You

You have taught me that it is all right to hate people on the basis of their not being able to reach your standards.

That a brilliant mind can get away with an unjust act because it is condoned, if not encouraged.

That it is perfectly acceptable to disregard other people's sleepless nights, calloused fingers, weakened immune systems, and dreams. 

That it is valid to waste people's time by not giving credit to the fruits of their labor.

That the best way to teach others is to punish them for not being enough.

That the right thing to do is to give up easily on the people who are striving and who are in greater need of your guidance.

That it is fair to compare and to treat people discriminately.

That if someone is down, it is wise to push him further to the ground.

That there is nothing wrong with capriciously changing one's mind and deciding to deny others the hope of doing better.

That one should be feared and heartless in order to prove a point. 


This test of character called law school has offered many lessons. Thank you for showing me which ones are rotten.

Getting Another Person

Whoever likes questions left unanswered and explanations left hanging, we should definitely have a quick chat over cake and tea. I need your help.

There comes a [very rare] moment when you will just decide to stop figuring things out and asking why. And it will get you weak. For a while, you will think to yourself how poor a being you humans are, with all your limitations - those caused by virtue of your being human, and those you cause among yourselves. The latter type is more frustrating. It comes in the form of miscommunication, lack of consideration, or simply the inability to give a damn.

What's separating you from the information you want is this imaginary line that's just too broken it can't bridge the gap between what you demand and what the other person can supply. It's when it's hard to get your point across, when you're deliberately deprived of an explanation, or when the one you're talking to is indifferent to your dire need of that piece of information. Surely there'll be attempts to fix that line. You can clearly repeat what has been said, or even force an answer out, but the thing with limitation is that you are placed in a situation wherein your ways of dealing with it are themselves limited. The line is essentially broken. The least you can do is to minimize the spaces in between, but you won't be able to remove the discontinuity.

There will never be a smooth transfer or sharing of ideas between two minds. A falsifying instance may be proposed: an understanding between two people. Some would say that this understanding is validated in cases when people come to an agreement, but we can never fully "get" where Person B is entirely coming from, can we? We only get hold of the idea at surface level, but never the underlying presuppositions which caused the other person to arrive at his idea which you seemingly agree to. Apparently, the line remains as it is. Broken.

And one more thing. It's imaginary. The line does not exist. I can never make you understand what I have just written the way I would want you to receive my thoughts. We will never come from the same perspective, because no two people have exactly the same experiences. You don't have the experiences Person B has, so no matter how you think you both get each other, you in actuality don't. What's keeping us believing that we understand one another is our assumption that we indeed have reached an understanding. I'll assume you understood me, and from there we move on. :)

Acknowledgement of the fact that there are may information another person possesses which we can never know of is definitely a downer. However, one has to realize that sources are everywhere. If the source is solely one person, though, and impossibility of acquiring it is becoming clear, let it go. This is when you'll decide to stop figuring things out and asking why. Some things will never be made known to you. Acceptance of this will help you move even just a little bit forward. Eventually, you would come across plenty of a-little-bits, and after some time, without even noticing it, you'd have gone way far from where you are standing now.

But then again, these are easier said (or written) than done.

An Almost-Sembreak Phase

These are the times when I badly need an exceptional inspiration. Or pressure. Either of the two will work. I have three 20-paged papers to submit, and three final exams to review for. I have the time and the resources.

And a huge percentage of the hours that I am awake is spent on eating. The interval between my every meal is averaged at less than an hour. I eat whenever I see food. I look for food whenever I don't see one at the moment.

It's not that I might not get things done. That's the result of an underlying problem. I am more concerned with the implications of this conduct. What bothers me is that I am not bothered anymore.

Something's telling me that what I've been doing (or not doing) are intentional. Writing this blog instead of prepping for my papers, figuring out why this is happening to me instead of making reviewers for my exams, reading Gabriel Marcel's Mystery of Being instead of understanding Heidegger and Sartre. Maybe I'm just exhausted doing things the way I'm supposed to.

I just ran out of will to follow my schedule, to be faithful to my plans. Motivation through rewards won't work on me. It usually doesn't make a difference if I tell myself that I will get all the pampering I want after all of my tasks are done with, or that I will watch a movie if I finish a certain paperwork in a challenging span of time. Those barely get me motivated, for I don't look forward to them. I demand for them beforehand. That's why my concept of unwinding is not that it relieves me from the hassle. It serves to set the mood for me to get started.

The bigger problem is that the motivation that actually works for me is proving to be very elusive. I need a reason, and this time, not just of any sort. I require an ultimate reason, that which encompasses all my other endeavors. I need a justification that would warrant the rest of my actions, not the kind that fails to account for why I do other ordinary, seemingly menial, tasks. I know that to look for this is an extremely tall order. It might even be impossible to find it, or to realize that I have found it once I've found it.

This is burnout at its finest and at its most inappropriate timing. I cannot afford one right now.

Someone please remind me of the bigger picture. Thank you.

