Good Weather

The weather's amazing today .... now I understand what is meant by a "sunny disposition".
I was being stressed out by life, but the sunny weather has kindly disposed of all my troubles for me
I now have a sunny disposition =)

Z-test and T-test

Which one do I use!?!

Stuck in the middle of a tedious assignment,
In despair, my tortuous soul cry out and lament!
My brains cells all run dry
What juice left have I
To crawl to freedom, from all these torment!

Overcame many a conundrum I can attest,
None as troublesome upon me as this one behest,
Utterly confused, confounded!
Speechless and dumbfounded!
Who the devils invented the Z and T-test!

Bravely I took on my darkest trepidation
I rush forward with all my indignation!
With fury like never before
A pen from my bag case I tore
And began on the nastiest multiplication!

Attempting to solve this blasted mathematic
I end up ranting, foaming, oh how pathetic
Falling like others on this path
To overcome his demonic math
Laying in defeat, I have become but another statistic

Living wills and the will to Live

There is a huge controversy going on right now about whether a certain individual should be kept alive. It is strangely saddening how the case, which is being fought on sacred grounds of the sanctimony of human life, has consecrated the very dignity of the individual that had been the sole purpose of its genesis. The whimsical removal and reinsertion of the feeding tube has eroded any semblance of respect for the soul that might still be inhabiting the greatly diminished physical body.

The Will to Live is universal....nobody has a right to take away somebody else's Will to Live. Certain countries or political systems take a slightly different stand, preferring to remove individuals whose continued existence in the society threatens the Lives of its other citizens.

How about the Will to Die? Shouldn't someone have as much authority to decide his own death as much as his own life?

Which side of the contention you are on says something about what you think. Are the rights of the individual above the State's? The guardian's? Are there universal rules that govern human life which surpasses law and can only be administered by religion?

How much you are willing to fight for the side you are on says something about how you feel. Maybe you think that individuals can choose their own way to live, and end their lifes. Or maybe your parents, being the people who gave you life in the first place, should be the only ones who have the power to choose to take it away. Or maybe humanity was never given the rights nor the power to its own life.

My own take, is that individuals should be allowed to live the way they want to, and be allowed to die with dignity, if that is what they wish for as well. What if I end up in such a tormented and wretched state of existence that I'm better off dead than alive?

Its a bizarre and ironical thing, this Living Will. A living will , a document cast in paper and ink, to cement an individual's decision to enforce his Will to Die.

Diet Coke

Drink Diet Coke.
I am drinking one right now.
I have been drinking Diet Coke all the time since my girlfriend introduced me to this marvelous drink two years ago.

I love the drink.... in fact, I am hopelessly hooked on it - call it an obsession or an addiction. There are weeks when I drink Diet Coke everyday. There are days when I drink more Diet Coke than water. There are days when my daily liquid intake is solely comprised of Diet Coke.

Before I go on any further, I must say that I am in no way affiliated with the Coca-Cola bottling company or any of its subsidiaries. My shameless repitition and promotion of the words "Diet Coke" should be taken as it is - an oral obsession.

I think that Diet Coke represents the epitome of human self indulgence. The perfection of a product after years of intense research and development. Come on, think about it. Here is something that you can have as much of as you want, doesn't cost you very much at all, and has ZERO calories. Zilch. No guilt. Nothing wrong if you drink 50 gallons a day.

Now, this is the first time in human history in which an obsession can be carried to its extreme without that itchy and bothersome feeling that you might be doing something wrong. I don't waste time; I can continue working on my project when drinking it ... in fact it IS supposed to help me stay awake. I don't get fat from drinking it. Truth is, I can drink at the same rate that my kidneys can work to keep pumping water out from my system. And I have pretty good kidneys - two of them too.

Isn't this really strange? This phenomenom seems to run contrary to all that I have been taught in life so far. Everything has a trade-off. You eat that one more Ben and Jerry's ice cream, and you are going to have to run more later to burn it off. You play one more hour of playstation, and you will have to sleep an hour later to finish up your homework.

Something doesn't make sense though. It bothers me that I can keep doing something without guilt. It bothers me that I gulp the liquid down in all its black glory, and it leaves me clear as water. (I am a living water filter!) It bothers me that you can find the word "DIE" in Diet Coke. There's something else that's making me feel edgy.

And then it struck me: It bothers me that I am free.

Free from guilt. Free from calories. Free from rules that dictate that I have to watch what I do to avoid the consequences. (It's a strange coincidence that the word "Diet" refers to a routine that one engages in, and is used today in Japan to refer to its legislature). A small victory for me, a mere and transitory existence, against the mandatory rules that governs us! Every drink I consume is an outright stake against people who say that there is a price for everything. Equivalent trade? Bah! Who says that an obsession is necessarily bad?

There is still the possibility that someone might discover that Diet Coke causes cancer.
Till then, I will drink my Diet Coke.
Cheers.

No right men left

I happened to read this post on a fellow blogger's page, and his whining mood caught on, and I feel the itch to complain the entire morning. In fact, I feel so much like complaining for the rest of today that I feel compelled to reduce this disease into words on this blogging page. The bothersome feeling is still there, but I feel more in control being able to write it down (I suspect that was why the fellow blogger did that in the first place), and it always helps when you share your crap with other poor fellas who happened to stumble across your blog (this inconsiderate behavior exhibited by the fellow blogger was what brought me here, whining, in the first place).

