Results.

Donald Trump was announced as the 45th President of the United States yesterday. People were calling it a surprise, but it wasn't really for me. Not because I have an in-depth knowledge of American politics or anything like that; it was more of a hunch. And anyway, after Leicester City winning the Premier League, Portugal winning the Euros, and Brexit all happened earlier this year, nothing should really be a surprise anymore.

(Incidentally, I read somewhere that if you'd put a £5 bet on Leicester City, Brexit and Trump, you would have won £15 million. It's been a crazy year.)

I had the luxury of being able to follow the results live yesterday (my Master's proposal is still yet to be approved due to administrative issues), and I have to say I got stressed when the final results were announced. I decided to get off Facebook for the rest of the day (though I did accidentally go on once later out of habit) to avoid the inevitable barrage of negativity, and de-stressed myself with a bit of PES, football with some local kids, and then dinner with my new housemates.

I think I would still have been stressed had Hillary Clinton won instead of Trump. Both candidates are flawed (to put it lightly) in their own ways, and the outlook would have been bleak whatever the outcome of the election. If I'd had to vote, I don't think I would have been able to bring myself to vote for either of them. As it is, I'm glad I'm not a US citizen.

For the past 18 months, I've been keeping an eye on the US election through talk show segments on YouTube, mainly for entertainment purposes. There was, of course, the whole getting-updated-on-current-events thing, but I frankly wouldn't have paid so much attention to the election if it following it hadn't also been so entertaining. Laughter is good for my mental health, and as someone who likes to keep mentally healthy, I try to get it whenever I can.

I do, of course, get the importance of keeping up with the world, regardless of whether it's presented in an entertaining format or not. I do read the news, and I do get concerned with the stuff that's going on. There's always something happening, good or bad. There's always something to talk about, always something to discuss.

The problem with talking about current events, though, is that there's always so much negativity involved. There's so much hate, anger, sadness. So many problems are out there in the world, and so many people getting upset over them. All this emotion is understandable, of course, and sometimes even necessary. You can feel what you want over what you want, but please don't drag me into it. There's already too much negativity as it is, and I don't want to be a part of it.

One of the things I want most in this life is simply to be happy. I realize I can't be happy all the time, but it's something I always aspire to be and strive towards becoming. Happiness should be more than just an emotion, which is temporary and fleeting - it should be an underlying state that you always revert to. Whatever it is you're going through, you can rest easy knowing that soon it'll be over and you'll be happy again.

It may be intelligent to to be able to think about big, important things and talk about them, but it's wise to know what's big and important to you and just focus on that. Trying to know everything about everything is great and all, but it's also exhausting. No matter how wonderful you think your mind is, you shouldn't overwork it.

I've never been one to publicly offer my thoughts on trending topics, because most of the time I can't be bothered to look up too much about something that will soon come to pass anyway. It's funny how everyone on social media at the moment is suddenly an expert on US politics as well as its effects on the global economy. Just like how not too long ago everyone was suddenly an expert on Islamic law and jurisdiction.

It's great to have opinions, as it shows that you have a functioning brain, but quite frankly no one cares. Your voice is just one of millions (billions?), and what you think doesn't really matter unless you're somebody important. That's just how it is.

Sometimes it's just better to keep what you think to yourself, especially if the environment is as toxic at is right now. Whatever has happened, has happened, and there's nothing more we can do about it. Focus on the present, keep your sanity, and look ahead to the future. There's still more to come, and you'll never move forward if you're still stuck in reverse.

Waiting.

I do not like waiting. It's just one of those things in life that you kind of just accept and can sometimes do nothing about, but that doesn't make the act of waiting any less unenjoyable. We've all done our fair share of waiting throughout our lives, of course, as have I, and I like to consider myself a person who's quite good at it. Unlike other things I'm good at, however, waiting is something that I would much prefer to avoid doing whenever possible.

Linguistically speaking, waiting is a verb, or a word that indicates an action. I find that to be a bit paradoxical really, because, in my case anyway, waiting usually involves me doing precisely nothing. I have that ability to simply zone out and literally not think about or do anything, and this particular ability is my regular go-to whenever I find that I am forced to wait for something. It's quite handy when I don't feel like wasting my phone battery through aimless scrolling on social media or playing the one mobile game that I have.

