It remains to be seen whether I’ll really stick with any of them, of course, but it’s worth a try, isn’t it?

1)Do More Stupid Things, and Try Harder at Them

Because I try far too hard not to, right now. This specifically involves doing fun-but-embarrassing and interesting-but-(I’m)not-too-good-at things. Also, speaking in various cliches, it involves “putting myself out there”, and “do it trembling if you must, but do it!”

2) Re-prioritize

Specifically, this means that I should spend at least as much time on any given day studying or doing something to materially “advance my prospects”- or just anything more focused on something I like doing; I could also try generally trying something fun in terms of coding, for example, because improving my coding skills is a good secondary “focus”, too- as I spend reading feeds or on facebook, twitter and the like. I’m honestly not sure how well this will work, because currently I spend FAR more time on all the rest than on anything really useful. But we’ll see.

3) Realize that Structure is not the same as Defeat*

Specifically, have a more scheduled life in general, and stick to it. Wash my clothes every week and not just when they run out. Wake up and go to bed at a sufficiently early time (say, 11-7) everyday, not just when I have an 8 o’ clock class or when I have nothing better to do.  Set aside some non-negotiable time for studies, however small that period may be.  (Correlated with 1) Get involved in more structured activities with rigid time periods and don’t worry about making time, make time.

*Makes more sense if you understand that I’ve long been a bit of an anarchist with respect to these things. Oh, I love to make lists and I’ve experimented with GTD and any number of productivity systems and tools, but I was always trying to find some way of abstracting whatever seemed worthwhile in these things while still maintaining a “carefree” existence. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, in any case.

PS: I find it strange that I can’t quite figure out which of the many categories that I’ve already listed this post would fit into. Or what I would name a new one, if I created one for this.

Is e=mc2 a sexed equation?…Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest…’

–Luce Irigaray, Le sujet de la science est-il sexue?

Via Fashionable Dictionary.

1. You can press a button that will make any one person explode. Who would you blow up?

Seriously? No one.

2.You can flip a switch that will wipe any band or musical artist out of existence. Which one will it be?

Erm.  Again, there’s no one who annoys me simply by existing.

3.Who would you really like to just punch in the face?

No single person. Have impulses every now and then, but they pass very quickly, and it’s always “manufactured anger.” Mostly manufactured out of boredom. (Yeah, I loved Fight Club).

4.What is your favorite cheese?

I don’t know, actually. For one thing, there are only so many that I’ve tried. I like some Blue cheeses, but probably not on a regular basis. Plain old cheddar, I think.

5.You can only have one kind of sandwich. Every sandwich ingredient known to humankind is at your immediate disposal. What kind will you make?

Bread, cheese, bacon, ham,tomato…more cheese?

6.You have the opportunity to sleep with the movie celebrity of your choice. We are talking no-strings-attached sex and it can only happen once. Who is the lucky celebrity of your choice?

I did have a brief Megan Fox phase that ended with Transformers 2, but it’s pretty much always been Natalie Portman in my more “tender” fantasies.

7.You have the opportunity to sleep with the music-celebrity of your choice. Who do you pick?

Avril Lavigne, although there is the whole married issue. But this is in the best of all possible worlds, right? So I guess I don’t have to worry about that.

Wait, Carmen Electra is technically a singer. Her! I pick her!

8. Now that you’ve slept with two different people in a row, you seem to be having an excellent day because you just came across a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk. Holy shit, a hundred bucks! How are you gonna spend it?

Save up for a new laptop.

9. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Where are you gonna go?

Do I get free tickets for friends, too? If not, somewhere nice with people I know. Most appealing place that meets the description is London, right now.

10. Upon arrival to the aforementioned location, you get off the plane and discover another hundred-dollar bill. Shit! Now that you are in the new location, what are you gonna do?

(I have a fairly specific answer here, but it wouldn’t make sense unless I divulge details about other people that I have no right to publicize.)

11. An angel appears out of Heaven and offers you a lifetime supply of the alcoholic beverage of your choice. It is…?

…Glenfidditch, but I say this without any real conviction.

