So it’s time for NaNoWriMo, which if you are not familiar with is National Naovel Writing Month.  I think deep down we all want to be writers, it’s a short cut to immortality.  Think about a good book something that has stood the test of time, or a book that stays with you long after you finished reading it.  The authors can reach out and affect us and isn’t that living ?  Being able to affect people and events around us ?

Imagine a castaway living on a deserted island, the castaway might as well be dead.  We can’t see or hear him and he has no way to affect anyone or anything.  For all practical matter he is dead, if we replaced him with a small bear that consumed the same amount of energy and produced the same amount of waste you couldn’t even tell the difference in biological terms.

And isn’t that what we all seek ?  When you boil down most religions it comes down to this, there is someone out there who cares about you and who watches you.  You are not a castaway that could be replaced by a small bear.  HE is watching and writing in THE BOOK and some day you will get a reward.  But you are alive and you do matter, although for most us once we die we are quickly forgotten.  Do you remember your grand grand uncle ?  You know the old one who smelled a bit strange ?  the one you were always reluctant to go and visit unless mom and dad prodded you to do so ?  It wasn’t long before we all forgot about him, what did it take a year or two ?  But what’s the alternative to sit and mourn indefinitely so that the dead relatives can once again live through us ?

At some point we have to move on.  We are programmed to do so, there is that never ending desire to improve the code, the double helix inside of us requires perfection.  Another infinitesimal step forward, another gamble on the side of evolution.  Evolution doesn’t play fair it has an infinite number of rolls and a never ending stack of chips.  Maybe that’s why the religious crowd hates revolution, it doesn’t play fair.

I don’t like to be a chip I think I’d be happier as a bear.  Does that make me suicidal or more like the indian gurus, sitting wisely aside from worldly affairs.  Above it all and unaffected by anything happening outside of their own bodies.  But is the indian guru any different from the castaway ?  At least they get offerings.

The Bare Necessities
Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean the bare necessities
Old Mother Nature’s recipes
That brings the bare necessities of life

Wherever I wander, wherever I roam
I couldn’t be fonder of my big home
The bees are buzzin’ in the tree
To make some honey just for me
When you look under the rocks and plants
And take a glance at the fancy ants
Then maybe try a few

The bare necessities of life will come to you
They’ll come to you!

A week ago I sat in front of the testing center and tried to relax. I took out my Blackberry and called a colleague, we had a big deal on the line and a few minutes earlier I had gotten some positive news from one of our key engineers that I wanted to share with him.

He wasn’t expecting the good news, which made it even better. It’s always good to surprise someone with good news. A few hours later I had good news of my own. A score of 740 on the GMAT exam put me in the top 3% of all exam takers. I should have been happy instead as soon as I got home I started to Google for people who had gotten a higher score. It didn’t matter that someone might have gotten a higher score in 2005 or if they had spent a year studying for the exam they had gotten a higher score, which meant I hadn’t done well enough. Finally at 10 PM while I was about to register for another exam so I could improve my score I forced myself to stop.

I should have been happy with my score instead all I could think about was the 60 points I had missed. It made me think about why I had that expectation. Like most other Iranian children I remember my parents looking over my grades and slowly shaking their heads, did you hear your cousin Mehdi is doing better, he’s first in his class but that’s ok you did the best you could you are third in your class.

I thought about it some more and decided I didn’t want to care about grades that much anymore. Now if you have ever seen my transcript you wouldn’t think that I cared about my grades at all, I have the full alphabet in there. But you see back then I didn’t care about my grade so that I could show other people that I didn’t care. It was important to have Cs and Ds even though I really wanted to get As and Bs that way I would never be accused of caring about grades like cousin Mehdi.

Oh and if you had some expectation that this blog would get updated on a regular basis I hope your expectations have been met, you just had to adjust your definition of the word “regular”.