psyche

I am sitting here. It’s somewhere between 4AM today and 4AM tomorrow. I don’t really know what I’m doing. Great towers of papers and file rustle proudly around me as I hunch over my computer. It glows and hums with life, staring me in the face and daring me to do something. I won’t do anything. I hear clocks ticking. They don’t stop. Up, down. Zero, one. High, low. Tick, tock. It’s some of the best music I’ve ever heard. At my back stands the shadow and he tells me to stop whining. I should listen. He is some facet of my hidden mind. I hate him but am somehow glad that he can’t die. He’s the only part of me that won’t. He says “Farhan!” and the gravity is too much so I don’t look up. I won’t ever look up! He tells me that I should just focus. I am smart but not applying myself. Is this true? No, I don’t think so. He does. Optimist to the last.
My problem is trivial now but I consider it agitatedly as it slowly begins to threaten to compress my brain until I can’t think straight and I simply expire. It is like some crushing weight. There is another shadow. Not the optimist this time, but an entirely less opinionated being. It is fact. It is the result that speaks for itself. The test score that needs no explanation. Surely there is no need for the backstory to each of these failures? I had neither disadvantage nor handicap. It was fair. I failed. So the shadow is fact and failure. It stands unsmiling but nods when it recognises me. It ticks like the clock. I will always fail. I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again now: it is an old friend. It stands fast beside the Don’t Whine Shadow. Fail Shadow and Don’t Whine Shadow. Freudian glimpses of who I am. “Don’t give up on me,” I hear myself scream, “for I am not going to fail all the time! I am happy! I will achieve something!”. Teenage angst or not, I feel very bad. Not depressed.
I understand without prejudice or emotion. I have no fear of this. It just makes me twinge a little with sadness; not emotional sadness but some strange intellectual sadness like that which one feels when one sees the organ fail. “What a shame.” That sadness. It’s strange enough to make me stop and cringe momentarily as days rush past. I remember feeling connected, but now I don’t. I don’t know if I’m just uncertain or if there’s something beyond it. It doesn’t matter. I am absolutely committed to the truth that I will never be good enough. Whether this is because I think I never will be or because I am simply genetically inferior, I will never know.

I will try. This constant emo-ism is beginning to grate on me as much as it is on you.

Pax

P.S. All you cunts out there, know that a battle will come. Yes. Count on it.

I’m not sure what it is. There are few people who are very good at a game but choose to resist the allure of profundity. Most competitors will begin to become so entwined in their art that they become ideal gamers and really don’t have to win all the time - they learn and adapt - but as a result of this, they do win. The few that keep the “play to win” attitude develop differently, training with demented intensity and becoming elitist to the core. I prefer this approach, to be honest. It is simpler and clearer, even if it’s less genuine - there’s no genius-level understanding, just hard work and foresight.

Perhaps this is a reaction to my own major malfunction (apart from having a small penis and being a nerd) - I’m not very good at maths. Granted I’m good enough and will probably not be really bothered by it in terms of employment or interpersonal life etc. but I have a cringing feeling that I know is accurate which tells me that it will bother me my whole life. Perhaps I’m just lazy. I don’t know what it is. What takes other people seconds to understand takes me minutes. Systems which I have interest in confuse me unendingly. It’s infuriating and cruel; I am just too stupid. I think I’ll make the best of it and on the surface it’ll look like I’ve conquered it and am happy to suck at chess and connect 4 and be unable to make simple arithmetical calculations as fast as the average eight-year-old, but tragically I don’t think I will ever forgive myself.

Pssht. Where did I go wrong? I don’t know. I’m not so bad that it’ll impede my life but it’s bad enough to hold me back from any kind of excellence. There is now nothing that I can say “Yeah, that’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at and what I’ll always be good at.” I don’t think there ever was.

I also think something else is wrong; sometimes when I see shadows moving or trees rustling in my peripheral vision, I think they’re people. Not like, I stop and consider the motion and think “Hmm, it might be a person…” but my gut reaction - what my brain immediately decides - is that it’s a person or animal or something, because I immediately freeze and have to look round etc.

I don’t know what it is. I don’t think I ever will. I predict I’ll always be stupid enough to fail to achieve really remarkable things, but work hard and have enough intelligence to seem like a hardworking unintelligent person or a lazy and slightly intelligent person.

So when you feel my contemptible loser’s gaze at your back, know that I am not ignorant. I am consciously aware of my failure. With slow applause I praise those of you with natural talent or the willpower to really be excellent. I, it seems, am a total fraud. My success is isolated and requires really hard work. I don’t know why it is!

Every part of me is disgusted by what I am; there are people with situations so many hundreds of times worse than my own that I cannot even begin to express my dismay at what a self-pitying wretch I am.

I wish I knew what it was all about! I don’t think I’ll gratify myself by descending into depression or anger. I’ll even smile, look: *smiles*. This is absurd. For fuck’s sake. If in months or years I look back on this and think “Ah, at least I predicted that my stupidity would persist in ruining my life like a crayon up my nose… I must’ve been somewhat intelligent…”†

Also, fuck.

