my first favourite dish: sorpatel!

I'm not one to usually follow a recipe, let alone remember it, so this post is quite likely a one-off.

First, some back-story: growing up, sorpatel was my numero uno favourite dish. I wasn't given much agency as a kid in terms of food - I ate what was presented to me, although my parents were quite aware of my preferences. Once I finished school I did get to eat out a bit, but it was mostly snacks. I do remember the first time I was ever asked what I'd like to eat though. I was about 19, and my parents were going to be away on a pilgrimage for 10 days. It was going to be the first time by brother and I were going to be left alone at home for more than a few hours. They asked us what we'd like them to cook and refrigerate for the time they were away (we had never cooked independently, other than frying eggs for breakfast - I don't think I had even ever made instant noodles!). I don't remember what Kevin said, but I do remember saying that I want 10 days worth of sorpatel. And the end result was us eating sorpatel for 9 days (we loved it so much it didn't last 10 days, and I remember we cooked a very terrible chicken curry for day 10!).

So yes - sorpatel, my favourite by a long margin, made even more desirable by the fact that it was only made a couple of times every year - Christmas or Easter, birthdays if we were lucky.

And then, when I was in Bangalore last month, Neena gave me sorpatel for dinner. Two days in a row. It was so good that on day 1 I told mom she had ordered it from someplace, not even stopping to consider that such good sorpatel could be made at home (sorry, Neena!). When she told me she had made it herself, and it was our grand-aunt's recipe, I was mind-blown. It was the comfort food of my childhood, only better! I had to have the recipe!

Couple of weeks later, back in Belfast, Neena sent me the recipe. It wasn't in the usual format, more of a flow-of-concsiousness style, which works great for me except when I'm out shopping for ingredients (and my brain-fog does make things worse when I need to approach unstructured things too)

So, one Friday I decided that was the weekend for Sorpatel. Friday night was spent first transcribing the recipe, then restructuring it so I have ingredients first and then the process.

I woke up at noon-ish on Saturday (as has been the case for a few weeks now - long sotry that probably needs its own blog post) with only one objective: I will not go to bed without having made sorpatel.

And so, here is Aunty Flo (yes, that's what we called her!)'s sorpatel recipe:

1.5kg pork (can include liver)

6-8 onions

15 garlic flakes

1.5" ginger

5 big green chillies, halved and slit

3-4 bay leaves

1 teaspoon sugar (optional)

tamarind juice (optional)

pork blood (optional)

for spice paste:

20-24 kashmiri chillies

2 rounded teaspoons jeera

10 whole peppercorns

1/2 teaspoon mustard

2/3 teaspoon haldi

15 garlic flakes

2" ginger

9 cloves

3" cinnamon

5 elaichi

vinegar to make paste

salt to taste

2 teaspoons oil

grind spices with vinegar to make a paste

if using liver, boil with salt and discard water

parboil remaining meat with salt. retain water.

chop meat small.

fry small quantities of meat lightly in oil till lightly browned and fat renders. fry liver last. retain rendered fat.

fry onions lightly till soft in rendered fat

add garlic, ginger, chillies

when onions begin to brown add the spice paste

add meat water to make a thick masala gravy

add sugar if desired

add bay leaves

simmer for 10-15 minutes for spices to cook

add tamarind juice if not sour enough

add meat and cook till tender ensuring gravy reduces till it's thick

optionally add pork blood for the last 5 minutes of cooking

Of course, I didn't fully follow the recipe. Here's my modifications:

• 1kg pork loin and also 600gm of sweet and spicy pork belly that happened to be in the freezer
• double the garlic flakes
• balsamic vinegar instead of normal vinegar
• some random type of chillies that were in the supermarket - not green, but fleshy and red. less spicy than the green chillies the recipe called for
• more than 2 teaspoons sugar (basically just finished the last bit of sugar in the house!)
• I did use tamarnid juice but no portk blood
• I forgot the bay leaves (ironically, I have way too many bay leaves in my spice stash! I really need to use them more!)
• 4 tablespoons homemade mustard paste instead of whole mustard - it's been lying in the fridge for 3 months so I was hoping the flavoud had mellowed a bit
• did not have whole kashmiri chillies but had a mix ofcrushed kashmiri and guntur chillies (that we basically use for our everyday cooking). I have no idea how much I put. basically just topped up the mixer bowl, adding more as it ground until it was a bowl full of paste.
• did not boil the pork. chopped it raw. did two rounds of lightly frying the pork before adding to the main pot before I decided to not bother and tossed the last half kg of chopped pork straight in.
• since the pork wasn't boiled I rinsed the mixer bowl and used that water instead.
• simmered for about an hour after it was gently boiling to compensate for not boiling or frying the pork.

End result: the pot was off the stove at midnight. It smelled so good I decided I had to make rice to go with it. So I boiled some long-grain white rice. Also, the end result looked too monotonous for a photo so I chopped some chives and sprinkled on top (just for the photo - the sorpatel completely overpowered it!).

A meal made in heaven. Think I ate sorpatel for 10 days, with some breaks in between.

Yep, still my favourite dish.

BTW, for all the chilli I put in (which I have a feeling was way more than the recipe called for) it still wasn't overpoweringly "hot" spicy - but it was off the charts in terms of "aromatic" spicy. it ws so spicy that when I ran the pot (my cast-iron dutch oven) under hot water, I started coughing! I think the copious amounts of sugar (as well as the slight sweetness of balsamic vinegar) offset the spice.

I have a feeling that just like how 2025 was the year I got comfortable with biryani, 2026 might be the same for sorpatel!

bring back search engines!

Today, while poking fun at a friend (hinting that he his assets are hard to find because he is rich and well connected). I mentioned Parkinson's Law, a book I must have read about 30 years ago - I read a copy that belonged to my dad, which has probably been disposed of by now and definitely not read since I finished school.

I tried various searches before giving up and assuming I remembered wrong. I even managed to find hte lsit of chapters of Parkinson's law, but nothing jumped at me (I did skim it pretty quickly though!).

The friend had his curiousity piqued though and requested a link to the ebook... which I found, trangely enough, as a PDF that looked like it was typed out in Microsoft Word. Not sure if it's legal to share now (the book was written in the '50s!) But anywy, I'll let you be the judge of it - here's the copy of Parkinson's Law I skimmed.

And then, as I was about to close the tab a few hours later (after telling the friend that's not the book but it's a good enough read anyway!) I started reading the book backwards. It was chapter 11! "Palm thatch to Packard or a formula for success"

My search tab was still open, so I decided to follow up a bit.

Call me a skeptic (which I most certainly am - probably irrationally so!) but the search engine's AI definitely worked much worse than I think same the search engine would have, a decade ago.

