I have a horror of emotions in general, unless they be negative ones. However, some people are just too precious not to be treasured; some feelings are just too beautiful not to be expressed.
Much as I worry about my internal wiring all being off, it delivers remarkable surprises from time to time. One side effect of being me is that I thrive in the face of adversity. Provided that the temperature can be kept near room temperature, of course. The summers here are simply unbearable, but one gotta live where one gotta live.
Summer in burgh was beautiful, as I once documented here. Truly beautiful. On the flip side, though, it was too easy. I just remember a group of undergrads from whatever country being somewhat rude to me in the sports complex, but even those guys later asked us if we would play badminton with them. Sweet times!
It was one of the best summers mostly due to the fact that I was moderately well-off, I had nothing to deliver for being this well-off, and I could pursue my heart's desire. Apart from drinking ice cream shakes with Aby in the afternoons, it mostly translated into studying spectral graph theory and experiment design. It was there and then that I finally understood the linear regression equations that I was supposed to have learnt in the previous semester. Who knows, maybe my professor remembers me as the girl who wanted to do 'research' but didn't know matrix inversion. Wow!
Back in those days, I used to be not popular at all. Now I look back with fondness on those serene days! Still, it was there that I made a not-very-radical observation that keeps popping up on overheard- I don't need men, I just need maths.
Hard work just isn't for me, and I'm just not for it. Aby worked hard that summer. I mostly read stuff on a variety of topics and theorized about graphs. Never led me anywhere!
In retrospect, I had it way too easy, and I never realized it at that time. It was only when I came back that I discovered all kinds of haters-explicit and implicit. I absolutely love them all and they are my only source of passion in a lacklustre life. With time, one learns to twirl one's curls and smile at all the incoming hate and dumbing down and underestimation that just keeps poring in. Guys who thought it'd take me six months to learn BERT, when their BERT is just model.fit and model.predict, as I say. Guys who thought I had to slave away for two years to find out stuff. Guys who think I can't write or engineer. I distinctly remember that I used to be bothered by all this, but for the life of me, I can't fathom why. Maybe due to low self-esteem. True and correct self esteem comes from the realization that we are all crap in the end and it does not matter and life is fragile, very fragile. Love, on the other hand, has turned out to be surprisingly robust, but that is a story for another day.
Why do I never experience reality the way other people do? Part of it is due to my distorted matrices, but there is something more sinister at work. Ah well. Who even has the time to be bothered about that.
True bliss lies in staying away from people in all shapes and forms, and in a happy way. Not in a whiny oh-the-world-does-not-give-me-attention, but in a careful and through way. People are people and you are you; you are crap and so are they.
Unless they hate you, in which case you have no option but to love them.
I've recently discovered Pinkaj Mishra.
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