Is Right Versus Feels Right ...

So, this week I've had some very hard decisions to make, and it just always reminds me, it never gets easier to make a difficult decision.  You know, the kind where it's like, "I'm screwed if I do, I'm screwed if I don't."

What I've learned in these situations is that sometimes the only thing you can do is what is best, safest, and healthiest for you and yourself, and nobody else.  And this often means that people are going to get hurt because of your decisions.  That's right, the ones you wanted to make that you hope would benefit everyone else but you know it only benefits yourself.  And you feel like a jerk because of it.
 

What I've learned over time is that if I don't respect myself and my needs, I will ultimately end up resenting the people I'm trying to please, or harbour deep seated grudges against others like it's their fault that I chose badly.  But the truth is, I'm usually just angry at myself for making the worst kind of decision--the one that denies what I want and manages to screw me over at the same time.

When you make a decision that is right, versus a decision that feels right, you are choosing yourself over all others.  And there is nothing harder for some people.  (People like me, for example.)  Sometimes, you have to choose yourself.  And when you make a choice because it 'feels right' and stops you from having to face unpleasant realities, you're actually doing yourself a disservice.  No one deserves to live in a dreamland.  And more importantly, you and I will never grow if we continue to propogate those kind of decisions as decisions that are good for us.

At some point life is about waking up and realizing just how precious life is.  We don't always catch the scent of it, we don't always know how valuable it is, but sometimes we only see it right before we have to make one of those kind of decisions--the hard ones.  And life is all about choices.

In the end, all we have are the choices we make.

The diffrences....

I have been talking a lot lately with friends and family about people not being good with commitments.  It seems to me that there are a lot of people in the world (and I include myself in this, guilty as charged, absolutely) that take advantage our your time and seem to consistently fail to help you when you need it, or at least spend time with you when you need it.

In some ways, it's always our own fault when we rely on acquaintances and false friends.  We're only setting ourselves up for failure when we rely on people we know can't be relied upon.  And usually we have a pretty good sense if someone is a commitment-phobe, reliable, or comes-and-goes-with-the-weather.

Everyone in this world deserves respect, but not everyone in the world deserves your time.  The most precious thing in the world we have is time.  And no one should waste their time on people who don't even know the value of spending time with you.

You know, I learned sometime around this year a really awful truth. 

'Nice' is not a good thing. 

Which is funny.  Not like 'ha-ha' funny, but more like, 'Am I on the Twilight Zone' sort of funny or 'Did that really just happen' sort of funny.  Odd, I suppose, is the right word.  It's strange how horrible nice can be. 

There are a lot of nice people in the world.  Nice means smiling, seeming to care, feigning interest, and generally remaining neutral to your cause, feelings, problems, and mistakes. 

Some people like having nice people around.  It's nice when people seem not to judge you, seem not to mind what you do, seem to like you.

But 'nice' isn't a picture of reality.  And nice people aren't your friends. 

Some of the worst things people have done to me have been while they had a smile on their faces.  They were trying to be nice.  You know, that thing that seemed so alright at the time?  But then all those nice people who were feigning interest about things you care about are still feigning interest while they watch your life collapse around you. 

Here's the difference between a friend and a nice person.  A nice person will walk by you in a burning building and comment, "That's really such a shame."  A real friend will pull you out of that burning building. 

We all have something in this world to give.  And some of the best people in the world I know, love and respect are not 'nice' people.  (Heck, most people wouldn't call my mother a 'nice' person, but she's the first to give her shirt off her back for people she absolutely despises.)  The people I love are: cranky, miserable, awkward, generally flawed people with eccentricities and foibles.   And I love them anyways.  And I hope they love me back the same.

It's hard not to want to be surrounded by 'nice'.  Everything's pleasant. no one judges your actions, you feel so safe. 

