Pritheee why so pale

 The problem of motivation, I have discovered, is almost wholly emotional. One wants to, or does not want to, work, because of a complex mix of emotions underneath. This is why I have trouble doing anything before the deadline, and why I constantly long for midnight all the day these days. I get up, with a single though, a single drive, a single motive: to go back to bed and curl up under my blanket, away from the world.

I have experienced it at a number of points in the past, though seldom with this much normalcy. I occasionally do stuff that I like, reading and watching and writing, but the threads that bind me to anything are fragile. My recklessness surfaces in every aspect of my life and if I was to get fired at this point, I would be immensely relieved. Ambition and drive seem like buzzwords; I have trouble finding the basic motivation to sustain life and to carry out its normal functions. I wish I was such a self-interested person as people think I am, for in that case I would actually do things in my favour. As it is, I constantly act against my self-interest and not in a driven, nihilistic way, just out of being stupidly emotional.

I have realized that not having any emotions is also a state of emotion and if it strongly impacts you, then it is a problematic emotional state of mind. If I was truly as nihilist as I believed, I would actually really stop caring about everything and not feel this dull throbbing void.

I think I just suck at handling stress, particularly at this point in time, and there are two very strong sources of stress: my job, and my 14(I think) applications. I need to tell myself that both are fine and whatever happens will be fine and life is above and beyond all this crap. If I enjoy eating a handful of cashew nuts with my coffee while lounging in the winter sun, that is enough for me and I honestly do not need any other source of joy.

Talking to people helps at times, particularly if they are not family, because then I am forced to engage like normal human beings. The relief, however, is temporary and disappears as soon as the conversation ends. Recently I have started realizing that with my story building talents, I create palaces from pebbles and hide away from the real life in their corridors. Being in touch with real life no longer has any attraction for me, so that is fine, but ultimately all my joys and sorrows are in my head and nowhere else. If I long and pine for something, it usually isn't anywhere; when I mourn something, it often never was there in first place. The jolts of reality leave me very confused at points, and pragmatism seems to be the only solution; it is what it is, and not particularly important at that.

My perception is always, always, always eons away from anyone else's perception.

Loneliness is a real and tangible evil, but there is no point complaining about anything, and who would hear me? My only problem is that the life instinct in me, though interesting in a theoretical way and seductive from afar, is very very fragile and easily gets affected by everything and everyone. The flame can be mildly and briefly brilliant, but it is all the more delicate and hard to maintain. I guess beauty always tends to be transient and fragile, for symmetry requires a lot of things to go harmoniously together, and a lot of careful thought, but it is hard and impractical to maintain. I guess I can console myself with the thought that I am a chandelier and not a lantern for a coal mine, and such is my lot, but I wish I was pretty at least, as a chandelier ought to be.

I guess I am just really stressed about my applications. The poor daftar walay are nice and of little consequence, till the day they actually kick me out. I did pour my broken heart and my evil soul in these applications and now I am waiting(in addition to running after my recommenders) and checking gradcafe which is a source of useless stress. At this point all options look equally crap to me and I am rather fond of my hiding place with a blanket but I guess one has to do new things in life. People are getting calls for interviews and I really don't want to talk to anyone, they should rather reject me outright. It does not rankle and it will not rankle. The whole process takes up a lot of time, effort and money and since I do everything independently, I'm not sure what I could have done wrong again, although I'm dead sure something is amiss. Something has to be amiss. So I guess I focused too much on robustness and interpretability and not on NLP and definitely not on general ML and did not tailor my app to each faculty that I mentioned and then I talked about too many things, as I am apt to do. There was no personal touch in my statement, and my letters are of course going to be lukewarm, and then whatever work I have done is trash, pure and simple. And of course they know that I do not have the energy and the zest that is required for graduate school but then I never ever had it. Mostly my applications will not get read at all, as I do not have enough publications at respectable venues and then of course I ignored the TOEFL.

There are a thousand things that can go wrong, and in my case something critical inevitably does. Today I am probably going to get a dressing down in a meeting at work, but let's be stoic about it. My cognitive functioning is seriously, seriously impaired- I don't know if it will ever recovered- and while it is hard for people to discern, I know how many silly mistakes I make all the time. For a change, I have stopped reprimanding myself over it. What I need is a vacation and a stack of good literature and an infinite supply of lemonade. 

