Strategic silence

Silence due to fear? Or to strategy? Social strategy, to avoid conflict. So is it fear of conflict? Perhaps. Perhaps it is fear of the social consequences that come with conflict what will others think of me, if they see me in a conflict? Not an always non-conflicting person anymore...
But that should be irrelevant. Another matter that appears, then, is the convenience of it. Afraid of the inconvenience that conflict would cause for the next few days? I prefer conflict to shadowy truths and repressed feelings. Open up. Say it.

Perspective

At times the intensity of humans - their exalted joy, their inspiring ideals, their sharpest of sufferings - seems to me as bland and dry as the gray bore of their unawarely deterministic lives, inconsequential to anything outside of this physical system of reactions and particle conglomerates, a boring constant across the infinite expanse of the timeline, unaffected by even our strongest efforts to change it, like the state of the ocean is to the force of its waves.

But when I manage to believe again that the possibility space is true to my perceptions, that the future is a fabric yet uncut, and holds at least two distinct states, and that I am, beyond my bodily capabilities, indeed the maker of decisions, the owner and victim of my future, the changer of the world, the forger of my destiny, then the smile and the awe and the laugh and the frown and the tear and the pain and the strength and the grief and the doubt and the fear and the bliss and the feelings and the will in others and in me feel bright and real again. I then also start caring more about buying orange juice to get enough vitamin C in the mornings.

Petty relationship muck

Complications have arisen, desipte my attempts at retaining simplicity. Apparently, our simplicities are very different, and incompatibly so. But didn't I know that?

I act, she upsets. I don't act, she upsets. I go ahead with what we'd agreed, she upsets. I grow afraid to upset her with every decision, with each novelty introduced. I dislike fear, I take up nonchalance instead. She feels upset by my nonchalance. I'm done with her. She can go, she can stay. Either way, she is not my priority now, even as she was.

As for me, I'm involved in petty relationship muck. Free yourself, dude. Free yourself. Go.

Rose

I was waiting for her outside the security area, just behind the TSA entrance where you take your shoes off and your body gets scanned. I'd brought her a hot milk tea in a plastic container that was now only warm, a little box of cashews, a thing of yogurt, a spoon, and a flower - an orange-and-pink rose I'd bought from a street vendor, with half the stem and the thorns broken off. I was dressed in jeans, a button-up shift with black and white stripes, and my black formal shoes - the mere fact that I know any of this means it was a special occasion for me.

That Friday morning I woke up early, as I knew it was due with things to prepare. She was coming that evening at 9PM, so I had to get ready. I started with a great relaxing swim from 7:30 to 8:00AM to start off the day happy and energetic. I went back home, gathered my laundry, readied my Macbook Pro, and took my mostly-empty backpack. The bus took me to the laundry place, where I dropped my heaviest load off. At 9AM I was traversing Giant Eagle to get basic needed groceries, like milk, bananas, bread, plus some of her favorites, cashews and yogurt. I took my time to pack most everything into my backpack, hung up the remaining two plastic bags from my backpack hook, and walked to the Apple Store. I got there at 9:50, and although the website said that they opened at 10AM, I was able to just walk inside.

Once there, they took my Macbook Pro and agreed to install Mac OS X Mountain Lion on it for me (it didn't let me do it myself), and I left it to them to complete the installation - I could pick it up anytime later that day. AT 10:30 I was back at the apartment, at a GTalk meeting with my 10-725 project partners to do the very last assignment for the course - the Project Report, worth .35*.28 ~= 0.098 = 9.8% of my net course grade. They seemed to know what they were doing, and though I dropped an idea every now and then, they pretty much took control over it, and I took advantage of the opportunity to wash the dishes and cook noodles for my late breakfast.

The next few hours I chatted around and found some items on Craigslist she would like - a whiteboard and an electric kettle. I made appointments to pick them up early next morning, and at about 3:30PM, I went to pick my computer back up. I then walked to pick my laundry up, and dropped it off at the apartment, picking up 6 orange roses from a street vendor on the way. It was 4:30 when I got there, and my project partners had asked me to print out the report they had finished and to turn it in, as I was the closest one. Taking it as my role in the group, I scooted off to school to meet the close 5:00 PM deadline. Printing the project report from a fresh Lion install without any pre-installed printers made it a close call, but in the end I managed to even print 2 copies of the report - one B&W and one color (the first one printed out unknowing that there were colors in the report graphs). At 5:00PM, I noticed that the "deadline" was quite soft - all I did was slip the report under the office door, and I was done with my course. Finally.

At 5:30PM I left school, and scooted off quickly to find rose petals for her coming. The closest florist to my apartment had already officially closed, but was very nice to open the door for me when he saw me looking through the window. He sold me 5 roses - 3 red and 2 yellow, and picked out the petals for me into a nice rose potpourri. Grateful to him, I left back for home and fixed up the remaining details. I opened up the roses and put them in a pitcher with water (in the absence of a vase), I cleaned up my room, I made the bed, I boiled milk and used it to make milk tea, I took a good shower, and I strewed the rose petals on the blue blanket she picked out the last time she visited. I broke off one of the orange roses to make more petals, and chose one to take to her personally. I dressed up in the button-up shirt my mom had given me a few weeks back, in my black formal shoes, and jeans. I reserved a Zipcar for two hours, picked it up, bought a pack of "Her Pleasure" condoms at the pharmacy, then drove straight to the airport. I waited for about 15 minutes at the gate before she appeared, dressed in clothes that, unlike her usual, were not particularly stylish, but did seem comfortable and warm.

She didn't seem that happy to see me - only dazed from the flights she had just gotten out of. Regardless, I was very happy to see her, and I gave her the orange rose. She seemed a little relieved but still dazed, and said she had felt sick on the plane, and that she hadn't even eaten the plane food. So we just picked up her bag from the conveyor, walked to the car, and we drove back to Pittsburgh. We made the reservation deadline with 4 minutes to spare, walked home with her red and metal-beige suitcases, and walked into the apartment and into my room. The first thing she noticed were the rose petals on the bed, and she let out a tiny, delicious squeal, the first one I'd heard from her on this trip. She seemed very pleased that I had prepared something special for her, and commented on how clean the room was, and on how special she felt when I gave her the flower at the airport.

Still, she was tired from the flight, so she took a shower, and I took the opportunity to prepare a quick dinnerette from little scraps I found - the box of cashews, the peach yogurt, a sandwich and a piece of bread she got from her plane food that I toasted in the oven, her re-heated milk tea, and a cup of soymilk. We ate happily, and then went into our room. And that's when we started.

She stood in front of me, looking at my chest, at me from underneath, as she gently touched her fingers to my arms in cute suggestion and submission. I took her in my arms and we kissed, fully, deeply, like lovers, like people committed only to one another in that silhoutted room that night.

We stood and we kissed for a while, then wanted to feel her better and pinned her to the closet wall, firmly and smoothly, feeling her delight as I pressed each part of her body with my own. It wasn't too long before she looked at me and the bed, and decided that she wanted to try the rose petals. I took off her clothes, all but her underwear, before I gently laid her down, backwards, and I saw her delight in the cool feel of the cool petals on her skin. I took off my own clothes and found myself on her, embracing her so close to feel all her pressed skin on mine, to exchange through it our passion, our intention towards the other - that full-skin embrace that for a blissful time makes you feel both protector and protegé, master and slave, and that warrants kisses across her entire body.
looking at her cute smile so close I kissed her eyes.....

Loving leech

lonelines crept up on me like a maggot hiding in a corner, just waiting for my first moment by myself. guilt threatens, and imagined future memoties in the snow and in the kitchen disappear into a parallel unmet universe. The skiing trip onto the house in the mountains, the ice skating practice sessions, the chinese and spanish one-on-one lessons... are all just vanishing future memories.

Terrified of losing myself into us, I cut you from me like I would a loving leech. You overbore me with your energy, and your joys, and your passions, and though delightful, I found little in it that was mine. I tore from you so I might keep and grow myself. I have yet skillls to learn, people to meet, ideas to consider and to assimilate, before I'm willing to invest myself into us. Now, I want to invest myself into myself.

A week with Echo

A week with Echo

Many things I've noticed, many things I've lived and seen. One week.

