Making Friends

Friends, many or few, short or tall, cool or nerdy, but we all have them. Beyond the nuclear family and the significant other, friends are often the closest people to us today. This dialog from the TV show Spaced puts it aptly: "they say the family of the twenty-first century is made up of friends, not relatives".
However most of us never consciously think about how we go about making friends? how does it happen really.

It is pretty much common knowledge that we make friends with people whom we interact often, meaningfully or with purpose and have common interests and values. But given these preconditions, how does friendship form? Any connection between two people would require the initiation of a connection by one party and its subsequent acceptance by the other.

In romantic relationships the roles of initiator-acceptor have hitherto been socially mandated with the man initiating and the woman accepting. With friendships however, there is no clear norm. Do some people tend to go out and make friends? while others tend to accept the friendship of people who want to be their friend?
What does this mean with respect to their personality?

This author realizes that he might be one of the latter, since he doesn't remember having made friends (barring a few friend requests on facebook) and wonders what it all means.

So you think you're wise

I've always thought of wisdom as a stage beyond knowledge. Often ignorance and wisdom are confusing, especially to those who are neither.
We often expect wise people to be a certain way, however most people do not have visible halos, long flowing robes, white beards and/or staffs! Therefore the need for a simple guide to distinguish between ignorant/smart/wise in practical everyday situations. Here are a few I could think of:

programmer writes sloppy code (ignorant)
programmer follows design principles (smart) [duh]
programmer is known to not follow (wise) [beware of appraisal time!]

doesn't care what people think (ignorant)
cares what people think (smart) [sad but true]
knows whose opinion to care about (wise) [the list of whose can often be surprising]

not chivalrous (ignorant)
chivalrous (smart) [indeed!]
willing to not be (wise) [guys don't try this at home (or on dates) :P]

totally ignores the speed limit (ignorant)
always within 5 miles of speed limit (smart) [also might help you avoid tickets]
never the fastest car on the road (wise) [cruising!]

blogs about fart jokes (ignorant)
blogs about interesting things (smart)
makes fart jokes interesting (wise) [here's to you Seth MacFarlane]

May this guide be your key to wisdom (or wisdom teeth removal)

sleepless

never seen the sun shine so
the sky lit up in hospital lights
no place for healing nor fighting
no tears left in my eyes

a middling moon sneaks
the needle feels no pain
as it darkens there is some
faint rumble of rain

drowning in my dreams
I'm afraid to see these
nightmares and cold sweat
I lie awake till dawn

from his bed of dark cloud
the sun gets up hungover
a lone bird chirps in the tree
I get another day to wander

How we write

When we start to write, we start with an idea, a memory or an observation.


Observation is the first pool, it is what we see at the surface. The minute details, textures, sights and sounds that make our descriptions vivid; the complex plots that keep us guessing, all stem from this pool. Not unlike the sun, this is a source of energy that is both immediate and free. At this point, our work has characters, structure and a plot, it might be easy reading. However fiction is not a travelogue or a documentary, we need more, so we tap our next pool.

Memory is formed from observations from days, months or years past. Not unlike how we get fossil fuels, all we see is transformed into something a little different, a single whole instead of isolated sights or sounds; and like petroleum, it is the most portable and powerful fuel that a writer has to keep her engines running.
A story where the characters are enriched by their memories and the plots go beyond the immediate to form well developed arcs are definitely much richer. We have now reached a good read, but the reader is still outside our work, to draw her in, we need to cast a further spell. And so we tap into our final pool.

Ideas are our deepest pool, from this darkness comes all light. Not unlike the interstellar clouds that give birth to new stars, our imagination produces all kinds of ideas, It can help the reader find out about the world that the characters inhabit, make them feel joy and pain, live the dilemmas, or even when your story is really good, identify with them, become them (if only for a little while). Not every idea is a star, some a just red dwarfs and some go supernova on you. The sincere writer knows that imagination running wild will kill the story, just as too much love will kill you, every time.

Wing

Its not a broken wing she says
Yet another of those rainy days
The bright lights are shivering
Its not my lips that are quivering


She looks into her ice cream cup
Its cold but may warm her up
The dishes are all dirty and stale
My dinner is hunger and longing

I tell her that its a full moon
But it doesn't cast a shadow
She turns the lights on
And tells me to follow

Poem: She

She plays with her hair, so many choices
She returns my smile, ignores my glances
Infects me with joy, hope and despair

My life it can never be the same
The walls crash down and
I'm naked in the sun

She yearns for something, someone new
She acts on impulses ,that only she knew
Mirages have never been more real