This can usually be found on Twitter.
This is absolutely beautiful.
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Since I am so obviously on a roll (and, happily, slowly regaining an appetite - yay!), I thought I'd post my comments on a blog entry by a friend of mine. Obviously, that's whats blogs are for, right? To examine the world through the power of words, to debate, to discuss, to explore - to discover what lies beyond the edge. (which edge? Whichever edge, I think. The edge of knowledge or the edge of man. All edges are equally exciting).
I've already picked up about five big mistakes (spelling, grammar, whatever) in my blog so far. Hmmmm. Never mind; I hope you'll all forgive me and let me be for now (and maybe I'll respond to some other stuff later in the night? Once I'm nicely fed and everything).
Okay, yeah, back to the post. Hiding in our own inner self. Admit it, we all do it to some extent or another. It's good to have a place to hide, when the whole world is getting you down. But: what happens once it becomes a problem? When your hiding place begins to smell of too much living, and you need to get out and smell the fresh air for a while? What happens when the room becomes a prison?
Before I go there, let me think about something else first: what value is there in "advising" someone? It's been argued that you can't really affect a person by just advising them - which is silly, really. If someone is too stupid to take the suggestion you're giving them, that's their call. It oughtn't to be your business. But what about people who will just refuse to "let you in" any other way? Well, right now, my position to that is: if they don't want you in, they don't want you in. Live with it. If you're life ain't interesting enough for you to want to live in it (instead of other people's lives) for a while, well, go work on it, but for chrissake leave other people alone.
Coming back, though: so what happens when your room becomes a prison? I say, you're locked in, you've lost your key - break down the door! I've found nothing in the world - not love, not confidence, not even self-worth - is half as useful as a good solid ounce of sheer courage. It's not that hard, either (I think): largely, you just have to pretend to be strong, and you are!
Of course, I've had more weak moments - courageless moments - than I can count. But I've also had my moments of sheer guts (okay, mostly either to impress a girl or just out of exasperation and don't-care-any-more, but still!). Yeah, and they're good, generally. Pushing yourself (even emotionally) just slightly beyond your limits, it's a good feeling.
The secret to a good life, I think, is overcoming your limitations. And that - always - takes courage.
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Largely, I'm here to push three things:
That will be all. Gawd, I sound so like one of those marketing people, don't I? "I'm sorry, Johnny, I can't see clearly; I've got big dollar signs in my eyes". Gawd.
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Nothing much, really. Nice to be blogging again, btw :P. Things are slowly turning 'round and 'round again, and with the exception of a major health blowout (plagued by headaches, stomach problems, etc. last few days), things aren't ... too bad. I guess. Maybe. Am still liable to sudden seizures of depression, but I can generally work my way around them, so it's not too bad.
Just had the most boring tutorial of my life. After a while, it was actually challenging to pay attention and try and learn something! But it's economics - can't be mad at it for too long :).
Will be going on a people-avoidance thing for a while, maybe. Need to get away from it all. Have some volunteering-related stuff happening this weekend. Also, there's the company to dream about (*sigh* *sigh*).
Other than that: Situation Normal, All Bored Out. :P. Cheers!
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Somebody e-mailed me about yesterday's post, and said that she didn't believe in the meaning of life. No meaning to life?? The poor, forsaken youth! So off I went in a huff (excusing myself from my computational science tutorial, obviously) to prove to myself and the world that there might be meaning to it all after all.
In a word: why am I alive now (apart from the always present, all covering, "too-scared-to-end-it-all")? Very simply, I don't believe in an afterlife. If I'm having fun now - and I am having fun now - it's something I'll loose the instant I kick the bucket. However bad things get, they're not 'nothing' - nothing being reserved for that time after the end, the final sleep, whatever you want to call it.
What else? Well, from past experience (and to the irritation of someone, I'm sure) I'll say: love. It's not just about previous posts (see my last), or just the astonishing frequency (hey, it's not that bad, okay?) with which I seem to get crushes on girls (it's much lower than it used to be! I swear!). It don't have to be love with a girl or a guy, neither; not even with a person, if you want. You can love: something you create, something you become, even something that becomes you (figure it out). You can love: a pet. A dog. A stranger (every stranger, if you want!). The list of things which you can love (and the list of things which need love) are endless.
