God Complex

Ahead of the yearly reflection on my life and writing, I can already say what I feel about what has happened in my life thus far. It can easily be reduced to a single word, really: suckage. Yes it sucks, it sucks beyond what I might be expecting (which wasn't really much to begin with but still), and I have every reason to believe that it will suck more.

I think that in many ways, this year can be classified as the Year Of Amazingly Bad Choices Whose Consequences Are Haunting Me. I've had to make a couple of really hard decisions, most of them done at the breaking point of my personal sanity and rationality, all with dastardly consequences whose ramifications I cannot see completely yet, since they have been lying beyond my horizon of understanding. I had been rendered increasingly miserable over the last year or so being here in the middle of nowhere, realising more than ever that I am a foreigner in a foreign land, surrounded by even more foreign foreigners than before. I've always thought of myself as being fairly immune to the whole racism nonsense, but given my experiences here so far, I think that is no longer true, partly because of the repeated actions of the few who don't seem to realise what they are doing.

But cryptoxenophobia aside, I keep feeling that I have been making rather bad life choices over the last six years of my life. Deciding to try out intimate relationships have left me emotionally broken with a hollow shell, deciding to to take on a PhD has left me intellectually broken with a permanent migraine in my head, deciding to do martial arts has made me more aware of all kinds of new types of injuries that I had never even heard of. But among the three, I've not really given up on my martial arts, not just yet, though I'm currently in a restive period to recover from all the random injuries that had occurred here and there because of stupid circumstances unrelated to martial arts.

Yes, you've heard it here. I've given up on intimate relationships and my PhD. Shouldn't be a surprise, really. I think that it has been pretty obvious considering my general affect over the last year or so. I don't even know how I even manage to be around people given that I find my connections with most of them so superficial I might as well be manipulating them like a true sociopath does, you know, the whole ``process predator'' thing. I like hiding away in my room in front of Eileen or any of my other machines, either hacking away on some code that nobody cares enough about except me, or playing some computer games (in single player mode I might add) that I like. In short, almost like my fourteen-year-old self, except with greater purchasing power, greater general social responsibility and greater empowerment in making my own choices. No silly lab tech/teacher to tell me that I cannot use the computer lab over the school break because I was there most of the time, no one to tell me that I couldn't run Linux on the machines because it wasn't Windows.

Silly me since the early twenties---what made me think I would change my very nature with the whole ``adult'' thing by trying to have deep conversations about society, going out to parties or clubs and drinking or even gasp socialising with people? Life is more than a career; so what if I made a lot of money a month. Will it buy me happiness? I don't think so. Early in life, I was altruistic, thinking that I am fully justified in sacrificing myself ``for the greater good''---now, after being exposed to society, I wonder, why should I? I can do enough to give back to what society has offered me; I don't have to sacrifice myself for the idiots who are out there. And now, as the rise to prominence of social media shows, I am even better off shutting my true self away from the populace. I have been increasingly disgusted by the mis-application of technology, the ``big-sell snake oil'' that idiots have been pushing to other idiots, and how everything is soooo lovey-dovey. This world is made for normal people; I'm dysfunctional, but it's the true me, it is the me that I am most comfortable with. Damn those who don't understand; I can control machines, I am a god of my machines---I can create my own happiness. That's what the general population do not do.

So why am I trying to fit in again?

Kick-off and Freewrite Transcript

Eh, I know this is kind of stupid, considering that I am using words for NaNoWriMo and yet, instead of writing my novel, I'm wasting them on yet another blog entry. Whatever man---over the course of the last 4 days, I had written around 23k+ words, I think I've earned my time to do something else that involves a different kind of writing.

First off, the kick-off party. Yep, the NaNoWriMo kick-off party on Oct 31 was a blast. The whole bunch of us were out in full force at the Illini Union and had a great time talking about writing and other random things in general. Small mishaps though, when Erin (one of the muncipal liaisons) opened up the big bottle of soda, it exploded into a sticky mess from the gas build up, and my shoes got hit by it. It wasn't too bad, just funny. Also, some free writing stuff that I have transcribed to here from that event:

It is the night in which a bunch of crazies decide to lose one month's worth of sleep and time on a ``one-day'' task, the task of fulfilling fifty thousand words in the short span of a mere thirty days, an event that was once thought to be impossible but has been completed by legions for the last ten or so years, with their inner editors removed from the equation, their imagination wanton, their grammar tested, their diction forced, their flow pushed, each of those who have dedicated their time and energies to the endeavour suddenly find a realise at the end of it all, as they settle back to the humdrum of daily life, after a whole month of solid, pain-staking writing, thinking, processing and fighting the inner urge to correct, confound and refine to repurpose their lives from the norm into one filled with fantasy, pomp, desire, hatred and jubilation, the one novel of around fifty thousand words, the end product of yet another iteration of NaNoWriMo---the National Novel Writing Month.

Yes, that was one sentence, a free write... in ink on paper. I'm not going to scan and upload an image of it, because it has one of the worse scrawls that I can produce in modern times (I'm not proud of its penmanship).

Next off, the contents of NaNoWriMo. I know I said before I wasn't joining, then I said I was, and now I am. But what is this year's contents about, really? Like always, I have no clue because I am winging it. But in broad strokes, think fantasy×realistic fiction and you'll have the general idea of what I'm writing. It has been decent progress, and I hope to surge past 25k tomorrow when I continue to write it. 6k per day is probably the maximum rate that I can go without shocking myself into a daze---2k in the morning (1 hour), 2k in the afternoon (1h) and 2k in the evening/night (1h). I find that the more time I dedicate to a stretch of writing, the less writing I actually do, which is interesting but not unexpected.

Anyhow, I originally wanted to write something really sad and depressing here, but somehow writing about NaNoWriMo cheered myself up, so I'll have to defer that sordid sob story some other time.