Rohit's Realm - February 2008
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February 05, 2008
As I sit here in my darkened 25th-floor apartment, staring blankly out at a completely frozen Lake Michigan, and anxiously awaiting the results of perhaps the most important Super Tuesday in my lifetime, I cannot help but be struck by the gross absurdity of the voting ritual that we idolize as the dearest representation of our collective freedom. It is a paradox I have puzzled over for years, never arriving upon a satisfactory answer: why do people, myself included, continue to partake in this farce that idealistic morons would have us believe is our civic duty? Put a different way—a way that is more suitable for the Realm—what incentive does any one have to ever vote? And absent any such incentive, why do people expend resources to do so anyway?
February 03, 2008
As my dramatically diminished frequency of posting in the new year should suggest, I have been immersed
in a lot of unpleasantness in recent weeks. Between increasingly frantic attempts at securing employment for the summer and reuniting with the maladjusted boys of 1524, I hardly had any time before last weekend to work on the quarter's only assignment for Legal Research and Writing, viz. a legal memorandum on intrusion of privacy worth 45% of the grade for the year. Needless to say, I overshot the word limit by over 1,800 words—this blog should be evidence enough of my inability to check the penchant for spewing incoherent nonsense—and had to spend all of last Sunday cutting out entire paragraphs, sentences, and towards the end, prepositions, articles, and other structures vital to sound writing. As hour after tedious hour of reading the same incomprehensible gibberish for expendable words and thoughts passed, I could not help but fall into a state of despair and existential angst (not an infrequent occurrence), pondering the same questions that have haunted me for years on end: (1) What am I doing with my life? and (2) Why did I not choose to pursue a life of crime?
February 10, 2008
One of the great paradoxes of my (necessarily futile) life is my perverse and often baffling ability to consistently balance my responsibilities in the professional/academic sphere while simultaneously remaining mired in dysfunction sufficient to shock the senses in my so-called personal life. How is that someone who rarely showed signs of cracking under the long hours and constant stress of college or corporate America can not seem to get on top of such routine trivialities as bills, grocery shopping, cooking, and going to the gym?
February 11, 2008
Those readers who have only recently joined me in the meaningless and ultimately futile enterprise known as my life—I mean, the Realm—may justly assume that the purpose of this blog (insofar as it has one) is to indulge the self-absorbed, narcissistic tendencies of its (optimistically) cynical author as he drifts aimlessly in a turbulent sea of mediocrity, loneliness, and despair. While this may indeed be what the illustrious Realm is about these days, incoherent rambling about mediocrity, loneliness, and despair was not where it got its start. In its original manifestation, the Realm existed for two purposes: (1) to counteract a world obsessed with and deluded by theoretical agents of purported happiness such as love,
marriage, and children; and (2) to hate on bums. In a much-referenced entry last year, I acknowledged my shameful hypocrisy with respect to the former; today, I shall do so with respect to the latter. Say it ain't so, Rohit. Say it ain't so.
February 13, 2008
With all this recent talk about politics and social welfare, complacent readers may have been lulled into believing that the sun had (finally) set on mind-numbingly arcane entries laden with techno-babble that only my equally geeky homies from my days at Cal could enjoy (or understand)—and which pervaded this blog in its earlier years. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth: I am, first and foremost, a colossal computer nerd. And consistent with this blog's theme of highlighting its author's soul-crushing failures (both with women, and in life in general), today I will discuss my greatest failing as a programmer, or in other words, my proverbial Achilles' heel.
February 16, 2008
I am normally not a huge fan of posting videos (other than those produced over at 1524, of course), but for all the incorrigible (computer) nerds out there, the follow clip from Barack Obama's interview with Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt is awesome:
