January 2022 New Year, New Scenery, New Atmosphere

Life#

The First Day of the New Year#

The first day of 2022 can be said to be full of confidence! After posting on social media last night, I planned to start the year in a carefree and enjoyable way, setting an example.

Updated the music library of CloundPlayer, including albums by Faye Wong and Utada Hikaru, allowing the day to be surrounded by wonderful songs 😊.
Made Braised Tofu according to Xiachufang Recipe, I personally think the essence is the Douban sauce 😍, paired with grain rice, the soft and hard combination has a unique flavor, delicious and filling.
How could I miss running 🏃‍? In the evening, I went to Biological Island to complete the first run of the New Year. Overall it was easy, but after 6 kilometers, I clearly hit a wall in stamina, it seems the breakthrough point is here.
After finishing today's R for Data Science, I went to watch the horror movie “Hereditary”, which should be classified as mysterious and cult-like, the horror atmosphere was quite lacking.

Interestingly, I started feeling emo in the evening, not sure if it was due to loneliness or being stirred by someone’s thoughts, maybe both. I wanted to find a horror movie to stimulate my spirit, but found it didn’t work much. However, I felt better the next day. My sensitive and overthinking nature really shouldn’t think too much at midnight; how did I forget how to write my signature — think simply, why did I forget so quickly, how annoying 😶.

Loss and Gain#

There was a small accident; I had originally made an appointment to go to the museum in the morning, but I arrived about ten minutes late and couldn’t get in. This is already the second time I’ve missed a museum appointment. Tsk, tsk, it seems the timing just isn’t right. However, with loss comes gain; I discovered that the museum’s appointment system releases the number of no-shows from the previous time slot directly to the next time slot — but it was only because I couldn’t get in that I found out how they handle it. If I had entered on time, I wouldn’t have discovered this, adding another useless piece of knowledge 🙄.

Picture · Body | Warm | Heart#

Being warmed by the sun, the heart warmed by love

I’m Coming to Beihai#

Due to the pandemic, I couldn’t return to Hebei, and since the house in Beihai has been rented out, this year I experienced staying at a friend’s house in Beihai for the New Year. It’s been many years since everyone has scattered, and I have few friends to begin with, becoming even more reclusive in the past two years. This reunion with old friends brought both changes and constants, the biggest feeling was that it seemed I had a brief connection with the world again, adding a precious experience to my short life.

Capture#

Tidy Data#

What is tidy data
How to make data tidy
The most important thing is to know what should be observations and what should be variables based on specific business needs. If the existing data organization is not tidy, it can be tidied up through pivoting or separating and combining operations. Specifically:
Pivoting
- A variable is spread across multiple columns — pivot_longer()
- An observation is scattered across multiple rows — pivot_wider()
Separating and Combining
- Multiple variables stacked in one column — separate()
- A variable scattered across multiple columns — unite()

Amazing R Websites#

R Charts provides code examples for R graphics created with base R graphics, ggplot2, and other packages.
Tidy Data Tutor allows you to write R and Tidyverse code in your browser and see how the data frame changes at each step of the pipeline.

Observations#

Markov Chain#

While scrolling through Twitter, I saw someone lamenting wanting to take everything they have back to the past to make up for regrets. One person's response to this question reminded me of my university studies on Markov chains ——

@Baye: I often think how nice it would be if I had everything I have now in my twenties, then I wouldn’t have to bear so many regrets. ↩︎
- @JustCast: There will be many different opportunities in the next twenty years.

* The “memorylessness” of Markov chains: The probability distribution of the next state can only be determined by the current state, and events that occurred before it in the time series are irrelevant.

Regarding life and choices, perhaps it should be as @Arya Yang said: "Once you decide the direction of the next step, never define yourself by the good or bad results you have achieved at any time."

A Person in the Universe#

How could I have been so carefree and energetic before, but now I’m becoming increasingly restless and impatient?

I know I’m not smart enough, and I’m sensitive and easily disturbed. Trying to grasp everything inevitably leads to chaos and confusion. So I just need to calm down and hold on to that little bit I cherish and not give up easily.

