The Good, The Bad And The “Ugly”
Aside from being the title of a movie, the above also seems an apt description of life in general and a disturbingly accurate summary of my life at the moment in specific. Let me give it a break down for the rare, rare few who actually bother to read this...
The Good:
On 06/07/2006, I had a good day. I had dinner and a movie with someone special to me. Now, for a few weeks now, I've been contemplating the possibility (faint though it may be) that I have fallen in love. After that much contemplation, I have come to a realization that I (and she, if she ever finds out about this whole convoluted mess I've woven for myself) can live with. Firstly, I'm not in love with her. She is special to me, that is true. By special, I mean that she can and does mean a lot more to me than most other people I know. This requires a bit more background on the nature of how I relate to people in my life to fully understand, so here it goes:
I don't know if it is conscious or not but I tend to make an effort to become the forgettable guy, the guy who's not quite outside the group but not quite in it either. Halfway between an outsider and the average Joe, so to speak. However, when someone is special to me, I consciously make an effort to try and make a mark in their lives: the kind of mark that lasts. I don't want most people to remember me when I'm not in regular contact anymore and I seriously think I am a truly forgettable person. But when someone is special to me, I want them, need them to remember me since I know I will be remembering them.
Special, of course, does not always mean I've fallen in love with them. It simply means they mean a lot to me and their well-being is something I treat as valuable as my own, depending on the situation at hand. I take great pains to get close to them, understand them and at times, even take the hits and misses of their lives as my own. Almost like the assimilation process of Star Trek's The Borg but not quite. It means I care about them to a degree that I reserve only for them and for no one else outside of my blood-family (and even in my blood-family, there are people I care less about than I do about Grace but that's a different story). Sadly, however, this sort of relationship is difficult to explain. I've theorized it requires someone to actually experience it to fully grasp what it feels like.
The minds of other people don't seem willing to accept the fact that she and I are very, very close but that I'm not interested in her that way. For them, a guy and a girl that are that close to one another must be in some sort of romantic link with one another or at the very least, there is a one-sided love hidden in the wings. But that is not the case, even though for a bit I let that idea get into my head. She is one of the very few bright spots in my life at the moment and I intend to do what must be done to keep it that way; to keep the status quo of our friendship while doing what I can to improve the status quo of the side of her life I can only hear about but never really touch upon.
With the background bits done, I am quite pleased that I got to spend some time alone with her. As I have said, she's one of the few bright spots in my life that are left since I began working here. Rare moments spent with those rare individuals who touch your life in some way are to be cherished.
So yes, 06/07/2006, despite the lack of sleep and the fact that work sucked afterwards, was quite a good day. Yes indeed, a very good day.
Here's me hoping to have another one next pay day.
The Bad:
In simple terms, work has sucked the life out of me. In less simple terms...well, this involved a bit of enumeration on my part.
First: The nightmares of my slumber have ceased to manifest and this terrifies me for their loss means a loss of my creativity, my drive to weave words and thoughts into dissonant but lovely notes in the twisted symphony of the human soul.
Second: The knowledge that I have ruthlessly pursued and grasped through the years I feel is slowly being chipped away by the idiocy and the monotony of the work. My intelligence is fading with every day that passes and I can feel most of it emptying into an abyss of endless complaints and ceaseless whining of things that they are too lazy or too stupid to take the time to figure out for themselves that it is their fault and simply expect someone else to fix it for them.
Third: I am seriously beginning to doubt my insanity. No, I did not just make an error there. I really am doubting my insanity since this job...is enough to make a sane man mad and thus, it also makes a mad man into a sane one.
Fourth: Where once I had a balance of Yin and Yang, now my Yang is fading. Without the chaos of Yang, the law of Yin is taking over my psyche and I am becoming predictable, static and unable to fully create anything without something in my head cutting it off almost before I start. I have lost my chaos, the chaos I require to feed my creative energies to write. With Yin taking precedence, my ability to analyze things has increased but at the sacrifice of many other aspects of my personality. The saddest part of this is that it isn't even my rules, my order that the Yin aspect is enforcing into my mind. The Yin is enforcing the thrice god-damned company's.
Fifth: I hate my job. No further explanation needed.
The Ugly:
X-Men: The Last Stand and the remake of The Omen.
X3 because it was a waste of a perfectly good franchise and I am seriously disappointed in the fact that the only concrete sighting of a Sentinel was a disembodied head and that the scriptwriters never called for any of the X-Men villains other than Magneto and some minor ones. What? No En Sabah Nur? No Mister Sinister? Disappointing. I expected more of what is supposed to be the last X-Men movie. It has merit and it is a good movie, just disappointing in what they decided to leave out.
The Omen remake because it sucks. None of the creepiness of the original. Barely average movie.
Moving on then, this is funny.
TRADITIONAL ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies and the economy grows.
You retire on the income.
CHINESE ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim full employment, high bovine productivity and arrest anyone
reporting the actual numbers.
INDIAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You worship them.
PAKISTAN ECONOMICS
You don't have any cows.
You claim that the Indian cows belong to you.
You ask the US for financial aid, China for military aid, Britain for warplanes, Italy for machines, Germany for technology, France for submarines, Switzerland for loans, Russia for drugs and Japan for equipment.
You buy the cows with all this and claim exploitation by the world.
AMERICAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You sell one and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
You profess surprise when the cow drops dead.
You put the blame on some nation with cows & naturally that nation will be a
danger to mankind.
You wage war to save the world and grab the cows.
FRENCH ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
GERMAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You reengineer them so that they live for 100 years, eat once a month and
milk themselves.
BRITISH ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
They are both mad.
ITALIAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You don't know where they are.
You break for lunch.
SWISS ECONOMICS
You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you.
You charge others for storing them.
JAPANESE ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You redesign them so that they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and
produce twenty times the milk.
You then create cute cartoon cow images called COWKIMON and market them
worldwide.
RUSSIAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 17 cows.
You give up counting and open another bottle of vodka.
MALAYSIAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You slaughter one for Hari Raya Puasa and the other for Hari Raya Haji.
Just before that, both the cows were wandering along the PLUS Highways.
PHILIPPINE ECONOMICS
You have only one cow.
So the government claims there is a shortage of cows.
The government ask grants from other countries so the country can produce more cows.
The other countries oblige.
The government divides the grants among themselves, and blames the opposition of corruption.
The people stage People Power 42.
The government is overthrown.
Then its back to the single cow.
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