Baggage

There are some days where you wake up and wonder to yourself, `why am I still alive?'. Unfortunately for me, today is such a day.

Before anyone panics, no I'm not contemplating suicide. Suicide only works on two occasions: getting attention through the attempt, or when there is literally no one who cares for you left for you to give a damn about so that the most logical outcome is to just end it all instead of prolonging suffering.

I will, of course, go back to the old standby and blame it on the season. But it feels a little frivolous, considering that I am no longer located at a latitude where the amount of sunlight hours is sufficiently low to warrant the appeal towards Seasonal Affective Disorder as the culprit. I could always blame it on the annual panic from realising that yet another physical year has passed while I will soon feel that I have aged by three years over three months again.

Or I can do the right thing and admit that the reason for my own dissatisfaction with life at this point is that I still have not gotten over the emotional baggage that I had been lugging around since a decade ago wheen the world started to make almost no sense to me, the day when I was released from the regimented confines of the education system into the more free-form world where the only real rule to obey is to not get caught breaking any rules.

If you were wondering, yes, that previous paragraph was a single sentence. Loopy huh.

Okay, while I'm on a roll, let me just put it out there. I'm dissatisfied with the way my emotional life is going. It has gotten to the point where it is starting to become somewhat affective of my daily life in a detrimental sort of way. The first large outbreak of this whole nonsense was back during the first couple of years of NS, from the Lunar Princess. Then it got steadily stupid as I clammed up. Then stuff happened in college, stuff happened outside of college, stuff happened during my PhD-to-Masters, and now, stuff happening while I'm working.

I'm self-censoring to protect... I don't know... people who were involved with me during those times, perhaps. I don't want some Google search to lead them here. No need to draw unnecessary attention. Considering that the visitors to this blog are largely people trying to look for malloc()-lab solutions and the Google web spider, one cannot be too careful.

So... stuff. What to make of it, really? Two words: slow [the hell] down. That's what I need to do. My biggest failing as a human (I can sort of pass as a demented AI, but don't tell anyone that of course) is that when it comes to dealing with other humans, I tend to run hot. And by ``run hot'' I mean ``with great enthusiasm''. Except humans being humans, they cannot appreciate nor care to understand that kind of tendencies. Machines don't give a damn---their perception of time, should there be such a thing, is simple. None of that creepiness or weirdness factor. If they need your attention, they need your attention. If you give your utmost attention, they don't balk and get all creeped out; if anything, they are probably happier with it since it means someone who cares is looking out for them.

You do that to a human, you get a ``gee maybe you're coming on too strong and are creeping me out''. Machines run at the time scale of minutes, hours tops per job, while humans run at the time scale of years, with a whole bunch of emotional baggage that comes along with them to boot.

Machines also have the tendency to not associate much meaning to any particular string of characters until they are told how to interpret it, while humans just jump to stupid conclusions on the get go. Here's an example: ``I eat human foetuses.''. To a machine, it's merely a string, but you, a human reading this [hopefully], you are treated to the unsavoury image of an unborn human foetus being macerated by a mouthful of teeth, possibly with the face of a Hannibal Lector adorning it. Naturally, you'd feel disgusted.

But I don't feel such things. Words are words until I choose an interpretation for them. That's why it's easy to pun, and that's why it's easy to introduce innuendo.

That's why after a while, people just... cannot take it. Because I think more machine-like than human-like, despite having a human-ish avatar with the usual biological needs.

Oh don't get me wrong, it's not like I don't have emotions. I feel sadness, I feel happiness. I know how it feels like to be loved, I know how it feels to be rejected or unloved. I know how to feel hate as well, and how to deliver the vitriol necessary to keep some ignorant assholes in line.

I need to have all those to be an effective musician after all. Musicians gotta feel to play music. Otherwise they'd just be a human version of a MIDI controller.

But I've never felt the need to show them strongly in one way or another. It's weakening. It shows a chink in the armour, the hole in the wall that has been built up from too many past trauma of the emotional sort.

I don't like feeling weak. I like to be in control. That's why I design algorithms and write computer programs---to control the machine.

But I can't control other humans. I'm not a dictator, and I'm not rich enough to buy control. I'm too poor. Even cooperative multi-tasking doesn't work when the clock circuit timings ``don't click''.

I don't know why I'm writing all these now. Perhaps it's a way of expunging stupid data in my head so I can forget about all these and get back to my usual low energy state to carry on living.

Or maybe it's a silent cry for help.

You choose.