It's not the object, it's the desire

In the evening my parents and my brother were going out for some casual shopping and while getting ready my father put on a new after shave. It had a peculiar flavor of lime and it shocked me. It was something as though I had smelled this fragrance long back and it had left a powerful mark on me. I tried hard to recollect if there was something I remember connected with this fragrance, but I couldn’t. I thought about it for sometime and found nothing. I was amused. I will never use this aftershave for myself. I don’t want to confuse myself my smelling it again and again.

This happened while I was in the 501st page of The Fountainhead. I was struggling with a small sentence on the last line of that page. I read it 5-6 times and yet I was not able to get it. There were no new words - just simple vocabulary that was laughing at me. I have seen this happen before with much simpler ones and this time I was thinking about the aftershave more than the sentence. After reading it I found that I was missing a small word – ‘for’. I was so preoccupied with that smell that I was not seeing this little ‘for’. The sentence was – ‘That special sense of living I thought this marriage would destroy for me.’

The very next page made me silently thank my friends again for gifting me this book. The middle of the 502nd page had this –

‘I love you, Dominique. I love you so much that nothing can matter to me – not even you. Can you understand that? Only my love – not your answer. Not even your indifference. I have never taken much from the world. I haven’t wanted much. I’ve never really wanted anything. Not in the total, undivided way, not with the kind of desire that becomes an ultimatum, ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and one can’t accept the ‘no’ without ceasing to exist. That’s what you are to me. But when one reaches that stage, it’s not the object that matters, it’s the desire. Not you, but I. The ability to desire like that. Nothing less is worth feeling or honoring. And I’ve never felt that before. Dominique, I’ve never known how to say ‘mine’ about anything. Not in the sense I say it about you. Mine. Did you call it a sense of life as exaltation? You said that. You understand. I can’t be afraid. I love you, Dominique – I love you – you’re letting me say it now – I love you.’

Long back in one of my posts on Flowing Emotions I had written “its relations that are more important than people”. I was confused after writing that. I didn’t know if what I had written was right or wrong. One of my friends said he didn’t agree with me. I had no answer to give. I thought about it a several times ever since then. I had never been confused so much with something I had written, myself. Then I read this today. I read it several times – just to feel the pleasure of being right, to enjoy a victory, to relish an answer I had been searching. This character in The Fountainhead, though has a few bad traits, is the second of the two in the story that are close to objectiveness, and are the heroic ones. They are probably the ones that have described the philosophies of Ayn Rand. I am in the 508th page now with almost 200 more pages to go. This is what I have perceived till now about this second person – Gail Wynand. The first of course is Howard Roark.

I am spending a heck lot of a time reading this novel. It is not heck I mean here. I mean the ruthlessness the word ‘heck’ describes. I have, at many instances, read a few paragraphs very fast – using a few techniques I had learnt sometime back – but it was just out of curiosity. The zeal to get deep into the book had made me come back and read the sentences slowly again – to feel them and to learn from them, to absorb them and cherish an understanding, and capturing every part of them. It’s making me happy and proud. I don’t know about this proud thing!

My day was good today and I have learnt a lot from it. I even learnt how car batteries are charged and repaired. I learnt how to be calm when I feel the throttling urge to shout back. I learnt how weak I am.

I arranged an old table for myself in a new place. It is front of a window now from where a lot of light comes in at all times of the day. I will do all my reading and writing work here from now on. It’s beside my computer so an added advantage. I will fix a tube light tomorrow on the wall behind my computer. The light from behind me, forming a glare on the monitor, is giving me a head ache.

Do they really don't think of their future?

I woke up to see light at 7:30 am today. I had slept at 2:30 am. So this was exactly they way I wanted to see it happen - me sleeping for not more than 5 hours. I later went to a friend's house and was there till 6:30 pm. It was truly a good time I spent there. I had my lunch at his house and we spoke for hours.