Pax

† Hey, if I can’t fucking make bad jokes, I can’t do anything, right?

Note to future self:
Work hard, you fool! There’s a chance your intellectual inadequacy can be overcome! This is no fiction, where people are strange like you! This is life! Be a man!

It’s been fucking unlucky with governments. It’s fucked. Good luck to free speech.

Pax

I drank a shitload of coffee today and now have a motherfucker of a headache. However, the program is almost ready! It should be finished by tomorrow at the latest, but hopefully within the next hour or so. I’m just compensating for aircraft being able to fly in the damage() function and writing the final updated setRecs() function. Everything else is awesome. I might go through and clean up (”refactor”) the code afterwards - if it’s not too fucking late, which it might be, fuck the fuck … fuck. Sorry, headache.

I must commend the makers of Taco HTML Edit and TextWrangler. I didn’t think there could ever be a Mac program to rival Notepad, but both of these fucking beat the shit out of it.

Pax

Maybe this is why I’m not a people person but again I am highly annoyed by people doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, or in this case choosing the right worldview for the wrong reasons.

Take, say, Elliot or Richard Dawkins or Dr Zetie. They are firmly atheist and secularist because they have considered the problems of faith and religion and have reached a logical conclusion. Now take several other people: they champion an atheist view because it’s easy to defend and it’s still countercultural. This makes me annoyed. If at some point they dropped the mind-melting arrogance and superiority complex they gain from touting such statements as “Religion was invented to control people.*” (Great, now stop telling people who worked that out when they were eight and go find some zealots to cleanse, you attention-whoring piece of… human) and perhaps sit down and really think hard, they could be nice!

Of course in Dawkins’ case as he said (paraphrasing): it’s okay to be arrogant because he’s right. But it’s not if you’re just being a twat and utilising some of the most clear and beautiful philosophies in the world for fucking social fodder, so FUCK OFF.

Pax

* Controlling people is difficult and annoying - so probably to make money off people, not to control them (although controlling them is a natural extension of making money off them in the most efficient way possible [cf consumerism])

Before I begin, I’ll just clarify the situation: at some point in my youth my grandfather gave me some pirate copy of Tiberian Sun which I played with interest. It felt like quite an odd game and I didn’t really think of it as part of the mainstream gaming media. I saw Firestorm in some shop one day and made my uncle buy it. It had a manual! I began to suspect that this elusive “Westwood Studios” company was in fact well-funded and professional. Then I bought Red Alert and to top it all off, Red Alert 2 came out. I didn’t buy it but my friends did and then they bought Generals etc. and then after massive disc loss, I bought The First Decade and preordered Tiberium Wars. So here I am.

Right. Now, I think the reason I prefer Tiberian Sun to, say, Red Alert 2 (which is dementedly fun) is that it’s a bitch. No superweapon disabling! Retarded Harvester AI! Veins! It makes it hard to play. The Hunter-Seeker - so annoying BUT it kicks everyone out of apathy and says “Look, play well or die.” The EMP and Firestorm walls give enemy tank/plane rushes and missiles the finger. The tactical possibilities were just great. Conversely, Red Alert 2? Race to build superweapon. If superweapons are disabled, race to build 5 Prism Tanks or 5 Apocalypses. Assuming you’re not a dumbo, you can just go and win.

I wonder what Tiberium Wars is like. In a strange way, I don’t really want to find out.

Pax

11:00 - Ah! Today I will be very productive, yes. Such a day!
12:00 - I like the internet.
17:00 - Ah, … shit.
19:00 - TV?
00:00 - Wikipedia is good, no?
06:00 - Will sleep soon.
07:00 - Soon!
10:00 - Eh!? Why’d you wake me up?

Alas.

Pax

Our class did the German mock reading yesterday and writing (the 150-word one) today. Both were somewhat disastrous, but useful as exercises - I will definitely know what I don’t know. The Public Schools thing is on Thursday. We have to meet Mathieu at Hammersmith Station at 07:10. At least we miss school*.

I am now actually on the verge of insanity. I need a new computer, I need a new Command & Conquer game and I need to find some work experience in IT. The fleeting happiness of making up humorous and usually apocryphal anecdotes to entertain people or beating the crap out of Core 1 specimen and past papers is now gone.

Speed me to my death!

* Said in vox imitating that of the Flak Trooper in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 when he says “At least I have job.” That great man! As I send him to his death, he consoles himself.

“At least I have job.”

Truly one of the greatest men on Earth.

Pax

For whatever reason, I choose to fail

UPDATE: About self-depreciation/deprecating and fake modesty - perhaps I’m just bitter that people took them away from me. Nevertheless, it’s better this way.

Pax

As the creation of this group hints at, the iPod/RAZR generation of form-over-function has infested Apple and is buying Apple computers for no reason other than their social meaning. This disgusts me. These people probably configure their systems so badly that any advantage that could be gained by use of Mac OS is lost and they might as well be running Windows!

If you’re an Apple noob, I suggest you subscribe to MacUser (I’m talking UK here, I don’t know about the US one), learn about UNIX, NeXT and Linux from Wikipedia and ditch the iPod in favour of something more great.

Pax