Assembled a 4x4x4 Rubik's Cube, Went to the Gym

9:25 PM (of Monday, November 25th 2024)

Today is Sunday, November 24th 2024 and the most distinct thing I can recall that I did today was that I put together a 4x4x4 Rubik's Cube. I didn't solve one, and I do know how to solve them, I've known how to solve up to 5x5x5 cubes since I was in middle school, 4x4x4 is harder in my opinion but they're solved similarly. Anyway, it wasn't really a Rubik's cube, it was a Chinese "speed cube", and how it's put together is completely different.

I was just playing around with it and spinning it quickly, and it fell apart. One of the pieces fell off, so I put it back. Then I kept twisting and playing around with it, and it fell apart again, this time more pieces came out. As I was trying to put it together, a large section of it collapsed. I said screw it, and just took apart the whole thing. This was a mistake, as I'd come to realize.

The photo I've uploaded, is already the cube 80% assembled. The hardest part was putting together the white pieces to make that sphere. I didn't take a picture of all the white pieces, but there were like 50 tiny pieces, there were so many. It's so many pieces. OMG. I wanted to cry, I wanted to give up. It's a $5 cube, so I would have saved a lot of time by just throwing away all the pieces when it fell apart, and I did consider that. However, I had this challenge in my mind, that if I could put this together, then certain things I believed in would come true. I wouldn't call them my goals and dreams, because they're not that, it's more like superstitious belief that a bad event won't happen if I do this, and this good event will, I don't want to go into the specifics of what they are though.

But yeah, I believed that if I didn't put this together, then this specific bad event would happen, and that an entirely separate unrelated good event wouldn't happen. So I had to assemble it, I had to put my entire life and being into putting this puzzle cube back together or else a bad event would happen, and this thing I want to happen wouldn't!

It look like 4 hours or something. I took breaks every now and then. This thing was so hard to put together because it's extremely delicate. The white pieces especially. Turning it once in this state would make the whole thing collapse, and it's so hard, it's so hard to even put a teeny amount of the white pieces together. I could give someone 3 pieces, and the shell of the white part, and give it to someone, and they would never be able to put even 3 pieces together, or it would take them forever. It took me forever, but I did learn some techniques to put it together.

The color pieces were just a little bit easier. It was still frustrating and delicate, I still couldn't turn it or else the whole thing would collapse, but it was easier than putting the white sphere together. It was so hard to put the white sphere together. OMG. OMG. I can't write in words how frustrating it was. It required absolute precision and delicateness, a teeny tiny nudge could shatter the whole thing, no joke. Imagine trying to stack 5 pieces of rice grain on top of each other. No, 10 pieces of dry rice grain on top of each other, a tiny nudge would make it all collapse. It was that hard.

I was considering cheating and gluing the white pieces together. I'm really not joking when I say it was delicate. If I messed up once, the entire thing would blow up. It took me like 3 hours to put that sphere together, making lots of mistakes, having parts of it collapse here and there. It was so hard. It takes like 10-20 minutes to put 3 white pieces together. I'm not joking with how frustrating it was.

Anyway, due to my silly superstition, I was able to do it. I put it together. I felt like a champion. A hero. A legend. I didn't watch any tutorial or anything to put it together, it was a trial and error process. I looked up videos just now to see if other people have the same type, and the video "How to assemble your 4x4 speed cube The Easiest Method" is the closest. His was still far easier, his pieces are magnetized and they slipped together easily. His sphere pieces were green instead of white, and they weren't as delicate and they didn't fall apart so easily. He's actually able to put it together easily, but mine, no, no, they were slippery and fell apart in a second. It was so hard to assemble. So hard.

Anyway, in the evening, I went to a hospital with my parents to pick up some medicine for my mom. It was the fanciest hospital I had ever been to.

Then I went to the gym with my dad. I did a few different workouts. This gym is tiny and doesn't have any heavy weights, so I just did some calisthenics of push ups, pull ups, chin ups, squats, leg raises, and planking. The other day, using this same exact superstition technique, just thinking about "if I do this many pull ups then this good thing will happen," I was able to do 10 pull ups in a row. I didn't write an entry for that date I think, or maybe I did and just forgot to write about this achievement, but yeah, it's an achievement.

Anyway, that was my day today.