The Habit of Farewell

(Date is approximate)

When we leave one too many dear people, we find patterns in the once-unique experience. And I wonder if it can, also, join the drudge of routinely templates of habit.
Let be what is.
~Oct 2011

Self-pity outside Paiz San Cristobal

Life without purpose becomes blurry. Nothing is worthy of focus, of attention. So time passes and nothing is achieved. Events occur around me, but they are irrelevant. Transient. Fleeting. And if no relevance is found, the mind is dulled. Or quieted. I'm not sure. And meaning becomes either precious or a nuisance. I guess which depends in the meaning's nature. Is it good, is it bad? Pleasurable, hurtful? I hypothesize that if enough dullness is experienced, any meaning, of any kind, would be a relief. So is dullness, an emotional void, sometimes portrayed in books and movies & such. Pain, even, becomes a relief.

So why am I in this state? I should be happy, enjoying my stay in Guatemala. Why do I feel dull? I hypothesize it is due to a combination of having no steady responsibility, like a job or studies, no routine, and few friends to hang out with. I have friends, and they are good. But I'm afraid to admit needing them. I'm afraid of needing them... I should need nothing and no one. But that would make me... a hermit? Not necessarily. Having friends and needing friends are different.

But also, I think my psyche is blocking my grief and my sadness of having lost some physical attributes to my recent accident. I feel ashamed (or do I?) of my new seeming limits, my new fears. Of not daring to jump down a foot high, of being unable to move faster than a running child. Of being afraid of trees and of dancing and of playing tag or simply being agile as before. I'm afraid that my new fears will limit me further than I already physically am. I'm afraid of accepting my new state. And as I write this I weep, giving credence to my hypothesis. The emotional void is preferable to the grief. The irresoluble grief. What can I do about it?

Wait. Exercise, hope, and wait. And pray. Praying involves faith. But it expresses intention. I wonder if I'll ever stop wishing that my accident was a dream.
May 15th, 2011

Dream fluidity

Do you know the feeling you get when you just had a dream and you want to remember it, and you are just waking up? And the only way to keep it fresh in your memory is to remain in a semi-asleep state, motionless, and if you move or you begin to focus on stuff from reality like getting up, how bad your breath smells, brushing your teeth, having breakfast, or what you're going to do today, the dream images rapidly dissolve and disappear? Do you get that? I do. Like this right here: http://xkcd.com/430/

Have you ever stood inside a body of water with your head over the surface and looked down at the reflection of the ceiling or the sky above, and tried to keep the reflection steady and detailed? Have you noticed how hard it is to keep the image steady, because any movement you make inside the water disturbs the reflection significantly? I have.

Property

(Date is approximate)

Possessions are such subtle burden after carrying it for so long. Too long now. Could they be perhaps that nameless thing that solemnifies childhood into the so called "adult" life? Could the incessant urge to keep and to hoard, to collect evermore, assumed by most, admitted by less with a slight taboo, the urge to possess, be a constant weight-down in the lives of billions? Let's find out.

Property partitions matter, time, and space, like privacy partitions (a subset of) knowledge. They both allow tight control over the flow of these assets, and the society I'm surrounded by assumes these concepts as essential to the integrity of its inhabitants and to all organizations they build. But although these concetps are ingrained into society, and seem to have been so for a while, it appears possible to me that this arrangement is a suboptimal game-theoretical local optimum analogous to that illustrated in the Prisoner's Dilemma; a "to each his own" strategy makes for the best possible worst-case scenario, though globally suboptimal.

Then again, we see examples of compartmentalization in Nature itself. The cells in my body keep their organs to themselves, perform specialized functions, and hold themselves separate from each other with their minute membranes, though they coexist with each other in the same medium, and they often exchange signals and materials? between each other. Nature is often a model worthy of imitating (in more basal form... everything is a part of Nature)... so what can we learn from this? That compartmentalization is indeed necessary, or at least one valid way, to build coherent, larger structures out of many? That we are on the right path?

Maybe. Evolutionary quandaries aside, though, I feel my possessions weigh me down. They shall be disposed of.
~End of March 2013

Parking lot thoughts

(Date is approximate)

I sit in the car, outside the gym, at 6:05 AM, waiting for my sisters to come back. I was supposed to sleep, but I don't feel very tired. What bothers me now is anxiety. Constant anxiety of what might happen if someone comes up to my car and tries to rob me. I shouldn't be. I've heard people are killed sometimes because the cellphone isn't good enough. Or because people don't have the "required" two cellphones. I mistrust the people walking around me, their mere reflections on the car beside me, even though I am in a fairly well-enclosed parking lot. Fear, anxiety, scenes of me resisting robbery cross my mind. I imagine myself grabbing whatever weapon the person would have, pointing it back at him before he knew what happened. Or honking the horn in alarm mode and hoping they got scared enough and ran. Or at least got frightened enough for me to grab his/her weapon and use it against him. Or to suddenly open the door in an attempt to hurt him with it, and then take the advantage to hurt him or get the weapon. Or keep honking until security got to where I was. Or to talk to the robber, asking him why he was doing what he was. Asking him to consider what he was achieving, what he was contributing to... or to just open the window enough to pass the cellphone through. I don't know. I don't want anything to happen, but the familiar anxiety hits me.

Darn it.
I should be calm, tranquil. At any time, though it might happen, there should be calm.
Calm and peace will wash over me.
Calm and peace will wash over me.
Calm and peace will wash over me.
Calm and peace, wash over me.

I wonder how long until my sis'es return? It's 6:37 - another 40 minutes left, I'd say.

I'd like to take my own cup or glass to fast-food places and ask them to use it instead of the paper/plastic cup they use. I'd like to do it constantly. And to be followed on that example.

It's hard to find a silent place around here. The radio is booming on the other side of the street. Ok, myabe it's not that hard, I haven't gone around and looked for it. But indeed, I've been bombarded with radio the last few days. Mari's at home, an official radio stand right now, and they're proclaiming it's karaoke thursday. I can't HELP but listen to it, and that kinda sucks. Oh wait, if I block my ears with my fingers, I can barely hear it. Well, good. But then I can't write. Ah, dilemmas.

So today I take my sisters to their respective destinations, maybe visit the Megapaca, go back home. Maybe to Proceres, they've got power cables for Elisa's computer. Oh, breakfast at Pans with my sisters before that. Buy a cheap wireless router at the Megapaca. Go back home? Work on RW/HBI. I've done some nice changes to it.

• Asset groups in roles.xml
• Applying the display name to Status Enums dynamically from a .properties file through reflection. That was cool, and allowed SO MANY simplifications. Custom ECFilter with only the original 2 fields; label and value. Unnecessary RWProcessRowsCallback and RWLimitCallback.
• Allowing the RWResourceBundle to be reloaded. I wonder what happens if private copies of RWResourceBundle. Doesn't seem good. I'd like to take a look at it.

(Ah, the radio volume is so much better now. Maybe someone complained :)

May 5th, 2011