Imminent Bachelor(ette)-dom

And so, the laptop hunt comes to and end and I am finally the owner of a fine machine to call my own. A graduation present, mum calls it. I call it a gift horse and don’t plan on looking it in the mouth. For the technical-minded, the lappie is a Fujitsu-Siemens Intel Centrino Duo Core 1.8 Ghz, 512 RAM, 120 HDD with DVD R/RW and WiFi.

As luck would have it, it appears my work as a Teaching Assistant (TA) is not yet at an end. SZABIST, it seems, is very interested in revising and improving the syllabus for the BS (CS) degree as much as possible and want information and feedback both from students and teachers, but with the focus on the students. I think it’s a good idea to take feedback from the recipients of any degree about amendments to said degree, but let’s face it: the quality of CS students has been on the decline for some time now and the most vocal gripes come from the corner of the students like myself who want to change the system rather than have to study something they can’t understand. The Coordinator is interested in discovering the reasons for this decline from the students who did choose to enroll, but the conclusion seems obvious: managers, businessmen, entrepreneurs, all these potentially stand to make more money (in the eyes of parents) than a kid with a Computer Science degree, and to some extent they’re right. What parents tend to forget while not so gently steering their offspring in the direction of some potentially profitable degree is that not every kid can be a good manager/entrepreneur/businessman. It takes a certain kind of person to succeed in each field and a kid would stand a much better chance of making it if he were allowed to actually focus on what he thinks he would be interested in and could work at.

At the time of my own enrollment in the BCS (Honors) program, some four and a half years ago, Pakistan was slowly beginning to realize that there was actually a Dot Com Boom (which experts abroad were then calling the Dot Com Bubble and predicting its popping) and that being a Computer Scientist may not just be for weird, eccentric genius types who were always immersed in their machines. As with the study of any field and like any college grad, I had no idea what I was getting into when I signed up. I had taken several very varied courses in my A levels and found that programming in C and drawing flow charts came fairly easily to me, and what was even better, it made sense to me! This was the reason I opted to join a CS Program, envisioning three years of drawing improved versions of flow charts and learning how to code more complicated structures. Once into the program, I began to realize that a fundamental part of a CS curriculum is Math and Science (Physics, to be precise). Finding both interesting and doable only when they make sense, I encountered a flurry of teachers more anxious to get the course material over and done with rather than actually try to make students understand the concepts. I also found out that in subconscious retaliation, I was also becoming too stubborn to learn from such methods. What happens when an immovable object meets an irresistible force? You start to flunk out, that’s what. Three years wasted, apparently and no end in sight to the many courses left still to conquer. It was at this period that I truly began to despair and wondered weather it was possible, even at this late stage, to actually switch over to the more harmless seeming BBA degrees. At least there the language spoken was English, not numbers and symbols.
Thanks to the level headed advice of a few good friends and future boss, I endured and finally have reached the end of the road.

The point of this post: I am almost a graduate now! I have but one course remaining on my plate and as soon as the result comes out (and I’m hoping desperately for a favorable one), I shall officially be a Bachelor(ette)!

The yellow cloud road

cloudy sunset

Originally uploaded by Mishaone.

I’m sure plenty of people noticed this if they were on the road anywhere in Karachi yesterday evening. This gorgeous path of clouds leading to the setting sun ended up turning a dark pink when the sun finally set. I only hope this can be taken at face value as a gorgeous display of natural beauty and isn’t indicative instead of sinister natural imbalances causing trouble sometime soon.

Coelho

A friend, well over a year ago, eagerlly passed on Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist to me, declaring it to be “absolutely brilliant” and insisting that I must read it. I don’t normally enjoy reading books other people give to me, but since it’s a fairly thin book and a quick perusal displayed to me a style very much like a simple children’s story, I accepted it and read it straight through, not because it was particularly engaging, but because I was desperately trying to find a point, some mystical words of wisdom within that had enlightened my friend to conclude that it was a brilliant book, or even a single reason to justify having read the whole thing. Although my memory of that time is hazy, I don’t believe I found what I was looking for, and consequently, the books remains vague in my recollection. Something about a shepherd lad, or was it a goatherd? Anyhow, I digress.

The reason for this post is another Paulo Coelho book I decided to pick up whilst book shopping at sunday bazaar (14 books for 1k = a bloody good bargain in my opinion, liberty books be damned!) simply because it had a fairly interested title: Veronika decides to die.

Why would I mention the book? Mainly because while The Alchemist did absolutely nothing for me, this book did. The story centers around a twenty something woman named Veronika who lives in one of those little European countries that nobody knows the location of (much like poor old Pakistan) and has a perfectly ordinary, mundane job in a library and goes through the motions of everyday life with no passion, joy, sorrow, or any strong feelings about anything. To put and end to the futility and pointlessness of it all, she one day decides to kill herself via sleeping pills, but ends up alive and trapped in a mental institution while doing enough damage to her heart by the suicide attempts that she will actually die in a matter of five days.

