To the Moon Maiden

O calm and serene
Brighten up my night
Up in the sky out of reach

Still a Yes

Even if I had known what I know today
I still would have sat on those steps of stone
I still would have watched as the sun shone
And danced over the hills in the distance
Three years ago I still would have said "Yes"

So it is

And so I am
Back to gray
Are you as red
As you were
Red before?

Two years

Two years

Changed for an ever

This night

Another I've never

Of pointy-haired bosses

HR(Human Resources) demanded the Xion document by 17th December. My reply clearly stated that the Ancient Brotherhood would not be issuing the Xion document until the Ceremony of Xion in May and that the Ninja document should suffice till then. So, HR, in all its logic and reasoning prowess, extended the deadline for submitting the Xion document to 7th January. Must control... fist... of death...

Yes, I'm a huge fan of Dilbert

My pie of uncomfortable

I've accepted myself as an introvert. I am no longer ashamed to be the guy who doesn't talk so much. I can sit awkwardly alone at gatherings and be totally fine with it. But here's the problem: most people aren't comfortable with me being comfortably uncomfortable in social situations. They try to make me feel better. What they don't realize is that in their attempts to reach in and smother my core of uncomfortable, they peel away the outer crust of comfortable (which smells like freshly baked bread) and announce the ugly insides for everyone else to see and judge.

Now I seem totally ungrateful. So I'll say I don't despise these acts of magnanimity; I've done the same things myself. The thing is if someone is awkward and um... inthlahrung, you should just let him or her be comfortably awkward and most importantly, never ever EVER direct everyone's attention to said awkwardness.

Growing old or growing up?

This was supposed to be a comment on someone else's blog, on a post about about getting older. But it's one of those things that I'd probably want to read again in a few years. And I kind of like it when no one seems to read my posts anymore; I can write like no one's reading. It's a little against my principle of not redacting anything I've posted but that's a topic for another post. Anyway here it goes:

It's after-churchsies in a new city. I thought I was still young enough to hang with the college kids with the crazy hairdos. I wasn't. Then I assumed I belonged to the working professionals group with the tucked-in shirts. I didn't. I went home alone realizing I was growing older but not growing up as fast. (This reminds me of a joke about how growing old is mandatory but growing up is optional)

It's all about the money...

I've come to realize how influenced I have become by money, or material possession. I think I've had this realization before but it must not have been a big enough a realization to actually be a part of my disillusionment, or maybe my disillusionment phase was too immature then.

It was about four months ago that I got my first salary. It's a decent sum - enough to spend on food, rent, transportation and the occasional expensive weekend and still have half of it left to put into savings. Then on one particular payday, I found that almost a third of my pay went to taxes because I had not provided my PAN number. I felt a sense of loss that I had never felt before. Never before as in this-kind-of-feeling-wise and not as-deep-as-this-wise. The next month, I half expected the same cut in pay (being the moron that I am, I still hadn't acquired a PAN card.) I opened my pay slip. I was getting my full salary! And a few days later, my application for travel reimbursement got approved and I was getting paid around half my salary extra! I felt the same thing I felt a month ago but on the opposite polarity. I was in a constant good mood and I was brimming with confidence.

It seemed silly that these emotions were brought on and altered by the amount of money I was receiving, but that was the fact. Then I remembered the first time I got my salary. I had attained a whole new perspective on how I spent my money. I was counting every rupee I spent, I avoided unnecessary expenses and I even made an excel sheet to document my spending, complete with average and total daily expenditure columns. Now I can start to understand a lot of things like why someone would bargain even for a minuscule amount, or why someone would never miss a horrible meal at the mess he paid for. I understood the tendency to save but it was only recently that I felt it myself (at a strong enough degree.)

The biggest point of this post, is how we are all so affected by the monetary value of things, like how my salary got me high and low, or how expensive things make us happy. I guess it has something to do with our egos. I'm not saying I wasn't happy as a child when I got a supercool winged ninja-like robot that transformed into three dino-bots, but that was a different kind of happy. This is a different kind of happy. I don't trust myself with it.

About time...

When I heard about Ronald Mallett and his time-travel quest, the one thing that intrigued me most was the possibilty of sending information back into time. Once it becomes possible to send even the tiniest speck of recordable particle or wave back into the past, time would come to a standstill at that very moment and at that very point in space. Laying down standards for communication, results of years of research could be sent back, effectively completing the research within zero or even negative units of time. Hence, at the very instance it becomes possible to receive information from the future, we would instantly have the technology to build infinitely better "time machines" as the exponential growth of our knowledge becomes a permanent vertical slope on the time scale, reaching upto infinity. There would no longer be any time barrier between any two points in time from that moment on, thereby effectively putting time to a standstill.

Today I thought about how we already have thousands of years' worth of knowledge available to us. It then occurred to me that we already have working time machines, only not as apocalyptic as Ronald Mallet's. Instead of an infinite amount of knowledge from the future, we have relatively limited and sometimes distorted information from the past. Thus, you are Pythagoras in ancient Greece with a time machine that sometimes corrupts its data and works only upto the present time. You are al-Shahrastani in medieval Persia with the same partially functional time machine. You are anyone anywhere in the past with this same time machine. Put it to good use.

Think moments

Some things have always intrigued me. They catch me unaware and lead me into think moments - while walking down a street, while waiting for the bus, riding in a bus, during an information theory lecture, in the middle of a book or a movie or anything at all - the tired science versus religion thing; then on a higher level, consciousness; and then ultimately, existence itself.

