Of songs and dreams …

They played Natalie Imbruglia’s "Torn" last night on TV and I was again reminded of how much feeling this song evokes in me. I don’t know if it’s her voice, the memories of the period when I first listened to the song a lot – 98, in Georgia when the song played a lot on the radio and I’d be driving and listening to the radio -, the words to the song or a mix of all of these things. Whatever it is, the song’s been going through my head since then and I’m listening to her "Left of the Middle" album while I’m typing this … I don’t know if she ever released a second album and if it was any good – guess I’ll have to look into it later today.

I woke up today from a dream about someone I love very much but the dream kind of left me feeling the same way that "Torn" does – with a sense of loss, a poignancy which is almost like tiny almost felt pinpricks across your heart. So what was the dream? It was a kind of romantic drama :p I was in India and had just got off a train where I’d spent some time with this person I loved. I don’t know if we met on the train (train rides in India sometimes take days …) but all I knew at that point was that we’d spent a lot of time together and that she was still on the train headed somewhere with the man she is to marry. I stand there on the platform thinking about the times we’d shared, the talks we’d had, the moments when we’d just sat in silence enjoying each other’s company. It was a bitter-sweet moment since I could think about how much I loved her and how much we’d enjoyed each other’s company but at the same time I knew I’d probably never see her again since she was going off to be married.

I laid in bed for about an hour going over the dream, going over all I remembered and all I felt. Sometimes I wonder if I give too much importance to such events since I do think that there are signs all around us – the trick is to figure out what is a sign and what the sign actually means. Maybe such introspection is bad since we can end up jinxing things ourselves by reading too much into something. But in another way, such thoughts about different scenarios and possibilities are good since that might prepare you for anything that might lie ahead. In the end I guess all you can do though is to live life a day at a time. Each of us are such complex creatures – our decisions are made based on so many little things and then there are of course those events that are beyond our control. So it really does not pay to ponder too deeply on things and it is best to take it a day at a time. But, there is this tiny voice within me which says "easy enough for you to say …" :p

Of ills and pills …

I am not too well again – according to my parents, this is seasonal since the sun is right overhead (which is true – I mean that the sun is right overhead …) and also according to them, this would not happen if I cut my hair <g> – which I’m not so sure about since they’d blame an earthquake in the Kashmir on my hair if they thought they can make it stick and it would do some good in convincing me :p Anyway, I indeed am sick but this has prompted a couple of questions for me. The first came about when my Dad said that I was in a lot of pain/discomfort but I wasn’t showing it. Now I really don’t think I’m in that much discomfort but the question is how do you know? What is a lot of discomfort to my Dad might not be a great deal to me since I believe that it’s no big deal if you can bear it. So how do you know what’s a bad pain/ache and what’s not? Isn’t it all subjective? Not that that question has any relevance to anything else but it just popped into my head since I’m always left wondering as to what yardstick other people use to measure stuff like this that they cannot really know personally … I might ask somebody if they were in a lot of pain but I don’t think I’d look at them and say that they are in a lot of pain unless they are screaming their heads off :p Or something like that …

The other question was about medicine. I usually hate to take pharmaceutical drugs (or Western medicine as we call it here) for a variety of reasons – the main two being that I believe in letting the body fight whatever it is that ails you first and that I don’t like to take pain killers for everything since I believe that they become less and less effective as time goes on if you take them for every little pain. Or maybe I’m just a masochist :p Anyway, I usually prefer to take herbal remedies unless it’s really bad and I need to go to a doctor and then s/he prescribes something for me. Even then, I usually get off the medicine as soon as I start feeling better 🙂

Now the thing was, that there was an article in yesterday’s paper about how one of Australia’s leading pharmaceutical companies was in trouble due to poor production practices – it said that they even collected powder on the floor and put it back into the production line regularly. And this is a company which made over the counter pain killers like Panadol, Paracetemol, Panadine etc. Not that I’m saying the herbal stuff is any better since they are basically off the floor anyway – they dry the stuff on the ground and then collect it and package it but it’s not usually in pill form – so you can wash the stuff, clean it up and make a tea that you use instead of taking a pill with all the dirt off the factory floor. What I’m beginning to wonder though is how safe are any of these medicines or remedies if the people who are producing them are so careless? I know there are regulations in place to prevent such things but this Australian company has been charged with regularly misleading the regulators as well. So I guess it doesn’t always work.

Should we resort to growing our own herbs and making our own medicine? But that probably would also mean that we are also safer growing our own food as well since you don’t know what sort of chemicals go into anything we eat. Sometimes I begin to wonder if technology is such a good thing if this is what we’ve come to but then again, this is not the fault of technology but rather of those who wield it – they’ve lost sight of the human factor … that it is human beings who’ll ultimately use the contaminated stuff that they produce to make a quick buck. That it can indeed be themselves or their loved ones buying the stuff they produce and subsequently falling ill. Why is it that we never think of these things? I don’t know …

Of situations and silences …

I have always had trouble deciding what people mean when they do something. I try to put myself in their place and figure out what I meant or felt like or wanted if I’d done what they’d done but most of the time this results in a completely different set of interpretations to what the person originally might have thought or meant. I am not too surprised by this since I don’t think we could really put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes except perhaps in simpler cases which do not involve a myriad of feeligns and emotions – each person’s reactions are based on their background, the way they think and how they feel at any given moment … at least that’s what I think.

