Of movies and moments …

"The difference between men and boys is the lessons that they learn – my father taught me" says the lead character in "Biker Boyz", a movie that I just finished watching. I’ve been struggling with certain things of late – impatience, fear, apprehension, doubt as to the future … all of this and more has been in my mind in one form or another. Sometimes I find it so hard to find my centre – my point of equilibrium. At others, I think I find it only to lose it the next day and to start the struggle to find it all over again. I guess this is always the case when life is concerned. But for some strange reason, movies seem to be my medium for discovering balance, to gain perspective and to get back on an even keel. I don’t know why this should be so, especially since I seem to find a lesson or a touchstone in the cheesiest of movies. It just is though and I’m grateful for that – I can’t imagine what life must be for somebody who doesn’t have a mechanism of their own to fall back on when they feel lost or troubled.

The funny thing is that I didn’t even want to watch "Biker Boyz" – I was too wound up, too caught up in my own worries and concerns. I sat down for the movie only because my brother was watching it and I needed something to keep my mind occupied and guess what? The movie turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. Now the thing is, I know that a movie always helps me but in this particular instance, I wasn’t even thinking of watching one because I just didn’t feel like it but now I feel much more calmer, more serene. So what was the movie about? It’s about this young guy who is out to prove himself in the world of bikers. It is a tale as old as time itself in certain ways and yet, certain elements in the movie did manage to evoke a response in me. Am I going to go into the whole movie? Heck no :p Let me just say that it has an interesting soundtrack, that I enjoyed the story and if you love bikes and bikers, you probably might enjoy it too – oh yeah, it’s got Laurence Fishburn in it :p And that reminds me of one thing that I’m going to miss soon – not being able to be at a premiere of "Matrix Reloaded". Darn it, one of the few movies that I anticipate for so long and I can’t watch it till it trickles down here through the pirated channels. Ah well … I’m off to go watch another movie 🙂

Looking high and low

Yesterday I found twenty bucks on the floor. This must have been like the second or third time that I discovered money on the floor within the last couple of years and the funny thing is that this had never happened to me before in my life! When I was young, I used to hear about people finding money here and there all the time. I even remember one time when my brother, sister and I were being driven to school by my parents and we stopped at a railway crossing and my brother suddenly spotted a two rupee coin on the ground and got out of the car to pick it up. I used to wonder why that kind of thing never happened to me and now I’m beginning to wonder why this kind of thing is suddenly happening to me :p Is it maybe because I’ve changed where I look? Could it be that I’d been looking up at the sky all my life and I’ve suddenly started looking down at the ground more and that is why I discover money suddenly?

What does that actually mean in metaphorical terms if this were to be true? Most of my family would say that it means that I should give up looking at lofty ideals and look at hard reality in order to realize that I need to live in *this* world. Of course, I wouldn’t agree with that. I’ve never thought of money as something that you *had to* have. Of course, it’s nice when you need to buy something and you can afford it but then again, I can remember times in my life when all I could do was dream about certain things and not be able to buy them at all. I still remember the time I was in a government think-tank where most of the others were politicians or bureaucrats with lots of money and one of them was bragging about the Palm PDA he’d bought off the Net and was showing it to everybody (this was over five years ago before I left for the US BTW …) I wished so badly then that I could have one of those but since I couldn’t afford it, I didn’t bother about it. But one of the first things I bought when I got to the US and could afford it, was one of the early HP Handheld PCs – the 320LX :p

But I digress – I still do not believe in looking down at the ground just so that you can find riches if that does not bring happiness to you and those around you. Money is just something that we’ve come to set up in our minds as highly important and have lost sight of other more important things like love, happiness, compassion, honesty in the process. Yes, the person starving by the road without a meal or a roof over his head may disagree with me, or the person who needs to buy expensive medicine for their wife or daughter and don’t have the funds … or so many others in specific situations. And I can’t say they are wrong. I can only speak for myself and in my life, I’ve always had enough for my needs but the trick always is to be happy with what you’ve got because then you’ll still be look up at the sky for those lofty ideals. Or to paraphrase Mr. Micawber from Dickens’ "David Copperfield" (who put it so much better than I could), – "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery" 🙂

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>

Dilemmas for dawdlers

My grandfather is on his deathbed – or so my mothers says. Of course she told me the same thing last week or rather, the week before. So what has this got to do with anything? Well, it’s got to do with a war of principles. My mother wants me to go see my grandfather before he passes away. Now normally, I would have no problem with this except for the fact that there is some hypocrisy involved here. My grandfather is not exactly the nicest of men – he believed that money ruled everything and spent his life in the pursuit of money, he tried to control his family by way of his wealth and even during the last few years, while he was bed-ridden, one of his chief topics of conversation was money – who made how much and so on.