But, that's not real.  Good friendship to me requires a certain level of respect for a person, but also respect for their feelings, thoughts and actions.  Not to mention the ability to criticize those thoughts and actions when a person gets to close to the fire.  I think Nietzsche said it best when he said, "Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him! We should also respect the enemy in our friend." 

In life, we are surrounded by enemies...inside ourselves and without.  But the best victories against these enemies come from a true friend.  Nice people just don't cut it in real life.

 

Ideas on beginnings.....

I recently started a new book. Well, not so recently. I just haven't made as much progress as I'd like. I'd been flailing around with it and for many months I couldn't figure out why. I loved the premise. It had a strong plot. I could even weave in some interesting themes without being intrusive to the story. When I finally sit down with all of my observation ,character studies, images, and plot outlines it often overwhelms me. Who's story is it? Will it work best with one point of view? Two? Should I tell it in 1st person? 3rd person? What are the stakes? How can I raise them? How far can I take it. Is that far enough?

And then there's my worst enemy -I no more have an editor, who from the very first word on the page begins to criticize direction, question word choice and order. My previous editor is such a pain, that I've been known to throw a pillow case over the monitor just to shut him up. Yes. I've done that.

A character in a book I recently created up came to me while I was watching to LIMITLESS  movie.What might it be like to be his BFF? Challenging, I'd bet. So I started with that idea and worked from there. I ended up with one of my favorite (albeit difficult) characters.I almost always think I'm going to write a story in 1st person point of view. I'll write 10-15 chapters that way, and then I begin to feel restricted. I start all over again in 3rd person, but now I know my character. I can work the immediacy of 1st person thoughts into my 3rd person POV, and still have the flexibility that 3rd offers. Maybe someday I'll get a whole story down in 1st person and make it work. Maybe it'll be my current WIP. We'll see.

I tend to want perfection from the start. I forget that sometimes it's best to sit back and let the story come. This time I'm going to tell it all the first time, even those parts that won't make the final cut. Give myself permission to ramble. Edit later.  *Puts a reminder post-it on the monitor* Yes, edit later...

Now, I never lift someone completely from life. Every character is unique, has a little of myself sprinkled in them, and is a composite from many sources, even snippets of conversation in the elevator.

But they usually start from something external. So it's time for me to pay attention again.

How about you? Do your characters originate from observations? Or do you make them up from scratch?

Keep writing,

Firdaus

Out of my head: Unknown

So, this week I've had some very hard decisions to make, and it just always reminds me, it never gets easier to make a difficult decision.  You know, the kind where it's like, "I'm screwed if I do, I'm screwed if I don't."

What I've learned in these situations is that sometimes the only thing you can do is what is best, safest, healthiest, and the most important things is economical for you and yourself, and nobody else.  And this often means that people are going to get hurt because of your decisions.  That's right, the ones you wanted to make that you hope would benefit everyone else but you know it only benefits yourself.  And you feel like a jerk because of it.

What I've learned over time is that if I don't respect myself and my needs, I will ultimately end up resenting the people I'm trying to please, or harbour deep seated grudges against others like it's their fault that I chose badly.  But the truth is, I'm usually just angry at myself for making the worst kind of decision--the one that denies what I want and manages to screw me over at the same time.

When you make a decision that is right, versus a decision that feels right, you are choosing yourself over all others.  And there is nothing harder for some people.  (People like me, for example.)  Sometimes, you have to choose yourself.  And when you make a choice because it 'feels right' and stops you from having to face unpleasant realities, you're actually doing yourself a disservice.  No one deserves to live in a dreamland.  And more importantly, you and I will never grow if we continue to propogate those kind of decisions as decisions that are good for us.

At some point life is about waking up and realizing just how precious life is.  We don't always catch the scent of it, we don't always know how valuable it is, but sometimes we only see it right before we have to make one of those kind of decisions--the hard ones.  And life is all about choices.

In the end, all we have are the choices we make....

Operation Blackbriar: look at us....

