Emotional Asymmetry

So this is what I feel:

I feel happy to see her confused, I enjoy her failed attempts at making me happy. She comes back, happy, excited, telling me everything about the Forum. I smile politely and lie: "I'm glad you had a great time".

I feel aloof, I act distant. Polite, happy, sometimes excited, but certainly detached. That's my role. Detachment. Friendship, but distant. No longer the close, warm moments we had as partners in a blooming friendship. She wants that, of course. We're best friends, buddies, partners, right? We tell each other everything! She smiles, laughs, makes up half-witty jokes with genuine excitement and gladness to be around me again. I laugh at her joke again, half-heartedly. Polite. Distant. I will not give her the excitement she expects me to reciprocate - I keep it from her like withholding a bone from a dog, I keep it just beyond her reach. No matter how high she jumps, I do not give her the pleasure. I can see the question mark in her eyes, the concern. I relish in her distress. I know it will grow.

I feel vengeful. I want revenge. I don't usually hate, I don't usually want other people to hurt. But now I do. I really do. I feel it. There is no thought to it - I just FEEL it. And today, trying to understand it, I did. I found out why do I hate her so much. Why do I want to keep myself from her, just at arm's reach, just enough for conversation and sparring of ideas, but never showing her my genuine feelings again. Why do I want to make her suffer. I understand now. She did the same to me.

Last semester, I gave you myself, Leila. I saw you and I thought of you: "Wow, she is amazing. Incredibly similar to myself, and yet I could learn so much from her." I liked your beliefs, your tastes, your passion for Life and your excitement for the small things that so many people miss. I could talk to you about anything and you would understand me, listen to me, and care for me. And when you meekly started telling me about your past and your fears, I was supportive. I put my entire being into making you feel comfortable, into telling you it was all right. I would've done anything for you, anything. Absolutely anything that would've helped you in the tiniest amount, I was willing to give you. My time, my hugs, my mind, my decisions. I had no priority, only you did. I was yours.

Baring ourselves gradually to one another, all the feelings I had for you emerged. I liked you in all your ways, in all of your roles. I appreciated you as a person, as a friend, as a classmate. I trusted you as my confidante and as an adept thinker. I loved your excitement, your passion, your vices, your pleasures, your joy - your body, your mind, your heart, your soul. So I offered you what I was willing to give to you, the most important person in my life: Everything. Myself, my thoughts, my feelings, they were yours to take. Whether it was avoidable or not, I do not know. But at the time, there was just no choice to take. You were inevitable.

So I told you I liked you, as more than a friend. And it was that first time when I gave you something, and you did not reciprocate. "I have a boyfriend".

Honestly, I expected that. Rejection, it was not uncommon to me. I even knew what to say and do. My mind followed the plan I had laid out for that outcome, and tried to forget about it. But the heart does not obey the mind. I could not forget it, and without my consent, I cried inside. I had not expected it, but the rejection injured me inside.

After my first big emotional drop, my heart told me to try again. In other ways, but again. I was still your best friend, and I still gave you all of my time, all of my energy - my entire set of genuine feelings was yours to take. And you gave me back some of your own. I liked your company, you liked mine. I trusted you, you trusted me. We shared our feelings and secrets, deeper and more hidden each time, and I looked, almost feverishly, for something in you that might hint towards your love for me. But I could not find it. Intense care, deep appreciation, strong friendship, great trust, yes. But not what I was so anxious to give you: my love, my heart, my entire being.

As I slowly, only instinctively, realized there was nothing else in you for me, I felt the tidal wave of depression coming, about to crush me to nothingness, and I tried to stop it. I pretended to feel for you only what you felt for me - a solid bond of friendship and nothing else. Oh yes, it was a ruse, now I see it. It was a ruse for you, and it was a ruse for me. "I love you. I feel very strong emotional attachment to you, but I think I have totally accepted that nothing is going to happen between us, and I think that... what I feel now for you is only fraternal love". It was a great debut. Not as much for you as it was for me - as long as I convinced myself of it, I was immune to my self-pity. How could I feel rejection as long as you returned all of my feelings? I felt no true love for you then, no, only friendship. The mask of "only friendship" protected me well - it kept me from understanding that the last shred of hope I had of you returning my feelings was gone. And only until now can I see that. My unconscious shielded me from being crushed.

