Jinxing

By Jonathan Lam on 01/22/18

Tagged: brain-dump

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I've had a relatively spectacular day. Not one amazing accomplishment and not a holiday, but little happy surprises. A surprisingly fluid turnout for the English paper oral defense. A surprisingly high grade for my Spanish presentational final. The arrival of the Regeneron STS participation t-shirt. The arrival of the bowling team shirts, just in time for our big match against Fairfield. Watching a Ghibli movie in peace. Getting my sister to listen to me learn to code, even if just a little bit. Doing the chores spontaneously and not having any family arguments. Going to sleep early.

And, finally, for the first time in three years, have a weekend without the heavy weight of doing homework, studying for standardized tests, or applying to colleges.

Which also means tomorrow will probably be a pretty terrible day (I say "terrible" for fear of using expletives, but more than just terrible). I'm predicting a catastrophic loss against Fairfield with lower-than-my-current-performance performance. Last week we had a record high as a team. This week, I'm expecting a season low.

Being a student of math, I hate that I can even begin to believe what I'm about to state. It's just tomfoolery to the statistician or psychologist. But it always feels so true, often making me lose faith in both randomness and practice.

I believe in jinxing.

If I had to pick one superstition that I believe most, jinxing would most definitely be it. In high school, I've felt it so strongly both in academics and in sports. It only seems to apply when there's a certain degree of uncertainty, such as when I'm not taking a test for an easy class. (For example, if I take a Statistics test, I have little reason to worry.) But when I take an English or Spanish final, even after many hours of preparation, I can come into them with complete confidence and disgrace my academic average during the test, or I can enter with very little practice at all and come up with beautiful syntheses on the spot. It never seems that confidence aligns with the result.

Take bowling or cross country this year.

In cross country, I knew that I couldn't do too poorly. I ran more this summer than for any other year in high school. But when I came to cross country this year, I burnt out in the first week— understandably. But then there was this inexplicable fatigue that made me feel as though I couldn't heal. And in bowling, I thought that three years of solid improvement would mean a glorious senior year. And how wrong I was.

But then it might seem easy to suggest "jinxing the jinx." But it's not as easy as it sounds. Trying to jinx a jinx into glory just means that you have the positive intention to start, and it'll just push a person deeper into the abyss. Perhaps "riding the jinx" may be more appropriate, because that subsequent jinxed feeling may depress a person, and, if timed just right, may jinx a person back into a positive state.

The problem now with bowling is that I expect a 300 game some time this season. I tell myself every game that I need to get a great game. This year, I was expecting so much, and it ended up just the opposite. I don't think I deserved the 300 game. Even now, after improving for a few years after the high game, I don't think I deserve it, logically. But, I instinctively feel that it should happen again.

Recently the frenzy of ups-and-downs in my bowling career has left me in a crazy competition of jinxes. It seems that, for every incoming match, the instantaneous state in the crazy rollarcoaster of my mental confidence for bowling at the time of the match will seal my fate in the opposite direction.

And that just means tomorrow will be a terrible day.

This is probably the only post I've had on my mind since sophomore year and THL. I just felt the strong conviction to write it today.

On a potentially happier note, the new Barlow Bowling website is (essentially) finished! See it at jbhsbowling.github.io. It's much more modular than the old website, and it's something I could see myself passing onto future generations of Barlow Bowling.