Well it's a 4 years late but I finally finish examined The Bourne Trilogy, I believe most people have probably already watched this movie; and some have probably downloaded it further hurting the hand that I hope will one day feed me. It was a good end to the series, for me it's "fit" very well. I'll admit that I was not excited when I first heard about the Bourne Identity and it's star Matt Damon. In fact I had waited till almost 2 weeks to check it out at cinema. I was impressed, and further more was excited when Supremacy came out. Ultimatum on the other hand was a tuff sell for me. The trailer offered nothing new, the story definitely offered nothing new, the cast almost the same except for one bad ass CIA agent that pretty much saved the show. David Strathairn plays Noah Vosen, a CIA man who runs the black ops in the CIA. Pretty much he can do whatever he wants. His new job is to of course take down Bourne and pin the Ops that created him on Landey, played once again by Joan Allen, or kill Bourne... well do they? The story really is nothing new, the acting is actually quite nice, but I don't want to talk about the well known damon acting. I'm more interested on the symbolism of CIA via Black ops, secret mission, assassination and etc.

Operation Blackbriar-Treadstone Upgrade

We don't know what this program was. They tell us it wasn't water-boarding or the other torture methods. (You do realize that "harsh interrogation methods" is a euphemism worthy of the Nazis or the Soviets, right?) They tell us it wasn't the massive surveillance that essentially rendered the Fourth Amendment so much empty language.

They also tell us that it was never an "operational" program, even after nearly eight years. Oh, bullshit. To believe that, you'd have to have your head buried so far up your ass that it would be looking out your navel.

Dick Cheney, the true power of Duhbya's maladministration, ordered this program kept secret from Congress, kept immune from the oversight of democracy. He explicitly evaded the rule of law. (Again!) This was - and still is - the canonical impeachable offense. It's also a violation of his oath of office.

There is no way that Darth Cheney would have been interested enough in "planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year" to suppress disclosure of it. The New York Times is playing along to even print such nonsense.

Note: In all the wingnut foofaraw about Nancy Pelosi accusing Leon Panetta of lying about the CIA's legal obligations to brief Congress is the most obvious bullshit. Panetta did not say the CIA always briefed Congress in compliance with its legal obligations. He said that it was not the CIA's policy to withhold legally required briefings. Is everyone in the media too dense - or too happy to play along with the inside game - to notice this?

value

I think this week I have spent a lot of time managing my own time.  And, rather badly I feel.  I have had a couple of 20 hour days lately, some of them in a row, and it all kind of came full stop after 14 hours of sleep.  I probably could have slept longer, but I made myself get up.  No rest for the weary. Sometimes when things get a little too crazy, when things are really insane and there seems to be no end to work, that's when we seem to appreciate small moments of rest, small things that other people do to us, or for us.

I have thought a lot about laziness, about what it means to have a healthy life-work balance, about what kind of career path I want to take, and it all comes back to time.  Time we have to spent, time that is taken away from us.  All opportunity requires time.  All failures are often a misuse of the most important resource of all--time. 
 
We only have so much time to give, to spend.  Everything always comes back to our mortality, to the choices we make, and to how we choose to use the time we're given.  What is a better life...one that is packed to the gills with activity, or a quiet life of contemplation, relaxation and self-enjoyment?  What is a better use of time?
 
There's no easy answer to the way to live your life.  But we all have a certain kind of freedom, a certain kind of truth.  Everyone has time, even if they have nothing else.  It's all dependant on ourselves to how we use it.
 

Why canada!

So, I just had a weird dream last night.

My wife and I were flying back to Canada, and we had flown into a smaller airport for some reason, taken a bus, and then somehow got stranded in the middle of Ontario. While we were looking at the map of Canada, she said we were very far away from where we needed to be. I said, No problem, and proceeded to move a red dot on the map that represented us and drag the red dot across the map closer to where we wanted to go, somewhere around a border between Quebec and Ontario. When we looked up, we were standing beside a highway, and I couldn't decide whether we were supposed to go left or right, and my wife said we go left, that's the way to Toronto. (We were trying to get to Toronto.) So we began walking left, and immediately ended up in a giant beach resort with the sun shining and people laughing and carrying around drinks and flowers in their hair. The beach resort was named a small place that I ', so familiar with although I can't for the life of me remember what it was called. (I saw a sign in a dream, but it changed when I looked at it three times from Vespa Beach, to Perdue, to what it actually was, which I don't remember.)
 

