A Coin Down the Misery Well

I’ll be back soon so there won’t be that profound sense of misery in me anymore. This place makes me sad. This place brings out the mediocre in me. Life sinks into a habit. I was walking home one night, that same route out of the 2 routes. Under those trees, I felt like I knew what my life will feel like for the rest of my life. Constantly running, constantly chased down, constantly playing games. Deep down, misery will pervade all that I do here. It’s in the quarantined apartments in the lifeless high-rise flats, it’s in the train stations with nonchalant trains arriving too punctually with aloof passengers, it’s in the identical, functional trees, the template way of thought– rather, the lack of and bias and self-righteousness and ‘scariness’.

I’m scared of this place and its people. It makes me lose faith in how I will be as a person. Maybe it is this way all around Earth. Maybe I need to go planet-hunting. Predictability scares me. If what happens in my life is within the boundaries of my imagination– why don’t I just live in my imagination instead? It’s so much cleaner than living it out. I could also freeze my life when my skin is still relatively taut and my figure passably good. Rid of all other value concerns, I feel that it is tragic to keep pumping life into a set of withered skin and jammed up nervous circuits.

I wonder about what I’ll be when I ‘grow up’. Soon, I’ll really be a ‘grown-up’. The transition is so smooth it makes no difference, really. Life is all about playing games. Nothing seems to stay good. When I see something falling lately, all I do is smirk and say .. oh yeah, this is disappointingly, what people do. I don’t expect anything anymore. I just concentrate on making myself happy, making myself great, well-maintained, winning the games out there.

Maybe there’s this misery well in me. It seems to be ever-thirsty.

Or maybe I’m just not in a good mood today, as all humans do sometimes. I would rather be a plant– one that does not serve humans, and die every few weeks or months.

Sacrificing a Virgin

I profess that I don’t know how to live. One thing though, before I continue– I’m very surprised at how clear my glasses are  after I wiped them with the special fabric hanky that comes along with the glasses and the case. It looks almost entirely like ‘real life’. I see no barrier. My degrees are really light (25, 125) and my glasses are fitted with 0 on the left lens and 50 on the right. I don’t usually wear glasses. But the difference between my two eyes annoy the hell out of me but terminally, slowly.

Right, I don’t know how to live. I have the grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side syndrome. It is one of those syndromes that alleviates themselves a little once you correctly identify that you’re in the thick of the syndrome. But still, you get confused. Sometimes, the grass is indeed greener on the other side.

I don’t know whether to live for frivolity or seriousness. It’s true, I would prefer, in all of my lifetimes, having unexpected moments in the day and night of desire, longing and fantasy, recalling how something felt, reconstructing images in my head and feeling a slight rush. I would prefer that to burning my brains, my eyes, my heart, my posture away, burning myself for an unworthy figure in hell. I nearly became paper-thin and irrevocably charred. I’m no longer a fan of pyro. I didn’t matter that much. No one else mattered that much. He was a fcking abyss, a depthless hell. I never made an enemy in my life until then. ‘Enemy’, the title, wasn’t agreed upon. I resolved to look upon it as such. I never expressed my views though. It was as if an ocean’s worth of divide has settled. We, as a collective species can’t see much nor hear much naturally in water. Now take that water and infini-tise it. I should probably call it a vacuum the next time to simply expressions. But I wouldn’t, because I’m a romantic. I’m still a romantic, like how I approach oranges, in the previous entry.

I don’t hate him. I think I’m incapable of hating anyone. His life has ended, to me. I observe (I did not deliberately initiate such thoughts), in my mind, that he has ceased to exist, as a person in this universe. I know he exist-exists, I see him electronically, passively. But to me, he’s unreachable, like he’s in a different world. I feel an undulating tremor of delight to know that he’s really a click away but in my mind, he’s just dead already, or deported forever. It was as if I had post-traumatic disorder.

I don’t remember a lot of things that happened. Too many for a memory like mine to be normal. I used to remember specific seats we took at specific places. I could spatially construct in my head an event when requested, no matter how banal. When I saw a photo containing the subject, I winced a little and had a resistance towards looking at it. When I did get myself to see it, because it’s so irrational not to, it felt like seeing someone I never really knew. It felt very surreal and the rediscovery of the subject made me experience an absent sense of rage, emptiness, grief and utter-detachment. It felt like being introduced to a devil from your past life. You weren’t there, but you were.