And now that I understand it, in my mind, my feelings changed. Not sadness, not self-pity, not love. Hate. It has been replaced by hate. No longer do I want to give her everything - I want to take it all away from her. I want to rob her. I think of the months I spent giving the best of my energy to her - waiting, wanting, asking, obeying, expecting, suffering. Suffering for a single person because she would not return my utmost feeling of love, but instead expected me to be content with her "fraternal" feelings. Suffering. I suffered. And now I want you to suffer too.

So I still act as your friend. "Do you want to go somewhere? We can go to a restaurant, Southside, wherever you want! (attempting to please me and put me in a good mood, having manipulated me in that manner so many times...)" "Meh, I don't know... you're the one who just landed. Are you hungry?" "I could eat" "Let's just drive around until we decide" "Ok". I still show her what I find interesting: "Oh, look at that tree, it's so symmetrical!" I pay for the bill, I act like a better friend. It's so much easier now that I am not truly your friend anymore. So much easier. So much easier to lie when the lie is so far apart from the Truth.

And I want to do with you what you did with me. I know you "feel" for me, I am your best friend. You've entrusted me with your secrets and your friendship. You will continue to give me your friendship, and I will reciprocate with mine fake own. But not like before. You'll see hints of true friendship, acts of trust, a friend like before. Yesterday was a hint into a day in which I was down, today I will act like a real friend. Tomorrow I may too, but focused on work. And every day you will see the same pattern you saw me act in last semester. But it will change.

You will gradually begin to notice something missing - your "friend" will no longer be there for you all the time. I will not want to go "smoking" sometimes, I'll be too absorbed in my work... or even with nonsense. Nonsense will be more important than you. I'll find better things to do, better people to hang out with. And then you'll begin missing my friendship. You will give me more than I give you, and later, months from now, you'll realize I have not been your friend for a long time, and what you gave me for all that time was for naught, was in vain. And you too will cry inside.

Fuck you.

Bucket List

If I died today, I will have never:
Skydived
Skiie'd
Learned to twirl a pencil between my fingers
Sled down a snowy hill
Jumped out of an 8th floor
Kissed an unknown girl
Made a snowman
Kissed Leila
Understood Graphical Models
Published a paper
Told my parents about my Life
Had a non-secret girlfriend
Driven a motorcycle
Had anal sex
Had a full blowjob
Visited Africa
Learned to juggle 3 things
Walked across a continent
Traveled faster than sound
Touched a dolphin
Made love in the outdoors
Had a one-night stand

*UPDATE, occurred on May 29th: Skydiving, check!*

My mind is a mess

I have a presentation to practice, and I could focus, but my mind urges me in anxiety, shakes me constantly, asking for attention to something I can't understand. What do you want? What do you want, mind? Is it about her again? What do you want to tell me? That I hate her? Is it that? Tell me something, heart - do I hate her now? Have I gone that far? What the heck??

Ahhh, yes, the relief of emotion springs through my spine - just a tiny burst. I close my eyes and more comes, without thought, only the soft release of emotional tension.

Is it true? I don't want to love her anymore - have I come to hate her then, in a defensive tactic? How stupid can that be? Must I project SOME emotion onto her, and if it can't be love, it must be hate?? Is that true?

Tell me mind, because I DON'T KNOW!!!! All I have is wordless emotion through my back and arms, but I can't distinguish it. How to tell?

I will state several possibilities, and the one which rings most as the truth, will be the one.
I hate her. Do I? She is kind to me, how can I hate her? She uses me. Does she really? I'm the one who offers to give her rides, talk to her, and who built up all the energy between us - I gave it all and... does the energy have to go into some emotion? And if it is not love it shall be hate? Despise? Repulsion?

I don't feel repulsed by her. I feel her as a sin - something I should not approach lest I fall in the vice of dependence. But there is attraction - and I work to keep her distant, and it works...
until now.

I love her. Man... the emotion I feel is much stronger. Through my back, arms, shoulders, neck, head... and more relaxed. Is it really that? It doesn't ring exactly true either. It seems to be closer, but it's not that. What is it?

She is my best friend, and I cannot risk to be too close to her. And that is saddening. An emotion of subtle woe stirs me, but it is not that strong. What is the truth?