I just noticed that I changed my track from need eternal sleep to need a vacation. Ah well. Life surfaces at strange moments.

I think that empirically speaking, it would be a bit surprising if I got 'sorry to inform you' from all 14 places. One or two will probably relent. Not saying it out of secret hopes, but just on the basis of objective facts. I remember someone saying back in 2017 that she got in 1/10, and I wish I had that kind of sense in the applying process. 

I have to confess I rather like NLP. It does not even require maths, which is beyond my ability at this point. And I find the discussion around someone's compensation at A around working on multi armed bandits very charming, and if I made that kind of money I'd take an absolute vacation a month a year in Europe. But then I'd have to work hard, and I don't want that do I? Or even, can I?

No ambition, no drive, and no aim. I am fine this way, I think.

How does one preserve the life instinct, when it is this delicate? A question for a learned person. Only if I knew one.

Today's episode of being a loser

 My day hasn't formally started, unless you count my attempts at going back to sleep as valid signs of moving, breathing life, but I'm delighted to announce that darya kinaray is no longer the solid option it was. The delight does not stem from my misfortunes(I'm not as sadistic as that yet) but it is caused by the triumph of the I-told-you-so voice inside my head.

Things never go well, and this has been the only constant factor in my life. Maybe I should start depending on the meanness of fortune, because it will always be there for me, unlike people.  I can trust it.

My applications-I hope they are done by this point, I sent out the last one yesterday- cause me some amount of misery, but nowhere close to the maximum. I poured my heart and soul in them this time-whatever I have left of them at this point in life- and as usual it is going to be too little and too late. There are a thousand points I could have improved upon, and the application underneath all that is weak as usual. I don't know if I am going to talk about my dabbling in research today. Might as well.

Applications do demand a lot of time, and I fear I wrote a stupid statement as usual, did not tweak it according to the faculty/group, and then I am a boring candidate ultimately. Somewhere in March 2019 I sent a frantic email to W. about how I cannot get in anywhere, and what he would advise. Communication is futile and he replied in his matter-of-fact manner that if I did research with someone somewhere it would improve my chances. I had a nice cabin in ISE tower at that point and a job where all my bosses respected my analytical skills. By contrast, most people I work with now would rate me 3/10 on average. Spurned by the idea that I wanted what I wanted, I got up and ran here and there, and initially made some headway. People in academia thought I seemed a good candidate, but they wanted me to leave my job and work full time with them, in exchange for money that would be enough to cover my taxi fare and some cups of coffee, but not all. 

Buoyed up by the idea of being someone who could turn away everything-shudder of shudders, money-away, I got up and left, and was on my way to join a lab where I would have tweaked FPGA code to detect fish most likely when I was snatched up by an interesting character. I spent some interesting months, first in a basement and then on an upper floor, but interesting as you must know by now is a loaded adjective. Very loaded, to be precise. It was whirlwind and tenuous and unstable as such things tend to be. There was a new goalpost every monday night, and of course I don't thrive in unstable situations. The guy has a heart that is good in places, and I had a very fun visit to the northern area with the whole team, but power corrupts men like nothing else. His bipolar blew up and it was decidedly not fun. I witnessed people getting hurt and then my turn came. My parents were disappointed by my meekness; they thought they had taught me to stand up to the world.

What caused me no small amount of consternation was the fact that these people vastly underestimated me. Right now I am pretty dumb with an unbelievably short short-term memory and I can't parse a line of mathematical symbols to save my life, but people usually tell me that I need to work hard for a couple of years and maybe something will come out of it, a publication or something at the end, and it irks me no end. For one thing, I don't have that kind of time in my life. For another, I cannot work on a single thing for two years straight.  For the third, I find this insulting.

So I read up on stuff and did some work, but obviously it is of low quality, and hard work does not come naturally to me. My periods of stability are very rare and I cannot produce passable work without them. The mornings when I get up and feel at peace with the world come but occasionally; the evenings when I can devote all my attention to words are few and far-between. I do not have a solid recommender and thus I fear my applications are as stupid these year as they have been in 2017, 2018 and 2019 and going to meet the same fate, the unchanging and unrelenting wall of 'we are sorry to inform you'.  The money they cost me this time weighs heavily on my mind too, for I could have bought lots and lots of beautiful shoes with it, and that could have served some purpose. My applications all fall into the void without creating any impact anywhere.

