Author: thisduck

A Passion For Magic

Wow, has it really been 9 months? In this entry I’ll go over my thoughts on magic and where I am with my magic.

My passion for magic is equal to or greater than my passion for software. For the geeks, the following conditional is always true:

adnan.getMagic().passionLevel() >= adnan.getSoftware().passionLevel()

Please talk to me if you’d like the full source code… anyway.

Why greater?

Magic is greater because it allows me to connect to people at a completely different level. It allows me to reconnect with people I already know, but also allows me to immediately connect to people I don’t know, those that are strangers.
A couple of months ago while I was still taking the TTC (Toronto’s Transit System), on the RT I was doing “my thing” with my cards. Some card flourishes and some effects. There was an elderly lady who was sitting across me, and I noticed from the corner of my eye that the card flourishes had caught her attention. I started doing a magical effect, and when I was done I noticed that she was uncontrolably smiling, and looking to the person on her left. I never touched her, didn’t say a word, didn’t even make eye contact, yet the magic was able to bring out some type of emotion in her. That’s powerful. That is the beauty of magic. And let’s not forget that group of 15 kids (about 11-12 years old) who were chanting “One more time” as their fists made circles in the air. They wanted me to do one more magical effect before I left the subway car.

I’m 23 years old, I don’t feel as if I’ve done anything in my life worth anything. Magic somewhat fills that void.

Is magic real? Do you believe in magic?

Is magic real? It depends on how you define magic, and how you define real.

If you define real magic as a human being having supernatural powers which allow her to control things beyond her natural control, then no. That magic is not real. If I could do that real magic, then no children in Africa would starve. Hell, no one here in Toronto would starve.

But that’s not how I define magic. So I do believe magic is real. The look of wonder on people’s faces is real, the hint of astonishment in their eyes is real, their gasps are real, the bursts of emotion are real, the reactions are real. The magic is real. The magic I do becomes real.

My magic

When I first started magic, I couldn’t wait to get out and show people. Now I’m exactly the opposite. Even when someone asks to see something, I refuse.

There is a difference in doing tricks and performing magic. I want to perform magic, but I know that for some, in their mind, I will always be doing tricks. I would rather touch a heart than trick a mind. If you think that’s not possible, you’re wrong. If someone feels tricked because of something I did, then I’ve failed as a magician. Unless of course, that someone will always see anything I do as a trick.

I want my magic to have more meaning. Unfortunately the image I’ve setup for myself doesn’t really lend itself to easily perform meaningful magic. Not every effect I perform will have meaning, some will just be eye-candy. I need to pick and choose when I slip in a meaningful effect, and pick and choose those who I do it for.

I stopped doing magic for that reason, I wanted it to mean more, only because it means so much to me. It irritates me to no end when someone makes a joke about it, belittles it, or even tries to “figure it out”. The last thing I think about is “how it’s done”, it’s not about that, it’s about the beauty of what you see. At least for me it is.

Even if people don’t draw any meaning from my magic, at the least I want them walking away thinking that they just saw something beautiful, not just something “cool”, but something beautiful.

The best compliments I’ve gotten from my magic are not “wow, how did you do that?” or “you’re very clever” or anything along those lines. The best compliment I’ve gotten is, “You’re gifted” or “You have a gift”. Wow, what a wonderful thing to say, I thank those who’ve said that, and those that think that. The other best compliment I’ve gotten is, “What’s your name again?”, often said by strangers as I’m walking away. They may forget the next day, or even in the next hour, but for that moment, they need to know.

Performing Magic

Something I’ve been thinking about for a while now is actually using my magic for some sort of good. This is for when I snap out of my lack of magic, and back into the “magic zone”. I want to start volunteering at hospitals, old age homes and other such places where I can do magic, maybe even schools, libraries or some such. I can’t just walk in and start doing random “tricks”, I would have to sit down, think, and prepare a show. I’ll be doing that once I get time off everything else, and I’m not sure how long that will take. But that’s in the grand plan.

A Passion For Software

Funny… I had started to write an entry titled “A Passion For Magic”, but decided to do this one first. After all, software did come first.

Some may misinterpret my “passion of software” as a “passion for coding”. That’s not the case. When I say software, I mean the entire software process. Everything including client management, project planning, software architechture, requirements gathering, writing technical specifications, coding/programming, usability, testing, setup and installation, and a whole bunch of other things that I’m sure I’m missing here.

Don’t get me wrong, I do love coding. That’s the part that actually creates a working program. But at the same time, I don’t see myself being a code monkey forever.

Let me refine the passion for software, as much as I like software development, I like web-based software development more. I suppose it’s because it allows you to test and deploy faster (depending on the programming language and setup you use, sigh). Web applications have a certain appeal to them. The way they’re maintained and distributed. It’s fascinating, if you have a good idea and you’re able to translate that into a web-application, you can deploy it on the interweb and have thousands of people around the world use your software. That has a certain appeal to it.

