Nova Daily - 4 March 2025

Hi!

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

- Carl Jung

I'm sure you know the feeling. You go to bed with a lot of plans and things to do for the next day, and then you wake up not wanting to do anything at all. You almost oversleep so you're stressed when you leave the house, and the projects that you were supposed to do just don't get done. You manage to get through the day only just, you manage to be polite to some degree, but really you're annoyed at everything and everyone, and inside your head the rage is building. You think to yourself: "Ok. The first person today who gets on my wrong side, even for one tiny bit, and I'll snap. I'll explode. Someone will feel my wrath today."

And then you get home after a long day, and no-one was so kind as to pull the trigger

Yesterday might well have been such a day for my opponent. Today it was my turn.

Bad days

An often used metaphor is to compare a bad mood with a bad weather. Both suck, but you get over either of them eventually.

Feeling bad is no fun. Not for myself, and not for anyone in my environment. I'd prefer not to have these bad days too often. However, bad days do happen, and I think that there's no sense in hiding or denying the emotions that I feel during those days. I see no reason to bottle up my feelings inside. I don't have to make it a display in front of the world, but stress release is important.

There are those who would have you believe that unresolved sentiment can lead to terminal diseases. To my knowledge there is no evidence to support this pseudoscientific claptrap, and I'd have loved to meet someone like this today so that I could direct the storm at that person.

I found this link that gives some good tips on what to do when having a bad day. I really like the almost humorous phrasing of some of the things. Especially the "You survived 100% of your bad days" had me laugh for a second when I read it for the first time. Laughter has a powerful and immediate effect on the mood, and if not used in excess or as a shield, it can be a great weapon to fight mental misfortunes. It can also put everything nicely in perspective: I've been worse. I've been much worse. And although this day won't make it to the ones that I'll happily remember at the end of the week, I'll survive this day as well.

It'll get better. It always does.

The game

So, today was a bad day. My game didn't exactly help either, although I could've played better. I had chances. But so did my opponent. And it's in these Reversed Open Sicilians with 8.b3 that I still have a lot to learn. There's definitely something to be gained from this game, and I'll be happy to do so.

My thoughts:

This'll be it for the moment. The deeper analysis will come later.