To hell with first impressions.
I want to start over
erase me & meet me for the first time.
Older people will probably yell at me if they hear me say this, but it seems I’m approaching the age where I really won’t want to believe how old I am. When did this happen??
On a brighter note, for today’s dinner I ate 8 of these:
http://www.laduree.fr/public_en/produits/macarons_accueil.htm
heavenly. I guess the upside of being older is freedom: dinner is whatever you choose it to be, even if it’s 8 macaroons!
Night of many thoughts from my simple mind.
One thought is just that – I realize more and more that I’m simple-minded and my brain doesn’t seem to work very fast. I once thought I was smart.
Another: People are so, so interesting!! How come we’re always talking about the most boring aspects of our lives when people are secretly harboring all this interestingness? Maybe it just means I lack the conversational skill to lure it out of them.
Why sulk about anything? There are a million fun things I could do instead. There are days when this wouldn’t resonate with me, but today I believe it! I think this is mostly my good mood taking over.
About 4500-4000 year ago, the Indus Valley civilization thrived in what is currently Pakistan, and some of India. They had neat urban planning, every house had access to water and drainage (excellent sanitation), and they had very precise measurements. Unlike other great ancient civilizations though, no signs of warfare or glorified violence were found – not many weapons were excavated, no engravings of kings vanquishing cowering enemies… In fact, no signs of the existence of a king or other power-wielding figure were found either. The houses were remarkably egalitarian, showing little evidence of concentrated wealth or power.
How cool is that!! To put it in context, their contemporaries were the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamian people, whose vastly powerful pharaohs and kings used force to mobilize the building of their great cities.
The world had completely forgotten about the existence of the Indus Valley people until the end of the 19th century. When its remains were excavated, it rewrote what we knew of human history.
Unfortunately the Indus civilization was abandoned by around 2000~1000 BC. It seems like no one knows for sure why but they think it’s because the climate dried up and a river changed its course.
And so far, no one has managed to decipher their script!
ENVY. This has to be the most irritating sin of all. Unlike most other sins, envy annoys the envyer more than it’ll annoy anyone else. I guess it’s a sin with its own built-in punishment :p
I’ve heard the arguments about why envy is useless: there will always, always be someone better than you; you’re harming no one but yourself; everyone was given their own path to walk so focus on yours. And I’m completely convinced! that envy is useless. But unfortunately this hasn’t stopped me yet.
I’ve only felt seriously envious about two people in my life so far. The current recipient of my envy has something that can neither be earned, nor bought, nor really worked towards. Can’t take any action – hence the envy.
But what that any of us has have we earned really? None of us chose or earned our personality, intelligence, looks, or family. We sometimes think we earn things through hard work and choices, but we were born with varying work ethics and propensities to do or not do things, I think, so who’s to say that part wasn’t “given” too? Even conversion to faith in God, they say, can only happen when God comes to meet you at that point – you can’t earn it on your own.
I’m curious to know what the rationing system is, and what’s the meaning behind it, if any? Who gets which things and why? I hope with all my heart that there’s a meaning and reason behind it. I don’t have to know what the reason is, but just to know that it exists and it’s a good one would give so much relief.
As for envy, the only real cure seems to be hope. You have to muster up enough hope though, and that’s not always easy 
It’s time to be a badass!
On some days, the world seems so beautiful. A tree that makes you catch your breath, unexpected kindness, something right happens in the world. So much beauty, and you’re filled to the brim with joy.
On other days, the world seems to be a living hell. A terrorizing place, horrific, unbearable. And you are overcome by a tiredness that is beyond frustration. Like after reading about something like the Haiti earthquake.
It’s not just that this disaster is so terrible, which it is. The tiredness comes from remembering all the terrible things that happened before, and dismay at how it never seems to end. War after war after war after war, disaster after disaster, all the way to the beginning of time. A new form of evil, just when we thought we’d defeated one. Another man who wants to bomb half the world, another crime, another injustice. Like the game where you have to keep whacking groundhogs that pop up. The people who experienced sheer agony at various times in history, and the remaining people who trembled at the thought of how terrifying it must be.