Anyway, to summarize my "conversation" with the search engine:

1. Me: "flunkey puzzle book rich chinese"
   
   Search engine (I'm paraphrasing): "The search results do not mention a "flunkey puzzle book" or any direct connection between the term "flunkey" and a puzzle book related to a rich Chinese character or story. It's possible there may be a misunderstanding or misremembering of the title." Followed it up with a few unrelated books.
   
   
2. Me: "it's a chapter of a humourous book"
   
   Search engine (direct quote this time): "The term "flunkey puzzle book" does not appear in the search results, and no humorous book chapter by that name is identified. However, The Chinese Puzzle by Ernest Bramah features humorous and satirical stories centered on Kai Lung, a fictional Chinese storyteller, blending wit and parody of Chinese philosophy and culture.
   One chapter, "The Story of the Man Who Was Thrifty," exemplifies the book’s whimsical tone, where a man’s extreme frugality leads to absurd consequences, told in an exaggerated, tongue-in-cheek style."
   
   
3. Me: "the chapter refers to the tendency of rich people to stay under the radar until they get so tich they are beyond danger"
   
   Search engine (direct quote again): "There is no evidence in the search results of a "flunkey puzzle book" chapter describing rich individuals staying under the radar until they are financially secure. The term appears to be a misremembering or confusion with titles like The Chinese Puzzle by Ernest Bramah, which features humorous tales of Kai Lung, or other books with "Chinese Puzzle" in the title that focus on culture, mystery, or religion rather than wealth evasion.
   None of the chapters in these works address the behavior of wealthy people avoiding attention for safety or strategic reasons."
   
   
4. Me: "Why do wealthy individuals avoid public attention?"
   
   Search engine (direct quote, as before): "The search results do not directly explain why wealthy individuals avoid public attention, nor do they confirm the existence of a "flunkey puzzle book" chapter on this topic. However, based on general understanding reflected in cultural and literary themes (such as in The Chinese Maze Murders and The Chinese Puzzle), wealthy or powerful figures may stay under the radar to avoid scrutiny, protect assets, prevent extortion, or maintain strategic advantage—especially in environments with political instability or social tension."
   
   
5. Me: "is there a chapter of a humorous book refering to this phenomenon"
   
   Search engine (direct quote): "Yes, the novel Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner features a satirical chapter-like narrative about an "extraordinarily, absurdly, kidnappably rich" Jewish family on Long Island who live with constant anxiety despite their wealth. The story humorously explores how the patriarch, Zelig Fletcher, amasses a fortune as a protective "amulet" against historical trauma, believing money can shield his family from disaster. His children grow up under this shadow—ostentatiously wealthy yet emotionally stunted—highlighting the absurdity and psychological cost of wealth used as a defense mechanism.
   The book satirizes how the rich, despite appearing powerful, often live in fear and go to extreme lengths to stay safe, not necessarily under the radar, but in a state of hyper-vigilance shaped by inherited trauma."
   
   
6. Me: "I have found it. It's chapter 11 of the book Parkinson's law, titled "Palm thatch to packard or a formula for success""
   
   Search engine (first para of the response): "Yes, Chapter 11 of Parkinson's Law by C. Northcote Parkinson—titled "Palm Thatch to Packard, or A Formula for Success"—does address the phenomenon you described. In this chapter, Parkinson humorously observes that Chinese businessmen historically practiced evasion and modesty until their wealth became so substantial that ostentation became safer and more advantageous."
   
   
7. Me: "Why was this chapter so hard to find using my previous queries?"
   
   Search engine (direct quote): "Your earlier queries were difficult to match because they used inexact or misremembered terms like "flunkey puzzle book" instead of the actual chapter title, "Palm Thatch to Packard", and did not mention Parkinson's Law or author C. Northcote Parkinson. Search engines rely on precise keywords—without them, results drift toward unrelated books with similar phrases (e.g., "Chinese Puzzle")."
   
   
8. Me: "the phrase flunkey puzzle is not very common and is used in this chapter"
   
   Search engine (direct quote): "The term "flunkey puzzle" appears in Chapter 11 of Parkinson's Law by C. Northcote Parkinson, titled "Palm Thatch to Packard, or A Formula for Success." It is a rare and distinctive phrase used humorously to describe how wealthy individuals—particularly in historical Chinese society—deliberately concealed their success ("flunkey" implying servility or low status) until their wealth made them secure from threat or envy.
   This obscurity explains why earlier searches failed: "flunkey puzzle" is an unusual, context-specific term not widely indexed outside direct references to this chapter."
   
   
9. Me: "are there other cited works of literature that talks about something called a flunkey puzzle?"
   
   Search engine (direct quote): "No, there are no other cited works of literature that mention the term "flunkey puzzle" besides Chapter 11 of Parkinson's Law by C. Northcote Parkinson.

   The term is highly unusual and appears to be unique to this chapter, where it describes the strategic modesty of wealthy individuals—particularly in historical Chinese society—who conceal their status ("palm thatch") until they accumulate enough wealth to safely display it ("Packard").

   Search results confirm that "flunkey puzzle" does not appear in other literary, academic, or cultural contexts. References to "flunkey" alone relate to characters (e.g., Flunkey the baboon in The Jungle Book) or synonyms for a servant, while "puzzle" appears in unrelated titles like crossword clues or educational exercises."

So, there you have it. I used a unique phrase in an indexed work of literature, with some (perhaps initially vague but increasingly refined and accurate) terms and context and it couldn't be found. A few questions spring to mind:

1. Have people been so bad at using traditional search engines prior to the introduction of AI/LLM based search engines that what seems like a step backward to me is a step forward to them?
2. Has the AI hype bubble driven this direction despite its ineffectiveness?
3. Is my search style so tuned to text search engines that LLMs can't work with it?
4. Is this all simply my confirmation bias?

Either way, I'm increasingly annoyed at not being able to find what I'm looking for.

ps: it's only a couple of days ago that I was looking for a BT song that I happened to be listening to, and the search engine couldn't find it despite me typing the lyrics of THE WHOLE FIRST VERSE into it! I should have asked why it cou;dn't find the song, but hey. I did take a screenshot though! Hopefully something to laugh at 10 years from now, assuming things get better by then 😁

for my eyes only

two occasions I missed having my dashcam on today:

the first one:

google maps taking me on a 55 minute drive through the countryside on completely unknown village roads (even crossing major roads and highways but not offering them as alternative routes) to rat-run a massive traffic jam on the highway at rush hour... I was doing 40 on many of those roads cos I was too scared to go any faster! I was cursing my luck but didn't want to stop and switch to Waze in case I lost network, because then I'd be well and truly lost... also it would have been very risky to park on those narrow roads on the chance that another city-slicker was blinkly following google maps straight into the back of my car! also the dashcam would have caught me audibly cursing... I was so glad I was alone in the car. Don't think Shruti has ever seen me scared when driving!

ps: found the route in google maps' location history. it looks like I could have easily been routed along highways instead!

the second (and more noteworthy!) one:

a fox ran across my path on the M3 exit at J1! thankfully, safely!

law of conservation of energy and computing

A question I've been mulling over for weeks, and wondering who to ask:

Computers use electrical energy and produce heat. Is the heat produced by computers less than the electrical energy consumed (I would assume so, but would like a definite answer!) and if so, what is that residual energy "stored in" computing? What happens to the energy when say the result of the computing is erased? A lot of the computing is just lost to the environment in general as well, so what happens there?