Last friday I picked up my rental car at the Avis stand at Pittsburgh airport, and happily drove off to Newark, NJ to pick up my friend/girlfriend Echo at the Newark airport.

I have story details to tell, but in short, I picked her up at 6:55PM. I ran out of gas before getting there, so I parked at the Economy Parking lot at the airport, and had 0 miles left to go. We spent a weekend in New Jersey taking taxis, renting zipcars, trying to siphon gas, and generally just trying to put gas into our ride back home. Half-stressed-out, half-excited to see Echo again, I spent a conflicted weekend trying to calm Echo's excitement down while dealing with the gas situation.

Right after the gas situation had been resolved, I talked to her:

"I don't think I'm ready for a long-term relationship. I know you are, and that you want a stable life, someone to hold onto and build a life with. But I'm not ready for that yet, and I think you should know that before you believe that I'm accepting a commitment between us already".

She looked sad and hurt, and talked very seriously about wanting to go back to China as soon as possible. I honestly though it was not such a bad idea, and was just waiting for her request to get her a ticket back to Shanghai. She talked about how she would look like a fool if she returned to her dorm and told her roommates that her big trip to see her boyfriend in the US had ended so quickly. To me it was strange though - I did want her to stay and visit me for a while, but I did not want her to be my long-term partner. We have fun sometimes, but she is so intense - she gives everything when she loves. Even when I don't and I hint to her to slow down - she just continues being intense and giving and expecting so much love and commitment from me. And I'm not quite there at all yet.

What I found astounding was that it took less than half an hour for her feelings to settle, her cold expression to turn into a smile, and to tell me that she realized that I had also done a lot to bring her here, especially buying the tickets, and that she did not expect me to commit completely, but that she was just here to spend some quality time together, and see if we could work our differences out with time. I agreed those were my intentions, and just minutes later we were making up with kinder words, caresses, and a healthy dose of sex.

Our drive back to Pittsburgh was loving and passionate. Not excessively so, but we kissed when we could, and we almost went into the family bathroom of a gas station on the way to take each other's clothes off. A misunderstanding disallowed that though, so we just drove back and we were here on Sunday afternoon and evening. We went grocery shopping at Giant Eagle and Target (for towels, cups, food, and other miscellanea), and then we came back to the apartment and had some pretty good sex. And so we had a good prelude to our first week together.

We spent our first week in fine bliss. She woke up early every morning and helped me get up and shower early. I followed her lead, although sometimes her chinese habits throw me off guard. She doesn't just tell me to brush my teeth - she just takes my toothbrush, puts toothpaste on it, and hands it to me as I enter the bathroom. She doesn't ask me to wash my face - she pours the cleanser she got me right on my hands, and tells me to use it. And when I refuse politely, she keeps pushing. Sweetly, but firmly. I find that quite annoying. Sweet, well-meant, yes. But annoying. I often felt that I was simply renting her as a mom. Not to mention as a cook. A great cook, yes. And though I enjoy her company and her food and her sweetness, I perceive a great asymmetry of feelings for each other and of expectations. As I've told her, I expect little. I don't know what I want from her, although she knows a lot about what she would like from me. She has told me: she wants a stable life - a partner she can completely count on, who would be on her side even if the rest of the world is against her. She wants to find someone to meld lives with entirely, to depend upon each other completely. I don't think I want that, and though I've told her that, she seems determined to stay with me for a longer time to try it out. My hopes for us are very slim, though.

To me, our relationship now is an experiment and a learning experience for both of us. I have never been involved in a long-term relationship, and I have had very little close contact with the chinese culture. Its language, its food, its habits, its wants and goals. I saw the possibility of learning chinese, of learning cooking, and of a close romantic/sexual/girlfriend relationship, and of building up a routine helped by a person who already has one. I also saw the possibilty of teaching her to swim, of helping her with GRE, and of helping her build contacts here in the US by being so close to two important universities in Pittsburgh. I repeat as much as I can, though, that commitment is not in my short- or medium-term agenda, and I hope that she understands me to full depth when I say it. She and I will not end up together. Our personalities are too incompatible, and I have told her that. She gets so strongly offended if I slight her, even if she knows that I do so with good intentions and with the kindest words I can manage. So strongly that she basically breaks up with me every time I do so. "… then maybe we shouldn't be together", "… then I should just go back to China". I'm actually anxious for her to go through with one of her threats sometime, though. It would make things much simpler. But as they are, I accept her staying here, as the experiment is still ongoing, and there are still things to be learned and to teach. But this will not last for too long. She will not stay further than the first week of 2013, but I see no gentle way of telling this to her. Not yet, though.

But every time she loses her countenance and threatens to break up, I simply hold my position and wait to see what happens. I do not strike, because I still think there is potential to be taken from the experience. But only minutes later, she comes back again, saying that I have done much for our relationship too, and she somehow switches back into caring and loving mode, and not a half hour later, she's excitedly telling me what we'll be eating for dinner. Her moods change too suddenly for my comfort.

She got upset on Monday because I attended Alex's TurnOn Meetup in the evening. It was my first evening with her, and yes, she was not my priority over this meeting. But this was because I had made a commitment beforehand, not because she was not important to me. Anyway, this did not produce much of a problem. A stronger problem occurred when I asked her to be nice to Leibny, when I detected a bit of tension between them, as she asked me if I thought Leibny liked me, and she thought she was not being nice to her (Leibny to Echo). She complained that she had not acted badly at all, and I told her that I had not implied that - that I was merely trying to keep the peace. She ignored my reasoning and kept complaining, and then we held silence for over an hour. Later on, the same pattern occurred. She tried to get an apology out of me, I presented my position in the most diplomatic manner that my own patience could tolerate at that time, but I did not stray from what I thought and felt. In the end, she somehow came back to being loving and caring, and we came back to a nice Friday evening of cooking, dinner, and hugging. Not exactly the..........

Optimization

Life is something of an unbounded optimization problem. There's no real global optimum, but it's a complex, ultra-highly dimensional, wacky space that we explore. And since there's really nowhere we have to go, we might as well just go nowhere. But we also might as well go anywhere, since staying put has proven to be quite boring.

Given the stated, I've also noticed a high concentration of people at local optima. People tend to settle once they find a sufficiently satisfying subspace, and then stay there, reaping the fruits of their nice personal niche. Whatever that might be.

I declare my intention to not stagnate in local optima. I've found a few. Most optima I find, actually, seem to host many who invite newcomers to stay in their spot. It's a nice communal culture of invitation and aggregation, but it tends to slow down the explorer's course. Like Calypso ensnared Ulysses in her island of pleasure and illusion for 10 years, so some hearty travellers also find themselves, after a momentous desire to "taste of all the fruits of all the trees this world has to offer", as idyllically stated by Mr. Wilde, conformant to their surroundings, less certain of their motivations, sluggish in their actions, and disheartened of themselves.

The compromises one makes for the sake of belonging to a successful optimum may seem small, and are perhaps necessary to truly experience the "true-and-tried" optima of the common world. But if joy cannot be found in what one habitually does and says, indeed, one's drive will fade, and after enough of saying what one doesn't mean and doing what one doesn't will, our dutiful mind might just adapt to artificially believe them. For all who consider Truth an optional luxury, this risk is terribly dangerous, and it sadly strikes widespread. But if one consciously decides to not delude oneself, then one has the possibility, and under fair ethical systems the duty, to free oneself from the comfortable cage, and to keep exploring the Lifespace, this possibility space, for whatever we decide to search for. Because only pushing into the unknown can an explorer keep his motivation fueled, his mind bright and curious, his will alight, and his heart joyful.

Life

my world is mine.not by possession, but by nature.by the simple sense of being.I saw a pair of autumn trees beside a suburban hill on the hill, next to my bus route. it struck me that the trees were beautiful, and that I was at the time, absorbing it's beauty through my perception of it.
I realized that those trees, as perceived by me, were mine to enjoy and in whose virtues I was free to relish.only I saw those trees as I did, and no one else could.
I then saw the other houses passing me by, and I saw them move, blur before my eyes along with the electrical wires around them, and the grass, and the concrete sidewalks, and the paved street, and the imperfections and grime on the window through which I saw the landscape. I an all of that.it is part of me, part of my life, integrated., irreplaceable,and I saw myself in the truth of my existence,as all around me, in all the angles that it enters me, in all the modes that I can perceive it., conceive it. I am all that I come in contact with,just because my life is mine and no other's.not that I won't let it beanyone else's., but it is simply an integral partof me, as energy is of light or as 5 is of the number set. it is a wonderful feeling to realize one's existence not as an isolated optimization and survival problem to solve, but as simple existence, seemingly shared with other beings similar to oneself, also equipped with perception, conception, and entire lifetimes of sequential worlds, the ones they perceived, the ones they conceived, each containing multitudes of complex emotions, only a small fraction of which they can actually describe, or understand, or maybe even remember. But it is all them - they are the result in the current iteration of a continuous loop of exploration and action that we, for the lack of a more descriptive term, called Life.