I hate her. I want to kick her, punch her, smash her to the floor, grab her by the neck, make her pay for the frustration I have felt. I am infuriated with her. I want her to suffer like I did, have her want me as much as I wanted her, pretend to fall for her, give all the hints, make her truly fall for me, want me, respect me, admire me... and at the moment of her highest hopes disappoint her, block her, suddenly grab her by the heart and not let go - crush it slowly - no, pretend at first to be a loving squeeze even. And when everything is perfect for her, squeeze and crush her heart to break her in every way - see her defeated, humiliated, lying on the ground, still begging for me to help her. And then pretend to have not heard her and walk away, absorbed by other things, and forget her forever except as the scar of triumph that appeared when my hurt was at moment finally healed.

She cares for me. Does she really? Or am I just her pity project? Even unconsciously... I may be just the one she feels sorry about because I suffered for her all of last semester. Sure as fuck I did. I suffered, I saddened, I cried for her. Fucking feelings. Literally. That's what causes all of this shit.

Now I act aloof, cool, distant. Unbothered by her. Am I really? If I'm writing this so fervently, apparently I am not. But HELL can I act it well! And I'll act it even BETTER! I'll ignore her so much that she will come crying to me, asking for time alone with me like she now does. And I will be busy. Too fucking busy for her.

Guilt Expert

The chains that are not

That's what we are, that's what we inevitably do, and how we work. We project ourselves with our thoughts and wills - our lives are the shadows of our innermost desires, projected upon the reality as we perceive and accept it. It is most common, and most devoid of effort, to merely receive this reality through the eyes and experience of others, a reality forged through the consensus of many people, an eroded intersection of practices of prudence developed through the ages. But though this is the easiest, best-treaded path, it is not the only one, and most certainly not one meant to remain in for the span of an individual's entire life.

Only until this is truly understood and felt can a person truly decide to expand his or her accepted reality into others - realities more complex, less constrained, and that allow far richer possibilities for our wills to project upon, than the one he was submitted into since birth. And when he does, he will weep, overwhelmed at the vast amount of possibilities that are and that he had never walked on, never imagined to walk on, always taught to ignore and forget. And when he later, sometimes meekly, most surely afraid, takes a step in the directions he has just discovered, he might weep even stronger when he finds that the chains that had always held him were only the shadows of his fears - and he can blame no one for believing in them - for assuming their power and perenniality, but himself.

And if this person then realizes that there are many more of these chains hidden in his life, in every corner, in the way he wakes up, in every menial activity, even in how we think, he can venture to find new constraints and directions he has always missed. And the more he finds, the more he ventures, the more he will find that his reality becomes closer and closer to his very thoughts and wills, to himself, his real self.

Life Programmer

After a few insightful chats with fellow conscious entities and some introspection, I've come into contact with a few more ideas about Life and stuff that I want to write up. (Sidenote: I once wrote a blog entry called "Life is a Program" (must've been more than 2 years ago now...), and I just hope this entry does not expose the same idea. I'll figure it out as I write this now.)

You know how, when you perform an action for the first time, such as walking, you have to concentrate to achieve it? You have to work for it, think about your steps, keep your balance, be aware of your whole body to avoid tripping with any obstacles. After a while, however, you're suddenly walking all over the place, thinking now only of the toys that you're now able to reach, almost unaware now of the skill that allows you new possibilities.

Same thing with driving. First you're mistaking the gas pedal for the brakes (a very bad thing to do), and before you know it, you forget the pedals exist as you're texting doing 90 on the highway. The task becomes automatic, a learned subprocess into which consciousness now barely intrudes. So I then think: This seems to happen with all tasks. Walking, running, eating, driving, swimming, reading, playing an instrument, watching TV, playing Halo, typing, talking - they all initially require learning effort (maybe except for the TV), but then they become automatic, unconscious.

