I have no time for idle cares
Through gazing on the unquiet sky.
And when an hour with calmer wings
Its down upon my spirit flings-
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away- forbidden things!
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.

                                               -Edgar Allan Poe

A Point Made?

The Funniest.
Randall Munroe, is still my hero.

Crash Course in Brain Surgery.

Ahh well, it's been Metallica all day.

Tagged by Nothing but "Ficus", Priyanka and Tangled up in Blue.

“This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog’s content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.”

To say the least, I'm flattered. More so, because each one of the fine individuals who bestowed the tag upon me, are people who I have admired and envied intensely for their remarkable talent for penmanship.  I continue to do so.  Thank you.

Some rules of the Game:
a) Show off your honesty by thanking the person who gave you the award and link to their post.
b) List 10 honest things about yourself.
c) Select 7 other bloggers you think deserve this award and pass it on to them.
d) Notify said bloggers about the award and invite them to be the honest ones next.

........................................................................................................................................................

1. I talk to myself. All the time. Complete with flourishes and gestures and drum-rolls and trumpets. It's just how I function (and successfully manage to creep people out, in the process). Talk about added perks.

2. I have exactly two unreasonable phobias - cockroaches, and beauty salons. Episodes from my life concerning both make for excellent spine-chillers. I have a theory stating that when disturbed, any cockroach in a 10 meter radius will automatically fly/leap towards my head, defying all laws of gravity, physics, and common sense. It has been proved to many a person-of-doubt, more times than I would like.   

3. When encountered with double entendre (intentional or not), my brain ALWAYS processes the second meaning first, and stops right there. It is with great difficulty that I coax it into proceeding further, to a more appropriate conclusion.

Corollary: I create the most elegant euphemisms out of thin air.

4. I suck at bowling. My scorecard, without fail, only reads of either perfect strikes or gutters. Same goes for a lot of sports, and most of life.

5. Most of my life as a card-carrying, living, breathing entity, have been a bunch of Chandler-moments strung together. No stranger to making jokes and having to explain the punchline 20 seconds post-deployment-and-blank-silence, I live through life elucidating upon pop-culture references that no one gets.

6. I am obsessed with candles, old books, letters, chocolates, non-colours, pan-asian food, knives and Hamlet. 

7. I have an unusual set of morals and ethics, but the ones I choose to adhere to, I do so with a staunchness that can easily be equated to fanaticism. Same goes for my philosophical, political and religious views, or the lack of them.

8. More often than not, I dislike receiving compliments, and prefer criticism greatly. I usually find the former to be hollow, while the latter almost always gives me things to think about. Conversely, I place great value in the opinions of a very selected set of people. They are the people I admire most.

 

9. Among all the things I should have learnt and never did (riding a bicycle, general empathy, using a straightening iron), my inability to smile irks me the most. Not that I would use the talent much, even if I did.

10. Through my years of a Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, I honestly believe that the one thing I learnt that I am truly proud of, is the use of an arc welding machine. The drill and chainsaws come to a close second.

To further cater to narcissism: 

11. I judge people. Based on the way they look, write, speak, dress and most importantly, think. I meet them, I study them, I file them under the appropriate category, and the dossier is rarely, if ever, re-filed. Also, I am biased against good-looking people, and tend to put them through more intense and rigorous testing-and-filing.With practice, I've gotten better at it, and have taken it all to the level of profiling. Makes for some interesting Metro train rides to-and-from college.

12. In the 21 years of my life, I have donned pretty much every role in the social setup that it is possible to play. From social-leprosy to blinding popularity, from being the mousy, bespectacled, stammering, clumsy fat geek to teetering on 5-inch heels, apple-martini in hand at swish parties, to nihilistic goth-rock fanatic, true blue leather-and-metal rebel, to jaded cynical bookworm with a taste for undulated sarcasm, political conspiracy theories, obscure art movies and Johann Sebastian Bach. Even made friends with the podium and stage mic, along the way. And what I've discovered from all of it, is that it's all a masquerade. Petty, in the greater order of things. It's the things that you retain through these roles, that define your capabilities and your limitations. It's only the things that are constant, that matter at all. 

.............................................................................................................................................................

Moving on, I am very very late with this, so most of the people I would have listed here, have already been tagged. So I will now tag the people whose blogs I love and stalk on a regular basis, and who may or may not have a clue about it. 