Netbook Uses

This Craigslist ad that humoured so much that I'm posting about it. This guy's selling an old, kind-of working netbook, and he lists several potential uses for it. Pay special attention to the last one.

Ad Link:

http://pittsburgh.craigslist.org/sys/3273024903.html

And because the link will eventually be removed, a facsimile:

_____________________________________________________

asus netbook/portable desktop eee pc 900HD - $50 (south hills)

---

Date: 2012-09-15, 3:07AM EDT
 tncrp-3273024903@sale.craigslist.org ^{[Errors when replying to ads?]}

---

asus 900hd eee pc

potentially:

web-only kiosk
security camera (built-in webcam)
streaming movie server
moving picture frame
sad and porous dinner plate

built-in keyboard has several bad keys, requires plugging in a keyboard ... everything else works ... plug in a monitor and mouse too and you have a tiny portable desktop.

has license for Win XP Home

currently installed very latest xubuntu 12.04 -- speedy operating system for web browsing, media stuff on a smaller machine -- better than XP Home

250 Gigabyte hard drive (upgrade)

2 gigs RAM (upgrade... 240-pin DDR, i think)

please include your phone number ... or somehow prove you're human. 

Echo

Echo,

I love you. I miss you so much. I've been unfocused these last few days because all I really want to do is spend more time with you, but now we're on opposite sides of the world, and any words of true feelings I might tell you might turn out sour later with time. I'm afraid of making promises that time won't let me keep. But I want to tell you that I love you, and that you complete me in many ways. Being so close with someone else? I don't recall. Feeling SO at ease, feeling such a perfect fit, physically? Mentally we are very different, you think at 20x my speed and still like to help me keep up with you. I feel happy and trusting when I'm with you.

So what can we do? We're in the middle of studies. Neither of us is going to quit our study programs to be with the other - we would never forgive ourselves. Promise future love, when we finish our studies? I could, but I'm afraid of not being able to keep promises honestly. Ours was a summer love, we knew it - but will it last? How can we know unless we give it time? We must give it time.

I wish you the best. You are a little diamond star, a remarkable jewel of energy and playfulness and intelligence. I hope to be part of your future, I hope to be your life partner. But while we still can't be with each other, I need time to finish this part of my life. And you yours. I want our good times to repeat. Let's aim for it. As stupid as it sounds, I want it if the other girl doesn't work out fine. I know it sounds shallow, but it's real. She is a big "what-if" in my life, and I must see what comes out of us, if anything, in the near future. I don't want to hope or root for anything - she may take me, she may not, we may work out only for a little while, or for years. I don't know. I just want to flow for now, and I will take decisions when I feel them.

I miss you, my git friend.
Truly,

Intended Sex Log

(What I began to write with the intention of a love and sex log with Echo, but barely started, shortly after meeting her)

Echo & Antonio Log: :D

Saturday morning, I arrived at the SFO around 9:30, right around the time of Echo's landing. I sat down in front of the gate, and looked as people from all over the world arrived - Mexico, Brazil, and Japan. An hour later, after a casual, time-killing chit chat with a japanese woman beside me, I saw a long gray dress walk on the TV, and I

As Echo unpacked in the room and I fidgeted with the covers on both of our beds, we talked about what we would do that night. It was saturday night, after all, and bars and clubs all around were buzzing with exciting San Francisco nightlife. It was still around 3pm when the Big Bang Theory topic came up, so I asked her to watch an episode before we went out. She said "sure", so I copied the episodes from my HDD, we lay down on the mattress.

She lay her head down on my shoulder, and I could smell a freshness in her hair typical for girls. It was on my nose
She looked so cute from that angle, so I keep looking down. She is so cute, I just couldn't help kiss her forehead again. She put heer hands on my hand because it was cold, she put one of my hands in her hand, and tried to warm herslef with m y body warmth. She gently squeezed and caressed my hand as I felt her face get closer. As she neared her face and emphasized her caresses, I felt the urge to kiss her cute eye. She reacted by getting closer and looking at me from below, with an expectant look that even I would not mistake for neutral. A few platonic kisses on her face, cheek, nose later, our faces slid with each other.

rounding up us on our body.


Her skin was the perfect combination of silk and a flower.

It's just sex

Now I think I know what they mean when they say "It's just sex".

Between-Days

You know how when you're awake up late at night, after midnight, and you're telling someone what you had for lunch that day, you refer to "today", and then you realize that you're technically referring to "yesterday", but you let it go because you got the concept across, and who cares anyway?

Well, I care. I care enough to at least propose new names for these in-between pieces of the night:

Muesday
Tednesday
Wursday
Thriday
Fraturday
Satunday
Somonday (It could be Sonday, but it sounds too similar to Sunday)

Their meanings should be self-explanatory.

De-automation

Since immemorable times, I've admired machines. Respected them, for their ability to ease one's efforts, quicken one's tasks, and bestow superpowers on us mere mortals. Distances we would take hours to walk, cars roll us through in mere minutes. Great expanses of unwalkable water, previous impassable borders, all sorts of boats now ply and float us through at our will and command. With machines we fly, we produce fire, make food, light darked rooms at midnight, mass-produce all sorts of goods, receive constant water supply in any of our homes, automate our liquid waste disposal, build shelters, shape the earth - it's safe to say that machines and tools have made our lives wondrously convenient and comfortable.

And then there were computers. Ahhh, computers. In my opinion, the closest mankind has come to replacing, and enhancing, their own brains. Birthed with the task of automating and quickening arithmetic/logical operations, they quickly found their way through all sorts of applications. Useful at first only for accountants, banks, and scientists, their fame probably spread through to librarians, writers, hobbyists - and then branched and trickled its way into pretty much every cultural stream of modern society. We now push a few buttons, and talk to people on the other side of the world instantly as if they saw us through a little magic window. We send instant, impalpable messages through the tireless electrical messenger, whose effort, where he material, would be vastly larger than even that of the often-ridiculed Santa Claus courier achievement. We store, share, and summon names, numbers, books, faces, voices, and music in little gadgets the size of a harmonica or smaller, and we can access knowledge bases, both public and personal, from any device in the whole wide world that taps into the ubiquitous Internet well. We process thousands, millions of pieces of information in the time that we blink, scratch our nose, or go get a cup of coffee. We delegate the task of charging fares or allowing access to little reading devices. We find any address in an unknown city without asking for help from anyone. We can produce visual art, static and animated, with precision and/or randomness the kind that has never been seen before. We can produce text much faster than any pen allows. We make and mold sounds like a potter does his clay. We can immerse ourselves in shared imagined parallel worlds of adventure and excitement. We shop from the whole world while sitting down. Mankind found a way to mass-produce logic, amass baffling amounts of data in tiny containers, and mass-spread information instantly across the entire world. How cool.

You can see how one can come to admire computers, or machines in general. I sure did. They imitate and enhance so many of our daily activities. What did I prefer - writing my long homework assignment by pen on a sheet of paper, where a mistake would leave a scratched-out word and evidence of my blunder on the paper, or comfortably typing and printing out a clean, crisp, perfectly-neatly fonted assignment? Since immemorable times, I've preferred the automated way of performing tasks, even if that meant going out of my way to find that automation. Because once you automate something correctly, you may never have to do that task, or automate it, again. And because with computers, not only are tasks performed more neatly, but they require much less of a physical investment. Why hire an expensive human toll-taker when you have a cheap wireless reading device? Why keep a large, heavy collection of videos on VCR, or even DVD, when you can make files out of them and have them available online on demand, weightless, nuisance-less? Why... etc.