I don’t know when the transition took place— when my mind rendered him non-existent and unreachable. I’m writing very explicitly, currently. There is a not-small possibility that he’ll read this but it doesn’t worry me in the least. I can’t feel or consider anything about how he’ll read this. Because he is non-existent. I’m writing so much about this because I just discovered this and this is the first time it has happened to me and I’m rather intrigued by this phenomenon. If I ever pass him on the streets, I won’t make any indications that I ever knew him in my life. My life wouldn’t be changed in the very least bit by that.

I met a monster. Like all super-human encounters, you can never really explain what happened to you. First, there aren’t human words for super-human occurrences. Second, no one will get you. But since you do get what happened to yourself, you aren’t really human anymore. Something in you has changed from that increase in understanding. When you look into an abyss, it looks into you and you become something merged in the middle.

I feel so different. And yet I am able to merge better with humans after that. I feel like no one can understand me. No one can reach the core. I’ve become too huge to bear. I don’t ever dig anymore— only when some urges surface and I need to blog like that. It’s like sacrificing a virgin when the moon is full. After that, I’ll completely revert back to my normal life.

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I now feel that there is no right way to live, not even right wayS. While I am envying someone’s life at the moment, someone may be— Must be (for I can see from the glint in their eyes) envying mine. I’ll just live. In the moment. For I know the outcome. I will succeed. I only get better at each stage of my life.

Oranges, Slides, Person, Intuition.

There’s something wrong with me. The root of it. Relationships with people. I have gotten a lot better. But only as much as habits I had since I was young. I used to always save the best bit of a meal for the last. I still do, but less fanatically. It doesn’t matter to me that much anymore. But I’ll still itch and it’ll still stay within the peripherals of my mind hours after that neglect took place.

I still cut an orange the same way my mom first taught me. At that time, she cut an orange into 6 pieces. I was around 8. I thought that was amazing, because my dad just did it in 4 and he taught me that first. 1/6 orange slices seem so much more delicious to eat. I remember what I thought of it at that time: 1/4 slices tend to coincide with the  ’white lines’ inside the orange and the middle ‘white pulpy-line’ is huge in the 1/4 slices. The 1/6 slices have less of the white pulpy-line and the white lines. Some don’t even have the central white pulpy line because of the way they end up being cut– decentralised. Those slices taste better to me. I guess I’m one of those who love the orange flesh bits of the orange and not the whitish bits– just like those who prefer bread without the ‘outer brown skin’. But less fanatically. Fanaticism fades with age. It’s funny how this makes me feel slightly sad.

I used to be so thrilled whenever I cut an orange– I strive to be perfect all the time. I get heaps happy when I’m about to eat an orange. It’s not only about the slicing part– I get so excited before I taste one. All oranges taste different. And I remember, after consuming quite a number of oranges, a classification of oranges started to form in my head. There were the sweet ones, sour ones and in terms of texture, the fibre-heavy ones (ah! The whitish bits are called fibre, I guess), the fleshy ones and in terms of ‘moisture’, the juicy ones and the dry ones and in terms of structure, the ones with thick rinds and the ones with thin ones. I love the sweet, fleshy, juicy, thin ones.

I have changed so much, I have been changing continuously but the one thing that has never changed is my love for that kind of orange. And it still itches me whenever an orange is sliced imperfectly. Something in me screams a little but the scream is getting duller and more lethargic. Will it disappear one day? Something in me says, no. But there seems to be little rational justification for that. Wouldn’t less of a mild OCD do me a little good that can’t be harmed? It suggests to me that that is something like a gene in me, something that gets me identified. No one else knows though. Now you know. But you will never know it with the vividness that I do. So, that is for me to identify myself? It does give me a stroke of warmth deep within when I recall it. It makes myself feel familiar to me.

And now I feel like I am dipping myself in red hot oil. This also feels familiar. But this is so much less trivial than oranges, though oranges are not trivial. I feel like I am falling down a slide. I’m not sure if I want to or should descend down that slide. You know about slides– when you reach a certain point, you’ll naturally start sliding down. And there is another point when you can stop yourself if you want to. It, of course, depends on the type of slides and the type of garments you’re donning. And of course, your weight, your exact position. All that technicalities. Just shut up and slide. The thing about me that I noticed is that I always end up going along with whatever. Keyword: end up. Key phrase.

