Observing life

 I am sick, and I am sipping y second cup of coffee. The afternoon is nice.

I need to upgrade quite a few ideas.

Life is alright.

How to calmly ignore important things

 I have a good sense of the relative importance of things. This has been supremely helpful to me, in ignoring important things and focusing on whatever is left. This is an interesting strategy for living life and ensures that you never do anything important incorrectly, since you just don’t do such a thing at all. The right recipe for a perfectionist heart. 

However, the calmly part is something I still struggle with. Right now, I have an important call in like half an hour. I would need to keep my video on, all in a super messy room, and inform the other person that I haven’t been doing anything recently. So naturally I need to find other things to do in the next half-hour. Through some glimpse in the past, I realized that this place has always been a sanctuary for me in hard times.

I guess I need to stop twitching inwardly about my call. This person is supposed to guide me about things, about my development. The concept I’m fairly skeptical about.

Right now I’m just scathing over the lack of coffee here. Not good coffee, mind you. Just coffee. In a city known for impoverished, out-of-work citizens, not a single soul is willing to get me average coffee, excellent coffee not being an acceptable concept here. Sigh.

\What other complaints do I have? I wish I could get up in the morning. As it is, I spend half the day sleeping. Just when I’m trying to get my eyes to open fully, N is back from work and he doesn’t like me focusing on a laptop when he is around. So essentially I spend my days sleeping, and doing nothing.

Sigh.

And I have to travel at the end of the week, to another city. Another sigh.

Life is so full of mundane things, I just have no idea what to do. How to cut through this cobweb of boredom. I guess I’ll start clearing up the view in my camera.

An incredibly dull life

Life today was extremely dull. I spent the day doing nothing as a protest, and it would have ended at that note, as so many days in my life have, but N arrived home and dragged me out of my bubble. He can't bear to see my resting and relaxing when he is sitting there, going over his stuff.

Life is very very dull as we speak. I have plans for the short, mid and long term but nothing right now. Last night I did cooked some specie of karahi and I can go eat it if I want, but what is the point?

Everything is incredibly dull. The surroundings, the people, the culture. People often have a ready diagnosis to spring at the symptoms of our-well, issues- from moral decay to economic ailments. I think we are just dull, pure and simple. The dullness reflects in everything, from my lack of access to human-edible strawberry to being unable to find information the way I want.

What is the solution? Should I dabble in something challenging? It has to be the right amount of challenging. Neither too much, nor too little. Plus, there has to be some utility. Maybe I can read Madni's kulliyat with a lughat. Participating in a DS competition won't give me that, I suspect. It is mostly about using the right amount of boosting.

Some time ago, I had been reflecting on how the last time I indulged in some competition was in 2015. Even then, I was kinda sure of the results. Anyways I indulged in some this year (or the last year?) and apparently there wasn't much competition this time. People my age have mostly given up on things!

Between the serious inflation, balancing my time and energy and making plans, my life overall is amazing. Still, I need to do something hard for once. Maybe I'll go study a course in statistics. Sadly, can't do topology or real analysis.

Building a day, a career, a life

 So I have gotten a lot of lectures on socializing in my life. Lack thereof, actually. My rude interfacing with people. My family, mostly my dad's family, never let this rest. I would get chided for being asocial in general, for reading in the middle of a crowd, for being awkward, everything you can imagine, and more.

Some time ago I got a similar lecture from my boss. That I did not interact with the team. That I came over and did not meet anyone. Kinda mother-in-law-ish. Since my MIL is a super chill woman, other people must compensate.

Today I realized that I interact and socialize and network just fine, when I need to. If I am leading a team, I get super chatty with people there. I try hard to find points of common discussion with S, since he barely talks. I get stellar reviews from my in-laws and have always gotten excellent job referrals.

N pointed out that people act very awkward with me. I simply mustn't take all the blame myself.

Life consists of swinging between major excitements and minor let-downs these days. My full offer consisted of a couple of extra elements that I had missed and the total goes up significantly when they are added. Aby already told me that I was going to be rich. The 1/2 week long orientation is going to take place in some nice location. Hopefully it won't be too hot.

