Random Thoughts on Bits of Post-its
Juggling between part-time work and part-time studies, a short term project for a dear friend occupied most of my time the last couple of weeks. At last, I finally finished it yesterday. Hurrah! Big thanks to "a-go-to-my pc-like-program" and "daily-dose-of-fresh-proxies" for playing vital roles in this research. Bigger thanks goes out to those who’ve allowed me to access their terminals from all over the world. 
Earlier this morning, I tried reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, but fell asleep instead. It’s a thick book - about the length of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, but obviously much more tedious to get through. I’d enjoyed his Guns, Germs and Steel, so I thought I’d give this book a try. Plus I’d asked D for book recs, and he mentioned about wanting to read this book. But now I remember that Guns wasn’t all that easy to get through either.
Looked through my phone book, and found the list depressingly outdated. So many entries I have to delete now - people whom I’ve long lost contact with, but mostly friends who have gone back to their places of origin. Haha, it shows just how many American friends I’ve made in the past years when you see that nearly a quarter of the entries now are numbers for restaurants…
Regrets - there should be no time for regrets. If I could go back and change my life, I would. But this is reality, no time for fantasies of a magical world, of time machines. So we’ll simply have to forge on. And anyway, who’s to say we can’t correct for the past in the future? This is me admonishing myself to take action.
And these are my random thoughts on bits of virtual post-its. *Wry grin*
October 20th, 2005 at 9:23 am
if you could go back and change your life, then you wouldn’t know that you would have wanted those things then, cause you wouldn’t be in this now, and maybe you would have wanted something else had you indeed done what you now wished you had.
this is some convoluted shit i thought up for whenever i kick myself for the past. if i didn’t grow out of that past, you can’t know that you didn’t want that past to turn out that way. hmm…
and you can’t correct the past in the future because the past is already done.
whew! did i make sense? :p
October 20th, 2005 at 10:10 am
That was indeed one of the most convoluted sentences I’ve ever read. Your statement’s true to a certain extent. But the problem with it is that when people wish to go back to change the past, they’re in the first place indulging fantasy. And if so, who’s to say they can’t fantasize about knowing what they’d like to change?
And you can correct the past in the future. Not for everything, but there are some things that you can change. For instance, if you regret not seizing a certain lost opportunity, you can learn from this incident and not commit the same mistake again should a similar opportunity arise. Or, you can set about creating your own destiny. Take action. If you regretted not studying political science in the past for example, you could always go back to school and study it part time. Etc.