true to my boring academic self, instead of going out to obtain the sex sex sweet sex I decided to go on the internet and read articles about sex; from sex-tricks-in-the-bedroom to gender equality to the endocrinological consequences of being castrated.

Anyway, today, I'm going to write about the topic of transsexualism. To do that I'm going to need to throw out some definitions which you may or may not agree on, but it's for the sake of coherence in my post. Here goes:

• Sex = your physical, physiological and genetic definition. You'd think this would be the easiest one, your binary of being male or female. Wrong. Some people are born with ambiguous genitalia, some people have dysfunctional Y chromosomes so their testes never descend and are in the position of ovaries, so your phenotype may be misleading. See I'm already going on a separate rant- given how you're supposed to be either male or female (barring medical defects), we'll label this one as binary.
• Gender: this one is heaps complicated, but it's what I define as your "identification" of being male, female, neither, somewhere in between etc. The word identification drives some people up the wall, because they're like "just because you think you're a cat doesn't mean you're a cat! Identification is bullshit!" and there is some validity to that argument, I'll go into it later. The most important thing to remember though, is not to judge whether identification is "correct" or "incorrect", but whether they identify yes/no. Okay? Gender is a spectrum, non-binary, non-discrete.
• Gender expression: how you dress, act, behave etc in accordance to "gender roles". Whether you ACT like a male/female/neither/somewhere in between. In essence gender is what you think, gender expression is what you do. Again, a spectrum. 
• Sexual orientation: whether you're attracted to male, female, neither, both, somewhere in between, w/e. It's what you want in a partner. Majority of people are heterosexual, meaning we're attracted to our direct opposites in terms of sex and gender- but of course that is not always the case.
• Transgender/transsexual: someone whose sex and gender don't match. Sometimes people use transsexual to imply that they want surgery or they have undergone surgery to correct the mismatch, but in my post I'm going to use the 2 interchangeably. Don't get your panties in a knot over it.

See there's so fucking much to talk about, and I think grouping LGBTQ (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) together is actually so hard because they're actually all talking about different things, and I guess their main similarity is that they're related to sex and that these people are minorities who are heavily stigmatized against. Anyway, I'm going to focus on the transsexual/ transgender part of it today. 

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Firstly, being transsexual in itself isn't technically a problem. This may seem counter-intuitive at first, because woah your gender and sex doesn't match aren't you just in constant misery because of how wrong everything seems? That may well be the case for some people, but in theory, if the individual is actually okay with their state of their mismatch, and there are no negative social consequences, then there is actually no problem. The main problem is, right, that there are almost ALWAYS negative social consequences. Just because the person is ok with themselves doesn't mean everybody else is ok with them, and I think that's totally fucked up but that's really the way the world is. Then here's the thing: is it the fault of the individual or is this something that we, as a society need to work on improving? Just because they're in the minority doesn't mean THEY are the ones that need to change.

So that was point one on "is transsexualism even a problem". Point two being "is transsexualism a medical problem". There are many treatments for it, right, from surgery to hormone replacement to counselling, and it is logical to question "what are we treating if it's not a medical problem". Well, being transsexual itself doesn't make you sick, but getting depression, anxiety etc as a result of this will make you sick. Thus we are targeting the root of these other problems and trying to work from that angle. There is a medical term for it- it's called "gender dysphoria", revised over and over because people find "transsexual, transgender, gender identity disorder" too offensive- I guess calling it disorder is offensive but I don't see how calling it dysphoria is much better. Political correctness in a nutshell. Look in my opinion, it's not a medical problem. We just have a diagnosis for it because it makes paperwork and legal stuff easier, but I don't think it means you're sick.