A LOT of my worries are going to simply vanish in thin air. I recall my life in Pitt and the lifestyle I had on a student stipend. I was happy there, and this is a major upgrade. A major, major upgrade. The city has a lot of pros and a few cons, with one major con. In general, boises here tend to make me feel isolated, but it is definitely their loss.

I have realized a couple of new things. First, money and materialism has a repulsive component, when I see how most people live in the world. I am not going to let go of this part of myself. It is a very real realization about the world that I have, acquired after a lot of suffering. Never forget.

The other thing is that people at work are going to be very smart but a bit cautious, going-by-the-book kind of people. Consulting work is that kind of work. You are required to be creative, but not too creative. This is another part of me that is going to remain with me, just toned down for work. But the adventurous, curious and intrepid side of me is something that is not going away, ever.

The world is always trying to mold you in some shape that suits it, that is compatible with it, that thrives with it. I refuse. The other day I was talking to my dad and I realized how he has always been a big obstacle in the path of me being myself and how he simply lost all power over me. The bullies all lose their power one by one. With my skills, there simply aren't enough challenges around now.

The world is a very small oyster. Almost no power over me. Randomness yes, people no.

I have also realized that in terms of big picture thinking, there are always like 4-5 cascading pictures at any time. You have to choose to focus on any one at any point of time. Different timeframes, dimensions, systems.

I feel sick at the idea of all the money, considering how people get by on scraps and work hard for them. The world is unfair and cruel.

One needs to be very non-emotional to see things as they are. At the same time, it requires fine-tuned emotional circuitry to be able to see things in detail. I guess an emotional circuit requires fine control.

In all the big/small pictures in my life, I need to reduce my screen time. By a lot. Grocery shopping videos are great fun, but and ultimate waste of time.

Going to get some work done now.

Emotion management training

 So I definitely need to train my emotion regulation circuitry. Not that I disapprove of it or anything, but I'm here looking at lifestyle videos for a certain city, when I don't have the formals pinned down yet. They were supposed to get back to me yesterday but did not. I am not bothered by the idea of them reneging but my total compensation is going to determine a lot of things so it matters whether it is closer to 150k or 300k.

N is super excited and he went through some summary of the history of the country under discussion.

This waiting is not super comfortable, but most of life is waiting. Plus, I am learning how to live life one day at a time. Really, today is the only day we have.

My only experience of living abroad has been around amreeka and although it is a wonderful place to live, my experience there was rather limited by my student financials. This is going to be a big jump and hopefully I can afford to be far more liberal with my finances. 

With the delay in the incoming offer, there is some likelihood of the location shifting to another city but whatever, I'm me and I'll do okay in any place. Also, daydreaming is fine and I am allowed to be happy. If it does not go according to the plan, I'll not be chiding myself for my bout of excitement. I am allowed to be happy and to daydream.

About work. I need to learn, really learn how to work smart. I have had some issues since childhood around it. I have produced a lot of output, but always after spending so much time and inwardly recoiling in self doubt. There is a certain clarity that was missing. I have found it now, a bit. Somewhat. Still discovering it.

The dynamics go something like this: someone would give me a task that would take 8 hours for 7/10 quality. I can produce 9/10 in 2 hours because all I have to do really is to sit down and do the work. Still, I would doubt myself and get stuck at totally irrelevant places and would take 32 hours to do 8/10. This has been my life. Even when I would study, I would waste a lot- A LOT- of time in opening my books, cleaning stuff, and would totally get stuck on super unimportant stuff. These are lapses of thinking behaviour that I am recognizing now, at 31 years of age. If I am going to a demanding place, I better be good at churning out quality work fast. I should be able to vary the quality intentionally.

Surprisingly, everyone else knows these things by default.

Z helpingly pointed out some time ago that I was having a mood swing in the morning about work. I could never have realized this all by myself. It was super helpful.

I think there are short term emotions (nice nuggets today!), long term emotions (I feel satisfied with life), and then way you feel about things. These are different levers you can tweak to vary your emotional state.

Okay with more delay, I feel the probability of a location switch increasing but even if that happens, I'll be disappointed for five minutes and then back to my joyful state. Life is too short to waste in regrets and disappointments.

Clearly I have changed.

