Explaining My Absence, and a Poem too.

So its been awhile since my last post, and no, I did not forget that I had a blog, but my absence has been more or less self-imposed due to the Final Year Exams for my Year 5, 2008.

Determined not to fuck up my exams like I have been doing for every single important exam in the past three years, I decided to remove most of my distractions and focus on work, calling this endeavor, as mentioned in my previous post, Pre-Projekt 45. And this is where all my mention of exams and Projekt 45 ends in this post, since I thought I’d write a retrospective on my performance when I’m more sober. That is not to suggest I am drunk. I just don’t feel serious enough to be adequately concerned about my future at this timepoint of writing, which is a chronic affliction that plagues most of my waking hours and wraps in guilt the rare two to three hours of sobriety and repentance. To explain, most of my days go like this: Come home from school and the first thing I do is to switch on the PC, yeah not a turtleneck-wearing, Starbucks-sipping, crappy poetry-writing Mac, but a hardcore leet dual boot XP-Ubuntu gaming-rig bitches (…not really, it’s a modest HP bought in 2002 that only plays CounterStrike and Deus Ex : ( ). On the PC it’s the usual routine of forums, discussion boards, vidya gaems, and general trolling and whoops its already 1 am. So then I decide to study for a while but overcome with exhaustion or some other lame excuse, I sit on my bed.

Then I weep, inside. I feel pathetic at having wasted another day, still lagging far behind in everything academic, distracted and uninterested during lesson time. Depression kicks in, fearing my dreams of a good college admission will never be realized, and the fact that I have to go to my class tomorrow and face the cold anti-stares of some pricks, and repeated snubbing and behind the back jeering of the many, put a weight on my mind, so heavy, it becomes hard to lift my head back up from the tear-stained bed, after sleep to go back to school. Back to the dread and underperformance. I thought I’d get used to mediocrity, but you never get used or grow conditioned to repeated mediocrity. You only continue reveling in that mud pit, becoming dirtier and dirtier, more and more mediocre.

I think I might have said it before in my previous poorly written post about how I feared mediocrity. The below average-ness. You’re on neither sides of the spectrum, nor in the middle. You’re a little above it , or a little below it, crushed by the masses of those who can memorize that formula a little better than you and blindly apply it without understanding its true significance, while you have to painstakingly read, understand and apply due to the lack of attention during lesson. Crushed by those who can weasel their way out of a difficult conversation a little better than you, retaining their dignity and their token friends, while you over-react and get a more tarnished reputation. Then you stupidly tell yourself you couldn’t give a flying fuck about reputation, only to realize that what put you in such a grimy spot was your selfish pursuit of that very same thing.

I’ve been through that. And as I wrote before, I, thanks to one invaluable friend’s advice, (ironically) the pricks’ attitudes toward me, and the support of my teachers and parents, have hopefully snapped out of this cycle. I removed these distractions completely, but not all at once, since that’s dangerous and according to experience, makes it easier to slip back into that vice. So it started with the easiest ‘vice’; Xbox. Rarely used these days, I gave the controllers to my dad to keep in his office. Then the games on the PC got deleted. And the hardest phase: internet removal. Few weeks ago, the modem was gone. A self-imposed action meant to wean me out of my cycle of time spending. And so this place stagnated, and my urges to go to my forums and such dulled. Studies were hard, but consequently, time spent towards learning increased and curiously, my non-fiction book reading too.

I’ve always been an avid reader, and a well-supported one at that, with enough books to have a mini-library, mostly novels. So I got some books to while my time away and started out with familiar territory of Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer, then Barack Obama (both his books), the non-fiction works of V.S. Naipaul, Rushdie, then soon enough I found a book that seemed to sort of understand the problem I faced; Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. I saw this book on an interview he had with Stephen Colbert (I’m a regular watcher of both the The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report) where he talked about how the internet was making people superficial. His argument on the show was how being connected to the ‘cloud’ of information, be it the internet or mobile phones or even Live Messenger, was giving people less ‘own’ time. Essentially time for quiet contemplation, the reliance on your own thought and retrospective reflection was becoming virtually (pardon the pun) non-existent with our continuous connection to the virtual world. How people had less time with their own mind to formulate their own opinion on issues rather than rely on the groupthink that permeates most of the internet forum and discussion sites, be it involved discussion, like a message board or online media outlets.

How true. I understood, then why I felt this sadness and depression during those periods. How serenity and understanding came over me once I unplugged myself from this matrix of millions of thought and ideas, where the most dominant ideas or memes influenced the group’s core line of discussion on a specific issue. Look no further than the comments on say, Digg.com, with constant memes ranging from ASCII art to phrases that have been repeated ad infinitum on any popular article. I myself have been a part of this, but I’m not unhappy about that. Obviously you might not necessarily know what I’m talking about unless you experienced it yourself, so I’ll leave it at that.

Not to get it wrong or anything, but what I discussed previously about the internet, is not exactly the main line of argument in Mr. Carr’s book, rather its what he discussed on the show. Here’s an excerpt from the blurb on its back to tell you what he talks about if you’re interested in getting the book (which, considering the people I know who read this blog, probably won’t care):

“Writing in a lucid, engaging style, he weaves together history, economics and technology to describe how and why computers are changing — and what it means for all of us. From the software business to the newspaper business, from job creation to community formation, from national defense to personal identity, The Big Switch provides a panoramic view of the new world being conjured from the circuits of the “World Wide Computer.”

These days are better days. Away from the internet, most of the time. I find optimism in the fact that I feel bored after three minutes on my browser, and much rather be reading up on Naipaul’s India of 1990 as compared to his India of 1964. These days I feel I’m quieter, and in less disquiet. I will not blame my poor grades or bad attitude on the internet, but only on myself. I do not regret having been on the internet, I gained much general knowledge through it, but I regret the obsession, lack of control and instability I experienced during that period. But these are better days, and you can expect more writings from me.

So now that I’ve explained my absence from this blog, here is my promise to you to update more often since I’m a bit more free now. In the next post: Nightclubs and Stupid People. I’m also going to ignore the condition of the economy to preserve my, and the readers sanity.

On a final note, these long posts seem like self-pitying rants on how much I suck. No, I did not create a blog to give you pointless exploits in my day in school or cool, awesome pics of me hanging out with my friends or my crappy poetry. This is a semi-fictionalized and dramatized take on a real kids perspective of the world, made to pass his time, improving his poor writing skills, and hopefully make those who read this understand the kid a bit better. Thanks once again to all my readers (don’t really know if I can put that in plural), and thank you to those guys who wrote the comments. I’ll write a written response to them sometime.

I have promised you no stupid poems from myself, so here is one wonderful one, not by me. One of my favorites, and rather apt for this situation.

Until then,

Roucateur.

Some things I like
I like these laundered days,
          crisp and bright,
and with the full promise
          of an unopened letter,
                    from a long lost friend.
I like letters
          hand-written, not lasercut,
                    with catcurled words
                              stringing artless alphabets
                                        like school children holding hands
                                                  about to cross a street;
                    words with moods and character
                              and a curious hunger.
I like words that come
          with the wind
                    against my window;
          with starbuds blooming
                    in the black garden of the night,
          washed in with the rain
                    puddling in the cracks
                              and crevices of my dried bones.
I like the rain
          that rivers through
                    my lifeline etched
                              on my palm,
          washing away my sins
                    and my memories of my sins,
                              sinking the hundred
                                        islands of my heartline.
I like memories
          of those youthful days
                    carried by the cadence of the radio,
          before the television
                    spread its million fingers
                              over my stainless skies.
I like these laundered days…

— Hari Kumar