12. Rufus appears out of nowhere with a time-traveling phone booth. You can go anytime in the PAST. What time are you traveling to and what are you going to do when you get there?

WOODSTOCK! (@kalafudra: I didn’t just overlook this, I mean it too )

13.You discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. You make the rules. What is the first rule you put into place?

Everybody gets a fair share of everything. After that, it’s pretty much the same rules as any enlightened society.

14.You have been given the opportunity to create the half-hour TV show of your own design. What is it called and what’s the premise?

Dammit, my life is a cliche. I can’t really think of anything specific here. Probably something like friends. Something that’s just plain old funny in a reasonably witty way, without sounding ridiculously pretentious.

15.What is your favorite curse word?

Blood and bloody ashes! (Seriously, isn’t that the coolest swear word ever?)

16.One night you wake up because you heard a noise. You turn on the light to find that you are surrounded by MUMMIES. The mummies aren’t really doing anything, they’re just standing around your bed. What do you do?

Try tugging at the cloth and see if they do something.

17.Your house is on fire, holy shit! You have just enough time to run in there and grab ONE inanimate object. Don’t worry, your loved ones and pets have already made it out safely. So what’s the item?

Laptop. Or whatever backup device has all my data.

18.The Angel of Death has descended upon you. Fortunately, the Angel of Death is pretty cool and in a good mood, and it offers you a half-hour to do whatever you want before you bite it. Whatcha gonna do in that half-hour?

Write a quick letter telling everyone I like that I like them, and try and stage it so that at least a hundred people are watching me when I pop. Will aslo require that the Angel of Death makes it look cool when I do, though. A literal pop of some sort would be perfectly adequate.

19.You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of your choice! What’s it gonna be?

Mastery of the space time continuum in general, which would involve teleportation and slowing/speeding up time. (I have a feeling reversing it will just cause problems that I won’t be able to handle.)

20.You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can only be a half-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you like to experience again?

My hypothetical past, I’m guessing. Sex with Natalie Portman?

21.You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?

I haven’t had any horrible experiences that I could isolate with enough certainty of not changing a whole lot else.

22.You got kicked out of the country for being a time-traveling heathen who sleeps with celebrities and has super-powers. But check out this cool shit… you can move to anywhere else in the world! Bitchin’! What country are you going to live in now?

When I was much younger I remember wanting to go live in Barbados, or some other tiny island at the edge of the world. Now it doesn’t seem quite so appealing. I don’t really know. The US? New York, in particular. Assuming I had the money, that is.

23.This question still counts, even for those of you who are under age. Check it out. You have been eternally banned from every single bar in the world except for ONE. Which one is it gonna be?

Absolutely no idea. Why does this apply for everyone? Does everyone else know their one favourite bar?

24.Hopefully you didn’t mention this in the super-powers question…. If you did, then we’ll just expand on that. Check it out… Suddenly, you have gained the ability to FLOAT!!! Whose house are you going to float to first, and be like “Dude, check it out…I can FLOAT!”?

Jacob’s, I suppose. He’ll be more excited than everyone else .

25.The constant absorption of magical moonbeams mixed with the radioactive vegetables you consumed earlier has given you the ability to resurrect the dead famous-person of your choice. So which celebrity will you bring back to life?

Alan Turing. He’s the celebrity I feel most sorry for.

26.The Celestial Gates of Beyond have opened, much to your surprise because you didn’t think such a thing existed. Death appears. As it turns out, Death is actually a pretty cool entity, and happens to be in a fantastic mood. Death offers to return the friend/family-member/person, etc. of your choice to the living world. Who will you bring back?

My grandfather, I suppose. I can’t say I miss him or anything because he died when I was barely 2 years old, and I have only secondhand accounts of what he was like, but it would be nice to get to know him.

27.What’s your theme song?

I’m thinking this up right now, but…the theme song from Scrubs? Superman, by Lazlo Bane.