My wife looks at the map, and says, with an extremely distressed tone, that we were VERY far away from where we needed to be. At this point there was a bit of a commotion, and for some reason, Tim Allen showed up with the lady who played his wife off of Home Improvement, with really gray hair, being followed around by about fifteen people all asking if they could take pictures of him, and he posed and was pleasant to them. My wife also asked to take a picture of him, which she did, and I wanted to stop her because, hey, the man's on a vacation. That's no way to treat him. After they left, he sighed a sigh of relief, and walked over to the beach to sit by himself. I was now alone, and I don't know where my wife went, but I assumed she went into the store to figure out a plan how to get to Toronto. I walked up under a little side hut attached to the main lounge, and looked at Tim Allen sitting on the beach all by himself, with the tide coming on a perfect sandy beach, and felt pretty forlorn over the fact that I was supposed to be in Toronto and that I was in a beautiful beach resort miles and kilometres and days and days of walking away from my destination. I heaved a big sigh and started to walk away.

Then someone called from behind, "Hey man, why you so sad?" I thought for a moment it was Tim Allen talking to me, and since I didn't think I really ought to deserve talking to anybody famous, I felt pretty flattered, like I was in one of those TV miniseries where good things happen to people who are down on their luck or Sidekicks with Chuck Norris or something. (Yes, I know. I was dreaming.) I turned around and I big group of black guys that I didn't notice before were staring right at me, as if I was the new show in town. This one guy with dreadlocks started talking to me, asking why I was so sad when I was in such a nice place. He said he's always happy, and he lives off of water and eating small things like seeds. He reminded me of King Louie from the Jungle Book, with the way he was talking to me. I was afraid he was going to start breaking into Bob Marley's "Don't Worry, Be Happy" with his posse as back up singers. Luckily, Tim Allen happened to come over and asked what the problem was. The guys answered for me, and said I was miles and kilometres and days away from where I was supposed to be and so I was sad. Tim Allen wanted to buy the men a drink for being so nice to me, and they tried to turn him down because they said they don't drink or eat a lot of things that he was offering them, but then one of the beach waitresses came around, and Tim Allen looked at her, and she said, "Don't worry, I'll bring them some vegetables and things they like." The guys looked pretty happy, and Tim Allen asked me to go sit a little ways away under the shade with him and talk about things. He asked where I was going, and who was that girl I was traveling with? I said she is my wife, and Tim Allen nodded, and then we sat for a while, just staring out, watching the people, and I suddenly felt a lot more relaxed and like I shouldn't worry so much about where I was going. We talked a little more, and then one the waitresses came and bothered him, to which he said a few things. I was surprised he didn't have bodyguards or more people around him since he had a pretty big career, and he said that People with less fame than him walk around with a horde of people following him just because they want them, and he has only one person. He sounded kind of critical. We laid in the sand for a little longer in silence. Then he started talking about various things, most of which I don't remember, since I then woke up.

Dreams are strange things.

Are You Willing to Go For A Dream? ....

You know, we all say we want to achieve our dreams.  The phrase in english, as it's put, is "Reach for the stars."  I think we say that because we think that dreams are something far away, twinkling in the sky, making us happy just to think about them.  Currently, I'm dreaming about Motorbike but maybe that's more a daydream.  Eh heh.  Right!

We all have dreams for the future.  Either for our families, friends, loved ones, and, of course, for ourselves.  It's interesting that our dreams so often rely on circumstances outside our control or beyond our ability to foresee the future.  Having a baby, becoming a famous musician, getting married, getting the job of your dreams, these are things we can imagine.  But we never seem to know how things are going to turn out in real life. 