Another friend was with us too. When the talk of our future - what after engineering? - came up, both of them said they were still undecided on it. I know they have their own ways and life and in no way am I supposed to question them but is this the same way others too are? I mean how can they not have anything decided till now? Don't they have any ambitions or any dreams? Ok, even if they don't want to do anyting, they should at least know by themselves that they want nothing!

After having a great time with him, I came down to my grandparents' house and then finally back to home at 9 pm. I came online sometime back and I shall be here for the next 3 hours atleast.

An hour in front of television today

When I left for dinner today at 10 pm, I had all my messengers logged it and were simply set to 'away'. I wanted to be back in 15 mins. But I got carried away. I was watching a comedy with my father for an hour. It was good except for the fact that I am going to write much against this television shortly on one of my blogs.

Today I couldn't beat sleep. When I woke up early, I was happy with it. But soon I found that the thing I was fighting against took me in its arms. I was fighting sleep and I had to sleep again. Today I read around 50 pages of The Fountainhead and I plan to finish the book in the next 4 days. I will do it. I am reading for the first time by keeping the book on a table and sitting erect on a chair. This looks as though I have turned out into an obedient student religiously using his study table in the most proper method. It just looks that way. I am reading a novel.

Today I sat with my mother for sometime. I was reading and she was readnig the newspaper. But she was sitting beside me and she was happy with my calmness - lately she had been saying that I have anger on my nose. I was in deep concern about her complains and I decided to be calm even when she bewilders me. She always complains that I don't allow her to touch me the way my brother does. She says I am still a small child. She was treating me like a child today. Good.

I downloaded the latest version of MSN messenger today. I was expecting it very new. I was not pleased. Did I ever tell how much I use MSN messenger? Well, it is not much of use now but I had hardly used yahoo untill 2 years back. I have more than 25 contacts in MSN and they are in regular contact - all of them my relatives.

It rained a little here. It was less than what I was told about the rains in other parts of the city. I was lying in the living room when I heard something like the falling of water drops. When I saw outside it was raining (obviously - what can I expect then?). I was not expecting the rain with so much light outside. As was I correct - it didn't rain much.

Yesterday I went to bed at 2am. For the past few nights whenever I go to sleep I hope for only one thing that I get fall asleep as soon as I close my eyes and the necessary requirement had been met when I open them again. It looks like a waste of time sleeping. But when I wake up, I don't feel like waking up. May be it is because I am lacking some will power to get out of bed. I will learn it.

Nothing much here

I, along with a friend, had decided to go to another friend's house but we came to know that he is still out of station. I know nothing how this misunderstanding crop up but it was probably something between 'thursday' and 'tuesday'. So the plan was cancelled.

I woke up at 7:30 am after sleepig at 3 am. It was a short sleep so I compensated it by sleeping for an hour in the afternoon. I didn't want to sleep but I had to.

The rest was as usual except that I wrote a letter. An open one - again. It is not finished yet. I will do it tomorrow.

Its so easy to irritate ppl... but so difficult to please their hearts

Today was a different day for me. It started late though and I spent a lot of time reading a novel, I thought of several things, in finer detail, about points that have been ringing in my mind. To start with I’d like to write out a few points. There is a lot of explanation to make them crystal clear and God-willing I shall do it very soon and put it on Flowing Emotions.

