Spring Cleaning - it never ends

The advantage of cleaning via moving is the chance to realize what you value. Apparently, I value junk. 

Last night was the emptying-out-my-PC-stuff night. Not the PC itself, of course - that'll be the last to be packed, supplying the soundtrack to the shifting... just the associated junk that accumulates around it. 

I'm blown away. A veritable forest of cables - A/V, extensions, USB cords, converters, patch cords, phone jacks. Headphones of every shape and size. Not one, not two, but five MP3 players with in various stages of breakdown. Gamepads, one PS2 with a USB adapter, the other wireless bluetooth. A wifi dongle. A bluetooth dongle. Card reader. Joystick. Wireless adapters. Webcam. Three  ancient cellphones. A USB cable intended for something truly monstrous, by the shape of it's other end - and I have no idea what it is. Those tine, tiny master/slave connector thingies. A burnt-out motherboard in Iron Man colors. TV tuner. A box of PC screws. A pair of wireless headphones, the radio versions. USB fan, from that time when the PC room fan broke down and repairing it was too much of a pain. External hard disk adapter/case. Plugpoint adapters. 

I packed it all. Hey, most of it still works in some form... it's like a giant, unwieldy, electronic jigsaw. One day it will all be assembled into something awesome. 

Which will then probably gain sentience and tear me from limb to limb, according to Shelley's Law. 

How could they leave without telling us??

a little trip down memory lane, tonight. some beer, a lot of remembrance.
it's been eight years, and it's unfair.
we always had boundaries. a clear dividing line. a phase of life ends, another begins, and there's no confusion. an exam, a holiday, a trip, and a complete change in the way life was. it was a clear, simple time.
it all ended in 2002.
the last eight years have been... mushed. slowly, imperceptibly, things changed, people changed, circumstances changed.
people who swore never to be slaves to the cell now own one.
people who were always supposed to be jungli became civilized.
people who were always supposed to smoke, quit.
people who were, were icons, dammit, gained weight, shaved, cut their hair, settled down.
groups fragmented, faded away.
all the things we swore we'd do, became less and less important.
bikes have been sold, or abandoned. cars have been bought. credit cards. emi's.
places that were packed until they threw us out are empty at midnight.
weekends are slept away, the high point being a movie.
slowly, insidiously, time steals it all.
it wasn't supposed to be like this. When something died, we knew it, and we knew what we were getting in return. Every sacrifice came with a reward.
I feel betrayed by time today. it came, and it stole almost a decade of my life and gave nothing back except memories. the good times we had, slipped away in silence, and they never even stopped to say goodbye. tonight, it's just you and me, and a long, long shadow that stretches away behind us, the dark stake that's pinned us to the ground.
I feel... lost, sometimes. where did everyone go? 
is this what it's supposed to be like? wandering about blindly in a darkening room, while everything you love vanishes into the dusk? as dreams die?
I do not begrudge the passage of time. It's natural, inevitable. What I hate, and what I feel shocked, angered, saddened by, is the way it just left without a party, without a whimper, just faded away. I feel emptied out, emptied with the knowledge that something I thought I had all along wasn't there at all for a long time. That I was dancing on a dream, one that softly evaporated in the morning, leaving just a confused sense of happiness and regret.

Where d'ye think you're going? get your ass back in here! leave if you must, but do me the courtesy of acknowledging the time we had, tell me that it had been good.
Let me see what happens next. I'm tired of flailing about in the dark.

Spring Cleaning: (Paradigm) Shifting

The Universe is with you, in the way that the guy who pushes you into the deep end of the pool is more or less moving in the same direction and is (almost) by your side. 

I took the first step in initiating Phase 1 of The Ultimate Cleanup Operation - of moving house - by arranging for an alternate and telling my landlord I will be vacating in 2 months. Promptly, and out of the blue, the plan got shot to hell by a phone call from HR - the company's allotted me a flat. Chances are, I need to prepone the move now - subject to approval by higher (Mrs.) authorities, of course. 

But it's still good. People push you into the pool so you get refreshed, woken up, cleaned, and generally snapped out of whatever rut you were in. I'm seeing a pattern, a plan here. A phase of life is ending and on it's last legs - time to move on. 

online identities

A lot of pre-modern cultures shared a belief that photographs can steal your soul - trapping something as essential and personal as your face in a magic box and spiriting it away. So would mirrors... during funerals, mirrors would be covered. 