Let's start with consciousness. I've always believed in evolution (I also believe in God. How I manage this will be covered in another section.) I believe there is no exact instance at which "life" started. I believe life evolved as interactions between various particles started increasing in complexity, finally forming entities that acted as living objects (to cut things short.) Evolution teaches that these objects evolved to become what we are today. The question is, when did we start being conscious? Have the aforementioned interactions become so complex that a living object now possesses an idea of being. When I think of myself as an individual, I find it hard to see how my thoughts, my motives and will, my very act of being conscious and thinking of myself as an individual with unique thoughts and motives and will are all end results of neurons and enzymes. I can accept this is evolution when I see people interacting with each other. But when I myself am here to have these thoughts, it is difficult to accept that my own consciousness is just a bunch of biology. (That was lousy communication; I didn't even convince myself when I re-read it.)

Moving on to existence, sometimes I think about how if everything that exists never existed at all. Not just our planet or our galaxy, but everything - the universe, parallel or multiple universes, matter, energy, time, space, the other six dimensions, any other dimension or anything else suggested in any attempt to explain existence. Not even an entity to bring all these into being. If you believe in the Big Bang, think of how if it had never happened and how if time never existed to come to a point where it happened. If the thought doesn't do something to you, you're probably not visualizing it right. "Wouldn't that be wonderful?" is what I would think if I felt suicidal.

It's late. Time to sleep.

A promise

How could you be so resolute in something so crucial? And you say you don't even know why. And I know how your faith in the uncertainty of what is to come holds back your promises, yet here you are with a promise.

Fear is good

Fear is good. It keeps pushing you upwards and generally keeps you alive. But if you let it control you and you don't have someone to help you through, it will kill you. Yes, kill, literally.

Later is bad. Umkay...

And I put off and I put off and I put off for later. When I was five and I could start reading I read something my late grandfather put up on the wall. It read "Never do tomorrow what you can do today." I remember being quite perplexed with the doing things tomorrow part. Mom explained it to me but I was still confused, what with not having any idea of deadlines and stuff like that. Today I put off studying for exams or doing assignments up till the last few hours. I have even stayed awake the whole night putting off packing. Now that's bad.

Spiders are bad. Umkay...

I just found out I'm afraid of big spiders - the big ones with the long legs. The small ones are cool. Sure I found a spider with a body two thirds the size of my fist in my bathroom last year (I used the bathroom on the other side of my hostel for a week after that) but you're supposed to be afraid of any insect or arachnid that big, right? Anyway this spider I saw had long extra thick legs and my skin crawled as I saw it scurrying out underneath the door. I took the most toxic thing I could find in my room - my deo spray - and sprayed all four sides of the door. That's probably bad for my health but it was worth it. Anyway I'm going home tomorrow for a two month summer break - yesss!! And little cat kittens are cute. But cats are mostly stupid. Dogs are smart though.

Stuff

Today I realized how attached I've become to my PC. My PC broke down last night and blatantly refused to start up again. I came back from the lab today all in-the-mood-to-lay-back-like and suddenly I found I had nothing to do. I couldn't watch Scrubs, I couldn't read a Conan issue, I couldn't find my laidbackness. Then I went downstairs and found people to talk to, and it was counfusingly surprising. Socially incapable animals like myself were never meant to have so much help being unsociable *sigh*

Anyway I can't wait for 6.60 Damn you IceFrog you sincere fool. And I can't wait for D3 Damn you Blizzard you arrogant genius.

A daydream

I'm a fool, and I'm drowning. Mountaintops and the bluest of blues. I can't sleep. I wish I was a song. Tomorrow is a dreadful place, it brings change. I see green everywhere. I look forward and all I see is a blur, I couldn't care less. A new place to escape to, and not just another place to escape to. Who knew words could be so magical, and never enough. An emerald in my hands.

Let it slide

Nobody is perfect. Like most ultra-cliched phrases its true. Anyway, I used to be something of a perfectionist. I like to think I've gotten over it. But then there isn't a really defined line between being a perfectionist and not being one.

I used to seek perfection in the games I played on my pc. I would reload until i got everything right. Then I found I had much more fun just letting things slide and accepting imperfections for what they are, not only while shooting aliens in the head, but in life in general.

Being a perfectionist or a control freak (one and the same don't you think?) has a lot to do with being lonely on the inside (and also on not finding satisfaction in your everyday life, but that's a totally different subject.) So when you find someone doing something some other way than you would like it done, let it slide and find someone to chat up :)

Its awn!!

Guitar drifting is beautiful. Andy McKee makes magical music with it. I first saw it on "August Rush" where the little guy starts playing without any prior guitar know-how (because you can't learn music from books, its out there - the Wizard says so)


















This time I have definitely bitten off more than I can chew

Blah

Water water everywhere
But not a drop to drink

Famous lines by a person whose name was a memory so brief I don't think it even qualifies as a memory. I could have easily googled it out but I choose not to. If you ask me there's too much information out there. I remember when information was precious. There used to be a certain snobbish satisfaction to knowing something the next guy doesn't. Now he just googles it out and pop goes your snob bubble. I guess being able to filter all that info and put it to good use would be the next edge. Thats evolution to you

Now about those lines, there are so many times they have changed to something else in my head, like 'People people everywhere - But not a single person to talk to.' ... or something else. I can't remember anything else they changed to right now. Typical. Oh well a post is a post

Don't look down

I'm scared of heights. I'm terrified of heights. If you are even slightly responsible for me being less than five feet away from the edge of a roof, I will launch a personal vendetta against you and pursue it with feverish fervor. Well maybe not but you get the idea :) Its what my nightmares are made of. Even as I'm writing this i can conjure up images of me being stuck atop buildings of structurally impossible heights, and me having to traverse super-thin ledges and the likes. I've been having these nightmares for so long I'm finding it difficult distinguishing them from real life memories. Last summer I discovered that I inherited this particular phobia from my mother's side of the family. Some might suggest therapy but me, I think it keeps me safe from all those ledges and edges so I think I'll keep it thank you.