# I have a very big ego that drives me. I approve very part of it in a way that helps me to become a better person.
# People desperately want leaders. They want someone who guides them and takes all the responsibility especially of the mistakes they commit.
# It is a very important trait to understand people. It is important to know what they are – to help them, nurture them, enlarge them and make them independent. All this is to connect with them. Understanding people, or the necessity to do so is everywhere – the adverts we see on the television are made in such a way that they please people and this happens when people are understood. This is just a small example. If understanding of people is taken as a crime then I don’t think anybody will have a right to roam around freely. Every person, right from a novelist to an evangelist, will be imprisoned. Just for understanding people.
# People are weak and they do not know what they want unless they see it. No one would have asked for love unless he/she had felt it at least once.
# Having integrity with people is most important, else everything done with them is short lasting and it amounts for manipulation and fraud. It is a sin to manipulate people. # Understanding is a 2 way process. The intention is to connect with them. People can be the biggest achievement or the biggest liability. The 2 way process gets them close to each other and makes them help and use each other in an equal way with integrity.
# To hurt a person is much worse than hurting our self.
# The most beautiful things in the world are the most useless ones. Lilies and peacocks for instant (I remember reading this as a quote somewhere). According to me Dominique Frankon in The Fountainhead too is useless except for her presence I in the story (I say this after reading just the part I have read till now. Its just an understanding).
# Selfishness is a virtue. Its better that people understand its true meaning – dictionaries have it. My blog has a few details on this. I am selfish and I know this is how I should be.
# People hate others usually for reasons unknown to themselves unless the person being hated is really at fault. It is some times because of jealousy. They fail to understand that its not actually hatred but jealousy. I think it is very good to declare openly that we are jealous of any person if we really are. This helps in having integrity with them. (When I say people, I am included in them)
# I shall never cheat a person. Even if I do anything that may hav a slight meaning of cheating him/her, I should make that person aware of it.

So many times I feel like making myself as open as the vast seas so that people know everything about me. Especially the fact that some of them think I manipulate them. I want to be clearer then mirrors. Mirrors are not clear at all - when I look into them I see myself. Every single thing that I hide burns inside me and hurts me more than any physical pain. Its the guilt that makes me uncomfortable.

I wish I could explain everything about me to everyone. I know most of them won’t be interested as they are never expected to be – but I want every person who thinks anything bad about me to know how much it hurts me to find anything bad inside me. But I also know I cant explain things to anyone who is ready to hear it. Language comes between communication. My not-so-good language stops me from being more transparent. I can’t put into words everything I want to say. But if I connect with people at an emotional level, this becomes possible.

To start with, what all I have written in ‘My Perception of My Own Life’ is very much true. What I had written in ‘I Am NOT Mentally Vulnerable’ is a bitter truth. What I had written in ‘My Humble Prayer to My God’ is one thing I shall always continue with. I mean every single part of all that.

I want every person who knows me to read this post but I know this is not going to happen. They won’t be interested. It is so obvious. And I respect them for this. I will be the same if I am in their place. But they will acquire so much interest in any talk about me they may happen to have; about the bad qualities in me. But they will never come to me and tell met that I need to correct myself. Any person who says I have faults openly to me is the person who cares for me. I shall write in detail on all this sometime later when I feel that I have understood enough to make others understand.

I sincerely hope I am not called as a maniac or a psycho for writing these things here (there is more to it actually). This may be madness though. I believe I can achieve nothing until I really get mad at it. All this is just a transition.

The book that will help me with a better understanding of people will be Personality Plus. It will tell how to classify people to understand them. The full name of the book is “Personality Plus: Understanding Others by Understanding Yourself”. SO I hope this name says a lot too. Actually this understanding thing is very important for people involved in network marketing – my uncle (connected to Amways) is into it and I have learnt a lot from him.

And regarding to my writing thing, I now fully understand how important it is to review what I have written. It is necessary that I edit the complete paragraphs until I really want something good. I shall start doing this to all my posts on Flowing Emotions shortly. I am presently after a few books – I have to complete them in a short time.

Ha

Few days back my mother said that I needed a 2nd almairah. She said it was necessary. I didn't knew that. But because she said, I agreed to have a new one. So, I got a new one today - a large double sided one. I won't be sharing any part of this with my brother as I used to do with the previous one which was much bigger.

While getting that thing inside my room, I got my little finger hurt. I bleed a little and there is a dark red clot now. When the wound was very fresh and was aching a lot, I thought it'd continue for long. It didn't. I feel nothing now.

