Slowly but surely it has come to this as I knew it would. This blog has now become a test of my ability to persevere. To keep on writing when my creative coffers are empty and yet to keep it interesting enough for me to read on a later day. Very few people in the world know of this blog, which begs the question, why do I write? Surely, it can't be for an audience, as the hit-counter on the front page cheekily proclaims. It's not really cathartic or anything of that sort. I believe it's just words for their own sake. As a litmus perhaps to see how much I can do with them before they run out.

Among the most interesting things I saw today was the website of Elena, a Ukrainian girl with a motorcycle and more guts then any man I've seen. She rode right through Chernobyl and made a photo journal of the ghost town that remains. Elena's pretty.

Life is unfair. Mostly because there is a lot more I want to say but I shall not, for reasons mentioned in some earlier posts. Onward the revolution.

The world is too loud for me and my generation is going deaf. Can someone please turn down the volume?

Today I took out the garbage. Almost three years of old emails from friends, lovers, enemies, and morons were deleted with the click of a button (Many clicks actually). I enjoyed doing this more than I should. I've changed.

I want to write some more on how liberating this feels, but words fail me and I need to sleep.

I also realized that I've stopped writing poetry. It's been more than two years since I wrote my last poem. I stopped. Just like that. And somehow, that feels liberating too.

I feel peaceful, but I suspect that might just be because I'm sleepy.

Good night.

Some music has to be listened to. Each word analyzed, each metaphor grasped and held close to your heart, until you begin to understand what it was the writer of the song wanted to tell you. Of course, you'll never fully understand, and it will take on a different meaning everytime you hear it. That's how poetry is. It changes you.

Some music has to be felt. It's a rhythm, a melody, a counter melody, a horn moaning until you can feel the horn-player's despair and taste his sweat, electronic beats that touch your soul like religion, violins that crash and soar, a bass guitar that seems to vibrate with the song of your life. Music to dance to. Music to make love to. Music that speaks to you in a language you thought you had forgotten a long time ago.

Most music should simply stay in store shelves and never be heard. Ever. A pity that the world around me disagrees.

Spring is slowly sneaking back into Madison. The days are longer now, than what I remember them to be. Trees are still leafless and nude but many are sporting the beginnings of leaf buds. It's still cold. My hands still freeze and mornings are still an unwelcome affair, struggling to stay under cozy blankets as time marches by. I have to be patient. Summer will come soon.

Creativity is dead. If it's alive I can't find it anywhere. Not in anything I write, nor in what I read. It decided to leave movies and music a while back, I know, but I am left wondering, if there's anyone left, who can really spends time with it. Everything that's been written or said recently has roots in something more seminal from the past.

The end of the world is nigh. The signs are all there. Strangely enough they've been there for decades now, but Armageddon refuses to come. I think it's scared of us. I don't know why. We're a generation of pushovers and nervous wrecks. Maybe that's why.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? I know.

Yield.

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slow-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation that's dying in the corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
But don't cry, baby, don't cry, don't cry.
-The boy in the bubble, Paul Simon, (remembered from off the top off my head, there might be mistakes).

And we wonder when quoting stopped being plagiarism and turned into literature. Standing on the shoulders of giants.

Lesson of the day: Never, never ego surf.

Another Tuesday.

I realized something about myself today. Things break around me. Watches, cell-phones, the little rubber legs on laptops, shoes, shoelaces, slippers, zippers and a lot else. Somehow molecules seem to lose adhesive and cohesive properties when I'm near. Sometimes structural integrity itself decides that it doesn't prefer my company. And magnetic and electric fields generally find me annoying and leave. This is not a happy realization. I like things, pay good money for them and I don't like them breaking.

Things that annoyed me today:
1. My reliance on numbered and bulleted lists.

2. The absence of a good Gimp port on Windows. Ideally one that doesn't cost money. Because, if I had the money to spare now, I might have bought Photoshop.

3. Finally accepting the fact that I'll never get a computer fast enough.

4. The death of good music.

5. Feigned political neutrality.

Another Wednesday awaits tomorrow.

After a brave attempt at some real blogging, I'm back to gimmicks.

Things that annoyed me today:
1. The weight of my backpack after I stuff it with my laptop and a couple of books. What's more annoying than the weight itself is that it reminds me that I'm all out of shape. How will me dream of becoming a super fearsome avenging detective ninja ever come true if I keep this up?

2. The fact that I can't read From Hell. I have the time. I have the book. It seems interesting enough. But I can't get myself to read it. Just like anything by James Joyce, it's an incredibly hard read. This isn't good news. I might end up adding this book to my list of books which I began but couldn't finish. That list already includes Ulysses, 1984 and The Doors of Perception. Cheer up Mr. Moore, you seem to be in excellent company.

3. The fact that I don't seem to enjoy music anymore. Any music. Ten minutes is the most I can do, before I look for the stop button.

