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Category: Personal


Thoughts "disfigured"

Stand-Alone Dreamer | 31 December 2004, 8:03am

I finally bid adieu to my old Nikes today. We



Current Music: aey jaate hue lamho..Mein bhi to chalta hoon

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Man among Men!

Stand-Alone Dreamer | 20 November 2004, 3:44am

Its very much a routine! I wonder how I (for that matter every soul around) manage to turn up everyday with the same lethargy, same PJ's and same smoking area and that damn same coffee cup and discuss the same team building outing plan that we have been discussing for what..three months now!; and still vehemently argue that life is fun; hilarious - Have they gone out of thier minds!?!?!

Recently I had been too tired to work at night; all I did was listen to music, read a little, read blogs, maybe draw on my 'dreams' sketchbook. I am a little behind schedule still It felt good. Listening to music on my headphones while I work makes me feel at peace with myself and the world. I realize most of my anxieties come from my postponing of things. As soon as I get down to work on them, the hole in the stomach disappears. Working at night, I feel a man among men again.

To have something to look for, that keeps me going. I enjoy expectation. I dream about these virtual horizons of my life. Yesterday we felt economically kamikaze and went for sushi with my friend and got fortune cookies. Mine read: "a door closes; another opens"..



Current Mood: Happy Indeed!
Current Music: La La La La La - Whatever

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Lets Practice Leaving Me the Hell Alone!

Stand-Alone Dreamer | 29 September 2004, 4:11am

It's a glorious, beautiful holiday here. I'd love to be in my pajamas, lazing around, doing nothing,
looking at the lazy spoiled kids in the neighborhood playing around with their oversized dog!

Instead, I'm here, at work, vainly trying to use my non-existent graphic design skills to finish up the presentation. I work 12 hours a day, non-stop, I rarely (never) have time to whine and fool around. It's not a matter of improving my time management skills, as all the time I have is busy being managed by a never-ending rush of phone calls, meetings, programs, and more meetings -- oh yes, and sometimes I try to eat. The infinite number of unread e-mails clogging in my mailbox, the un-answered phone calls, both official & personal, has started giving me nightmares.

There is a finite amount of work that one human being can do. If you want someone to be able to do everything well, you need to give him a reasonable amount of things to work on. 4 hours spent finishing up a presentation for an Israeli VP, no matter how important, is 4 hours I couldn't have worked on marketing, new proposals & programs, acquisitions or anything else.

When doing the entire program by one's own self, one cannot do everything, and therefore, rational creatures might let him off the hook; for not being perfect at maintaining his training record or for not single-handedly 'marketing' the management fantasies all over the globe or for not implementing 'high-priority' programs and research guidelines or for winning the Nobel Peace Prize and saving starving orphaned wallabees in Africa, on his miniscule 20-minute lunch break.

Granted, that became a rant more than a list of reasons, but I think the point can be considered made. I sometimes wonder whether I'm expected to work this much, and that in order to do everything that I'm expected to do, I should really be working more.

Looking through some of my old file archives, I ran into some old self-portraits from my time in college... I looked so different then. I almost could not recognize myself. Some non-describable sadness in my eyes; an uncanny feeling, may be a pure bachelor emotion, a form of estrangement, weird unfamiliarity, to say: was that really me? Also, did I really look like that? The pain inside is so evident from the face. I wonder: How come I did not realize it back then?



Current Mood: Screwed
Current Music: where the hell is the time for music!!

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WE LIE IN WAIT - Id Love to Wear a Rainbow

Stand-Alone Dreamer | 21 September 2004, 10:39pm

I have, of late, not been a good blogger. Not only is the connection here absolutely unreliable (maddening in its technological disfunctionality), my life has also been extremely hectic, confusing and drastically busy. This city where I live is an unreal city: it's like seven cities in one. Living here is the constant practice of an extreme sport: a hardcore reality show, where simulacra becomes routine and reality blurs into sci-fi fairy tale madness.


While I have never been more disappointed about human nature, I have been feeling extremely enthusiastic about my work. Even though poverty is still the sign of my times (it has alwayz been that way, no matter what I earn) it looks like if I hang tough and don't kill myself before in a desperate act of weariness and utter melancholia, the future may even look quite bright...


My work and sporadic exposure to psychedelics of human mind are what keeps me going (especially working with a team at New Jersey, where I keep laughing and enjoying the exciting challenge of managing people who stop working when I wake up &  vice-versa). I still continue to read a lot (poetry, critical theory & more psychoanalysis) and my beard keep growing...


If that profound form of sadness did not keep growing within me I guess there would be nothing to stop me from achieving now what I most deeply desire. Still, that pain is still there, and, ironically, gives me the energy to get up every morning and let my life run the show for itself..myself, whilst I play the role of an amused wayfarer...


