Year: 2009

on the way home

might i make you laugh a little?
might i make you cry?
might just spread your wings a little,
catch a glimpse of you in the sky.

a penny for your thoughts?
though a penny’s not a lot.
not in all the world is copper mint
to match the way in which you think.

tell me where you are,
tell me where you’ve been
to take my mind off
the mess that i am in.

they have yet to make a pill
that betters all that ails us,
and for all the things we think to do
it’s our lack of thought that fails us.

this is not the poem,
not the one you sought.
just scattered words here,
a conversation with thought.

on thinking and doing

teetering on the edge I am,
teeter teeter

I have a headache. I need to wrap my head around it, but it seems to have me wrapped. I suspect that it is a symptom of thought, or of desire, or some combination thereof. But it is there. I can feel it.

I remember simpler times, when I just did things. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t thinking, I was, but that thinking happened in the process of doing. A shift occurred somewhere along the lines. The process of thinking overtook the process of doing. Maybe I was just done with doing, seeing as how I had already done it. Maybe not.

On the commute to and from work I started to read tech books (back in 04/05) even when I didn’t have any immediate use to draw from them. Some of them were on the deep tech aspects and others on the design aspects. It was basically a knowledge store, I wasn’t using this information for anything, I was just collecting it. At lot of it came in handy, when something was crashing or breaking, or when someone asked me a question a window would open up in the brain and I’d either know the answer, or know where to find it. Better yet, being able to combine two separate ideas to devise a possible new use. All this is good, but at some point all this thought collected and got to a point where I couldn’t implement the ideas I was holding (or maybe I felt I couldn’t). This was/is problematic.

It’s not like I didn’t try doing things. I’d load up the machine and get ready to string together ideas in code, and then I’d feel a thousand pulls from a thousand ideas, leaving me in a state of paralysis. Overload, crash and retreat. I would think things and not do things. So I’d leave things incomplete. This incompleteness is not particularly new, I can’t remember a personal project that I’ve “completed” to completion even when I was doing things. But now I would barely get started and get stuck. What is this state of “completeness” anyway? Maybe I started to believe there was such a thing as “complete”, and knowing I could not get there prevented me from doing anything?

I found myself going through this cycle with magic as well. First I learnt and did, then I read and read and read. When you read volumes of books with titles like “The Structural Conception of Magic” you tend to place more thought into magic. How can you not? And it’s great, I love that aspect of magic as well, it’s fascinatingly fantastic. But if you’re like me, to a large degree it prevents you from doing. Oh and there’ll be no false modesty here, I am very good at this magic thing.

I can see an effect and like it for what it is, but you can’t see an effect the same way after you’ve changed your frame of thinking on it. This has nothing to do with the secret of the effect or “how it is done”, far from it (anyone who really has a feel for magic should know that the secret is far from the Most Important Thing). So while I did magic the last couple of years, I wasn’t really there, I wasn’t in the magic, not as much. Hah, and I’ve only been doing this for 3 years now. All of this, of course, is going on in my mind alone, not like anyone else sees it or cares, nor should they.

But of late I’ve started to get that feel back, that feeling of raw excitement, an inexplicable trembling passion. I was watching a couple of my favourite magicians, stuff I’ve seen before, stuff I’ve done before, and l was very moved by the magic. It was exciting and fun. What I feel magic should be like, the flow and the feel. So awesome, so fluid. It occurred to me, how do they do it? These are people who have done magic for decades, thought and thunk, written books, performed thousands and thousands of times professionally and otherwise, they have forgotten more about magic than I will ever know in my lifetime. How do they do it? This applies to all the software monkeys too, they’ve designed and redesigned, built and torn, they have more knowledge in their left pinky nail than I will ever scratch. How do they balance this thought and action?

What should be my approach in comparison? Why am I in paralysis? Why am I not in a state of doing what I love?

It’s foolishness.

totter totter

your eyes

eyes?
what of them?
what about them?
they are objects for a romantic lover’s rhymes,
but not mine.

no,
i did not see or look into your eyes before
i was taken by the aura of your presence,
the rhythm of your actions,
and your raging imperfections.

your eyes?
i have already forgotten your eyes.

might I make you laugh a little?

I don’t have too much time on my hands nowadays, but this post will prove otherwise.

The following are my renditions of “your nose”.

