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 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 🙂

Of love and loonies …

I watched this made for TV movie called "Don’t Tell Me Secrets" (at least I think that was the title, not so sure now) a couple of days ago that that made me want to write this entry. It was about this woman who is a lawyer and has just divorced her husband who is also a lawyer (at least I think they’ve just divorced – I missed the beginning of the movie). She is involved in a case where her client has been raped and then threatened not to go to the authorities. The woman persuades her client to prosecute and her ex- becomes the attorney for the defendant, Sean. Her client ends up missing, Sean keeps on following her and making threatening remarks and she is haunted by memories of her mother with whom she had a disagreement years ago and who disappeared never to be seen again.

In the midst of it all, she finds love in the form of a shoe salesman who used to be an attorney but gave up practicing law after some harrowing incidents in his life. Her client turns up dead but she can’t prove that Sean did it due to insufficient evidence. In the meantime, she gets threatening letters and she is not sure who is doing it whether it is Sean or the new guy in her life who seems to be so mysterious in certain ways. I will not go into all the details but in the end it turns out that the orchestrator of all this drama is actually her ex- that he wanted her back and so had tried to scare her into needing him. He’d actually unleashed Sean on her knowing that he was guilty and it turns out that he had even murdered her mother because she was against their marriage.

Over the top? It seemed to me so. Why would anybody ever do all these things to somebody that they claimed to love? But then again, I guess that depends on *your* definition of love – whether it is a selfish love where you want to (or need to) *own* the person you claim to love or a selfless kind of love where you just want the other person to be happy, wherever and with whomever that they like. To *me* love should always be of that second type but unfortunately, I don’t think that kind of love is that prevalent. Everybody wants the kind of love where you have the person you love with you – sometimes even if they don’t love you. What sort of a relationship would that be? A very unhappy one is all I can say …

The movie made me sad in a way … for the woman, for her mother, for all the suffering that they had to go through – just because one person was selfish in their loving. This was just a story but I do hear of such incidents quite a lot here in Sri Lanka, where a lover will kill the object of his affection and then take his own life. What kind of a choice is that – kill what you can’t have? Isn’t that really childish? I don’t know … Sometimes I do really wonder about the human race … but then again, I guess these are the things that go into making us what we are and when we are able to overcome all these baser instincts of ours, we will become worthy of the name "human" – if we haven’t wiped ourselves off the face of the Earth before that, that is :p

Look and learn?

I was talking to Jordan yesterday and she made a remark in talking about little girls dressing up in revealing clothes that made me start thinking along a completely different track. What she said was (and I quote) "Men will always look. Period. Always. It’s a thing with you guys – you are visual creatures. Many years of study and porn have proven this." But what started me thinking was not so much the "little girl" angle as much as the "men will always look" bit. I told her at that point that as a person who does not *always* look, I resented her remark and no, I’m not trying to sound holier-than-thou or to say that I’m some kind of a saint (far from it :p) but I was curious as to how others looked at this particular issue – both men and women.

Now when I’m in love with somebody, I just don’t look – it’s automatic … not something I force myself to do consciously. And to me, that seems natural – if you love somebody, you obviously should be happy being with that person, want to be with that person – so why would you go looking at anybody else? Of course, I too look at a pretty girl if I’m not otherwise attached and as Jordan said, I think that bit at least is natural – it’s just the *always* look part that bothered me 🙂 Incidentally, this is something that I’ve noticed about other people – that they might be in love with somebody but that does not stop them from drooling over somebody else. Is that normal? Is that how everybody else behaves? I don’t know … I’m just confused and trying to understand. I can always argue on the other hand that there is nothing wrong in just looking – it’s just that I don’t know how a majority of people look at this issue.

Now I’m not talking about being possessive and not wanting your partner to look at anybody else. I’ve gone through that in my own time. I have been in a relationship where I was faced with both extremes – this girl didn’t want me to even talk to any girl online (let alone look mind you) while she wanted to be free to do whatever she wanted to do – including go out to bars and dance with other guys … all this while claiming passionate love for me mind you. I never could reconcile that attitude with love. And of course, in my time, I’ve been guilty of being extremely possessive so I certainly can’t claim to have been so innocent myself but again, this is not what I’m talking about when I talk about the "looking" thing. I’m not talking about not doing something because your partner does not like it or because it is considered bad form – but rather, not doing it because you naturally don’t feel like it. But again, this might simply be a matter of individual preference and if so, all I can say is each to their own 🙂

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