Love of Lights

I am sat in the dark of my room at 7 AM, on New Year's Eve's Eve, listening to renditions of Auld Lang Syne on YouTube. New Year's is my favourite holiday of the year, above Christmas and all the others, because it actually symbolises something for me. I mean, naturally the flipping of man-made calenders doesn't literally represent some important change in the fabric of the universe, but it represents an important change in our man-made universe, which is just as, if not more, important. It's an unusual time of ubiquitous introspection, amongst even those who aren't usually into that sort of thing. People think about how their year went and what they will do to better themselves in the next year. People often take it trivially, but still, it's better than nothing, and I find it important. So, having said that, here's my New Year's moment of self-reflection and forward-looking: 2012 was certainly a dynamic year for me, but it was pretty terrible emo...

My generation puts a lot of value in spontaneity: spontaneity of action (fun people!) and spontaneity of thought (witty people). While attractive, I don't think this is necessarily a particularly good characteristic to have -- in fact, the opposite, I submit, is better. Prescience and the sharpening of your rational instrumentality, knowing your end and how to go about achieving it (prescience of action), knowing what things constitute appropriate and interesting conversation and then saying those things (prescience of thought), bear more fruit, I think, than spontaneity. With that in mind, I wanted to write a post about my first semester, so I know what to say before people ask me about it. Socially, it was curious -- interesting, teaching. The most important lesson I learnt from it, I think, was not to put too much emphasis on expectations, especially if they are informed by a mass expectation, which is often itself informed unreliably. Instead, I learnt, have experiences in ...

Today was my last afternoon in Edinburgh for the year 2012. The next time I return it will be 2013 and I will be ready to do things differently. I'm not entirely sure how things will pan out, but with my new equilibrium schedule as a basis, I hope to see a brighter future for myself, in terms of me doing the things I want to do and not falling to apathy, ambition-lack, and self-pity. I took the afternoon to take a stroll about some parts of the city, have some lunch at a café (while reading the very entertaining essay E Unibus Pluram by DFW). It was all spent alone, but I was content. At some point I almost feared that one can live a content life mostly alone (not completely, mind you -- simply mostly). What a dissonant image to my friend- and love-centred mind. Anyway, I took a few pictures, which marks a return of the Roaming Sessions, ed. 6.

I've decided that I want to test run my schedule of equilibrium before next semester, but I can't do it right now because exam season has my mind too frazzled, and holidays are meant to be for relaxing, so I can't have as much weight on Study and Disciplined Creativity as I will during term time. With this in mind, for the holidays (December 17 - January 14), my schedule of equilibrium will run: Unbridled Free Time (including sleep) - 20 hours Study - 2 hours Disciplined Creativity - 2 hours This gives me a ludicrous amount of freedom to do what I want whenever, including sleep longer, but also tests the structure of the schedule out, and also gets me to keep on top of studying and creativity. Saturdays and Sundays remain reserved for completely unbridled free time even in this holiday version.

There are 24 hours in a day. Let's remove 7 for sleep. 17 remain. Let's account 30% of the remaining day for procrastination/unbridled free time -- that's roughly 5 hours. 12 hours remain. Now split the remainder of the day in half, 50% study, 50% disciplined creativity. So the day is split into 4 categories with a certain amount of allocated hours, those being: Sleep - 7 hours Disciplined Creativity - 6 hours Study - 6 hours Unbridled Free Time - 5 hours Now, let's discuss in more detail what each category entails. Sleep, naturally, is for sleep. There needn't be more discussion about that. Disciplined Creativity will include creative pursuits that are too often and too easily procrastinated against, the creative pursuits that require slightly more discipline. They require more motivation than what would fall in 'Unbridled Free Time', but aren't made mandatory by any outside body as in 'Study'. Things include: mainly, reading for myse...

Ideals exist to strive towards. Like glowing beacons in the dark, they guide you towards some better destination. You need not ever reach or attain perfectly an ideal, attempting to do so misses the point. You simply use an ideal to guide your behaviour. There is danger in ideals -- namely, if the ideal is corrupt, bad, or imperfect, you will be lead towards corruption, badness, and imperfection. So you have to remain vigilant and be prudent in your choice of ideals. I've been thinking (well, I'm always thinking) about what my ideal self would be like. What person do I want to be? I want to be a writer, so there are 3 things that I can think of that are important character traits to have as a writer: one should be engaged in the world and with other people, one should read ferociously, and one should write. Today I'm mostly concerned with reading. I don't read as much as I should do, especially considering that my course is text-heavy. But even beyond that, I don...