Honestly, I am still amazed at how when things seem to be the worst I still manage to feel optimistic and energetic. I wonder if I only cheat myself, or if in reality I will always need that weariness, that deep sadness to face everyday in life.


Current Mood: Heartbroken
Current Music: - One Hand In My Pocket

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WE CAME DOWN FROM THE TREES!!!

Stand-Alone Dreamer | 14 September 2004, 6:44pm

And then I realize the only physical exercise I did this week-end was climbing up and down the stairs. And it is already Monday, and the hours had passed by swiftly, by the minute, as always. I am not a morning person, in the sense that I don't look forward to it. But I still think & whine about the time to have breakfast, to smell the coffee, read the papers on line, a post here & a mail there, listen to music.

But I couldn't possibly work during normal hours, having to rush in the morning, not having time to think, to stare at the screen while say, Kathryn Williams whispering to my ears. My eyes are still half-closed, and my brain is not quite up yet, but my mind is still between a broken dream and a promised land. It will take me at least one more hour to be ready to start typing any coherent phrases, to make up my mind about all the things that have to be done if one wants to be a normal person.

I think of mornings as this space and place for recollection and reflection. I am reminded of the gorillas I saw at one of those National Geographic Zoo explorations sometime back, how they grabbed their heads with their hands, as if they were involved in some deep phenomenological diatribe, or as if trying to forget some painful memory. I was deeply moved by the immobile anxiety they showed; it was the unquestionable evidence that we had more than one thing in common. Unlike other primates in the zoo, the gorillas would not even move at all, unless for a slight movement of the left hand to scratch some area of the head. One of them was lying flat on his back, and held his head with both hands, sometimes covering his eyes. And I could not but feel empathy.

My mornings are like a day in a zoo: the consciousness that I am being observed, that things must be done, performed, that I am not totally on my own, and that I am not really free to do whatever I may want to. Mornings are the place where I realize that we came down from the trees, as they say, very slowly, but violently at the same time, by force, as when I fall out of bed, hurting my head. To start a new day, a new week, is painful. I cover my eyes and my ears with a pillow, and realize someone, out there, is looking.



Current Mood: Worried
Current Music: We Came Down from the Trees - Kathryn Williams

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::..THE GROUND BENEATH HIS FEET..::

Stand-Alone Dreamer | 2 September 2004, 9:18pm

Refuse to get up from bed. The laptop lies near...warm and whispers silently.

Type as if your life depended on it. Watch the cursor blink. Listen to the beat.

The phone ringing interrupts. "Abi..?," the question is repeated. 'Yes', I murmur disgustingly, staring at the fifteen inches of a screen, surrounded by open books,empty tea mugs, water bottles & an abandoned TV.

Type as if you wanted to forget you are writing. Read yourself aloud; get scared of your uncanniness. The water tankers & garbage trucks outside, the noise of staying home on weekdays...

The phone rings again. The same question. yell out "Yeaasss", staring at the little clock, running, on top of the window.

Type as if time were your enemy. See the words appear on the non-existent page. Count the words, the commas, the semi-colons, which you hate and once read indicate bad taste.

Go downstairs and walk in circles around the table, go to the kitchen, open the store, find a pack of old chips, eat it with passion, type again...

Fall asleep and wake up with the phone ringing. Fury burning through your veins. Get up, take a shower, get ready. Run down, to the garage; start the car and drive away under the menacing gray clouds.

Pull down the windows, feel a bit of rain that reminds you of the world. Stare at the ground, look for hints, trace back your memories.

Don't think about his feet. Pretend you don't care, run away...

Say hi to the old watchman & his pathetically malnutritioned dog,

watch the girls hurrying back after their regular course at the Aerobics center, change routes to work....

Get back in and the mirror changes everything. Feel the body come alive, like an uncanny presence.

Like you, without being you. You become I in the process....


Current Mood: Bored
Current Music: Macy Gray - A Moment To Myself

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What a wonderful day...I envy life!

Stand-Alone Dreamer | 7 August 2004, 1:08am

Don't you hate it when you have the day off from work and you plan on getting a lot of things done but all you end up doing is sleeping and sitting around in pajama pants that are way too big for you and watching ESPN?

Except for the sleeping part, yes.

Reading "Dead Souls" helps pass the time and makes me laugh when I'm reading it in public. The guy out next door saw me reading it and called me a "grad student". Hmmm, How I wish!



Current Mood: Bad Hair Day
Current Music: aint no mountain...

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Loosing my beloved ones - a pain in the neck!

Stand-Alone Dreamer | 20 July 2004, 3:38pm

I do realize, there will come a day when souls I know, those I care, start dying at pretty regular intervals. But as of right now, I'm mostly familiar with the death of inanimate objects. An oxymoron? No, not at all. Silly, Yes, may be..