Trying to wrap my head around the law of conservation of energy in this special case.

Speedo Error

I recently calibrated my motorbike against GPS because my speedometer had stopped functioning on a 1200km ride, so I needed to have an idea of the speed from the tachometer. After 12 years and 150000+km of believing 5000 rpm in 5th gear was 80 km/h (the indicated speed on the speedo, when it was functioning), I was confronted by the fact that it was actually only 71 km/h! My first reaction was "it feels like my entire life has been a lie" 😂

ps: this was another forgotten draft... from March 2024! Strangely enough, Carly's tachometer (in fact, the entire meter console) failed a few months later. as of now it has a working backlight but only indicates high-beam, neutral and turn signals. I now adjust my speed based on the sound of the engine, and my biggest surprise was looking at my GPS speed and realizing I ride faster by sound... about 10 km/h faster than I think I am!

Locked!

My phone regularly changes the wallpaper even when locked. Today, it changed the clock from digital to analog, applied a "warm" filter to the wallpaper, added some random text and emoji to my "emergency contact" message on the home screen, and replaced the left shortcut from phone to some random app. When I took my phone out of my pocket I almost couldn't recognise it! 

On the plus side, I finally figured how to change the emergency contact message (I realized two months ago one of the digits of my emergency contact number was wrong - and it had been wrong for at least two phones/6 years now!)... so it evens out.

ps: posted from a forgotten draft from 11th April 2024

pps: I now protect myself from in-pocket shenanigans by always keeping my phone screen side up!

old jokes get funnier

In school, I had a teacher who had some sort of speech impediment where she would pronounce desk as decks... and it sounded like suspiciously like dicks in her thick Marathi accent 😂

her favourite thing to say when she'd see us boys fidgeting would be "put your hands on your desk - it'll help you concentrate". when we were like 10 it seemed innocent enough and we'd comply dutifully, but as we grew up it got funnier and funnier until at like maybe 13 it stopped working altogether and would just get the classroom in splits laughing 😂

ps: i'm not sure why, but this post has been in my drafts for at least 5 months... and i finished school 26 years and 5 months ago!

the great road trip

2025 has been a rough year. I've had plenty of time off work, but it was never by choice - always because I couldn't work. to an external observer, both probably look the same... but as the battle is one that is largely internal to me, what's in my head probably matters more than what I appear to be doing.

two weeks off work. it was planned so that it should be more than enough. it should make me feel completely unpressurized in any sense. and when I left home, that's exactly how I felt. leaving at 9:30am (well-rested but actually sleepless from excitement!) meant I'd face the full blast of the October sun... and I did. by sunset I had barely covered a third of the way to goa. but my strategy paid off - taking enough breaks kept my energy levels going, and even with some really bad roads I was able to ride through the night and reach goa at 8:30am. 23 hours! that kinda set the pace for the rest of the trip. I rested that day and the next, before setting off for my next destination, bangalore. once again without adequate sleep, just 3 hours, and a very arbitrary route: I ignored Google maps and retraced the route I took 12 years ago, in October 2013. I reached bangalore at a little before midnight, with my bike giving me a couple of hints that all was not well. 

the next day, I spent the morning trying to locate a good mechanic to solve what didn't seem like a trivial problem, but when I set off, carly simply died on me and refused to start. thankfully not even 100 feet from a mechanic who worked on the bike for an hour but took half a day to answer my call, leading to me only collecting it at sunset.

he reassured me the problem had been fixed, but I had massive doubts as what he described as the problem definitely didn't match the symptoms I saw the previous day, but did match with it not running at all.

I left at midnight, practically to the minute. 

In hindsight, it seems foolhardy, given my misgivings, but this is probably just one of the many questionable decisions I took during those two weeks. 

thankfully, it played out. the bike ran fine, only giving occasional starting trouble... until I had a surprise when the chain skipped the sprocket halfway through kodaikanal ghat! however it was so loose I was able to pop it on by hand, and I was in kodaikanal by noon. located another mechanic, and while I was explaining the problem I noticed the chain had basically lost a link! regarding the electrical gremlins, this one said there's no problem, I simply need to use the electrics sparingly. obviously not the case, but I decided to take my chances and ride on. I decided to swap out carly's front tyre though, despite the mechanic insisting it was good to use... and from kodai, carly played ball, until literally 500 metres from Harshad's farm! after a couple of half hearted attempts to get her going, I called for help and Harshad towed the bike to the parking area a short walk from his property. we left carly there overnight. it was time to forget about the journey and enjoy the destination.

and enjoy I did. Just two and a half days on his farm gave me the shot in the arm I so desperately needed. the sounds of nature, his pets, the home grown and the home cooked food, being surrounded by people who were running on a slower clock than urban India, had its desired effect. Come Monday morning, I was ready to begin my journey back home. and then carly sprung another surprise - the choke cable, essential to starting, and in case of uneven running, keeping her going, gave way. we managed to get carly started using a pair of pliers. the ride to kodaikanal was wet... nay, soaking, and by the time we reached the only dry bits were inside my tank and saddle bags. kodai was dry and warm though, and the mechanic listened to my list of gripes and did his best. I also took the opportunity to give carly fresh brake pads and swap out the other cables... again despite the mechanic saying the existing ones had plenty of life in them.

Harshad and me at the mechanic in Kodai, just before I set off to return

a relaxed lunch later, I bid farewell to Harshad and was on my way. carly ran fine until almost midnight, when, right after shruti insisted I not ride all night, carly stopped and refused to start. thankfully I was just 3km from a major town, and was able to hitch a ride to the main bus stand opposite which I got a hotel room really cheap. 

the next morning was spent trying to find a competent mechanic, and once I did, carly started without a hitch. a common pattern was becoming apparent. a night's rest seems to sort things out. that's a decent strategy, but I was only 50km from bangalore and had plenty of advice regarding which mechanics could help. so that's what I did. the first mechanic outright refused, and when pressed further, pointed to another karizma (a white one, at that!) which he claimed was lying in his workshop for 6 months awaiting spares. I decided to call it a day. the next morning, I headed to another highly recommended mechanic, intending to arrive right as they opened. unfortunately, I was told the exact same thing. 