Now I won’t try to judge him, he is entitled to live his life his own way – as we all should be able to do. He did what he did and I have no problems with that nor do I hate him. In fact, I’ve gone to see him during the last few years whenever I could when my brother and my father wouldn’t for their own reasons – I have no idea what the reasons are, I never asked them since I figured that their reasons were their own, who am I to question them? My mother did visit him from time to time while he was sick but I don’t know how many of her sisters did or how many of my cousins did. However, now that he’s on his deathbed (or at least seriously ill …) I suddenly get asked (or rather, *almost* told …) by mother to go see him. Again, I can’t say for certain that *is* the reason – but it smacks to me as if trying to make me conform with what’s *expected*. Here, everybody gathers at somebody’s deathbed when they are near death because otherwise "people" would think that they abandoned their relatives and didn’t care for them.

This to me is total hypocrisy! If you don’t care enough to see somebody and to talk to them and to be with them while they are alive, why would you suddenly change your actions when they are dead or ready to die? I don’t agree with that sort of action and will actively change my behaviour to not do that sort of thing. If my grandfather wanted to see me, I guess I would go but I know he couldn’t care less. Plus, "seeing him one last time before he dies" makes no sense to me – I’d rather remember him as he was in his prime – shouting, laughing, being who he was, rather than the way he is now – bed-ridden and in pain. Am I just justifying my own refusal to be at my grandfather’s side when he’s passing away? Maybe I am – I can’t say for certainty that I’m not making excuses – in fact, this is what I’ll probably be told by my parents and others – that I’m merely making excuses. But to me, I’m doing what I think is right.

In the end, this is all any of us can do – be true to ourselves since we cannot please all the people in the world anyway. My two cardinal rules are: be true to yourself and don’t hurt others if you can help it. In this case, I think I am abiding by those as far as I can though I am not so sure that I might not be hurting my parents by my actions … Ah well … nothing is ever easy, is it?

Prose, Poetry and Philosophies …

I’ve actually become kind of stable again – and that’s a scary thought in and of itself :p I’ve had a better night of sleep than I’ve been having for the last few days, realized why exactly my slumbers have been so restless and have also come out with all of that if with no new insights but at least with the confirmed conviction that we have to treat the world simply as with the outlook that "people are people", that each one of us is different and has different reasons for doing what we do and while we might understand the actions of others, that it never pays to try to define an analogue between ourselves and another person and try to define their reasoning that way :p

However, the preceding nights of sleeplessness did allow me to think and during one of those long hours of lying in bed willing slumber to come to me, I began thinking of all those things that have influenced my philosophy about life and I realized that to a great extent my life has been shaped by stories. OK, now I’m mixing things up – at that point, the thing I realized was that there was a lot of poetry involved in my philosophy, the bit about stories came later when I thought more about it but it made better narrative sense to begin with stories :p Ah well, let me do it the way I originally thought it out – to heck with narrative sense :p

Poetry has always had the power to inspire me, to make me think and to define how I conduct myself in life. There is Rudyard Kipling’s "If" which has given me lines such as "walk with kings nor lose the common touch", "make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss, and lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss" to follow as axioms in life. I just quoted those from memory since once I knew the whole poem by heart but have just gone back and re-read it and see that there are many more lines but that I might also have fallen down on some of the advice. But the poem is beautiful and it has made a lot of sense to me in the past and it still does. But there are others like James Henry Leigh Hunt’s "Abou Ben Adam" which defined my thinking about religion, God and humanity; Percy Bysshe Shelley’s "Ozymandias of Egypt" (and of course, it’s prose counterpart that I always remember as "This Too Shall Pass") and Robert Frost’s "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" has defined how I try to meet problems and perceive myself and what I do; and of course Robert Frost’s "Mending Wall" which defines my relationship with most people – though I might have taken the words slightly differently than Frost intended them to be :p

