Meeting of minds and clashing of souls

Yes, I know it’s been a while since I’ve updated this page but my only excuse is that I’ve been fairly busy with so many other things – but that really is no excuse since this is supposed to be a reflection of my thoughts and I shouldn’t put my thoughts on hold <g> Anyway, I’ve been busy and then I was in Kurunegala and now I am finally back. Even though it’s a Saturday, I went to work since dial-up costs are prohibitive here (you have to pay for even local calls) and Net access is cheap at work since it’s free and I was missing Jen since I’d been at home for the last couple of days with very brief forays online to talk to her. So I rushed to work so that I could talk to Jen and catch up on all that had been happening in her life.

While I was talking to her however, I heard some great news from another friend of mine. Since it is something personal about somebody else, I will not go into details here but suffice it to say that I have been vouchsafed the power of prayer once again 🙂 I have always known that God is listening if you pray to him but sometimes it is nevertheless surprising when you receive a response so quickly – does that mean you have no faith or just that you don’t expect God to respond quickly? I don’t know … But I just know that God is listening.

Jen and I talked through the day while I worked on a variety of things – including installing SP1 on my notebook machine which I took to work with me. How well do we know anybody around us? Sometimes we think we know everything about somebody and then a casual remark opens up a whole new area of their lives that we never knew about and we find ourselves pleasantly surprised (or shocked/horrified etc. but this particular instance was a pleasant surprise – nothing negative at all :p) to find that there is a meeting of minds between yourself and the other person on a subject that you thought they wouldn’t be interested in at all. I treasure such moments of discovery about any of my friends. Maybe it’s because it’s just another cementing of the bond between them and me or maybe because it reaffirms that I am not alone in this world in the way I think or look at things – then again, it might simply be because I’ve found something else to talk about with them. Whatever the case maybe, I do cherish such moments and now that I look back at this entry, I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this :p

Open book life

I’ve said before that my life is an open book and that I would write about almost anything here – however, there are certain qualifications to that statement :p While my life is pretty much open, I do hesitate to talk about anything which also involves somebody else because while I might not care about my privacy, I can’t make the same assumption for other people’s privacy. So sometimes I would talk to a friend online and I would want to write about what we discussed here (of course it’s perfectly innocuous stuff – not anything private) but then I’d wonder if they wanted me to talk about anything they said and since I don’t know for certain, I usually don’t write about any of it.

Of course the other thing that I don’t like to discuss here are things dealing with personal life, relationships etc. Especially if they are about stuff that is best left private – I believe that washing dirty laundry in public does no one any good and so don’t talk about certain things here. So while I do say my life is an open book, I guess that is not strictly true. Maybe I should start calling it a half-open book life? :p

With a little help from my friends …

My announcements of departure (never to be seen again :p) might have been a little premature – while I was indeed hurt and was determined to leave all things Net related behind, I heard from so many friends online (both via comments and through personal e-mails) that I could actually feel the love and I feel I would be an ingrate indeed if I were to turn my back on such a lot of people who wish me well 🙂 Plus, the situation which led to my declarations of departure and doom and gloom has also kind of resolved itself and I can look back on it with a bit more equanimity and a lot less sorrow, anger and pain. So I guess what I mean to say is that you will have to put up with my blathering and verbose style of writing for the foreseeable future and I’ll probably get back to the software development in a few days too – too many things piled up to get to it right now.

Incidentally, does anybody remember Wet, Wet, Wet? I know that The Beatles originally did "With a little help fro my friends" but it’s the cover version by Wet, Wet, Wet that I remember better. But even that has been ages since I’ve heard their version – guess I should go to Kaza and see if I can find it …

Fini?

Sometimes trying to help people and trying to be nice just doesn’t seem to be good enough. Certain things have come up in my life which might mean that I give up on all of this – the journals, the development work everything. At the moment, I am not sure where things stand but by tomorrow I might decide to delete this site and a few other journals online as well as take down my software related sites as well. At the moment, I just feel so sad and bereft of all support … I am really wondering if it is all an illusion and the people around me are as nice as I’d thought all of them to be. Oh well, this is just to warn those who might read this page – since I don’t want to suddenly stop writing or take the site down completely and leave you all wondering. It’s been fun knowing you all and in some cases it has been a real privilege. Thank you for the good times and the bad times were probably my own fault… See ya on the flip side!

Of friends and the past ..

