End of Conference Week

Sometimes I look back and reflect upon my actions both big and small---this occurs regularly, particularly when I have little on my mind. In the past, I would be rather hard upon myself and end up thinking that I have screwed up big time ever since the past, and that often leaves me in a rather depressed state.

Time passed and with each new experience I gain from the many facets of life, I slowly learn to ease a little on myself. I mean, sure, there are some things that I could have done differently, but then again there're so many insights that can be gleaned with the benefit of hindsight. Being hard on oneself is sometimes useful, since it forces the self to actually actively seek improvement to prevent reoccurrences of mistakes, but like many things in life, being overly hard on the self is actually detrimental, since one becomes obsessed with the what-ifs and end up forgetting about living in the present and planning for the future.

Part of my character flaw is that I do tend to brood a lot. Ever since Ida left me, I have started to brood less over time, starting from the completely heartbroken phase initially to something that is still sad, but not so sad that I am completely unable to function at all. Perhaps the most apt adjective here is ``resigned''---I am resigned with the outcome that there is little that I can do right now to recover what was lost, and that I have realised in some ways that I need to find a new meaning in life just to move on.

Today was kind of fun. It is the last day of the EMNLP 2009, which occurred after the ACL-IJCNLP 2009, which are conferences for the natural language processing and computing linguistics community. For the whole week, I was basically running around from talk to talk, listening to what that foremost researchers have found out and have shared with the world. By Wednesday though, I was feeling rather drained, and so it felt really great that today was the last day of the conferences. I learnt much, for sure, and basically round up the day with a meeting of the old classmates.

Like most class outings, it was mildly awkward in the beginning, since the cliques basically sealed the earlier interactions among folks. It was great to see them though---it has been a while since I have met many of my old classmates. But of course, those who basically liked treating me invisible continued to keep me invisible, which is fine with me even though I might think that the action was rather petty. It is rather hard to believe that the folks I saw tonight were part of the same class back in 2002---everyone seemed to be much older, yet there were still traces of the old character trait that lies just below the surface of the skin. But I digress...

Perhaps I can write more again some other time.