The problem however is that while I don’t think I can really figure out what somebody else wants or means, I still have to try and do so at certain times. It would be ideal if all human interactions could be either so transparent so that no translation is necessary (which probably would mean that either we all start thinking alike or we verbalize things a lot more :p) or if we are always able to talk things out freely and openly so that we can figure out what the other person meant and then be able to base our judgements on hard facts. Unfortunately, life isn’t so – or maybe *I* make it to be so since most of my problems seem to stem from the value systems that I adopt.

Doesn’t make sense? OK, well, if somebody tells me that they don’t want to talk about a certain subject, I will (almost fanatically) respect that request and not talk about it till that person has specifically informed me that we can talk about it again. The problem is that sometimes people assume that I’d *know* that it was safe to talk about it again based on their actions and since I don’t like to base my actions on a judgement call (lest I be wrong) unless absolutely necessary, I will simply go on till they specifically tell me and try not to assume anything. You’d think it would be simple enough for me to ask them if it was OK to talk about the subject again and find out from them wouldn’t you? But that is where my fanatical refusal to talk about the subject comes in :p If they didn’t want me to talk about something, my thinking usually is that they wouldn’t want me to bug them about whether we could talk about it either. So silent I remain and try to figure things out based on the other person’s actions … and this as I mentioned earlier is a slippery slope indeed …

Yes, I know … I should probably try to decide what is important enough to warrant breaking the silence – maybe that would work? But then again, how do I decide that? Is what is important to *me*, that important to the other person? Again we come to trying to put ourselves in another person’s place and so it goes – round and round and round. I sometimes think that being in my mind must feel like being in a hamster cage :p Do other people have these dilemmas too or do I just make these things up to keep the days going? <g>

Of men, women, moments and wonders …

This entry goes out specially for my head fan who’s been asking me how come there have not been any new entries in a while :p Why have there been no new entries in a while? That is a tale for another day – if I care to tell it :p But here is something that struck my fancy … I was out for most of the morning and came in to catch the middle of a movie on TV called "Desert Gamble". It had these three characters who ostensibly meet up by accident (I didn’t see that bit) who get to know each other and as the story progresses we see connections and threads running through the story that connects and binds them. Of the three – one is a guy named Harry who has separated from his wife, who has taken everything of his including his dog and gone off. The second is a woman named Pat (I’m not sure about the name there) who has divorced her husband who she thinks has been cheating on her but still longs to be with him. The third is a woman named Edie who is going to be married and is waiting to meet her fiance.

As the story progresses, we learn that Harry actually cheated on his wife (because he was so used to her he says) but didn’t consider it cheating since the women "were just passing through" (according to Harry). We also learn that Harry and Pat seem to have some sort of a connection after several encounters and that the man Edie is going to marry is Pat’s ex-husband. There was one moment in the movie where the three characters just walk along and talk about their lives and how certain things came to be and you wonder about human interactions and whether any of truly know where we are going and where each person we meet has been and how our paths may have crossed at some point without us even being aware of it. OK, maybe it’s just me or maybe it wasn’t that particular scene as the whole movie but it was an interesting movie in that it made me think about how we interact with all those around us and how sometimes our lives touch those of others without us even being aware of the fact.

The movie ends with Harry finding romance with Pat and Edie discovering that she is actually marrying Pat’s ex- but still deciding to go ahead with it (though she does tell Pat that her ex- has "got a bumpy ride ahead of him" :p). It left me with a warm feeling (maybe it was all that country music since I enjoy country music) but maybe it was the fact that however scarred we may be by things that went on in our lives, there is always the hope that we can find happiness again as long as we have hope 🙂

Sinesolis was kind enough to write to me as soon as he’d seen yesterday’s post and offer to do more icons – he’s always been a great guy like that and I really am thankful to know that there are such nice people like him out there 🙂 Thanks again Sinesolis! I did do all the icons on my own in Axialis Icon Workshop as an interim measure and have the new UI mostly working. The edit toolbar has grown enormously and now actually takes up two rows. It looks a bit cluttered to me honestly and I’m beginning to wonder if it indeed is too busy – I guess I’ll have to post a screenshot for you to actually see what I’m talking about. I’ll probably do that tomorrow if I can get the new build upto the level of posting an entry with a link since then I can do all that from the new build itself and so test out the publishing part of it too :p

So far, the text formatting stuff in the WYSIWYG editor works fine and I’ve also added an HTML view where you can still see the text in all it’s HTML tagged glory and since I’m still using the PlusMemo component for the HTML view, you still get all the colour coded HTML tags. However, the formatting toolbars become disabled in the HTML view and so you’ll either have to depend on custom code snippets or code it in by hand :p I did add a new option where you can specify what the default view should be – so those who like HTML can always start off in HTML. I should warn here that while tables are supported in WYSIWYG view, WPTools does not support embedding tables within tables (or maybe that’s just for HTML files) and so you might not be able to do a lot of stuff with tables, but table support is there in WYSIWYG mode.

There are problems however – the first one I came across was the fact that adding hyperlinks in WYSIWYG mode is kind of oversimplified. To add a hyperlink, you have to (in the code of course) use a function which inserts the URL and the text for the link. Now I wanted more control such as to be able to specify the target etc. I don’t know if that is possible with the hyperlink insertion function since I haven’t worked with WPTools too much before this. Guess I’ll have to start doing some experimenting. Hopefully, it’ll work because if not, I’m going to have to either find a workaround or talk to the WPTools developer and that’ll mean time wasted and I hate that …