Tag: me

Posted on in The Life And Times

Showers

I have to admit, this target of writing a blog post everyday is hard. This is the tenth day since I decided I would write a blog post everyday and this is the sixth post. Six posts is more than a part of me expected. I knew from the beginning that writing 20 posts in 32 days is a reasonable measure of success. It’s hard because not only do I have to think of a theme to keep a blog post coherent that other people wouldn’t mind reading about, I also have to find about an hour a day to sit down and write. So far, the former has been harder. Taking time to write has largely been eating into my sleeping time. (Sleeping less has become harder due to the lack of any form of coffee other than instant coffee in my house and therefore sleeping has also been eating into my working time.)

I usually end up deciding the theme of my blog in the shower. I know a large number of people would agree with me about the shower being a place to gather your thoughts, reminisce about your day, and plan the rest of it out. The rest of you probably have cold water showers. I think it also adds to this that I usually have a shower in the evening instead of the morning. I always tell people that this is because it’s more important to feel clean in bed than in the morning since you then spend more amount of time feeling clean and also, how much can you dirty yourself while in bed? You should still feel clean in the morning. Although I think another reason is that I would not have enough to think about in the shower in the morning. It would be a waste to spend twenty minutes cleaning myself when my mind is blank. 

The place you do all of this thinking doesn’t have to be a shower. What’s important is that you’re doing something, preferably standing up, that you do so often that you can carry it out subconsciously. It’s important to be able to do this activity subconsciously to free your mind enough to think about what’s really on your mind, and it’s important for this activity to be done standing up because otherwise you’ll either be falling asleep or there just won’t be enough blood going to your head for you to get any real thinking done. This is why I also get a lot of thinking done when running and I don’t listen to music while running that often anymore since the music restricts the free thought. This is also why you go out for a walk when you can’t get any fresh perspective on something. This is also why I need to stand up and bounce a ball off the walls of my room when I really need to think about something. I decided a long time ago that if I ever get to decide the work culture of the office I work in, one of the things I will do is make sure that there are more smiley yellow sponge balls in the office than people so that anyone can throw them around whenever they feel like.

I find it surprising that I’m writing a blog post today since I haven’t showered in over 30 hours now.

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“OMG, Me too!”

I’ve always had trouble appreciating people. I’ve also always had trouble accepting compliments and “Thank you”s. Over time, I’ve conditioned myself to respond with a “Thank you” and a smile to every compliment no matter what it is. If it really means something to me I also won’t be able to stop myself from blushing while thanking you. I’ve also conditioned myself to respond to a “Thank you” with a “You’re welcome”. This has led me to say “You’re welcome” in many awkward situations. Such as when my manager said “Thanks for coming in for this talk.” or when a friend’s mom said “Thank you for coming for the wedding.” I’m slowly learning that some “Thank you”s need to be responded to with another “Thank you”.

When it comes to appreciating people and their work, I wouldn’t be able to tell someone straight up that I thought what they did was awesome until recently. I felt that I should give an honest unbiased opinion to people. This is probably what my checklist for appreciating something would have been:-

  1. Do not get carried away in the feeling of the moment. Refrain from saying something if you won’t feel the same way the next day.
  2. Compare it with the best it could possibly be and comment on it accordingly. Superlatives should be saved for things that truly deserve them otherwise they won’t mean as much when they’re really needed
  3. Do not sound like you’re flattering the person. 
  4. If it’s been said by many people already then there’s probably no point in saying it again.

For all these reasons, compliments from me were hard to come by. When I really liked something I’d say it and it would mean a lot and everything would work out fine. However there have been too many times when I really liked something but I said nothing about it. I’d regret saying nothing a little bit but I’d still continue doing it. As I learnt over time how good it feels and how important it is to have someone appreciate you I figured that the points on my appreciation-checklist are unnecessary because:-

  • If something’s awesome in the moment then there’s nothing wrong with saying that it’s awesome right then.
  • Superlatives don’t need to be used that sparingly and I can use extreme phrases to describe something if I like it that much because it turns out that I’m articulate enough to come up with more extreme phrases when I need them.
  • I should stop worrying what I sound like.
  • What’s more important is that if someone’s done something awesome, they deserve to feel good about it for a while.