It sounds stupid, yeah - whoever or whatever you love, it will pass; she will grow old. He will loose his teeth and hair. They might die - they will die, eventually. Some rules are forever.
"If you love somebody, let them go. If they fly away, they were never yours to begin with. But if they come back, they're yours forever". Bullshit? I think it might be true. The "forever" bit, anyway. They're all in there somewhere, you know - every single person, every friend, every cat, every building, every field, every home, every place that I have stepped, every thing that I have seen and loved - and, I suppose inevitably, every girl I have ever loved - they're all inside me somewhere. I can still remember ... ah, heck. I have thousands, millions, gazillions of memories, glorious, beautiful, amazing memories. Some real, some not. A boat, on a river of water - on a torrent, a flood, my very first Bombay monsoon! And crosses - on a church - jumping into view from behind a bridge. And that's a fraction, the smallest part of the smallest, the most inconsequentially beautiful memories of my life.
The ones which mean something? A cat - a kitten - held fast against a yellow sweater. "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", on a plane. Crying, on a bed. Friends. Computers. Holding someone so, so close, and wishing it could never end.
Life, it is worth it. Maybe not after you die, but I'm not concerned about that, not really. But it is worth it to me now, and I'm going to insist on squeezing every drop out of it; to take my memories and my emotions, my dreams and my desires, and my hopes and possible futures; to take them all and mix them into a story fit to print. To be able to sit down - sometime, somewhere - and to look back, and to feel good about who I was and where I went and what I did. That, for me, is the meaning of life.
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And what am I mad at? Me, of course!
Here I am (I've heard all this before, it's all coming back to me ... am I just regurgitating another's pain, or something altogether more malicious: hiding my own pain behind someone's else's complaints? Ah well.), wasting it all away. What? Well, look at me. I'm sitting here blogging from my Lab. You know, the place I should be working? Yup. And I have a tutorial tomorrow, and I ain't done nothing so far. And I dun think I will, until tomorrow morning, maybe later. I'm just wasting it all, and you know where that goes, uh-huh. Nowhere. Nada. A zero with a tiny hole in the centre, just big enough to suck your entire future into with no hope of escape, no means of progress, no way out. Just a tiny, tiny hole into which you fit (trust me; I'd give it all up just to fit into that hole. A hole. Any hole. Just to fit in somewhere, to live a moment without shaking it up into a thousand pieces, that would be heaven). And that's it. Lights out, game over. It's all over.
It's times like this (here I go, vomit-vomit-vomit, all over again!) that I understand where suicide might come from. It's not about the depression, really, is it? (It might well be, I suppose, but not for me. Me, I'm so neurotic, I'll make myself believe that things aren't as bad as they seem, rather than get overly depressive about it!) For me, it'd be about the sheer pointlessness of it all. Give me a reason to live, and watch me fly so high, so high, you wouldn't believe. But make me find my own reason, and all you'll get is a bag of bones and blood, forcing-pushing-creeping, one day at a time, towards its own inevitable end. It's sad, but it's true.
I don't know why it's so, but it is: somehow, the one thing that really gets me up and awake and ready is love. Well, I'd say crush, but I promise to come back and edit this once I figure out the difference. It's true. The only program I've written since 1995 that I'm halfway proud of, I wrote cos I had a crush on a girl at the time. And unfortunately, the crush didn't go on long enough to get into the testing bit, so the code has several major bugs. Not working, for one :P. But that's the truth, really.
You know what I hate most about "Glass Palace"? Too many characters who end their sentences with ellipses. "No, but ..." "She's not ..." "I won't say no, but ..." Not really quotes, but that's how they sound. Why are people in the book perpetually being unable to stop themselves from completely a coherent sentences? Did everybody in the mid-20th-century suffer this problem, or what?
Hey, don't want to leave you with totally negative stuff. A brilliant interview with one of the Chernobyl engineers. Not everything in the world is entirely depressing, ever.
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Wow, some day I've just had. Woke up way too late, then had just so much happening all over the place. Oh - bought a new phone! :) What do you think of that, huh? Argh, life is so hectic right now, and tomorrow is going to be such a busy, busy day! But only one hour of lab ... atleast ... that's a relief :).