You could consider it a ridiculous belief, but belief it is - the subject matter doesn't matter, what matters is your faith, your psychic investment in that abstract. Caught by a sudden, unexpected flash, Tribesman X worries about his soul, Brand Manager Y worries about revenue loss due to IPR abuse and trademark violation, Celeb Z sees a loss of image and star value... we all worry. We worry about some intangible, indefinable thing being taken away from us... yet we put it right back out there every chance we get, in other media. 

How much of ourselves doesn't even belong to us anymore? Our lives, images, plans, feelings, hopes, dreams, triumphs and disasters... all out there, all for the world to see. To respond to. To discuss among themselves about. 

When you ride a tiger, you can't get off. We aren't riding a tiger. We're riding a kraken, an island on the back of a whale, blissfully unaware of where it's taking us... 

One can say that a digital profile is as much a part of the personal self as any insubstantial notion of the mind, psyche, soul... whether it resides in the brain, the heart, the liver... or a server farm in Norway. But I believe there's a fundamental difference. A policy change in Palo Alto should not reduce my sense of self-worth. Nor should a random comment, like (or lack of them), etc. Yet - they do. We post. They respond. We re-respond. 

But more than that... why do we place so much into this? Time that will never come back. Thought. Emotion. For what? If we enjoy sermonizing from our soapboxes, we should do it knowing why we're there. 

Let's not become carried away in collective groupthink. 

Start asking Why. Start understanding what you get... and what you lose... and if it's worth it in the end. 

metaphors

the sun is climbing slowly towards the zenith. the day is getting hotter, and even the breeze is gone. sweat streams off me, and the weight of the bag is getting heavier - which is weird, considering I've been eating and drinking out of it for a while now. 

it was dark when i woke up, and i'm thinking back of those few hours - packing, timepassing, making the calls and making plans. it's always a tough call, that one, when you pack - should you be prepared for everything, at the cost of a bag that weighs 19 tons and screws you throughout the whole trip? Or blithely pack bare essentials, and god help you if anything goes wrong? i generally tend towards the former. and it's telling, now. sure, it feels good to see the smiles on the faces of the people who ran out of water long back and who you helped from your supplies - but smiles don't make chafed shoulders easier to bear. 

trying to peer ahead, up, look for some shade - how much more do we need to climb? the sun is blinding. hard to see, now. everything was so clear at dawn - a world exploding with possibilities, and me fresh as a daisy and raring to go. there's a patch of trees ahead - i think i'll stop for a bit, take the bag off. catch my breath. 

some views have been spectacular, though. worth the trip. i should've brought a better camera. 

and people wander off all over the place. half the time somebody's gone off on a trip of their own, getting lost, calling to show something... exploring slows the group, but makes for a better memory. 

wish it would rain a bit. or at least some clouds. 

damn, i need to lose weight. all the samosas in the morning are making themselves felt. 

not leading the group anymore - somewhere around the middle-end, i guess. doesn't matter. as long as i don't lose the way - i know where we're all going. some might just get there first... and do what? take a nap? i'd prefer to see more of the trek... after all, getting there is half the fun. 

unless you're stumbling along in the dark, scared, lost and alone. that's not much fun if you can't handle it. 

and the afternoon is going to be even hotter, if we don't find a shadier path. need to remember that. take it slow, but not too slow. 

oh, well - take that as it comes. concentrate on that shady bit ahead. it's coming up soon. 

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.  

Spring Cleaning: Revolutions

Looks like the cleanup is going to happen the way it's always been happening while I was growing up - by taking each and every single individual item in the house, one by one, wiping it down, and popping it into a box. What's left over at the end of it all is dust, dirt, stains, junk, trash, and memories. 

Then all the boxes are picked up, moved a short distance, and as if by magic, a new life begins. One where all surfaces are clean, walls are painted, all your stuff consists only of working, neatly labelled items, and the air is full of pregnant possibility. There are no rules that say, 'put this here', 'this goes there', or 'this is out of place'. Everything is out of place, which is the best place to be in. 

The machine's been overhauled, lightly sprayed with oil, polished, put back together and is raring to go. 

Now I just need the boxes. 

Are non-vegetarians evil?

Had an interesting debate few days ago while tearing a chicken patty to shreds with my evil pointy teeth. A staunch vegetarian stared at me for a few minutes, a look of disgusted horror on his face, and asked me if I knew how chickens were ill-treated before being killed - their feet being burned off because of being confined among their own guano, etc. I told him that's why I didn't eat the feet, and he got up and left the table... but it got me thinking. 