Life is a fairytale, according to Aby

 Still, that is her perspective. From my side, things look okay and I hope this is going to continue. Personally, I felt that I was living a fairy tale on the day of our nikkah. This feels okay, mostly. 

A chance to work, most of all.

Last week I worked hard at an office assignment and my boss loved my presentation. Finally my grip on reality seems to be returning.

A lifelong pursuit of causality should enable one to always get the desired result merely by putting in the required amount of effort.

Anyways I think I will do some work now.

Also, I have a shopping list to prepare.

Employee of the month

 Guess who got dropped at office before 8:30 today. Answer: someone who got moved around at the gym at 6 am today.

I am up for an award, for sure. 

Life does seem to be different. Cleaner, more efficient, more roomy. We are super excited to settle in our life here. 

I have quite a few ideas of things to do.

Poets and Quants

 McK said yes.

I feel humbled and I feel infinite gratitude. I am indebted to so many people for helping me shape my life the way I wanted. N, Z, Abhi, S for their continuous and always positive support. My family for being there at any cost and in any scenario. 

I can think of quite a few things I am going to do for both our families, for the kids in our families, for a few causes that are close to my heart- education, female empowerment and languages. 

All my life, people have told me that I was wrong. Dead wrong. Not just in my calculation, but in my way of calculations. The way I thought about things. The way I looked at things. Society gaslighted me left right and center.

It was only when I went to grad school that I started seeing things in perspective, and realized that maybe I wasn't wrong about everything after all. My life after coming back was one difficult war, but I actually came out a different and super resilient person.

I like studying cause and effect. This has been my lifelong pursuit.

I think I have things to do. No time to waste.

Abhi thinks it sounds fairy-tale-ish that I applied to just one place, and that place was McK, and they said yes. On my part, I feel more satisfied and relieved than blissful.

Surprisingly, I feel no negativity. I do not feel 'relieved' to get a chance to run from my current situation. I have learned to love the current moment. As I was just lecturing Z, life is an incredibly rich and complex phenomenon, something that none of us can grasp fully. We, the poets and the writers, try but fail mightily. But even in our failure, we retain a very nuanced view of life, as compared to the democratic point of view.

Still, my main feeling is gratitude.

Pure frustration

 I have frustration, and nothing else. Nothing, really. The only jobs in the market are from my current employer and my last employer.  My salary is good for wiping tears and nothing else.

My preparation for Sunday seems to be crap. Yet I don't think feeling bad is going to fix anything. These cases are inherently hard and my brain refuses to think. Still, it is what it is. 

I miss Karachi but life here is nice. I am a bit tired of being no one but such is life. The money over there would be tolerable and I am not beating myself up over anything. Of course I will find another way, if it doesn't go well, which is really hard to predict right now.

We are super excited to move to our new house and have a stable life for once. Yesterday I had crazy fun at an office party. I will be working hard and partying hard now.

The loneliness strikes again

 My take home salary in 2023 is about half of my MS stipend in 2017. I should calculate the derivative.

I woke up in the evening and feel slightly depressed. My emotion regulator is back in Karachi and I am trying to resolve things on my own. 

For quite some time, I have been realizing the faults in the way I see the world. I have always been able to see the faults in the way other people process the world, but being able to see mine is very rare.

Anyways, I went to an office party today and I was surprisingly social. Very social, by my standards. I talked to a lot of people and it was fun. My agenda was to get integrated back in the team, and get integrated well. It worked.

As for the work, it is what it is. Same goes for my salary. After all, there is no point in whining about things. That is not going to change anything. Why waste your effort in doing something that will yield no result? I think I complain because deep down I know that I am not doing anything meaningful to change anything.

Not doing anything is an exaggeration, I do try very hard at times. It is just the lack of consistency that results in weird dead ends. My current interview situation is tricky, with a third one scheduled to evaluate me properly. I haven't prepared for it yet, and I think I mostly need to prep and stay confident.

After all, I did give a very nice first interview. Prepping is the only thing I can do to change my situation. If it works out, fine. If not, fine still, and I will try something else. Most importantly, I do not hate my present the way I used to do once. The trick is to keep working.

I have been hibernating since 2018, and it shows. I have no economic capital, no social capital, no career capital. I have been getting by on super duper easy mode. 

It shows.

 

 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.