Trust me: you should never trust me!

I have come across too many clueless and oblivious people to ascertain that I am not one.

I don’t finish reading half the books I start. In fact, most books on my shelf keep pieces of paper or string pointing to where I had stopped.
Perhaps some might think that these bookmarks also mark certain traits: laziness/attention-deficit/procrastination. They would be wrong, at least partially. While I would definitely score an ‘above average’ mark on any test devised to detect aforementioned traits, the main reason I don’t finish the books is that there are certain passages I can’t get past. Certain pages, paragraphs, or even single phrases stop me dead in my tracks. These could be resonant or original; heartbreaking or eyeopening; genius or just genuine; but always, always profound. They force me to look up, down, or sideways, and sometimes even backwards –essentially anywhere but forwards– and how does one move forward if they’re looking elsewhere?
Every time I pick up a book I had not finished, I re-read the same passage, and, again, often, stop. Sometimes, if I put it aside for a year or two, hoping time would provide enough distance in which to accelerate–gather up momentum–to go through the block, I succeed. But even that is not guaranteed.
To this day, I have started my favourite novel over eight times in the span of as many years, but never finished.
Today, as I look forward to a twelve-hour flight, I stare at the only book I brought, Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and I wonder if I’ll succeed where I failed twice before, in 2002 and 2004. I think about the first hurdle, so close to the starting blocks, in the acknowledgments:

[Theme] c.2 The Knowingness About The Book’s Self-conscious Aspect.
While the author is self-conscious about being self-referential, he is also knowing about the self-conscious self-referentiality. Further, and if you’re one of those people who can tell what’s going to happen before it actually happens, you’ve predicted the next element here: he also plans to be clearly, obviously aware of his knowingness about his self-consciousness of self-referentiality. Further, he is fully cognizant of the gimmickry inherent in all this, and will preempt your claim of the book’s irrelevance due to said gimmickry by saying that the gimmickry is simply a device, a defense, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story, which is both too black and blinding to look at–avert…your…eyes!–but nevertheless useful, at least to the author, even in caricatured or condensed form, because telling as many people as possible about it helps, he thinks, to dilute the pain and bitterness and thus facilitate its flushing from his soul…

Perhaps in this time of worldwide rice shortage, there are worse things I can do with my time than visit freerice.com, where one is quizzed on vocabulary and “for each word you get right, [the sponsors] donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.”

It took me about 8 minutes to get the sponsors to donate 1000 grains, which got me wondering how long it would take me to get a cup of rice donated.

Nominally, 1 cup of rice = 7,200 grains (I counted 10,000… well, sorta… I counted about 300 to 400 grains (say 350) in 1/2 tb.sp., i.e. ~2500 in 1/4 cup, i.e. 10,000 in a cup! and yes, that’s a typical Friday night for me.)

This means I have to “play” at freerice.com for more than an hour for the sponsors to donate one cup of rice. While I do have a lot of free time, I don’t particularly want to spend hours being quizzed on vocabulary.

I’d rather, for example, spend my time calculating how many grains of rice are produced a year: The world produces 600,000,000 tonnes of rice x 0.65 grain/paddy x 1000 kg/ton x 4 cups/kg x 10,000 grains/cup = 15,600,000,000,000,000 grains of rice produced per year worldwide. That is to say, about 2,400,000 grains of rice/capita, or 240 cups/capita/yr. Suddenly I feel bloated — maybe I should’ve had less chicken biryani for dinner.

Now, consider this: every year since 2001, the world has consistently produced more transistors than grains of rice–for example, this year we’ve produced 900,000,000 transistor/capita– even as we’re sure transistors aren’t as yummy as rice.

Oh, one more fun fact: rice has 40,000 to 50,000 genes (compared to 20,000 to 25,000 in humans.) Look it up.

When all the dust had settled down,
And the crater revealed itself
— a crusty bullet-entry wound
the size of an adolescent heart —
Only simple forms remained;
Bacteria, Philosophy, and Art.