As with most kids, my parents and grandmother had to resort to quite a few tricks to get me to eat my veggies when I was growing up. Though none went so far as to tell me that I would get mutant powers from the radioactive food(Calvin strip), there were quite a few outrageous attempts. One of them was to just blatantly say that a vegetable (koorkha; I still don’t know the English name for it) tastes like chicken. Of course, it doesn’t taste anything like chicken. It tastes like most tuber-like vegetables when made with masala/curry mix. But we bought it anyway, and kept trying to see if it was even vaguely chicken-like, and consequently ate somewhat more of this than most other vegetables. In fact, as retarded as this makes me seem, it was only 3 days ago that I finally decided that they were definitely lying.

“Culture clash” is a ridiculously over-exploited cliche with regards to the Indian psyche. It’s a favourite theme for just about every writer of “Indian Fiction in English” (the other one, of course, is colonialism and the Raj, so you can probably decide that it’s the whole deal), and “Indian English films” have the same obsession. Perhaps it was a reaction to this relentless torrent of media informing me that I was a confused and tortured soul, but I had pretty much decided that it’s Not That Big a Deal. Yes, there were lots of little “moments of confusion” as I grew up, but by this time, I had felt that I and most of the people that I grew up with more or less smoothly navigate our identities as Malayalees* who spend a great deal of time in “Western” skin. However, lately, I’m beginning to question that.

We use English in daily life almost exclusively not only because it’s the default medium (after all, we can’t speak the language that a lot of the people we have to deal with speak) but also because nearly all of the “input data” that we have comes to us in English: from text books for specific subjects to newspapers, blog posts, and all social media, as well as television and cinema. (You can argue that all this can be made “native” without much extra difficulty, and in fact it is in almost all other cultures, but the fact remains that at least now, most of this is most conveniently accessed in English.) It’s simply easier to “think” in English-avoiding the additional processing step of translating all of this data once we access it- and thus, inevitably, we do. (I do, and the only people I have asked do, but I will confess that I’m just assuming this here without any real statistical proof. Would anyone like to comment?) Obviously, this means that the natural “output” is also in English; it would require still more processing to translate, even if one is quite adept in both the languages. This effort is quite minimal in most cases, but it isn’t zero, which explains the cases of people like A who are very traditional(one might even say sheltered or naive or any number of stronger terms), who has only mallu friends(i.e. close ones; it’s almost impossible for most of us to end up in a situation with only mallu friends, unless they have some very strong biases), and talks only in mallu with them, but still ends up using whole phrases of English for any even moderately complicated concepts.

Now, I had understood all this a long time ago, and had mostly made peace with it. Whenever I am home, I speak in fairly “pure” Malayalam with parents, cousins, and most other people that I meet**. Of course, even when I speak “pure” Malayalam there is literally no way around using English for any technical or non-fundamental concept, because I simply don’t know the words for them, but I restrict them to simple nouns, not phrases. This is, however, changing, albeit slowly. I still talk only in Malayalam with my immediate family, but the number of borrowed words/phrases is increasing. Much more marked is the change with cousins, especially the ones from my generation. Even the ones who grew up here are now (deliberately or unconsciously) switching to English every now and then for whole sentences at a time. I’m not very concerned, but it is food for thought.

After a long period of discussion, debate and analysis on how-badly-do-I-want-it, what-am-I-going-to-do-with-it, why-do-I-need-it,  is-it-really-a-good-idea-buying-second-hand, and how-much-money-should-one-really-spend-on-things-like-this-anyway, I finally bought an iphone 3G. Or at least, my brother finally paid money to some guy on ebay so he can send him an iphone 3G. If all goes well, I should get it when he comes down for Christmas. If all doesn’t go well, I’ll end up listening to a whole bunch of I-told-you-sos.

One final anecdote: there are two main swimming pools (excluding the one in our school; I would have said 2 “public” pools, but they’re members-only, which really isn’t the same thing) in this town. One is fairly centrally located and in the Kottayam club premises, which also has lots of other facilities. The downside is that it is tiny, and inevitably overcrowded. The other is bigger and much more serene, but it’s a little out of town, and not nearly as many people go there. I usually prefer the second one. So I went there this evening because I really, really need the exercise, and it was as empty as always: me, 2 much younger kids, and an old man in the pool, with the kids’ mother and some other guy watching from the pool-house, which is a bit off. The old man is perhaps in his late 50s or early 60s, and he’s doing laps, albeit very slowly. When I finish off a lap I notice him standing about a quarter way from the shallow end, clutching the wall, and he weakly waves me over. When I get there, he says, “Can you help me? I think I’m having an angina attack.”