Another thing I’ve never been able to do is to vocally, whole-heartedly agree with someone’s opinion. I’d think, “If you’ve already said it then what’s the point in me saying it again.” and “If you think Richard Feynman is God then you probably believe that more than I do.” and “If you just said you love this song then I don’t want to take that away from you by telling you how much I love it.”

But the truth is that these reasons are stupid as well and it’s a warm feeling to share a genuine like or dislike for something with someone. When you share it, the thing that once existed only inside your head now has a meaning in the outside world as well.

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Overdue

It’s been way too long since I last wrote something here. In my defense, being unemployed while trying to be self employed and trying to feel productive and trying to avoid feeling like I’m wrecking my future is all very difficult. I guess my blog posts are going to start sounding like Kerplunkle ‘s now. I’m finally free now and I can do what I want, when I want. All those plans of making a new blog on a personal website and making a detailed plan and then using the new blog to track the detailed plan kinda got put on hold for now. I did make a plan though. It’s spread over two spreadsheets and has my long term goals and the guidelines for achieving them and all the things I could possibly work on and what good they would be and short term goals for all the things that I choose to work on and tasks that I need to finish and everything. I had made this plan on the 25th of May and I’m supposed to review it on the 25th of June. I decided to work on three things for this month, the Online T-shirt store a.k.a Redwolf, a freelancing website development project for the PCR lab at Kasturba hospital, and writing. I’m not going to go into details with what I was supposed to do in a month, but I can say that stuff on the Redwolf front isn’t going badly. I was supposed to finish making the PCR lab website by now but the woman who I was supposed to make it for has been out of the country so far and so I’ve barely begun working on it. Writing is only marginally better. I was supposed to finish writing a short story or a chapter of something, or a single substantial unit of anything but I’ve only written three and a half pages if I remember correctly. Now it’s not bad, and it can be counted as a unit but it’s only three and a half pages and it lacks any direction so I really can’t be satisfied with it. That’s it with the things that are supposed to be measured.

The story with the things that aren’t supposed to be measured is far better. I’ve made myself a routine where I wake up at 9am mostly everyday, and work in two shifts, one before lunch and one after, till about 6pm. I give myself weekends off, at least Sundays. Now you may wonder why I don’t want a regular job when I work exactly the same way on my own. It feels infinitely better to be able to write when I feel like writing and work on Apache servers and SQL databases when I feel like working with Apache servers and SQL databases. You see, writing does count as work since it’s one of the three things I’m working on this month. Also, I don’t have to work in an office with annoying people and artificial lighting and air conditioning everyday. I can work at home, and when I’m bored of working at home I can find someone else who’s equally unemployed and go work wherever they are. I also don’t have to wear full pants. This is very important, in principle. I haven’t worn full pants since my last day at work. I’ve been running or doing some form of physical exercise at least four days a week and that’s definitely something to feel good about. I have been meeting a lot of new people who are doing a lot of interesting things. Actually this meeting new people thing is a recent development which begins with a story of how I met a girl I found cute but never really spoke to which I would tell you about but it really doesn’t make an interesting story. What I realised after that incident was that I’m really bad at meeting and talking to new people. This is despite the fact that I like meeting new people most of the time. I know a lot of people who really like doing something and do it a lot but still remain bad at it but I never thought I was one of them. Then I decided that I should make a conscious effort to talk to new people and so I should try to talk to 7 new people every week out of which at least two should be female. This has been easier than it sounds. I’m allowed to meet people whom I either haven’t spoken to in years or people who I’ve met before but never really spoken to. It’s surprising how many people are doing interesting things around me and how many of them I could be interested in working with. To think, I may never have found out. This went well in almost all cases except this one guy I met in Lokhandwala who I spoke to in quite a bit of detail about what he’s doing but I never asked his name or how I know him until it was too late. After a point it would just have been awkward to ask. He looked familiar and recognised me and knew my name so I’m sure I know him from somewhere. I just hope he doesn’t find his way to this blog post.