There is another thing to be considered, though. That is skill. Automating tasks, while enormously useful, can degrade skillsets. Take lightbulbs, for example. Lighting our homes since the 19th century. How the heck did people see at night before this? Fire, of course. Everyone who wanted to see what the hell was going on after dusk had to have candles, a torch, or a little oil lamp. But more importantly, they had to be able to deal with fire. Most everyone was an expert at handling, moving with, and containing small amounts of fire. Over a hundred years later, which layman has to deal with fire besides the occasional cigarette lighter or the even-often-neglected stove? And now the electrical cigarettes, electrical stoves, and microwaves are pushing that boundary even further. Dealing with fire on a daily basis is falling out from the common skillsets.

So is sewing. And cooking. And dealing with numbers mentally. And remembering appointments. And telling stories. And penmanship. Among others. Manual skills, when successfully automated, are thus transferred into the machine's skillset, and often shrunk in ours. Our nature compels us to be skilled at what we practice, and most often to not be skilled at what we don't. Given this, I think it's important to consider skill as an important feature besides convenience, comfort, and mass production. Considering extremes, would you rather be a skill-less comfort prince, served and fed and clothed and sheltered and entertained and transported most perfectly and predictably by servants and machines... or would you rather be an ingenious woodsman, jack-of-all-trades, able to make yourself a living in whichever way you chose? I'd be woodsman. I'd at least know how to make phone calls and use Facebook, of course. Oh, and Bash.

And when you look at the inner workings of most machines closely, and compare them with the human counterparts that used to fulfill their functionality - it is hard not to notice the machines' crudeness. Look at them - you'll see. Their existence has a purpose, and to that effect, they can do nothing else. No rotating motor has the delicacy, the sensitivity of one of our common hands. No camera can capture the full experience of a beautiful landscape in front of our eyes. Music production is an example that has struck me most recently - no machine/computer, with any method or algorithm currently at hand, is able to create pleasing or melancholic or exciting music on the fly, at will, as say, an experienced guitarist does.

While machines allow for enhanced strength, speed, and predictability, we humans inadvertently possess incomparable amounts of versatility, and very, very importantly, UNpredictability, an important subset of which we call creativity. Imagine machines could model every different way of doing things that man has been already capable of, every skill - imagine that someone achieved that tremendous feat. What, then, of everything that man has NOT yet been capable of? Would we be able to teach these machines, when teaching a machine is a skill in of itself? Could we develop new skills on top of others, even after having delegated and forgotten our previous ones?

Not that I don't like machines and computers. Heck, I love 'em. They're awesome. They light up my room. They let me watch movies in bed. They allow me to travel to far-away lands without getting my feet sore. They let me listen to music from all over the world. I find housing, I buy furniture, I meet friends, I learn new knowledge, I communicate through the whole world with them. I wash my clothes with them. I make a living with them. I LOVE all this technology. Do I want people to stop using it? No. Do I want to stop using it? No. Do I think that people should stop developing technology? No.

So what the hell were those four paragraphs about? Well, as usual, they're about awareness. People, myself included, are often plagued by a lack of awareness. Basically, all I'm saying is that we should be aware of what part of our skillset we're delegating to technology, and that there are skills out there of which we are probably not even aware of because they are so superseded or obfuscated by technology. Again, penmanship comes to mind - I wonder how much less the newer generations know how to handle a pen than the one I grew up with.

Beyond skillsets, consider action for its own sake. I used to think that it was always better in any situation to delegate a task to a machine than to do it myself. Why risk the fatigue? Why risk failing? I realized why. Because we are meant to act! Our bodies' purpose is to generate action! We people are capable of such a vastly rich space of actions - and it is such a joy to indulge in the world, to sample of the delicate, or of the subtle, or of the fast, or of the beautiful - not only to observe it but to create it! When you observe something beautiful or colorful or wondrous or fantastic or bizarre, do you ever feel a desire to create it? "Oh man! I would SO like to be able to to do that!!" I do. I think we all do. It's our imitative nature. How pleasing I find it to learn and play a beautiful piano piece!, even if not with the  grace of the performance that originally encouraged me. How satisfied I feel when I manage to sew my sock's rip with needle and thread, and can then avoid touching the cold bathroom floor with my uncovered heel in the morning!

Act for action's sake. Tis an often-neglected concept.

Anyway, consider de-automation. It's not always as bad as it sounds.

Moved

Moved, trapped, bursting with empty expression,

panting at ineffable emotion,

sweet, sweet pitch,

energy of inspiration, of beauty...

pure joy I perceive, and I so want it, I feel it, I want more,

I refuse to ignore it, to continue postponing, allowing myself to tedious tasks,

for the music is there, it sings, it always is,

it brings joy and light through only air,

proving that such joy, such energy

can be anywhere... everywhere.

And I want to feel it, to make it, to dance it, to immerse myself in it,

but I'm at the office,

What to do?

Enjoy... your soul is yours.

How to feel it more? To feel so... willing, excited, PASSIONATE???

I ask you, Music, Life,

help me be with you.

I pant to soothe my

burning larynx, lungs,

pleading me to let them burst in

song and music and joy and truth.

But I'm at the office.

Your order has been receiiiiived

Sometime in the Fall of last year, T-Mobile announced a special deal - something along the lines of "Unlimited Text/Calls/Data for $39 a month. Zero contracts". Intrigued, I read the details on the T-Mobile website, and I thought I'd try it. So I called T-Mobile, and I was attended by a calm-sounding guy whose name I can't really remember. But for the sake of narrative, let's call him Brian.

I proceeded to inquire details about the program - whether it would work with my current AT&T iPhone, whether I would need to buy a new phone or could use an old cheap one, what kind of obligations would I acquire, what kind of coverage did it provide, etc. Brian was very polite, and answered all of my questions. About 20 minutes later, I was sold, and I ordered a package. Brian said "you're in luck, we have a promotion today, you'll get a free cheap phone, and you'll only need to pay for the SIM card, which will be $1.99". I said "awesome!", and gave him my card details and stuff. After a few seconds of audible typing, Brian told me, in his calm and polite voice: "All right, Mr. Antonio, your order has been received".

At that point in time, just around the last syllable of "received", I experienced a mental shift. Whether in attitude, in perception, or in my thought processes, I felt a sudden change in me. Somehow, what Brian was telling me was a factual truth. Not that it really wasn't, but in that moment, I perceived his words as unquestionable fact. It's a little hard to describe, but imagine having information fed to you directly, unfiltered by the brain, by doubts or mistrust or questions or inferences or reasoning or subsequent emotions about it. It was simply true, my order had been received, and Brian was letting me know. How simple. That last syllable even sounded longer. "Your order has been receeeeeiiiiiiiiiived" (Ok, not that long. But long enough).

The feeling did not last too long - maybe between 1 and 3 seconds. Shortly thereafter I began thinking:

• Wow, Brian is talking so matter-of-fact'ly.
• Why do I think that he is talking so matter-of-fact'ly? Did he say something special, or in a special way?
• No, he didn't. He was just talking and I suddenly felt like he knew exactly what I was to know, and that I was learning an important piece of knowledge.
• What was THAT all about?
• Oh, wait, did he just ask me a question? What did he say?

And then I resumed my conversation with him, regular style. My T-Mobile phone and SIM card arrived a few days after, I never used it myself, and I activated it only months later for a friend who arrived in Pittsburgh and needed a temporary phone.

The whole incident might have faded into oblivion, but this mental shift has happened to me at least 2 more times since then. I believe one time was while I was in a park. No one was talking to me that time, but I experienced the same inflow of perception - everything was true, I had no doubts or questions or even thoughts, and the feeling faded quickly.

And tonight, I decided to skim through a music theory workbook before going to sleep. I skipped a long prefix that explains the main notes, the basic time symbols, and other basic music concepts, and began reading the section of the circle of fifths. I was going through a section that explained how some notes can be written in different ways, like F#=Gb. As I read that equivalence, I experienced the same mental shift. Suddenly, F# simply was Gb, that was the truth, and that book was the perfect way to learn that. So simple.

So I wonder about this mental shift. Is it good? Can I promote it? Can I exploit it? Is it harmful? Should I avoid it? Can I avoid it?

But I can't summon my unfiltered perception on-demand to have my questions answered in apparent absolute truth. For now I'll settle for an I-don't-know and a good-night from my own self who thinks it's much later than the time that a prudent week-worker should go to sleep at on a Thursday-Friday night.

