Looking Back...

It is sort of a strange thing to realise that a year has passed on by once again. This is the second year that I am spending in Singapore after my undergraduate stint, and to a large degree it would seem to be the case that I have more or less fallen into the pattern of life here once again, this time from the perspective of the part-time student who doubles as a full-time researcher. Life is not great, but it is still manageable, with careful prioritisation of the activities that I might want to engage in considering the limited amount of time I have and the limited amount of energy I can bring about to get things done.

It's a truly strange season though, this time of the year. I believe that I was probably feeling something similar at this time of the year last year, but at a level that is probably a couple of magnitudes lower now than in the past, since, to be fair, I was in a rather heartbroken state last time, whereas for now, I'm just in a generally disaffected type of emotion. I'm slowly training myself to not worry about all the things that make me sad/depressed, but like always, the theory is often easier to come up with than the practical implementation of the ideas that surround the issue.

It is not that I have given up completely on love, but that I have come to the rather unsettling conclusion that it is not the right time now. The conclusion is unsettling because on the one hand I might actually try to convince myself that the whole business of love and relationships should not be pursued during this rather limited time period that I am facing, but on the other hand, my emotions seem to be doing anything but. No, I've not fallen in love with anyone just yet, having learnt my lesson about the pitfalls of ``falling'' in love, but there's always this missing feeling of some sort that is within me, as though all the activities that I have been engaged in are not doing anything that is helping me keep my mind away from all these things that keep creeping up on me. I'm not really sure how best to describe the entire circumstance, but this is probably the best way that I can say about things for now.

Life seems to always be a consistent uphill struggle for me, or at least, it seems to be the case. Most people are probably happy to get by with whatever job they could get their hands on with the degree/diploma that they might have, but somehow that doesn't seem to be the optimising function that I'm running on---again we find that I'm taking the path of most resistance, and in many ways, am suffering greatly from the choice. It's not so much that things are impossible to handle (that's simply untrue), but that there's just so much of it that everything adds up really quickly. Time commitment issues are among the worst---at this stage, I'm probably overcommitted in time by at least 40% over what I'm supposed to be working, and there is no such thing as an over-time pay that can be claimed. It's a very tiring thing to keep running forwards at full power all the time, losing sleep and other implements that may actually make the job easier in the long run. Am I just a whiney person on this regard? I wouldn't think so, because I have all the evidence to show otherwise.

*sigh*

I'm not exactly bitter over things now, but I'm really just disappointed with myself; I keep having the feeling that I am unable to put in my best in all the things that I have gotten involved with in one way or another, and that feeling of disappointment is probably more depressing than the fact that I am committing to nearly 140% of my 47-hour work week. Being disappointed in the self is much worse than anything else in the world for the simple reason that it impinges on a very fundamental aspect of the ego: the self-confidence.

Self-confidence is a self-reinforcing concept/property of every normal person. If you do something that you are confident of doing and succeed, your confidence in the matter will increase. Conversely, if you are not confident of doing something and you have failed, then your confidence would have shattered. But in the case where you just keep getting hit with failures to meet one's expectations, there will come a point in time where the self-confidence just keeps reeling back from the high levels of negative reinforcement that one was indeed incapable in some sense of the word.

I just hope that my self-confidence hasn't taken such a blow yet.

NaNoWriMo 2010! Official Winner!

54,206 words later, I am done. Proved to be a little harder than last year, because I had to compress all my writing in the first half of the month and I couldn't do much for the second half due to all the work commitments. As usual, grab the manuscript from my domain. I'll fill in more details here some time in the future when I have a little more time on my hands.

Rant

I suppose it has probably gotten to the time in life where one is starting to get more ``boring'' as a general rule of thumb, because I find that I have less and less interesting things that I really want to talk about over here, or even on my other blog. I'm a little less pensieve than before, partly because there's just so much that needs to be done that I have little time to be worrying about other things that might be affecting me, this being November and all. Oh and the fact that every day, in effect, I am mostly working on things alone, just me with my machines in my cubicle, wondering about why something wasn't working in the way that one would think ought to work, only to end the work day with a few queries still left in the mind that needs some more investigation once I reach home.

I have been told by many people about how they can read the various research papers on the buses and the other public transport---I'm not that super to be able to do that. One thing is that I am afflicted by motion sickness, so actually reading anything on any moving vehicle is probably going to cause more grief than anything else. Couple that with the fact that I absolutely adore annotating the text I'm reading, it means the the three hours that I use each day travelling to and fro work are effectively ``dead'' time that I cannot use to do all these readings.

Maybe it is a good thing for me, in a certain sense. Already I'm feeling the effects of being overworked---my mind has been drifting all over the place, sleep has been rather fitful, appetite has been low, irritability has gone up, and I'm seriously starting to look forward to the weekends. This cannot be a good thing considering all that had happened---I've always thought that I was a workaholic, yet now, when faced with the harsh realities of an effective over-commitment of time, it feels as though I'm not as I thought I once was; I was still human with silly human requirements after all. Like sleep and its friends.