I think I sent 14 this time. Not a very interesting experiment. I probably should stay away from gradcafe. I can not compete with the world and will never try in the future. But out of practical concerns, I have to chase my recommenders and make sure that they submit all my letters everywhere. It is no fun. I am sure they hate me at this point.

I lounge in my lawn in the morning these days, and have become a half baked cookie as a result. I can look forward to Sep, but pretty sure it is going to be a big disappointment as always.

Why I hate people

 In today's episode of insanity, we are going to examine a deep but important recess of our subconscious. I have always hated people, though never with a vengeance, just with a dull resignation. People who hate people with a passion usually have a concrete cause and source. They have been rejected by some specific representatives of the people. I have been rejected too, so much so that it seems to have been my sole purpose of existence. Mostly by grad schools and companies, sometimes by people, but I accept it philosophically and it is not the main cause of my grief.

Yesterday I got a 'We are sorry to inform you' from Max Planck. Going there would have been fun, but alas, they do not want me there. Also I forgot to fill out the application after creating an account and they are polite enough to regret this lapse of good manners on my part.

Not that it did not hurt for a moment. It did.

Back to the main point.

There are a few combinations that spark my hatred like nothing else. Greed combined with idiocy. Power combined with insensitivity. Lack of sophistication, although God knows I had been trying to get over it for two years. Injustice, particularly if it is directed towards someone else and not me. People have been unkind and unjust to me, and it does not rankle me personally. The world is stupid and lusting after short gains all the time, and if they try to trample me in the process it makes sense from an evolutionary point of view.

However, when people are unkind and selfish and unjust to others, often people who are weaker, it ignites my passion like nothing else. Currently I am living with a very very closed mind, because survival trumps everything else, but I strongly hate bearing a witness to something that is going on. It is cruel, greedy and selfish to the extreme, and it operates under the guise of principles and laws. I hate bigotry, I hate greed and I hate small mindedness. I hate provincialism and I hate lack of kindness towards humanity, so much so that I end up hating everyone and everything and am left with nothing but the void for company.

And it stares back.

Ah well, I look forward to solving inverse problems in the future and being content with life for a change. It is what it is, I am what I am, and this is fertile ground for a roaring comedy, instead of the tragedy I imagine myself to be in. See, I want to think of myself as the prima donna in some heart breaking tragedy, but I'm simply not beautiful and charming enough. 

Also, I kind of look forward to singing jinne mera dil lutya, darya kinaray, but who knows. Also look forward is a phrase that triggers me but with my verbal memory, there are infinitely many of these, and it can't be helped.

I don't know what it is with sugar and mental balance. It is clearly complex, and I can't figure it out for the life of me.

Techniques for survival

 Survival is necessary(until it isn't), and these days I have realized that it is sufficient. Sorry for the old school signal processing terminology, but can't be helped.

When survival becomes necessary, you need to switch everything else off and focus on it as being the only thing that matters. You'll need to cut off supply to other modules, and they will suffer, but the bigger picture has to be kept in mind.

Somehow I keep repeating the same things over and over again in my life, to no avail. They are never heeded by me, and I keep falling in the same traps. I know this is the definition of stupidity, but this is what I am.

I think mental balance is a fairly valid metric, and it can be estimated indirectly through a number of things. Mine has always been fragile, and it is seriously disturbed these days. Sure, things can be a lot worse in a number of areas, but the current state is pretty horrifying and demeaning. Lack of mental balance robs you of your personality, your drams and your life. In a way that is very real, yet can be communicated through neither texts nor poetry. The unhinging is so obvious that sometimes even I can't help noticing it, which leads to a strange feedback loop of doing something while knowing that a small, rational part of you will hate you for doing it. Self control is often touted as the solution to a lot of problems, but self control becomes exponentially harder in these kind of situations.