Before the train of thought slips my mind, I thought I'd make a quick post about it. Recently a few thoughts have been permeating my mind, some inspired by Paul Graham's essays, some by my general anxiety and fear that I'm not interesting because I don't have any particular interests, that I'm not as smart as I'd like to be because I can't find anything particular to be interested in. One of the aforementioned Paul Graham essays is called 'Copy What You Like' which in a way answers my fears and worries about not being interesting, not knowing what I'm interested in. I simply need to mentally trace the things I enjoy down to their core principles, schools of thought, and subject matters and then chase those. I'm currently in my first year of university in the UK, so I've unfortunately already specialised in the fields of Philosophy and Italian (language and culture), but it's no massive problem because I think I've chosen correct...

If you knew me, the title of this blog post would come as a shock. I lean towards optimism thoroughly and with what I believe is great reason. I (justly) believe that within every human there is the capacity to form attachments which means there is the capacity for empathy which means there is the capacity for kindness and love. I believe all people can be good, and I believe, given the nature of the human condition, all people with full rational capacities are made necessarily interesting people. To be alive is inherently interesting. With that in mind, then, why is it that my interactions with people are almost consistently disappointing? People are interesting, so they should be entertaining, and people tend towards polite (due to normalised 'manners' and such), so they should be inviting. Why isn't every interaction, then, a joy and wonder? We can approach this from two angles, I suppose: that either 1) something is defective in the people that disallows them from b...

Organisation is still extremely difficult for me, especially when I haven't been in the greatest of moods and have had to do mandatory midterm essays while other work continued to roll in and pile up. It's gotten overwhelming, and I need some kind of personal, internal revolution. I've come to realise that, in addition to the previous post, perhaps in reaching happiness one has to occasionally work from the outside in, as opposed to my usual attempt at working from the inside out. Perhaps instead of trying to sort out your feelings in order that you can act adequately on them, one needs to simply act as though they had their shit together and the associated feelings will follow naturally, because you will be living the way you wish to, as opposed to merely thinking about how you would like to live. Perhaps they're both valid, but I should like to try out this new method. So I need another operation organisation. I need to think in schedules and time slots like a few...

University started so well, and now everything has crashed. I met a girl I conceive of as being right in almost every way, and yet things failed with her and now we're not speaking any more. It's been a while since we've seen each other; there have simply been a few exchanges textually that resulted in no resolution (because she is resolved against me) and a flurry of indirect pleas in the form of blog posts on my end. Finally I've forced myself, by removing her from every aspect of my life, to try to move on. Recently she unfollowed me on tumblr, which signifies her cutting the last (strong) string that connects us. I've already been through feeling shattered and distraught, so now I'm faced only with a confused kind of emptiness -- the kind of emptiness that existential crises flourish in. I can't help but wonder that, if in our personal lives, the future can never be ascertained and is always changeable, what motivation do we have to try to do anythin...

I think tonight finally calls for a long-awaited introspective post about a certain gargantuan change that has occurred in my life. The move to university has been a curious one that has marked a few interesting things about myself to myself -- some typical and some atypical. Firstly I'll begin with the move and freshers week. Freshers week happens twice as fast as any other week in your life -- but not "fast" in so typical a sense: it intensifies time; it feels as though 7 days were actually filled with 70 days worth of experience. It's excruciating and embarrassing to say, but I fell in love in those 7 days, with a girl who goes by the name of Annie. She deserves a post in her own right, so I shan't insult her with a few non-committal lines here. Just know that I feel intrinsically attached to her -- had you let us meet in any possible world or at any possible time, were I the same person and she the same person, I'd have felt this same attachment. It...

Before we get to the post proper, I must remind myself to make a post soon about the fact that I succeeded in getting into the university I wanted most, and that I'm moving there in 3 days! Okay, here is the post proper (copied and pasted from tumblr because I wrote it there first): september 4, 2012 - july 21, 2020 I’ve just struck a deal with my friend—or rather a bet, or a goal, because there’s no exchange coming out of it—in which we agree that we will have each sold at least 1 novel by the age of 26. This isn’t a deal concerning publishing — you don’t need to be published to sell 1 novel (we’re talking about just  one  here, not as in multiple copies of one story — just one novel); this is more an incentive to have completed something, to have completed it to a standard where we’d be content with somebody reading it from front to back. 26 for both of us is 8 years away which is actually plenty of time. 26 in my head seems a lot sooner than it really is, but it...