4. Stupidity. And stupidity coupled with stubbornness.

5. Impatience. My own.

6. There's more but see item 5.

Anyway, having got all that out of the way, I'm happy to note that I finished reading Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson yesterday. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, Transmet is a comic chronicling the life and works of Spider Jerusalem, your friendly neighborhood paranoid foul-mouthed freshly-bald investigative journalist who works for The Word, a newspaper publishing in a future that is unlikely yet familiar. I want a bowel disruptor.

It's a Saturday afternoon. I've been awake for just two hours. It's the first warm, sunny and generally beautiful day we've had in months. It's the harbinger of another gorgeous summer. The Coldplay (Parachutes) CD that I have waited for, for almost two weeks now, has just arrived in the mail along with a Valentine's Day card from my parents. I've just had two blueberry waffles and a glass of cold apple juice for breakfast.

Nothing has annoyed me yet. Nothing will be able to for while now. I'm feeling too good for that.

Life is good.

Everyone's got a gimmick and it's about time I got one too, hence:

Things that annoyed me today:
1. Brain dead line wrapping behavior in Thunderbird 0.5. Lines seem to be neatly wrapped at 72 characters. Then you send what seems to be a neatly formatted email, and lines aren't wrapped at all at the receiver. The situation is worse if you're composing from a template. The template itself seems to have line wraps. Unfortunately, any edit you make that involves deleting a newline (basically pressing backspace at column 0, and going to column 72 on the previous line) makes it seem that that particular line is wrapped when it's not. So the receiver gets an email, which has some sentences wrapped at column 72, others not wrapped at all. Receiver then doubts your IQ.

There is a rewrap function in the edit menu, but we need an option to automatically rewrap all outgoing emails.

Better yet, we need Thunderbird developer's to look at the jEdit project, and take inspiration from their concepts of soft and hard line-wrapping.

2. On again, off again, on again, off again-right-in-the-middle-of-a-transaction-with-the-bank wireless internet connections.

3. Self censorship again.

Its 2am and I'm waiting for Windows XP SP2.

This post was actually going to be about a fairly controversial topic, but then I realized that this blog is publicly viewable, and I'm not really ready to wear my opinions on my sleeve. Yet.

Another interesting phenomenon of the liberating weblog subculture. Self censorship.

Or maybe it's just me and my paranoia acting up again.

It's hard to write. And mostly when it's hard to write I simply rant, which while being simpler, is never as interesting, nor can be used to maintain a torrent of words and ideas. After all, how much can one person complain?

So it comes to this then, an unsteady ramble, almost forced, with no clear direction. No story to tell or idea to dissect.

After a quick trip to the library, I returned with large stack of graphic novels, including Alan Moore's classic Watchmen, and his recently-converted-into-a-movie-which-got-mixed-reviews From Hell. I've read Watchmen before, but it's a compelling read. (For those who don't know much about Alan Moore, he's a British writer who's recently announced his retirement from comic books, and who's written stuff like Swamp Thing, a compelling horror comic about a man who's killed in a swamp, only to wake up as a muck-encrusted monstrosity, and after finally coming to terms with his loss of humanity, finds out that he's not the man who died, but rather just a bunch of plants who have evolved into him, and gained his memories. Mr. Moore's other famous works include, the aforementioned Watchmen, probably the first and certainly one of the most disturbing studies in super-hero deconstructionism, examining how a world would be, if it really had men who could fly and masked vigilantes meting out rough justice, and the recently-also-converted-into-a-movie-but-the-movie-sucked The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.) I skimmed through Watchmen, and couldn't find the patience to read From Hell. I suppose something must be wrong if I'm getting impatient with mere comic books.

Here I shall segue to what seems to be the problem with my mind lately. I seem to be on a short fuse of sorts. Not in terms of temper but rather in terms of attention. I seem to be suffering from a sudden bout of attention deficit disorder, wherein I can't stick to a train of thought long enough to follow it to its logical conclusion. Rather, I simply wander all over. And I suppose having easy access to the internet simply aggravates this problem.

Most of my time these days seems to be spent at sites like Slashdot, or Ananova, reading about the next nerdy (or quirky) news item. I should probably just bite the bullet, and install a RDF aggregator. Then again, that's probably courting further loss in productivity. I can't believe I'm saying this so early in my career, but I seem to be suffering from work addiction, and these are just the withdrawal symptoms.

I shall end with more recommendations from off my reading list (most from my former reading list):

1. Supreme Power: Another superhero deconstructionist tale, only this one is still going on, and new issues come out every month. It's by J. Michael Straczynski, for whom comics are a second job, his first one being a writer/producer of television and film. A preview of Supreme power #1: http://www.wizarduniverse.com/magazines/wizard/WZ20030815-sp_1.cfm

2. Preacher: A weird, violent, and iconoclastic tale about a Texas preacher who loses his faith and gets to play host to an entity as powerful as God, his ex-girlfriend who's now a hitman, and his new best friend, an Irish vampire. After he finds out that the Devil is dead, and God has abandoned Heaven, the preacher goes out to find and confront God and make Him pay for His actions.

