وقت آفاق کے جنگل کا جواں چیتا ہے

میری دنیا کے غزالوں کا لہو پیتا ہے

After spending a day without power, clearly one tends to become poetic.

My life is stuck.

I miss the north

 Eight months of marriage, and I consider myself one of the luckiest women in the subcontinent. And one of the happiest. And the derivative for these is positive. I told N in the days leading up to our marriage that I had calculated that I was the luckiest bride in Punjab and Sindh for the last 100 years.

The only thing missing from my life is a second coffee. I just had one and I am not sure if I should have another. I guess I'll let the caffeine from this one settle first.

We have a massive power outage and it seems to be affecting network coverage too. I came out of my house to this nice coffee place, but then they started having issues too. So it is difficult to get anything done. Some recent events got me thinking about my life too- though not for long.

By now, I have realized that if one keeps pointing towards the same set of problems in one's life, this just implies that the real problem lies somewhere else. This applies, for example, to my whining about being worthless in life. I just saw the evidence for Sep 19, Sep 20 and realized that I have been saying this forever. To my credit, I got out of this mindset by Sep 2021, although I had my own issues-admittedly much smaller-in that time slot.

I'm listening to this nordic music that I discovered last summer and god, does it remind me of khaplu and altit fort!

Back to my issues. I have been saying since forever that I have no worth, in a whiny tone. First of all, this is a fact of nature and I embrace it with all my love for wisdom. It does not make me feel bad about myself. I am neither inferior nor superior to anyone else, and this is not going to change.

Anyways the real cause of my lack of worth is generational-my abba jee does not have worth of his and I have inherited this lack of stature. If this bothers me, I can always work on building my worth. Our society is highly antagonistic to progress, but this is not my problem. Worth is highly tangible and if it is there, one can see it. The real utility is only partial-I want to be able to afford a coffee every day and not once every six months.

I guess human beings have to be a highly organized unit. If I want to have gloria jeans in the morning, I must work for it in the evening, because abba jee has no worth. Otherwise I can't have it. This is a simple law and I can't go against it. Last month was an eye opening month for me, as I ran out of money within a week or something. That hurt.

Worth, worldly as well as literary, must be built. Blood, sweat and tears must be poured in. The output of this process can be measured, no doubt about it. The only thing that is growing in my life is my social media following, but I am just a bit skeptical about it.

I think the rest is going to follow.

Last week I had a cool interview, but missed a paper deadline. Ah well. All in a day's work. I would have screwed up my interview, but N acted as my emotion regulator and made me see sense. It went well, but this place has a low acceptance rate, and I don't care like I did back in July 2022.

To be honest, the most important thing is the realization that I have no worth, and I'm not building it by writing here.  This is an outlet for my emotions that I keep using for the sake of old times, but it isn't contributing to my literary life.

What else have I learned? I move on. From situations, and realizations. Yes, you realized something. Now move on.

I have learned that giving an average amount of time to tasks can give really good results, but I have to put in this time.

Money, output, social following and real change, these are going to be my objectives from now on.

Z plays the sweetest tabla ever. The other day, I called him up when he was in his class and stayed on the line to listen to it for five minutes or something. 

I have let go of my melancholic tendencies, and happen to be the liveliest thing alive these days. I feel the joy of life very very keenly-the second fills me with happiness, the minute with the joy of a lifetime. What more can I ask for? Also, I have recently taken the challenge to be the happiest person I know. So many minor annoyances just fall away when you look at life from the lens of joy.

About my writings- honestly I need to access my inner feelings. I am simply writing from an extremely cognitive place. I want to be able to access my emotions.

All this theory, and no practise

 So I have spent 32 years of my life learning theory, but none practising it. Maybe a month or so, but nothing more.

It is time I started putting my theoretical learnings into practise. What the world of practise demands more than anything else is output, so I will be working on that from now on. My output needs to be in a human-friendly format, so I can't just keep ideas in my head. I hate doing work with zero impact so I will be looking for ways to maximize my impact to effort ratio, all while increasing my effort.

On Friday, I had a nice interview with a guy but they are a highly selective lot so I can't say anything. Besides, I have another interview left. Besides this besides, I simply do not care. If one avenue closes, a thousand others open up.

I will go learn some python and take a test. High time I learned this language. Also I need to finish a translation. That would be all.

A course on life

 I was inspired by the idea of having courses on death to design a course on life. Not sure if I am a suitable person for teaching such a course, but I can maybe work on the outline.

Ultimately life is finite and this is the most important constraint, so we have to be mindful of the time we have. You should be optimizing for happiness and satisfaction, if you are a normal person. Someone recently pointed out that happiness is a mixture of short term-being happy in the moment- and long term-building the life you want.

Sadness and grief are fine as emotions but as Z highlighted, I get mood swings when I think of working. Ultimately it is the self module that needs to be strengthened. I should be able to bargain with myself to do things I do not want. Right now I have a task which sucks but then I'm also going to a session for local poetry in the evening and I expect it to be great fun. These are the kind of things for which one lives.

Also, I realized today that one needs a spray or serum to control frizz and that's it.

Yesterday, I realized what a neurips reviewer told me 1.5 years ago. I feel smart!

The next steps after being declared lame

 Okay yeah I have accepted that I am a lame person. This implies that I move on to the next step.

Yesterday I landed back in Karachi. The day was spent being disoriented, but today I woke up kinda on time and feeling okay. For quite some time, I had been waking up feeling pathetic. My parents' house does that to me. Today, however, I feel that I am on a beach in Hawaii, at least. This is a short summary of this house. The weather is kinda cool if I sit in the drawing room and I can feel the winter feels.

What does a lame person do? Well, the most straight forward way is to continue being lame, and that is the path of least resistance. However, I intend to be someone else, and this is a good start. The realization helps you chart the path forward. The objective function helps you decide the algorithm, you see.