I had a tough decision to make. ship carly from bangalore or ride on. it was only Wednesday morning, so I had 5 days of riding to cover 1000 km, and going by the previous whole day of riding, carly could be expected to do 350km without a hitch. 

another questionable decision, but I trusted my gut. I was on the road by 2pm and this time voluntarily picked a hotel at 10pm after covering 250+km.

feeling heartened, I set off the next morning, expecting to cover half the distance to Mumbai - a reasonable (or even conservative) goal, given how carly had been riding. but it was not to be. 

I took a long evening break with the intention of riding till midnight before calling it a night. but carly had other plans. she died once less than 50 metres from the restaurant parking lot, and again another 500 metres later. I saw a hotel opposite where I was on the highway and decided to not push my luck and call it a night at 8pm.

that evening was spent nervously consulting Google maps. it was Thursday night and I had 3 days to cover 450 km. a fairly achievable proposition. but there were questions. I could not ignore carly's tantrums getting more frequent. I decided to keep going the next morning and play it by ear. I skipped breakfast and just headed out, on a limb and a prayer.

within an hour, the indications were plain to see - carly was getting increasingly difficult to start and was dying more frequently, and within an hour of getting going. 

on a whim, when I was passing the next city, karad, I asked a motorcyclist where I'd find trucks parked. he directed me to a spot near the petrol pump, a few hundred metres away, on the highway. I asked two travel and tours companies - they advertised bus services but I hoped they could connect me with a trucker. the first one refused, but the second one agreed. he agreed to put carly on a bus to Mumbai that evening and me on a seat on the same bus. 

I heaved a sigh of relief. 

the road trip was over for me. I pushed carly to her limits and found the limit of my risk appetite (though not my physical ability). 

those 5 hours of waiting for the bus, sitting at the bare shop of the tour operator, gave me another chance to think. and think I did. 

I concluded that this trip has been a success. 

for the first time in a year and a half, my body and mind were not the limit. 

I'm obviously nowhere near my previous level of abilities, but this was reassuring. I still had it. I can still do things I enjoy. and I did enjoy those two weeks. as Harshad said when I called him to inform him of my decision: "I sense a long blog post coming up" 

this is the long blog post. but it's not long enough. there was so much more to these two weeks. to reduce it to the three way tug of war between body, mind and machine would be to lose the essence of this adventure.

this, though, is where words fail me. emotions and feelings wash over me and leave me bedraggled, like a shell on the shore. 

all I can say is it feels great to be alive and here. it feels great to feel great. heaven knows I've missed that feeling long enough. life has been reduced to going through the motions for long enough for me to lose sight of it. but just like a shell on the shore, I am not impervious to my circumstances. this post is a reminder that no matter what the struggle, I still have it in me. 

before I prepare to touch down in Ireland and be reunited with shruti and resume my "life as usual", I am going to close my eyes for a few minutes and let those feelings wash over me again. soak through my very being. let my soul absorb as much of it as I can, like a sponge.

it might sound clichéd but it rings true: four wheels move the body, two wheels move the soul! 

Inertial goals

Sitting upright, belt on, with the in-flight entertainment counting down the minutes to my destination, and with nothing else to occupy myself than the physical sensations being fed to my ears, I feel tuned in. The flaps extended. Once, twice. The engine goes quieter, almost silent, on my noise cancelling headphones. It feels like we’re floating. Another sound, this time a longer rumble than the flaps being extended. It must be the landing gear. To confirm my gut feeling, the sensation of floating changes to the sensation of being held back very gently by my seat. I’m somewhere near the centre of gravity of the plane, but I feel a slight change of attitude. Pitch down. The stabilised glide slope should be 3 degrees, so the correction couldn’t have been more than a fraction of a degree. We’re floating again. Then we’re slowing down. First for a couple of seconds, then for maybe 10 seconds. The wind noise is much louder than the engine noise now. The noise dies. We’re ready to land! I’m far from a window so my only indication is the actual touchdown. I didn’t feel the flare, only the touchdown. Firm braking and a right turn to the taxiway when we’re still at a decent speed. Flawless.

Flying must be like riding a motorbike, except with more controls. It feels the same… except that everything is more measured and precise. Makes me wonder, how would I do as a pilot? 

And then I remind myself, I can’t keep a 40 foot yacht in a straight line unless I have a point on the horizon to aim at 😂

the diary of an excited man

it's 6am. the birds are awake, although the sky is barely aglow.

I'm awake too. I shouldn't be. but I know why. 

it's energy. it's adrenaline. right when I don't need it. 

I don't want to think about what I'll do when I need it. 

my hope is, there are enough safety margins. there is no inclination, motivation or reason to take risks. 

I'm taking it easy. this is for fun. 

I need to reinforce my self-belief in what I can do. heaven knows I've been reminded enough of what I can't. 

I don't want to think about if I'm ready... or if carly is ready. 

is everyone around ready? 

maybe there is no such thing as being ready. we are where we are, and we move in the direction we want to go.

the highway awaits. some familiar territory, evolving over the years, yet somehow still the same. and the most exciting part: unfamiliar territory.

on the road and in my head. 

you know what? I'm ready. off we go.

thank you

after 8 months of regular sessions in the "condition management" programme and a little under year of CBT before that, today marks the first day in a very long time I am out in the world without the reminder that a healthcare professional is going to check up on me in a few weeks. while I'm going to keep doing what I have been doing for the past few weeks/months that culminated in me getting off the programme, it has to be said that my social circle is in no small way responsible for my recovery... and I'm grateful for the friends who have helped me get back on my feet. it's ironic that I'm putting this up on my blog when all of the benefits have come from meeting my friends in person... but I feel it must be said anyway. I may not always have the energy to meet my friends, but sometimes even trying is more than half the battle... and knowing I'm being thought of and my company is valued means a lot more than it might seem in dark moments when things don't feel very hopeful. 

I don't know how to end this post, other than say thank you, and hope things keep moving in their current trajectory (ie upwards instead of downwards!).

take care! 

n-gage'd

Found a 20 year old photo in my "to sort" directory in my photo dump.

1st September 2005.

A photo of my first phone, a Nokia n-gage, ringing as I called it after transferring my own sim to a friend's phone for this experiment. I think there was a way to take screenshots on the n-gage, but it didn't work when the phone was ringing.

That phone doesn't power up any more (not sure if it's still around or trashed), but the 1gb memory card that was in it is still with me, with all the data that was on the phone when it was last used! Among other things, it has a backup of the internal memory of the phone, a paltry 4mb... of which some 800kb was taken up by every single SMS I received over 4 years - 2004 - 2008. I don't know of any software which can read it, unless I fire up a Symbian emulator and install the app to restore the backup (I think I still have the installer in a backup somewhere!)... that will make for some interesting reading!

A typo finds "news" from the future!

