A lil bit of HATE!!

Technically, I don't like hating unless its deserved, but I deleted a number of people from my Facebook friends' list and I think you deserve to know why:

• Looking through your wall, I just saw bitterness and bitchiness. That’s not in the list of things I’d like to experience, online or offline.
• Looking through your pics, I see you have a propensity for taking pictures without your shoes on. I like the socks, but I’m afraid the tendency might be telling of a psychological disorder I’d not like to be part of. I like the grass/countryside background though.
• Looking at your profile picture album, I see the same four sample pictures that came with an outdated version of windows. I was so awed by your originality, I mistakenly clicked “ignore”. And now I just can’t seem to recognize which profile is yours.
• Looking at your profile, I see one of your updates was who care’s. I took the advice when I read another update saying let's be the end of us. I was very concerned when under the work section I saw “I am STUNDET” and in the high school section “I am THOUGH”
• Looking at your profile picture, need I mention your only profile picture, I suddenly realized you, a guy, recently appeared in an obscure female teen model site from an equally obscure country. I have no problem with the obscurity you operate in, but I have a policy against having famous people as friends.
• Looking at your profile picture, need I mention your only profile picture, I must say you have awesome legs. I’m just wondering why that’s all I can see. Is it the better half? Does it mean you like walking all over people? I think you’re too deep and cryptic to know on social media. Lets meet during one of these public cause walks. Come to think of it, I remember you asked me whether I was a model when you added me. Me? A model? Awww, shucks, how perceptive of you.
• Looking through your profile, I must say I’m dying to see you in a pose that’s anything natural. Your lips are dashing but its too bad they filled up the screen and can’t be seen in perspective. Your favourite quotation is “so what”. So what if we’re not friends? Good to know you “kEeP iT FieRCe” tho.
• Looking through your info section, I am deeply moved and amazed at your revolutionary political stand “we need trustworthy readers”. Your depth is even more perceptible in your stand that “no quote is a cliche unless you take things for granted”. I completely identify. From the shape of your mouth, I will not underestimate your prowess at proclaiming where you are from by your accent. Your name doesn’t help much.
• Looking through your profile, I notice your profile picture says you’re single. As in literary. Your last update says “im single and lonelly....inbox”. One word for you, Mig33. I was afraid of looking at your info section. 17 mutual friends? This is why I need to do this more often. I’d have deleted them as well but the first one happened to be my ex’s current and that would just seem jealously bitchy.
• Looking through your profile, I notice you’re friends with Fundi Mbengo. I don’t know him. This has nothing to do with your profile pic. Especially that third one. I just instinctively checked to see if my wallet was still here.
• Looking through your profile, I notice you have 2 fathers and 1 mother. And your were born in 1994. Who the hell was born in 1994? Wait, that means you’re 17? Time does fly. Add me after 4 years when you’ve done a DNA test to establish who you’re from.
• Looking through your profile, I notice you have 4,000 friends. 

I hate statistics. Apparently, 70% of the are made up on the spot.

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Early Monday Morning Rant

You know what I find impressive? That a perfect stranger can hold my concentration in chat for more than 6 hours without the conversation straying to that annoying topic of sex. Like going to the gym, its a fantastic thing to do but a lousy thing to talk about. I found that positively invigorating.

Sadly, part of my life has to do with a community where few people are capable of actually engaging in social discourse for the sake of getting to know each other without discussing the very finite possibilities of what can go on in the bedroom. This is in stark contrast with the aesthetic qualities of the said community. Yes, I went there.

Moving on, the weekend was cold and wet, which inevitably made me think about love, and how it tends to dull the senses - blinds the eyes and insulates the skin from cold. I could use some, or just buy some chocolate and make myself a hot cup of coffee. Yep, I think that will work - the chocolate, not the love.

So here comes the work week, that 5-day break in between weekends. This is an important week, at the end of it I get paid, and I also make some life altering changes to my life. Wish me luck.

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Droid Sleep

I've never understood how I sleep, those moments of temporary extinction as H.G. Wells so aptly put it. 

I constantly hear of people who suffer from insomnia or other sleep related problems. I don't. I can sleep on top of a concert speaker playing heavy metal........I've slept in Carnivore during one of those rowdy music sessions. I can also sleep under a 100 watt bulb, even a blinking one. 

All I need to fall asleep is to decide that I'm sleeping. I used to say I have a contract with sleep, for which I can quickly get an order of specific performance via a quia timet (legal jargon for anticipatory) injunction under a certificate of urgency, so to speak.

And my sleep is always deep and satisfying.....the only thing capable of giving me less than perfect sleep is a tooth ache.