And that’s what I’ve been up to since I was here last. It’s not lot but I think it’s enough for a start. I’d tell you more but it’s late and I’m sleepy. In case you read this before I re-read and edit it tomorrow morning and find a lot of mistakes then just correct them in your head.

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Day 2

Hello All,

I thought that today I would have the time to sit down and write a long elaborate post along with some pictures and videos about my first impressions of New York. But the truth is that I’m too tired. I didn’t get to sleep much on the flight here and coz of the time difference that day lasted 33 and a half hours for me. I could have slept after I got here, but it was 12 in the afternoon and my roommates were going to see the India Day Parade, which has been happening in New York on the 15th of August for the past 30 years and after all it was my first day in New York and I thought that since I’m still only twenty three I’ll be able to manage it. The consequence, however, is that I had a terrible cold all of yesterday, which I’m still getting over, and even after sleeping 11 hours last night, I’ve been sleepy since 10pm today. I should sleep at 11 anyway, which is 12 minutes from now since I have to get up around 7 for work tomorrow.

This place is awesome. And as Shivani said, I do feel right at home here. Sadly, I haven’t got the chance to explore NY much. And that is exactly what I plan to do tomorrow after work. I need to find ways of keeping track of all the fun stuff that goes on here. You know, live music and other such stuff. This means that I might not find the time to write a decent blog post tomorrow either. I unpacked today though. I moved all my clothes into my closet. Now the only things I have on the to-do list in my head are: organise my pictures, figure out how to make calls for cheap from my ipod and laptop, write a decent long blog post and find places to keep track of all the fun stuff in NY. I’m being redundant, I know. I guess by the end of this week my I should have adapted to this. This house I’m staying in is big and comfortable. I also have a roommate who cooks, but he’s leaving next weekend. I’ll let you know more when I have the time. For now, I’m off to bed. Let’s hope tomorrow goes well. Goodnight.

Posted on in The Life And Times

30-Apr-2010

I haven’t been here for a while. The main reason is that I’ve been trying to make songs. And I don’t feel like writing blog entries after writing songs. It’s all about expressing creativity, if you ask me. My primary motivation for ever posting anything here is to express creativity. When this creativity has other outlets I no longer need to post here anymore. But I’m here now, just to let this blog know that it’s not forgotten about.

About the songs that I’ve written, I could post the lyrics here but I’d rather post the songs themselves once I have a good recording of them along with the lyrics so you’ll just have to wait. About the rest of my life of late, I’m tired. I have hardly ever slept over 8 hours a night and this is a good thing. It’s just that I’m tired. It isn’t easy to try to do everything you want to do along with a full time job. But its torture to not do everything I want. The story of my life is desperately lacking some romance at the moment, but that it has been for a very long time. At least there’s enough of everything else going around. There are times when I feel that if my life was a book, the reader would definitely have stopped reading by this point. This is not one of those. What I really want to do is write something. A short story, a fictional blog, anything more that a song and a blog post like this one. Unfortunately, the only thing my mind is willing to do at the moment is sleep

But I will write something soon, and you’ll be the first to know. Until then, good night.

Posted on in The Life And Times

Simplicity

There’s a sense of simplicity I get after being out of the routine of my life for a while. Absolute simplicity. I feel like I know the answers to all your questions, and they can all be answered in under a minute each. I know what’s right and what’s wrong, and what’s neither of the two and really doesn’t matter. And the distinction is really easy to make. I know what I’m doing wrong. I know how to save our environment and just how much we’re going to fuck it up before we manage to do that. I know which direction our society should be heading in and what we need to do now to start getting there. I know what’s inevitable. Well, I wouldn’t use the word ‘inevitable’ but I know what’s very, very likely to happen. I know why you’re unhappy and dissatisfied and anxious and angry, and yes, I’m talking about you specifically.

