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December 29, 2005

Winter Break 05

Ok, sorry. That's all I'm going to say. Just sorry. I've got a case of the lazies. There's something about being at home that just pulls the blogging spirit right off of my "to have" list. I have been thinking about blogging a lot, just haven't had the willpower to do it.

I've been quite busy, If I do say so myself. I've got on my new burgundy trousers, fresh from the initial warsh. I like them, but I have no idea what to wear with them. Pictures will surely come later.

I've seen a lot of people since I have been home including (in the order that I saw them) Dana, Rachel (& Brent), Lauren, Sarthak, Suzanna, Darren, & Anna. Not to mention family and family friends. It's been a good vacation for seeing people, and hopefully I'll get to see more (especially when I go to Vegas for CES in a week or so). I'm a little sad I wasn't able to make it down to San Diego for the break, but 2 weeks is an amazingly short amount of time when you get down to it.

My cell phone broke a few nights ago. I was expecting it to happen soon, and it finally cracked in half. I must say, Verizon was awesome about replacing it. They helped me through the process, charged me as little as they could, and got me a phone by the next morning. All that and I didn't even have the insurance. :-)

My mom got me Arrested Development Season 2 for the Festival of Lights (Hanukkah, or Chanukkah, or Hanukah, or Channukka, or FoL). I've been devouring episodes at a frenzied pace. 7 in the past 15 hours. I guess I could be going faster, but I'm mixing in internet job searches for breaks.

Oh, and reading. I've been devouring book pages as well. At the beginning of the break I knocked out Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start, which is all about being an entrepreneur and starting your own business...be it a technology company or non-profit. I thought the book was enjoyable. We are being "forced" to read it by Marty for the capstone class...I think all the books for that class have been good. It is surely more about starting a for-profit company than a not-for-profit one, but still, there are numerous helpful tidbits about starting -and continuing- any major project. It was an easy enough read.

Right now I'm in the middle of Yann Martin's Life of Pi. Sometimes it's hard for me to get into books that aren't based on reality, but this one has been easy. I highly recommend it. It's a bit of a thinker, but a fun story as well. You'll never think about zoos or the animals in them in the same way. I'll leave you with one of my favorite passages, the entirety of chapter 56:

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had a malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even to manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

-Yann Martel, Life of Pi

Posted at December 29, 2005 06:56 PM

Comments

Posted by: Apurva at December 30, 2005 07:59 AM

Posted by: Cin at December 30, 2005 02:10 PM