The flip side of this equation is that any occurrence within my sensory range which threatens my person (and for a paranoid person, that's a whole lot of shit) suffices to wake me from blissful slumber. Every time anyone so much as touches the handle to my bedroom door, my ears and eyes snap to attention, you know like the way a cats ears almost psychically flick towards those tiny sounds that only cats should be concerned about. I guess that's a good thing, especially given that I instantly fall back to sleep once the "threat" is past.

The more puzzling weird thing about my sleep is that my ears seem to record everything that goes on in my sleep and then plays it back in fast forward just before I wake. I wake up to the memories of the auditory aspects of the nights happenings, almost without fail. Freaky, right? 

Amongst the weird things my ears have been "privy" to while I'm asleep is various discussions about me by people who "know" me to be asleep at the time. I've even overheard the heartbreaking phone conversations of someone I thought was (should have been) attracted to me until I overheard them on phone describing their "type" (I was not remotely within that description).

So the question is, do I really sleep or do I just think I'm asleep? But so long as I'm rested the following day, who cares? Right? They say you can't survive an extended period of time without REM sleep, and since I'm alive (technically), that means I do get that kind of sleep. Again, right?

I don't believe in taken longer than 20 minutes to write an inspired post, and yet within that time, some quick Internet research has informed me that my (hitherto) unspoken theory is well founded.  Don't you just love how humanity's collective knowledge and belief is accessible to any research savvy person with Internet access? 

Anyway, it would appear that (obviously) your ears still hear everything as usual and send this information to the brain which then discriminatively decides which of these sounds it will transmit to the conscious part of the mind. That's how you get to wake up to the louder sounds. 

Since you hear everything, the brain wakes you based on a library collection of which kind of sounds should be a concern of the conscious mind and which should not. In my case, physical proximity of unauthorized persons (my exes and some of my bedmates seem to be allowed to enter my room without waking me) ranks highly among the things to be processed consciously.

It also makes sense that my subconscious would remember everything it's heard and that my conscious mind would have access to these memories but in a de ja vu sort of way. Until I'm convinced otherwise, that's the explanation I'm going with. It's either I accept that or I start to believe that I'm schizophrenic and that I don't actually sleep but that another personality simply takes over at night.

Wow. Finally a post that has some research going into it. There's hope for me yet.

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50 Posts Later: Taking Stock

Today I have decided to take stock of my blog, for no apparent reason except common vanity and typical self involvement.

I started it in a huff in November 2010 with three posts in one month. After that I could have sworn (without the debilitating thought that lightning would come out of God's black and blue sky and smite me in the nether regions for swearing falsely) that I did not have a blog until some creepy young man came out of the woodwork and made me develop it into a habit. Creepy amazing young man. Few can influence habit in me, I am, admittedly, profoundly stubborn.

So on 24th April 2011, this journey begun again and I have consistently written at between 3 and 9 posts every darn week from that day. This week I felt inspired to beat the 9 post record, but after posting this, I need two more just to reach that record. And from past experience (as though experience could relate to anything other than the past) I don't do much posting over the weekend. So who's this who says I don't have a life?

My favourite posts are those written at the height of emotional distress (and for me, mental agony over a hurting knee can be regarded as emotional distress since I hardly take more material matters to heart). But strangely it would appear that the audience thinks otherwise. Now, having configured blogger statistics to not account for my own page views, the few stats on my page relate to external views only. This also means that the popular posts are also some sort of poll on what has been read the most.

Blogs???? That's the all time most popular? Freaky weird taste. And how did De Ja Beau rise to top 10 position overnight? At least the latter I'm proud of. The former was just me lashing out at my perceived emotional nature of the few blogs I was privy to. I have since learnt the devious nature of blogs and its ability to turn into an emotional upload opportunity.

My all time favourite posts - in no particular order are "the Selected Seven" (a shortlist of the TV characters who have most inspired me), "Chemistry: Table of Elements" (the post was inadvertently deleted but I converted it to a page), "Emotional Roadblocks (my first ever passionate post and auto-expose)", "Judges without Verdict" (a topic close to my heart), "8 classes of gay men" (not my own work) and "the Most Peculiar People I Know" (a shortlist of my most outstanding, not necessarily dearest, friends).

As promised, the topics are erratic and none of them deal with the "important" issues in society today. Its a blog, not a freaking magazine. I am not ashamed. At least 70% of the posts are born of some form of inspiration while the balance is made up on well thought out place fillers. There are a few rants, simply because I'm not perfect.

So there it is. My Blog. And after all this time I still have little idea of how long I will be able to maintain it before settling for two posts per year or altogether abandoning it.

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De Ja Beau

Ever had that de-ja-beau feeling? Don't know what that is? It's when you suddenly realize that a few seconds before, you'd seen a pretty person but were too absent minded to take in all the detail. So you look round frantically trying to locate them. I get them all the time when I'm on the road or in malls. I hate it when that de-ja-beau feeling turns out to be false i.e. they turn out not to really good looking after all.