The above two paragraphs are my thoughts recorded at the time while reviewing my recent writings. It’s clear that I’ve been in a state of self-doubt and exploration during this period, which is why I’ve been keen on observing the words of sensitive and delicate people online, noting down the thoughts of these strangers. When I look at them all together here, it feels quite wonderful, as everyone goes from being "a grain of sand in the era" to "a person in the universe":

@💙💛: I need to frequently confirm whether my heart is kind, whether it is upright, whether my thoughts are conforming, whether they are assimilated, whether they are fragmented and lacking depth... This leads me to often feel that I am not good enough. I am foolish and superficial, sometimes even malicious, I am guilty.
@KMemo233: I feel like my depression is about to relapse... Sometimes I desperately want to gain others' recognition, as if I need to prove something. Sometimes I feel lonely and empty. Today my head feels heavy, as if all the blood is in my head, and I have no energy.
- When I feel anxious, I often fidget with my hands.
- I feel like a wet towel, soaked in pain, twisting my whole body into a twist, yet still dripping with the juice of suffering.
@A Polar Bear: I had breakfast with my sister this morning, just sent her off to school. I was in the car looking at the rearview mirror, and suddenly my eyes turned red. In the blink of an eye, she has grown so big. My sister was born in 2005, 14 years younger than me. I accompanied her through her childhood. Today she said she really likes the books I left at home, including works by Yukio Mishima, Borges, and Yu Hua, and the CDs are all from the music of that era, which she loves. I suddenly feel so sad that people are always meeting and parting.
- @Biantaibear01: My brother and I have a similar age gap. He played with me before I was three, but after that, we had fewer opportunities to live together because he joined the army and started working early, leaving home. Many of the later unexpected events were borne by my brother and me together. Once he got angry and said: "Have you forgotten you still have a brother?" Because we hadn’t lived together for so long, I couldn’t perceive him, but later long talks made our relationship very good.
@Philo2022: Nothing has meaning, but being interesting is also fine. When doing nothing, I can happily pass the time; when there is work to do, I can help others; when my mind is active, I feel fulfilled; when exploring and discovering, I can find new joys in the mundane. Who knows what will happen after death? At least while alive, being able to feel joy often is definitely not a loss.

Reflection#

My Reading Memory#

After I learned to read, the earliest reading memories I can trace back to, aside from textbooks, are primarily due to being in a Catholic family, so I had access to the Bible and some other religious pamphlets from a young age. I remember treating these as little stories, even during church services, where the scriptures were too dry for me, and those verses harder to understand than classical Chinese. I would spend the entire service thinking about what story each verse was telling. Therefore, my favorite readings were the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, the Bible, and the biographical stories published monthly in the Faith Report, as they all had plots and coherence, forming my earliest narrative and plot-driven reading experience.

Later, after a few years of school, my older siblings would bring back some extracurricular books from school (not sure if they were birthday gifts from classmates or borrowed for sharing). My father, who worked away from home, used his skills to build a four-tier bookshelf from a few wooden boards. I still remember the dark green paint I chose for it. Unfortunately, it accompanied us for nearly twenty years, and in recent years, while cleaning, I couldn’t remember to take a photo of it; all of this can only exist in my memory now. I still clearly remember a few books I read at that time — "The Legend of the Condor Heroes," "The Three Musketeers," and "The Little Prince." My later fondness for fantasy and martial arts web novels is probably related to these three books, hhh.

Then came high school, where I began to be exposed to mobile phones and the internet, leading to a crazy obsession with online novels: gangsters, urban, western fantasy, martial arts, fantasy, and even danmei. I really don’t know how many of these electronic books I read at that time. I remember my first phone didn’t have a touchscreen, and the page-turning button changed color from being pressed so much. Later, I used a small stylus, which scratched a groove on the protective film on the right side of the screen 😂. Some say these are the spiritual opiates of that era, but for me, who had never seen anything in the rural area and knew nothing of the outside world, I believed the content greatly satisfied my curiosity at the time. The authors’ casual descriptions of urban life and work, as well as the entanglements and portrayals of various relationships, filled my barren and parched mind. This was one of the few ways I had to access this information, so I relied on them, read them, and became deeply immersed in them.

A shift occurred in high school. As I gradually became accustomed to city life, my way of engaging with things increased. Spoiled by this, I began to be picky about those online novels, flipping through them, and slowly only one or two could hold my attention until I found them all tasteless. Looking back now, due to changes in my experiences and circumstances, I had slowly outgrown the phase of reading those books. Later, with the advent of libraries, I began to love going to the library, and the books I read gradually shifted to best-selling modern works and some major classics.

In recent years, my reading experience has changed significantly. Looking back at my records, aside from some technical books, the main types of books I read are basically four categories — history, science fiction, detective suspense, and modern Chinese novels. These books not only help me understand myself and my environment and the world but also, like how I once peered into the outside world through online novels, continue to take me on journeys through those worlds and fields that I am curious about and do not yet know.

In the past two years, I have also slowly begun some new experiences: focusing on new fields, engaging with new literary forms, and getting to know new authors. I am grateful for the books I have encountered along the way and those I will meet in the future, and for the act of reading itself, which has been a good companion that has never been absent at different stages of my life. I hope to continue growing together in the future.