Our tenants made a mess out of themselves today. They had not paid the electricity bill for the last 3 months and as obvious it seems to be, their connection was cut by the department people. These tenants said they had forgotten that they had to pay the bills. The most amusing part was the climax - they went to the department office, paid some money to some people there and got back the connection without paying the bills. I am sure dad is going to look into this matter tomorrow. I will just be a silent spectator.

I am still left with the arranging of my old books. Today I had to move a table on which I was stacking them. The books and papers include the ones from my first year of engineering - more than a year old now. I even have to arrange my clothes. I even have to fix my music system - some screw in the disc loader had come out a few days back and it is working just standing the weight of the CD. I even have some letters to post - there is a post box nearby but it looks like a trash box hanging on the trunk of a huge tree, so I will go somewhere else. I also have to take the print-outs of my last story and change it in a way that looks good to me - polishing I mean. I will complete all of them tomorrow.

Today I cleaned 21Gb of space from my computer. It was amazing to find that the disk cleaning utilty did the major part of it. I am planning of a standard restoration of my computer. There is a built-in feature that automatically formats the hard drive and reinstalls the operating system and also the softwares that were shipped along with the system when I had first bought it. It will erase all the data created by me so I have find out ways to back it up. I hope everything works the way I want it to.

The last 2 hours I have spent were making me feel like crying for everything, though I didn't do that till now. It is one of those times when you feel like weeping for everything. Even the things that make you smile otherwise look so innocent that you feel like crying for them. The only reason that they are innocent. Even a simple pen lying on the desk has so many memories attached to it ... I have been using this pen for the past 7 days and it is supposed to have nothing related to it except for some scrap I have written and a few phone numbers, but it seems as thought it has bacome an integral part of my table and I can't live without it. The same is the case with everything I am seeing for the past 2 hours. I know this is temporary and in a few days the pen will be thrown away by none other than me and I am going to laugh at myself for crying for such a stupid thing. Right now I am trying not to think about any kind of past. I always have in mind the options concept so everytime I feel bad about anything I know I am commiting a destruction onto myself..... :D

I woke up at 12 today. It was a sleep that was to be paid in due of what I mortgaged on Sunday night. I had my first meal at 2:45 pm and the second at 7:15 pm. My dinner got over just sometime back.

I have taken this pic because it made me feel something too. I couldn't define that something else I'd have written it.

Could have been better

It was around 3:15 am when I posted the story, 'Humilis and Purpa' on Flowing Emotions. When I read it first after writing I was pretty satisfied with the way I had worked it out but after rereading it in the evening today I felt I missed on several things. The basic element I wanted to do was to make the readers clearly visualise the location of the story. But when I read it I couldn't imagine things for myself. I am satisfied but I guess if I edit it a little then it can be much better.

This was the first time I spent so much time just to plan the story. The first thing I wanted was the right pictures which I didn't get. Though I came out with something close to what I wanted, I'd have prefered something more mesmerising. I searched in Google Images for more than an hour. But before that I had to decide the color of the flower, and the names of both the characters. Wikipedia was quite helpful with all this. I also had to study the seasons and the changes they bring in. A little more about flowers and clouds was also somthing I learnt though it wasn't necessary. I tried my best not to include any thing which would be directly concerned with humans ... I wanted to have something where there would be no such thing as human except the concept of 'heart' and love. I suppose I was successful with this.

Today I didn't do anything much worthy to be written here. Though I woke up early I slept a lot during daytime. I didn't get to chat online with anyone today except for short versions with a cousin. In the evening my parents and my brother went for shopping and I stayed at home. The dinner, as today is a Sunday, was from outside and just a few minutes I had a mango.

My yahoo messenger is creating problems again. I do not understand why Yahoo people always have some little problem with all their versions of their messengers. Trillian is wonderful and it requires no messenger, it is so convenient to use too. The other messengers I use, MSN and Google Talk, are perfect though the features are limited. Even www.e-messenger.net is fine.

I have updated The Technology Blog and News and Opinions.