3. Ghost World: This has nothing to do with ghosts. It's an immensely funny story about a pair of teenage girls, who decide to wreak havoc with the lives of people around them by playing practical jokes. This became an excellent movie starring Thora Birch.

Nothing more to say. It's bloody 3am and I need the sleep.

So. Each and every knob in the world which controls temperature has only two settings - `Too hot' and `Too cold'. Choosing between them is an art that one learns to master only after spending multiple nights either like a leg of lamb in the freezer or a chicken carcass left to bake in a clay oven. Why are essentially all temperature controls created so that you are either charred to a crisp or quick frozen to a state of suspended animation? Why can't I find a single bathroom fixture, which does not consider me its bitch, and decide to alternatively boil me or flash freeze me? All the time when it knows that the soap is going to come to life and leap out of my fingers again and make another desperate attempt to secure its freedom by escaping down the nearest drain. I probably shouldn't get started on soap reanimation and save talk about it for some other time though. Right about now, I wish I could come up with a catchy slogan for those oppressed by temperature control devices, but my brain's overheated so they'll have to wait.

On a side note:
Why are rants always such interesting reading? Is it because we as rantees commisserate with the ranter, or are we simply enjoying the spectacle of someone else breaking down in frustration (or anger or envy or whatever emotion the ranter is channelling at that time) ?

On a side side note: (If such a thing exists)
Rantee: I'm fairly certain no such word exists in the English language, but it means `wild' in Marathi!

Another late night, another sleepy day. Don't you just hate people who are early to bed and early to rise? Morons and maxims strike again.

Dumbing down. Their doing it to the newspapers. Television is already a victim. Radio died a lifetime ago. The Internet will be next. They'll come one day, soon, with their scalpels. Full frontal lobotomy. What a way to go.

Why do I have to suffer a world of idiots?

These are strange days. I hope I'm old before I die. (Thank you Robbie Williams, you manipulative thief of a singer)

On a side note:
Why is good literature always about despair, hurt, loneliness, pain, cruelty, torture, defeat, animus and such else? Modern good literature in particular. Why do people have to die, fall ill, break, kill, rape, vomit and choke to get us all a good read? What happened to stories about happiness and honour? Heroism? Love even? I guess I need a change in library.

The good old days are gone it seems. More than seventy channels and nothing to watch. Comedy Central doesn't cut it these days. Cartoon Network even. And too many bloody commercials. TV needs a revolution.

Maybe they can have a reality show about viewer disillusionment with too many reality shows.

I want a British accent. Not because I want to sound fashionably British. Or because I want to impress people. No, the reason is much simpler than that. I want to be able to say "Bollicks!" without sounding funny.

For instance, you can say, "Be nice"
"Bollicks!"
"My life is so miserable."
"Bollicks!"
"I like whining. Please let me whine. I'm sad. Boo hoo."
"Bollicks!"
At this point, I remove my Walther and ...

Or consider the following, you can say, "Hello"
"Bollicks!"
"Hi there"
"Bollicks!"
At this point, I remove my Walther and ...

Yesterday, I ate bite sized pretzels with a pizza flavored filling.

It's during thrilling moments like these that I begin to realize the grandeur of human civilization. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions of years, flying and leaping and tearing each other down. All they achieved was a hit movie with unknown actors and great special effects that spawned some boring sequels. Humans have been around a fraction of that time and just look at us. We invented nuclear fusion devices, lobotomy, the 80's and pizza. And then one pioneering inventor outdid himself and decided to invent, (Tada! Drumroll!) pizza flavored filling! This blog entry is my humble tribute to him.

I read about a revolution today. Nobody was freed. It's hard to reconcile this with a world of cola wars and XML.

And right about now this blog should be dying a natural death, what with all the indifference that it's had to live with. But for some reason, it refuses to die. Mighty nice of it though, as I got something to discuss.

Let's do some food analysis here. First some definitions. Convergent evolution is an evolutionary process in which organisms not closely related independently acquire some characteristic or characteristics in common. This usually reflects similar responses to similar environmental conditions. (Quoting directly from the excellent wikipedia.org). Can this also work out for cuisines? Specifically Indian and Mexican cuisine. Both are spicy enough. Mexican food has the flat breads. The rice and spicy sauces. So what gives? Convergent evolution? Hah! Mexico been secretly spying on India. All these years! And of course Korea had been doing the same to the Konkan coast. Lots of seafood and lots of spice!

Ah! So nice to get that of my back. Now I guess I'll go back to my attempt to murder this blog.