Why doesn’t everyone see this simplicity? Because everyone over-complicates things by adding unnecessary variables in the equation. People like to complicate things to get the answers they need to justify their their wants and beliefs, to help them be them . Hitting a contradiction sooner or later is inevitable very, very likely. You probably need to forget your place in it all for a while and look at things from as far away as possible to feel what I feel. I went away and I met myself there. I met myself after quite a while. I don’t mean that in the way you look at yourself in a mirror, I saw who I really was, what I really believe, what parts of me I’m afraid to let surface.

In spite of everything I’ve said here I know that this feeling is transient. I know that I could be wrong, and about something or the other, I will be. But at this moment, I’ve got more of it right than you. The question really worth asking is, where does go from here?

The answers, I could tell you. But I really don’t believe they should be sold as answers to anything. To be completely honest, I know that they’re not the answers good enough to stand the test of time. I might share some of them with you over time as thoughts and nothing more, because that’s what they really are. And this is just a feeling. It’ll be gone soon enough.

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Rebel

I am a rebel by nature. Not that much of a rebel, if I think of all the rebels I’ve heard of, but a rebel, still. And as a self-proclaimed rebel, I think that a rebel would be a rebel whether or not he had something to rebel against. It’s in our nature to reject some part of the world we live in. We look for causes, for things to call right, for dreams and visions worth fighting for. We could invent them, if necessary. The important thing is having something seemingly bigger than ourselves to fight for.

Sometimes I believe that the things I want to fight for are the most important things in the world, but most times I know they’re not. Not to other people, not to me, not to the world itself. And if I had to fight for my self enough, I wouldn’t care enough or have the energy to fight for anything else. The truth is that we’re happy enough of the time, and we’re all fine. The world’s fine. I’m fine. It’s likely that I’ll always be fine.

This however, is not enough. I’m not fine with being fine all the time. Fine is okay, fine is fine, but fine does not satisfy me. Fine doesn’t go with the rebel in me. I can give you a few dozen reasons why it’s not right to settle for fine even though the ups and downs I’ll win by fighting may never sum up to the same level, but they’re not important. What is important is that being me keeps me happy most of the time. And it just wouldn’t be me to settle for fine. Hence, I must rebel.

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The pursuit of happiness

How hard do we have to try to be happy?
Do we really feel the good only in contrast to the bad?

When the days ahead look like an uphill climb, they say you need to climb as hard as you can, and then convince yourself that you can climb harder. You need to torture yourself to get to the top. You need to feel the pain. The only explanation I can understand is that we only torture ourselves for how good it feels when the torture is over.

We’re taught since we’re little, that we can get anything at the cost of unwilling effort. Homework for freedom, chores for chocolates and marks and grades for anything else on your wishlist. It’s a way of preparing children for the world they’re going to grow up in. So they’ll accept it without too much suffering.

They still say you need to work hard to get what you want, but what does ‘work’ mean? what do I want?
I’ve hardly felt better than when I’ve spent all day and then stayed up all night doing something that I love. And I don’t recall ever getting something I want by doing what everyone understands to be ‘work’. Because whenever I thought of something as work, I never did it well enough. And yet, I have as much as anyone else. I like that I can contradict them by just existing.

Everything takes time and energy. It’s just that I seem to have an endless supply of energy with some activities, while others make me want to sleep 14 hours out of 24.

Sometimes I feel like it’s a battle between me, and the way the world is. And accepting the world to be the way it is takes the most out of me. More than the fighting. I once heard the line, “We need to pretend the world is the way it should be, to show people what it can be.” And it made sense. Because very often, what feels like the easiest thing to do is to just keep fighting. Without any real hope of winning, but just fighting to preserve my identity. Fighting to exist in a world that contradicts with me.

Getting back to the question, I think we need to torture ourselves once in a while. Everytime we start to forget what the pain feels like. Maybe just so we can see the happiness when it comes, or maybe just out of boredom and curiosity. To understand ourselves, and see what we’re capable of. And in the long run, it does make us happier.

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Drive

One night, he had no idea what he was doing. He had no idea why he was doing it, what he should be doing, where he should be heading or who he is. Is he pretending or being true to himself? He had no idea how he looked in others’ eyes. He had no idea what he was going to do the next day. Whether he would wake up at 9, or sleep the entire day away. He had no idea what he wanted to do. Neither his instinct nor his inertia of routine had anything to say about it. He had absolutely no idea who he was. What he’d been so far could draw no conclusions toward that.

