A Better Version of You (Rather Than a Bitter One)

Its been a while and a lot of unwritten thoughts. Today's will be about the way we handle difficulties in learning a new skill. Lets take stamp-collecting as an example. Its a rather tame one but I have chosen it for a reason :). I go to the stationary store, buy a stamp album, start writing loads of snail mail to my facebook friends in exotic countries and blackmail them to at least send me a blank letter back for the sake of those little square pieces of paper that are probably licked onto the envelopes ;). Then I have to learn the value of each stamp which depends on its rarity, categorization of stamps according to shapes (diamond, triangle, regular, etc), countries, year, blah. And then I learn the fine art of shameless bargaining. "I will give you two triangles for one of your 1980 retros". And the learning continues.

This is easy compared to skills you have to build that involves people like Public Speaking, Sales, Leadership, Dating, etc. Why? I am sure you didn't ask me that LOL. The reason being that there is this teeny weeny thing called rejection. You try this, you try that and you look for the things that click, discard the ones that flop. Same as in any skill acquisition but the feedback is instantaneous about whether what you are doing is a success or a failure. And this is one thing I have learned to handle. The only way to get through all the shit is to-get-through-all-the-shit. Because when you get used to people getting bored of your speeches, people not being impressed by your sales talk, people being put off by your social etiquette, thats when you learn and most importantly, that's when you realize that what other people think should never stop you but inspire a tough person like you to get it correct the next time.

(thumbs up)

A Dreamy Slashfest

Last night i had this weird dream. I saw myself, in the first-person-shooter-game-style, walking around and all of a sudden i pop these adamantum claws from my hands a la wolverine. I gaze at it, startled at first, but i grin when i see some bad-guy-type of fella running towards me and i tell him "Time to get slashed into itsy bitsy ribbons, bub". Well... i wished i had said something like that anyways, the way heros are supposed to do and all. Anyways, after the carnage scene is over, i hang around looking for more stuff to try my new claws on but am suddenely confronted by my clone smoking one of those cigars. Contrary to cinematic expectations, he's not here to challenge me to a me vs me fight, psychological or otherwise. He just stands there, in the third person, and smokes the damn cigar while looking at me with one of those "Bet you don't have the guts to smoke despite all that tough guy posturing", and i wake up all of a sudden, sweaty faced and panting hard.

And then this still sleep-fuzzed brain gets into analysis overdrive. Number one. Explaining away the claws is easy. Almost everybody wants to be in logan's heavy canadian branded, probably made in china, boots so thats a piece of cake. Number Two. But since i am one of them non-smokers it looks like, even in its house-keeping and filing-away process, my brain couldn't make my dream of being my fav x-man even virtually true along with the fact that i am supposed to be blowing smoke if that has to happen. So it, divides me into two to keep me happy while at the same time getting me to wake up cause you know, the memory spring cleaning is over for the day (or night) dude and you better rise and shine, sonny. It was only later that i remembered that since wolverine has this high regenerative ability that it didn't matter whether he smoked or not since his lungs would repair itself into that of a new born baby's faster than you can say "adamantum balls". So, if you managed to put him into one of those huge hospital scanners, which seem to be used for almost every other diagnosis whether in the movies or in real life, and you made him smoke his cigars while zooming into his lungs area, you would see his lungs turning black and then his mutation kicking in and turning it bright healthy red (yellow? white? somebody with the necessary medical knowledge, help me here).

So, in the parallel universe where our mutants are having fun and getting a piece of each other, you can imagine the disclaimer on the cigarette ads: "Smoking is a major cause of... blah blah... except if you are born packaged with the quick healing chromosome. So to all you unlucky ones, gnya gnya :P"

With that split resolved, i go back to sleep and get ready to enjoy the rest of the dream, blazing cigars, a stronger than steel, six bladed beast, smelling blood in the cold night sky and running towards his prey composed of gun totting army men from the Weapon X program. AWOOOO!!!