In Continuum.

We've all been using the internet for a while now, or at least you have made it far enough to be reading this sentence right now. Somehow or another, you've bound to have come across one of those image verification things online. You  know, those little boxes with fancy colors and shapes of different numbers and alphabets twisted into odd shapes and sizes. Supposedly, the computer cannot read those strange shapes very well, which is why they use those fancy little boxes to identify you as human whenever you are trying to post a comment on a website, do a search in a forum, or anything along the lines of those internet functions. Those little fancy boxes are called CAPTCHA, which basically stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". I know the acronym doesn't exactly add up, but I am not making things up either. I am just as surprised as you are that those fancy boxes actually have actual technical names to go along with them, and that is a little something I found on the internet while being on an aimless roaming mode. 

Think of it as a blood test or running your thumb print through some multi-thousand dollar machine. In the world of computers, it comes down to identifying strangely shaped numbers and letters to prove that you are a human, as if humans can be defined so easily in real life. If only that is the case though, but it's not like we really give it much thought in our day to day life really. When was the last time we sat down and thought about what differentiates us from our neighbor's pet dog, or the gorilla in the jungles of New Guinea? A little less hair and a lot more things to talk about perhaps, but these are questions that we don't think about. We don't need to prove that we are humans on a day to day basis, it's the same as we don't need to prove that we are alive to somebody else either. Lately, I have realized, that there are some things in life I don't need hard evidences to prove either. There are things that shouldn't even need to be proven, although I have spent the better half of my life trying to do exactly that. Anyway, it's been bothering me and I am glad that I have finally gotten things sorted out. 

There is a reason why those dreams about you having accidental offsprings are so scary. You remember those horrifying dreams don't you, those dreams of you breast feeding your future child and your faceless husband smiling down at you and calling you "honey". Or the image of you standing outside the emergency room and looking at your wife through the window in the door as your son gets squeezed out from between your wife's legs along with a gallons of blood pouring out from the gaping womb. The scary part is not so much about the amount of blood and gore, but rather the addition of another human being into your life all of a sudden. You know how it is with another human being, it never fails to complicate things. It is not so bad in real life, since you get about nine months to prepare for his or her arrival, you are mentally tuned, hopefully, when the baby arrives. But you have zero time to prepare yourself in dreams, and all of a sudden you have this new life, this human, dumped into your life to complicate things.

I think the world would be much simpler if we just existed in our own worlds. That is not to say that it'd be a much better place to live in or anything like that, but it is definitely going to be simpler. None of those human interactions that we cannot run away from even during a trip down to the mall. We bump into people everyday, and there are so many things that has the potential to piss them off one way or another. It is difficult to thread through a crowd of strangers without one of them giving you a cold stare or to mumble some curse words under their breaths. These are strangers we are talking about, people we don't meet after a split second of physical meeting. Those people that we are forced to interact with in school, in our workplace, in our families, the situation becomes a lot more tricky now. You have to find a way to live in harmony, but when you are in a world whereby no two people think alike, it becomes more difficult than building a rocket out of your bare hands, or swim across the Pacific for example. I think we have all come across people who doesn't like you, people who pretended to like you, people who genuinely like you, and the ones that liked you for a moment and then left. I am sure, like what I mentioned about CAPTCHA, it is ringing a bell right about now. 

I have found that I shouldn't be proving to other people that I am me, the way I shouldn't be proving to others that I am a human through some internet literacy test. It just came to me that other day out with a friend for dinner, a chat with a friend online, a message from the least likeliest person from school, that I really shouldn't have been trying so hard to be a different person to different people. I shouldn't have tried to prove myself to a variety of different people because that is only going to take your farther away from who you really are. I guess what I am trying to say is that, you can never satisfy everybody by trying to be everybody all at once. You have to understand who matters and who doesn't, who gives a shit and who really doesn't. You cannot expect everybody to give a shit about you because, well, one simply can't do the same for everybody else. I have been under the false perception that it is normal, that it should be the case, to be immersed in a group of people and expect yourself to have a healthy relationship with everybody. I've always seen those people with a few friends, not with distain, but with a mentality that they are not fitting in, that they must have their reasons to stay out of the loop. But I guess, after the incidents that have transpired, I have realized that that is really not the case. 

I think it is admirable and respectable to be people like Naz or Travers, people who can live with and live without others. They are self-sustainable, perfectly fine with themselves and contented with who they are and what they have. They are the kind of people to dust themselves off and move on with their lives, because they've got themselves - and that's what they really need. Of course, that is merely what I see in them and may not be the truth at all. Still, I feel that this ability to be self-sustained is more than just a personality, but somewhat of a gift somehow. They don't need to prove themselves to anybody, they are the way that they are because they are comfortable. I, on the other way, seem to have always been on a hunt for more, with this greed that overwhelmed me to an extent that it went out of control and crashed landed into this epic mess of things. But she was right when she said that people might not always get you, but the ones who do are likely to always be there. It is in times like these when you really figure out who's who, who's not. You start to know who is really going to be there, even when he or she isn't really there for the most part. You are probably not going to read this anyway, but then your message saved my life. OK, not literally but, at least it kept me from slipping deeper into myself. I never expected anything of that magnitude from you, so thank you for that. Thank you. 

So, I have realized that I shouldn't be trying to prove myself to anybody, shouldn't be trying to please anybody for the sake of doing so, or have a dozen different personalities until you lose count of them yourself. It's so easy to say "Be Yourself", when that really is the hardest thing in life. That's what they usually tell you in books or internet websites about dating tips anyway, they always tell you to be yourself when, really, the last person you should be is yourself on the first date. But we are not dating here, we are not trying to impress a girl with our best suits and our best jokes. Why should we do that in a working environment anyway, what obligations do we have to others? Why do we have to impress the others and make them like us anyway, there isn't a rule written down in black and white for us to do such things, is there. I realized that I should just be self-contained, and the doors to my mind is going to be a one way thing. Going out there to please has been too tiring and too exhausting, and it is about time when I go home and invite guests over to my place, guests that are not going to wreck my home and puke all over the sofa. 

There are some things you don't need to prove, and I suppose the idea of "Me" is definitely one of them. It has been bothering me for the longest time, and rock bottom does not begin to explain what I have been going through. I suppose I have been the best to people, I have been pretty horrible in fact. It is karma, or perhaps just a bad turn of luck. Some people remain silent, while others blatantly tell you that what you are going through matters little to them. Whatever it is, it only helps you see people clearer, you know where to draw the lines now. You know who to invite to your party, you know whose party to completely avoid. You know who to devote your time for, and those whose mere existence is a complete waste of your time. You cannot be that "main dude" for everybody, so you might as well stop trying. I'd much rather be the "main dude" just the main group of people that cared for you when you needed caring, that gave a shit when you needed them to, well, give a shit. I'd like to love those who deserve to be loved, and not paw at the feet of others who treat you like a molecule. Now I am just waiting for all this to wear off, because everything will eventually. That's how it works, that's how the mechanism functions. Tomorrow is going to be the first day, of the rest of my life.