Lessons learnt the hard way.

I learnt a lot from my experience of trimming my hair today. Yes. I trimmed my hair, on my own. I think the things that I do are a little overwhelming for fellow humans or other species of the planet, but there it is. 

I am now a successful hair trimmer. No, I am not a trimmer myself, like the person who walks around in boxes in malls. I am a trimmer, by way of vocation. Vocation, is probably a strong word. Maybe not since I really can't think of anything else.

There are eight different ways of trimming hair: standing, walking, sleeping, sitting, bending, swimming, slouching, and something else. I must include a cautionary note here: only the first one is advised when you are doing it yourself. The rest can produce unexpected results, depending on how mainstream you want to be. Me, I am extremely unconventional, that I think going to saloon for a hair cut is conventional. This society has fed us doctrinaires that are so oppressive and regimented that I am going to break free from the shackles of this machine and rage against it. Rage against the machine? Get it? 

The general rule before starting to trim your hair is to stand in front of the mirror, stare hard at the imbecile looking back at you. Yes. The gloomy face coupled with the depths of despair that oozes from every single pore of the face, with eyes that have lost the will to sparkle and a jaw that has drooped from the constant fear of panic, insecurity and the complete and abject surrender to the depravity and...

Once you have done that, it is recommended that you charge the trimmer completely. In case this step is not complete, and in case your trimmer stops mid-way, and in-case your trimmer doesn't run on power but has to be completely charged to run- I mean what kind of an idiot makes a charger that stops mid-way and doesn't turn back on when you plug the charger in? What kind of delusional engineering makes these stupid lithium ion batteries run out in the time it takes for a human being to take a leak? Seriously, do you even have engineers in your workforce, or are you running the place with a bunch of eight year olds?

The way you trim your hair is to go over the first pass from the back of your head to the front, or the front to back. or side to side. or maybe the diagonals. Maybe the ends. Maybe the front, just a little bit at the front. No, now you have removed too much from the front, remove from the sides. Yes, the sides, no you idiot, not that side. That is not the side, that is the back, oh my god, are you educated at all? Are you allowed to handle knives, you could be a national disaster for all I know, what is wrong with you? What kind of a person doesn't understand the front and back?

The trimming process is now complete. It is imperative that you do not walk out of the bathroom now, assuming you are conventional and are doing it in the bathroom. Yes, we are all laughing at the extremely clever double entendre that you created with the 'doing it' there, can we please move on? So, yes, take a shower now. Forget all your sorrows, think of a glacier and the starting point of a very small rivulet that picks up steam as the ice melts more and more and suddenly becomes a deluge that is going to kill you. I mean, like, kill you completely. Where were we then?

Process improvement studies are always recommended for the completely hopeless cases who cannot do the normal jobs and have to look for outrageously stupid things to do. Other people can just go about with their jobs and stuff. I would recommend a note on the lessons that were learned during the process, because it looks like you could use a lesson or two, what with your completely tactless handling of events in your life so far, it would be very surprising since you have learnt nothing at all from your previous lessons. 

Some thoughts.
I have included some extracts from Pico Iyer's Falling off the Map(Italicized prose). The most amazing book I have read in a while. Strongly recommended, most beautiful and witty prose.

There is the loneliness of the sociopath and the loneliness of the only child, the loneliness of the hermit and the loneliness of the widow. And as with people, so with nations. Some are born to isolation, some have isolation thrust upon them.

What dante forgot to include was an additional circle for the met department officials here, who tell us that it is going to be a lovely rainy day and it turns out to be a scorcher of a day. I am quite sure he is revising his circles to include even more vile acts, condemnable in every which way like the idiot who starts honking as soon as the traffic lights are green. Actually, green is probably a tad too far from the truth in a place where signals hardly work. Its the most cruel joke of the century that we are being referred to as emerging superpowers given the nightmare we live in.

"We are now in the province of Jujuy!The capital of Jujuy is Jujuy!". This pronouncement, unremarkable at the best of times, was not made easier by the fact that "Hoo-Hooeee" sounds as if it consists of nothing but vowels"

Tortuous and sinuous are the paths that are before us. I corrected the first and the third word six times before I could find out the proper spelling with the two 'u's. Now I am not sure if the usage of the apostrophe in the last sentence is right. Now I am wondering whether the 'the' used before the apostrophe is necessary at all or is just redundant. Now I am trying to figure out if redundant is actually redundant in the previous statement. I just figured out that if I lived life this way, I would never get anywhere with doing what I originally wanted to get done. So much for introspection and retrospection.

"What would you like", a smiling waitress asks.

"What do you have?"

"Nothing."

"No eggs, no tea, no avocado?"

"Nothing. Only beer."

Apparently one of the planets that has been not so very nice to me for a while is beginning to change its attitude and is going to go easy on me for a bit. But, interestingly, another planet that has been the nicest of the nicest things(like grandmothers) is going to turn against me in the most severe way(like the grandmother-in-law). So, yes, status quo. Or, worse, ratings downgrade. Every time someone tells me that they are going through the seven-point-five planet phase, I immediately do a rating downgrade of their credit-worthiness. Actually, you might as well do a downgrade of every-worthiness. Self-esteem, already teetering on the brink of negative territory is smirking at me. Ah well, such is file. I mean, life.

Perhaps it because it is so otherworldly that Iceland leaves such an impression on the mind, because it feels so little like the planet we know;days spent there are interludes from life, sojourns in some other, nether twilight of  the mind.

We are abnormal, in that we want to feel that we would start off on a new trajectory of life that would turn our lives upside down for good, cause much happiness and abandon all our piled up miseries. Everything in this life is over-rated: happiness, attachment, love and sense of entitlement. We just cannot embrace the cold depths of the meaninglessness surrounding us, and we try to attach tags to organize our emotions, which is quite counter-productive. I don't want to talk about the cliched and done-to-death topic of dualities or other such spiritual topics which are, at best, only superfluous for the non-initiated. 

At dawn, in Thimphu, the mist swaddling the western mountains. In the mornings, the quiet tennis-ball sound of wood being chopped...At lunch, in the hotel, a team of Japanese salarymen lined up in dark suits around a large table muttering gloomily, "Muzukashi desu, ne?"(It's difficult, isn't it), as they bravely did battle with their curries.

A picture: not thinking a thought, not saying a word, not breathing a breath, looking at the never ending snow capped peaks broken only by a stream of water, harboring not a single ill-will towards anything, and this vision frozen in space-time. This is what I want. 

So, Senor Pico.

My surname actually, is Iyer.

So your father's name is Pico.

No, my father's name is Iyer.

But here it says Iyer, Pico.

No, My father's name is Iyer. 

So, your mother's name is...