I've been trained from an early age to remain vigilant in the face of an extended period of waiting. Looking back now, the time I used to spend waiting for my mother or either of my grandfathers to come pick me up from school might not have been all that lengthy, but back then it seemed like forever. My sister and I used to find comfort in Billy Joel's "The Longest Time", although years later I discovered that the context of the song was quite different from what we used it for.

I incidentally just read about Arsenal, the football club I support, employing an Austrian 'gridlock consultancy firm' to design a new queuing system to reduce waiting times on match days. The fact that such a service even exists is actually sort of amazing to me, but I guess it makes complete sense. People specialize in everything these days, and due to supply and demand, the fact that a lot of people, like me, don't like waiting, there was always going to be someone finding some way to make money from addressing that.

Having said that, though, waiting is just part of life; there's only so much you can do to speed things up, but most of the time it's impossible to eliminate the wait altogether. The world today, among other things, is characterized by its need for instantaneousness; everything has to be done now, now, now. It's a viewpoint I personally agree with, as I don't really see why something that can be done quickly, well, isn't being done quickly. However, I do accept that there is always a certain amount of waiting that needs to be done - I just always prefer that it's as small an amount as possible.

Sometimes, though, there's really nothing you can do to reduce your waiting time. I'm currently waiting for the proposal for my Master's project to be approved before I can properly start with my research, and I've been told that the approval process typically takes a month, though mine might just be able to be completed slightly sooner. This was last week, so I have potentially three more weeks in which I have no choice but to wait.

I could, of course, get started on my reading, which is what my supervisors have advised me to do. It would at least be better than simply doing nothing. With me being me, however, exactly no relevant reading has been done. I've pretty much been doing what I usually do when I'm waiting for something, which is basically nothing.

I guess I've been hardwired since young to do nothing while waiting for something, but it's a habit I'm trying to break. I intend on being at least a little productive this week, if only so I can tell my supervisors that I've actually been doing something besides watching YouTube videos all day. Rambling about the act of waiting is one way to get the juices flowing, in any case.

Warming Up.

I left home for Nilai this morning to get a reference form from my former lecturer, which I needed in order to complete my application for my MPhil program. I'd actually hoped she could just scan it and email it to me so I could just send it to the university I was applying at online, which is what I was doing with another reference form from another former lecturer. As it happened, she insisted that I come get it from her in person, and sure enough, I received it sealed within an envelope.

What that entailed was that I was going to have to physically deliver the envelope to the university, so I figured I might as well just print out the other reference form and deliver that along with it. The only problem was that it took until almost lunchtime for my other lecturer to send me that other form, so by the time I'd received and printed it out, I wasn't gonna make it to the university in time to catch the staff there before they went out for lunch. I was just going to have to wait until after lunch to go there.

While waiting, I decided to go have lunch with my friend, who was also a course junior from MIU, and had recently graduated after finishing his internship. The guy had recently managed to dig up his old Pokemon cards and had been spending the weekend raking in a ton of cash from selling them off. Incidentally, we were having lunch where we were while waiting for a couple of his customers to come and meet up with him.

I mentioned in a previous post about a conversation we had previously about possible future careers. It's been a couple of months since then, and I guess you could say things have gotten less murky regarding what I see myself doing with my life. My friend was telling me that I should just go ahead and become a lecturer right after finishing my Master's, mainly because he thinks I'm good at teaching and also happen to be a very patient person.

Fair enough, I do enjoy teaching - I genuinely loved helping people out with their studies back in school, and that continued throughout college and university. And I do feel that I have more patience than most, but mainly because I just prefer to spend my energy quelling my rage instead of feeding it. I've also previously stated multiple times in this blog that I see myself as ultimately becoming a lecturer...but straight off the bat? I'm not too sure about that. I still think I should spend some time working in the financial industry first, which seems to me like the responsible thing to do with the (little) knowledge I possess about it.

One route into the industry that I'm planning to explore is that of a certified financial planner (CFP), which, on the surface, is a qualification that seems to be quite obtainable. Being able to manage your own finances is an important skill to have, and to help people with that seems like a role in society that I would actually like to fill. I was explaining an investment-linked insurance plan to a friend the other day, and I quite enjoyed it. Told you I like teaching.

For now, though, I'll just wait on the offer letter from the university for my MPhil, which I'm told can take up to a month because of approvals and stuff; during that time, I should probably just start what I can on the research. Once everything starts, things are probably gonna get really busy, so I might as well start warming up.