Sunday, March 22, 2009

Auto-Writing and Other Adventures

And so passes yet another day. Another day done here means another day closer to graduation. On the one hand I am glad that I can slowly start to literally make a living for myself. On the other hand, I feel a little sad about the whole business, since I am once again picking myself up from what is now familiar and am going to something that is less familiar. What will the future be? Will I be able to deal with whatever comes my way?

If I were dealing with this alone, I would have much easier answers for these really hard questions, but that is no longer the case---my fate is intertwined with yet another. There are so many things to think and worry about, and even with my excessive powers of planning/worry/thought, I cannot fathom the gravity of the entire issue. That of course is one of the many reasons why I am feeling under the weather of late---I'm thinking too much about the future once more.

I guess the old adage still holds: whatever fate brings you, you take it [sort of]. Almost all of us can figure out how much I am worth as a working person, but how much am I worth as a person? I have no clue, and perhaps that is one of those things that I need to think about---my seeming self-confidence is only apparent when we are talking about professional situations and not personal ones. More things to worry about, no?

And so time passes yet again, and I think more and more about less and less until I think everything about nothing, before realising that at the end of the day, I truly am thinking nothing about everything because this life is just a passing dream---only the eventual death is something that is the most definite among all the experiences that a person can undergo.

But what do I see upon death? Probably alone, somewhere, if I don't go out with a bang that is. Lying in bed, staring vacantly at the white ceiling where the fan whirrs idly under the summer heat. If I'm lucky, I'd be old, and possibly drooling to the side, perhaps still having an active mind, but a failed body of some sort. And when the final moment comes, I will probably be trying to fight it off as much as I can, or more likely to just accept it with an air of resignation, and to die regretting about the things that I should have done but never would. I would be a passing memory to all around me---at death, no one will remember who I was, what I had done, how I had gotten there. All they would know is that a decrepit old man had just died on his bed, possibly choking on his own drool---never knew if the old geezer was thinking anything at all.

Birth, ageing, sickness, death---just part of the cycle of living I guess. I think I'm probably past the stage of fearing death, since I know full well that I will not be remembered anyway (and what else can one be more fearful of that that?). I have not yet gotten to the point of embracing/welcoming death yet---perhaps eventually when my will to live is sufficiently low, I can bring such thoughts into my consciousness. So what if life is just an illusion---we are all just meatbags anyway.

*sigh*

Sometimes I think that I'm just too negative for my own good. I mean, it is true, isn't it, that I'm rather negative? It served me well in the past (and it still serves me now!) but it has this weird effect that affects my affect, causing me to be miserable more than half the time. Negativism---the very epitome of my dark character I guess, something that is so innate that the best I can do is to mask it away, as opposed to trying to correct the judgemental thought. I like to think that I'm matured, but at times I discover I'm probably more naive than most people. Well, I don't know what is really going on anymore, and am just literally following the flow, going where life and life's past decisions have taken me. I'm probably one of those few people who can sit in an empty room all day with nothing but the walls as my companions, and still not feel bored about it.

I dunno... perhaps I am destined to travel alone through the marshes of time, stuck in some forgotten place, pondering about the mysteries of the universe as I assimilate knowledge and information from all corners of my being. Perhaps I'm a modern day recluse, one who, despite living in the city, is more isolated than a hermit living on a deserted island. Perhaps I am secretly just an actor, acting out roles to their final conclusions, never having the chance to truly discover what makes the ``real'' me. Perhaps I'm just being delusional over the whole affair, and I'm just confusing the heck out of myself through all these random and useless thoughts.

``Verbal diarrhoea'' is probably the best term that I can use to explain the current situation that I am in right now---I just keep writing and writing and typing and typing, with little care if what I'm saying makes any sense or not. In some ways, this in itself is a therapeutic affair, since there is little inhibitions that I have in trying to put my thoughts in order. But I sometimes feel sorry for the reader, for he/she has to untangle all these garbled pieces of information that spew forth my dishevelled mind and trying to find some sense of coherence among all the data that is available.

Ah life! You are among the biggest conundrums that I have ever faced. Sometimes you make me happy and savour the moment of living, many times you make me loathe my existence, and pray for a speedy end of my pathetic being; sometimes you inspire me to live on courageously and the infect others with the inspiration I found, and at other times you reject me and make me more dejected than the souls that are bared from heaven despite living a morally upright life. The confusion of it all, the seemingly tellingness of life juxtaposed with its coyness---it baffles all who live it, be it eight or eighty.

I look back upon what I have done and think to myself: I have made many mistakes in the past, and I have made some positive accomplishments. But why can I only remember the damn mistakes and not the achievements? Why is it so that I am programmed to only recall the bad and not the good? Is there something fundamentally wrong with my thought processes, or is this one of those ``error in thought'' things that people talk about but I have never truly seen? I have no idea what I am talking about right now, but I'm just... letting the words flow ever so smoothly from my mind directly to my finger-tips and finally onto the keyboard to be sent into the computer. The feeling... is strange, to say the least, but is comforting to a small degree, as the regular staccato sound of the keys being depressed and released one after another in quick fashion.

I look forward in life, and while I once saw green pastures meeting a clear blue sky in the horizon (with butterflies and flowers and other pretty things no less), all that I see now is a deep fog, much like the one that London infamously has. I can't seem to see past the outstretched hand's distance, and beyond that, all I can see is just this deep fog that hides all that is far away. The fogginess of the whole enterpreise remains even though I rub my eyes and clean my lenses---perhaps it is my mind's eye that requires some form of cleaning and possible debridement.

But I digress... in a multitude of tangents, no less. Some slightly more concrete news then. I have finally made the big move to remap the caps-lock of my laptop keyboard to that of the left control key---this is so that I will get use to the ``correct'' position of where the control key ought to be, and more importantly to avoid the ``emacs pinky'' that is obtained due to prolonged unnatural stretching of the left pinky when trying to hit the ``traditional'' control button. That said, as my graduation gift to myself, I've decided indulge in a $70 keyboard known as the Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2. The wonders of this keyboard lies in its portability and sensible placement of keys, as well as the rather comfortable tactile feel of it. That and the ability to set specific functions on the keyboard through the DIP switches in the back---I swear I will bring this keyboard to and fro work for my own edification (and to keep my left pinky from dying unnecessarily).

Strangely, I'm starting to actually enjoy Real Analysis. It is strange because the last time I did an abstract mathematics class, I was basically dying from it because I didn't have any form of intuitive feel nor the deep interest. But with Real Analysis, I find that I am starting to get the hang of it and to develop this mathematical intuition on why the theorems are the way they are and how best to go about proving them. That said, I hope that I won't do too badly for this class, otherwise I would be really sad person in the end.

I don't think that I have much to talk about now... I have basically spewed too much words here already, and it is getting rather late. Perhaps I should turn in for the night, and wonder about how to deal with things later on in the day...

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