What constitutes identity is a fascinating debate, and there are few clear cut answers. However I am all too well aware of how something tangible or intangible can take over your life, transform you into something else and put you on an unprecedented path. In rare moments of rational clarity, you sit back and analyze your behaviour and feel that you no longer recognize this person. I guess addiction must feel somewhat like this.

The offshoots of events are strange, very strange indeed. I do a lot of things these days but the underlying lack of confidence is not even pathetic, it is scary. I have zero- absolutely zero-self esteem as a writer, as a woman, and as a worker. Everything I do, I do with a superhuman effort of will and after battling with an incessant storm of anxiety and fear. I shy away from speaking at the most important points and indulge in self sabotage to an astonishing degree. I am the only one who knows what it cost me to send in a bunch of stupid applications, to talk to people about them and to do all the work. Confidence was never ever my problem, but now I stubbornly believe that all the work I do is utter trash, even when it gets a stamp of approval from some valid person. 

And yes, I am mortally afraid of having to talk to someone about my work. As for talking about anything else, I have always been most stable on my own, carefully secluded in my own cocoon, away from the world. The world isn't going anywhere, and it will always welcome me back with open arms when I decide to get back to it. My cynicism is still there, but it has shifted its focus from some aspects of human relationships to some other. On some particularly horrible days, I have gotten by because some random person thought some random shair of mine was pretty. Sure, my eyes are dead, but I'll take the compliment about my poetry.

Sometimes I think the best thing for me would be to live the life of a monk till September. No one knows what is going to happen till September anyways and I'll have to be content with this amount of uncertainty.  No one even knows what will happen after Sep either, but how many things can I worry about?

 Of course, I am equally scared of all these time periods, but it can't be helped. However, personally I'd like the idea of catching the virus and having a valid reason to pass away. The constant struggle for mental balance is too much effort, and rarely worth it. Maths used to be a joy for life but I can neither read nor write a single equation now and turn out poorly written drafts on how to process text.

I could be solving inverse problems somewhere by next sep, but there are a lot of unknowns involved. Even if things work out, I'd be scared of the whole situation. Maybe I should read up on fear and see what it is and how it operates. Till then, living a completely isolated life might be the best thing for me to do, although I'm already fairly isolated. Once upon a time, I used to be my own person, and that got me through a lot of things, which is something very few people can say. Somehow an absolutely dark horizon gives hope to one through its sheer bleakness. If I was left alone to die in a desert, I would not beg, I would not cry, I would not whine. I would tighten my belt and get up and get going with a knife in my hand and courage in my heart and with a come-what-may attitude.

I like stories, and get stuck in them. The real life has little worth to me, and when I try to fit in I fail miserably. My experiments at fitting in and making myself acceptable have all ended horribly. I am not going to try this again.

Of dark, cold things

 Life is particularly cold and dark these days, but there are a few points to consider:

1. It has been quite cold and dark in the past. Case in point: December 2017, particularly towards the end. Same goes for Feb 2018. And July 2014. There must have been other such points in the more distant past, but age has muddled my memory. Oh yes, July-Aug 2013.

2. The future holds the possibility of even darker, colder points for sure. I must not let the possibility of their existence ruffle my feathers and disturb my sleep at night, but I must acknowledge the chance that things can be worse. Since this is an infinite domain and I am too familiar and too agile at navigating it, let us close this point and move on.

3. The uncomfortable truth is that I have an affinity for cold, dark things, and it is useless to deny this. They gravitate towards me, and I towards them. A lot of psychology can be invoked at this point, for which I'm not qualified enough.

4. It sounds a bit gollum-ish but for the life of me, I haven't found a reason against dark, cold things. Sure, everyone recoils instinctively from them, just like they instinctively recoil from me, and in the latter case it just shows that they have common sense, an instinct for self-preservation and a heapload of duaas from their mother. Still, no rational reason. Maybe because the dark cold isn't the ideal situation for life to thrive, but who needs life, and who needs thriving? Anyways these are broad generalizations and some kinds of life thrive under the mountains. In places deep, where dark things sleep. We all have to move past our biases when we grow up, at times.

5. Dark, cold things have a heart too, and it functions. Heart of darkness, heart of the mountain. People normally have trouble understanding this. This instinctive horror, the recoiling, the repulsion that they send out in very strong pulses- they impact them too. However, since it is cold and dark, the effect often isn't visible, and thus non-existent by the world's definition.