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Once upon a time, on a tiny island on a wet splashy sea, there lived a young boy. The boy liked to dream, and he liked to think, but he loved to laugh; sleeping, unfortunately, was not on this boy's list of most favourite activities. Or anywhere near to top. Or anywhere in the top million, actually.
The main reason for this was his matteress, a thin thin thing with the hard wooden bed rattling (and I do mean rattling, and I do mean loudly) just below. He hated his matteress, and he hated his hall - this ancient, dirty thing - and the toilets, which he would rather not get into at quite this hour.
On the whole, life for this poor kid wasn't quite the rosy thing it was (he would vaguely suspect, during the more air-conditioned parts of his day) supposed to be.
Where can you get a Control-Alt-Delete for humans?
I can hear the crows now. Cripes. I am going to be so destroyed tomorrow. Good night, cruel world.
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On the good side:
On the bad side:
On the whole, I think the first set makes up for the second though. Still, feeling much better now. Yes, tomorrow is another day; and the question as to which day it is exactly can be left for a better time :). Good night.
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I literally don't know what to say, so I won't say anything. Are we back to yesterday? Or is this - could it be? - tomorrow? I know I'm talking in mysteries, but I don't really have a choice. Everything is, all of a sudden, just so awesomely, incredibly right; like I can't believe. Could this all really be happening?
Suddenly, too, I know why people say love is worth it. Despite it all. It is.
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A hundred and fifty blog entries (spread across over 25,725 words, averaging nine posts in four blogs a week, and with 127 outbound links across the web), and what have I learnt? Very, very little.
I want to write about this book I read today, "Five People You Meet In Heaven", but no, not right now. I want to write about what's happening in my life, my frustration over the interview slots, my relief that it's done, and my pride in having done a good job as well as in being a part of creating SPS batch '04-'05. But I won't do that either.
Very, very, very simple question: is love worth it? And why? And what - if anything - are you expected to do about it if this madness, this insane reaction to one specific person, persists? I dunno. Thought about it a bit tonight - the problem for me is, I need to think about this, unemotionally. It's far too easy for me to get caught up in the emotion of the thing, and to ignore the simple, basic facts which underlie it all.
I was writing this at 3:25am last night; now, a nice long sleep later, I can't seem to remember what all the fuss was about. But I know the fuss is waiting to be resolved, somewhere.
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Well, the cat is now well and truely out of the bag. So now what? Well, if I'm allowed be a little mathematical about it:
where 'X' is the newly collapsed cat, and 'Y' is the desired end result. Naturally, 'Y' must be determined now, so that the mapping function can be well and truely quantified. So the real question is now: what do I want to happen, next?f(X) = Y
Of course, there is one rather obvious flaw with all of the above. This will be left as an exercise for the reader.
(Naturally, I am in good spirits. If I were depressed, do you think my post would be this small?)
This post was posted by Unknown at 11:34 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Hello, World!
Well, okay, it's probably highly inappropriate for me to say that, considering where I am (in my room), in what state (half-awoken, yes, at 2:47pm!) and what my aim (stay here until hunger drives me out) is. Oh, and of course, the little things: curtains (drawn), lights (off), music (SFF, right now in the midst of a loud and blaring Avril song).
Had trouble sleeping last night, so right now am just lying around, sort of simultanously trying not to think of anything and to think of everything (well, okay: trying not to think of anything, but not really succeeding). Of coure, blaring SFF music is probably the wrong way to go about it, but I haven't heard so many of these songs in ages ... and I need a break, I really do, of one sort or another.
For those in the know, yes, this means that my change-handphone-and-room-phone plans have been postponed, atleast until after the weekend but, I suppose, possibly indefinately. I don't really call people all that much, do I? Will the few (but long) calls I make actually make a big savings for me, if I were to go with a room phone? Then again, at 1/10th the price, I don't see how they won't. Decisions, decisions, decisions. "In My Life" is now playing.
Then again, I suppose sitting around in my room doing nothing on a Saturday afternoon is probably not the best way to clear my mind and take a break. So how? This is Singapore, after all, and incredibly boring. Maybe I'll go Jurong. Maybe I'll go to the Chinese Gardens and take photos. I dunno, let's see. I'm off. Ciao.
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"A beach house," he said, "doesn't even have to be on the beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate," he went on, "at boundary conditions". "Really?" said Arthur. "Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other."