During her internment in Villete she realises that she has nothing to lose and can therefore do what she wants, say what she wants and be who she wants without having to worry about what others think of her. Who’s going to criticise her, she’s mad after all.

Sounds familiar. A desperate pointlessness to life, a lack of the will to take a risk, to bare it all, to be yourself, all sounds very familiar, which is why I found myself so engrossed in this particular book, specifically the first part, which is such an articulate way to say all that I want to say but will erase a minute later for fear of sounding foolish or, well, mad. Guess there’s a Coelho book out there somewhere for each of us to relate to.

A day at the gym… again

I debated whether to walk the mile and a half or so to the gym, but realized the futility of arriving at my destination for some exercise after having completed by daily hour or so of exercise in arriving there. Upon arriving at the gym, one is intimidated by the lack of any actual overweight inhabitants. It seem all the members of the club are toned and fit and visit the gym religiously only to maintain this state. Odder still are the variety of contraptions on display, silently staring at you as if daring you to figure out what on earth they are for and why one would straddle/hang from/sit/lie upon them at all.

I moved towards the time honored choice for the newbie: the treadmill, and found one blessedly unoccupied and quickly started it up and started my brisk walk. In the meantime, attracting the eye was a lady of modest bulk laying upon the floor on her back, her legs going through the motions of peddling imaginary bicycle pedals in the air whilst she lays, somewhat ironically one machine away from an exercise cycle which would have allowed her the benefits of the same exercise in a considerably less odd position. Another odd inmate in the duration of my stay was a lady who constantly stared at her own arse in the multiple mirrors while jogging violently on the treadmill, as if to shrink it by sheer force of will. I never understood the point of covering each and every wall in a gym with mirrors. I would assume people visit a gym because they don’t really like the way they look and want to do something about it. Why cruelly remind them at every turn of their appearance and cause them to gaze, in some fascination, at what they look like from every angle while using a treadmill?

I looked upon one such mirror only to discover, in horror, that my rear had apparently grown to double its size (quite the sight) in the twenty minutes of exercise rather than shrinking, only to discover, to my relief, that it was a combination of two mirrors displaying half of my visage each and overlapping considerably that created that illusion and nearly scared me half to death.
This time, thankfully, it has been several hours and no sign of kneelessness. Huzzah!

For all the gamers out there

A state of kneelessness – Day 2

This lack of knee movement is getting on my nerves. Each step invokes yelps of pain, therefore I have decided (wisely) to stay put. Oh, glorious day of inactivity, how I have missed you!

The day of doing nothing but playing World of Warcraft all day has given me time to think about the future. Provided that my asshat of a teacher decided to let me clear the one course standing between myself and a Bachelor(ette)s Degree, I have to face the fact that I’m almost (gasp) an adult. Seemed like a dirty word in the good old days, but now it seems inevitable, this physical evolution to adulthood and eventually marriage. Why is it we must still propogate those annoying stereotypes about having to get married and multiply to populate the earth? I mean we’ve all wandered so far from religion already, why not a step further by becoming a fully mature capitalist state, in which the first thing to go would be the family unit. The second thing to go, mind you, would be the social pressure to attend all sorts of ridiculous functions in the name of socializing, as if there’s something wrong with you if you prefer your own company to that of nitwits with whom you have nothing in common. Agonizing silences, drifting from group to group, talking about nothing, hardly listening, smiling on cue, is all this rubbish really necessary to be a well rounded individual? If you listen to mum, yes. Bah!

Bloody Hell!

Lost: 200 calories, use of knees.

After much deliberation, I decided to start going to the gym again. Bad idea, since I generally tend to overdo things on my first day. Ended up cycling vigorously for half and hour while listening, and mentally growling along, to metallica. As if this wasn’t sufficient, I ended my session half an hour later with twenty minutes of very fast walking on the treadmill. One thing that can be said in favor of lust is that it helps to drive one forward on an exercise routine. Unfortunately, all the excitement proved a bit much for poor knees, which have caved almost completely immediately thereafter. I am currently engaged in shuffling back and forth across the room groaning and trying to move knee joins as little as possible while walking and sipping on cool soft drinks to soothe self, which defeats the purpose of working out in the first place.

Later, was saddened to discover Lahore trip for next weekend appears to be off. One of the concerned parties has been tragically buried in work issues. Sad, I was looking forward to visiting since it’s been near nine years since I last went. Ah well.

On the brighter side, have purchased PDA from a notorious character on worldcall forums and was plagued the rest of the day by fellow WC-ers asking me if it was really true and that I had conducted a trade with the creature in question in person. The celly purchased, for the fellow gadgetoholics who may be reading this, was a Motorola e680. I’ve always wanted a touch screen and I’m not afraid to say it, regardless of what friends indicate that statement means taken in a Freudian sense.

Also, am just about to conclude my reading of “Wuthering Heights” and have downloaded 1939 film adaptation to watch. Lawrence Olivier and painful knees are in the cards for tonight.