Today is 7th September 2025 (yes, I double checked!). It's 18:29pm (British Summer Time) as of writing this. And so, I was wondering how this "happened":

Funnily enough, accepting the search suggestion (ie correcting the typo in my search query) fixes the news as firmly in the past - despite it claiming it searched using the corrected text to begin with!

ps: worth mentioning, I used "search.brave.com" - I didn't know Brave had switched to using it's own engine. I thought it was using google - not that it matters, seems AI crap is finding its way everywhere!

spider and fly

while showering a couple of nights ago, I was surprised to see a rather large fly flying about in the bathroom - it probably entered through the open window, attracted by the light - that usually attracts moths, but there's always a first, and this fly was it. while it was buzzing around one of the downlights, I noticed there was a single line of spider-web-silk that started somewhere else at the bathroom and ended at the light. nothing unusal about it, but the light made the web particularly obvious - so obvious, that I could spot the peturbation in the web, as the fly flew around it. it wasn't very clear if the fly flew into the thread or not, but it was clearly having many close passes at the very least, as it seemed to be flying around the light. there were a couple of rather big jerks to the web which were clearly the fly making contact.

shortly after that, the fly seemed to come to rest on the light. my first assumption was that it was basically as close to the light as it could get to and couldn't figure what else to do. I had also finished my shower, so I turned the light off while I dried myself off, so that the fly's movement from that spot might indicate if it was free to move about. I also noticed the the fly was not moving quite as a fly might be expected to - perhaps indicating that it was struggling with the web, although maybe it was also having some sort of seizure due to being so close to such a bright light.

dried off, I switched the light back on to observe the fly. it was still moving in that weird manner - it seemed like it couldn't move one wing in the same way as it could move the other, and same for one or two legs. I also looked around for any obvious spiders, especially around the web. there weren't any.

I switched off the light again and opened the window as wide as I could to air out the bathroom, and hopefully also give the fly as good a chance to fly out as it could have. I shut the door and went on with my evening, wondering what will happen next with the fly, and reminding myself to check on it when I bring the window to its normal ajar position.

about an hour later, I stopped back to check on the fly. to cause minimum disturbance to the fly, I switched off the lights outside the bathroom, opened the door as little as I could to get a look at the fly. I also didn't turn the room light on, but instead, I used my phone's torch. the fly was still there, and it didn't seem to be moving at all (unlike earlier when it was moving erratically). as my phone's light didn't seem to disturb the fly, I entered the bathroom and switched on the light. the fly was completely immobile and didn't respond to the light at all.

I was quite surprised. did a couple of encounters with the web (and not a big web, just one thread!) trap the fly to the point where it was unable to move at all, possibly dead?

how strong is a spider web, and is there something else to it like the stickiness, or the way it catches on the body of the fly, that causes even slight contact to get it into a more tangled position where it cannot move at all? or is there something on the web that paralyzes or otherwise affects the fly?

I spent a few moments observing the fly and thinking these thoughts, before I turned the light off, left the bathroom and shut the door. I considered taking a photo, as this blog post was definitely half-formed in my head (even the title, inspured by a memory of this animated series from my childhood!), but my phone was charging, and thought I could get a better photo the next morning.

next morning, I went to the bathroom, phone ready.

there was no trace of the fly. none whatsoever. not on the light, not on the ground. no trace of the web either.

since the window was left very slightly ajar (in fact it had shut enough overnight to not allow a fly to get through) it was impossible (or maybe very very unlikely) that the fly had revived and escaped.

the only other plausible explanation was that the fly had been completely consumed by the spider overnight.

RTFM

Someone gave me this pair of bluetooth headphones, which I was able to "fix" and start using with a few minutes of effort. Today, a few months later, I accidentally activated the redial function (at almost midnight - not even sure who I just called! 😨). It took a good 20 minutes to find the manual online, and it seems the headphones actually have 4 unmarked buttons, and each of them have multiple functions depending on the duration/number of presses! The manufacturer was really expecting their customers to RTFM 😂

PS: after having read the manual end-to-end (no feat, given it's all of 4 pages) it turns out there is absolutely no indication of which side is right and left either, so even RTFM doesn't help 😏

the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything

 ... is 42. or so the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy says.

it's obviously tongue in cheek, but it's also something more.

it means the answer doesn't mean much, if you don't ask the right question. and sometimes asking the appropriate question is more tricky than finding the correct answer to it.

I don't know if it's a mid-life thing (aside: I wonder why the word mid-life is almost always used with crisis!), or if it's just a my-life thing, or it is a combination of both and the series of crises that life seems to be throwing at me with regularity.

but yeah, it's definitely a time to think about questions, as much as I think about answers. in fact, the answers to most questions I ask myself these days are quite obvious - which, to me, is a hint that perhaps I'm not asking myself the right questions.

one thing's for sure though, my 40s (so far) have been an exercise in crisis management. it seems to have started with the motorbike accident just 3 weeks before I turned 40 (or maybe the near-crisis career "bump" that happened a few months before it?), and it's just been one thing after another since. some positive things have happened as well, but it's fair to say that while the successes are welcome and lasting, they also seem to be few and far between, while the struggles, although not disastrous, do seem to knock me down with regularity - to the point where every single day seems to be a struggle I'm ill-equipped to deal with. some of those struggles are self-inflicted/self-exacerbated (mechanical problems with my motorbike and car come to mind) but the vast majority seem to be curveballs life/the universe is throwing at me.

one thing that stands out the most though, is that these crises have reminded me in no uncertain terms, that the most valuable of all things is health. the next is human connections. somewhere in the mix is things like discipline, persistence, consistency, etc.

but those are all "answers". it's been a while since I've even stopped to consider the questions, in anything more than an academic, philosophical, almost idle sense.

mom loved to say that one of my granddad's favourite expressions was "is life worth living? it depends on the liver" (an obvious pun on the organs/health of the person asking the question, as well as the state of the person themselves).

in my case, I can say, beyond doubt, that as a person, my life seems worth living.

my daily struggles have reminded me repeatedly of the privilege and opportunities I have - my support system (both emotionally and economically), my stress-free environment (if say 95% of the people I know were in the same situation I am in, they probably will not have the circumstances to easily deal with them!), and more... 

and yet, the struggle remains. a struggle so bad that I am sometimes jealous of people around me (obviouslt on a superficial level! I know my situation is unique and I cannot pick and choose aspects of others' lives - that's not how the universe works!). a struggle that I hope isn't going to occupy me for the rest of my life, although I am realistic enough to acknowledge that worse struggles do exist, and it's not a guarantee that things will get better quickly or easily.

I don't know why I am so fixated on this struggle. I don't know why I can't see the bright side of things. of getting the clarity to see life as it really is. without all of its assumptions and distractions. 

