unfinished stories

we don't know where they go, or where they come from. they just are. today. now. that's their perfection, with no excuses and no apologies. they are complete because they do not try to be complete. everything is meaningful, everything is chaos, and everything is infinitely ephemeral. 

Think of the books you really loved, the stories, the b-grade movies you watched drunk, baked, on mute. The music videos that seemed to be trying to say something. The middle issues of a story arc in a moldy yellowing stack of comics you found under the stairs. The flower found still preserved lovingly inside a book in a second-hand store. Yellowing portraits of strangers on a wall. The pastiche of flickering images stitched together in the channels you flipped past at 1 am, too tired to sleep, too sleepy to be really aware of what you were doing. 
Dreams with no meaning. Emotion without reason. Images without plot. Music without words. 

They happen, and you stitch them together into a story that's all yours. It's a story born of your memories, your experiences, your interpretations of what you saw. It's may not be what happened, but because you don't know what did happen... it could even be true. It's a story that nobody else would have, and it's a story that depends on so many moving parts in time that it could never have been anytime before, or anytime since. 

I love these stories. I don't want the series to continue, the the hero to get his vengeance, the loose ends tied up, and the curtain to fall. 
I walk into the middle, and I make it mine. 

Why was this so important? What happened to you, that you should want this? Who is she? Why do you see that face in your nightmares? Are you really going to pull that trigger? Did he ever forgive you? Did he forget? Will he remember? 

Invent your own past, your own reasons for people to be who they are, for things to be what they are. Leap in. Surf. Leap off and make up the rest when you run out of pages. 

Every waking moment is a story you invent as you go along. Every moment past is mystery to be deciphered. Every moment coming is a world of possibility where anything may happen. 

What else is there to live for? 

Making Decisions

Ever since childhood, I've always had a difficult time deciding - for every pro, I'd counter with a con, for every positive there would be a negative, and I'd get fed up, switch sides, and it would happen all over again. 

I tried the list-the-pros-and-cons methods, but as you can guess, that was a brilliant exercise in creativity and self-justification and paper usage, but not much good as a decision-maker. 

Finally, I resorted to a technique I'd learned over 2 decades ago in class 6 maths. 

Weighed scores. 

And made a revolutionary discovery. 

Technique:

• List your choices down
• Assign attributes
• Assign weights to those attributes
• Score each attribute 
• Calculate the weighed scores
• Add up the weighed scores
• Sort by total score. 

Obviously, Google and Excel make this a lot easier. You can add on a lot of other stuff - looks (which I've realized tends to play a fairly significant veto role in decisions), brand name, etc - but ultimately, it boils down to how many attributes you identified, and if you got the information you needed for each one. 

The revolutionary bit, is that this not only lists down the decision, but also lists at the same time every possible justification you had for it, every possible choice you considered, what you felt was important, and how each compared to the others. Numerically. 

It also breaks down the task into clearly defined, simple, nibble-sized routine activity. Feature searches. Data entry. Formula building. Scoring. 

No big decisions, no brain-freezing infinite chaos of swirling possibilities. 

At any point, you can pause the decision-making by saving and come back exactly where you left off. 

It's... zen. There's no emotion struggling against logic, no tsunami hammering on an unprotected coastline. It's the order and quiet of a Japanese garden, a Roman irrigation system, currents through a semiconductor chip. It doesn't knock the emotion out of the decision, but instead channels it, into exactly where it is most appropriate and most useful - in assigning scores and weights. The rest, it's just maths. 

And if you don't like the end result, argue with the logic - and with a few quick changes, edit the scenario to match. It's not cheating, it's intuitive systemization. A large, complex system can go haywire with a small mistake; but that is clearly felt in the results, and can be traced to exactly why. 

There's no cognitive dissonance, no buyer's paradox. It presents you with a fait accompli, with an opportunity to change before you actually swipe the card. 

Heck, it even gives you a sorted, prioritized list of options!

And I've realized, it can be applied to any comparative decision. The only thing that limits yo, is the attributes - or possibilities - that you've considered. 

wsfgythyd

in one hand, i hold a fresh-from-machine espresso in a paper cup. the other, a plastic bottle i just filled from the watercooler. condensation forms and fades in the dehumidified, conditioned air. conflicting signals, burn and freeze. imagined thermoelectric drift. i feel awake. 

strange dreams. a party, a relocation, old places, new faces... ever thought about how two familiar aspects of life can become bizarre if brought together? 

caffeine buzz. 

sometimes, the bkc stretch can almost compensate for the juhu bridge. but nothing can make the andheri bit of the w.e.h. anything other than the drive up to the gates of of the city of dis. 

i like early mornings. the time doesn't matter, it just has to be before it gets used by other people. before sunup, before rush hour, before office timings, before the movie start. on that side of reality opposite the langoliers, existence gets you high. little things. smells. highlights off chrome. sunshine.