Gaurav's Blog

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Winter is
Cold wet sad empty
Then comes summer

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When you're lost
The only way back home
Is through loss

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There is one thing you should know before I start writing. I'm not depressed. I'm not mad. I'm not angry. I'm not frustrated. I'm not afraid. Most of all, I'm not sure. All this - I'm sure - is perfectly okay.

Eventually, your surroundings leak into you. It happens. It's one of the rules of life - like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or the other one, the one with all the funny Greek symbols in it. That which surrounds you, makes you; leaks into you, as certainly, as surely, as water into a sponge (or perhaps, out of a sponge; causality isn't all its cracked up to be). In short, coming to the point: you are where you are. And what your circumstances surroundings situations places points p

And then? You flush. Kerploosh. Wash it all away, top-to-down, left to write. You squeeze yourself (like a sponge? Only if you're into that sort of thing :) - and you wash it all away, and hey - guess what? You find out what you are. What makes you. The code of your being, the heart of the matter, the centre of it all. And once you know that, nothing, but nothing, can take that away from you. Ever.

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Apparently, I'm ...
Which OS are You?

Not bad, eh?

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Why are there so many decisions in life? So many paths, so many ways. And no knowing which road is going to get you there - or even where it is you need to get! Life has it's own weird ways of taking twists and turns anyway, and you never know when the path you choose will take you - through happiness, sadness, and just general growing up - right back to where you began, or maybe to a better places, or maybe ... ?

And that's all fine by me, but: why do we have to choose our own paths? Why do I have to decide, right here right now, what I'm going to be doing tomorrow? The day after? The day after the day after? It can get big-scale: grad school? Job? What kind of job? Services? Entrepreneur? It can be small-scale: breakfast or skip? Laundry today or tomorrow? It can be emotional: what to do with such-and-such person? Ignore? Distance? Try again? Life has a way of keeping us (me) on our (mine) feet, and it's strange and bizarre.

Mostly, I think (I hope) it's just my weird (non-sensical) sleep schedule. I'm one of those people who can pull off 'most any sleep schedule which gives me 6-8 hours of sleep a day, but changing schedules is HELL on me, and right now my schedule is royally screwed. As can be seen by me blogging at 3am. But I think I'm a lot sleepier today than I was yesterday, so that's good.

Coming back, choices. Yes. These choices, like all choices everywhere and everywhen, could (potentially) determine everything from this moment on. I've had that happen before, without having a clue. An ordinary, everyday dinner slowly metomorphosises into the most important evening of my life. A day trip to the museum ruins everything. Slippery water, and - bam! - nothing is as it was, any more. Choices are what determines it all.

Pradeep said recently (not-so-recently) that choices are actually unimportant - when we come to a choice, our personality history past present friends conscience childhoods have already made the choice for us. It's up to us to face (with courage) the choice that has already been made by us. We only, he said, have two choices - to do that which is in our nature to do, or to revolt against it. Revolting only buys us time, though - our true natures will win in the end. The only way past life's checkpoints is to turn in your passport - authentic certified, no lies wishes dreams fantasies - and to admit ourselves to ourselves. Any misrepresentation of his ideas is of course entirely my fault.

I don't agree. I am a firm believer in free will (if for no better reason than that I'm a terrific egotist, and I'm not going to give anyone else credit for my "glorious" actions). I have lived my life both as a fish in a flow - seeing, smelling, watching, dreaming as the world flowed past - as well as a salmon, pushing myself through waves of uncertainty doubt tomorrows yesterdays towards my goals - and every once in a while, have even achieved glorious victory or something like it. (But then again, you know what happens to salmon who swim against the tide, don't you?)

I think that my nature isn't what has been squeezed into me by the past. I believe that it is that which I make it, through the choices I make at every step of the way. The times when I decide to be childish and (let's face it) stupid. The times when I pretend to be smart, and the smartness pays off. The times when I love and hate and try and fail and stop and go and all the other minor, hideously important, completely jobless things I do every week. It's all, when everything's said and done, going to add up into one thing: me. And it's up to me - my responsibility, so to speak - that when everything's said and done, that I am someone I can be proud of.

