it pains me

it pains me to see you torture yourself so indefinitely, where the answer is laid before you so plainly. i only pray that you see this before it is too late, that everything that you write, i have empathised with, have been through, am willing to suffer and bear with if you would let.

and i write in your style that you may see, that maybe, two people are not so different after all.

assumed birthright

what gives us the right to anything? to physiological needs, to psychological ones, to personal and interpersonal ones? what gives us the right to happiness? and what makes one more deserving than another?

how can one write or speak or contemplate and think, of happiness and self-actualisation and love and hope, when there are those whose most extreme of concerns is surviving the next day, or hour, or minute? when in mortal danger and with life against its odds, would we think of happiness and contention, or just making it through the current ordeal?

which begets, that if you (or i) worry about the most mundane of worries, as a broken heart or a dullness to the mind, or a lack of extravagance to life, then truly, we must be blessed for everything that is threatening and dire has already been sorted such that they no longer bother us.

indeed, how can anyone of any problem not fathom anything that is worse? and so, of presumed love, or lust, or monotonous hate - of bickering and of jealousy and vanity and fate - how can one worry so much about so inconsequential? we have all fallen victim to overlooking priorities, even those who are at the deepest end of forsaken. unless we are faced with death, or anything worse. which then begs the definition of what is worse than death? maybe, to some, to all, those things which we have just mentioned? and thence negating the argument?

maybe, we assume too much, that being in this world entitles us to things - many things - that others think leisurely and frivolous. what gives us the right to anything?

what gave me the impression that i was ever entitled, beyond that i am already blessed?

p/s: existentialism is such a humbling tool, i am glad that if all else fails, i still have it, particularly upon my deathbed.

op ed

opinion pieces are the most frivolous and meaningless of the lot, because in this day and age, everyone has something to say but just like this sentence, nothing worth saying is said and nothing said is actually worth much, if anything at all.

growing with curves

in the laboratory where i do my post-graduate, i am currently doing a series of experiments which involves generating growth curves for certain bacterial strains. this involves growing an overnight culture of the strains and then coming in early the next morning to start a 14 to 20 hour experiment that basically ends with enough time for me to come home, sleep, and if the next day is allocated for another set of growth curves, repeat the whole process again. now, i'm not complaining, because as tedious as it sounds, i do take a couple hours off to have dinner (i don't do lunch, though), and in all honesty, i only have to take hourly readings from a growing sample of bacteria. the time between is allocated for other things, such as reading up on the experiments, planning future ones, studying bioinformatics and doing the chores around the lab. all of these are not too taxing, except for the reading parts, which can become quite the headache, especially if left to accumulate.

however, it is unfortunate that, i always find a few hours' worth of time that i find free, and my mind strays to things that i want to do for leisure instead - blogging, reading a few books that lay dormant now upon my desk at home, and various other things - and i always find that my motivation is at an all-time low. it's easy to create excuses - blogging has become lacklustre in absence of a (my) muse. reading is all too redundant when it reminds me of work. and i find myself wanting to do something different. something other than watch a movie or a tv series, or play a game (which i find boring except for when i have lots of work to do, when suddenly pacman is the most exciting thing in existence).

i sigh for my lack of sleep, and i sigh even more for my lack of focus.

in any case, this is not a rant post, but a brief re-introduction for me back to blogging, which i can and will hopefully be able to indulge in more often once my growth curves are done (although, knowing how postgraduates work, i have no reason to believe the workload will get any lighter). additionally, it may be influential that it is a holy month of sorts as of now, and being the superficially pious person i am, i am trying to adhere to certain religious rituals and customs that i might normally not make time for. and once the month is done... i guess that leaves me more time to do other things, even though i shouldn't? who can tell.

hopefully i write of growth curves tomorrow - a sign that my mettle is not as fickle as my focus.

equal or lesser than

when we're feeling vulnerable due to a failure, we often generalise to make it easier to feel sympathetic for ourselves. failed a job interview? down with corporate oligopolies. pay being cut? government choking the people. got dumped? men/women are all the same. couldn't break that high score? damn lag. always. and the other guy was cheating.

it's a natural response, but it takes someone outside the scene to look into the situations when all is going well, and try to answer the hard-hitting questions.

so when all is being neutral, look upon your neighbour, your father, your daughter, your cat and your anonymous brother in arms. and ask yourself, is he really the face of everyone? or is individualism the new, unblamable hypocricy?

scientific breakthrough

the buzz word around the hipster science world right now is 'higgs boson'. or for the less scientifically articulate, 'god particle'. in 2004, when i was studying medicine, drudging through the lifelessness of physiology, anatomy and biochemistry, i would often escape into the elegance and beauty of physics, and one thing that caught my mind so enthrallingly was the large hadron collider and its postulated results. it is so unfortunate that now, when i hear so many people talk about these things which i used to struggle with (and still do, to a large extent, for i am not a physicist), i enquire to find that they have only a superficial, media-scraping mastery of the subject. which is to say, they know nothing at all, and just throw around obfuscating terms to seem intelligent.

as such, i have forgone the interest in striking a conversation relating to the higgs boson. when someone talks about it, i feign ignorance, all the while face-palming in my head at their lack of knowledge, and once they have talked of their (little) understanding of the field, they will have no choice but to change subjects. and therein lies sweet relief!

yes, i am being a nerdy elitist here. why? because these people deserve not to be acknowledged as 'smart' for being able to use google and hitchhike the latest trends. why? because ingenuity and the amazement that is science is only defaced and scarred by their hipster attempts to be cool (for nerdy is apparently the new cool). why? because the world does not revolve around being superficial, especially when you try to emphasise otherwise.

why?

because if you really believed that i was ranting on about a scientific advancement that everyone has a right to see and feel and know and debate...

then you are missing the point.

that i am ranting because it is the only thing that i can understand.

because i don't understand you.

pictures i like

i stood in front of a gathering once. a class, if you may. and in my mind i imagined a simple picture. i told everyone, 'draw a picture with a tree'.
'a house, and an orange sunset, and birds upon the horizon.
'in it, there should be no persons, and no complexities of technology like cars and computers and phones.
'and be done in an hour'.

so, we all set out to draw, myself included.

of course, none of the pictures were the same. some were prettier than others. some were more vibrant, some were more memorable. but they were all essentially from the same idea. and this encompasses what is perception. we remember, and we see and feel and know of the important things. the big things. the momentous ones. but in between, we fill the blanks however we want. and there is so much room for artistic license that we often get carried away - that what someone fills in with a lake or a shade or the colour blue, another may have the total opposite (if there are opposites for those things).

and this has been my problem for so long.

p/s: i hate falling in like. it makes you vulnerable to the weirdest, most unreasonable things. and for me, letting go is impossible. it's been so many years. ten to be exact, maybe slightly more. and i still cannot imagine how i came here to be this way, but i still think that the future is devoid. how i hate this. and from it how i hate myself for it. though the painter is to blame for his drawing, maybe it is the person who seeded the idea who is to blame for it being an existence in the first place?