A lovely night isn't it? Apart from Eirian-II, all my other regular devices for reading are currently drained of their power, leaving me with some time to kill, and nothing to read. Couple that with the cool night time air from the just-fallen rain, it feels like one of those days where a little blog entry is in order.
Relationships are hard. I've finally gotten enough courage to read Suzuka, something that I have had my hands on for quite a long time but could never really ``man up'' to read it. I watched the anime for it that spanned the first ten volumes of the tankōbon volumes, but obviously it was only an adaptation and was therefore less complete as compared to the original manga. The choice of ``man up'' is deliberate---the story is in some ways sad because the failings of the protagonist are just so plain to see from the third party perspective, but in-universe, it is easy to see just why he can't see his own failings himself.
It hits a little close to home, actually.
Anyway, in the grander scheme of things, there's a reason why I don't watch much anime now as compared to the times when I was in college. I can't take it any more. No, not because of the ``animation'' aspect, but the emotional aspect that comes with each of the series that I watch. They feature human qualities like friendship, comradeship, romance, and somehow they all feel as though they hit a little close to home.
What I mean is, I feel lonely. Each time I watch these anime or read such manga, I feel a little lonely inside. It's not that I don't have any human connections whatsoever that is causing such a feeling of loneliness---it is that kind of semi-hollow feeling one gets when the connections are not that deep. It's a side effect of building all these protective walls around me, always presenting the fantastic façade against the world, always working to exhaustion to avoid having to introspect to find the lonely person within.
In many ways, I am extremely content, verging on being passive even. Sometimes, under the right triggers, I am reminded of how life can be like, and those times, I wish I were dead since that's how I end up feeling inside. Dead. Like there was nothing left to do for my emotional self.
I don't anger much. I don't cry much. I don't actually feel much in general. I share some mirth with friends over a joke, and maybe have that impish slant towards the ridiculous, but that's about it. It's quite contrary to be a musician while having such monotonous emotions---it seems that I have been good enough at fake-projecting all the needed emotions out whenever I have to play a piece. A cool gift, I would think, but ultimately it is just hollow. When I sit alone and stare out into space and happen to look back into myself, I see shadows. It seems that I can never look into myself---if there's something I would fear, it is to look into myself and finding nothing of value there. I only look outwards of myself, observing the world, thinking about what goes on out there, reasoning about everything else. I am too scared to look into myself because I know that I can find nothing there.
Sadly though, despite trying my hardest to not look into myself, I have done so more often than I care to over the past few years. I think I lost a part of me the day Ida dumped me. It has been five years, and you know what's funny, every now and then, out of the blue, I will think of her still, even though I know she cares not about me any more. It's not that strong of an emotion, granted, since it has the luxury of time to space it out---what I remember are the good things that happened, the kind of closeness that I'd never gotten ever since. But there was still the distance---we're talking about a girl who probably got the closest to me before it all fell through, and at the end of the day, even that wasn't close enough. I'm not really sure what to make of that though.
It's a funny sort of feeling to have. On the one hand, we find that people are relying on me increasingly for guidance and leadership, as a pillar to support our small little sub-section of society, all of which suggest some level of maturity and ken. On the other hand, I feel that deep within myself, I am still emotionally insecure and possibly immature. As I near my thirtieth birthday, I cannot help but wonder if my karmic lesson for this life time is to learn the true meaning of love and understanding.
Monday, November 24, 2014
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Night Time Introspection
The hard part about living isn't about intellectual stimulation, but emotional stability and assuredness. That is something that I am fast starting to learn as I trudge through yet another year.
Technically, we are now approaching the traditionally disliked portions of the year. And this year, strangely enough, is turning out to be no different from previous years.
