frustration

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Rant Against Rants

We rant. That’s what we do the best. Not listening, not reading, but ranting. That’s what we do the best. So allow me to hitch a ride on this bandwagon. I seek your permission to rant about rants.

We rant for everything. We rant against everything. We rant for rant against everything. We rant against rant against everything. We rant on clichéd topics. Topics that have been burning us for decades. Topics that have burned the victims for decades. Yet we don’t douse the fires, we just rant about its devastation.

One of the few reasons I still use Facebook is to read interesting articles. I have been pruning my feed like a Gardener prunes the bushes. Still I find a lot of junk. Just in time to end the year, I found this great app called pocket which is like a Facebook for sharing articles. I hope I do a better job avoiding junk there.

So this new year I resolve to gradually shift my sources of articles to platforms other than Facebook. Let’s hope I am successful.

Have a happy new year!

(As an apology to everyone, here is a website with lots of positive news)

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Kill Perfectionism

I love engineering. It has been by dream since my childhood days to be an engineer. To create something so perfect that it is almost metaphysical. I used to build bridges using twigs and leaves in my garden after the rains and watch the ants pass through them for hours.

I have no illusions about the works I create: coding, writing, presentations, some hardware with stepper motor which turns left when I press a button or the bridges which I build using twigs. Most of them just work, sometimes barely. But once in a while I would create something which would really make me proud. Not even close to perfection I agree, but decent enough to keep me going.

What bothers me is not the failure itself, but the indolence that breeds inside me due to the fear of failure. The procrastination that gets exhibited because I don’t want to create something worse than the last jewel I managed to create.

I am good at making things that work. I am good at finding the problems and fixing bugs. Maybe I should just stick to what I am good at. Maybe I should just build the foundation and let someone else build the highway.

There is a direct co-relation between my inactivity and the number of unread mails in my inbox. I just swept my inbox empty. I hope the causation follows.

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I Think I Lost Something

Having a passion and having a crush have a lot of similarities between them. Both keep you obsessed and if you are a thinker like me, you will be preoccupied with these thoughts the whole day. You think about it, you dream about it. You want to do anything to get it. You feel anxious. You feel scared. You feel miserable. And sometimes you even feel serene and confident. Not a moment spent away from what you think you ought to do passes away without guilt.

At times I had both, but now I have none. Somewhere down the line, I lost both of them. And this is what this post is about, a rant about my passivity.

Someone once wrote for me, “you could have been an outrageous piece of awesomeness, but you really have to light a fire under your ass”. True, but I believe this laziness can be cured only when I.catch hold of a passion, a motivation to get going. I know I am past the age of having childish infatuations, but a passion is something I yearn for desperately.

This is to hoping I find one soon!

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frustration or something like that

Past two days have been a lot frustrating for me and so this is the safest method I could think of to ease the pressure. I am working on a project which is critical to a friend of mine and the adversary I am up against is our very own IITG network.

To put it in layman’s terms, I have a remote server on which files are supposed to be edited and I log onto it through my laptop in my room. And more often than rare when I perform an edit, the cursor stops blinking for 5 seconds and and it takes maybe 30 seconds to save the file, and add to it another 30 seconds to refresh the page on a web browser and see the results. You see, our lan is a time sharing network. Our laptops get bursts of time to send data, which get stored at the routers till the routers get bursts of time, to forward that data to another router, which again requires bursts of time to send that data to the remote server. And this bursts of time is based on some probabilities. And so I was a victim of heavy traffic congestion along with very screwed up odds in favour of me. I felt like I was playing a game. A game where I was being provided with bursts of time to finish off as much of code as possible before the cursor stopped blinking again.

There are an uncountable number of things that we desire in our lives. Some important, some might not be so important. Some we get, but for some we are not so lucky. But we must understand that each one of us wants the things to go in our own way. And I choose to believe that the guy above tries to take a maximal subset of all the wishes of all the souls on this earth. Considering the mathematics involved, its a monstrous amount of job, and obviously each one of us will never get satisfied. If I really like something, I can get crazy for it. But as for the end result is concerned, I just need to let it go. I even choose to believe that this guy above is recording my efforts somewhere, anywhere. Maybe its not true but believing so makes life a lot easier.

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Fighting A Lost Battle

There are uncountable battles which I have lost. And there are as many which I have won. But not until the results were out that I could enjoy the sweetness of victory or the bitterness of defeat. But this one is different, a lot different.

For an optimist, the words goals and deadlines are divine in nature. They keep him on his toes, they are like checkpoints to be cleared in the journey of life, and without them his life would be just a stretch of a long road with no bumps and no turns making his journey unbearably monotonous. Whatever the result may be, never in his journey does he think that he would miss the goal, shoot off the deadline.

There are some battles in life, or maybe a very few of them, where you know for sure that defeat in inevitable, conditions favor the adversary and victory is just a fool’s hope. You are too tired, not because your muscles lack strength, not because you are exasperated of those infinitely many challenges thrusted upon you, but because you don’t have any motivation to keep you going. But still you wont quit, because you believe in miracles, a faint voice in some dark corner of your heart assures you of victory, and this voice however weak it might be, becomes the basis of your faith although everything around you is announcing your defeat in its own shrieky voice. You know that when the reality descends, it will slap you so hard that you will think a hundred times before committing to any further challenges. But that’s the beauty of an optimist, you still go on.

So I am ready to surge ahead with just a handful of soldiers, against the unsurmountable enemy. Instead of fear I feel serene, tranquil. There is nothing I can do except for fighting so hard, that my efforts are remembered forever. I have got just one chance to show what I have got, either I resign to my fears and let my feelings, my spirits plunge deep into the abyss, let them be lost into the oblivion or I muster enough courage and fight in such a graceful manner that my feelings and spirits cast an everlasting impression. For me there is no option to quit. And who knows, maybe the angels bless me and the miracle does happen.

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The Lost Mango

My eyes were set on it. The mango at the top of the tree. It seemed so ripe, so sweet. People told me I couldn’t climb that height and I should choose the lower ones. People warned me that it might even be rotten. I even heard someone saying that if I somehow manage to climb so high, as soon as I try to hold it, it would just fall down and I would loose it.

Nonetheless, I had to give a try. I managed to climb the height. I reached the top of the tree. And as I tried to touch my prize, I lost it, for it went crashing into the ground. I was shattered. People said it was just a mango and I could always get another one. But I knew it was not just that, just a fruit, it was something more. It was something my heart was set on. It was my desire. And it pained because with it went away a piece of my heart.