My intuition rings bells. But something  just makes me speechless. I can’t help it. I throw myself to the sharks. This time, I’m thinking. I’m scared. Scared. Funny, it is one letter away from ‘scarred’. ‘Scarred’. Oh you don’t know. You have never seen my face. What’s underneath. I don’t mean it figuratively. That’s all you can know.

I want to leave the slide as soon as possible. But I still crave the sight and feel of the slide. And I still wonder, just a little, how it would really be like to slide down. My intuition gets clouded by thoughts. I shouldn’t think. But I can’t help thinking. I can’t help Feeling. Nothing will stuff those feelings. Nothing really spends those feelings. I lead a very active life. I’m short of nothing-really. I run around everywhere everyday and my feelings gets spent, catharsis-ed. But there’s always THAT RESIDUE that haunts me at odd moments during the day. It makes my heart leap and then sink. And I’ll tell myself to shut up. You know when you’re in a lift with bad damping– the moment when you reach your desired level.

Telling myself to shut up is correct. But I don’t seem to ever. When I get to the point when I have to tell myself to shut up, I can sense that the ‘point’ on the slide is reaching. In the past, a voice in me will rise and aid the slide. I thought that voice is called ‘reason’. Whatever it is called, I hope the ducks feed on it. Whenever I start to debate with myself, IT IS WRONG. I’ll remember that. The reason for writing this post today is to remind myself to be clear-headed, clear-intuitioned.

I don’t care what happens to me from now on, in the future. I won’t ever be hurt.

Murakami Quilt, Quasi-trolling

I’ve been reading this huge, thick book, 1Q84. Along with many other things, it’s healing me. The characters in there make me feel like a relative of the human race. I got to understand that some actions and thoughts of mine are normal and that some inclinations of mine are normal and can be acted upon. I make indiscernible waves in this huge messy world of human beings and their thoughts, emotions and actions. And then you would point out the catch: all that, from fiction?

Quite sometime back, I made the decision to ‘become hot’. Hot people have it easy. Their presence throws people of lower self-esteem and confidence off-guard. They become more yielding, pleasant and awkward. That group would take up quite a sizable number of people, depending on how hot you are— the more hot you are, the more people who are less hot than you. I wasn’t hot, never before in my life. I don’t mean that I look ugly. Hot is different from pretty or beautiful. That is why pretty ‘average-looking’ people can be called ‘hot’. I’m sure you can pull out some names. Hot, or at least what I deem to be hot, is being confident, larger-than-life-or-close-to, sunny, warm, curt-without-the-negative-connotations, having an appropriate sense of entitlement, happy-go-lucky-without-the-bad-stuff. And of course, you should do your best to look the part physically.

Once I commit myself to achieving something, I always get it. Commitment seems to be synonymous with resolution. Just wait on the synapse, eventually both of them will be connected. I am indeed, getting hotter. People on the streets look at me different. It’s such an endearing sport to catch someone staring and watch them sheepishly retract their gazes. They stare because they see confidence. I have no boobs. It runs along the family. I got it from my dad. Maybe just a curt, polite gesture. Like when you re-wrap the fragrance-oil-burner you got last Christmas which you couldn’t get yourself interested in and send it over to a relative you couldn’t get yourself interested at. Like when you’re forced to smile for that family photo right after the rights to the remote control is ceded to your baby sister. That’s how big my boobs are.

Just this first half of last year, I couldn’t walk 5 metres anywhere without pulling out my cellphone. I couldn’t look up at anyone. Meeting someone’s gaze meant death. I’m glad I’m alive now. Not only alive, but also kicking. Very hard.

So it’s a new year. I listed down ‘happiness, wisdom, character’. Going into specifics seems rather taboo to me. I seem to believe that there are many paths to something. You should choose that ‘something’ and watch the path unfold. Following a path may not lead to the endpoint that you desire.

The last days of 2011 were spent rather interestingly. I did lots of gym, yoga and swimming. Of course, my family was also working out a bit. I did not neglect them. Although I’m still a little bitter over my dad for giving me too petite a chest. Today, 1/1/12, I holed up in the cafe I always used to go and read 1Q84 for a few hours. Then I went through the rituals I did in the past by eating at that certain place and getting a certain drink at another. 6 months have gone by. The cafe is still playing the same music and the yoga centre too. The same lifeguard/swimming instructor who taught me 4 years ago is still there. He recognised me.

