The Inbetweeners

  To be honest, this week has been a bit of a blur and of perfectly warranted anxieties. To extract what I have learned would be like wiping crude oil off a bird's wings. But I will try? Delivery matters. I listened to two people delivering the exact same speech and was reminded of the difference between communicating a speech and merely saying it. The former conveys the implicit meaning the words attempt to capture, while the latter expected the words to stand on their own merit. I know this to be true, for music because it is something I struggle with. Due to my perfectionism, I want the presentation to be technically perfect, forgetting that the purpose of music is to express the spirit, not just communicate the text. This is a lesson I keep forgetting, so it was nice to be reminded. I am not where I want to be. Not who I want to be. But equally, not so far removed from that ideal that I feel pressured to change substantively. The dissonance between my ideal and reality is, rat...

 Here's what I learned this week; Intelligence is a muscle that needs to be trained, exercised and challenged. Unfortunately, I have not been directly doing so. Yes, when I watch the, more than, occasional commentary video I am training my intelligence, much like the walk to work can, technically, be counted as exercise. But the primary purpose of that consumption is entertainment, not education. So, I need to be more intentional in training my intelligence. From next week, I'll end these posts with a commentary on what I learned from a paper I read, a documentary I watched or podcast I listened to. I hate, absolutely fucking hate, the idea that African nations were given democracy. We were not given democracy, we fought for it. We bled for it. We die for it. It was not a gift from the colonisers, who set up their colonies for their political and capital interests, not for democracy. No one has ever been given democracy. Even the Americans, the self-proclaimed bastions of democ...

Happy New Year! Let's talk about some lessons, shall we? I often find myself wishing for a reset button. Or the ability to make multiple clones of myself so that they could live out every option, take every path I was availed. Or the knowledge of all Aileen's in all the universes. I figure, it's the only way to make sure I don't make a mistake. To guarantee that I have "NO RAGRETS" by the end of my life. But this often means when I reflect on my life and the choices I have made, I focus on what could have been and yearn to return to the moment I made the choice to choose differently. Which means, I don't know how to live with, and move on from, my mistakes. I dwell on how I should have never made them in the first place. For example, when I make a mistake in an essay, I start again. I don't salvage, I burn and begin anew. But that doesn't work with life. I wish it did.