Oh, fuck. That’s bad, right? Where are all the people? Why isn’t there any lifeguard or attendant here!?

“Ah, OK, shall I go get someone?”
“No, there are 2 pills in the left pocket of my trousers, they’re hanging up in the locker room. It’s a grey tracksuit, actually. Just bring those.”
“OK”

I run in, and nearly slip and crack my skull. I find the trousers and search and don’t find anything and search again and find 2 absurdly tiny pills in the right back pocket, and rush back.

“Here.”
He swallows one pill and leaves the other one there. I watch him and wonder if I shouldn’t get someone anyway.

“Ah, much better. I think I’m alright now. Just watch me, OK?”

He then does 2 lengths without stopping.

_______________________________

*I talk about only Malayalees and not Indians in general here for two reasons. One, I don’t have any first hand experience of any other group, so it would be unfair to make generalizations about them; to use a technical analogy, it is one thing to use a fact that I know holds in some situation and trace out possible implications, which is like linear interpolation between two points on a graph. I might be off, but I know there’s some semblance of truth. It’s a different issue to assume that the facts in one instance probably hold for another instance, which is like doing linear interpolation at the edge of the graph, knowing only the slope and one point. The second reason is that I don’t really think it’s this prevalent in other groups anyway. We as a group are rather renowned for our tendency to go far and wide and interact with other cultures. Also, from what I’ve heard, the relative position of Hindi to English in north India is much, much stronger than the relative position of Malayalam to English in Kerala. Basically, people care about it more.

**Important exception: I use English with lots of people in my school who are just much more comfortable in English, and also with “fraud mallu” cousins who are visiting, who grew up outside and didn’t really mallu that well and/or just prefer using English.

I watched 500 Days of Summer in the middle of the night* yesterday and…well, I have no idea what to say about it. Oh, the movie’s very well shot and the soundtrack is awesome and everything’s very tastefully done and both the lead actors are great(Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel; the others are good, too, but these guys are awesome), so you should definitely watch it if you can. But I don’t honestly know what to say about the central premise.

On the one hand, it says very clearly right at the start that this is not a love story, and it certainly isn’t. A great portion of the film is spent “debunking” the very idea of love, and elaborating on what happens when people have irrational expectations of each other, and of how much one can leave to “Fate”. Tom Hansen is presented as the epitome of naivete, and there isn’t much ambiguity on this.

Narrator: This is a story of boy meets girl. The boy, Tom Hansen of Margate, New Jersey, grew up believing that he’d never truly be happy until the day he met the one. This belief stemmed from early exposure to sad British pop music and a total mis-reading of the movie ‘The Graduate’. The girl, Summer Finn of Shinnecock, Michigan, did not share this belief. Since the disintegration of her parent’s marriage she’d only love two things. The first was her long dark hair. The second was how easily she could cut it off and not feel a thing. Tom meets Summer on January 8th. He knows almost immediately she is who he has been searching for. This is a story of boy meets girl, but you should know upfront, this is not a love story.

On the other hand, the very clear message at the end is that it does play an inescapable role, that there is someone for everyone (and strongly implies that there are, at the very least, very few people for any given person, and that any two people who get along well with each other and feel strongly about each other won’t necessarily make it, and often for completely mystical reasons) and that “love” isn’t something to debunk, that it’s real and that you will find it eventually, just not necessarily when you expect to find it.

Summer: I woke up one morning and I just knew.
Tom: Knew what?
Summer: What I was never sure of with you.

The intended composite message is, I presume, something along the lines of “don’t rely on fate all the time, but do grasp an opportunity when it seems like the right thing to do, take people at their word when they say they don’t want to be in a relationship, love is real but it’s not necessarily easy to find” , etc.

Summer: You weren’t wrong, Tom. You were just wrong about me.