I've been advised to try meditation. but meditation in and of itself leads to idle meandering. I think I need something mroe directed. I think I need to ask myself more questions.

or maybe I just need to sleep on time (yes, there are actually 3 people who have advised me the same thing, and in fact it's the only thing that the majority of people who are closely aware of what I'm going through agree upon). damn, that would be an anticlimax if it was true!

either way, here I am, rambling along. a metaphor for my life, if there ever was one. 42 years old. happy birthday to me!

black roses

I came upon a rose garden. The rose garden had black roses, which I know fascinated my mom as she has mentioned them multiple times for some reason - I think she saw them once 45+ years ago.

I was going to go bring her to see to see the black roses when a friend arrived at the garden to tend to the roses. She told me they looked black because they were burned roses. She showed me the bit where the ends of the petals were still red, as that was the newly grown bit.

I didn't at the time question how burned petals could continue to grow and how the new growth was red, but I did think to myself that it would be very disappointing to explain to my mom that black roses are simply burnt roses.

And that's when I woke up.

Coincidentally, I completely forgot about this until I saw a video today, a tongue in cheek one about people who can't see colour in their imagination, which prompted me to describe my dream in the comments. I found the coincidence (that I would dream of black roses on the same day I'd come across a video of people with black and white imaginations) uncanny... or was it confirmation bias?

Either way, time to tell mom about my dream about black roses... or not.

the un-optimized life

A comment on a youtube video about watching everything at 3x speed (to keep your mind sharp and optimize the rate of flow of information) reminded me of something I've never blogged - a bit about my past, that very strongly shaped how I lived ever since. 

I'm not feeling like rewording my comment, so here it is, copied from the video:

Interesting thing about speed listening. I'm guessing there haven't been long term studies about this though. I have anecdotal evidence about speed reading as an analogy. I started speeding up my reading from when I was about 6, hitting my maximum at about 9 and sustaining that for many years - I never counted words per minute but it was 4.5 pages per minute of paperback novels. At that speed, I was reading between 2 and 3 books a day, literally running out of stuff to read. I kept that speed going till I was about 19. At that point, I think I got saturated with information (I had literally ready my entire school library, although my uni library was much larger and I didn't bother even trying to cover it). I can speed-read even now (I'm 42) but I find it very exhausting and not worth the effort. I have stopped optimizing the flow of information into my head and now focus on enjoying the journey, even if it's information for information's sake. It seems like youtube/podcasts in general are inefficient sources of information, so a person may not hit saturation point as quickly (or at all?) but given speed-listening to youtube has been with some people since childhood, I wonder if they may eventually reach the same predicament as I have with reading.

Just to add: while the first aspect of my life to be consciously de-optimized was my information diet, it's now spread to pretty much everything else. As recently as 10 years ago, I used to believe in packing every moment of free time I had with "things worth doing".

That's completely changed now. Well before Chronic Fatigue Syndrome took over my life, I had very much stopped optimizing my time. Everything has become about being "in the moment" even if the moment was something mundane. Kinda like climbing the same hill twice a week for 3 years - something I could never even imagine 10 years ago!

I still seek new experiences, and still enjoy change, but I have stopped feeling that pressure now. 

To put it differently, life doesn't feel "too short", life now feels "long enough" - a crazy thing to say when I can literally see weeks and months go by in a blink, just staying afloat - eat, work (not always - CFS has really impacted my ability to get things done!), sleep repeat. And no, I've not run out of things to do. I've simply stopped maintaining a ToDo list. I now do things as I feel like, when I feel like. I don't sweat the missed opportunities, the things I could do. Or even the things I could do better.

I don't know if this will ever change, but I can see this is simply what I learned in my late teens with regards to information and learning, spreading over to the rest of my life.

Anyway, it's 10:45pm. I'm off to bed!

Time

Waiting... first at the reception, then in a quiet tiny room. The "procedure" was booked for 4pm but it's now 5pm and no procedure has been started. I've been fasting since 10am, and not allowed to drink any water since 2pm. I started off feeling hungry but I'm not hungry any more - only thirsty. Desperately thirsty. But there's something I'm more desperate to do. To lie down and close my eyes. Ironically, the only thing in the room with me is a bed. But I have not been asked to occupy it yet. The bed looks more and more inviting as the seconds tick away. The seconds tick away loudly - the clock on the wall is really making its presence felt. I'm waiting for something to replace the ticks of that clock. Even silence would be fine. Silence would be great, actually.

The "procedure" took 7 minutes. The doctor said that's about as quick as it can be done.

And then, another wait. This time, in a different room, with a few patients in beds. Thankfully, I'm in a recliner chair. There is a clock, but I can't hear it ticking. There are louder sounds: something I can't see that sounds like a fan, and the beep of someone's vitals being monitored. At one point, the beep turned into a high pitched whine and the nurse asked the patient to take deep breaths. Back to beeping.

There is a TV on the wall. It's tuned to a news channel. The news is all about war.

It's interesting that even war is more bearable than that clock ticking. 

[kris.blog();] New comment on Adriana Jenkins left a message on your guestbook.

what are the odds that a really old blog post (14 years old, to be precise) poking fun of a spam message gets a comment 3 days ago... AND THAT COMMENT IS SPAM! like spamception!

ps: I am now waiting for this blog post to attract more spam 11 years later!

the office party

it was late one afternoon. i was in office. suddenly, the fire alarm went off. everyone made their way to the nearest fire exit. down the two flights of stairs, we were all in the lobby, about to head out the emergency exit. the lobby wasn't like my office building's lobby though: it was much later - maybe 8-10 times the size overall, and with a really high ceiling that was maybe thrice as high as my office's. it also had a completely different style - indicative of a glass fronted modern building, not the 100+ year old stone walled office building i work in.

anyway - the fire alarm turned out to be a false alarm and we were told over the PA that we could return to our respective floors. that's when I checked my pocket (front right - that's where it always is!) and realized I didn't have my access card on me, so I couldn't get back in myself. I spotted my manager Tim getting into the elevator (or actually - an elevator, because there were 3, unlike my actual office) and got into that one. it was a massive elevator - practically room sized!

I stood next to Tim, waiting for the elevator to take us to the first floor.

and that's when I realized I wasn't wearing a shirt.

a lady standing across me, wearing a business suit, seemed to notice the same thing at the very same moment.

she said "you might want to wear a shirt to work", to which I mumbled something and hurried out of the elevator, extremely embarassed. I had no idea what to do, but thankfully the lobby had emptied (presumably everyone had taken the stairs or one of the 3 massive elevators), and I had a moment to scan the seemingly bare lobby for something to save my dignity. I saw a crumpled piece of fabric in the corner. I walked over to it and picked it up. It was a discarded, dirty (but not overly dirty) grey hoodie. in fact, it looked exactly like a hoodie that's lying in my shed at home - it's what a handyman left behind after he built an awning for my motorbike in March 2022, and it's been lying in the shed ever since!

