The immigrant experience

I finished reading "The immigrant"  by Manju Kapur yesterday. Set in the 1970's its the story of a couple brought together by an arranged marriage. It is not a well written book by any standards. It has the stereotypical dysfunctions of a marriage but what makes it interesting to me is that it has aspects of being just an immigrant, not a married one, woven into the story.

Given the quality of writing, I was surprised to  come across the best summary of being an immigrant in this last paragraph of the book : "Perhaps that was the ultimate immigrant experience. Not that any one thing was steady enough to attach yourself to for the rest of your life, but that you found different ways to belong, ways not necessarily lasting, but ones that made your journey less lonely for a while. When something failed it was a signal to move on. For an immigrant there is no going back."

May be its not just the immigrant who feels that way. May it just resonates with me and I happen to be an immigrant.

Fight on

When people fight over things, there is almost always a negative judgement passed towards it.

When people fight over things, it must mean that they actually care about it. So people out there fighting over a toy,  a relationship, a person, I say I won't judge you unless I think what you are fighting for isn't worth fighting over.

Would that mean if I don't fight over something, I do not care for it? I just think I care for things which go above and beyond it.

They ask me, "How do you do it?"

I get that quite often being eternally single. I say its easy and not so easy at the same time. Coffee for the days, some endorphins for the evenings, alcohol for the nights, a few interesting people around and being a bit crazy helps.

Hey girl

" Write every day. Not every other day. Not tomorrow. Not after the party. But before. The more you write, the more comes out of you. If you don't give inspiration an opportunity, it will never arrive."
say Ethan Hawke. Not Ryan Gosling but a better version.

From being hung over to being extremely drunk

I guess that's what happens when I force myself to be too disciplined for over two months.

Started with MIT Sloan school of management's conference on the Digital Economy and ended with me passing out in a car. Actually started with me being hungover and ended with me passing out in my friend's car.

Grand Hyatt - blue bottle's cappuccino - rally pad - connor - rafael - Afterlife - ritual roasters - wild side west - Lexington - Elbo room- the bar beside the cat club - 6NDR309's backseat - the forgotten purse - the knock on the window - the opening of the door - a few long seconds and that my friend is the end of the night.

Well the missing parts are the car that I left in the city and the parking ticket that I found on the dashboard the next day.

The outsider's perspective

I have been thinking about the outsider's perspective for a while now. Can we make a broadly general statement about the outsider perspective?

I initially asked myself "Is the outsider's perspective always positive or negative in certain situations? If so, what are the situations?". Take relationships for that matter. When they fail in particular. The outsider's perspective, it seems to me, is always negative no matter what. Or affairs. Or really may be that is the case when anything goes wrong according to the societal norms. The outsider usually fails to empathize with the situation. Sympathize, maybe. The outsider perspective could be all positive about a person's abilities. And that positive perspective could be just wrong.

This led me to ask myself again: " Is the outsider's perspective that of just ignorance?" Not all the time, right? We go seek an outsider's perspective to find our blind spots. Don't we? One might argue we don't ask an outsider but we ask a friend. Nonetheless, the outsider is known to have an unbiased opinion. So the outsider's perspective is not always that of ignorance.

This leads me to the question "When should an outsider have a perspective and when should he/she not?"

The power of habit

So,  I have been reading the power of habit by Charles Duhigg. I have been against self help books all my life but I should say this book changed my perspective on the genre. After being dumped and doing an intensive survey on being dumped and having a bit more experience in the 'dump and get dumped' cycle, I came to the following conclusion. (Disclaimer:  It could change). Every experience that you have been through, every emotion you have felt,  every mistake you have made have all been experienced, felt and made before. Not once but many many times.  I guess that is obvious when you think rationally but I am sure we are the most irrational when rationality is what you need the most. I am not saying one should not experience life as it comes. All I am saying is when you do and something happens that you do not understand, these books could provide a good insight into what happened.

All habits have a pattern: cue -routine -reward. Changing habits is most effective when try to change the routine while keeping the cue and reward the same. To make the change long lasting,  you need belief, in yourself or a higher power. It helps if you have company.
Then comes the pivot habits. The one habit which could bring a change in a lot of other aspects.
In my opinion, the theory seems simple but what is essential is recognizing the cues and the rewards we are seeking. 

How do I seek to incorporate this into my life?

Simple things.
Make my bed as soon as I wake up.
Brush my teeth before I go to bed.
I have the habit of eating before going to bed, in bed and in between my sleep. The cue is me being ready to go to my bed and read or watch some television. The reward obviously being filling up my moderately full stomach. Having a cup of nice hot tea everyday. That is going to be my routine.
Write one reaction paper every day.

So that's my list:
  - make my bed.
  -  write one reaction paper every day of the week.
  - brush my teeth before going to bed.
  -  a hot cup of caffeine free tea before going to bed.

The reaction paper a day is a bit over ambitious but lets see how it goes for a week at least.