Think of John Galt here saying.. "The existence of inanimate matter is un conditional, the existence of life is not; it depends on a specific course of action.." [pardon me here, for anyone who just finished Atlas Shrugged would definitely be able to show some empathy]

First one to go was a tee shirt that I've had since 1999. Guess I bought that because of some kind of emergency, as it was a costly tee shirt from the underwear department of a major department store. It used to be black, but through some accident it was put in the wash with a load of white towels and bleached to the weirdest, most non-uniform shade of brown. I've tried to find out other brown shirts like it, but the kind of hue that result from an accidental magic..well, you know its impossible to replace that. Over the years, the already luxurious cotton fibers became softer, little holes showed up in the neck binding, and as it thinned out, it's drape became sexier and sexier. Oh! how I loved this shirt. When giant holes began appearing in the underarms, my mediocre sewing skills came to the rescue every time, but after a while the fabric had so thinned out that it could no longer be saved. It took me a while to accept that it was really gone. "You need to accept it," my friend said. "Tee shirts die.." And he was right. I'm currently debating on a burial or a cremation.

Now, on the brink of death, are my "hipster shoes" (what I called them at a party a few weeks ago!), my lovely burgandy floreshiems that I have worn pretty much every day for almost..god knows from when!. I guess that's one reason why they are so ragged. The toes are completely scuffed. The soles are worn down on the sides. The eyelets are starting to rip away from the leather. The leather itself is so dry, that it has started giving me solid nightmares. I decided today that they're going to have to be replaced soon. My friend once said to me "Don't you own any other shoes?" and to that I thought, "What? Am I supposed to have a shoe fetish?" I guess I used to, but oh, how much time you waste in the morning wondering which pair of shoes you're going to wear today!

Death is so deep a subject that it's actually like one of those ponds people dive into, thinking they are really deep, and end up breaking their necks.


Current Mood: Sad
Current Music: find a job..get a life

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Here I am! Im OK!

Stand-Alone Dreamer | 8 July 2004, 8:14am

That experience, the experience of being Not Ok, all the while exclaiming its opposite, is now summed up (for me) in those two words, not unlike their peculiar - urban? - incarnation, in which the phrase is used in combination with 'no', most usually to a street vendor:

"Street Sheet?"

"No, I'm OK."

Maybe every utterance of I'm OK is a way of expressing how exactly the opposite everything is.

But I really AM individually OK after hours of sleep. In addition, we went around all over the place. We saw a jungle. We saw some kids playing a complicated clapping and shouting handgame. We saw some sales. We saw people waiting in lines, and we stood in lines. We saw the windows across the way. We saw the clouds turn color.

I'm OK..



Current Mood: Happy Indeed!
Current Music: its a party..

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Optimists vs. Pessimists..

Stand-Alone Dreamer | 1 July 2004, 11:37am

This is a little tricky..for most part of my acquaintance with decisions and views I consider myself a natural optimist.  I do sometimes think of myself as a realistic evaluator of events, not biased by any fixed tendency to interpret things positively.

I am optimistic most of the time and about most issues 'coz-

Most bad things that happen do not seriously affect my ability to enjoy life as an individual. Most good things contribute to my ability to enjoy it.

I am tremendously aware of the power of good ideas over bad, and see the evil of the world as inherently weak and self-destructive.

The first was with me for most of my life. The second is acquired, and I think the more I learn history the more optimistic I get.

I've met a lot of Objectivists who are perpetual pessimists. They are dropping the context, since they seem to see only the bad, and ignore the good.

Some, however, seem to see both and focus on the bad, while I see both and focus on the good. The reason I do that is that on the basis of the good, I can work.On the basis of the bad, I can only quit or whine.

Is this merely a sense of life issue, or a complex historical evaluation in which different people get different results?



Current Mood: Happy Indeed!
Current Music: another stop sign..u keep moving!

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Ramblings of a crazed confused insomniac:

Stand-Alone Dreamer | 30 June 2004, 8:25am

I feel like I can see every ebbing soul, every broken dream, every shattered memory, every emotion that passed by... like a stranger in the night.



Current Mood: Bad Hair Day
Current Music: Do NOT make friends with the rock stars!

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your struggle to shrug your shadow off

Stand-Alone Dreamer | 29 June 2004, 9:40pm

it is a dream..to get ur mind..ur thots obey you..How many times during the long and drab day at work or in school that you felt you are wandering around in premises of which you probably haven't even though of previously..you think about it..fantasise about it..nuture a little dream out of it..and then wake up next day completely unaware of it...it is time for another dream...another piece of thot..they come and go..

how often do you get to think of what you want to think? Or is there something called 'What you want to think? '.. Isn't what you are thinking now what you want to think..??



Current Mood: Feeling Better
Current Music: wanna walk agin in the sun...

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