I dusted it before putting it on, and it fit, thankfully. I took the fire escape, as that was the only way back up that could be accessed without an access card. there was one access controlled door that I had to get through to enter the office though. thankfully, someone saw me through it when I knocked and let me in. my colleague Patrick. he asked me where I was and to hurry up and get into the frame.

everyone was posing for a photograph. everyone had a can of beer in their hand. I didn't want to hold everyone up so I simply posed without a drink, completely unaware of my grubby sweatshirt - I was on the sidelines as everyone was already in place for the photo, which was just as well. the angle from which the photo was being clicked was very weird - it required a lot of people in a verysmall space, so some were sitting on the desk, some squatting in front of it, and a few of us standing on either side.

the occasion was a visiting manager from one of our overseas offices, and after the photo was clicked, everyone took their seats. a lady (katie?) asked if anyone didn't have a drink and would like something. someone asked for a guinness. she said there weren't any more cans of guinness. someone said they hadn't opened their can of guinness and wouldn't mind swapping it for a can of heineken zero. I asked for a can of guinness zero, but there weren't any. I said any alcohol free beer would do - perhaps heineken zero then?

I took my can, popped it open, and took the last seat available - the one right next to the visiting manager. as we settled in, I looked around and was surprised to see, near the far end of the table - mom!

she was making some sort of hand gestures - she seemed to be suggesting she should move over and sit next to me. I realized that her moving over would be quite disruptive as she would have to squeeze past everyone on her side of the table, and then past the manager as well, and find a place to sit next to me, which was already occupied by plenty of people. and she'd have to find a seat as well, or pull one from somewhere else.

i tried to signal back with to her with my eyes and hands that she shouldn't move and simply sit there.

the manager had started speaking, and he was quite brief. somewhere in the middle I sneaked in a comment or question, and he replied with something humorous. towards the end he left it open for questions which a few of my colleagues asked, and he duly answered. once he wrapped up, he stood up and walked over to the breakout room where he made himself a coffee. everyone else got to their feet as well, and started mixing about.

mom walked over to me and asked me what i thought about the talk. i said it was nothing exceptional but definitely useful.

she asked me what prompted me to make that comment in the middle of his talk.

I told her it was simply something that came to my mind at the spur of the moment.

she asked me why I interrupted him when nobody else did.

I told her it's a fine balance of judgement about when saying something is welcome or considered an interruption. if he hadn't paused the right amount of time and I didn't have whatever came to my mind ready to say, I woudn't have said it. I told her it's something that takes years of practice and skill, and it's something that a lot of people don't seem to grasp how subtle but effective the skill is at building relationships - and also breaking relationships if done wrong.

she told me she was glad I was able to do it with such ease.

and that's when I woke up.

ungraceful degradation

"the ability of the human body to gracefully degrade under adverse conditions fascinates me :)"

- Kris, September 7th 2013

12 years ago. How much has changed since then.

I have just spent a whole week, barely functioning. Literally just crawling out of bed to eat and rest and eventually sleep. Cooking is about the most I've been able to muster the energy for.

The funny thing is, metabolically, my body is supposedly fine. Not entirely fine - but probably in similar shape based on medical parameters etc. But it isn't behaving the same. Has medicine not reached the level where what's going on can be pinpointed? Or is this the result of the passing of some tipping point in a slow process which was in motion years ago, maybe even before 2013? Some doctors have said it could also be the result of a brief viral infection that left me but that my body has not recovered from.

Chances are it's a combination of at least two of those things.

One thing is for sure - biohacking does NOT work long term. All those things I did to push myself, thinking I had discovered something really smart about myself? They probably had long term effects.

Irregular sleep, low quality sleep, multiple short sleep intervals instead of one full night's sleep - the impact of those is clear to me now.

Screen time is now having an impact obvious enough to be measurable on a day to day basis.

The constant input of compressed information into my head may or may not be affecting how I process information now - but I know that my ability to process information has definitely been affected.

Embracing the internet and social media (back when it seemed fledgling and world-changing) seems to have had an oversized impact on me as I have been using it for far longer than most people. It's reached the point where the measures I had put in place to streamline my usage have been blocked by social media platforms, forcing me to use them as they see fit.

And then there's random age related (yep some things are clearly age related!) things that are simply making it harder to deal with everything else.

And so, we're at this point - where I'm struggling to cope. Where the degradation is no longer graceful or even sustainable.

But I'm still alive and functioning. I can still do most of the things that I used to, but just more carefully. I'm worried about how long that will last though. That is not a day of realization I'm looking forward to.

chronic fatigue

one of my daily struggles, in fact something that I'm surprised I've only mentioned on my blog once in passing despite it being such a massive part of my life since March 2024, is a unique yet pervasive (for me, since then) feeling. it's a feeling i struggle to explain to most people, and a feeling that very few people are actually even able to understand after I've explained it. the medical term for it is chronic fatigue syndrome, and it's something which, when it initially hit me and took over my life, left me completely hopeless, confused and literally on the verge of giving up. it's a feeling which, in hindsight, was completely alien to me before it hit me, and so crazily different from how I'd live before then that it has completely knocked me off my feet!

for those who know me well, I used to be like the famous battery advertisement (was it duracell or eveready?) - I could just go on and on. I was never too tired for anything. I could push myself to the limit, and when I was at my absolute limit, I could recharge a bit and keep going for some more. kinda like the latest phones that advertise a few hours of battery life on 5 minutes of charge, from their crazy high power quick chargers. there was a time in 2002 where I kept going for 68 hours without sleep, and was back on my feet after like a 2 hour nap... and another in 2007 where I did something like 32 hours followed by a 4 hour nap and then kept going for another 20 hours after that. most of my late teens were spent being up all night and napping through the day to keep going. there's this one episode I can't forget from 2001, when I fell asleep during a statistics lecture, and somehow kept writing was the professor (prof. Fernandes) was saying in my sleep. my friends claim I was so fast asleep I was snoring. the professor called my name, a friend shook me awake, and the professor asked me something she had just stated to the class. I was quite blank, until I looked down at my own notebook and saw I had scrawled the answer! I read it out and she was flabbergasted. she thought one of my friends had prompted me, but I showed her my notebook and she was forced to believe me. that's the sort of life I used to lead. even as recently as 2017, I once rode overnight to Goa after a whole day's work in office - I remember the ride to office with my fully loaded panniers as they touched a car while filtering in rush hour traffic, and then a friend clicked a photo of me before I rode off from the parking lot at sunset. after I reached my friend's place at Goa at noon (yes, I did take a nap on the way, especially after the sun rose and the heat really started getting to me), and I literally had a shower and was going to take a proper nap, when my friend was like "did you ride to goa to sleep?" and dragged me out for lunch, followed by drinks at one beach, then a swim at another, dinner, and fianlly a DJ/private party that went on till about 1am and I was in bed at 2am. that's the sort of thing I could do not too long ago.