Agent Green Glass, Weevil Girl, MINDfreak, Meghana Naidu, Anushka, Niti Jain, Kroswami, and Mentalie. 

I think that you all are brilliant at what you do, and I would urge at least 4 of you to write more often!

P.S. I also hate mathematics.

Jolted out of LimboLand.

I'm back. Internship complete. Final year of college. Things to hang on to, things to preserve, and things to let go of. I have the post-its in place. Besides, yesterday was pretty much the kind of day that happens, and then you try to live with and in it, for the rest of your life.

To those who left the uplifting comments in the last post, thank you. To those who have waited, I'm glad. And to those who will drop in, welcome. I hope to get to know all of you better.

Let's roll!

Some updates and more of things I don't have to say.

Allow me to exaggerate. The spirited, lively river of what one may have once approximated to the merest equivalent of creativity, has dried to a slow, muddy trickle. Not only am I unable to write, I am also unable to think. Contact with the human specie is so limited these days, that I'm almost glad for bank loan promotional calls. Long winding conversations with myself are no longer even marginally engrossing. The last 3 years have disappointed me, and now I disappoint myself. In my world, that's the lowest low of the rockiest rock-bottom. Occasional periods of acquiring a vegetative state are not uncommon, but this is a whole new level of under-performance. I have a million pressing matters to address, and all I'm doing is shutting myself in a room 24x7 and not thinking. In fact, I'm dedicatedly and assiduously not-doing a whole lot of things. Also, I expect my 6th semester results to be announced anytime between last week and next month. That mere fact has turned me into a bawling, jumpy ball of nerves. I do not exaggerate when I say that my life and sanity depend on it. I want to apologize to all the people whose calls I have not answered, comments, mails and messages I have not replied to, not wished on birthdays and anniversaries, not called back, offered flimsy excuses to avoid meeting, and in general, been very very awful to. I can't. Not at the moment. But one of those people who have been nice enough to surprise me with her calls and concern(and will read this, I'm sure), is the one I owe a major apology to. I will make things right. Please know that I mean to.

Of Punctuation and Deathblows.

What if someday you come down to being just a punctuation mark? Say, for instance, a | between the !s, or a . between the ,s or the : between the ;s, which is all a fanciful way of saying the same thing really. What if you don't, and instead settle for the snug little place between the first and the third guess? What if you stop thinking in terms of pedestals and podiums, and bring it to a black piece of mistaken sentiment on a crisp white sheet of paper?

Yet, it would mean the exact same thing. What a difference a well-placed, and well-timed mark makes. Or a coup de grâce, for that  matter.

Florence+The Machine

taci.tur.nal

Internship. HCL. Noctivagance.
*yawn*

For one with Darth Vader-ish ambitions, I should, at the very least, be allowed to rewrite the dictionary as I please! Take note, blog URL.

OR

Misuse psychosomatic inclinations to induce spontaneous yawning in whoever reads this post.

I started out fine, I would like to believe.

A Grave Concern.

All through the years spent living, breathing, observing and thinking, an individual creates a vast memory and knowledge warehouse of facts, figures, words, thoughts, inferences and deductions. I, like every other person with a similar disposition, treasure that figurative cerebral repository more than most things I have ever had the capability or fortune to possess. It falls to reason that if what we are is defined purely and in entirety by what we think, what we believe, and what we know, is it not a cause for concern that essentially, all it would take is amnesia to wipe out a person's existence?

This Day's Blurb.

Suburban passive aggression.

Of Wormy Apples.

This week, Apple overtook Microsoft to become the most valuable firm in the tech rat-race. The Wall Street marks it as the end of an era, where the most significant technological product of our age no longer sits on a desk. Instead, it dangles from belt clips on low-waist jeans. To put it succinctly, I am not happy.

I am convinced that if there is any one cause worthy of a third World War, it has to be the PC vs. Mac debate. Seriously speaking, Archduke was a joke in comparison. Poke any random Apple fanboy in the slightest of ways, and they burst into a spectacular fire-and-lights display of livid rage and righteous indignation. Sure, it comes in neat packaging. Sure, it has its pros. Sure, it is a snazzy and expensive version of Shiny Computing Box for Dummies. But from where I look at it, the cons easily outnumber the pros. In fact, they punch them into a pulp, dribble them, and throw them right out the window and into the trash.

Why I hate Apple:

1. Proprietary software taken to the extreme. License upon license, copyright upon copyright.

I run three different photo-editing programs, each with a diverse set of features as per requirement. Same goes for all media applications. How does one break out of the stifling bounds of the iLife package?