I suppose my favourite quote from Look who's talking! would be appropriate here: "I'm sorry, but ... I'm going through a selfish phase right now". Am I? This post is horribly, horribly, horribly egotistical, and I seem to be having problems relating to people recently. No idea why. It's just weird and sad, I guess. Again, I hope it's related to sleep, and when I finally fall asleep today (before 4!) it will be one small step towards getting over this problem.

I have been listening to some awesomely good music today. I mean, it's just my old songs and stuff, but I haven't listened to them in ages, so it feels good to. I removed all the songs from my Media Player, and re-loaded them to set all the fields and stuff correctly (also, some songs had gotten lost in shuffling disk space around). And the first song to play once this operation was completed? Yup. That one. See what I mean about choices?

Well, yes, coming back (and hurrying up, 'cos it's 3:30pm already!): choices. Well? I wish I could just sit down and make a decision, but it's 3:33 and not a good time for such shennanigans. My present positions seems to be largely: it cannot be denied, I went to City Hall recently. Give it a week, let's wait, let's watch. The world is - and I'm really forcing the optimism into me right now, not that it's a very hard thing to do for me, but still - a much stranger, more fantastic, more interesting place than anyone can imagine. Perhaps, maybe just maybe, there is an answer waiting for me in the coming week, hidden beneath or perhaps behind something (or, well, hiding in plain sight). And maybe I will find it. And if I don't? I'll worry about that next week. I'm sure that by then things will clear up, atleast a bit, one way or another. And if they don't ... argh! Recursion! *blinks out of existance*.

(Oh, and btw: if you have some spare time, could you please tell me what you think?)

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Today's such an incredibly lethargic day for me. Have already missed most of the day, as well as most of my Econs lecture. Will toddle along now and see what remains that I haven't missed. Also vaguely considering getting my long-delayed haircut tonight. And (of course) an assignment due in at 9pm! Sigh. What is wrong with me today??

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It's 9:30pm on a Sunday evening. I have a test tomorrow morning at 10am, an RBR due back by 9am, and an assignment due at 12nn (intelligent observers will note that this effectively means the assignment is due back at 9am, since I'll have to go to the library then and stuff). This, considering how much sheer grades are resting on the next twelve hours or so, can-not be good.

Oh, and IVLE ain't working too good right now.

And and and several other issues are still very unresolved and uncertain.

And and and and I have to go down to NUH and *eat* something now.

But: everything feels suprisingly good. This is very, very scary - what happens when I fall off this pedestal of a high I seem to be sitting on? But I should probably be grateful that there is a pedestal to hold me up a lil while more, just a little higher than before.

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Today has been one of the best (college) days of my life.

Okay, typical procrastinator me had two assignments to finish and hand up today, one by 9pm, the other by whenever the Prof was going to leave her lab. And naturally I'm up until 4am yesterday night (not wasting my time! working on something! full details in due course!). All the while I was working today, I had to keep stopping every twenty to forty minutes, cos my head would be hurting too badly.

But I managed to get and keep (without a single fine!) an RBR book, get all kinda of nice references, work my tables with the Superior magic of LaTeX, get everything (except the title page ... sigh!) looking oh-so-sexy, and submit it in before the Prof left! (And did she complain sarcastically about how late I was? Nope! A smile and a thank you. I love my profs!).

And then I get back to SPS, ready to get cracking on my assignment due at nine ... only to find it had been postponed to Monday! Wow-oh-wow-oh-wow! Yippee! Yahoo!

Also discovered Scirus - essentially, Google for the science world. Love it already.

What an awesome day!!!

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This is one week which is really just turning out bad for me. Nothing definate, nothing certain, just ... shit. I dunno, I haven't been this bugged with my life in ages. It's weird and atleast partially uncontrollable, so ...

