eat me henger

mirrors alienate us.  we need the mirror to adjust how we externally present ourselves. you stand there, on your own, composing yourself - based on your own aesthetic sensibilities - because you care about how others will perceive you. but had mirrors never been invented, we would've needed other people to organize our outward appearance. it would've been part of our social contract to be responsible for fixing each other's image. owing that to each other could build our social cohesion. i need others because they will fix my face. i need others because they will help me conform to fashion standards. we will always be part of an ecosystem, we need to coordinate ourselves to function effectively for our community to serve its purpose. we do it to an extent, we tell each other what to do and avoid. we don't want our family or friends making a fool of themselves. we want important people in our lives to put their best foot forward. because even if people can see themselves...

love costing three months' salary is cheap.  it's a good heuristic to anchor a measurable value for something potentially priceless. adjusting for differences in cost of living from the 30s, applying the classic adage nowadays is absurd. but love isn't about being right, it's sacrificing irrationality for fulfillment. it's something i often get wrong. i'm autistically keyed in with being ruthlessly correct. however, looking back, i only remember the times when i was wrong and yet i received love. i don't have a running list of such instances, but i intuit that i've been frequently the smaller person. i'm grateful to have been lucky more times than i deserve. i've assessed myself to be selfish in not giving back the love i've been graciously showered with. i know the right things to do, but i can't bring myself to genuinely do the right things. for me to be authentic, i need to first subscribe to the values conducive to acting the right wa...

i'm terribly indecisive. i always fall trap into analysis paralysis. i love learning, i love researching things, i love getting as much information to aid in decision-making. but i hate choosing. nothing is truly clear cut as good or bad choice. that's another thing the schooling system failed us. we had thought for years that there's always one correct choice. but in my experience of overthinking through life, decisions are always taking the bad with the good. ideally, i don't want to bring any negativity. contrary to my dramatic and dark writing, i sincerely want a good life for myself. so much so that i want perfection. i adopted an approach where if i do well at the beginning, if something felt natural, then i'll pursue the path. that prevented me from learning how to persevere. stumbling from the start was a sign to not spend any further effort. it afforded me to focus on my interests and natural inclination, but that only created a sheltered worldview unable t...

the challenge for passionate writers nowadays is to not sound like artificial intelligence.  perhaps for most people that don't find joy in writing, chatgpt gets the job done. anyone going through the motions needing to fill a blank page with paragraphs could easily plug in a simple instruction to write a report, summarize something, elaborate anything. done with the day, everyone else can move on with what they truly want, or at least be the best of a bad situation. so when i see reports that reek of generative artificial intelligence, i'm disgusted, but i try to empathize that they just wanted the task off their to-do list. for better or worse, i'm not like them. i like the process of actually being on the edge of a typing cursor pushing my personal processing power to come up with the next word that make logical sense in the sentence, in the paragraph, and whatever grander thought i'm trying to capture. and i say "capture" because knowledge feels like magic...

in a fateful turn of events, my career shifted for the better.  i'm now working on the things i like, i'm actually working now, spending most of my day doing actual work. but not the same kind of work i used to do. before these large language models became a thing, i used to write everything from scratch. new word document every single time. it was tedious, but fun in a rouge-like kind of way. always challenging myself to create fresh. the challenge made my objective productivity comparatively less than what i'm able to do with the paid version of chatgpt. i'd like to think of paying for chatgpt as giving myself a pay cut to make my life easier. i essentially have an assistant that can suffer the tedium for me at such a rapid rate that most people can't deliver. what it then demands from me is that i need to have a pool of internal intel for it to process. without such essential ingredient, it's terribly generic, the intelligence is indeed artificial. i also nee...

my career has gone to shit in the past year or so. the system has not been conducive to maximize my talents. the my colleagues and superiors haven't been a pleasure to work with. the actual office space suffocates the hell out of my autism.  this point in my career is abhorrently demotivating. and i'm supposed to be blamed. no, not mismanagement. not the lack of discernment from those who actually understand my abilities, and still choose to not put me in the right place. to be fair, i haven't been playing along. the pre-existing dogma has been utterly ridiculous. i deliberately delay accomplishing tasks and ignoring instructions which i find to be an insult to my intelligence. most people will not understand why i choose not to perform with simple tasks. even an underpaid underling can do them. but see, that's the thing. it's below my pay grade, just as much as there are tasks that are above my pay grade. it's all about having a decently accurate assessment of ...