Laziness/Bad Habits

“laziness is the key to avoiding bad habits”, a funny looking man once said.

I know myself to be one of the laziest people I know. With plenty of bad habits to boot.

I’m one of those people that would just stay home instead of going out, due to sheer laziness. Take weeks to get certain tasks done (mowing the lawn). Being late for or missing lectures back when I was at school, and a host of others things, a list too long to mention.

But I want to change that, and I’m taking steps to do so. Albeit slow steps.

The will to change was triggered mainly by two things: magic and certain events and situations at work.

Things I’ve started to do (or stopped doing):

  1. Stopped playing poker at lunch. What a great decision. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but given that I started the whole lunch poker thing at work, usually gathered people to play, dealt pretty much every hand and played probably over 85% of the games played in the last two years. You tend to get associated with it. I’m very glad to disassociate myself from that.

  2. Waking up early and getting to work at 8am. Here’s another big one for me. I had gotten into a state where I was getting late and inconsistent with my waking up patterns (sleeping patterns is a whole different issue). Now I have my alarm set to 6am, and I’ve come to a point where I automatically wake up at 5:45am, then I wait for the alarm to go off.

  3. Started Jogging. Something I haven’t done regularly since high-school (5 years ago), and that too only during gym class. Ramadan/fasting has but a break to that, I only started the week before Ramadan. I had started jogging 4km each day for about half an hour. I’m definately going to re-start that once fasting is over.

  4. Squash. Great physical activity, lots of fun. Right now only playing once a week, and it’s only been three weeks. And this was something I didn’t want to but a break to due to Ramadan. I knew that if I stopped playing for a month, I would get too lazy to start again. But once Ramadan is over, I’m going to get a membership to the gym so that I can play more than once a week.

  5. Stopped doing magic at work. Hmmm… not sure this was a good thing. I haven’t done much magic for over a month (work or otherwise), but I would never consider giving up magic. I love it way too much. Not doing magic for a month has got me fallen into a rut in that regard. I don’t like not doing magic. But more about magic in later blog entries.

Things I want to do:

  1. Learn the guitar. I know I can’t sing for beans, but the abililty to create something pleasant to the ears is very appealling. I want to be able to play a few Cat Steven songs, the Filefly theme song, and more importantly I want to be able to play the music of my favourite Hindi songs on a guitar (even if the songs don’t use a guitar). If I can do magic, I should be able to learn how to play a guitar. But we’ll see how that goes.

  2. Learn Spanish. I never thought I’d ever be interested in learning a different language. But why now? and why Spanish of all languages? There is a decent amount of magic literature in Spanish. It’s not just about the “tricks”, it’s about the beauty of magic. I would love to read those books. (I did say magic had a lot to do with my will to change).

  3. Pick up table tennis again. It’s been over 8 months since I last played with any regularity. I want to get started again.

  4. Stop talking so much, and listen more. This is a difficult one. But something I’ve started to work on. I don’t say much of meaning for a person who talks so much. What I absolutely hate is when I interrupt others. It’s plain rude. At least I’m aware of it, hopefully I can condition myself to talk less and not speak out of turn.

Not that any of the above really give a point or much meaning to my life. I’m still looking for that, or waiting for it to come.

But either way, here’s to self improvement.

Quotes

I’ve taken most of the quotes from my old quotes page and moved them over into the Quotes category here.

I left out the ones I felt were too cheesy. I’m going to leave them there on the original page though.

It truely is a shame, I come up with these sayings say on a train or in a conversation, and I forget a lot of them. I think to myself, “That’s definately one for the quotes page”. But when I get to the keyboard to type it out, it totally skips my mind. Perhaps I should get a voice recorder.

I just hope the words incite some form of emotion for those that read them.

Blogging Again?

Yet once again.

Originally I had wanted to develop my own blogging software and use that to blog. But I eventually gave up that thought once I realized the amount of planning that would be required to build it. I’m not giving up on the idea of building the software though, I’ve started the planning part of it. [Framework Planning]. In the meanwhile I can use this to blog, because I have quite the bit on my head right now, and even more inside.

Back to the blogging part. What will I blog about? Hmmm… mainly about myself. Let’s be honest here, I’m not at all knowledgeable about politics, literature and all that other stuff that makes people sound important. (Infact, I had to use spell check to get the word ‘knowledgeable’ correct). I can’t pretend to be an expert on something/anything, but I think I know my thoughts and opinions fairly well.

Even though I will blog mainly about myself and things that happen around me and in my head, I won’t be posting anything too personal or private. This will be like a public diary of sorts. I wonder why people keep private diaries anyway? What’s the point of having a private diary? I already know all my private details.

Hopefully I won’t abandon blogging this time around, but we’ll see how that goes.