I was thinking about all of this later and I realized that stories had influenced my course in life as much as poetry had – stories like the ancient tales of mankind in the forms of Greek/Roman, Norse, Hindu mythology; stories from books that I’ve read, movies and heck even comics – "with great power comes great responsibility" 🙂 This makes me wonder though, when you base your whole life on works of fiction, does your life become a fiction too? :p

Reality and reliability …

Maybe it’s because I’ve been running on less sleep than usual but reality has begun to wear pretty thin for me recently :p Trish, in discussing a different post I’d made earlier, made the comment that the difference between reality and dreaming was that reality seemed to be "heavier". While this made perfect sense at that point, now even reality has begun to seem very light and insubstantial. Certain things which happened over the week seem to be just figments of my imagination and I keep wondering if they happened at all or if I simply imagined them? If I didn’t have concrete evidence to the fact it did indeed happen, I’d be even questioning my sanity at this moment … actually, that’s not true, I’ve always questioned my sanity – but then again, I have always questioned the sanity of the rest of the world too :p

I know this is familiar grounds – me debating reality and whether we can believe what we sense as being our environment or events taking place around us. One of my theories is that this whole world and everything that happens to me might all be in my head – hence the name for the site -. Some of the things that happens to me might actually vindicate this theory since some of it seems to be pure wish fulfillment but then again, since some of the things I most ardently wish for seem to come almost to hand and then always be snatched away might seem to indicate that I might actually be somebody else’s figment of imagination and that they might be having fun at my expense by bringing my dreams close to fulfillment and then snatching it away again – like king Tantalus of Greek myth who was fated for eternity to be in a pool of crystal clear water and have delicious grapes growing right over his head but have both the water and the grapes recede out of reach whenever he reached for either. Yes, it’s just me being self-pitying … things aren’t that bad :p

All of us have problems of one kind or another to deal with. It’s just that at times our problems seem so huge that they completely obscure the fact that others have problems too. This is mostly due to the fact that our troubles are so close to us whereas other people’s troubles seem so far away. However, sometimes if we pay any attention to another person just once in our lives, we might discover that compared to their problems, ours are nothing at all. As long as we remember this and remain strong, nothing can overcome us – whatever life, ourselves or the gods throw at us … or so I sometimes think … but then again, that’s when I’m not feeling the threads of reality to be so tenuous that I think I might drift away in just a moment :p

Perchance to dream …

I’ve been having problems sleeping again. Part of it is my fault since I stayed up a bit too late for a few days and then got up early and if I don’t get enough sleep – it kind of builds up and I start having sleeping problems but part of it has also been the dreams. No, they are not nightmares – I never have nightmares 🙂 These are just dreams which leave me feeling so very tired the next morning – dreams which make me think that maybe I wasn’t dreaming at all but was living another life… Yes, I’m going into that crazy twilight zone again … let me come back :p The dreams are real enough – I just don’t remember enough of the dreams when I wake up though. Or like the other night where I was dreaming and thought, "Oh, this would make a plot for a wonderful story" and when I woke up, I remembered thinking that but I just can’t remember any details about the rest of the dream – and I *knew* in my dream that the plot made perfect sense. Ah well …

Then today, I got up in the wee hours – again something I’ve gone through before – and couldn’t go back to sleep. I finally did fall asleep but it was the kind of sleep where you are sure you are not sleeping – does that happen to you? I keep on dreaming and am aware of the dream and of the fact that I’m lying on the bed too – so I don’t really think it’s a dream so much as me thinking … or at least that’s what I think when I’m dreaming. So I wake up feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all and so very tired. I just hope that the waking in the middle of the night bit does not start all over again – I just hate that and it leaves me being so darn cranky :p

Life, she ain’t simple …

Life – it just threw me another curveball. Totally unexpected, totally out of the blue and as I mentioned a couple of days ago, totally in opposition to a certain course of action I was beginning to follow up on. I don’t know if it is wish fulfillment or just some sort of a mystic reaction to my actions but there it is – but the thing is that this time there is a certain rightness to it, a certain this-is-the-moment-you’ve-been-waiting-for, feel to it. So I’m going with it again. Anyway, when life throws a curveball at you what do you do? I guess my baseball analogy fails me at this point and I must jump to cricket – you must either hit out or get out :p I’ve decided to hit out since getting out is not even an option at the moment – I hope it never will be 🙂 Yes, I know, none of the above made an darn sense whatsoever. Sorry, I’m just writing for myself today. Putting down my thoughts and feelings and reactions and whatnot down so that I can read it later and both savour this moment and be able to think back a bit more objectively on the situation.

