My Funny Valentine

Love, as they say, is a four-letter word.

So this is the New Year

There are no startling revelations, no resolutions, no dawning of realization or judgments of quality about how the last year of my life has been. I will not say that I have done good or bad, or neither, which is even worse; nor will I make empty promises for a future I cannot predict. Suffice it to say that the last year was, perhaps for the first time, entirely mine. And if I did not do anything noteworthy, at least I did nothing (or very few things -- one can never say that one is guiltless) that I will live to regret.

Forced periods of cheer never sat well with me, so it would be a drastic understatement to say that I am not a holiday person. However, I must admit that this holiday season went off without any of the usual hitches that usually accompany my holidays. Indeed, at times, it felt as if all was going right with the world, and those times are rare enough that one takes notice of them.

New, shiny tech toys brightened Christmas Eve; not only was Jesus born but there was bubble wrap galore to be popped. Maybe that accounts for how happy we look:
















And, even though we were on opposite sides of the world, we were still able to spend the turning of the new year together, through the series of tubes called the Internet, and World of Warcraft.

Being Here Tonight

Edit: What do you do when it's freezing in your apartment, it's 2AM, you can't sleep, and the servers are down? There's always work, I suppose -- technically this could all wait until tomorrow, but getting that 4am timestamp in your email really wins you serious brownie points with the upper management. Besides, even if they don't notice, which is entirely likely since they all work the same ridiculous hours anyway, you get the admittedly empty moral victory of having finished something ahead of schedule, and the added bonus of being able to nap at work with impunity.

Tonight is nothing compared to Saturday, however -- I can't even begin to describe it. It's a horrible feeling when you're sick, tired, and you feel like splitting your head open on a sharp rock just to alleviate the pressure -- and all of the physical ailments only sit on the surface of a already crumbling foundation of personal relationships, falling like dominoes, one after the other. The last straw is when you realize that there's no one you can call, no one around to reach out to -- literally no one to hear you scream. It's a very sobering feeling to realize that no matter what else happens tonight, you're the only one that will ever know about it.

The mix, I suppose, is my way of trying to put a label on the experience.

The wind has picked up tonight, and I hear the sound of leaves being flung against the windows. In a few hours the train will start. The wind sounds almost like air raid sirens at this hour.

In the immortal words of Valerie Solanas:
"I dedicate this play to ME,
A continuous source of strength and guidance,
And without whose unflinching loyalty, devotion and faith
This play could never have been written.
Additional acknowledgements: myself­
For proofreading, editorial comment, helpful hints, criticism and suggestions
And an exquisite job of typing."

...and the leaves stood still...

The sun rose, having no other choice, on the nothing new.

This post, like Wikipedia, will be a collection of ill-separated facts and impressions, informative but meaningless.

Since when did the accumulation of material goods and possessions, often of a domestic nature, equate with maturity? By this measure, someone who owns more imported Italian silk couches than me is a more "mature" person (and, therefore, a better person, and more deserving of society's approval). Actually, I may have just answered my own question.

But I still refuse to believe that just because I am equally happy to sleep on a couch, a bed, or the floor, I am guilty of juvenile behavior.

Direction is for people who are short on time and patience. A person who has both to spare may go whichever way she damn well pleases. At any rate, we will all end up in the same place eventually.

You are listening to a song that you've half-heartedly heard a hundred times before, only this time, something is different -- you're in the right kind of mood to appreciate it, or you're not tuning it out or distracted by other things, or a chance phrase or melody catches your attention....and suddenly, you realize how wonderful of a song it is, and wonder how it's possible that you've never noticed it before. Was it always a good song that you'd simply never truly listened to, or did you actually evolve to the point where you could finally understand it? If the latter is true, then what prompted you to keep it, not knowing if you would end up liking it or when?

Music isn't "natural" in the same way that "art" is natural. You can look at a waterfall in nature and a work of art by a famous painter and consider both to be "beautiful," but how many people would consider sounds that they encounter out in the wild, in the course of their everyday lives, to be "beautiful" in the same way that a Beethoven symphony is beautiful?

Science fiction is supposed to be about the exploration of the human condition through the use of technology -- but a lot of science fiction deals with the interaction with alien beings, and many of those stories don't have much to do with technology at all. So why this fascination with aliens as a theme of sci-fi? My theory is that the theme isn't really about technology at all, but about how to bridge the communication gap between human beings and something that fundamentally does not think like us, be it aliens or computers.