Stop looking for meaning. There's no particular point to this post.

I've had a random discussion with a bright mind just recently on a most interesting topic - me! Until today, I've been going around thinking I'm a realist, turns out I'm a realist leaning to pessimism! I always knew my cynicism would sell me out one day. 

Even my boss knows I'm a cynic. This one time I was going to get a performance evaluation and the first thing my boss says when I walk in is "You don't always have to be a cynic". I disagree, cynicism has it's place.....in everything. I disagree with Desiderata on that one - being cynical about love is only practical.

Having done lots of accounts, I've internalized the prudence concept - provision for expenses beforehand and don't ever account for revenue before receipt. Elsehow said, take worst case at cost, and best case at NBV (net book value for those who didn't do or pass any accounts exams). But I also do believe that there is hope, that the light at the end of the tunnel is not necessarily an oncoming train, or the pearly gates.

I like to judge people from sheer intuition, without being prejudiced by facts.

Some people are pissed not so much because they have it bad but because so many others have it just as good.

Blogs are from the devil - what else single handedly derives such inspiration from anger and hate?

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Stuff Yoda says

Yoda once said "Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose" and "fear (of loss) is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. And hate leads to suffering" and "the dark side clouds everything, impossible to see, the future is". Basically, the little green old man was saying attachment is pure evil that complicates everything. And he's not the only one. Some half-wit wise-ass said "if you love some(thing)one, let them go. If they come back, they were yours to begin with. If they don't come back [get yourself a rowdy bunch of them muscle types and go beat the crap out of them].

Showing affection is a good thing, but once you get attached, the inevitable flaw in humanity rears its dashingly conniving head. "The heart of man is deceitful, and desperately wicked, who can know it?" says the good book. Trusting in humanity, the kind of trust that leads to some degree of dependence, is something that must be avoided unless inevitable (and if inevitable then its not a matter of trust, but rather lack of choice).

Love for personal gratification is a game, a game which once won loses its lustre and gives way to what Ghandi called "pleasure without conscience". I most certainly believe in love, but only in two shades - love born of sacrifice, and love born of convenience. The former is a choice, with little to do with emotion. The latter is emotion, bridled by reason, and almost always entails nothing more than reciprocal affection, not attachment, and if ever the latter, then born of habit subject always to adverse choice.

And nausea kept me company all 10 minutes I was writing this.

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What I want in my bedroom

Before I get to what I want in my bedroom, let me mention the things I appreciate about a weekend:

1. Sleep. One of the most constrained activities during the week is sleep. This whole unnatural business of telling your body when to wake up must be met with equal and opposing force during the weekend, and by this I mean sleep until your body is pissed off.

2. Friends. I never get to see enough of them during the week and as cool as my workmates are, there are parts of my social well being that they do not stimulate at all. So a friend or two will do, with just that little bit of compromise on preferred activities in order to accommodate them.

3. TV. Watching TV during the week is a highly controlled activity, much like medication.During the weekend, I need to get fed up watching telly so that, come Monday morning, its all out of my system.

4. Eye candy. One of the tragedies of being me is that official wear does nothing to enhance the aesthetic value of those few mortals who I get to see on a daily basis. Even if it did, I have a very small selection to choose from and that, invariably, has disappointed me. So over the weekend, I like to get an eye-full of beauty, keeps me from enjoying them post-apocalyptic horrors too much.

5. The Road. Travel during the week is a necessary inconvenience due to traffic and time constraints. During the weekend (or at night) however, hitting the road with no urgent destination is completely relaxing to me. I've always found inspiration from motion (not that kind, wipe the smirk off your face) and the road gives me one of those rare opportunities.

If you think that picking a cute friend from out of town and going home to watch TV in bed with them would sort me out then you don't know exactly how choosy I am about who gets to be my friend, what constitutes good looks, who can get into my bed and exactly how far I'd be willing to go to get such a person.

So what happens when I have a lousy weekend? Well, the road needs some sort of inspiration (and company and fuel). Eye candy is a tricky one,  where to find them and how long I can enjoy the scenery before it becomes creepy is not an exact science.

TV needs resources, namely movies and series I haven't watched to the point of nausea, and such few script writers and directors can hold my attention long enough. Friends can be sucky at times, either by not being available, or not getting the idea behind the road, eye candy and TV interest I have.

Sleep, on the other hand, is within my complete control. But at times I am unfaithful to my bed, by leaving it for TV, eye candy, the road or friends, at times by bringing strangers to it.

The conclusion is simply this, I need a TV in my bedroom, and posters of beautiful people, and enough credit to chat to my friends....occasionally about the road.

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