I like being alone, most of the time. It's quite relaxing to just be oneself, to read, to figure things out, to not over-stress about the social pressures of the world. But then, there are times where even the alone person starts to feel a little lonely, to actually crave for some kind of human contact, to talk about the things that were read, to discuss things that were experienced, to just share a yarn or two. Then, there are the times where physical contact is craved, to hold someone dear in one's arms, to cuddle, to hug, to snuggle, to just feel the kind of warmth that comes with being with a loved one.
Those are, as far as I can tell, the key ingredients to actually staying mentally sane.
I get my talk on with people every now and then. Granted, there are not that many people whom I actually talk ``serious stuff'' (or at least things that are of direct interest without necessarily providing a ``productivity increase'' in the monetary sense), but I do get to talk with them at least once every quarter. It's not enough, but it's not as shabby as it sounds. Such talk takes time to gather information and analysis, and is probably best spent at the rate of a symposium.
But the physical contact, I don't get it much, if at all. Not since 2009. It's a side effect of being withdrawn, in many senses, from the wider world. It sucks to live in a repressed country where even a hug is suspicious, let alone getting close. And in a place where repressed love is the norm, people like me who like physical contact just get no air time, especially since I'm not that gregarious or rich enough to sally through the repression.
And that's the chief reason behind my general low affect, if there's any reason to be found.
I don't lack money. Okay, I, like everyone else, wish to get more of it, but it's not something that is actively hampering me. I am pretty stable in terms of employment and my intellectual curiousity---I've not reached the point where I feel like I'm not doing anything useful or interesting just yet. But I miss being close and secretive with that special someone, and sometimes that drives me nuts.
My usual remedy is to just go run or do hard physical exercise to burn it all out of the system. It works, until I sustain injuries of some sort, or if the weather gives me a big fuck you in the form of the Sumatran haze or unrelenting rain. So it's not exactly a permanent solution.
I'm fast reaching the start of the fourth decade of my existence (do the math: if I reach thirty next year, that's three decades that had come and gone, with the fourth one beginning). Maybe this innate sense of ``missing something'' will dominate this upcoming decade, the way the innate sense of ``where do I fit in the world'' dominating the decade that just passed me by.
Hell, maybe I don't even get to live that long, dying from a broken heart or suiciding from an overload of despair that is not easily removed through the physical exercises that I attempt. Who knows?
Technically, we are now approaching the traditionally disliked portions of the year. And this year, strangely enough, is turning out to be no different from previous years.
I like being alone, most of the time. It's quite relaxing to just be oneself, to read, to figure things out, to not over-stress about the social pressures of the world. But then, there are times where even the alone person starts to feel a little lonely, to actually crave for some kind of human contact, to talk about the things that were read, to discuss things that were experienced, to just share a yarn or two. Then, there are the times where physical contact is craved, to hold someone dear in one's arms, to cuddle, to hug, to snuggle, to just feel the kind of warmth that comes with being with a loved one.
Those are, as far as I can tell, the key ingredients to actually staying mentally sane.
I get my talk on with people every now and then. Granted, there are not that many people whom I actually talk ``serious stuff'' (or at least things that are of direct interest without necessarily providing a ``productivity increase'' in the monetary sense), but I do get to talk with them at least once every quarter. It's not enough, but it's not as shabby as it sounds. Such talk takes time to gather information and analysis, and is probably best spent at the rate of a symposium.
But the physical contact, I don't get it much, if at all. Not since 2009. It's a side effect of being withdrawn, in many senses, from the wider world. It sucks to live in a repressed country where even a hug is suspicious, let alone getting close. And in a place where repressed love is the norm, people like me who like physical contact just get no air time, especially since I'm not that gregarious or rich enough to sally through the repression.
And that's the chief reason behind my general low affect, if there's any reason to be found.
I don't lack money. Okay, I, like everyone else, wish to get more of it, but it's not something that is actively hampering me. I am pretty stable in terms of employment and my intellectual curiousity---I've not reached the point where I feel like I'm not doing anything useful or interesting just yet. But I miss being close and secretive with that special someone, and sometimes that drives me nuts.