Now, he knew he was going to sleep though. He wasnt anxious, he was at peace. It wasn’t even that he didn’t need to know, it was beyond that. He was happy not knowing. He was glad. The lack of answers, all the questions gave him something. They gave him a reason and a drive that had been missing for a while. Curiously missing. They gave him a reason to want to be awake after he woke up the next day. Because he would have to go looking for the answers. He knew the answers wouldn’t come soon, and he knew it wouldn’t be a reason to celebrate when he finds them. He just knew that he had to look. More than he ever knew any of the things he had no idea about anymore.

He thought he realised something about himself. He thought he realised that he didn’t adapt to change quickly at all, something he always thought he did. He knew he didn’t want to realise anything. He could sleep now. It was time for it. Without looking forward, without anxiety, without a planned defense against forseen boredom. Tomorrow would be a whole new day. And so would the day after that. Not just hours ticking away, counting that which can’t be measured. A whole new day, the way a child would look at it. Like a book by an author he hadn’t read. Like a new gizmo to reverse engineer. Like anything that is whole, and not something forced to take its place.

He knew that tomorrow, he would be driving.

And when he opened his eyes the next day, he already knew it. He knew it before he looked at the scribble in black ball pen on his left wrist that was the one word: “drive”.

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Talking to myself

hello.

hey, it’s been a while.

yeah, where’ve you been?

around.. but I guess I’m back now.

how come?

I don’t know, you got me here.

yeah, I guess.

….

I hate myself.

me?

all of you.

well, that’s just you.

I know.

is there anything I know that you don’t?

I don’t think so.

then I know you know, you don’t have to say so.

fine.

. …

I missed you.

I thought you hated me.

yeah, but that’s just me.

so, now, why all this hatred?

dissatisfaction, I guess.

why’d you pick me to talk to about it?

its one of the things you’re there for.

cool.

 

free will sucks.

yeah?

I was hoping for you to elaborate on that, it’s more your thing.

sure .. well, it isn’t really imaginable living without it.

…

and always doing the smart thing, or the right thing kinda limits your free will anyway.

now you’re getting somewhere.

I’m not really sure what I meant by that.

me neither.

that goes without saying.

why?

the whole you knowing what I know thing, remember?

yeah…

in any case, if you don’t want free will, I could always tell you what to do.

no you cant.

and why not?

because you can’t decide what to do, that’s up to me, and you cant really tell me anything because you’re limited to what you do.

hmm.., never really thought of it that way.

thank you.

 

so anyway, as I was saying, free will doesn’t really suck, and it’s gonna be there whether you chose to believe that it’s real, or an illusion.

….

you can believe it doesn’t exist you know. that makes it as good as it not being there.

not really. it doesn’t make a difference to me.

hmm, you got a point. but it would make a difference to other people.

let’s talk about me, alright?

fine.

so, go on.

you misuse it.

free will?

yes.

that doesn’t even make sense.

you overuse it. you should just do a few things blindly without thinking so much. stick to decisions already made.

okay, that kinda makes sense.

in other words, limit your free will .. since you hate it so much. everyone thinks they know what to do, they think they know what you should do, you know what they think you should do, jeez, you even think you know what you should do. that is, until you start doing it. why don’t you just do it?

….see, this is why I make you do this job.

I’m not done.

go on, then.

you may agree with me now, but tomorrow you’re gonna forget all about it, because you can’t stick to a decision, as I just said.

I always thought not being able to stick to a decision was better than sticking stubbornly to one.

you can overdo both. and stop digressing.

fine, you talk.

its not like I’m asking you to shut up, but let’s get this over with.

alright, alright, go on.

so, what are you gonna do to make sure you don’t change your mind tomorrow?

I am not gonna change my mind tomorrow.

that’s the best you can do?

you got a better idea?

guess not.

good.

..

I’m really sleepy.

fine, goodnight.

…

I’ll be .. around.

nice to know.

..

goodnight.