To New Beginnings.

Like always, something I read sums up pretty much all that I want to say right now.

We wait for the perfect thing to happen. To meet the perfect person. To land the
perfect job. To wake up one day to that perfect figure.

But maybe perfect things don’t exist. All we get is a chance to choose, what imperfections we live with.

:)
:D
:)

What Do I Know?

What does it take to write? An idea? An inspiration? A frame of mind? What? What? I mean, why is it so hard to think of something worthwhile, when I spend so much of my waking hours pondering over trivial (and sometimes not-so trivial) issues?

What about that thing Rene Descartes said, “I think; therefore I am”? Am I not? Really?! I am thinking about it, aren’t I? Therefore that implies I am. But, is that what I want to think about…whether I am or am not? I want to think about other things that really need my thoughts, for example, say saving the world! Well, I am thinking about thinking, but not really thinking. Is that a waste of time? Am I rambling? Yes, I am. So, that definitively confirms I am. So now that that is out of the way, what am I? A product of this sadistic society? A product of the bourgeoisie, who disclaim it? A product of my peers’ influence? A product of my own thoughts? Or all of the above? Or none of the above? Or am I not a product yet? Do I have to pass through Quality Check, Quality Control before I can actually think and be taken seriously? Do I need an approval? Why do I need an approval? Do I care if I am approved? Who approves of anything anyways? Does approval/disapproval affect my thoughts, my thinking process? Will I become a better person if I am approved before thinking? Does thinking right really matter, at all? What is thinking right? What is right? What is wrong? I can decide, if I think.

But, what if I am denied the freedom of thinking?…whatever you call Right is right, right?!



Everyday, I see the predicament my girls suffer…. deprived of their most basic freedom and utterly uncertain of everything. It disturbs me, immensely.

The Importance of Being Earnest.

And Now The Crap I Left Unsaid....

I think I have made up my mind about what relationships really are and I think I know that they are never what they are supposed to be, and definitely never what they appear to be...
What they are or what they become after a considerable time-span, if they are still extant, I cannot say for sure because of this very reason. I believe, rather unromantically, that these so-called relationships become seriously stagnated and progressively so with time. In an *earnest* attempt to undersand this mêlée between ideas and hypotheses generated in my tiny little brain with their tangibility, their practicality, I have tried using analogies drawn from real-life experiences (others' not mine), films, books, even agony-aunt-type magazines and blogs to no avail. I have since given up pondering over such "matters" completely, which I'm sure you must have figured by now as I am writing an entire blog. I have to admit, I don't mull over it at all!

I need a break man! I get way too involved in other people's "matters" and forget I have a life of my own that I ought to be Living. The sad part is that I gave to remind myself. Shit! Why I spend SO much time thinking and not actually putting things into practice, is something I honestly don't know. I am brooding over it as I am typing out this crap. And I am saying to myself; thinking about this isn't trivial, it's simply my general interest in other people's business, which "they" mildly refer to as curiosity, it's just my need to be earnest about everything, my insatiable necessity to be Miss Goody-two-shoes Know-it-all!
(Which, for no reason, reminds me of something I read about ignorance in Oscar Wilde's 'Importance of Being Earnest', which has nothing to do with relationships or for that matter to do with curiosity...I just remembered it and said to myself, why not get more arbitrary than my usual self. Besides I find it absolutely hilarious, so....)

Lady Bracknell: I have always been of the opinion that a man who desires to
get married should know either everything or nothing. Which do you know?
Jack: I know nothing, Lady Bracknell.
Lady Bracknell: I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a very delicate exotic fruit. Touch it and the
bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect
whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes,
and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor's Square.

Ah! I have exhausted myself talking about inconsequential things, as is my favourite diversion from mundane, monotonous routine, I loosely refer to as my life. :D So, I leave you think about the importance of being earnest.

*Random-ness Alert*

Please go listen to this song by Oasis called "Importance of Being Idle"....

I don't mind
As long as there's a bed beneath the stars that shine
I'll be fine, if you give me a minute, a man's got a limit
I can't get a life if my heart's not in it

OK, so I'll go listen to the song now, and you get back to whatever it is that you were doing before you chanced upon reading and bearing with my random reflections! :D

Adieu! Tata! Bye-bye!

Ermm...

Paul Engle - "Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise."

My Gmail Feed does the strangest things; the 'quote of the day' is almost always apt for the day that was...I WISH I COULD'VE READ THIS DARNED QUOTE EARLIER ON IN THE (YESTER)DAY!

Now, I feel all stupid and not-so-wise after-all! :(

Why does it always rain on me?

Conversations.

I said, I love the quote.

"I wanna live with a musician. She'd write songs at home and ask me
what I thought of them, and maybe even include one of our little
private jokes in the liner notes."

Then 'S' said:

"i love that quote, but doesn't the film suggest in the end that this
is just an empty dream, just wishful thinking? that you can't CHOOSE
the person you love in this clinical, scientific way?

one of my pet peeves in life (as i've mentioned so many times) is the
apparent gap between who you want and who you need - - a person you
*fall* in love v/s a person you *want* to fall in love with.

because as far as i remember, the musician fling doesn't work out for
rob gordon!
:'( "

Then I said:

"i love the quote independent of the outcome in the film, i love it just by itself. i don't really know if i would really love to live a musician, i just find the idea very romantic.
you know, a lot of things in life are about wishful thinking. and it's fun because it's wishful thinking. it gives you something to look forward to. If something is already perfect, there is always a catch somewhere, you know, maybe you just did not see the *conditions apply written in fine print, because you were so overwhelmed by its perfection. You know, you make things perfect for yourself...there are always compromises, it's whether you choose to make them or you have no choice but to make them...that's where all the difference lies.

another train of thought,
i believe you consciously make a decision of falling in love, it doesn't happen of its own accord. choosing a person in a clinical, scientific way, sounds cold, but you minimize your errors that way.
If you choose to fall in love without thinking, you have chosen to be blind in love. which means you have to compromise a lot more to account for your blind decision (I'm not saying it's wrong, i'm saying you always have an option to do otherwise, you simply choose to ignore it).
With wanting to fall in love, you are still falling in love, but with your eyes wide open...you know exactly what you are getting into, the parameters are already set, therefore the compromises, much less. i feel its a lot safer that way.

and the gap you speak of, in the first case you are already in love so it doesn't matter anyways, with the *want* to fall in love, you are willing to fall in love, so you are almost there, the rest is taking another step forward."