I don’t get constancy. A strange feeling set over me when I discovered those. And then I began to feel puzzled at how I was feeling puzzled. I seem to expect them all to change. I seem to expect something, which I did not set my eyes on for a while, to change. The world tends to stay the same. No wonder, such wretchedness, such bastards, they channel themselves into infinity.

There are some things that I’m not pleased at. And I seem to think that I am right about those. But I can’t express that to anyone because of the remoteness of the issue. And I don’t want to express it to the party in question. I content myself in believing that what needs to be learnt will be learnt. Someday, if I were right, my proposition will be delivered to him/her not by myself and not by struggles, quarrels or fights but by the universe’s response to the person’s actions. If s/he were wrong, him/her will definitely hit a stumbling block. I don’t need to lift my finger.

I believe that right things will come at the right time. I am always happy with the way I am.

Alter-egos

I have so many alter-egos. But the difference is that now, I no longer aspire to unite them. A certain group of people does not need to know what I do with another group. Who I am to one group doesn’t need to be demonstrated to another. I used to think that presenting my whole self  to certain people is the best thing to do i.e., makes me the most likeable etc. That was when I still thought way highly of myself. Now I know that it’s not only my game I’m playing here, but everyone else’s. A part of growing up is to pander to others’ preferences. Not that you’re a doormate— it’s just an easier way out. You’re easily exhausted or probably too lazy when you’re older— or maybe those are synonyms. It’s not necessarily that I fake things to get by. In fact, I never present anything false about myself— I just limit what I express. Some elements of myself I limit are subtle, some are bold, some are downright dumbfounding when presented to another party. But now, I realise that I have so many different categories— different behaviours, appearances, expressions etc.

It makes life slightly hard to live when you have 5 different appointments in a day and are meeting 3 different groups together one late afternoon. But still, a functional brain is more fortunate than a Jekyll-and-Hyde potion.

Because.

Why I am an Atheist: Frivolous version

In short, I don’t need to go to a certain place on a certain day, or a certain place everyday at certain times, I don’t have to avoid certain foods, I don’t have to avoid certain activities. Even if I don’t like those activities and won’t do them in the first place, I don’t like you telling me I can’t do them. I don’t have to incur economic costs or accounting costs or sunk costs in the process of being a member.

I don’t need the membership. No thanks, salesperson, have a good day.

Thoughts

Just some general, scattered thoughts about my life or just thoughts nowadays.

I think the sure-fire cure for depression is to become extroverted. Depressions is often caused by introversion or withdrawal from company due to certain stimuli– think about it.

I’ve been improving as a person more and more. I’m aware of my ‘shortcomings’ (based on norms) and I fully embrace them. Some guy pointed out to me a few of them on several occasions and even asked me to fix them and one of them is what one would normally deem very insulting and disrespectful. To all of that, I said that that’s me, that’s how I’m like, I don’t care if it bothers you. If you don’t like it, you can just gtfo (said in a more polite fashion). One thing to note is that my response is not antagonistic. I’m confident and I absolutely respect myself. I hold the wheel. I love myself, more than I love anything else and my love for myself can’t be surpassed by anyone’s or anything’s love for me, not at present, not in the past, not in the future.

This was also what a certain ‘Lisa’ expressed in Oprah in the episode discussing about the book/film ‘The Secret’. Rough quote: “I fully love me. I am the first example of how the world is supposed to love me and I have to give them the best example ever. I can’t expect people to treat me better than how I treat myself. It is unfair. I’m supposed to show up showing my greatness and allowing you to celebrate it with me.”

It is such a far stretch from who I was in the past. I was always looking for acceptance and would jump at any offer of affirmation. My entire existence was based on how I perceive the way in which others value me. Just to chip in a small digression: I think this is very much due to my childhood. I never really gained my parents’ acceptance as a kid (though they very much love me), I was constantly scolded, nothing ever seems to be good enough and after a while, I hate trying because no matter how hard I try, nothing seems to be good enough and I get scolded again. And so, I saw the world as innately antagonistic and I had to prove myself to the world and I was never good enough. ‘The Secret’ is right. This attitude attracted all the wrong things to me, because I made the ‘order’ to.