As a programmer, I see this effect as the creation and calling of functions in our mind. We learn tasks, we create specific functions for each of them, and as we refine our function with further experience, we enclose these tasks into functions we will rarely need to change or think about again. We just call them with the appropriate parameters and we're done!
So what does our consciousness do? In this model, it seems to be the programmer. The scripter, the operator. It is the entity that takes experience through our perceptions, ponders about what has to be done, learns methods to do it, accumulates enough observations, and gradually learns a pattern of action that is best suited for each task in most observed contexts. And as this pattern of action is enclosed into a function and shows better and better success rates when used, our consciousness gradually learns to trust it and eventually takes no further part of it until it again perceives the need to. The function is complete, and the "programmer" can now move on to "writing" (learning) new tasks.

void drive(Vehicle car, Location destination) {
  Key carKey = this.obtain(car.getKey());
  this.enter(car);
  Route route = MapUtil.traceRoute(this.getLocation(), destination);
  car.start(carKey);
  car.driveRoute(route);
}

Do you think of putting your keys in the ignition before you're actually doing it? Do you think about your hands when you turn the steering wheel either way? I assume not, just as you barely think of how much you bend your knees as you walk down the hallway to go eat at lunchtime. According to this model then, learning is the creation of "functions" for tasks that we repeatedly perform, and consciousness is the learner for these, the creator.

Far-fetched dumb baseless hunch? Imprecise/incomplete model of a much more complex reality? May be. But I like it. It fits a pretty big chunk of my perception of Life until now very well.

I'd also like to relate this concept with that of the Exploration/Exploitation tradeoff, famous in the context of Reinforcement Learning. What should a learning agent do? Explore uncharted states, find new tasks to learn, new goals to achieve, risk unknown hazards? Or should it further exploit and refine its learned tasks, guaranteeing its success, content with its predictable world? The latter requires little effort on the part of the consciousness (the programmer) and mostly guarantees a predictable outcome, but will probably learn very little. On the other hand, exploration requires considerable effort from the consciousness, and the results are mostly unknown, but the experience the agent gains as new learned tasks (functions) extend its set of skills, and with it, its set of possibilities.

IMO (In my opinion, not International Maritime Organization), I prefer Exploitation only as much as it allows for more Exploration. In other words, Exploration is my goal, and Exploitation the means (and the occasional distraction :).

So, I consider myself a Life Programmer. I'm guessing others do too.

As more and more thoughts churned around me, even less of them made sense, and guilt barely managed a lash as I succumbed to my animal instinct.

Life Programmer (discarded)

*UPDATE: PLEASE IGNORE THIS POST. IT WAS THE INITIAL VERSION THAT I DISCARDED BEFORE WRITING THE NEXT POST*

After a few insightful chats with fellow conscious entities and some introspection, I've come into contact with a few more ideas about Life and stuff.


(Sidenote: I once wrote a blog entry called "Life is a Program" (must've been more than 2 years ago now...), and I just hope this entry does not expose the same idea. I'll figure it out as I write this now.)


I guess a good way to describe the idea is something everyone relates to: Consciousness. You're conscious, right? I assume so. I know I am, or at least it sure as heck feels like it. And as Descartes said (or at least as the popular version goes): "I think, therefore I am [conscious]". Isn't that right? I think it's right. So:
S1: I am conscious.


On the other hand, there's Physics. To start with, let's assume that classical, newtonian mechanics is true, from the tiniest to the vastest level - universally correct and valid, perfect - a system that comprises matter, energy, forces, and in which every given action determines precise reactions, where each state determines the next as commonly perceived through time. If this were true, the future of the universe could be exactly and precisely determined at every moment in the future, and nothing that were made at any point in time could "change" what would happen in the future. The entire universe, past and future, would already be perfectly determined. Change would be an illusion. Decision would be meaningless.

S2: If Classical Mechanics is true, then the future cannot be changed.

The conclusion of this last statement contradicts Doc Brown, however. That alone seriously impairs its credibility, and makes me consider about other options. Removing the assumption of the perfection of newtonian mechanics, I now summon the relatively recent theory of quantum mechanics. Now, I'm not too knowledgeable about quantum stuff, but I'm guessing that if you're reading this blog, you're not too keen on reading something too formal anyway.

So quantum mechanics is largely based, as I understand it, on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision.[1] It is not that the experimental equipment is not precise enough - the two quantities in question just are not defined at the same time by the Universe.[2] When I try to completely understand that, I go like "WHAT? ", as many others have too.

says, as I understand,

Following this assumption, we

Of course, now quantum mechanics has come and said
Now, I'm not too knowledgeable about quantum stuff, but for now, let's assume that

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics
3. 
   

2010

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