(and a polish poem regarding the problem of evil)

A Poem For The End Of The Century
By Czeslaw Milosz

When everything was fine
And the notion of sin had vanished
And the earth was ready
In universal peace
To consume and rejoice
Without creeds and utopias,

I, for unknown reasons,
Surrounded by the books
Of prophets and theologians,
Of philosophers, poets,
Searched for an answer,
Scowling, grimacing,
Waking up at night, muttering at dawn.

What oppressed me so much
Was a bit shameful.
Talking of it aloud
Would show neither tact nor prudence.
It might even seem an outrage
Against the health of mankind.

Alas, my memory
Does not want to leave me
And in it, live beings
Each with its own pain,
Each with its own dying,
Its own trepidation.

Why then innocence
On paradisal beaches,
An impeccable sky
Over the church of hygiene?
Is it because that
Was long ago?

To a saintly man
–So goes an Arab tale–
God said somewhat maliciously:
“Had I revealed to people
How great a sinner you are,
They could not praise you.”

“And I,” answered the pious one,
“Had I unveiled to them
How merciful you are,
They would not care for you.”

To whom should I turn
With that affair so dark
Of pain and also guilt
In the structure of the world,
If either here below
Or over there on high
No power can abolish
The cause and the effect?

Don’t think, don’t remember
The death on the cross,
Though everyday He dies,
The only one, all-loving,
Who without any need
Consented and allowed
To exist all that is,
Including nails of torture.

Totally enigmatic.
Impossibly intricate.
Better to stop speech here.
This language is not for people.
Blessed be jubilation.
Vintages and harvests.
Even if not everyone
Is granted serenity.

The (2008/05/25) cover story of NYtimes (login reqrd), exposes –the tip of the iceberg–a tale of web 2.0 gone wild.

It’s easy to draw parallels between what’s going on online and what’s going on in the rest of our media: the death of scripted TV, the endless parade of ordinary, heavily made-up faces that become vaguely familiar to us as they grin through their 15 minutes of reality-show fame. No wonder we’re ready to confess our innermost thoughts to everyone: we’re constantly being shown that the surest route to recognition is via humiliation in front of a panel of judges.

the Gawker “voice” was righteously indignant but comically defeated, sighing in unison with an audience that believed nothing was as it seemed and nothing would ever really change. Everyone was fatter or older or worse-skinned than he or she pretended to be. Every man was cheating on his partner; all women were slutty. Writers were plagiarists or talentless hacks or shameless beneficiaries of nepotism. Everyone was a hypocrite. No one was loved. There was no success that couldn’t be hollowed out by the revelation of some deep-seated inadequacy.

When Jessica cautioned me against reading the comments, she also told me that the commenters loved it when she revealed personal details. Not only did I find this to be true, I found it to be almost necessary. Injecting a personal aside into a post that wasn’t otherwise about me not only kept things interesting for me, it was also a surefire way of evoking a chorus of assenting or dissenting opinions, turning the solitary work of writing posts into something that felt more social, almost like a conversation.

It’s a must read for anyone who “overshares” on the public arenas of the internets.

By Pablo Neruda (translated by Robert Bly)

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailor shops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don’t want so much misery.
I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.

(more…)

The “image” below is constructed using css. (i.e. properly sized and placed characters.) In fact, without formatting, it spells:
oooo(OOO\L(OOOOO\L(O||\\||\\\\((8ooo((8oooo))boOoooooo)boOooooooooo///•••••___•••CCO(-

Intrigued? then maybe you’d like to see it come to life.

[via MeFi]

… or the story of a man working in regenerative medicine giving his 69-year-old brother the finger cells scraped off a pig’s bladder, which facilitated the regrowth of the fingertip he had lost. Watch the BBC videos (a bit graphic), and then answer me this: How long, do you think, before we start using this technology for funtainment?