Consider the chicken. It's the most populous bird on planet Earth. It has no talons, can't fly, is fat, slow, stupid. It doesn't breed fast, and isn't particularly poisonous or even particularly bad-tasting. By all logic, if left to itself, it would have gone the way of the dodo. Yet, among birds, it's a spectacular success - because it linked it's evolutionary success with humans. 

As a species, did it make the right decision - guaranteeing it's success as a whole, while sacrificing the lives of the individuals? For as long as humans eat chicken, and are sitting on top of the food chain, chickens will not be extinct. Nor will any other domesticated animal. Nor will the scavengers, the vermin. In fact, they will evolve along multiple lines, filling several ecological niches created by Man. 

So the question is - by guaranteeing it's success, by ensuring it's immortality as long as the (non-vegetarian) human race exists - are us meat-eaters evil? 

Spring Cleaning: Part 2

The Cupboard

Threw out a whole bunch of clothes - stuff I don't like, doesn't fit, is worn out, and even some stuff that's been lying there for a while... hey, if I haven't worn it for a year, I doubt if I'm going to be wearing it tomorrow. Ethnic formals wrapped in bags and shoved into deep storage. Ditto, sheets and blankets. Socks sorted by color into large ziplocs. Belts, handkerchiefs, and watches in their own individual plastic trays. 

The Den

Do I use even one of these 2 beds cluttering up the place? No? Then why not use one as storage space for the bike? Transfer mattress, dump all of R's gym stuff on the window-set and bike goes up on the box... immediate space. Need to dump some of that gym stuff, hasn't been used at all... 

But... it's feeling like a losing battle. No matter how much I try, the essential mess - the clutter still comes through. All the lofts and deep storage is stuffed to bursting, cupboards full, shelves full... and there's still, so many things everywhere... crowding me, disrupting... have to move on. Have to find a better way to deal with this. 

Spring Cleaning: Part 1

The Blog Sidebar

Gone. The malfunctioning blogroll, the useless subscribe options, the ads, the logos, all the cool cute stuff. I don't miss it. I barely remember what was there or why I even had it... mostly useless. Some experiments, now dead and done. Mostly, extremely cringeworthy.

Haloscan

What started this? I think it was - Haloscan. After two or three years of ignoring buggy code, I finally got down to it and wiped it. Lost some comments, but who cares.

I felt light. I felt... freed.

Torrents and Games

I left the PC off last night. Ferelden can take care of itself for a while. No torrents either. I've barely started seeing the stuff I've downloaded. What's still coming in, can wait a little longer. In fact... maybe I should just leave it off.

Went for a walk instead. Listened to music. I like this feeling.

Life is too complicated, too messy. The circumstances will color perception. The junk outside will infect my mind. Has infected my mind.

It's time... to exorcise.

Spring Cleaning

I, am in, a spring-cleaning mood. 

I usually let it finds its outlet in

• Cleaning up my room
• Getting the bike serviced
• Formatting my hard disk
• Updating my CV
• Changing flats
• Going on a holiday

But this time... I want to do more than just that. I want to do all of the above. And more. 

Dangerous times. 

Feel... heavy. Weighed down. Too many things. Too much to worry about. 

Ballast. 

The trick to never have any regrets is to never look back. If I take an axe to the ropes now... I will need to remember this. 

If, of course, it comes to the axe. I need to backup first. 

What the hell - it's good Feng Shui anyway. 

Watch this space. 

Some more lucid-dreaming experiments

An interesting discovery - While I know that falling asleep in partial light triggers longer, more vivid and better-structured dreams (with correspondingly far high chances of taking control), it appears that the light needs to be present only at the point of falling asleep; yesterday's experience couldn't have been longer than half an hour, yet the memory lasted far longer. 

Which raises an interesting point - after the REM phase, what is the mind doing? Building dreams triggered off in the light-triggered REM? For the entire night? Or is the REM phase the start and finish of the dream, with the mind switched off for the rest of the time? That won't explain the intermeshing of the real world into dreams - like alarms, people shaking you awake, other noises that awaken you, or even the screaming nightmares at 3 AM (long after REM is done)... or are these cases of an REM phase restarting, or persisting? 

Needs more research. 

An interesting aside - videogames (or any kind of games) are naturally predisposed to be dream-matter because the subconscious recognizes the rules it plays by - and superimposes those rules, controls, and imagery (skins, if you will) in a manner that I guess is very similar to what the games themselves use - databases, scripts, CSS and skins. 