Orgasmic Meditation

Today I attended an OM session from 10AM to 7PM. You can imagine that a lot happens in nine hours, and right now I actually don't feel like narrating everything I remember. But I will mention the highlights:

1. I sat down in a double-row, semi-circle of chairs in a large room along with around 30 other men and women of many ages and ethnicities. I talked with many people around me - they were all very friendly.
2. The session directors, Robert and Joanna, told us what OM was about, and their own experiences on how it changed their lives. Robert, a 13-year OM'er, said that he started because he and his wife weren't having sex anymore. Joanna said that she started as the company product placement coordinator, and then she eventually tried it, and she felt herself unraveling with time, from a motherfucking tight-ass bitch, as she called herself, into the much calmer, aware, and perceptive person she was now. Questions were taken across the room.
3. Robert and Rachael performed an OM in front of us, in a massage table. Rachael took her pants off, she opened her legs wide for the whole audience to see, and then Robert narrated through the whole experience. He basically put on gloves, dipped into some lube, put her fingers into her vagina, and stroked her clitoris with his left index finger for 15 minutes. Rachael seemed to enjoy herself very much during the process.
4. We went out to lunch. I talked to Kat and to another guy whose name I already forgot while lunching at Soma Cafe.
5. We came back, and more questions were asked around the room.
6. We got up, the room was cleared, rhythmic, dancy music was played, and we were told to mingle around, and either look, or not look, at the other people in the room as we passed each other by. Then we paired up randomly, and we performed several exercises, each time with a different partner. Exercises: 1) We "noticed" things about each other's face and said it out loud in a tone-neutral way, saying it with approval, 2) we talked about our favorite pet in the most juicily-detailed way we could. I talked about Ulysses and heard Steven talk about his previous cat, Flamepoint (a white cat everywhere except for orange on the tips of his ears), who one time leaped off the roof to grab a bird passing by, and then proceeded to decapitate it. 3) We asked each other "Would you like to OM?" repeatedly, to which we always said no. We then did the same thing, but this time we said yes. 4) We stroked the other's forearm with our index finger while, first silently, later offering changes to the stroke, and then receiving instructions from the strokee. 5) We did basically the same thing, but massaging our partner on the shoulders, back, etc.
7. We sat down again, and a lot more questions occurred. Then each of the steps in the OM process were explained - the setup with the yoga mat, the blanket on top, the towels, the gloves, the lube, and most importantly, the specific posture. Then a lot more questions happened.
8. Finally, we got to the OM Lab. We basically found ourselves a partner by asking other people (I didn't - another unpaired woman just paired up with me by default right before starting). We "noticed" stuff about each other like in the first exercises, then she took off her pants, she lay down on the mat, I sat down beside her, I put on my gloves, we got into posture, and then I just followed the guides' directions. I told her "I'm going to touch you", I put my hands in position around her vagina, and I basically stroked her clitoris for 15 minutes, following her directions when she said needed a change, and trying to feel something inside me sometimes. I don't think I felt any kind of special tingling or super energy flowing through me, at least not mind-blowingly. However, when she started to really moan loudly and enjoy it and just basically scream all the way through her pleasure, I felt a crisp, strong desire to hug her. She climaxed quite a bit, and she squirted out onto my gloves time and time again. It was strangely not really arousing, but just rather... pleasing. After the experience she didn't seem to feel like talking to me. She didn't explicitly avoid eye contact, but I really wasn't looking for it either. Still, stroking someone's clitoris seems like a fairly intimate activity - I guess I can understand her hesitance. (I did get to hug her before she left the place).
9. Later, Robert asked everyone for frames of experience. I didn't have anything solid to say, although now that I think of it, I did feel a strong desire to hug her. Then people clapped, I grabbed a few more snacks (my hands felt really clean despite having just inserted my fingers into her vagina, due to the gloves). I made myself a member of the Facebook OM Hub by paying $29 (in addition to the $149 that the session itself cost), had some more cookies, exchanged information with a few people, and came back home. Joanna said that we should be super extra-sensitive for the next 48 hours or so - I wonder what I'll perceive.

Travels

It's been at least months since I've narrated my Life's events, so after a sudden whim impulse and a few seconds of intense deliberation, I've decided to pause my silence of long, and share my legendary exploits with the anonymous online void.
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I arrived in Pittsburgh this morning, June 30th at around 11AM. Having checked no baggage, I walked straight to the National Car Rental booth, where a short queue, and a few seconds later a friendly guy with a nametag inscribed with "Matt" greeted me from behind his counter, and asked me which car I wanted. I looked at a Camry first, but I was sure the case would not fit comfortably, if at all. So I asked for a truck, and I was offered a huge white Escapade truck, the length of whose bed would fit the Camry in its whole. I asked for a smaller truck, and luckily they had one: one with a shorter bed and whose cabin was lower than that of a city bus. But before I took the truck, I remembered I still had some questions to ask the airline. So I traced my steps back to the ticketing area, and interrogated the lady behind the counter about the allowed weights and dimensions for passenger's luggage. After a few consultations with higher employees and some conversation regarding the luggage contents, I was assured that my extra-large and extra-heavy case would indeed be accepted, given that I paid the fee of $25 for the first bag, $90 for being overweight, and $175 for being oversized. Assured thus, I went back to Matt, chose the small truck as my vehicle, and drove away to my Pittsburgh apartment.
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As I came back from Yosemite last Sunday afternoon, half of my mind was concerned with getting the car back on time to the rental company, by 5:30PM, even though Tom was driving as one with a deadline would. The other half of my mind was half-obsessing over my conversation with Wen Xin, a cool girl from China with whom I found myself exchanging travel anecdotes and language tips - I taught her Spanish and she taught me Chinese. Pretty and confident, she won my liking, but I was unsure about whether I was causing a good impression - hence my obsession.

Back at my apartment, I opened the door and met with an unfamiliar face. He introduced himself as Justice. "Like the virtue?", I asked. "Yeah". The name caught me by surprise, but I could imagine someone named Justice. It reminded me of "Rainbow" and "Feather", the names Emily told me about 4 years back. He was my new roommate, and he told me they had a spare room for the summer, and asked me if I'd like to stay through the summer for $700 a month. The moving process at the end of the month would be most convenient, and the apartment is in a great location, so the offer was almost unrefusable. So accepted I his offer, and indeed found a great room in my target area. A few hours later I fell asleep on my pillow-bed while watching a random episode of Doctor Who.

The rest of the week was fairly regular. Every day I woke up between 6-9AM, morning'd, and had some breakfast. The first few days I had no food at home, so I walked to the office and bought a nice hot oatmeal to have as breakfast from the Adobe Café. But on Tuesday evening I found some time in the evening to slip into Trader Joe's and buy supplies: pasta, soymilk, cereal, bananas, and such essentials (The unsweetened original soymilk in SF Trader Joe's, by the way, is delicious). The following mornings, therefore, I broke my nightfasts with Bran Flakes and soymilk in the apartment kitchen.

In contrast to the one before, this week I felt productive and got stuff done. A half-compiling bunch of code became an almost-fully functional, parameterizable system, plus, I got a few experiment results ready for my advisor back in Pittsburgh. It wasn't just work-productive, either - I also spent some time searching for stuff I wanted. So on Thursday evening I rented a ZipVan, and picked up furniture around town - at one place I bought a table, a short table, a mirror, and a chair for $55, and at the other I got a queen-sized Sultan mattress for $30. That night I learned that driving a van takes a while to get used to (it had no rear-view mirror), and that SF-downtown traffic can be slow like molasses when getting on the highway.

Friday was a varied day dotted with a few emergencies. I skipped one hour from the office in the morning to visit the Reddwerks booth at TechCareerExpo, then I called Silvia because she needed someone to talk to, and then I had to coordinate Julian picking up the RW equipment from my apartment in Pittsburgh and FedEx'ing it to my apartment in San Francisco. He couldn't find anyone to open up the apartment for him, though, so it didn't work out in the end. I still had to ensure proper delivery of the equipment to SF, I promptly bought a roundtrip ticket to Pittsburgh for that very night after midnight just to get the equipment, and flying back on Sunday morning at 6:40AM.

