Rubik's Cubing

The Square1 cube variant solves to

I’ve found from my own experience and teaching others that learning efficiently is a two-step process. The first and most important step is to become inspired to learn a skill or curious about the subject so that your mind and fingers itch to assimilate it. This has got to happen sooner or later or those “Ahah!” moments just don’t come, the experience is painful, and all but the most resolute or most pressured give up entirely after a while. Sometimes you have to begin step 2 (actually learning material) before you can bring yourself over the inspiration threshold, but if you don’t, you at best obtain only a passive understanding of the subject. So if I have to learn how to do something, I spend a really long time figuring out why learning it will be awesome. Then it is effortless to excitedly blast from the starting blocks. Anyway, that’s what I wrote this essay on speedcubing — to inspire friends to get past step one (don’t laugh at my times, it was sophomore year).

Ah, the 3×3x3 Rubik’s cube. Beauty unparalleled. Crisp, sharp, even, Lexan textured tiles. 190 cubic centimeters of red, green, blue, yellow, white, and orange elegance. In supple and expectants hands I hold this hallowed item, preparing to solve. Feelings of anticipation. Lost in the wash of color, I feel the smoothness of the 30-weight lube that lines the clean black crevices. A faint smell of plastic permeates the room, vaguely similar to the pleasant aroma of a newly bought automobile. A familiar soft swishing sound caresses my ears as I tentatively turn the first face, beginning anew a journey into the unknown.

As if alive, the cube emits a quiet clicking, moving faster and faster in a blur of light as it becomes one with the fingers driving it, receiving and giving energy, and filling its holder with focus and determination. Front center clockwise, right counterclockwise, top clockwise, my fingers beat in a blinding crescendo, and faster than the words describing their motion can form in my very mind, they fly through algorithm after algorithm, disregarding logical reason, engrained in comfortable patterns of antiquity, lost in memory. Orient last layer, FRUR’U’F’, RUR’URU2R’. I pause for breath, suddenly, I see the path! The 15-move algorithm flies not from my fingers, but seemingly from the cube itself, faster than thought, sound, or even light.

I throw the cube down, filled with triumph! Solved! Then, in trepidation, praying my months’ work has proved fruitful, I lift the stopwatch. As I press the stop button, not only the clock, but time itself freezes. After veritable millennia, my eyes focus themselves on the digits, unable to process what they see. Then the reality churns back into motion.

CRUD! Still 24.04 seconds! I slump back, defeated by something weighing less than 6 ounces…

Driven to greater determination, I fish my 5×5x5 cube from a bag of chattels, ready to roll the dice of fate once more.

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