Each time, each person will respond in the way they deem right, and that will keep us busy. There are brave people in Haiti fighting the disaster, preventing it from becoming something even worse, and because of them the world preserves its hope. But in the back of our minds we’ve been asking all along, WHAT is this place, so beautiful and terrifying, and WHY are we here?
Weekends are a brilliant idea.
It’s a peaceful Saturday after the team Christmas party last night. Here are things that will happen during the rest of the year:
* 14 more days of work
* I am moving to a new flat in 2 weeks
* I am flying home! in 3 weeks
A friend still in college visited me over the weekend. I’d been here in London, physically apart from almost everything that defines my personal history, and to have someone from that other side walk into this new world strangely gave a jolt to my brain. It sharpened thoughts that had been dulled, and made me look back again at those four years I spent in a pretty little town in the middle of Jersey.
It’s a little early to be writing commentary and analysis on how college changed me – I probably won’t fully know, or be honest enough with myself to know, until a few years out. Also, things that loom large and serious with me now, I might laugh at a few years hence. But this is what I was thinking about yesterday:
And… I started writing all this stuff starting with freshman year and realized this was getting too personal for comfort! The abridged version is that I went into college a poster child of self-secure contentness and came out hungry. Still hungry. If we meet in person, though, and you’re not skirmish about personal talk, maybe we could tell a story for a story
Saying I’ve spent a week in London is really quite meaningless. A week can be such a different timespan depending on what a person experienced during that week. In that sense my first week in London was certainly heftier than a normal week; it was one of those weeks where time-space bends just for you personally, and you’re dazed but you keep going.
My little brain was exposed to so many new stimuli at once I’m sure it’s having fun, using all those circuits that it skipped while carrying on in autopilot before. If it’s at all efficient it’ll go into autopilot again soon, but for now even finding my way to work is an adventure. I guess this just goes to show that if you’re finding you have to try harder and harder to find something that feels stimulating, maybe it’s time to move on to something or somewhere new.
No one has time to read the little details about everything I did and saw, so I’ll try to organize concisely into two categories: nice things and challenges.
Nice things:
- Tipping truly discretionary (most people don’t tip)
- Nice people (haven’t met a rude person yet)
- Walked into a private medical clinic this morning, booked an appointment for 3 hours later, and upon arrival saw the doctor with no wait. Fascinating.
- Somewhere very close there’s a church, and I can faintly hear the choir singing, from my room!
Challenges:
- Transport(subway) inconvenient compared to NYC
- Strange return policies (ex: “sorry, only the manager can reverse that, and he’s only in 8am-5pm weekdays” ?!)
- Shops generally open shorter hours (Closed by 5 pm sundays)
- a separate hot faucet and cold faucet in the sink. Apparently I’m supposed to block the drain and mix the hot and cold water in the sink to get warm water. Hm.
- Had to wait a few days to get internet and phone access. How dear the connections were when I finally got them back! It’s not a good feeling to desperately want to tell someone you’re fine but not have any means of doing so. Eventually sought out a public phone for this purpose. A pound lasted 30 seconds.
- developed a mild Achilles tendon injury for reasons I don’t quite understand
- messed up on first piece of work I delivered
- weather getting chilly
- long work hours by my standards: 8:15 to 6:30, with minimum half-hour commute
- not enough furniture in my bedroom to accomodate all my stuff- had to go out and buy a cheap little desk, etc
- No Bed Bath and Beyond equivalent. Ended up ordering clothes hangers from amazon. Show me someone else who’s used amazon for hangers.
- dishwashing is called washing up.
- date convention: dd/mm/yyyy. Potentially very confusing.
Learning English anew:
- “have a think about it” = think about it/give it some thought
- “chuffed” = happy
- “it’s ok” = you’re welcome
- “cheers” = used in various circumstances unsparingly
- “check my diary” = check my schedule/calendar
- “holiday” = vacation
There was more but I don’t remember.