I was always a doormat, whether apparent or in disguise. I would structure my life around other people– I fear their inconvenience, I would always agree because I thought I had no preferences and didn’t mind anything when in fact I just wanted to go with the flow to fit in and supposedly make things easier for others, I had no clear opinions– I don’t hold my ground because I was always wary to see how others would respond and would change my opinions accordingly.

I didn’t know that the path of least resistance isn’t often the best way to go. And many things, they don’t need to be analysed at all. I don’t need to react to them. To them, I say: I really don’t care. Trolling is good because a dash of it is how you’re supposed to approach life. You don’t need to take many things seriously. And uncertainty is fine. If it were to become certain, it will eventually. It will sort itself out. Many times, you don’t have to be the one doing the work. The one who cares more does the work. If you don’t want to do it, don’t care about it.

Don’t hunt for reciprocation. If you’re hunting for reciprocation, there is often no chance of reciprocation. Let the others do the work. Let them pursue you, let them try to latch onto you. If they value you enough, they will. If they don’t, they aren’t worth having in the first place. You save the effort. When you are not chasing (I’m referring to all events that require some pursuit) and sit and wait to be chased, you level yourself up, you automatically raise your value. You’ll not only ‘sell for more’ but get better and more ‘buyers’. AND, you can afford to wave a number of them away or take them as tryouts or use them to experience the side of the ‘rejector’– it feels really great when you find out that you don’t need something anymore or at all and grow out of something and gain so much from it all. This is when demand > supply. In economics, the price goes up too.

The courageous is rewarded. Be brave. Dare to throw away some things that you don’t feel are good in your life. Sometimes, you don’t even have to abandon it physically from your life if you can’t– just abandon it in your mind when it is out of sight. Step onto the edge, step into air. Step into uncertainty. You’ll be very, very surprised. The greatest things will come flooding in. Things as great as you would allow, as great as you would open your mind to.

A lot of this is ‘common sense’ to many people. But it’s me, you see. I’ve just started re-discovering life sometime this year.

That is all for now.

Flirting with madness

“Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off. – Rohinton Mistry”

I am ‘madness’. This isn’t going good.

- To be continued -

Toastmasters Speech 2: Age

I’m so happy about how this turned out.  At the point of writing, I thought that my speech didn’t make sense and I was just filling words without too much thought, applying slightly-desperate measures to finish it, making do with what I thought was a jumbled no-direction mess that sounded good though, truthfully. I wrote this in 2.5 hours and got the best speaker and I didn’t read my script after I wrote it till the actual speech. I was also multi-tasking as the grammarian, I did table-topics and I also introduced the special activity portion. I was really busy before Toastmasters and was really busy during Toastmasters so this turned out amazing. And I’m pretty surprised at the volume of compliments coming in. Thanks so much guys..!

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I just had my birthday yesterday. But I can’t tell you how Young I am now. Past the age of 18, age does not exist for women. As far as I know, my piano teacher has remained 18 ever since she turned 18. My mom jokingly claims that she is 18 whenever the issue of age is brought up … only that she’ll jokingly claim that she is not joking. Frankly, I’m sick of all these 18-years-old women. We can create an entire joke out of this. A woman lies on her deathbed. Her last words were, “Tell them I’m 18 …”. Right till the very end. Right till the very end! If only she were able to hold such a valiant attitude towards washing dishes.

Age has always been a very interesting topic to me. Dear Mr. Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters and guests, tonight I’ll consider age in terms of education, general societal attitudes and life.

I was asked to organize my speech for this project. I did it in terms of ideas. If society were to do its speech, it would do it obsessively and compulsively in terms of age. We all know about segregations in terms of wealth and possessions. We all know about the Joneses, we have to always keep up with them. We’ve also surely written a paper that quotes the percentage of people surviving under $1 everyday and then there are those big bosses, mostly commerce and law degree holders, residing atop those wretched glass buildings with those acrophobia-inspiring full length glass windows with views too good to be true.

