Assorted Notes

THURSDAY, 11 NOVEMBER 2004

Dear 18 to 35-year-old reader, your options as a working adult are as follows:

1. Find a job that provides you with a sufficient income.

2. Find a job that provides you with sufficient income and that you enjoy doing.

3. Find a job that provides you with sufficient income, and that gives you a sense of fulfilling a valuable role in the broader community (not only in the workplace where you earn your income).

4. Find an opportunity that provides you with sufficient income and that is consistent with your critical self-perception – developed after confronting your Given Self and defining your Chosen Self.

(Number four is more complicated. Professional work, or any work from which you earn money, must be chosen, and is sometimes needed long before the person has a more sophisticated idea of who he or she is other than “My name is John or Mary; I was born in Town A or City B; I like this or that; this or that bores me; this or that makes me angry; my father and mother and siblings are A and B and C and D and my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends are these and those; I want to live in a three or four or ten bedroom house or apartment in Country X or City Y; I want to drive a Porsche or donkey cart or truck, and I want to get married and have one or two or seven children.”)

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WEDNESDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2004

22:59

I have learned that not appearing means silence. And that silence, if you can handle it, is good.

23:57

When I was younger, it felt like I was doing something wrong when I spent “too much” time on my own. Which is not surprising because from an early age it is discouraged; “You should get out more,” “Spend some time with other people,” “It’s not good to be so alone all the time!” people will often utter their well-meaning opinions.

It may take years before you develop some alternative views on this matter, for example that social appearances – which incidentally require much more personal information than anonymous appearances, and even appearances in professional capacity – mean a lot of “noise”. And this noise silences voices that many people fear – and perhaps in some cases need to fear.

These “voices”, if you pay attention and if you think long enough about what you “hear”, ultimately reveal insights that are only destined for those willing to listen, and for those who are willing to keep the airways clean to encourage the process.

———–

[Many people in the history of the world have been known to have heard “voices”, and they responded by taking actions that have affected, and still affect, the lives of thousands and even millions of people.

There are also many people who will never make any tangible impact on their environments who also hear voices every day. The fact that many of them are locked up in institutions confirms how these characters are viewed by society – whether it is justified or not.

What “voices” do I hear? Although the term is a useful one, I should mention that I don’t really hear voices (most of the time I don’t, anyways). The times I refer to when I supposedly “hear” something are usually times when my own voice fills the airways while I am in deep conversation with myself. That my self-talk is uninhibited – I’m not trying to impress anyone in a social appearance, for example – means I can throw the proverbial table full of cards. These “cards” may be answers to questions, or solutions to the problems I regularly harass myself with regardless of whether I am on my own, making an anonymous appearance, or appearing to the community as “Brand Smit”. Once these cards are on the table, the validity of each one can be considered on merit. No answer, no solution is ever accepted blindly because some or other voice had dictated anything to me.]

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TUESDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2004

A (new) existence in three essential steps

[Not the first mention of these thoughts, but who keeps count if something can be expressed in steps?]

Step One: Confront your Given Self, and accept what you cannot change.

Step Two: Taking into consideration unchangeable aspects of your Given Self, define who you want to be, how you want to appear to the world, and what role you want to play. Decide whether you would prefer to be on your own or with another person. Also decide where you would like to spend your life on your own, or where you would like to spend it with another person.

Step Three: Considering all the above decisions, figure out how you can provide in your daily needs without denying the Self you want to be, and in ways that are conducive to who you want to be, to the role you want to play, and to your ideal contribution to society.

Zig-zag

It is always possible to see the truth. The question is, at what price?

People often say, “You’re shameless!” when they want to chide you. Isn’t that strange?

From the China Post:

“People don’t have to like what I do. I’m happy as long as I get them to talk about the issues.” ~ The opinion of photo-artist, “Olaf”

In Hong Kong, Health Secretary, York Chow told reporters: “Suicides are committed for different reasons, but the most common is that (victims) feel disconnected from society.”

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TUESDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2004

The brain is like a computer – the first few minutes after turning it on in the morning, the files and programs that were active the previous night slowly reactivate. After a few minutes a familiar character makes his or her reappearance: you are again embarrassed about the previous night’s incident (because the “program” that had been installed years ago also reactivated to stimulate a feeling of shame); you are excited again about the same things; you’ve got the same dreams, the same ambitions and the same beliefs. Some uncertainties, embarrassments and anxieties may have died down somewhat, but you’re essentially the same person.

Can it therefore still be said that it’s a new day? As I am sitting here writing these words it is “Tuesday morning” at “08:06”. I just had breakfast. It’s fairly early in the morning, and yet it is thirteen and a half hours after my dinner “last night”.

Janis Joplin once said (or screamed), “Because as a matter of fact, as we discovered on the train, tomorrow never happens, man! It’s all the same fucking day, man!”

Yet, the idea of a new day is much too valuable to abandon on a technicality. Every new Time Unit of Daylight followed by Darkness offers several possibilities that can never be underestimated: opportunities to make a mess of things, opportunities where your life may be at risk, opportunities where your life may end the next moment … and opportunities to stop messing around, and to get on a better path than the one on which you’ve been wasting time so far.

A new day then – even if it is only because it sounds more poetic – is waiting for me, and for you …

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WEDNESDAY, 3 NOVEMBER 2004

Note about the protagonist

By the time one gets to “Personal Agenda, Book Three” the material is not about me anymore – it is about a character. This character’s name is “Brand Smit” – same as mine, and his story coincidentally corresponds 100% with my life. The reader, however, sees the character, “Brand Smit” in ways that are influenced by their own identities and agendas, and not exactly in the way I as “writer” view the character.

THURSDAY, 4 NOVEMBER 2004

On the material currently under review

Many questions had to be answered in the evolution of my chosen role as a writer: In what genre do I want to write? What do I want to write about? How do I want to make my material available to the reader – print, CD-ROM, Internet? If in printed form, would I like to publish it myself, or am I going to send it to publishers until someone “approves” it? Also, what purpose do I want to serve with my material? Do I want to entertain people or lecture them? (My choice is to shed light on some issues that affect most people on a personal level.) Do I want to earn money with my material? Put differently, how important is financial compensation for my writing, which will of course affect content, style, genre and manner of publication?

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