2. Zero room for customization.

3. Restricted access to OS kernel.

Every Windows user worth his salt loves DOS. Any Linux user's life depends on it. An apple user, is left to his own devices.

4. Zero flexibility in tweaking and programming.

5. Extremely limited software portability.

6. Zero-portability of software developed on the system itself.

7. Annoyingly long list of incompatible hardware and peripherals.

8. Coming to iTunes. Now, can someone please explain to me why I would want to use a software that insists on copying my music files into an entirely new non-virtual library of its own? Memory is a precious thing. Considering that I store about 60 GB of music on my system, there is no way I'd choke it up with double copies. Also, the iTunes library is not organized in any coherent fashion, so the original folders on disk cannot be done without either. Add to it the misery of its bland, pasty interface and no thematic customization options available. Not to mention, having to download an wide array of additional software to deal with the fact that it does not support wma audio and to convert all video to mp4. Compare with Windows or Linux, where all you need is an internet connection to download easily available codecs and plugins, apart from the fairly comprehensive range of supported formats.

9. By far, the only reason iTunes even exists is so that the world's iPods can be put to use. Of course Apple has every reason to try and make sure that it doesn't work with anything else. Throw in those $30 pieces of scrap wool they call iPod socks and every other over-priced accessory Apple markets just because the iPod does, and always will, sell. The things they get away with shock me. Really.

10. The continual updates and releases of fairly useless thingamajigs like Safari. Not to mention the massive download sizes. Nothing eats up computer memory faster than Quicktime, iTunes and Safari put together. The 3 harbingers of a processor's doom.

11. Simply said, a Mac dumbs you down. If someday they took over the world, a major part of the joy of using a computer would be lost. In order to use a system to its full potential, one has to dig deep and explore its innards.

12. The marketing, the pretentiousness of the "Mac lifestyle", the brand tag, the overwhelming smarminess of the Mac vs. PC advertisements(which, by the way, are so erroneous that I don't even know where to start). 

I haven't even gotten into the technicalities. But there's this to compensate.

Truth be told, if a Mac is a smarmy college punk, and Windows is a rotund bespectacled geek, Linux is the tattooed biker on a mean set of wheels.

So upon coming upon this little piece of news, I exhibited some major distress symptoms. Within 2 days, it was time for extreme measures. Since then, I have downloaded and installed Ubuntu on my laptop and my desktop, and gotten rid of iTunes altogether. I chose Ubuntu, because it works on a philosophy that is essentially the polar opposite of everything Apple stands for. And 3 days on, I am waaaaaaay beyond satisfied with it. The thrill of working in an entirely new environment, and learning to work hardcore on a system is thoroughly refreshing. It is completely customizable, is very "hands-on", offers an exhausting number of options with open-source software, and yet remains surprisingly intuitive. Not to mention, its media players synchronize perfectly with iPods and have far more features than anything Apple could come up with. The only limitation I see so far is that internet connectivity is crucial to its functioning. Aside from that, the GUI interface through Compiz is to die for. One even begins to love the overzealous autoconfig after a while. Much love to open source.

P.S. The reason why Apple is :"virus-free" and "spyware-free" is because the most virulent of malware are designed to attack the Windows OS, owning to the popularity of windows. It is relatively "bug-free" because it only works with a limited set of hardware components. Unlike Windows, with which you pretty much throw it all in and make it work Needless to say, I wait eagerly for the tables to turn. Something tells me, it won't be long.

Oh well, the devil makes us sin.

To Quote.

"I don't know whether or not we will meet again. I could, with an effort, look into the future, but the time is too short. I'd like you to know this: separation contains as much of a mystery as a meeting. In both cases a door opens. In meeting, it opens on the future, in separation on the past. It is the same door."

-Elie Wiesel

For fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities.

White wisps wafted towards the sky. Transparent and weightless, spiraling out through the sunroof. Through the mist you could see a faint glimmer. Or miniaturized apocalypse. It's all about perspective, they always said. With a careful flick of his hand, he dusted the ash off. And wished. There was time, after all. Almost enough.

Silently, she looked out the glass at the street ahead. And wished. If only there were more things he handled as delicately as his cigarettes.

To say what needs to be said...

Exams have drained the life out of me. Will be back shortly, when I have gained some semblance of it back.