Sometimes you get stuck in this really strange spot half-way between dream and reality where your dreams are real and all you have to do is reach out and touch to have your dream but it seems almost impossible to raise your arm because your arm suddenly seems to have grown so utterly, impossibly heavy. Have you ever been in a situation like that? My thoughts are very chaotic right now, I don’t think I’m even thinking completely lucidly, I’ve just gotten up a little while ago, had a fairly strange night of dreams and am actually rambling just now, get reality settled in again and also getting ready for another day of work after a week of idleness. I am sure today will be full of its share of drama at work – I don’t even want to think about it since I’d like to just not be bothered about all these nitty gritty details of life right at this moment …. (yes, I’m rambling and just trailed off …)

Of idleness and indolence

Things have been extremely slow of late. I have not been coding, not updating my main site, The Developer’s Corner, that I’ve been regularly updating for over two years. Basically, I’ve simply been content to be idle, watch movies, speculate on stuff and play with software. This has given me the opportunity to learn a few new things and to explore a few areas that I had not explored before but I find myself asking, "what about the people who are so eagerly awaiting the next release of my software?". I have a responsibility to them too. Yes, it is free software but just because the software is free does not mean that I have no responsibility to my users. It is a dilemma.

That is just one dilemma out of many that seem to confront me suddenly and I seem to be content to think about these matters and yet come to no decision. The others? What am I going to do? Where do I go – stay in Sri Lanka or move to another country? And most of all, what is the purpose to our existence? These are just a few of the questions going through my mind suddenly. For some strange reason, it seems to me that we are at a critical point in history – a cusp if you will. I don’t want to make any decisions right now, I just want to live life day by day, as it comes, since to me it seems that future events will dictate my course. It seems a little indulgent at times and also laggardly to think somethingelse can control my life instead of simply taking charge of my own life and going on with it, no matter what. But my sense of historical forces seems so strong right at the moment (maybe I’ve been reading too much Gordon R. Dickson and his "Childe Cycle" is beginning to affect me …) that I just want to see how things play out before I make a decision. But how long can you stay inert and indecisive anyway?

Another reason for my inactivity (at least as far as moving out of Sri Lanka or staying on here is concerned) is the same old one – my parents. I’ve had this debate right here about talking about other people on this journal and so will not go into details but my parents have their own reasons for wanting me here – some of it emotional and some of it cultural. They unfortunately are very true-to-norm results of their culture unlike me and so their perceptions, feelings and actions are ruled by their culture. While I can understand their actions, I still can’t say that their beliefs and their perceptions are their own and leave – they are my parents and I am their firstborn … believe it or not, that (being firstborn) carries a certain responsibility with it when you are over here :p

One more thing that seems to be brought home to me again and again is what Terry Pratchett would call the gods-playing-dice-with-us-as-pieces syndrome :p I find that there are certain actions of mine which almost always results in a counter-action by fate, gods, happenstance … whatever you may call it. It seems almost inevitable and seems to have the kind of precision which makes me believe more and more that there is a pattern to it. (Yes, my insanity begins to show through as I expose more and more of my mind <g>) There is a collection of stories (I think by Frank Herbert .. not sure off-hand) called "Case and the Dreamer" – one of the stories in it is about this woman who loses her one true love to death and embarks on this quest to regain him by cloning him and making sure that his life follows a certain path while she remains the same age by going into suspended animation – one day, she will awaken and come back into his life but till then his life will be steered in just such a way as to make their first meeting one where they would fall in love … or something like that. That is an intriguing thought and coupled with this whole being-blocked-at-certain-points thing, I can’t but wonder maybe if my life is controlled in such a way too? OK, I will stop now before the men in white jackets come for me :p