I talked with my wife about having dreams and achieving them, and I think we both shared a similar feeling that we thought adulthood would be a somewhat safer, happier place as we go about achieving what we consider to be our dreams.  The truth is, however, is that achieving our dreams means taking serious risks...risks that sometimes mean we fail.  And nobody likes to fail.

People that we think had star-studded lives actually has serious issues and conflicts that they faced, and were only rewarded for persevering.  Tun Mahathir lost his political career after fired by Tunku but one of his teeth by time he became prime minister, and was in constant pain for the rest of his life.  Lance Edward  Gunderson known as Lance Armstrong one of the most successful athlete, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, with a tumor that had metastasized to his brain and lungs and he survived with a record seven consecutive times. at Tour de France. People have pain.  People have problems.  Most of the problems we have are insignificant compared to people plauged with disease, famine, or the loss of their friends and family.

The truth is we shape who we are, and we choose who we are and we can be anything, really and truly anything we want to be.  Everything bad in our life can be a disaster, or an adventure.  It can be an obstacle, or a challenge.  The reason most of us don't reach our potential is not because we aren't capable of achieving our dreams, but because we turn back when the obstacles seem to be too much for us to surmount. 

I guess we all think we want to achieve our dreams without thinking we have to sacrifice anything.  We want to have success with the hard work.  No one wants to change when they think about their dreams...most people just want the results without the consequences.  All things in life come with a price, whether it's time, money, or health.  Nothing in this world comes without a price.  But, that can be comforting, because that means that even we have a value that can't be nullified, as individuals.

There is no obstacle in life so large we can't overcome it to achieve our dreams.  As long as we are alive, we have a chance to change our lives and realize our dreams.  It doesn't mean that dreams get easier as you get older.  It seems to me, dreams become harder to achieve the older you are, but they are always, always still possible.

But what are you willing to give up in your life currently to make a dream real?  And how long are you willing to toil for a dream you have?

2011 it's alright....

You know, I have a lot of things to do this week.  And I would like to take up the old adage:  "The Devil finds mischief for idle hands."

This is so true.

I can easily say the less I have to do in a week that really challenges me, the less I have to do that makes me think, "Wow, I'm doing the things I want in the way I want," the more I feel bad.  I do.  I just feel bad when I'm not expressing 'me.' The more time I try to deal with daily details, small things and boring to-do items that grind on my creativity, my personality, I(and frankly) my well-being, the more I feel like ending it all, and taking it all with me.  (Hypothetically speaking, of course.  I don't actually wish anyone any harm, not even my worst enemies, if such things exist.)

I know that I have to work hard to feel good about the things I do.  I think I have been expecting my life to magically right itself when I'm surrounded by things that are constantly draining on me, and not helping me grow as a human being. Thankfully, I have been able to limit a lot of that business, and now I am focusing on the most important thing in the world:  Me.  And it feels really great.  My life was meant to be busy.  I was meant to work hard.  All the time.  I like it.  I don't know where I got this idea that I should try and slow things down.  Let's speed them up again.

How hard have you been working to achieve your dreams lately?  What makes you feel inspired?  It's funny, it doesn't take much to make me 'feel' successful.  I just need to work with people I like, and work hard.  That's pretty much it.

Well-being for me is tied to being able to express myself, to create myself, the kind of me I want to be.  And I know that there are a lot of things in my life that aren't quite right and that there are a lot of things that never seem to turn out the way I would expect, but I am happy that I am starting to do things the way I want.  And, eventually, I will be able to do the things I want, all the time.  You know, when I'm really famous! 

Then again, maybe that will limit my freedom a bit.  Eh heh.

I am happy for my family,my wife and all the friends I have in my life, and I'm thinking of you all the time.  This year is going to be the best one ever!  Believe it!