I keep forgetting that being a writer--if I want to be a good one--needs to be just as investment as any other professions. I  need to really focus on it, to put time and effort into it, to think consciously about it. For example, I realise that one of my weaker areas is painting a sufficient sense of 'place', and I've always struggled with how to do that better, but it seems obvious what the answer is now. I need to gather the funds to travel to places I imagine my story is set, and really soak in those places, take pictures, wander. So a writer needs a job too. A writer can't just sit, poor, writing. No, a writer needs money to fund his ability to write, just as a lawyer needs money to fund his ability to be a lawyer (i.e. for research books on the law, etc.). Furthermore, there are other things. I need to be a more attentive personality, if I want to be a good writer. I need to really focus on the phenomenology of being a human. I think I might start taking more pi...

I am tired. It is the end. It is 23:42 as I type this sentence, so it is very nearly the end of the day. Today also happened to be the end of my A Levels, which is most certainly the end of a significant epoch of my life. I won't proclaim with any certainty that A Levels are over and that I'm moving on, because I'm not entirely sure about how I did in my summer exams; I'm hoping I won't have to retake anything -- I would rather go to Clearing and find another course at a university other than Edinburgh, so long as I'm still able to do Philosophy as part of my degree. I really want this to be the end of A Levels. I truly do want to move on. I feel ready. I want to step out into the world, unprotected by my mother's house above me; I want to have a space of my own in another city, and I want to develop as a person. I want to be self-aware in the most beneficial way possible, i.e. not half as neurotic as I am now, I want to become more confident, continue in ...

I'm beginning to feel jittery, claustrophobic. This is probably because I haven't spoken with anyone outside of my family for over a week; I'm feeling closed in by my house, the walls of my room. I don't really know whether it is a personality flaw on my part that I apparently would sooner sit alone, devoid of friends' company, and feel like this than simply organise an outing, or whether the truth lies in the fact that I feel as though my friends don't want my company or perhaps I'm just not bothered enough to contact them, perhaps I'm just not good enough friends with them? There is also the issue that this is the week before our exams, so perhaps none of that has anything to do with it and people are just busy revising. But this has happened before, so it's not entirely just exam-related. I think, though, that it is a personality flaw of mine as opposed to an obvious reflection of my relationship with my friends. I'm never the one to sugge...

Normally I do not worry about mock or practise question results, because they hardly ever reflect what I will actually get in the exam, due to the fact that as I do them, I'm still in the process of re-learning a bunch of stuff I've forgotten. But recent psychology practise questions have really put the Fear in me, man. I need a medium-C in order to get a B, but my practise question results have turned out E and D. Like I say, normally this wouldn't worry me, but it does this time because I don't know what the fuck I'm doing wrong, and his comments aren't helping. He says I need to focus more on evaluation, but if I do that then I will not be doing any description of the theories, and it's confusing, and I don't know what the fuck psychology wants. Psychology has become my dark horse. I always thought Spanish would be the thing that brings me down, if anything does, but it looks like it might be psychology. I recall in January that before my psycholo...

It's been almost a week of my new amazing schedule and already I grow weary of it. They're tiresome to me, revision schedules. Revision is tiresome to me in general. The idea of exams repulse me more and more as the years go by. It's quite worrying considering the fact that I want to continue education for the next 4 years. Sometimes I want to quit education, or at least take a year out to focus heavily on writing a novel. I wish I could, but it's simply impractical and would not be smiled upon by anybody. I hope to write a lot over the summer, before I begin university (that's if I get in). Nothing is certain, and that's scary. Unless you're an exam aficionado, a scholarly whizz, the ending months of A2s are quite horrifying. The future is set out before you in a clear and crystal image, but the path before you is indeterminate, not made of solid, not made of gas, not made of liquid, but there. Just a hazy substance, a confused substance. A substance yo...

