I failed my driving test for the 3rd time today, but I don’t really care at all. The first time was because I didn’t stop for long enough at a stop sign + didn’t know the driving course so I almost missed some of the turns, and the second and third times were both because I was too far from the curb in parallel parking. Ironically, I actually parallel parked correctly the first time which is really sad. Parallel parking is really hard for me because my family’s car doesn’t have rear view camera and I’m kinda too short to see through the right mirror properly so I just park based on *vibes* (aka I have like a 50% success rate). But I literally don’t know where the car is when I’m parallel parking, I just guess… recently I have been trying to use vague reference points to figure out when to turn. I should probably figure out how to adjust the mirror properly. Anyway, I was not expecting to pass the test today so I’m not really sad. I’m not really in a hurry to get my license because I’m not really going to drive in college. I kinda want to see how many times I can fail the test without trying to fail. However, I don’t want to waste my mom’s time…
However, I am still bothered about doing badly on the Putnam a few weeks ago. I think it will be a while before I get over it.
It’s really weird; before the Putnam I was expecting absolutely nothing, and thought I’d just do my best without really caring about the result (hence my very minimal practice). During and immediately after the test, I thought I had done fine. And then I thought about it for the next few hours, and the next few days, and over time I became less and less confident that I had done fine. In fact, I now believe that I did pretty badly. I can’t even think about it without painful flashbacks to what could have been. To if I had thought faster, known to write more down, panicked more, taken it all more seriously. If I had realized that my trying harder might mean the Caltech administration stops thinking its math students are weak.
Bad performances are slip-ups if you have many prior good performances to back them up, but if you have none, then they’re just bad performances. And here I am starting from zero.
And so, I’m again expecting absolutely nothing…
This is one of my biggest 2024 regrets… well actually, I have a LOT of 2024 regrets. But I learned a LOT of lessons in 2024. I think I wrote somewhere that I thought 2024 would be the year in which I change the most, and it is true by a long shot as of now. I don’t even recognize myself from a year ago. Back then, I was in college app hell, battling with a mental malaise that was suffocating my brain and long-term vision, and my life ran on nostalgia from pre-senior-year events that was only getting fainter and fainter. I pity that self so much -- if only I could give them a fraction of the freedom and happiness I have now.
I hope to do better on both the Putnam and driving tests in 2025 :)