That evening I had several free hours left, so I went and picked up a Lalanne juicer I found on Craigslist for $40, near Ocean Beach. The tram trip was long and somewhat boring, but I made it well on time - I still had time to a quick dinner back at the apartment before grabbing my 2 empty-ish backpacks, and even then to still wait at the airport for almost an hour before boarding my flight to Pittsburgh.
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I felt quite good the first day of my internship at Adobe Systems - a smiling and genuine welcome talk from Kam from the Adobe San Jose office, sprinkled with descriptions of seeminly endless benefits that the company provided its employees, made me feel quite welcome into the company. A funny safety video, a building tour, and a free lunch later, though, I had nothing to do, as my mentor was not in town just yet. So Nick, another guy with the same mentor, and I simply went back home at about 1pm.

I met my mentor, Gautham Mysore, the following day. He seemed tall and smiling, and he showed me to where I would sit during my internship - at a desk on the 3rd floor, one out of a row of 16 CTL interns, all of us facing the southern wall of the building. We have a nice view of the Caltrain tracks turning southwards from the terminal station. At lunchtime I met many of the other interns, and I was promptly invited to go to Yosemite National Park on a weekend trip. Eager to see new places in the area, I said yes! Productivity-wise, that second day of my internship I basically sat at my personal computer all day and looked for things that might be useful for the new project. Third day, I received my computer and an IT guy helped me set it up - we set up about 5 different accounts, I thought of passwords for each of them, and then began to inquire on all the company benefits. Thursday, I began reading a bit about Sphinx. Friday, I don't really remember. Though the office tasks that week were very vague, I had more definite goals in my personal scope. My first few days, I spent quite some time in the office looking for apartments in padmapper, and I reserved every evening that I could manage for a different apartment interview.

I managed to get an apartment interview for that Monday evening, a little bit west of Dolores Park. Though relatively far from my workplace, I was willing to grab onto the first decent place that appeared in front of me, since housing in the area seemed to be in extremely high demand, and I only had acquired the right of shelter until the end of the month. The guy who showed me the place seemed nice - he was an 40-something freelancing programmer who had been working on a project for around 2 years now. He was veeery mellow when talking, and seemed to have a holistic view on everything. He claimed that his house was impeccable and that he desired it to remain that way if I was to live there. I was a little unsure about fulfilling those expectations, but I said I would give it a shot. After 2 hours of conversation and tea, I let him know that I would take the place. He told me he had to think about it, though, and I went back to my place to sleep. The next day he would tell me that he had decided not to accept me as his roommate.

On Thursday I visited an apartment off-Folsom between 7th and 8th, and I was met by a pretty cool, knowledgeable, down-to-earth musician, programmer, ex-Yosemite guide, tech-shop aficionado who manufactured his own electric motor for his car and was about to install it himself, and who had lived in Thailand for some time, where he found his current wife, whom I also met that day. I would be their and some other guy's roommate if I took the room. I found myself trying to seem "worthy" of being the roommate of these very-cool-seeming people, and after about an hour's conversation, it had seemed to go well. The following week he would tell me that I had been accepted as their roommate, and I would refuse their offer.

I managed to get a really quick apartment interview for Friday at 6:20PM. I needed to be back in the office lobby at 7PM for the Yosemite trip, and the apartment was at least 1.5 miles away from my workplace, so I called in a taxi to drive me back from the potential apartment back to Adobe. I actually ran to try to get to my interview on time (not a trivial task with my banged-up ankles), and I was there by 6:30PM. They had reserved 20 minutes for an interview with me, so I ended up having a 10-minute interview. This hot, long-legged girl greeted me at the door and showed me the place and the room. It was a nice, medium-sized room, it all checked out well, and most attractive of all, all of the roommates were girls. So if I got this room, I would be living with 3 girls, at least 2 of which were pretty hot. I think almost all of them were lesbians, but it still felt like a pretty good place to live in. We had a flash conversation about what my schedule was like and what I liked to do, not 10 minutes later the next interviewee knocked at the door, and I was courteously escorted back to the front door, and told that they'd let me know if they had chosen me. On the weekend, they would text me saying that they thought my schedule was incompatible with theirs, and that so they had not chosen me as their roommate.

My taxi was waiting for me at the front door, and it drove me to the office with a good 10 minutes to spare before 7PM. I waited for all the other interns to meet, and then we drove off. After a quick grocery stop at Trader Joe's, we began our trip to Yosemite. We arrived at the house we rented off AirBnb just at about midnight - a very comfortable and rustic-looking lodge just beside a very dark forest road. We found our beds, unpacked, and went to sleep.

The next few days I spent most of my time in one of the cars, getting to know all my fellow travelers, gazing in awe and pleasure at the rocky mountainsides not-densely sprinkled with shrubs and trees, of a green color only a little too dry to call it lush. And hiking. Ohh, hiking. On Saturday, most of us decided to take one of the longest "popular" hikes in Yosemite Valley - it climbed up a long and steep path beside the beautiful Vernal Falls, which sprinkled refreshing breeze unto our panting bodies, and through which we could see beautiful rainbows everywhere. Many impromptu picture sessions ensued. We kept on climbing to the top of the falls, and then proceeded to keep on climbing to get to Nevada Falls. They were not quite as spectacular as Vernal, but the hike itself was satisfyingly challenging to complete. We then continued hiking our way up and down the mountains, rocks, rivers, trees - we reached a high point called Glacier Point, where we had lunch and sat for a while, and then we walked down - a seeminly endless walk down that annoyed more by its length than by its difficulty. I took the opportunity to exercise my ankles - after detaching myself from the main group, I ran downhill as much as I could, landing with all my weight on steeper and steeper angles on my ankles. It hurt, but I knew I was telling my body that I needed that range of motion. It was a total of 14 miles or so, and it took us about 9 hours. Later on we had a full dinner at one of the park's cafes.

The next day we went to the park again, and this time our sore legs decided to climb only easier trails. We mostly walked around on concrete sidewalks, and the one trail I remember taking was only about a quarter mile long. We got to see another nice fall, but the majesty of the third waterfall was quite mitigated by the first two. The part I really liked about that day was Yosemite Falls. Not the fall itself truly, but the pool on which the water fell had big boulders sprinkled all around it. The best part was that the boulders were just the right height for human climbing! So Vova, Tom (two other interns) and I went and jumped on the boulders, advanced towards the waterfall, and got to the highest point we could get to by climbing the rocks and the dirt terrain beside the waterfall. We had a great view, there was graffiti up there, and we could feel a little bit of the breeze coming from the waterfall. The feeling was delicious.

After a few more easy, scenic hikes, we got back to the cars and decided to drive back. I said goodbye to everyone going in the other car, packed my stuff, and rode back to San Francisco with the intern gang.
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The week when I returned to Pittsburgh was pretty mobile for me. Basically, Scarlet and I left Shangri-La on Friday morning on a bus, and reached the Li Jiang bus station early in the afternoon. After a cab to the train station, we found that the next train to Kunming would leave 4 hours after we thought it would. So we bought our tickets, sat down, and taught each other chinese and german until our trains left. Once in our train, we found our beds, got comfy, and slept all the way to Kunming.

We woke up in Kunming on Saturday morning, found a cab to take us to the hotel we had booked, of which it did a terrible job. We walked around clueless for about half an hour before figuring out where our hotel was. Once there, we rested our tired feet for about an hour before venturing to walk out again. Walking around Kunming was relatively unimpressive, aside from my being awed at the ant-like abundance and utterly empirical driving method of the chinese people. Eventually we tired from walking, the sky got darker, and we went back to the hotel to sleep. The hotel was much shabbier than all the other places we had stayed at, but it was just enough to rest before leaving back to Hong Kong.

Early morning on Sunday, we took a cab to the Kunming airport, and took our flight back to Shenzhen. After we got there, we took a 20Y bus to the Hong Kong border, where we just walked across a building to get to the MTR terminal station on the Hong Kong side. Once there, Scarlet and I took the MTR - me to Hong Kong island, she back to her apartment. We said goodbye at a station pretty unemotionally - she seemed pretty neutral and adverse to hugs.

I took the trains back to the same hostel I had stayed at my first time in Hong Kong - Yesinn at Causeway Bay. Scarlet had suggested that I visited Macau during my last days in Hong Kong. My tired body didn't much like that idea though, and my guilt coerced me into doing some work for my advisor during the last two days I was there. Though I did walk around the city a little bit, the bulk of my time was spent on my hostel bed catching up with my email inbox and my social networks.

