Life sometimes feels flat and formulaic, like I am a robot who follows a grid.
I do much less of that then most people I know. I need to do yet less still.

Black swan. A new genre of "icky movies". Nail cutting, splinter removing, foot blister popping, rash scratching genre of ickyness. Imagine if my toes grew together and I had to separate them. It would only not-hurt if it was an LSD trip.

Natalie Portman plays the perfect IT girl. Are IT people always on the verge of going crazy? Perhaps they are.

The poems became prayers.
The prayers became mantras.
The content gave way to form.

Many mandalas of the Rig Veda were written about Soma, or Indra drinking Soma: a hallucinogenic drug and also possibly a stimulant. Of the ones I've read so far poem 10.119
says:

"The violent gusts of wind the draughts that I have drunk have lifted me. Have I not drunk the Soma ?
In my grandeur I have surpassed the heaven and all this spacious earth. Have I not drunk the Soma?"
Aha this spacious earth I shall deposit here or there. Have I not drunk the Soma?
In one short moment I will smite the earth in fury here or there. Have I not drunk the Soma?"

One reason the Rig veda interests me is that I have this notion that Indian culture has its roots in a community of people who were much freer and less rigid. Perhaps this is why these people came from outside or at least lived at the edge. As the rig vedins move into mainland India, the Sama and Yajur vedins take over. The sama vedins construct melodic chants to set the rig veda verses to (perhaps these melodies already existed for another language) , then the Yajur vedins set rituals to these chants and poems that are extremely rigid. Every aspect of the ritual alter is closely constructed with utmost attention to geometry (actually requiring many early geometric proofs to be proven by ritualists in the Sulba sutra), linguistics, phonology etc. The rigidity has brought much but probably has also taken away much. The rigid layers are easy to see, I myself am from a family of Yajur vedis. The inspired poets who were high and breathing some fresh mountain air are harder to see.

I learned most of this information by reading Frits Staal and his references.

I saw Kiran Desai walking through the street and I was surprised. I narrowed my eyes and stared to make sure it was her. It was her alright, but she looked like she could be my sister. She looks young, playful, tall, thin and very beautiful. It was surprising. It made me think I could go home and just write a book. She can.

The fact that this account is attached to the gmail acount I don't use often has become a huge barrier to entry for me. Small things thwart my work. I need to focus on keeping the environment in order, my working environment, and then the work just comes.

I seriously want to be a writer now. I think I am expressive, I understand life and activities through writing, its a way I become conscious. What I need now is a story.

Its been a while since I wrote here... but I just wanted to write and say, I'm happy.
I'm very happy that I get paid to go sit and think on this beautiful campus.
As if that is not enough I get to live right across the street from it in a beautiful high-ceilinged apartment, a block away from the river on the other side.
Somehow there is a little piece of ann arbor---an idyllic college town---trapped inside of New York city.

The dead decayed feeling I got at IBM research is absolutely gone. I feel excited about what I'm working on, learning a gob of things all day. This is what I want to do.

I think I figured out why I get tired and frustrated with "coding".

Its because I HAVE to do a crappy job of it, for what I am supposed to be accomplishing.

I get paid to figure out the design automation algorithm, and then I have to smash out
the code in a hurry to obtain a prototype.
The infrastructure is not set up to crank prototypes out easily.
Ideally, I would have a phase where I would think about the infrastructure of the software
that I am making. Then things would be nice and good. But for me, publishing , prototyping
and demonstrating earn me more brownies, but sadly my prototypes get directly used in
production.

I like writing because maybe I have more practice or because it uses natural language
which we are hardwired to produce. I can do it quickly. I can think quickly about how to write my idea. It seems easier than software engineering in that way. I don't feel that I have to do a crappier job than what my capability allows.

I've been listening to a lot of Bill Gates on TV, somewhat coincidentally.
I need to remember a few things he says.
1) He makes products that he would like to use.
2) He believes that software is magical and powerful, and the capabilities of what you can build with software keep increasing.
3) He believes that the so-called risk he took in dropping out of Harvard, was actually a very low risk. Right time, right place, sniff it out.

I used to dislike baseball.
Now, it feels like oatmeal for breakfast.
People locked in their positions and rules, flowing like clockwork.
Yet, with some leeway for excellence in specific channels.
The variables are tractable, but with uncertainty.
Baseball can't save the world, it won't cause an oil spill.
Cozy with a chance of dreaming.

The ducks are turning dark like crows.