Category: Outlook

continuation of part 1.
“What can you say about a twenty-five year old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. The Beatles. And me.”–Oliver Barrett IV, (Erich Segal Love Story)

Love Story is one of the few movies that I’ve seen at least 20 times, and that still makes me cry uncontrollably. I’ve all but given up on finding true love, so it especially hurtful for me that what is denied to me is so harshly stolen from oliver and jenny.
There’s this one scene where oliver and jenny fights because oliver gets mad at jenny for trying to thaw the ice between oliver and his dad. This is their first major fight. Oliver runs through the campus like a mad man trying to find jenny, the music sets the scene and the actor playing oliver delivers. The whole thing ends with oliver returning home, finding jenny by the steps of their apartment, as he is about to say sorry jenny lifts her and and stops him, saying “Love Means Never Having To Say I’m Sorry.”
That’s preety much how I feel about decisions in my life. I try to live consciously. I try to be self aware of the different things happening in my life. I try to make the best decisions possible in any situation that I am in the middle of. I weigh every variable and try to control for variables that affect my decisions such as, how does the effect on people I love affect my decision. I weigh everything and in the end pull the trigger on most decisions in my life with no regret. I have nothing to be sorry for, any decision I made I made knowingly and wholeheartedly. Somethings may have not entered my calculations. I may have overlooked or underestimated things and probably made a better decision with more time and introspections. But in life time is limited and your information is always imperfect. You will never make any decision if you let yourself be paralyzed by analysis, fear of the unknown, or the uncertainty of anything that can be considered trailblazing.
I have many quirks most of which are common enough not to engender any reaction outside of boredom. If I would fancy vanity, the expression of this would be how much I think about anything I do. The only times I am spontaneous would probably be in moments of anger, and those moment are seldom, but bunched up, yet occur in long intervals. I never allow myself to feel sorry for me and in turn any one. I believe that within the framework of God, we have free will and in that free will we have the power to shape our lives. I will never concede that we are powerless. I will never concede that our nation, that my/our lives are hopeless. I look around me and in those fleeting moments where a narcissist looks beyond himself I see only three kinds of people. One are those who are afraid, always blaming someone else, the government, his/her situation, his/her surroundings, Two the borderline, not knowing much of anything and yet their hope lies in the fact that they are still not within that negative self-feeding cycle of self pity, that most people of type One are, Three are the people who have No Apologies/Never Going To Say I’m Sorry Types.
They see the injustice in this world, the pain people go through and probably the narcissistic nihilism so prevalent in modern society and yells “UP YOURS”. The are the men and women who cannot be stopped. These are the people who may not eventually win but would never be losers. These are the people who say “Why can’t I dream?”,”What makes me different from people who looked up saw the moon and would not stop till man has finally touched its surface”,the person who do not doubt “That everyday is the real Time Of Your Life” .
I walk the streets and see a nation’s youth whose ambition is to go to greener pastures. To find a better life. I see them. Some of them are my friends. Some are most dear to me. But when I talk to them my hear cringes. I see the youth of our nations without heart, without courage, without resolve. I see people foreign to the simple truth that you can succeed anywhere, a nation whose greatest ambition is to not have to work hard.
(This is ironic for I am the one without work. I am an invalid telling working people they fear hard work. I would like to reply but this is not the post.)
For what is it that most people use as a reason for their flight, “For My Children To Have A Better Life.”
But what you are actually saying is that I am a shallow person beholden to the consumerist dictums of the modern senseless world. I want to raise my child in places where I am second class citizen, working 2-3 jobs just so that I could make LVMH or Mercedes, richer. I have no dreams whatsoever and my children would probably never be as successful as the son and daughters of Chinese,Japanese, and Korean immigrants. I just raised them to be cowards and slackers and If by some miracle of circumstance my child succeeds I would make it seems that he/she was a genius with boundless energy and charm, not the persistent and hardworking person that he or she probably is, Why because people from the Philippines never understand hardwork, they understand illicit trade, winning the lottery, marrying a rich husband/wife, but hard work, anyone who succeeds through hard work is suspect. (Why?This is for another longish ranting post)
This wasn’t supposed to be written like this, but I can either write following my mental outline or I can write the way that makes my blood pressure rise and Thank God I’m Alive!
Would you ever choose otherwise?
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
— Teddy Roosevelt

I’ve been a very boring person this past two years. You could compress all I’ve been trying to say with just a few words.

• Passion
• Love
• Self Awareness
• Self Expression
• Reality

Since working for a start-up (My first job actually!), afterwards discovering the likes of Paul Graham and other Start-up Envangelist.(I know I am weird I joined a tech startup before being brainwashed and fully converted to the startup way of thinking). Got Fired and depressed. Got depressed enough to go working for a traditional but still small to medium software company! Got Fired again. Now trying my hand in Cooperative/startup hybrid.
I am simply unemployable.(But this is for another post.)
What I was really going to say before the mini autobiography is that in trying to be true to yourself, in trying to find who you really are, you are bound to do things to feel sorry for but love means never having to say I am sorry. It is selfish, yes it is extremely selfish but the fact is it is true.
We must never intentionally hurt anyone but there is a line between trying not to hurt anyone and doing what is best for you. When that line has to be crossed err in the side of finding yourself. Err in the side of your happiness. It happens often enough but the fact is you cannot apologize for trying to be happy. You can be sorry for how it affected them but never for what you did! Never!
more to follow…..

follow up to : On Betrayal
I was thinking about my previous post on betrayal and I realized I can take it in a another direction. So here goes.
Sometimes when your doing something and it contradicts what you are saying may be you are not betraying yourself but actually trying to learn. What I am trying to say is maybe you just do not realize what you are doing contradicts what you profess to believe in. May be in some alternate chain of actions what you are doing does not really contradict what wou are saying. maybe, maybe.
But, what I believe is actually happening is that you are failing to listen to what your inner self is telling you.
When you have such a tough time getting yourself to go to work, your innerself is telling you something.
When you are more energetic at your hobby or side project after working a 9-5, your innerself is telling you something.
When all you can do is just smile whenever someone is talking, listening but finding yourself wondering about what you are going to do next,your innerself is telling you something.
When all you seem to do is laugh when you are with them and you are suddenly a different person, your innerself is telling you something.
When you can’t seem to shake the image of her face and how she slants her head whenever she talks, your innerself is telling you something.
When it hurts so much that you cant seem to find anyone who understands how much pain you are feeling, your innerself is telling you something.
I think that we have always had that inner compass, that inner self that we just cant lie to. We go through life first having no innerself because when we were young we did what we felt doing and because we knew little evil we weren’t that bad, And as we grew and got a little smarter, developed a little slyness and knew more evil things or maybe learned somethings to fear or learned to be more insecure we separated with the true us that lies within, that part of our being who we cannot lie to, where we can show no pretenses just the truth.
This is the innerself I speak about. This is the innerself we must be more aware of, for I would make you a bet that if you did listen more to it you’d be happier by far!