My usual remedy is to just go run or do hard physical exercise to burn it all out of the system. It works, until I sustain injuries of some sort, or if the weather gives me a big fuck you in the form of the Sumatran haze or unrelenting rain. So it's not exactly a permanent solution.
I'm fast reaching the start of the fourth decade of my existence (do the math: if I reach thirty next year, that's three decades that had come and gone, with the fourth one beginning). Maybe this innate sense of ``missing something'' will dominate this upcoming decade, the way the innate sense of ``where do I fit in the world'' dominating the decade that just passed me by.
Hell, maybe I don't even get to live that long, dying from a broken heart or suiciding from an overload of despair that is not easily removed through the physical exercises that I attempt. Who knows?
Sunday, November 16, 2014
The Post 50k Rant
Alright, now that I am safely past the goal post for NaNoWriMo with only a story to finish as opposed to 50k words to write, I can sit back a little and write a little something here.
Let's start from the benign shall we?
This year's story is a social commentary of sorts from the small and large scale social turmoil that we see in the world today. Inspired by happenings in Singapore, Hong Kong and even Ukraine, I put together a fictional ``neo city-state'' that is the setting for the three different viewpoints that I explore in the city. The framing device is that of the protagonist doing a history project, and having to interview three people who had lived through a particular era that involved something that was known as the Restoration Conflict. Since that said event happened roughly forty or so years earlier in the time line of the framing device, we run into the obvious issue of the Unreliable Narrator, and in this case, three of them, which is also a subtle hand waving mechanism for me to pay a little less attention to continuity among the three different perspectives as compared to the other stuff that I hard written before the involved parallel perspectives in the writing. In its current state as at now, I have completed two of the interviews, and am in the middle of a segue to bring out the third and final interview before writing a conclusion of the whole affair. I estimate that it will take at least another fifteen thousand words or so before I can claim that the story is done.
But for now I will give myself a break for today (it's Sunday!) and instead focus on validating the 500 generated datasets from work. Yes, it's mind numbing and is a doozy, but like I said before many times, if something is worth doing, it's worth doing right. I'd rather take the pain now to verify the stuff instead of waiting till much later when we need it that I start to panic and patch things together.
Work-wise, there are still a couple of server programs that I need to write, some calculus I need to sort out (logic system, not the stuff Newton/Leibniz invented), and some inane but annoying bugs I need to fix in the existing server program. Some of the stuff can be delayed, but there are a couple that needs to be in ship-shape by Wednesday, which is a tough but not completely impossible call.
And now, for some brain-hurting stuff.
I was reading articles online recently, and came across these two rather interesting stories. I'm linking them below with my own titles:So what was it that I found interesting about them?
The concept of death versus immortality.
I'm pretty sure I had talked something about how one dies twice before, if not here then at some random Facebook post. But in case it is one of those delusions I have, here's the concept again.
Funny enough, this concept isn't invalidated by a future archaeological discovery. True, the bodily remains may be found, but a body does not make a person. The words said may capture some aspect of the abstract essence of a person, but it's a snapshot view, not as integrative as the whole interaction that had occurred with the person, and if the attribution is lost, the abstract essence loses its identity and just becomes wisdom of the ages, i.e. you're still pretty much forgotten.
The two stories thus highlighted have provided a new dimension to the notion of ``abstract essence'' of the person. Instead of a snapshot of a single instance, or being locked in the mind as a memory, we have an interactive recording of what the person did. In a way, it's a projection of the person's abstract essence into the space spanned by the interactions permitted in the digital medium. So in the first story, it's the boy's father's driving being captured, and in the second, a symbol that was drawn up by a now deceased grandmother.
There's a certain amount of immortality behind these two stories. They are sort of like memories, but they are also stronger than that, since they capture something that can be shared with other people losslessly. The same ghost driver in the driving game can be experienced by other players of the game in the same way, and the grandmother's Mii can still be involved in in-game interactions. So in that sense, they haven't died the second death.