I should just wait. I'm probably going to remove this post by tomorrow, if not by tonight. I hate being depressed, and I hate being unsure, and most of all I hate being cut out of loops. But now I want to cut myself out of a loop ... the loop called existence ... just flow and flow and flow until I'm all flowed out, until I've reached the sea ... then stop ...

It's absolutely classical Gaurav depression, just elevated a little (a lot, actually) and so unbelievably stupid as to ... as to ... well, when I told Janani I was depressed, she was just: "you have to stop going into moods like this". And it's true. I have to stop being a baby about the world. I have to grow up. Have to have to have to have to. Have. To.

This is nuts. This is shit. This, I suppose, is life.

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Life is so boring. I've been telling myself I'm going to call Kaberi, just to get myself through the day sometimes. Things are always buzzing aruond my head, and it's this ugly combination of not being able to do anything enjoyable (or not having anything that really turns me on?) and being tired with schoolwork and other such insanely boring stuff.

Seriously, I should just become somebody else. Sounds to me to be the simplest solution of them all.

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I really don't know where to begin tonight, and that's depressing. Shows you how disconnected I've gotten, lately.

Well, it's not disconnected. I still know who I am, and what I'm doing here, and (atleast roughly) how the world looks from out these eyes. Lately, though, it feels like the world itself is slowly rolling away from its hinges. My friend's latest entry scares me - it's red text, on deceptively light blue background, with a really spooky picture of a angsty looking guy, who might be crying. Having had way too much coffee today doesn't help. Being in love and not doing much about that, either, makes it worse. And a friend of mine is horribly upset about a whole set of things. A near-friend is creeping me out, and - maybe, just maybe - changing everything all at once. Oh, no, he's not. Oh, yes, he is. Oh, no ... and and and I've missed two lectures this week. Two. My worse week since school began, and it's only just begun.

Am I upset? No I'm not yes I am no I'm not. No. I'm not. I'm enough of an optimist to not care about the local trends any more. It doesn't really matter, no-oh-oh. A change here, a cent there, does it matter?

And yet, and yet. Change-continuous is inevitable, and I have no problem with rolling with the punches, but change-forever, now that's an entirely different bowl of fish. Change-forever, well, I'd welcome it even, in my more optimistic moods. But in general, change-forever (especially if I suspect that it is really, truely forever) gives me the creeps.

I could be philosophical about it, I guess: isn't change-forever exactly the same thing as change-continuous? Just bigger?

Ha, ha. Sometimes I wonder how many of my prison cells are of my own choosing - how many will just vanish into smoke the instant I understand that they won't, can't, hold me back? And how many - despite my most ardent wishes - are my real prison cells, those that will hold me under their hypnotising stare all the way until the day I ... but surely, I'll find those I can't accept, and they'll be rendered helpless and vanish into the mists of time, too?

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I were to be reduced to this: a white screen, text scrolling by in gloriously high resolution. Typing and creating, scattering dreams ideas thoughts words letters bytes nibbles bits across the internet. It's a fool's dream, I'm sure, but an incredibly tempting one.

I want to go on writing, to go on dreaming. One day it will all end - this crush, this dream, this life. Everything. And then, what will matter? This page? This post? I don't know.

Probably nothing very much. This is such a relief to me. I'd hate to matter, to have people care about me and miss me after I'm gone. The freedom is heady and exhilerating.

Love friends depression life pathways directions possibilities hope (yes, damnit, hope) aside, something that's really turning me on these days - business. I don't believe it myself, but it's like the first time I learned to program in BASIC all over again. Was trying to figure out how much money a certain proposed company would make (never mind the idea), and the spreadsheet I got, just looked so much like crap. Did it again yesterday night, and man oh man does my new spreadsheet look good. It's getting better, fellas, and you know ... one day, it might actually happen?

What? Who knows. I just know I'll get there someday and find out :).

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