people

You learn a lot about people from how they speak, what they write and even what they take photographs of. For some reason - one that I cannot explain - people who always speak of themselves, write of themselves and take photographs of themselves always seem like narcissists to me. Maybe that isn't true, but it seems that way to me and I cannot explain why. Maybe it is that I don't do the same and thus I am more attentive to it.

But it goes beyond that. People criticize my picture on Facebook because it only shows my right eye, staring out, but then I hold little importance to how others view me. I'm too busy looking at other things to dally with myself more than necessary. Why? Because the world around me is much more interesting than I am - there are so many things to see and share. But then I use websites to express my own opinions, and perhaps there is some narcissism in that as well.

It makes me wonder, though. So many times I meet people who are so caught up with themselves that they seem to be oblivious to what is around them. In relationships, too - just yesterday I spoke with an Aunt who confirmed what I thought - that my father was most upset with me because I wasn't what he wanted, but instead was my own person. This, I imagine, is true of many people - so I don't feel special - but the confirmation from a third party who knew us both did sit well with me.

And still, I don't understand how people can focus almost completely on themselves. Is it narcissism? Insecurity? What is it that makes people this way?

I had occasion to say today that I pitied someone. It wasn't that they were poor, or that they were hurt in some physical way, or that they were otherwise worthy of pity in some popular sense of the word. It is difficult to explain, especially without going into details, but I will.

There are people wandering around who are constantly trying to do things, raise themselves up - and such people do not deserve pity. Instead, those people deserve respect. Then there are those that try to move ahead by being sly, and in some ways that deserves respect as well. But when they try to be sly and consistently fail, when they try to raise themselves up by trying to take from others without methods worthy of respect, I used to get angry about them. Now I pity them. In a way, it is like knowing that they are trying to climb out of a barrel but the inside of the barrel is covered in oil. You watch them almost make it a few times, and then you watch them slide right back down. Mostly they make lots of noise while doing this, but at the end of it all they always remain in their barrels.

It used to be fun to poke them with sticks, torture them, tease them - but I outgrew that part of my life before I hit my teenage years. Then, you might be in the barrel with them and tire of them trying to step on your own head. On another day, you may simply be afforded the luxury of watching them from a distance and knowing that no matter what they do, they will remain in that barrel. They will continue trying to do what has always resulted in their own failure. Maybe they don't belong in the barrel, but they certainly don't seem to belong anywhere else.

The sun rises, the sun sets.

There are cycles in the world, where a Wrong can permeate a reality so much so that illusion is all that is apparent. That Wrong travels on the lips of friends and strangers alike; each victim becomes an agent. Each agent finds a new victim to become an agent. We pollinate each other with whatever is on our lips, be it a beautiful song or a deadly kiss. We transfer anything we carry over to the next person, and so the cycle goes, not unlike the truth about socks.

It just keeps going. A viral spiral, a supposedly never ending cycle. But the cycle can be broken, it can be stopped and it can be halted so that there is no transfer. It can be grounded, sent to ground through a conductor in a world of insulation. The torch need not be picked up. But it requires something novel.

It requires looking beyond the obvious and looking into the why of things. When someone hurts you, do they really intend to or are they just reacting instinctively? When someone pleases you, do they really intend to or are they just passing something along? Can one exist without the other? Is there really a possibility of balance between the two? Should there be?

In having a hard drive crash, I've been reloading the main system... all... day. Its something I have never really enjoyed - the time spent waiting for something to be ready, and the long periods of time it takes to download updates and code through the cocktail straw of a pipe I have in Trinidad. It is like watching refrigerated molasses ooze.

And yet, it is clean. It is the wiping of a system that had grown cluttered in ways that I had not appreciated in some time. A system that, in 2005, was new is once again new in 2008 - through the failure of a hard drive. And I find myself not wanting to install too much on it. It is light. It is fast. It is clean. It doesn't have the gigabytes of documents I had on it - thankfully, I had already backed those up. It doesn't have the years and years of emails stored away, it doesn't have all that junk I was slowly sifting through - some of the junk older than the computer itself.

Clean.