Chance

There is thing about chance regarding meeting people that bewilders me. Mitchell in Ghostwritten puts it in a very interesting way.

A man in a train sees a woman in a suburb train and takes a liking to her in some old-school Romeo and Juliet love-at first-sight style.

“Look at her! Look at that woman. Febrile. Corvine. Black velvet clothes, not an ounce of sluttiness about her. Intelligent and alert, what’s that book she’s reading? And her skin- that perfect West African black, so black it has a bluish tinge. Those gorgeous, proud lips. What’s she reading? Tilt it this way a bit, love… Nabokov! I knew it. She has a brain! But if I break that rule and talk to her, even if I break the middle-way seating rule and sit one seat nearer to her than I need to, she’ll think I’m threatening her and the defenses will slam down. None of these problems would exist if we had just met by chance at a party. Same her, same me. But chance brings us together here, where we cannot meet.”

Chance brings us together here, where we cannot meet. Doesn’t this ring a bell? Haven’t we all met a guy/girl whom we really wanted to know but did not have a chance to do so in a way that if you made an effort to do so, it would warrant suspicion towards you? You see a girl you really like in school. You notice that she often gazes at things blankly. Damn those puppy eyes. Boy o boy, isn't she cute? You really want to know her. You are shy. You see her in the library, and you think of approaching her and initiating a conversation. You think to yourself, "what will your friends think of it? What will she think of you?" It’s not worth it. Going out of the way to know someone usually leads to disappointment. The best course of action to you, is inaction and so you fail to act.

The situation changes now. You see her on the street, it starts to rain heavily all of a sudden. She’s getting wet. You have an umbrella, she doesn’t. You offer her some temporary shelter. Everything’s going smooth. She smiles at you, you smile back. What’s the difference you ask? Chance. Thing is, it doesn’t happen at all. So all you can think of all day is jejune thoughts like when she’s walking down the lecture hall you think to yourself “Wouldn't it be nice if she trips (albeit slightly) and falls near me so I have the chance to help her up.” Or thoughts like “it’ll be nice if she boards the bus one day and is out of change for the ride, so you have the chance to offer to pay for her ride out of a kind heart.” WHAT KIND HEART you say?!? I can’t disagree on that. What Kind heart?

Chance is such a strange thing.

Here’s another situation regarding chance that puzzles me. Let me begin by describing myself as a very unlucky person vis-a-vis the people around me. When I mentioned this to my friends, they just shrug me off and say something like “It is because you only remember the bad things that happen to you more often than the good ones, you think that you are an unlucky person.” or "Everyone says they are the unluckiest person on Earth" I beg to differ. It just seems to me, that I was born an unlucky person. That is why I don’t gamble because no matter what the odds are, even if its 50-50, they are against me. (*Note if I bet on something with you, I'm probably going to win)

I remember how I used to play an online game called FFXI. My clan would form a party to hunt for rare item. Every expedition, there would be around 12 players hunting for one item and when we find it, everybody is given the opportunity to lot for the item. That is we roll a dice, and we are given a number from 1-100. The person who gets the highest roll wins. It so happens that I had been playing that game for 3 years and every time I lot for an item, I lose! Imagine this- there is a 50% chance for me to roll a number above 500, but seems to me most of my rolls fall below 100! It’s really so bad that my team mates will always jokingly laugh at my poor luck. My friend Donald, he’s been playing the game for almost as long as me but during the raids, he has a total of over 30 pieces of equipment from a Dynamis raid, and I have an unbelievable zero!

The point of this entry is not to whine about my bad luck. It’s just that because I know I have a natural disposition to lose when I take a gamble, I always try to make the odds of winning favourable to myself (Who wouldn't?)- That is to say, I will calculate the probability of winning and skew it towards myself by taking calculated risk. In the same game I played, there was this enemy called the Veracious Vivian(VV), that when slayed, has a 1% chance of dropping a really rare and sought after ring. How the game system works is that every 36 hours (3 days) this monster will appear in a fixed area and there are always teams of players camping for it. It’s so popular that it is possible for the area to be packed with around 50 people at once. The team that claims VV first will be allowed to lot for the item. The programmers of this game in some form of twisted humor decided to make the game a little more “interesting” for the players. They made it so that if VV is unclaimed for a good 1 hour, it becomes “Hyper VV” and the odds of dropping the ring when killed would be increased from 1% to 100%.