Mind-work

I always (not sometimes, not often, not mostly, but always) get this urge to write. However, along with this unrelenting desire to concretize my thoughts is this constant feeling that what I will be writing will never measure up to what is actually going on inside my head, regardless of the crucial and painstaking process of making sure that what I would write will completely capture my ideas, from the minutest detail to the largest picture, from the most superficial observation to the deepest realization. How many times have I caught myself thinking aloud about how I badly want a device that can automatically save the exact contents of my mind.

It strikes me as odd that in most cases, though, my ideas come in the most bizarre forms. I hear them as unintelligible swooshing sounds, but not with my ears. Or I see them as flashes of lines and colors, but not with these poor eyes. It's crazy. What's sure is that I understand them (weirdly enough), but they don't make it easy for me to make them understandable to others. They seldom come in words, for crying out loud. I have this theory that they are pouring in way too fast to the point that my brain gives up on trying to box them in the realm of language. It's like a stampede. You don't give out name tags to people in a stampede.

I can't sustain a thought long enough to give me time to find a pen and a paper, or to open Evernote, or to Compose a Message, so that I may jot it down. That's because it gets replaced by yet another fresh (or maybe just a persistent) topic. It would be tolerable if the replacement takes place in a linear manner, but no. There is overriding, clashing, overlapping, and disjunct of ideas all in the same head, all at the same time. It's safe to say that the most chaotic place in the world for me is my head. 


It gets tiring - a working mind. The worst thing is that one cannot bring about the cessation of the process. It continues as long as one is awake. 



The irony is that the process is what keeps me from sleeping.

Inspiration

I never really thought about the role of inspiration in getting a job done.  As long as you know what you should do, and as long as you have your reasons for doing what you are about to do, you can do it. Of course, this comes with the assumption that the task is doable in terms of one's capacity. There is no problem with the "Can you?" You are very much able.

When it comes to a person's motivation to perform an act, I had not seen how task identification, task justification, and capability would still serve inadequate to produce this willingness - until recently. I have always seen willingness as something that just follows, after one determines the importance of doing a certain action.  You name the task, provide the rationale for it, and then want to do it.

What now are inspirations for?

They become needed when will is lacking, which happens when previous justifications for actions won't suffice anymore, which happens when the previous setup where the previous justifications used to be based on no longer holds, which happens when the previous factors causing the being of the previous setup either have gone or have become insignificant, which happens when a different set of factors replaces the previous. There is a demand for an inspiration because you have exhausted all the old whys. An inspiration serves as a new reason for doing. This then becomes your new justification. As one can infer, it is a cycle of replacing justifications to suit the then-current setup, depending on what the then-important matters of consideration are.

One is led to ask whether it is ever possible to have a permanent Why.

Feelings

I don't like how feelings work. They are sneaky. You never see them coming. You become aware of them once they're already inside your kitchen getting the last bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut from your refrigerator. They don't knock. They come uninvited.

They are manipulative. They cause you to act in ways contrary to how you would act had your mind taken over. Worse, they bully away your rationality by saying that they would make fine and better reasons for action. And they don't even talk!

They refuse to be controlled. Enough said.

They demand that you pay attention. Attention is one of the things you don't give indiscriminately. You'd want to be in control of what you spend your time on, thank you very much. Here come your feelings. Like an untied shoelace, they have to be dealt with.

They feign innocence. They have this mechanism of convincing you that what you did was justified/right/acceptable. It will work, I tell you. Then once you've finally come to your senses, you look back at them, but you will not be able to blame them for what just happened because they appear so... Uncorrupted.

They mess with your defenses. You use your head to build your walls so that distractions may
not find their way in. You have feelings, leading strangers and enemies into secret passageways you did not even know existed.

Still, they manage to make up for all these acts of mischief - without meaning to, for sure.

You begin to see the need for a better wall. You learn to blame yourself for your decision, not the circumstance or the influence that led to your making it. You get to review your priorities, and maybe find out why you keep on tripping. You deem the importance of wisely controlling those which you can, as you are humbled by those which you cannot. You now know better than letting your feelings get the best of you.

You remember to lock your doors.

Judgment

If judgments could speak...

I would be deafened by the loudness of thoughts coming out from your silence and stare. The sounds produced would be incomprehensible, though. No, not because they're too loud. It's because you yourself don't understand them. You don't own your ideas. You quickly adopt the most convenient mindset. You have opinions grounded on hearsay, and only hearsay. You hold on to your views like you do to a dying cause: unreasonably. You don't recognize the importance of juxtaposing your notions with facts. You spoil your beliefs like you would a favorite child (Apparently, your favorite child is not so favorable to begin with).

You're not brave enough to clarify things. With me. You never ask. You condition your mind to ring that bitch alert whenever I would pass you by. You enjoy too much thinking that way of me, when you don't even know why - or how - you arrived at all your unfounded descriptions.

I'm not asking you to understand me. God knows how difficult a task like that would be for you. I'm asking you to be aware of your shortcoming, and to please hate me for better reasons. For the meantime,

If your  judgments could speak, you'll produce noise

If your  judgments could speak, I would hear them, but I won't listen. I wonder who would.