At this point, I will stop and admit that stupid o'clock cometh, and will end what I'm writing because really, I have no clue what I was getting at. Blame it on the NaNoWriMo-ing I have done.
Till the next update.
Let's start from the benign shall we?
This year's story is a social commentary of sorts from the small and large scale social turmoil that we see in the world today. Inspired by happenings in Singapore, Hong Kong and even Ukraine, I put together a fictional ``neo city-state'' that is the setting for the three different viewpoints that I explore in the city. The framing device is that of the protagonist doing a history project, and having to interview three people who had lived through a particular era that involved something that was known as the Restoration Conflict. Since that said event happened roughly forty or so years earlier in the time line of the framing device, we run into the obvious issue of the Unreliable Narrator, and in this case, three of them, which is also a subtle hand waving mechanism for me to pay a little less attention to continuity among the three different perspectives as compared to the other stuff that I hard written before the involved parallel perspectives in the writing. In its current state as at now, I have completed two of the interviews, and am in the middle of a segue to bring out the third and final interview before writing a conclusion of the whole affair. I estimate that it will take at least another fifteen thousand words or so before I can claim that the story is done.
But for now I will give myself a break for today (it's Sunday!) and instead focus on validating the 500 generated datasets from work. Yes, it's mind numbing and is a doozy, but like I said before many times, if something is worth doing, it's worth doing right. I'd rather take the pain now to verify the stuff instead of waiting till much later when we need it that I start to panic and patch things together.
Work-wise, there are still a couple of server programs that I need to write, some calculus I need to sort out (logic system, not the stuff Newton/Leibniz invented), and some inane but annoying bugs I need to fix in the existing server program. Some of the stuff can be delayed, but there are a couple that needs to be in ship-shape by Wednesday, which is a tough but not completely impossible call.
And now, for some brain-hurting stuff.
I was reading articles online recently, and came across these two rather interesting stories. I'm linking them below with my own titles:So what was it that I found interesting about them?
The concept of death versus immortality.
I'm pretty sure I had talked something about how one dies twice before, if not here then at some random Facebook post. But in case it is one of those delusions I have, here's the concept again.
One does not die once in reality, one actually dies twice. The first time one dies, one loses one's overt consciousness over one's body. The second time that one dies is when no one can remember what the essence of one is, i.e. one gets forgotten by everyone.I'm not talking about planar travel and transcendence the way most people might choose to tackle this, I'm merely pointing out that the existence of any person is validated by his/her physical manifestation, and his/her abstract essence of his/her nature. If both are lost, then they have effectively died twice, with little to no chance of recovery.
Funny enough, this concept isn't invalidated by a future archaeological discovery. True, the bodily remains may be found, but a body does not make a person. The words said may capture some aspect of the abstract essence of a person, but it's a snapshot view, not as integrative as the whole interaction that had occurred with the person, and if the attribution is lost, the abstract essence loses its identity and just becomes wisdom of the ages, i.e. you're still pretty much forgotten.
The two stories thus highlighted have provided a new dimension to the notion of ``abstract essence'' of the person. Instead of a snapshot of a single instance, or being locked in the mind as a memory, we have an interactive recording of what the person did. In a way, it's a projection of the person's abstract essence into the space spanned by the interactions permitted in the digital medium. So in the first story, it's the boy's father's driving being captured, and in the second, a symbol that was drawn up by a now deceased grandmother.
There's a certain amount of immortality behind these two stories. They are sort of like memories, but they are also stronger than that, since they capture something that can be shared with other people losslessly. The same ghost driver in the driving game can be experienced by other players of the game in the same way, and the grandmother's Mii can still be involved in in-game interactions. So in that sense, they haven't died the second death.
At this point, I will stop and admit that stupid o'clock cometh, and will end what I'm writing because really, I have no clue what I was getting at. Blame it on the NaNoWriMo-ing I have done.
Till the next update.
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