Wow, blogger. This new layout... very minimalist. I don't know what to think. I'll get used to it. Anyway, I'm only here to lay out my battle plan for exam season. I think my problem is that my actual school timetable is higgledy piggledy, so I need to create some sort of permanent structure to give me something to do. I've decided to try Charlie (of issocoollike fame)'s tactic of trying to do A Thing A Day, or rather The Thing Every Day. My main one being revision for the exam season. As to the structure, I will emulate a typical secondary school day's time table. So this is every day, from Monday to Friday (weekends too, if necessary, actually), regardless of whether I have to really be in college or whether I am at home. Start - 9 AM PHILOSOPHY 9AM - 11AM (10 mins break at 10AM) SPANISH 11AM - 11.30 AM First Break - 11.30 AM to 12.00 PM PSYCHOLOGY 12.00 PM - 13.00 PM Lunch - 13.00 PM to 14.00 PM SPANISH 14.00 PM - 15.00 PM PSYCHOLOGY 15....

I'm not gonna lie, man, my soul is weary and tormented, but I'm gonna hold out in the belief that things will improve. And I will hold out not merely on irrational hope or faith, but on the vision of possibility. It can  get better, that is clear enough, but damn, how much longer do I have to wait? I hope not long. I will need at least one of two things to feel less despondent, one of them being easier to attain than the other, though both not easy. Let's call these two things Freedom & Symbiosis. Freedom hopefully shall soon be attained, and I will be happy when that occurs, but Symbiosis is another question entirely. But for now, while I have neither, I just feel so down, it's crazy. I will be okay, though. I will be okay. My cowardice forces me into bravery; I will make it through until I find some kind of happiness, because the thought of giving up scares me far too much.

1. I hate the strict restrictions on freedom (of travel, specifically) on people simply because of where they were born. I wish the world's immigration systems were more human -- effective, but still understanding. Unfortunately, they're not, and I can see very little that I personally could do about it, so I must unwillingly acquiesce to the state of things. 2. Experience of the world is fundamentally first-person. Reading, analysing, interpreting art, literature, and philosophy must also be done from a first-person perspective: you can only see in a piece of art, or understand in some kind of theory, that which you can understand; beyond that, there is nothing to be seen or found. Your understanding can be expanded, but there is only ever so much as your understanding, and your understanding is perfect as regards you. The world that you experience is the true world that exists; the art that you interpret is the true art's meaning. Some might ask by way of response: ...

Seeing as the Digital Diet pretty much fell flat on its face, I've decided to approach this from a different angle. Earlier today I got one of those excited epiphanous moments in which an idea surges to your brain and you feel you must either act on it or at least note it down for future reference. In this case, I decided I'll act on it. The idea was simple: I'm going to buy lots of books (particularly in the Young Adult genre), stop using Facebook for a long time,  and simply split my time between reading, writing, watching films, and any revision/homework that I have to do. Hopefully approaching it (the Digital Diet) this way will be more effective. We'll see.

Yesterday I returned from my travels to Scotland (Edinburgh, St Andrews, Glasgow) with my friend, and today I am spending all day lying in bed with my laptop and doing nothing in particular. It feels good. Again, the visit up north was worth it, and has confirmed the fact that I will be accepting Edinburgh as my firm choice and Glasgow as my insurance. Of the three places, Edinburgh was my favourite, due to what seemed  to be a completely friendly disposition among the people, beautiful surroundings (architecture and nature -- envision strolling down a street and glimpsing powerful mountainous landscapes from the corner of your eye), the general feel of the city, and the university. At the talks we heard tale of the fun things you can get up to in the university societies, of which the Philosophy Society enthused me. There still exists a nervous element within me about starting a new life in (technically) a different country, but that's natural, and besides it's accompanied b...

There's a sinking, despondent feeling in and around my chest. I do not feel well. There is this recurring sense of things being unreal that occasionally comes to me, and it is often accompanied by the stark desire for some kind of change in my life. I don't know what it is. I think I just didn't have such a great day, but it has affected me far more profoundly than it should have. It's disgusting. I don't know what's the matter with me. I wish I could just get over myself. Writing always helps, though; as I pour these words out right now, I feel less bad about the situation, but I'm not entirely healed. Within me I often battle with this notion of sentiments and rationality, and which is more important or which comes first. I realise that thinking rationally can effectively affect your sentiments, and so I often think that rationality is the greater of the two, but then I also realise sentiments often spring forth wildly, untamed, and efforts to control the...