Last night, for instance - was a dream about what combination of tactics in my Dragon Age characters would work best in various combat situations. The healer at a distance, pumping up the fighters; the tank to distract unwelcome attention from the healer; the mage to target and incapacitate the bosses temporarily while the weaker enemies are disposed of, etc. And since a videogame is essentially an artificial-reality construct, it was a dream about a dream. 

And the game in question is about a main character who's been trapped in a lucid nightmare herself; so it's a dream of a dream of a dream. LOL. 

funny no more?

I was reading some of my earlier blog posts.

I was funnier then.

:(

The Fermi Paradox: Peeing in the gene pool!

Did I just answer the Fermi Paradox?

To summarize - the Drake Equation is a calculation of the likelihood of existence of intelligent, non-human life in the universe. A lot of assumptions, a lot of guesswork, but considering that our galaxy alone has over a hundred billion stars, very, very likely.

The question therefore was - if they're out there, why haven't we met them yet?

The Fermi Paradox is the addition of one more factor to the calculation - an unknown quantity as of right now - which prevents the existence of intelligent life.

And I think I just got what it is. It's evolution.

Or rather, de-volution.

Think about it. Right up till the Industrial Revolution, people would die of stupidity. The environment was hostile, and resources were limited. If you couldn't take care of yourself, and weren't an asset to the community, you would die and nobody would be able to - or want to - save you. Your stupid genes would leave the gene pool. Humanity would get a little bit smarter, evolve some more.

This made us all so smart over time, we became the the masters of the planet. The process took three billion years, but here we are.

And since we're the masters, we control everything. We can kill lions, great white sharks, rhinos, elephants, blue whales. We even kill them by accident, without meaning to and often without even noticing. In hundreds and thousands. It's genocide, an extermination all the more criminal in it's being accidental. If an animal competes with us for a resource, god help it. It's already extinct.

And with all the resources we now have, what do we do?

We create ideals.

Ideals of altruism. Of helping those less fortunate. Of charity. Social security.

All this makes people who were otherwise scheduled to be chucked out of the gene pool, are now allowed to hang around and contaminate it.

Think about it. How can you ever deny someone the right to breed, no matter what circumstances they are in? It goes against every ideal of liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, enlightenment, emancipation, and personal freedom. It creates stupid children of stupid parents who are allowed to survive and breed. It creates a world where higher levels of intelligence marks you as different, strange.

Outcast.

Intelligence = success? In some ways. Short-term ways. Success in your own lifetime, maybe guaranteeing your children's. But long-term success? Like preserving ecological diversity, not poisoning the oceans and filling the atmosphere with carcinogens?

Nope.

It's just not good business sense.

So we continue to get dumber and dumber. Intelligent content dies, starved of audience and thus, money. Content gets dumber, making people dumber, and it's a vicious cycle that ends with an idiocracy.

And that's the missing link, the answer to the Fermi paradox. Any civilization which is smart enough to be the masterclass on it's planet creates in the process a situation which leads inevitably to it's own stagnation and destruction.

A few generations down, someone will hit a nuclear button and some of them will still fly. Not enough to kill all life 22 times over. Maybe just once.

And sometime, somewhere, yet another someone else will look up at the silent, starry sky and wonder why they're alone in the universe...

almost 4 months.

nothing to say? not really.

too busy to say it? kind of.

bored of blogger? maybe.

maybe I owe an update. 2009 - a look back - coming in 29 days.

Meditative Motorcycling

Biking is an experience deeply similar to meditation.