All the testing on BlogMan yesterday meant that I made no post here at all but to find out all the techy junk, you’ll have to read the other blog :p I have found a new friend who is one of those select few who enter my "inner circle" :p I make friends easily but I don’t let most people know about the weird stuff that goes through my head – OK, you may beg to differ since I write about a lot of things here that are totally weird (or maybe not – depending on how you look at it <g>) but then again I don’t write about *everything* here. There are things I leave out – personal stuff, the weirdest theories I have about the world and reality etc.

I feel a bit of a duality here and also feel me going off at a tangent (and not talking about what I originally intended to talk about – but let me save that for another day and follow this thread of thought …) Now most of the time, I say my life is an open book and everybody is free to know anything about me. Heck, I write about almost everything in my life on this journal … but that’s not quite true because for the longest time I never spoke about my former marriage, my ex-wife or my son. The reason I carefully left those things out has nothing to do with how I feel about privacy at all but rather to do with Sri Lanka and how things are perceived here … basically it was to save my parents from heartache and embarrassment (though I can never understand why *they( should be embarrassed about something that I did) in case somebody from Sri Lanka or our family read this journal. I’ve decided to totally let go recently though and so am willing to talk about even the stuff that I didn’t talk about earlier.

Again, my comments need a little bit of explanation – at least about the Sri Lankan society bit. Here in Sri Lanka, everything is stratified and compartmentalized – you marry from your own class, own race, own religion and anybody who strays outside is an embarrassment and usually ostracized by their family. I have never cared for this kind of behaviour or this kind of society and didn’t really worry about how others felt when I got married but then it became evident that this was a source of great mental agony to my parents and to spare them any further anguish and embarrassment when dealing with our relatives, I refrained from talking about my marriage and later divorce on my journal. Then I came back to Sri Lanka and my parents wanted me to get married again and that made it an issue again because a person who has been married is sort of "devalued" in the marriage market. I have always had problems with the fact that my former marriage was not mentioned when my parents wanted to find a bride for me and I always intended to let the girl know before everything was finalized if it ever came to that because I wouldn’t have felt at all comfortable in getting married to a girl under false pretenses. However, that never came to be fortunately since I told my parents that I wasn’t interested in marriage at the moment :p

OK, I see I have really strayed now … But I guess what I was trying to get at was that these pages are an open window into my life and I talk about everything in my life (at least now) here but that does not mean that this is the sum total of my thoughts and experiences. There are still areas that I will not talk about here just because it involves other people and that’s the issue I really wanted to write about today but since I’ve already written at length, let me save that for tomorrow 🙂

When it rains …

(I wrote this entry yesterday – and to confuse things more, it will appear under the right date too – but couldn’t post it due to problems with BlogMan testing)
Jen’s having a real tough time at the moment, first she and Hunter were sick, then her tire had to be replaced, then Hunter got the croup and now her car has been vandalized and her CD player stolen. You sometimes begin to wonder why so many bad things should happen to the same person. It would make sense if it was a bad person but when it happens to somebody who believes in helping others and goes out of their way to do so, you really begin to wonder whether there is any justice in the world.

I will not even get into the whole justice thing because that’s another rant altogether :p But what do you do when you somebody you love for and care for has problems and you are too far away to do anything except pray for them and hope that things turn out right? I am the kind of person who wants to be on hand to help when somebody has problems – especially someone I love – and I feel so helpless when I can’t do anything at all! This is one of the reasons I returned to Sri Lanka – because my parents were over here and I knew I could never be on hand to help them or support them if they had a problem. (Of course, I feel completely useless now that I am here but that’s a different story :p) And now, I feel the same way as regards Jen – I want to be there at least to hug her and to tell her that it’ll be OK but I can’t because I am here. It’s frustrating … Of course, in the meantime, none of this is going to help Jen any …

What is love part deux :p

Hmm … looks as if the timing of yesterday’s post was kind of unfortunate – though I had planned to write that since the day before and it was basically meant to be about what *I* thought about love and what *I* thought it had to be. There are no rules of conduct in this world – each one of us does as our conscience (or whimsy) dictates. As somebody pointed out to me in the GrooupHug mailing list when I said something to the effect "that I always have tried to do what I thought was right", that I would do what *I* think is *right*. Of course, that is basically what I said but I think the other person meant that what I think is right might not be thought of as right by others. I see his point in certain instances but I also know that there are specific things which are thought to be right by everybody in general. Anyway, I digress – as usual :p
Something I had had in mind to mention when I started the whole "What is love" entry was Haddaway and the significance/memories that the song has for me.

