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The Making of a Dumb Datum

Imagine 10,000 years in the future. Two archaeologists are digging a site, and they find the remains of human bones. They take those remains to the lab, perform tests on them, and try to reconstruct the habits and lifestyle of that human. Say those bones belong to me. They are trying to find out my story, how I lived, what I ate, where I traveled, etc. Once they find all the info they need, they toss it into a museum where they store all other such ancient human remains they find. I was essentially one data point to them in trying to understand how humanity evolved over time. Or I can also call myself a “datum”, the singular form of data, literally one piece of information to solve a bigger puzzle. Honestly, I don’t need 10,000 years to become a datum. I am already a part of several datasets people use these days to study many things. So for that objective learner, I am already a datum. Now let me get to how I got the dumb part of it. I have had an interesting and eventful life so far...
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The Future, The Past and The Present

I got back into reading stoic philosophy lately, and it helped me realize an interesting fallacy of my brain. If I think of my brain as an optimization solver, its objective function is to maximize my chances of survival. Time flows in three distinct categories of past, present and future, so my brain applies a separate logic to each of them. Future is considered as the most important piece, primarily because main objective is to see as much of future I can. Therefore, in a particular day, most of the thoughts and emotions generated are about how I can conserve my future. Naturally this means, present and past are relegated to play supporting roles. For example, two main concerns of my future are how my career will pan out (considering the changes in tech due to AI and a fickle visa situation), and if I will be alone for the rest of my life. Most of my present is muddled by the worries about these concerns, which are not in my control. Past is a whole different story, because while...
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Courage the Cowardly Dog

My brain sometimes generates these ideas that I don’t quite know what to make of. For example, two weeks ago it came up with this masterpiece of “what if I try to attempt two back-to-back 50 mile running weeks?” It’s a stretch considering my running fitness at that time, and if I had thought about how I only ever ran a 50-mile week once in the past, which had me limping for two days straight, it wouldn’t have filled me with any confidence. But it’s a good thing I sometimes don’t think. The first week somehow went by in a blur and I managed to hit the 50-mile target. I also managed to give my left foot a nice, round and ugly blister. Honestly, I had a lot of emotions and thoughts going on during this week that my brain hardly registered the effort and the formation of a blister. My long run for the first week was 18 miles, 14 of which I ran with my marathon training group in perfect silence, so it didn’t feel like a crazy week after all. After my last run of the first week, I went t...
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The Comeback Kid

My day started pretty normal today. I didn’t want to wake up as usual, but forced myself to, because a certain someone decided to make his life complicated by deciding on an ambitious marathon goal. I went for a 7-mile run and my legs were still feeling the 50 miles I ran last week, but little do they know that this week I am taking them to a never-experienced-before 52-mile territory. Once I returned home from this run, my entire body just wanted to shut off and not move an inch. Maybe because it knew I had a long day ahead. Today I had to attend the UTD career fair as a recruiter. This meant I will be passing through the streets of Richardson and a few walk ways in the campus where my brain made some memories. These are good memories, but they weigh a bit heavily for now due to the conclusion. I had a full-blown panic attack yesterday about this career fair (which is weird because I never dreaded these when I was a student). But I told myself that this is a difficult situation I ...
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Atom

Lately when I am overwhelmed, I start thinking about how we’re all made up of tiny atoms, and how atoms are mostly hollow except for one dense nucleus in their centers, and how if an atom were size of a cathedral, nucleus will be the size of a tiny fly, and how this tiny fly is so dense that it makes up the entire weight of cathedral, where as cathedral itself has no self weight, and I say to my brain that all of this makes no fucking sense, and my brain says “nothing in this world makes sense, so stop overthinking and just go to sleep”, and I say “but this is 9 am in the morning”, but my brain is asleep already
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Fly

Whenever I hit the rock bottom, I am quick to blame gravity. I say things like "look at this stupid gravitational force always dragging me down mercilessly while I am trying hard to fly." I also blame Newton and his apple, as if there was no gravity in this universe before that apple hit Newton's head. But if I just for a moment chill out, and stop trying to find who's to blame, I may say things like "jeez, what if gravity is not the pulling force I imagined it as? What if it's just rock bottom accelerating up and catching upto my feet that feels like something dragging me down?" If this is true, then it means I am not actually losing the progress I made with flying everytime my feet hit that rock bottom. It's just gravity being annoying and tricking me into believing that I am a lost cause. So, I guess I should keep trying to fly. 
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A 12-Foot Mistake

I used to have a cocky attitude towards exams. I think it’s because I was lucky and never really had to study very hard to get a decent grade in school. But overtime I have come to realize that my luck actually screwed me over big time. It meant I failed to develop a habit of sitting in one place for hours and studying with vigorous intensity (I am always jealous of people who can do that). So, when school actually got hard and I could no longer escape with minimum effort, I tried to get some focus and build good study habits. But of course, I became miserable and felt like I wasn’t cut for it, so I accepted that my talents lie elsewhere. I am yet to find out where those talents of mine are hiding, but meanwhile as a consolation prize I found that I love consuming and telling stories. So, I remember there was a brief period where I was looking for a story in everything I read, and if there wasn’t one, I used to spin up some bullshit story. Especially during my undergrad when me and m...
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A Brand New Day

I think the concept of post-credit scene is one of the brilliant inventions in modern cinema. It gives a reason for people (at least, for those who are curious enough) to sit through the credits and read through names of technicians who were instrumental in creating that movie. But I remember there was a time when I used to hate this concept. It’s because I was an impatient youngster who didn’t want to sit through a never-ending stream of credits just to catch a brief sixty-second scene. I was also a youngster who purely watched movies out of my passion for story-telling. But I am not that young anymore and developed an inkling of what others may call ‘patience’ over time. I also saw my passion for movies fizzle out in between because I was too focused on big potato stuff in my life. But life smacked me in the face with those same potatoes, and I had to find a way to distract myself from that pain. So, I decided today to go watch Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and this was my second time w...
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