I was assured back in my undergraduate years that once I was done with undergrad, life will not be any more hectic. Then, just like now, I knew that it was a lie; it is hardly the case that things will get better over time. If one were lucky, the status quo is maintained and there will hardly be anything that is sworth worrying about any more. But of course, the thing is that in real-life out of that of academia, work is never-ending---everything is ``in the book'' and while you might have access to your ``cheat sheets'' all the time, the fact that you need to consistently be applying all these ideas at least nine-and-a-half hours a day means that at the end of one work day, the sheer feeling of lackadaisicality is just hard ignore.

I supose there is no one else to blame but myself. In many ways, it might be the case that I have been thinking too highly about myself, always setting goals that are so high and hard that most people think that it is sheer folly to even consider, let alone trying to work towards them. Always a need to prove myself, always a need to show something. Maybe one day I will learn how to overcome this character flaw and figure out how to take things a little easier so as to leave myself with some time to actually do the whole ``be alive'' bit as opposed to being a cog in the entire machine.

I started on this post with hardly any true direction---I think this truly qualifies as a rant of some sort. Maybe some day I will get to look back on this, reflect on it, and then learn to laugh if off.

용서 못해 (I Cannot Forgive)

It seems that even I am not completely immune to what goes on in society. Anywhere, here's something I've been hooked on to for the last few days:A very catchy hook; can't resist. Also, the lyrics are rather saddening too...

Initial Capitalisation in Vim

To change the words to be of initial caps, first get to the beginning of the word, then type gUl. To continue for other words, just use w to get to the next word, and . to repeat the action.

Tip from here.

The Pariah

I am the Pariah, the Ishmael of the microcosm that I was once a member of. Amongst peers, I am peerless, not because of my irrefutable ability, but because I was a non-conformist. I yearn the closeness of a fellow human being, but abhor the vulnerabilities that come with the association. I wish to be loved, but have forgotten what is like to love. I am the abomination of humankind, the very essence of what it is to be an outcast.

Each time when I thought I was a part of a group, circumstances would always show otherwise. The world I live in is a constricting cube of norms, not all of them understandable, not all of them comprehensible. As the months turn into years, the more I live in this world, the more I wish I never lived.

Many a time, the will to live had deserted me, yet somehow I was denied the sweetness of death by factors all encompassing, as though it were my karmic retribution to be in constant suffering. Surrounded by the temptations of a thousand hedonistic practices, lured by the seduction of the evil twin sisters of the muse, I struggle past each day trying to be oblivious to all that is occurring around, with my steadfast holding of the small spark of determination that stems from my life quest of seeking knowledge.

But with each passing day, I find the winds of change increasing in intensity, and at times, that spark that I hold so dearly to seemed all but vanquished, raising my hopes that my piteous existence would be snuffed out once and for all, only to have them dashed like waves upon rocks, with the spark enfeebled but hardly dead. Oh woe it is to be living the life of the unliving!

My rational intellect was torn asunder from aeons past, through the three times of silliness I led myself into, the same three times where I exposed my heart and all to the cruelties that made the world. And thrice I exposed, thrice I did fall, hard each time, from the uncaring stabs from those I thought cared the most. A year of construction had commenced since the last defeat, and slowly but sadly, the fortress was built anew, with nary a thought for any save for myself.

Me. Myself. I!

The fortress that held the castle of the heart is now desolate of the once warm springs of love and emotion. In the throne of Eros now sits the Dark Lord who ruled the land of the unliving, poisoning the ventricles of the beating heart with spite and rage that burned the blood into a boiling mass of chaos. Gone are the compassion and empathy, gone are the feelings of comfort. Welcome to the despair, to the blackness, to the pure feeling of suffering. Such is the lot of my life.

As I sit here fulminating from the recesses of my soul, I wonder when will my karma of suffering finally end.

Dealing With Light Tarnish

If you have some metal stuff with light tarnish, consider using toothpaste as a light abrasive to bring back the shine.

Statistics for NaNoWriMo

Some useful tools for NaNoWriMo:

1. Use http://www.nanowrimo.org/NanowrimoUtils/NanowrimoGraph/yourid.png for a nice breakdown chart.
2. Link to http://www.nanowrimo.org/NanowrimoUtils/ProgressReport/yourid.html for the detailed numerical breakdown. See this for my own breakdown.

Material partially from here.

[Ed: Forget these links for now... there's something wrong with the hosting side on NaNoWriMo. Just use the standard widgets for everything.]

NaNoWriMo 2010

And so it begins again. Current working title is ``Towards Cacophony'' with a tentative genre of ``Young Adult & Youth''.

Track my progress over here (it's the same link as before).