Well, so without further ado, let me get started on this statement that is often heard amongst the teeming group of teenagers and young adults looking for love. Many of the womenfolk believe that there is no right men left (the male corrollary of this is "there is no pretty girl left in my neighborhood"), and that all the good men have suddenly disappeared for good. One even wonders if the good men ever existed.

A proposition I have, strange as it might sound, is that the male species is a bunch of people who are born with the innate ability to apply economic principles, except that for his case, it applies to the women folk. He seeks to maximize his well being by appropriately fine tuning his behavior with the external world, so that he is always at the highest point on his yield curve. Somehow there is always a trade off in this kind of situation, and in this case, a male's "bastardiness index" increases the further up he goes along his yield curve.

Being nasty makes a guy happy. Being totally inconsiderate and oblivious to other people satisfies his cavemen longings. And hence, a male seeks to achieve the highest bastardiness index that he possibly can in relation to his capacity. That is a lot of fluff. Lemme try to clean my words up. In other words, a male tries to satisfy his desires as much as possible, and this entails doing many nasty things to the people around them. The difference is, some males have an ability to do much nastier things and still get away with it, while there are others who are so far down on the curve that doing even a single nasty thing is completely out of the picture. (Scold my girlfriend? I will NEVER do something like that!)

Nice guys belong to the second group of males (that's me). They are there not because they want to. They are there because they cannot afford to be anything else other than being nice. They are restricted by the effect of diminishing returns with each nasty thing they do.

Now. What does this capacity, this ability to get away with doing nasty things refer to anyway? What kind of males have this thing you call capacity? This is where the catch 22 is. Physically attractive males, materially well endowed males, rich males, males who can sweet talk themselves out of any situation involving females..blah blah blah, and the list goes on. Hold on, you say, isn't this the kind of dream partner that females have been looking for? There you go, males seek to maximise the amount of nasty things that he can do to you. Going after an attractive male just opens an invitation for more nasty stuff.

Womenfolk might then ask : Where do I look for those nice guys who are at the bottom of the curve then? Being at the bottom of the curve, they do not look anything like the guy of your dreams. In fact, just throw that entire misconception away. They don't own flashy cars, which is why you don't notice them. In fact, they hide out in the most out-of-the-way neighborhoods to defend themselves against the onslaught of capitalistic males chomping on their territory. Some neighborhood where females don't usually visit.

Which is why there are no pretty girls in my neighborhood.

Cutting Hair

My head feels a lot lighter! Somehow that makes me feel really airy and happy.

Just finished cutting my hair, all by myself. A ritual that I have been engaging in, grudgingly, over the last four years that I was in the States. I do not proclaim to be an expert on haircutting, and my eyes being in the same head whose hair I am trying to cut certainly complicates the whole process somewhat. In fact, it makes it nearly darn impossible to cut any portion of my hair thats not directly in front of my eyes.

Yes ... but why put myself through the torture of cutting my own hair then? (or for that matter, to put my friends through the torment of having to put up with my weird hairdo after every makeover session?) The reason is, I adamantly proclaim: there is almost definitely something about the shape of my skull that makes haircutting by any professional in the US an impossible task.

Its a strange claim, but I do feel certain protrusions on my head that don't feel like they should be there. And my haircutting experience so far with American hairdressers have been horrendous, really horrendous. My friends around me never hesitate to tell me that I would have been better off if I hadn't gone for THAT haircut. And that is a real pain.

Besides, the price that hairdressers charge in the States is much too high ... much too high for a haircut that even I think that I can do without. Speaking of which, almost everything, except electronics, in the US is overpriced. How can a poor student like me afford to have my hair cut every month! I have to save up my precious cash for that Ipod which I have been eyeing for months!

And so I cut my own hair. It is easier to blame my disastraous haircut on my inability to see what I am cutting ("oh! i wouldn't have been able to see that! thank you Jason!") than to blame it on a hairdresser I paid $30 to.

Ah yes, and this feels good. My head feels lighter. My wallet doesn't feel lighter though, and I am $30 closer to buying that Ipod.

A Question

The time is right, for a musing. A musing for amusing myself, and a pain to all those who are reading this. The subject of today's musing is motivation, a topic brought up by my dear friend Eugenia who broached the subject of why certain people have it, and why others, well, don't.

My instinct was to look inside myself for the answer. (A rather biased view, but it saves me the trouble of having to justify what I can claim to be mere opinions.) Why am I so fiercely motivated at times, and why am I so strangely placid at other times? I found my answer rather quickly - I am but an emotional animal, chained and dragged by my whimsical feelings. Something beyond my control, it seems.

I felt pretty satisfied with my answer, but something continued to irk me, and it took me longer than I should to figure out why. How can something (my emotions), whose origins lie within me, be outside my influence? My ever-relentlessly-self-contradicting self came up with another question in answer to that: by whose law am I supposed to be able to control things that originate within me? I grow nails, and I digest my sushi which I had for lunch, but I am as successful in controlling them as I am in controlling the weather.

Alas, it seems, and I can see why my life is a mini-tragedy of sorts. It is depressing enough that there's things out there that I can do absolutely nothing about; it is absolutely terrifying that I am a slave to the very vessel that I am in! It tells me how to feel, and with my genetic material, I was destined to look this way no matter what!

I looked around desperately for a way out, and it seemed that there might be some hope for me in Buddhist teachings. The way in seems to be the way out. A rigorous journey into the within might bring me closer to the bigger meaning that I am too small to comprehend.

To be continued......