And the conversation ends.

Why did I make the conversation public, you ask?
Coz these things have predominantly been on my mind, last couple of days.

hmmn...

I fully justify my stand to me, then, why does my heart still feel heavy?

One Thing...

Is EVERYTHING redundant?!

I wonder if anything original really exists?!...Life is much too redundant. I mean every-fucking-one lives it! Everyone is born; everyone dies! I fail to understand how anything that happens in between could be anything but inconsequential mutations in the repeats. It just seems that everything that one has done is a repetition, only there is this remote possibility that you don't know about it YET.

And then there was...

"This is your one opportunity to do something that no one has ever done before and that no one will copy throughout human existence. And if nothing else, you will be remembered as the one guy who ever did this. This one thing."

--Sam in Garden State

And then I wondered all over again...

What is my one thing? Does everyone have their one thing?

Philosophy of the D in my PhD.

I plan to apply for a PhD soon (read,in a couple of months), and I took up teaching so that I don't sit at home listlessly, uselessly, and basically to avoid making my life pointless. You get the idea, right?!
(the pittance of a pay-check is responsible for such negativity towards teaching!)

I'm between my M Sc and my PhD,
I am in the transition state, let's call it 'D'
'D' is the high-energy state where all the excess energies are being resourced towards attaining a stable state PhD.
*nerd alert blaring at top volume!*

Yes, the point of all the rambling is something I read written on the black-board when I entered my classroom.

"Experience is something you get when you are looking for something else."
--Anonymous

How perfectly it defined my transition state for me!

*sigh* *sigh* *sigh*

My Teaching 'Experience'...so far...

As time passed by, I realized that sitting at home made me progressively dumber, stupider (I know it's not a word!), it was driving me insane everyday. My mind had become so empty; I saw myself becoming the DEVIL!! Sitting at home reading, listening to music all day, watching all the films that I always wanted to watch, etc., it was all fun at first, but the realization that things in my life stayed where they were annoyed me immensely. Exciting things had ceased to happen in my life...the ennui seemed to have no end. That was when I decided, I had to set in motion all my blasted brain-cells and do something constructive with my time...I had to start working part-time somewhere, to keep myself occupied at any rate with something 'technical'...I was done with the non-technicalities of life! The artistic urges wanted to go to sleep while the practical, more scientific ones took over and took charge of my life! [spicing it up for me while they were at it! :)]

I started teaching. Something I always dreamed of doing!...but in my head, I always thought I would teach the grad-students (I've always considered them to be more committed to learning, and education, and have a wider knowledge base to work upon, etc.). NOW, here I was teaching first and second year under-grads! I mean, I was one of them so recently! I knew so well their never-ending need to be nasty to the new TA's! How I dreaded doing it!

Fortunately my first class with the first year B Sc kids was fabulous! *phew* I liked my students and they liked me! (atleast that is what I would sincerely like to believe). It was hard for me to accept how much I was enjoying teaching a bunch eighteen-nineteen year olds!...and thinking about it, for the first time, I realized what I was enjoying, I was loving the process of making better grad-students out of them! I was thrilled when they looked up to me for answers, I was elated when they asked me logical questions. It was fun leading them to answer their own questions, by deducing from the knowledge they already had, from their experiences and observations in day-to-day matters and then building upon it to finally teach them what I intended to do in the first place!

"The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards."
--Anatole France (1844 - 1924), The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

So far, according to me, it has been an enriching and educating experience for me (definitely) and my kids (hopefully). To sum it all up...

"When one teaches, two learn."
--Robert Half.

GOD knows how much I love teaching! God bless my kids!



P.S.: The, er, inspiration for typing this post was the Robert Half quote on my Gmail. "Fucking coincidence" was what 'S' called it when he randomly emailed me same the quote just as I began punching in my thoughts in this space, I loosely refer to as 'my blog'! :D

Love's labour lost (?!)

"There is something incredibly ridiculous about the feelings of people who you've ceased to love, and, who have in turn ceased to love you."
--Oscar Wilde in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'.

Why?

It almost feels like a mockery to try and understand, to sympathize with the ones you've "gotten over" (not necessarily the falling-in-love kind of love, it's the same with all the relationships where there was any kind of love involved, be it close friends, family, etc.), it all seems put on, seems fake, cheap and artificial.
What is lost from the bond? All that went into making it work in the first place, does it reduce to nothing? Or does one go into denial that they have not "gotten over" in the true sense of the word? What happens? Is it just that one's priorities change? Is it that there are other relations (in want of a better word here) that now demand the labouring over?
The same things that would've kept one awake through nights... trying to figure a solution for the loved-one, suddenly seems trivial to the point that one even forgets that their previously loved one needs them, and needs them desperately?!
Do all the times they've let you down, when you needed them and they conveniently overlooked your problems become a source of this indifference?
Now that it's all over, does this indifference make one a bad person? Does it make one heartless? Does it matter at all?

Why does my heart feel so heavy?!