“Normal”: [audio:http://www.jaaduhai.com/bol/nose.mp3] [direct mp3 link]

Then, for some odd God-forsaken reason I thought I’d play a little. And this isn’t going to fool anyone, it’s as phony as a very phony thing. I hope it makes you laugh, but if you cringe I know I did my job right.

[audio:http://www.jaaduhai.com/bol/noseeng.mp3] [direct mp3 link]

And I didn’t stop there, oh no. I went ahead and did this:

[audio:http://www.jaaduhai.com/bol/naak.mp3] [direct mp3 link]

And now I have no time on my hands.

drop in the bucket.

Saad arrived thirty minutes before exam time. The halls were full of nervous, chaotic students chattering about possible solutions and methods. Saad, however, felt a silent calm. It wasn’t that he was confident, he was simply tired. He had been up all night long, in bed with the textbook and problem sets, and with coffee as his companion.

When the TA had given the go, Saad decided to pace himself through the exam. Easy questions first and hardest questions last, he thought. Half an hour into the exam, his stomach started to growl. Saad had skipped breakfast in the morning, or perhaps he had forgotten. He tightened his abdomen muscles hoping no one heard anything.

With an hour left to go, Saad started to doze off a little. He quickly shook it off, and continued with the exam. He started to feel that his nose had started to run, and before he could reach for a tissue paper, a drop from his nose fell splat on the exam paper. Except that this drop was red in colour. Saad realized that his nose had started to bleed. He brought his right hand up to his nose, as a cup to hold and collect the drops of blood. He raised his left hand to catch the TA’s attention, “My nose is bleeding.”

“Are you okay?” asked the TA, a little concerned and a little suspicious.

“I’ll be fine, it’s just blood,” Saad rushed towards the washrooms.

As drops of blood fell onto the sink, Saad rolled up a piece of paper towel, stuck it up his nostril, and washed the blood off his hand. He cleaned up the sink and looked at the ceiling for a few minutes, hoping to let the blood clot and hold. Once satisfied, he took extra pieces of paper towel with him back to the exam room, just in case.

“Are you okay?” asked the TA again.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Saad took his seat in the exam room.

There were a number of problems left to solve and Saad started to work his way into the exam. After a few moments he heard a sound, “Psssttt…”

Saad looked around and everyone seemed to be continuing as normal. The TA was seated at the front of the room, reading a magazine.

“Psssttt…,” Saad heard the sound again, realising that it was coming from the drop of blood, “You had a great chance to cheat there.”

“What?” replied Saad, in a whisper.

“When you went to the washroom, you had a great chance to cheat.”

“No, I mean… what is going on? How is this possible?”

“How is what possible?”

“This conversation, I am talking to a drop of blood.” Saad looked at the drop that had now embedded itself into the exam paper and turned a purple like colour.

“So what? Who told you blood can’t talk? You’re talking to me now, so this must be real.”

“This is insane!”

“Hah, I think you had better concentrate on your exam, Saad.”

“Not with all this talking, can you keep it down? The TA is already suspicious of brown people, I don’t want to get into any trouble.”

Saad continued on with some of the harder problems on the exam.

“I think you better double check that.”

“What? Double check what?”

“That problem you just finished, the third step is messed up.”

“Holy shit, you’re right! How did you know?”

“I’m literally a part of the paper. Oh, and you should know, the answer to question number 11 is the same as question number 3. Question 11 is the hardest.”

“Wait a minute, this is cheating!”

“How is it cheating?”

“You’re giving me the answers and correcting my mistakes.”

“But I was a part of you, I am your blood. How can this be cheating?”

“Because you’re telling me what to do before I think of it. Are you just my mind?”

“No, I am your blood.”

The TA fake coughed, putting an end to Saad’s whispers. The answer to question 11 was indeed the same as the answer to question 3.

“See, I told you so,” said the drop of blood.

“Yes, thank you, but there is something so wrong about this. I need you to go away.”

“You still have a few more questions to do.”

Saad went on to finish the exam with hints from the drop blood from time to time. The exam time ended and the TA started to collect all the papers.

“I hope I never have to see you again,” whispered Saad.

“Excuse me? If you’re taking thermodynamics next semester, you will see me,” said the TA, slightly disturbed.

On the way back home all the students were discussing their answers and planning for the next exam.

“How’d it go, Saad?” asked Helen.

“It was weird, but I think it went fine. I think,” replied Saad, “I’m too tired to think. I haven’t slept.”

Saad immediately fell asleep when he got home.