At this point, I have absolutely no sentiments of any kind to dole out. The only evidence (empirical, of course) is this: one never stays at the same point on a curve. This is true, and will always be true. I wish I could say this in German, because everything sounds profound in German, but I can't so angraizi will have to suffice.

The past is oddly comforting: you can always look back at horrible times, and get a feeling of warmth, because you powered through that point. Sure, you have a horribly wired brain, that keeps thoughts around forever, and makes very strange associations, and it primarily makes for averagely beautiful couplets that the public can swoon over, but it never lets the ghosts of days past escape. Sure, you have a very weird sense of time and live more in the past and the future than everything else, but documented evidence of the past that feels so different between now and then counts for something.

People and things come and go, and they are free to carry out their wishes. That is the way of life, and someone who can't handle that hasn't really grown up. It is what it is happens to be a very powerful argument for soothing one down and widening one's perspective. What you feel is a very personal, very subjective matrix through which you view a distorted picture of reality and the whole enterprise is rubbish.

We must be stoic, ourselves, and go back to the shadow which we came from. The outsides, the margins of life; they suit me, and I suit them. I try to fit in, again and again, and it just leads to massive heartbreak. Better be rational about it, from now on.

I iz submitted (and to be rejected)

 The theme of this year has been rejections from the amreeki continent, and it is going to continue. There is nothing to be alarmed or amazed about this, because trends continue. The USD-PKR rate does make me reflect on my life choices though, because I just spent an year's worth of dining-out fun on my applications, which feel less like applications and more like the cries of a lonely heart and soul at this point.

Life is somewhat stable, and there are a few things to look forward to, such as eating more stuff. At the culmination of this great but worthless project, I treated myself to some cheeni khana, which costed a fraction of a fraction of what my obsession did.

At this point, I like to think that I have become experienced and thus knowledgeable about the whole application process, but in reality the only thing in which I'm experienced is getting rejected from all sorts of entities. Literally all sorts. At this point I could write a book about their diverse features and facets, but some other day.

So my guess is that this time I'm going to get 2 accepts max, 1 on average. Not that it would be a bad state of affairs. Bad states of affairs depend entirely on the definition of bad and I've eliminated them from my life.

I do think I have insights into the application process, but like all my other thoughts, this one has no basis in reality either. The objective truth is, objective opinions are difficult to form, and the only feedback you can get on your application is in the form of a binary decision, and extrapolation from that is very hard to do.

This time I would like to think that I have an improved profile, but I can't say for sure. As is my fate, whatever I want is already highly coveted even if it be something ultra dumb, so there is the competing pool to consider. Honestly, at this point, I think I'm labouring under some Peter Pan syndrome, but what is the point of sticking to practical life? None whatsoever.

Races and competition are not my things, and I am never going to beat myself up over random crap. Whatever comes or goes is so pointless anyways and it is again very hard to keep track of all the comings and goings, so I'm giving up. 

I have a decent shot at a place darya kinaray and I should try to secure it, besides dreaming up of a life there. Dreams come easily to me, and they are infinitely more interesting and less cruel than the real world with real people. A woman can but dream.

I'm a firm believer in the tenet that if you see problems everywhere, it is you who is the problem. Ultimately there isn't even a problem; it is just the lack of compatibility among things. Recently I started thinking about forgiveness and it seems a very strange concept to me. What does it mean for a person to have forgiven another? I think it is just a way for the sufferer of a perceived injustice to feel good about themselves. The one who has inflicted the said injustice has already had their fun, and they are probably enjoying the fruits of their success at the current moment. It makes no difference to them what another person thinks. The other person is just trying to grasp at straws, and the concept of forgiveness is one such straw that society has supplied them with.

I need to work on my communication skills. They are beyond pathetic, but hopefully not beyond redemption.

I've always had extremely cynical ideas about everything, and life has just reinforced them. At least I can take solace in the fact that I might be slow and dumb at 30, but I was wise and sharp at 16.

I iz accepted

 Kinda old news, but whatever.

Henceforth, all my shairs are going to be dedicated to AnonReviewer1.