Tuesday afternoon, I met up with Scarlet at the mall near her apartment. We had lunch, we found little to talk about, and then we departed again. My 8PM flight dropped me off in Vancouver, where I waited over 6 hours for my flight to Toronto, where I waited over 2 hours for my flight to Pittsburgh. Thanks to punctual flights and a direct bus route, I was back at my apartment by noon. And at my advisor's office by 3PM. He happened to not be there that day. Nevertheless, I spent the rest of that week focused on getting jackknife experiments finished, ROC curves plotted, and learning about speech recognition engines in a crazily short crash course that nevertheless gave me confidence about being able to figure out the Adobe project later on. Oh, and packing for my summer life in San Francisco. I fit my temporary belongings in the big zipper-expandable blue bag that my mom gave me and my two backpacks.

Saturday morning, SuperShuttle picked me up at my apartment (where I was staying on the couch because I was subletting my room to Sarah girl). I arrived in SF at around 11AM, and I took the BART to downtown, still without a place to stay at. I had my backup plan of staying with Stewart McCoy if all my Craigslist requests went unanswered. Luckily, a guy called Ezra said he had a room he was subletting temporarily until the end of the month. His place was luckily not too far from the subway station. When I got there, he happily showed me the utterly empty room. The room looked exactly like the kind of room I was looking for - roof, walls, a door, a smooth floor, working electrical outlets, and a pervasive functional WiFi network. I wrote him a $500 check right then and there, he gave me the key to the apartment, and that was the last time I saw him.

Very happy to have found shelter in the city, I took a walk around after unpacking. I also had a backup AirBnb reservation for one night not too far away, and since it was non-refundable by then, I thought I might as well use it. I got to the AirBnb place late afternoon, and I was greeted by a semi-cheery girl who showed me to my room - a very small place, about the size of two small closets - I think I could've fit four of those rooms into the one I got from Ezra. My plan was to Netflix on that bed for about an hour and then explore the city further. My body begged to disagree though, and before I knew it, I was waking up next morning after sleeping 14 hours straight, with a much-refreshed and yawning body. Now that I think of it, it was probably best to have slept there that night - my room did not have any cushiony materials besides a couple of pillows, and sleeping on bare hardwood floor would not have done wonders for my travel-ridden body.

After taking a shower, I really had nothing else left to do there, so I folded my sheets, said goodbye to my hostesses, and never saw them again. As I walked back to my apartment on Market St, I saw many rainbow flags on the sidewalks. So many, that I thought that San Francisco was not only dense with gay people, but that it had actually become the official city sexuality. (In reality, they were just preparing for the gay pride parade happening the following weekend). I took a free tram back to 7th St, got back to my apartment, and unpacked my three travel bags. Still without a bed, a mattress, a yoga mat, or even a rug, I took a blanket, a comforter, and two pillows still in the room closet, and made a makeshift bed out of it. The blanket on the bottom as floor softener, a pillow for my butt, a pillow for my head, and the comforter as my heat insulator. Not the best of lays, it still made my sleep almost smooth. Not a week later, though, I realized that my body was feeling abnormally fatigued during the afternoons, and I inferred that it wanted a more cushiony support for the nighttime. My search for furniture and for a more permanent apartment were pretty high priority during my first week in San Francisco.

No words

No words

but heart aches

and tongue shakes with anticipation

of saying what has no words.

Plans cross

paths meet

times shared

dreams shared

joy scattered

in fast memories

and yet long

rich with chance and adventure

A bright gem of experience

belongs not to one but to both

inseparable

inextricable

We fuse in time indeleble.

Then time shifts

the fork in the road nears

and joy slopes into longing

the future longing of the bright past

inevitable

Tapestry

A tapestry of earth and water under an ocean of wind. Wind seeps water, water molds earth and springs life, life moves all. Life sprouts out of need for the inevitable, out of will, it is because it can, and for no other motive. Its existence is justified by its entelechy, and just like earth and water, Life's nature is adaptive and aimless. Its achievements project only into its own sphere, and the mountains and the lakes and the rivers and the clouds and the bacteria are no more and no less for the actions we make or the decisions we take, for we are all part of this set of crude, magical elements that we so often mistake as foreign to us.

Grandeur

Grandeur is a successful man's aim,

but to a fallen one, it is vanity.

It is easy to shun riches that seem unreachable.

For the shun is usually for the sake of others,

and though austerity is not as much liked as ambition,

the latter is empty without some proof of completion,

and scantness is less disliked than greed.

And if not for others, what say we, what say I, to lofty goals? Do I want them truly, will I march in zeal to seize them? Not material prizes, for they are as all of this world - temporary, decaying, and themselves. How can I "have" something else? Will I trust the system of property so much as to base my Life's aims on it, to place the jewels of my life on an unsteady balance made out of human illusions? No.

Will I seek social approval, public admiration? To have the opinions of others focus on my Life and actions, when neither directly affects their Life? To become a symbol of status, a model for others to follow, a statue of opinions and ideas to project upon Society's fresco? Opinions and thoughts shift with the wind, tide, and season, and experience, both personal and public, proves to me that such approval does not signify success. An admired person might very well be confused about his so-called achievements, and public opinion does not only never match, but is often a terrible detractor from the vastly more important opinion of oneself. Does my heart shift in excitement at the thought of public fame? No.

Is knowledge a worthy ultimate goal? I've pondered this question often. Is knowing the countries, the people, the languages, their ways, their skills, the compendium of world knowledge, a goal suitable to dedicate one's life to? Those learned and cultured seem more able in general and more at ease with the world, but certainly the most knowledgeable people are not necessarily the happiest, this adjective a common ruler I measure success by. But to avoid introducing a new concept, assume that I have absorbed all knowledge. Assume my brain possessed the ability to communicate with all people, to quote and transmit all ideas ever written and spoken, understand the world's economy, that I could reproduce the most beautiful music from every instrument made by man, name every star in the known sky, cultivate roses in the desert by pure know-how. What then? Because as I just now read: "When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself". Do I seek a Life of ultimate knowledge and culture? No.

Expressing oneself, even if only for oneself (and often best if only for oneself) is supremely important. It is like bringing out tender new seeds of ideas into the sunlight of the world, from where they can find the energy and materials they need to grow into their full form, and avoid remaining forgotten in their patch of fertile dark soil. For we are both inside and outside, and a force on the one is reflected on the other.

And again I realize I want a Life of selfness. Not selfishness, I hope, but a Life with the primary goal of self-development. And to do this, I need to convince myself that academic degrees, wealth, income, knowledge, and approval, either personal, institutional, or public, while they may be powerful means, are certainly, definitely, and unequivocally, not the goal. I realize this at times, and I've cowered back to the wide path when faced with unsaid guilt and warnings, promises of regret. Will I cower this time? Or have I not cowered, but only directed my Life goals to a longer-term plan? Maybe I cannot now know. Or maybe I did the one, hoping to achieve the other. It is true that randomness and accidents are wonderful companions in this Life, but I believe depending on them to achieve one's goals is a faulty course of action. Intention is the key. If you depend on luck, you might achieve your goal, but you will have learned nothing. I hope I am at each step closer to realizing these truths with my heart as well as my mind.

Proud

(Mar 29th, 3:33PM, bus)

Teetering between casual and true

I've held the world in vain contempt

A mess of burden and flawed opinion

Unjust, a vortex of decay

negates each attempt that we may

present to change our existence.

And mankind, a frustrating kind.

Confused am I, for to be part of it, I feel

equitimely relief and shame.

So capable, dutiful, wonderful,

egotistical, frightened, and false.

A being with vast possibilities

so often squandered and tossed.

Plagued with hopeless imperfection,

the world was unworthy of my affection

and I reserved it for the few,

for the realm of the pure and true,

convinced that no one knew

a worthy way to live.

My mind sneered at those

who poured their soul out to the world

for what good is any task

when the results don't ever last?

So I attempted, lone and proud,

to discard what illusions I'd

unwittingly caught during my journey

of this annoying so-called Life.

So I built up a strict membrane

between the outside and my brain

insistent that my processes

pure and abstract remain.

