Sheep happens.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Personal Reminder

The end is ostensibly around the corner, yet the battle seems like it is going to last forever. They say this is it; this is all I've been working so hard for all these times, but it hardly seems like it's worth it. I know, however, that my perception is highly flawed. All these people, they've seen it all, haven't they? No harm can come out of putting up a good fight...

Even if fighting hard would cause me some hurt, it'll be better than hurting those who have expectations of me, wouldn't it? It will all be over soon, and unless I truly work hard to take out every single one of the enemy, one of them might come along and stab me in the back.

If it comes to that stage, it'd be too late for regrets.

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Face to Face

It seems like I have run out of things to say, with the exception of rants about the superficiality that is so dominant within the boundaries of many friendships today. Countless experiences shared between people are peripheral and ephemeral, without any profound connections of the agreeable nature being established as time passes. What are the friendships of today based on? Without deviating from facts, other than those which technology has brought about, people of today are making friends for the same old reasons that people of the past century have.

You could be friends with someone who just happened to take the same bus with you to school; you could be friends with a stranger you met on the train whom you offered a seat to; you could even be friends with someone just because he sat next to you in the restaurant and started a conversation with you.

Maybe communications had a part to do with it, maybe technology has somehow removed the sociable aspect of humanity? Science has advanced technology in such a way that people can now be represented by a cocktail of pixels on a computer screen, even by a series of seemingly meaningless combinations of letters. Verbal conversations can now be reduced to mere prose, projected to even the very ends of the world through an intricately sculpted maze of cables, or even through electromagnetic waves in the air. You can now communicate with just about everyone in the world who has an internet connection or a cell phone. In a sense, if a number could be put to the degree of individual accessibility to the world, this number would probably have been multiplied by a hundred times or even more within the past decade or so.

Somehow, this superficiality that has its roots in the flaws of long-distance conversations have propagated into the real interpersonal conversations in everyday life. Words can scarcely be found between so-called "friends" of today when it is a face-to-face encounter, unlike a virtual encounter where words flow freely without any hinderance. Of course, few absolutes can be found today and it can be said for certain that this hypothesis does not hold true for everyone. It probably is that barrier that people today put up around themselves to ward off possible threats to their personal images, unlike the times when people were more trusting and truly friendly because they had nothing to lose by making an extra friend.

I'm just some guy trying to make sense of what is going on around him, and why certain things happen when they should not be happening. The coldness of certain encounters are really freaking me out.

Friday, August 01, 2008

Uncertainty

Talk about unspeakable issues. I can't help but feel the existence of that barrier that should never have existed at all. All that was a plethora of possibilities yesterday has become void, and I can't help but ask why. Ask who? I don't know. Myself, perhaps. What have I done to merit such ills? Have I not tried to be the best that I can be? The blame always has to go back to me, how I have influenced the situation and what I have done to salvage it, because it never is another person's fault, is it? Yeah I'm always the one who's lagging behind, the one who's not good enough, the one who's average at anything and everything, the one who is always to blame when things turn sour, or maybe the one to shun when you feel like it. So you're better, so I cannot give a proper answer to your question. That does not give you any right to step all over me. I will not stand being looked down upon as a person, because you have no right to insult another person who is standing right here in the same Earth that you live in.

To think that they'd taught students of today about human rights. Alright, enough of that.

I often wonder how I'd end up in the situation I'm in right now and how I'd become the person that I am today. Is it all planned, like in the case of predestination? My present contention is with the predestination camp. The idea of free will is only human, isn't it? We'd have no way of proving that our free will is absolute. Humanity might just be God's play, every single step taken already scripted at the beginning of time. We'd never know if the actors that we are could ever add improvisations to the script or even alter its course. The intangible Truth can never be absolutely apparent to us, for human perception is severely flawed. Maybe what I'm typing now is highly myopic in nature, but isn't that human nature, to be myopic? Most of our attempts to rid ourselves of this short-sightedness have been to no avail.

We fall down, we pull ourselves up, and there's bound to be another time when we fall down again. It all boils down to the unpredictable nature of life, but where is the line that separates the predictable and the unpredictable? When does the seemingly predictable crumble into the unpredictable? Life works in such a way that even the predictable might break down into the unpredictable anytime. Doctors could predict that I'm still going to live for a long time to come given my present health, but who's going to know if I am going to contract a terminal disease within the next year? Analysts may say that there will be no nuclear war because it is far too costly for any party to start one, but who's going to know if another megalomaniac like Hitler takes the stage? After all, Hitler was only here only about half a century ago.

Anything is possible, almost everything is uncertain, life is as such. The question we should be asking all the time should be "what's next?".