First Ambivalent then Cool

Today was my friend's birthday. Yesterday though I was online and chatting with him I forgot to wish him. It was only when another friend reminded me that I wished him and the way I did it was a new one: I started the foto sharing feature in yahoo messenger and sent him a pic with the words "oops I forgot", then I followed it with sending many pics with birthday wishes on them.

We met today and it was good; but because of a friend who is a bit unhappy with this birthday guy, I was confused. I called him at an 'In' without informing him anything about the birthday thing and the b'day boy's presence. So, later I had to do a lot to get things right. We both then had a good time at Hyderabad Central and the initial anger bacame history.

I left for my grandparents' house from HC and came back home at 8:30 pm. Now, after my dinner I will get on to work for a post on Flowing Emotions. I am bit afraid to start with this as it will be a kind of fiction. Though there isn't much story in that, I am sure I will make it feel like one.

A cup of tea beside my keyboard

I had a friend at my house and it was good that we spent some time. Tomorrow his father is expectd to arrive from abroad and he will start his annual hibernation ... the kind that makes him a little cut off from his friends and keeps him glued to his house ... just to make his father believe that this is how he is always.

I did absolutely nothing today. I didn't even touch the newspapers. They were lying on the floor, left that way by my brother as the were soaked in water. The person who supplies the paper had thrown it into a water puddle. Though it is dry now, it looks like an old one and I didn't feel like reading it. Even my father has no interest in it today.

Just a little while ago (its 8:13pm now) my mom kept a cup of tea on my table and I was wondering if I could complete this post till it gets cold enough for me to drink. The warmth or hotness of tea or coffee I like depends on my mood. But I don't know how! But I usually prefer coffee as cold.

I couldn't read any book today, but I will definitely do a bit of reading before sleeping. And my daily solving of sudoku was lost somewhere and I will start it again from today. I even want to update Flowing Emotions today but I am not sure if I can pull off another thing.

I am working on my 8th blog and this will be one that will require regular updates. I will be writing my views on the international and national news. I have subscribed to the feed of NY Times and this thing is working beautifully. Just that the content is not the way I want it to be. I will get the right things shortly. The page is http://xubayr7.blogspot.com .

And yes I am aware that my other blogs too need updates and I will get with them soon. :)

Quite a lot happening

As already known, I had a terrible head ache yesterday evening. I had been to a friend's house which is more than 2 hours from my house. Yeah, thats the way I measure it.

I sometimes liek having a head ache. It gives me a chance to experimention a few expressions. These facial expressions create a lot of difference the pain makes me feel. They help me relax and yet allow the pain to be there so that my relaxation is more pleasurable. It creates a different feeling when I frown my forehead and I different when I leave everyhting lose. Pressing my nose hard, squeezing my cheeks, rubbing my eyes, pressing my temple with fingures in circular motion, lying down sideways, lying down flat, and trying all these things - wow, I enjoy doing this. Though sometimes this helps reduce the pain, but the final treatment is usually a good sleep. Yesterday this was the only treatment.

At my friend's house yesterday we tried connecting his cell phone with his PC. Everything worked fine. By the time I was home it was 8:30 pm and as expected I didn't fine anybody waiting for me. My mother continues her talk on a small chore I couldn't do and later she thought of asking if I had fed myself with lunch during the daytime. Later she asked where I had been.

Today morning the fist thing I had was tea. I slept again. Our servant maid didn't come so I had some cleaning work to do. I was fine. It will be fine as long as it is asked once in a while and now daily. I wanted to write for the blogs today and I couldn't. The real reason was that I spent a lot of time reading The Fountainhead. I went for more than 60 pages today - almost at a streach. If I spend this much time on anyother book I could have completed more than 200 pages in the same time. But the time being spent here is worthy.

And yes, this present post is the fiftieth in succession. Though I did miss a few days I didn't know it was so easy to write a daily journal. I do not know if it is easy to read it too.