Mathematician by accident,

my axioms were my soul.

Ignored the fleeting and mundane,

believed no facts but my own.

The world was my laboratory

my mind its skeptic servant

Trapped in the instinct of survival,

resigned to test until the end.

And indeed I built a system

of custom, personal truths.

Consistent, complete, heartfelt facts

The solipsist admired his work.

Then in the nature of the world,

Time and life failed to stop or peak

and I became a sole recluse

in my pure mental abode.

Ununderstood, ununderstandable,

my haughty self would not share

its beauty to an unworthy world.

And Loneliness struck

as it always had.

Comfortable in my achievement

unable to dismiss it anymore

as the fault of an incomplete model.

The sentiment was real and wild

and neither my truths nor my inferences

managed to prove it away.

For a perfect glass tower does not last

in a world of perpetual change

nor in a proud bag of flesh

who, vain, attempted to build

a system that justified and praised

his pride and his solitude,

and disguised his own fragile image,
his shameful truth,

that he was really only

afraid.

Of chance and whim

of failure, of surprise.

Of disknowing the answer

of not being the best

of being only another

dot in the canvas

of an ugly, ruined world.

But the world is not smooth glass

and neither is my nature.

We are flesh, bone, blood, dirt,

air, light, sounds, vibration,

gas, thoughts, heat, waves,

joy, fear, words, tears,

breath, death, shouts, and love,

a chaotic prodigy of creation.

We are explorers of possibility

free threads in an immense space.

It's a fairly mighty concept,

which we anyhow must face.

Bold or afraid.

Gridlike Universe (March)

I see green needles out of brown poles,
proud, upward, forthgiving.
I see light slide oh so gently,
caressing each swaying needle,
each uniquely,
and all at once,
soltiduminously,
shining on each distinctly
not to its volition, but to theirs.
Is this part of our gridlike universe?

I see a gray shade over blue background,
its edges shift and fade invisibly,
yet undeniably,
a swift cloud beneath a white half moon.
So far, so bright, and yet so dimmed
by the halogen yellowish lanterns
that now seem to swarm this place.
But the moon's color of brightness,
whiter than crystal white,
it spawns an ineffable purity.
Alone, nonchalant,
but oh so observant.
Is this part of our gridlike universe?

Forgetful Consciousness

Are we here to learn to focus? We live in a world with patterns consistent across time - an anchor of solidity in an infinite space of possibilities. The world then reminds of, constantly, of our state. Were it not for the world, the great majority of our psyches would collapse, dissolve,  in the ocean of uncertainty - no control or pattern, lost without a guide or reference. A being bursting with freedom, but without an identity or a path, with no wind or pain to react to - what gives?

The world gives us momentum, and with it we can learn to inject ourselves with its state and its consistency. But I notice that many, I included, ride on it without learning from it. We depend on the world's consistency to guide us at every second of our Lives. We accept it, embrace it, become a pawn of the world without learning from it. From the world we can learn patterns, consistency, sequences and relationships between possibilities, and we can choose what to explore at each state.

I think one challenge is to learn to not be blown away by Life's momentum, but learn how to nourish your own consistency, core principles, and momentum, and apply it to the world. Otherwise, the Life lived becomes a sequence of reactions. Challenge accepted.

Code Materials

MATLAB seems like Playdough - easy to mold, flexible, quick to build anything. As malleable as it is non-robust, it is hard to keep anything inside it solid or predictable for long, and the different pieces blend together, so that the boundaries between the different pieces of the program are fuzzy or just plain undefined. A certain level of solidity can be achieved only if programming frameworks and standards are set, and even then only under specific restrictions. Otherwise, MATLAB programs rapidly become a big blob.

Java seems like cast iron. Each of its pieces is well defined and solid, and its templates are the key to the code, which is a blueprint that says how instances of these templates interact with each other. Once a piece begins to interact with many others, it becomes crucial to the system, and the more it is used, the more unchangeable it becomes. If a core piece is changed, all related pieces must also change to adapt to the new core template. Its reusability requires its core pieces to be very well-designed and versatile. Once built and functional, however, a system can remain solid and predictable. What it has in solidity, it lacks in flexibility, and it is not unusual to find multitudes of new pieces designed only as patches to upgrade the core capabilities, at which point the code can become a maze of convoluted logic and obscure exception cases.

C seems like stone. It is not meant to be built upon distinct templates and pieces. A C program is typically a whole - carved for its sole purpose from bottom to top, and each of its parts is unique and solidly bound to each other - a functional collection of one-time usages of logic to solve the specific problem at hand. It is not as common to think of C programs as pieces to place one upon the other, but rather as monoliths of specific functionality to always be used explicitly. If a single program grows too much, it inevitably becomes a mountain of piled-up code that only exceptional documentation, significant logical empathy, and a brave, patient heart can successfully sift through or change. A well-written C program, however, is exceptionally robust and can last for generations to come.

C++, a semantic upgrade over C, is like clay. Pieces and templates can now be designed and molded, though the interaction between them is loose and fragile, and requires good coding practices to keep stable. Changing a crucial piece of the code will also break the designed interactions, although the language is itself malleable enough to allow hacky patches to such changes, like just attaching an additional lump of clay to fit the broken pieces. Clay templates can now be reused in other C++ programs, although the core logic of the code is still, like C, usually monolithic, not open to transfer or reuse.

Visual Basic is like paper. It's not meant to be robust or reusable, but it's pretty quick and easy to produce something "basic". It's versatile - a handy tool for pretty much any task, provided you memorized the techniques for each distinct case. But using it for anything more complicated than quick scripting is not a wise choice. The thing can tear apart at the most unexpected times and cases, and it's only solid enough to support a few layers of logic, before you start using strange hacks just to keep the thing together, but it'll probably still crumble under any fair amount of stress.

PHP, if anything, feels like leather. Both sturdy and flexible, it can be used for a great variety of tasks, while still able to hold ground as a robust platform if designed properly. Once it's well-designed and working fine, it's great and robust. It's not much to look at, however, and its slightly unseemly syntax, combined with its extremely open types and annoyingly global set of API functions, can make it a pain to debug. Though it supports objects, inheritance, and a lot of good stuff, getting the syntax right can be hard for newcomers. Plus, its notorious lack of type-checking and its super-relaxed membership rules can counter many benefits of object-oriented logic. In short, for any simple tasks, it's awesome. For complicated tasks, once it works, it works great, but either making it or changing it can get messy.

Python feels to me like plastic. Not for the hardcore, but rather for those who prefer to just obtain abundant third-party generic pieces with specific purposes, and slap them together to produce a quick solution - a grab-and-use approach. Gets even complicated jobs done quickly if you know what to look for. Very loose interactions, however, and the freedom it gives the coders can be somewhat offset by the often poor allocation of resources caused by the coders' disknowledge of the inner workings of each generic piece.

HTML seems like Lego pieces. All the pieces are already designed by someone else, you just need to attach them in the right order. They don't even have to fit well, the thing will hold as long as it kinda makes sense, even though it mostly ends up looking ugly as heck. Mostly rectangular and predetermined, HTML is simple and serves a specific purpose - show stuff. And as long as it shows what you want, there's really no desire to make it elegant or reusable, as there's not much elegance about the language anyway.

CSS is like fabric. Each description and rendition layers boring HTML with bright colors, it covers up its pieces to soften surfaces and shade corners, it produces gradients, brilliance, and style. A most visual-oriented language, it appeals entirely to presentation, and it contains no substance beyond the cover value.

Vida Impromptu

Efímera la vida,

comienza, termina.

Y aún absoluta,

fuente de experiencia,

un regalo de conciencia.

Una vívida gruta

entre un vacío de existencia.

Life Theorist

sometimes I feel like a Life theorist

who observes Life from a distance, observes it, and brews up a model or a pattern every once in a while, but who fails to experience it. Involvement contaminates the observation, doesn't it? But isn't involving oneself the only way to experience? Why do I feel there's something from my Life? What am I missing, what do I want? Is it friends? Love? Family? Or truth, independence, and wisdom? Or skills, knowledge, talent? Or adventures and excitement? Will Life always come back at me and prove me wrong whenever I find something I believe is right for me? But then again, the principle of the ever-changing world holds, right? It is foolish to expect a single ultimate goal.

Let me experience then. Let me Live!