and now, it's different.

if I over exert over a period of a few hours and sit on the couch, I might be in a position where I'm too tired to even get up to drink water, eat or sleep. if I over exert and go to bed, I might be in a position where I am unable to get out of bed the next morning - or even the next afternoon. there has even been a time when I was too tired to get out of bed in the evening, and literally got out at 8pm!

worst of all, there are no warning signs - I just have to anticipate it. I have been out cycling for 35km a couple of times - it doesn't feel weird while I'm out and about (other than the actual reduction of my physical capabilities after the last year and a half of minimal exercise), I get home, put the bike in the shed, wifey brings me a glass or two of water, I sit msyelf down on the couch - and that's it. I can't move for the next few hours. sometimes even 6 hours. my brain's awake and active, which is terrible when coupled with the entertainment laptop hooked up to the tv (and of course and endless list of things I could "get done") while seated there in my half-zombie state.

it's such a regular phenomenon that I've actually identified missing gaps of unaccounted time (literally hours) where I know where I was, what I was trying to do, but can't really match the total elapsed time with what I achieved. I was obviously better off going to bed... but I didn't. because it felt like I couldn't.

and then there's the mornings. my alarm goes off at 8:13am, labelled "wake up". I have practically never woken up with it. I do wake up physically and either dismiss or snooze it. if I have enough energy i change the snooze time from the default 5 minutes to a more realistic (in my head) time before snoozing. I have tried keeping the phone out of arms reach, and on such days, depending on my energy levels I might get out and reach it and drag it back to my bedside before dismissing/snoozing it, or on bad days I just let it ring out for half an hour or however it takes.

my next alarm goes off at 9:15am on weekdays, appropriately labeled "start work". this alarm has varying levels of success, although of late it's not been looking too good. some days I've managed to snooze it at an appropriate point where the subsequent ring has caught me at a time when I've had the right amount of energy to get out of bed. some days I've forced myself out of bed even though I felt like I wasn't ready for it, and 10 seconds, a minute, or sometimes even 2 minutes later (ie after I've pee'd) I have gotten back into bed.

My mornings are so fuzzy I don't really have any data about which strategy works better or worse, and certainly no data about what works so badly it needs to be abandoned altogether.

if all has gone well I'm out of bed and somewhat ready to tackle the day. if it hasn't, I'm back in bed. this is where the real disaster begins to unfold. over time, my fatigue from the previous day seems to overlap with my lack of energy from being in bed for so long. I get thirsty but don't have the energy to grab a glass of water from the bedside table. or even worse, I do, and the bottle is empty because  I was so "barely awake" when I got out of bed the previous morning I forgot to take the empty bottle down with me - and of course nodbody is in the bedroom during the day so if it's skipped in the morning nobody will notice. even later, I'll be so hungry I don't have the energy to get out of bed.

sometimes I'll be fast asleep for hours, other times I'll be half-awake, lucid dreaming, and there are days when I'll literally be wide awake, alert, and able to have a whole (albeit brief) conversation with Shruti across rooms. sometimes I'll have the energy to check my phone, see messages from work, see work meetings/appointments (and yes, over the last year or so, I've actually had more medical appointments than work meetings!). sometimes I'll have the energy to message my manager that I need to take the day or a few hours off work.

on some days, I will appeal to Shruti to help me out of bed, and she'll physically get me to sitting, help me get my feet to the ground, help me to my feet, take me to the bathroom or down the stairs.

on other days, I won't even have the energy to call out for help.

she's tried getting me out of bed when I'm not ready and I'll literally fall back into bed as soon as she's not helping me up, or sometimes I'll beg her to let go of me and I'll get back into bed. there was even last tuesday when she physically took me to my work desk and I sleepwalked through the next few hours until I had the energy to get out of my chair and back into bed.

it's the sort of problem that has me completely flummoxed - I don't know what will work, or what won't, until it does or doesn't.

as a result, I've begun shying away from challenges - or taking up challenges fully anticipating completely disruptive setbacks.

I've stopped hiking.

I've (almost) stopped cycling.

I've almost stopped sailing.

Even the vacations we've gone for have had nap times scheduled.

If I had to explain all of this to 40-year old me, I'd have thought it was some sort of joke (or horror story, more likely).

Oh and there's the accompanying brain fog. But that's another long story.

Somehow, I feel relieved to finally get this typed out.

Based on all the medical advice I've been given, chronic fatigue syndrome doesn't need to be experienced the way I currently am experiencing it. There is a path to living with it which isn't disruptive (or even noticeable to others). It's just that all my attempts so far have not succeeded for extended periods of time.

But there is hope. And I'm counting on it.

Right. Off to bed now.

y u lukin lidat

May 2012... 13 years ago to the day. I did a 600+ km  overnight motorbike ride across the country as I was on vacation and had just got a job offer confirmed - they expected me to start on May 28th. left Karnataka at like 6pm and reached home at about 10am. there was no network for the first 6 hours or so, and Google didn't have offline maps back then - I was riding in the dark along (and sometimes beside!) country roads in the hope of getting to a highway... which I did at almost midnight. I remember the sigh of relief when I pulled into the Kolhapur McDonald's, finally able to freshen up and grab a bite. 

From stert to finish, I listened to this song on loop and sang along - literally the entire night, to keep myself alert:

Inna - Amazing

When I got bored of the existing lyrics, I made up my own. Mostly funny and sometimes rude, some so rude I can never repeat them out loud. Not that it really matters what I sang though. It kept me going.

Y U Lukin Lidat!

the universe is finite

My YouTube viewing list (and also my subscriptions, now that I've actually started subscribing to stuff) is predominantly science-y content (with the odd aviation, coffee and motoring stuff that creeps in). Last week was particularly physics-y though. So much so that I had an astrophysics dream! The dream was of the universe being a cube (strange, because everything we know points to it being spherical or spheroidal), but the stranger bit was what was happening inside the cube:

The cube was initially entirety and uniformly lit bright, and then suddenly seemed to undergo an implosion of sorts, after which it went from bring brightly and uniformly lit, into being filled with rapidly shrinking specs of light. It remained a cube throughout, but the contents of the cube were changing. 

When I woke up and had a thought about it, I realized it was a different way of looking at the universe. A finite universe.

And that's when it struck me: the total mass and energy of the universe has been and will be constant. The universe seems to be expanding very quickly, but that expansion is a function of time. If one was to use time as a scaling factor of the universe, it doesn't seem infinite at all.

The universe was never born, and will never die. It's just constantly being scaled by time. In fact, could it be that the only scaling happens in our perception?

I need to ask a physicist.