Unfortunately, I got caught up in the entry itself and it got a bit emotional for me to actually think about the lighter side of the entry : So here goes the rest of it today … I know that it wasn’t that memorable a movie and that some people said at the time it was released that it should have remained an SNL skit and never made into a movie at all but I still remember that particular scene and the song though I don’t remember much else about the movie at all :p Of course, there are other songs like that that I associate with a movies – for instance there is Gloria Gaynor’s "I will survive" which will always remind me of Keanu and his team of "scabs" mincing around on the football field :p There are other songs like that that I associate with either a movie or a certain situation or moment in my life but I can’t recall all of them or write about all of them here – I’m too busy listening to "What is love?" :p

To me Haddaway’s song will always bring up visions of Will Ferrell and Chris Katan doing there manic dance in front of the bar in "Night at the Roxbury" :p

What is love?

Haddaway seems kinda appropriate at the moment … Ah well … I am being sad, dejected, introspective again – it’s all in those cycles I talk about. I often wonder what the word love means to people because it doesn’t seem to mean the same to everybody. When I say love, I mean an emotion which is wonderful and glorious, sometimes warm, sometimes exciting, sometimes tender. When I feel love for somebody, I want to do everything in my power to see them happy, to do whatever I can to make their life easier, to be there to offer a helping hand, to share their joys but also their sorrows. To me love is unselfish – putting your loved ones before yourself sometimes even at some personal inconvenience to yourself – just because you love them.

But I get the feeling that at lest to a part of the world, love seems to be just an excuse to have sex or to get to know somebody and to be with them and get them to do whatever you want them to do. It seems to be just take, take and take, no give. There is no concern for the other person, no eagerness to see them to, to talk to them or to just get a glimpse of them because your heart longs for the one you love. It seems to be all about what can they do for me rather than how can I make them happy or at the least, how can we be happy together? Why is it always me, me, me? Or am I just expecting too much in this day and age? Isn’t romantic love – the pure kind of love which just wants the best for your love there anymore? That can’t be the case since I know of people who do share that kind of love but maybe it’s not as prevalent as we are led to believe … Who knows indeed since I am just one person and you can never know how it looks from the other side …

What dreams may come …

I dreamt again today and I think I have started dreaming again … OK, that’s not accurate – I have again become aware of the fact that I dream. I think we always (or almost always) dream when we sleep but don’t always remember that we had dreamt. I have always been fascinated by my dreams – in fact, that was one of the reasons that I wrote "The Mind of Morpheus Mentor" – which of course is still unfinished :p That started originally as a different story, a story which tried to describe how I saw dreams, or rather, a story that described what I thought dreams were – another life that we lived when we slept.

It might sound crazy but I used to wonder if we really rested when we slept or if we just lived another life. Maybe it’s like that old Chinese paradox which goes "I slept and dreamt I was a butterfly and then I woke up and wasn’t sure whether I was a man who’d dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who was dreaming that he was a man" :p Actually no, I didn’t think that my waking life was a dream – I just thought that both my waking life and my dream life were both separate lives. I would wake up after a full night’s sleep and feel not a bit rested, feel so very tired and lethargic and I’d have had all these dreams of strenuous action. So I used to think that maybe I did do all those things while I slept …

Of course, dream life being usually much more interesting than real life, it is probably just a dream to wish that dreams were real :p

Dreams so sweet …

This will probably be my first Solipsitic Meandering entry made from home since I’m going to use BlogMan to do it and it’s going to be a whine – but that’s nothing new for me, is it? :p I had a dream last night that I was in New York and that I’d got a job there. It took a while for it all to sink in and then I was like "Oh wow!! I can see Jen on the weekend!" – curiously in my dream it was Thursday (just as today is) and I was so excited about the whole thing. Of course, I then woke up to realize that none of it was true 🙁 Not that it makes an ounce of difference to anybody else but the dream was so vivid that I really lived it for those moments and so it was all the more shattering to realize that things were what I wanted them to be.

This brings up a point that Edward (who incidentally is a solipsist) made in one of our discussions – he said that if all of this was in his head, it would be better because he could do so much because he could do anything and control everything. To me personally, solipsism doesn’t work that way :p I think all of this *might* be in my head but if so, that it all works according to ground rules that I had already laid down. My life is supposed to be a certain way and even if it is in my head, I can’t really alter it suddenly or become omnipotent. At least that’s my explanation for my life being this way and still thinking that it’s all in my head :p

I’ll probably keep this brief since I have to make two blog entries today (one here and one on The Developer’s Corner) before I get to work. Ah the joys of journaling stuff :p