What are the indicators of me being lame? I have recognized a few:

1. My financial mess. Basically I earn nothing and want everything. Not an ideal situation. While I do need to spend carefully, I also need to simply earn more.

2. My lack of depth, in everything from machine learning to philosophy. I have been told that I am simply not an artist, but I do like educating myself.

3. My zero-footprint existence. If I was to vanish today, no traces of me would be left behind, except my stupid clothes. I bought so many and after so much sampling, my god. My brain would conjure up dreams about colors and fabric patterns back in the day.

4. I get horrible scoldings from my boss, and this has been happening for quite some time. This needs to stop.

Maybe I will go read Cal Newport's ideas in some time, to help me organize my life.

Once you have made a discovery about yourself, you must stop being overwhelmed with emotion over it. When I find something out, I keep doubting it forever. The right next step is to move on to the next step. This phenomenon of being stuck in local maxima is something ingrained by my family. As with (almost) everything else they taught me, I'll be working hard at throwing it out of my system. Gunderson says that one must build a life narrative, create meaning out of suffering and use it to create a sense of self, a direction for the future. N thinks that he happens to be exceptionally unlucky and if there is something bad that happens to 1% of 1%, it will happen to him. On my part, I consider myself extraordinarily lucky. If there is something good that happens to 1% of 1% of 1%, that will happen to me. Multiple times, I have been thrown in situations from which only an outlier escapes. And I have escaped. Events like Carnegie Mellon, N and my blend of practical sense and imagination come to mind. I'll add Z to the list too, for he is  father, mother and best friend combined to me. Now he has become my poetry teacher too. I might have spent years and years lying dormant on my chaarpai, writhing in pain, but there is a fire inside that refuses to die down, even though the world tries its hardest to quench it down. I simply refuse to back down and I have never even met a man with such an indomitable spirit, let alone a woman. Right now, I might be sitting all dolled up and demure in my drawing room and conversing about lunch with my folks (new) but it is just one side of my nature, one that is reserved for family. A simpler person might consider this simplicity to be deceptive but on my part, I just consider this to be another dimension of mine.

I used to have two different personalities for home and work. The two are collapsing and although this has lead to trouble at work, I am hoping that the synthesis can be very cool at the end.

So I guess I'll be building a life outside social media now.

Of being lame, and recognizing it

There are some things that I have always known. A fortunate smaller set tends to be recent. So this is something I have realized recently: I am a lame person.

This was shocking, the first time it dawned on me. Lame was the last adjective I would have ever attached to myself. In a past life, I would have actively resisted this diagnosis. However, I have a good grip on reality these days and this revelation, while shocking to the core, stuck with me.

The pill was bitter, but I swallowed it. I finally saw that I am a lame person overall. I state things without having thought much or enlightened myself. I don't produce much output. The little output I produce has absolutely no significance and few people go through it. I don't have any serious asset and if I get fired from my job, which is looking very likely these days, I will be begging people for another job.

I don't work hard and I don't exert myself. I seldom learn and I get bored to death in most of life. I feel that there is no growth. Unlike most of my life, I, however have an identity, so lack of material and ideas does not bother me.

The lack of material and ideas does not bother me. The lack of depth and effort does. Not just bother, its bores me to death.

Okay I am going to try my hand at drama writing. Just decided it five minutes ago.

Tennis lessons have been promised to me since forever.

I will be producing output, as the first step in my humanizing journey.

A girl was complaining that this is a fast-paced age and things just end. I think it suits me mightily.

As all troubles, this has been triggered by economic issues. I am broke and this made me realize that I am effectively an active piece of scum. Let's see if I do something about it.

From ideas to actions

 I usually make fun of people for indulging in concepts like new year resolutions, but this year I had an epiphany near the first of January: that I am a woman of action, and all my troubles stem from denying this, and venturing into the realm of ideas.

Now, don't get me wrong: the realm of ideas is a fine place indeed. My problem is that thinking is not my strongest suit and I can't often get far just by dint of thinking. No matter how much I think, I am always dissatisfied at the end of the day. As the evening dawns, a dread begins to set in, triggered by the realization that I have done absolutely nothing in the entire day. One full day, gone, 

This is how life has been eroding-minute by minute, dawn by dawn-for more than the past 30 years. I have been struggling, but I never could find the solution. The right code to live life by. The way to live. A personalized fit.

Discipline has always been problematic for me, but recently I have started taking a different approach to it. Now, instead of forcing myself to finish Yet Another Task, I try to adjust and compromise. I am vacationing and N sent over something and asked me to party more on his behalf. That is the kind of radical transformation my life has undergone. Adjusting discipline approaches seems like a minor change when compared with this.

Why do we need discipline at all? Because I want to get a number of things done in life. I am rather tired of playing with sampling strategies in a sanitized environment and want to test them in the wild. The wilderness of life. 

I am listening to Andre Rieu orchestrating the playing of a beautiful piece. Too bad that my payscale only allows me access to local cinemas and nothing else. And that too only occasionally.

Anyways I have always SUCKED at time management. Recently I went through my undergrad memoirs and earlier and that time was horror-show-time. At least I properly party now.

Back to the problem of ideas vs actions. M, a young poet, suggested that perhaps some people are more suited to one vs the other. This set me, paradoxically, on the path of thinking and not acting. However, I soon realized the error of my ways. My disposition is towards acting, and although a lifelong gaslighting campaign by the society did distort my thinking and acting), I am finally in recovery mode.

So the gist of the matter is, I have to start acting and let go of my thinking ways. I already have. I mean I spent 4-6 hours thinking of sleep but now I am up and running and will be doing things during the day. My hibernation days are over.