A brand new start

Hi, welcome to my brand new website:)

I am Xy, a first year PhD student living in Germany. A typical day for me looks like this:

Wake up between 7 a.m. and 1 p.m.
Consume a vengeful amount of coffee with my boyfriend
Sit myself at my desk and stare blankly into my monitor, which displays a paper on obscure maths that I definitely don't need to do my job
Try to figure out if what I try to do is fundamentally or even profoundly so, ridiculous and trivial for the rest of the day
10 minutes before I decide to give up and wrap up for the day, I do something vaguely useful that involves producing some code
Try to hide my existential dread and proceed to browse boardgamegeek.com
Play board game with my boyfriend and win (most of the time)
Put in joint effort to leave the house and scavenge throughout the city
Consume content in video format in bed, which involves many accidental white lies("Just one last episode...")
Mentally prepare myself for another day of lack of productivity and go to bed knowing I am loved, that everything is fine and will be fine, and that three years later I won't be looking at the exact same paper, wondering if there's somehting wrong with my academic career.

I have a feeling that this isn't a completely relatable day for most people out there, for first of all, not everyone lives in Germany. More importantly, not everyone would choose to do a degree in theoretical physics. Perhaps it is exactly the nature of research in this field itself, but the lack of regular creative output has been inflamatory, causing an ache in my busy head that is only comparable to a day-care playground. (I used to joke that statistians should model the running kids there with stochastic 2-D particle collision with boundary conditions.)

I had been a gigantic bookworm growing up. Oweing to my retrospectively relatively autistic tendencies, I had always preferred spending time by myself and getting lost in books over going outside and meeting my friends. I had a great dream brewed up over the years culminating in junior high. I wanted to be a writer, a novelist. I wrote tens of thousands of words and published them on various websites during primary school until I got a company reaching out to me, offering me a status of official writer for their website. Of course, I was too young to sign the contract myself and for some mysterious reason, about the same time, I made a U-turn and got myself hooked with physics. And I've been a physicist ever since!

Fast forward to when I was in junior high, my best friend was this brilliant young rebel, a fierce, smart, unyielding and daring girl who dreamt big and would let nothing stop her. She was just as big a book worm as me, we read books after books during classes and lunch breaks, we watched arthouse movies after school. Our secret code language was comics, small square gridded comics in which our classmates and teachers all had their own animated caricature. I was in love with Nietzsche reading Also Sprach Zarathustra while she was in an online anarchist community reading The Good Soldier Svejk. One of the things we so passionately hated was the mentality of people around us. In a Chinese coastal city, progressive minds weren't in danger of overabundance back in 2013. The teachers tried to isolate us from the rest of the class in fear of contamination. We got so much joy out of our quarantine, when they exiled us from classes we climbed up the secret tower in the school chapel all the way to the bell, from there we got onto the roof and enjoyed the bird's eye view of the empty playgrounds.

But it wasn't before I met my best friend after junior high that I truly dived into the world of philosophy. She is the most studious person I've met when it comes to philosophy. I have met many philosophy majors during uni but none compares to her. We used to spend so many afternoons in the city library, searching for Heidegger, Sartre, Camus...It was almost a unison that we both made our transition from metaphysics to existentialism. Perhaps it was a feature of turbulent youth, but it still appeals to us the most even now.

My love for board games started in uni. For people who aren't very familiar with China as a country, board games aren't items common in most households, including mine. There have been a handful of tabletop games my peers were crazy about growing up, however, out of my dislike for video games(I have severe motion sickness) and general scepticism, I never bothered to try them. I minored in computer science during first year of uni in UK, most of my friends were future programmers, future pillars of our society. One of them was the president of gamesoc for about two years and in second year, I finally took on his invitation and showed up at my very first game night. I remember looking at the enormous box full of cardboard boxes thinking: What a bunch of nerds...hyping over some...cardboard boxes.

Well yeah...I became one of those nerds myself. I kept stuffing my Ikea Kallax shelves full with these cardboard boxes because I just can't get enough. One of the luckiest things about my relationship with my boyfriend is that we are both highly competitive gamers at heart. He is a big MTG nerd and I play anything that doesn't involve scary fantasy monsters/demons or some swift walking boots. (Sorry gloomhaven and MTG) I confess that I would totally buy a mechanically mediocre board game just because the art is cute enough, but I am also a strategy nerd that has a very good feeling for the EV of my moves. When it comes to navigating myself in a game with an overwhelming amount of components and scoring mechanisms, accompanied with a library of cards, I am invincible.(against my boyfriend)

So above summed up are the three biggest passions of mine, physics, philosophy and board games. Knowing my yearn for writing and sharing, my boyfriend suggested using this website as a blog. I'm sure blogging here will help me get through my unproductive days, but more importantly, I still believe that the words written act as a timestamp that encapsules my mind at a certain point in time. When I read back the things I've written in the past few years, I see in front of me snapshots of my head, a circus with changing audience.