Think about it.
When you meditate, the most critical thing - the essence, really - is to empty out your mind completely, let go all the thoughts buzzing around in circles over and over again as if on rails, and give those tracks a chance to relax from the load, rejuvenate, free-associate again. I developed a technique - as every thought appears, I would just imagine it whooshing away into the background behind me, leaving my head clear again. Once you've treated it that way, it's easy to take everything as it comes, and literally leave it behind you. After a while, nothing new comes, and there's just the sound of your breathing and a warm, deep-brown empty room.
When you're on a bike, it's like that. Everything comes at you from the vanishing point, roars past in the reflected echo of your own engine, and disappears forever. Nothing is permanent except the road, the hum of the engine, wind and sunshine. Riding is automatic; you don't need to see. Everything happens by touch and physical memory of control positions and sequences. And it's ingrained, not needing thought. Reflex. It's like breathing, like heartbeat.
The road is Life. Events come and go, but you steer around the blocks and bad spots, slowing down and speeding up, looking for that break in traffic, those smooth stretches. Friends keep pace with you on their own bikes, sometimes coming near, sometimes far away, on the same road and the same journey but entities by themselves. If someone crashes and burns, he's left behind very, very fast, the pain forgotten in surprisingly short time. If someone skids and falls, he loses a little time, but catches up again soon. Sometimes, if necessary, you interrupt your own journey, stop and help... but in the end, we all move on.
The past is visible, but it takes an effort - of thought, of that impulse to look down at the rear-view mirrors. Mostly it's automatic, just to judge things coming from behind... but sometimes you want to look back. Don't look back too long, though, or something coming up ahead will smash you into pulp, unaware.
At it's core, it's being completely free. Your body, your machine, is doing what it's supposed to do. Your higher mind is at liberty to think, to dream, to go down whatever mental lanes it wants, explore uninterrupted trains of thought. To enjoy the pleasure of pure, uninterrupted thought, and no-thought, just sensation. Disturbing elements literally get whipped away in the slipstream.

A car, now... a car is different. All along, you're aware of the metal shell around you, the controls in front of you, in your field of vision. Wind is cut off, sounds muted, sun dimmed by the windows, smells lost in the air-conditioning. You're always careful, avoiding scratches, bumps, and dents. It's too overt a reminder of your own body, your mortality, your place in life. Traffic is a limiting factor, not a minor obstacle easily bypassed. The rat race, with all the other strugglers around you, physically limits your journey. Sure, you can carry a larger load - luggage, co-passengers, music, all the other paraphernalia of life - but there is a price you pay. The soul will always be aware of the body it inhabits and the pathways it must travel.
It can't ever fly, free in the sun, alone and one with the world around.

Time Travel. It's possible.

But the traffic is always one-way.

In.com introduced a feature that they're downplaying - maybe unintentionally - as a simple boss-impresser and never-forget-a-date-again feature only - the delayed send feature on their email. But Futuremail had it right the first time - it's possible to send a message across time.
Unfortunately, everyone wants to talk to the past. They remember all the wrong choices, bad decisions, all those times when, if only they knew then what they know now... but think about it. Would you want a stranger telling you how to live your life, all the time? Not just any stranger, but a patently loser-type stranger, stuck in a life he hates? Telling you to take choices for reasons you don't believe in, or - and be honest - have already decided about, one way or another, and resent having these decisions questioned?
Manu drew an interesting analogy with life as a tree - read it here.

On the other hand, it is possible for you to talk to your future self. Every mutual fund you buy, you're effectively gifting some cash to your future (lock-in period plus) self. And every credit card swipe is cash borrowed from that future self, with questionable returns. No wonder most of us want to rethink decisions. Every photo album, diary, forgotten trunk in the attic, is a message.

Why not use this? Let's talk to our future selves. The people that matter. There are things we want to tell them. Remind them about what we want them to achieve. Remind them of the time when they were young, and had dreams. Let them realize those dreams are achievable.
Send a mail to yourself for your next birthday. Say what you want to do. See how it feels.

So long, and thanks for the all the memories

"The evil that men do lives on after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."
Not always. Sometimes, the good is stronger.
The flesh is weak. It falters, makes mistakes, falls short of living up to the immortal perfection of the soul.
The flesh dies.
The soul lives on.
The soul is what gave us the music. Gave us the memories. Gave the background score to some of the best times of our lives. The music is something that will always be with us, will always be remembered.

The music will always live on.

Rest in peace.

still down with the sickness

the body works in mysterious ways, it's adjustments to perform.
will someone please tell me what does a healthier lifestyle have to do with an excruciatingly painful blocked ear? New cilia growing in the esophagus decide that the best way to celebrate their existence is to forcibly shove all possible phlegm from sinuses into the nearest Eustachain tube? Is this some kind of internal Pink Chaddi campaign?
This happens every time I try to go healthy; catastrophic breakdown. It's like how BC's body reacts to holidays and half-days, or even leaving from office early. I don't get the message.
I need some Blood Music noocytes. Existing systems for internal performance management and KRAs have gone for a toss.
Or maybe I have them already. I wish they'd get a move on, then. This intermediary crap is buggy.

The weekend's score -
C: C-
W: D
F: C+

motivator...

be careful what you ask for.
you just might get it.

yesterday's score:
C: C+
W: B+
F: B-