All of which is quite reasonable. I don’t know what I’m complaining about, but I am. I find this film entirely too cozy and cynical at the same time. The synthesis seems imperfect. I’m in the minority here, I think: it has an 8.1 on imdb and an 87% on rotten tomatoes, and any scattered reviews I saw all seem to praise it.

Hmm. That’s not really saying much. I’d give it that much, too, because it really is a great movie, despite the…discord. It’s well-shot, the little bits of animation in between don’t distract from the plot, and as I said above, all the performances and settings are wonderful.  Maybe older or more sophisticated critics understand that  the discord and the confusion is the point. I should be able to accept that. I just don’t.

*is 3AM to 5AM the middle of the night or more like just before dawn? My sleep cycles have adjusted so that 2AM feels like midnight, so to me personally it feels like the former, but I’m guessing it’s technically just before dawn. Irrelevant, anyway.

Fiona Apple sings “I Walk a Little Faster”:

Serious request.

Also, is it me, or is this song really hard to sing? :-/ I think it’s me, because it sounds like it should be doable, but I’m going badly off scale.

“When you read the book,it’s like, ‘Edward Cullen was so beautiful I creamed myself.’ I mean, every line is like that. He’s the most ridiculous person who’s so amazing at everything. I think a lot of actors tried to play that aspect. I just couldn’t do that. And the more I read the script, the more I hated this guy, so that’s how I played him, as a manic-depressive who hates himself. Plus, he’s a 108-year-old virgin so he’s obviously got some issues there.”

–Robert Pattinson

via kalafudra.

So exams are over, although my work at the institute is not, and I’m finally doing something interesting with Google Wave: Playing RPGs. Specifically, Eclipse Phase, which is a CC-licensed RPG that deals with transhumanist themes:

Eclipse Phase is a pen & paper roleplaying game of post-apocalyptic transhuman conspiracy and horror.

An “eclipse phase” is the period between when a cell is infected by a virus and when the virus appears within the cell and transforms it. During this period, the cell does not appear to be infected, but it is.

Players take part in a cross-faction secret network dubbed Firewall that is dedicated to counteracting “existential risks” — threats to the existence of transhumanity, whether they be biowar plagues, self-replicating nanoswarms, nuclear proliferation, terrorists with WMDs, net-breaking computer attacks, rogue AIs, alien encounters, or anything else that could drive an already decimated transhumanity to extinction.

I’m just getting started playing a one shot scenario, but if I like it, I’m definitely hoping I could continue playing with someone that I already know. (Or not, random commenter, if you are interested!) Do comment if interested. 

Second- and I’ve been wondering about this one for a while, and I’m not really sure how to go about it- I was thinking of writing a post on preference modification and “preference choice”, which is a rather oxymoronic term that I quickly need to find a substitute for. Essentially, it was sparked off my my rather religious friend telling me that I would be much happier if I picked things other than my current preferences to be happy about. This struck me as both obviously true and completely pointless, but I am coming to realize that I may have been wrong about the latter. Of course, this is hardly a revolutionary idea: it’s already preached by any number of religious and spiritual groups, and any number of best-selling self-help authors as well. I am interested in:

a) seeing how far this is actually possible, with what is currently known about human psychology and perhaps any technological assistance. This post seems to imply that it is not.(“One of my Secrets of Adulthood is “You can choose what you do, but you can’t choose what you like to do.” “)

b) Postulating that at some point of time, any amount of self-modification is possible, how far would one want to take it? This is an ontological issue, obviously, relating to how far your preferences dictate your identity- there’s a wonderful quote from High Fidelity* that fits in well here- and you can expect some amount of philosophy to be thrown about. The whole “so why don’t you wire up implants to pleasure centres in your brain and just stick yourself into a socket” issue will also hopefully be discussed here.

The problem is, I can’t seem to get very far on this alone, so I was wondering if anyone had some sort of pointers/links/ comments.

*”I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like… Books, records, films – these things matter. Call me shallow but it’s the fuckin’ truth, and by this measure I was having one of the best dates of my life.”
–Rob Gordon, High Fidelity. 

 Isn’t the fact that this poor girl still hasn’t found a husband in 2 years proof that they are pretty bad at what they are supposed to do?