// rohitsrealm.com / archive / 2008 / 03
As many of you who know
me in real
life could attest to, I am a fairly hardcore user of Google Reader for all my syndication needs. Until quite recently, I would venture that I was a very satisfied user. The introduction of the Shared Items
and Friends,
however may just change my mind.
Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Perhaps it is because I am within a day of finals again (damn quarter system!), but for that, or some other reasons not worth indulging in as public a forum as this, I have been thinking a lot about expectations lately—our own, those of others, and those of society—especially, the relationship of such expectations vis-à-vis the (patent) meaninglessness of life. In particular, how do we (in the royal sense) reconcile the lofty—and very likely, unattainable—expectations that we and others set with the certain and blinding futility of life? In a dense and meandering article last year, I suggested that the way to resolve this paradox was essentially to ignore it, letting hope and (daily) contemplations of suicide coexist uneasily, mentally disquieting though that approach may be. Today, I propose an alternative solution: deleveraging one's personal brand
(as we say in contemporary parlance).
With the first week of Spring Break nearly over, and my (triumphant) return to California, in particular the Bay Area, drawing to an unavoidable close, I cannot help but succumb to the memories of a bygone era that this trip has evoked with such puissance as to shock the senses—good ones and bad, those that stir laughter, and those that conjure tears (insofar as I am capable of such emotions). The memories that hardly seemed indelible even a month ago have demonstrated themselves to be just that in the course of less than a week. To say that the past few days have been surreal would be grossly unjust; a waking dream is perhaps the closest I can come to describing it.