Point three: how do we treat gender dysphoria? I guess I've sort of explained why we treat it even though it's not an illness. This is usually the bit where people get heaps uncomfortable. The main legit argument I hear is "just because you think you're something doesn't mean you are something." And you know what, on a literal level, that is true. Yet that still doesn't mean someone is wrong and it still doesn't mean they're sick. If they want their body to match their brain, then we should respect their autonomy and they can go for it. I have the same reasoning for elective plastic surgery which I explained years ago- yeah yeah I know they're not the same thing because apparently improving yourself for the sake of vanity is looked down upon, but to me, you should just do what you want to be happy (without harming others yada yada). Problem with surgery is that it's expensive, it carries risks (infection + other complications), it's largely irreversible and people are really uncomfortable with "destroying perfectly functioning body parts". The first 2 sucks, the third is a matter of opinion. "Perfectly functioning body parts". So what? These people don't want to use their sexual organs for those functions. Things that shouldn't be there aren't useful to anyone anyway. It's like fertile women who don't want kids, tall people who didn't become basketball players--- because they have priorities in their lives and they wanted something else. 

Point 4: the mind vs the body. Naturally some people won't be convinced that being transsexual is not a disorder of the mind. People still believe that being homosexual is a disorder of the mind. "There is obviously something wrong with their brain, otherwise they would be like the rest of us". Though we often use majority to define normality, it doesn't mean the model fits with every example. "Why don't we treat their mind instead of treating their bodies?" Well that's hardly a novel way of looking at it, with the number of grotesque things people have done in history to make others conform. See I actually got caught up in this a while ago- I was trying to figure out why we didn't treat the mind, and why we allow this incongruity--- but if someone said they identified as a cat we'd say they were insane. 

The answer is simpler than I imagined. We don't turn people who think they're cats into cats, because no one is born thinking they're a cat, and cats don't function too well when you place human responsibilities and expectations on them. We don't turn them into cats because their quality of life doesn't improve and they're not very useful to society. We treat the body over the mind because it is our minds that make us who we are. If your significant other lost a limb you may very well stay with them, because they remain the person you know and love. If your significant other suffered a brain injury and had a massive personality change, you would feel as if you had lost the whole person though their body was still there. I'm not sure I understand the concept of a spirit or a soul, but by some chemical miracle our brains have formed in such a way that we have thoughts and feelings and it's really our brains that define who we are. Our brains change naturally as it is, and I don't know if enforcing uniformity in our brains is the way to go. Like, I just finished reading Brave New World (really great book, btw) recently and I'm really not that keen on that particular thought.

Then there's the issue of how we can't realistically alter someone's brain with such specificity right now- the technology isn't quite there yet (in terms of safety and cost, at least). So there really isn't much of an argument for altering someone's gender to match their sex, and I personally believe altering the body is way easier than altering the mind. 

Would someone choose to change their gender instead of their sex if given the choice though? Absolutely. If there was some magic pill that someone could take so they wouldn't be stigmatized, criticized, ostracized for being themselves, I'm sure the line would be huge. Oh wait, are we still on topic? So the thing about gender is- it doesn't actually change as you get older. People with gender dysphoria never "grow out of the phase". Asking someone to be a different gender is almost like asking "would you like to be someone else". And if you've ever learnt anything from children's TV shows it's that you never really want to be someone else, you'd really just want yourself to be better. I wish we could do some sort of social experiment, where people stopped being so obsessed and hateful about transsexualism, and then see if we still struggle with the idea of transsexuals being normal people.

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Oh man my rant is so fucking long it's atrocious. I wish I had someone to talk to about these things these days. I feel like people are always too busy for me. I want to talk about this, about genetic research, about the existence of God and bunch of other things which seem kind of irrelevant to me on a personal level. I think what I'm trying to say is that I miss intellectually stimulating discussions, and I feel like all my degree wants out of me is a robot that can remember some textbook really well. 

Basically to sum up my opinions on the idea of transsexualism:

• It's not a mental illnesss
• We treat it because of illness associated with it, not because it's an illness in itself
• Perhaps societal change needed over individual change
• Alter the body not the mind otherwise we turn into a sci fi novel
• Aim to improve quality of life and stop being a little bitch if they are not harming anyone. Their bodies, their choice.