But have you considered about age? Have you considered how convenient classifications by age are? Have you considered about how there are no good reasons to such classifications other than for the sake of pure convenience? At a certain age, we need to go to school, at a certain age, we need to learn algebra, at a certain age, we need to learn about mitochondria, retroviruses, aorta, jejunum, ileum, gall bladder, yada yada. Why can’t we learn them earlier? Why can’t we learn them later? Why must we learn then at a certain age? Why can’t we learn it from another book? Why must we use books at all? Why must we go to the same place at the same time and meet the same people over and over and over? I used to be very passionate about the idea of home education. Home education and schooling. It’s like the difference between free range eggs and caged eggs. The difference? Free range eggs cost twice as much as caged ones. Those eggs are more authentic, nutritious, happy and feel more like chickens in general. Organisation creates order but inhibits the disorder that is the root of creativity. What society sees as organization, I see it as bureaucracy. Peter’s principle states that ‘in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.’ Grouping children by age leads to many of them rising up only to the level of what is required for their age. And nothing more. And what is required of them is arbitrarily defined. I believe we can achieve so much more if we don’t carry limiting expectations of what age should entail.

The attitudes that we hold towards age are pretty intriguing. We’ve heard of the child prodigies. We’ve heard of the woman who gave birth at the age of 66. We’ve heard of the centenarians, people above the age of 100, doing marathons, distances that many of us can’t cover. We don’t know if they took a 100 years to practice to be able to run like that or that it is because they led a running lifestyle that led to their ripe, old age. Stories like these in which our fellow comrades perform way out of league of what is expected of their age make our eyes lit up. We also have the slangs: cougar, cradle-snatcher, milf, dilf etc. And then we have the youth worshippers. We’ve heard of exotic vending machines in Japan that supply used schoolgirl panties. It’s in a land where pornography and pedophilia threads on a thin line. Taking a look at my mom’s cosmetics drawer, 50% of the products now have the words ‘age-defying’, ‘age-erasing’, ‘age-restoring’ and the likes on them. But my mom is not the only freak. That is becoming so commonplace. But does it work? Well, strangers and acquaintances mistake us for sisters, All the time. It doesn’t do much good for my self-esteem. I would ask my friends both out of fear and the need for comfort: do I look .. old? They would pause and stroke their chin or then equivalent (scratch head, rub nose, umm…), “No Justine, you just look very mature…” I’ve gotten used to it. All my life! Those scars run deep and I remember when I was 8, I was having breakfast with my family at Maccas and they suddenly started handling balloons out to kids. Or people who looked like kids. Because I didn’t get one. But I’m pretty sure I was still a kid because all kids like balloons and I liked balloons so much that I just had to get it. So I walked over to the balloon-guy sheepishly like a dog with its tail between its legs and asked for a balloon and had to withstand the intensity of his bewildered gaze. “These are only for kids.” I looked over helplessly at my parents. Thank goodness they came to my rescue. “She’s only 8.” That was the end of my childhood. At least I got my balloon.

I used to laze around in libraries a lot. And because the library near my house gets updated fairly frequently, I get to know what’s in trend and what’s not though uh… in books, which is not very helpful for maintaining my social life. There was this period in 2008 when I started to notice how there were tons of books coming in under the titles of ‘What to do before you hit 30’, ‘Things to do before you arrive at the glorious age of 60’, ‘Things to do now that you’re 50’. I’ve seen ages 30, 40, 50 and 60. What about 20, 70, 80 etc.? I bet they are not in publication due to the perceived lack of a market. Who reads such books before they’re 20? But in the first place, do teens ever read books anymore? And I guess marketers are little tight-lipped about the number of people still up alive and kicking and able to read books beyond the age of 70. Death. Death is interesting. Franz Kafka wrote, “The meaning of life is death.” I think death is the first step towards thinking about life.  With death, life is finite. Thinking in terms of economics, many of us seem to want immortality but we don’t last forever. Scarcity of life creates opportunity cost which forces choices to be made. And these choices define our lives and the meaning of them. Immortality entails unlimited choices. But we all know that eating too many slices of cake make us feel nauseous. Let’s look up at the law of diminishing marginal returns. We can’t have too many slices of cake in our lives as they would lose their meaning. And then there’s the quote: Life is a terminal illness. With each stride we take, each word we speak, we’re inching evermore close to death (whisper hand). And the only thing we can do about it? We throw a party for it every year and call it our birthday. And we derive a lot of joy from it.

And I did derive a lot of joy from my birthday yesterday. It’s because I love cake and I love free wishes. I still kind of believe in wishes, I throw my coin down the wishing well each time at those touristy spots. But I never go beyond a dollar because I know it’s partly a ploy for Them to rip me off. But I still believe in wishes. Is that old-fashioned?