Being the good o’me, I decided to calculate the odds of getting the ring with both scenarios in mind.

Scenario 1: Killing normal VV

Should VV be camped by an average of 50 players and 5 teams, that is to say 10 players per team, and assuming that each team has an equal chance of claiming VV, the chance of my team claiming VV would be 100/5 = 20%

Since there are 10 players in my team, the odds of me winning the lot for the ring would be 100/10= 10%

Since the ring has a 1% chance to drop, the odds of a player getting the ring would be 0.2X0.1X0.01= 0.02% Wow. 0.02% that’s really encouraging for a 36hours wait every cycle.

Scenario 2: Killing Hyper VV

So I say to myself, wouldn’t it be better for all teams to wait for VV to become Hyper VV and than slay it? I was thinking of the optimum scenario, where everyone would form one team of 50 players, kill hyper VV together and have all players who fought Hyper VV lot together. This way, we can kill it faster and raise our odds of getting the item.

The probability: 1/ 50 = 2% !!

So now the percentage has increased a good 100 times in everybody’s favor to 2%. I don’t know about you but 2% seems chance seems pretty bleak to me too. But being me, every time I was at the scene, I would try to get all the teams to form one bigger team and wait for an hour for VV to become Hyper VV. The strange thing is that nobody is willing to do so and the moment VV appeared, it would be claimed faster than you can blink your eye! I mean how obtuse can everyone get? Here we have two choices and we choose the option that based on logic and some common sense, opt for the lesser of the two. Why? Because men being men, will imagine himself as the winner.

This reminds me of the story of Princess Helen, the most beautiful woman the world has ever seen. When her father, King of Sparta declared Helen of marriageable age, all the Kings, princes, rich and powerful man of the world came to propose to her. It was prophesized that because of Helen, a great war would be fought and many Greeks would die. The King was thus facing a dilemma because he was worried that Helen would be the cause of great envy among men and because of her beauty men would wage a war over her should she not be chosen as their wife. Odysseus, thus proposed a solution for the King to avert any such troubles. The king will announce that all the suitors must swear an oath to uphold Helen’s choice of husband, to be content with it. If anyone should seek to disrupt the marriage or dispute it, then all the others will make war on him. The king asked the reason why they would agree to such terms, and Odysseus replies: “Because men being men, each will imagine himself the winner, and enjoying the benefits of this oath.”

Humans are such strange beings indeed. On one hand, when chance doesn't come our way we pray with all God given earnesty for it to appear. And when we have the choice to increase the chance that favours the outcome we desire, in all spheres of God given opportunities, we preclude it with our stupidity. How poetic.

Lastly, to end my post, there is this issue about women that I fail to understand. Women needs to know that men (whether they know it themselves or not) are natural hunters. And like all hunters when hunting for their prey, sets traps. Of which, the of the most popular trap is by saying things like "I always tell a women when I first meet her that I see other women too... If they can't handle that, they can stop before they start."

This is a sophisticated way of alluring women. Mitch says: "It sends out a challenge, "You could be the one to change me, you could be the one to make me believe in love again." Dwight calls it the "Bird with the Broken Wing Syndrome."" I knew this professional fornicator in army, and every day he would come to me and say "EH MOK! I met this really hot chick last weekend and she had the most amazing tits" or something along that line. I don't know what was up with this guy but he seemed to take great joy boasting about all the women he fucked, from a married doctor to some slut he met at Zouk.

One day out of curiosity I decided to ask him, what was some of the things he does to get the girl. And I'm sure you can guess it- "send out a challenge". What gets to me is that as amusing his stories are to me, he can be a total jerk when he says to me things like "girls are like tissue, once used you throw away." (I feel sorry for the women who knows him). Based on personal experiences, love is overrated. As much as you like it to believe, men (including me) are like leopards, and leopards do not change their spots (Easily). Most of the time, women just end up hurting themselves when they adopt the "Bird with the Broken Wing Syndrome." It's just not worth taking the chance. Trust me on this.

Digressing a little, if I were a girl I would live by this rule- Don't be Naive. So what rules should a guy live on you ask?

Two simple rules:

1. Don't love a girl who has less to lose than you do

2. Don't love a girl who has less to give than you do

You will never get hurt this way.