Of course, computers do not "think" -- but they do in the anthropomorphic sense that they seem to take input, process it, and give output based on the result of the processing done on the input. The same may be said of certain humans.

People can, and do, anthropomorphize anything, from lolcats to toons in online games to God. It is not necessarily bad. In any case, it's the only vantage point we have to see things from.

All hail the beginning of the end.

Fire and ice are both quite nice, but they're definitely not the only ways to go -- especially if you consider all the recent popular "artistic" interpretations of our entire civilization's untimely, if not entirely undeserved, demise. The following is by no means a complete list:

All the movies involving comets, asteroids, or meteors crashing into the Earth and blowing everything up: Armageddon is the go-to one, but I could also list an entire slew of other, equally bad, over-CGIed movies about things exploding near or inside the earth such as Deep Impact, Asteroid, or Judgement Day. I suppose I would also have to mention Sunshine in this category, although I think this movie shows a little more class and restraint than your usual run-of-the-mill, everyone-is-going-to-die action/slasher flick.

All the movies featuring civilization getting wiped out by some other semi-natural or atomic disaster: Noteworthy mentions include the universally reviled The Postman, The Sum of All Fears, Waterworld, The Core (which laughably depicts a scenario in which the Earth's core has to be restarted....), and, of course, The Day After Tomorrow, the pinnacle of all disaster films, which simply features every single natural disaster happening at the same time. Brilliant! Children of Men is the standout in this category.

All the movies featuring civilization getting wiped out because of a zombie infestation. Or possible a vampire infestation. Or both. It seems like the zombie movies are coming out of the woodwork, no pun intended...28 days Later, Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil, all the remakes and parodies and sequels thereof...and I am Legend, the new Will Smith movie, which is actually based on a decently good book and is therefore even more tragic because of it.

Jared Diamond's Collapse, which is a systematic analysis of the end of times of some of the world's greatest civilizations.

Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, a book about what would happen to the earth once all humans are gone.

The Wikipedia has a very exhaustive list of all disaster films.

Do we simply have an unhealthy obsession with our own inevitable demise? Maybe perhaps, because we feel like we deserve such a fate? Although, who knows, this might be nothing new. Maybe this has all been done before. I mean, the Apocalypse as a Biblical term used to just refer to a "revelation," and somehow during the Medieval period, it became synonymous with "the end of times" and the development of Satan as a foil for God -- so, maybe, the Catholic Church actually invented the genre. Who knew that such a power mechanism could go on to produce such universally despicable and tasteless drivel for the entertainment of the masses?

Actually, that's pretty much a given, isn't it...

Thanksgiving double feature.

Ah, Thanksgiving. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Thanksgiving is less about giving thanks for a bountiful harvest, and more a celebration of gluttony, greed, pride, lust, wrath, sloth, and envy -- in short, all the deadly sins wrapped up in one delicious, basted turkey package.

It is possibly also a celebration of the triumph of capitalism over socialism.

Oh, and imperialism, let's not forget that one.

You can feel secure in the knowledge that you are advancing your civic duty whilst you ritualistically gorge yourself on high-calorie sweetmeats.

The console that wasn't there.

Here's the funny thing about addiction.

Well, there's more than one, and it's not really all that funny, if you stop to think about it. Human beings are born to want, after all. Night and day, just unthinking, unfeeling wanting machines. And it's entirely encouraged to accrue certain addictions, provided that they are the socially acceptable ones. I'd even go so far as to say that addictions come and go like fads, masquerading under the name of "goals," or "values."

The fact of the matter is that no one cares what you do with yourself as long as it's not getting in the way of the March of Progress.

That's one side of the story. Then there are the other, private addictions.

It is trendy to quit these habits, or to pretend as if you are interested in quitting these habits -- it generates the impression that you, although fallen, are taking an active interest in reforming your life for the better. And the repentant sinner is a very sexy role to play, particularly when said role is accompanied by a lot of swaggering and posturing and backed by the moral dictates of the masses. But, let's face it, everyone knows it's a farce. And even if you're actually interested in quitting, even if you know that a habit is truly bad for you and that you'd be doing yourself a favor by ridding yourself of it -- it simply doesn't work that way.

You think that the need will go away if you replace it with something else. You think that you'd be alright if you can just make it through this one night, week, month, year, life. But it's never that simple. Sometimes doing damage is the only way to feel better.

And we all know that addictions of the body are childlike compared to addictions of the mind...

"But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo,
and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the
dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands
clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fin-
gers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there."

-William Gibson, Neuromancer