Tenth grade was the worst two years (edit: yes, two years) of my life. It completely alienated me from others, and made me consider suicide. Which I never actually committed, evidently, I’m here blogging myself to death. Ta-da.

Organization is not a learned “skill.” It’s not a “skill” to begin with. It’s about spending time dealing with bureaucracy and the paper-hell in advance. In my experience, it saves practically no time whatsoever.

Unfortunately, I seem to have this self destructive tendency to work great under pressure. If Dushkin works great under pressure, Dushkin will try to push self to edge, Dushkin will create stress for Dushkin to finish work. In other words, I procrastinate on purpose.

“Know thyself” my ass. It’s obviously self-destructive, and mazochistic. One of my incompatible wishes somewhere down in my id, to only work under pressure.

Organization detached me from the rest of the world. You start reading self improvement books, working on things in pieces, and the next thing you know, there’s a distance between you and the rest of the world and you just can’t do anything about it. A thin membrane will seperate you from your peers, parents, “community” and friends. “Sorry, can’t talk now, I’m busy.”

By decompressing your work, you leave yourself practically no time to do other things which are, probably, more important. When you do have the time, you will realize that your “friends” have already gotten into the habbit of not inviting you to social gatherings (of whatever nature.)

Reversing the situation is theoretically impossible. For instance, my birthday “party.” I invited various people, out of which two people came, and one uninvited guest, another one arrived an hour and a half late and insisted on leavingbecome midnight for a total of about 1 hour of actually doing anything. The other three decided it’ll be a great idea to go smoke pot, although I made it very clear that I have no interest in it. The whole thing ended at around 11:40 pm.

I timed it, phoned all the parties that needed to be phoned, passed emails around, begged, and wrote everything down. When it came to the practical stage, nothing went as planned.

It crossed a certain line when I began planning social interaction and trying to make sense of my world using the calendar. After two very long phone calls with BlueCoffee, I finally began to snap out of this organization-overdrive.

There is, I would say, no correlation between organization and saving time. Some of us just work slower, some are less able to isolate themselves from their environment.

It basically became very clear to me what I really wanted to do with myself and how to stop this organization madness. Unfortunately, without it, my grades are starting to slip. I might be a “better person”. I do find myself facing my incompatible wishes and slowly my super-ego dissolving and making less descisions. The former view, which accepted self-help books, now rejects standards, ideas, laws and roles and substitutes it with something else.

At the same time, I can’t convince myself of all sorts of things. The result of less self discipline. I also find it much harder to read, listen to records all the way through and stick to a single task.

My advice, don’t “get organized”! Your superiors are going to go nuts, but at least you don’t sell yourself to the whole bureaucracy.

Actually, I’m quite sick of organization. All I really want is just to run around aimlessly in grassy meadows and not think about anything. Society is all about normalization. Not very pleasant.

At home I have a server running Linux and a MacBook.

Every now and then, I want to run an X11 program. VNC takes up my whole screen, and therefor it’s counter productive, but there’s another way.

Mac OS X has an optional X11 server. After installing it, programs could connect to it and coexist in the Aqua environment.

The thing is that while my server doesn’t change IP, my MacBook does, since I often alternate between wi-fi and ethernet, and even then I can’t be bothered to set it every time. So basically, the IP always changes.

For this purpose, I made this useful script. I’ve tested it on zsh, but it should work in Bash as well, I believe. I put the following lines in my .zshrc:

if [ $SSH_CLIENT ]
then
export DISPLAY=`echo $SSH_CLIENT | sed ’s/ [0-9]* [0-9]*$//’`:0
fi

Basically, if the variable $SSH_CLIENT is defined, it takes that variable, nips the last two figures (one being the source port and the other being the destination port), which leaves us only with the IP of the machine we’re SSHing from. Pretty useful. Now all you need to do is put xhost the_ip, where the_ip is the IP of the machine you want to connect to you, in your .xinitrc to automatically allow it to connect to you.

It werks!

Right now I’m experiencing various worrying symptoms: strong nausea, a slightly sore throat, possibly even a fever. But here’s the thing, I don’t actually admit it, I’m not going to do anything about it, and why? Well, that’s exactly what I asked myself just a couple of minutes ago.

Just how many times do you hear your colleges/co-workers/classmates complain about terrible headaches? You can’t actually tell that they’re having a headache by just looking at them, they’ll have to tell you that they have one. Complaining about it is a deliberate action.

By admitting (and accentuating) symptoms, you accomplish various goals. Most notably, you can decide that you are “incapable of doing any work”, and thus, excuse yourself from any work that might cross your path.

The reason why I don’t go around telling people how bad I feel is because I am aware that I have to finish the tasks I’m assigned to, that I wish to complete them, and thus, I don’t have the urge to tell everyone about my nausea.

So basically, unless you’re actually dying, admitting your symptoms to others means, more or less, that you’re simply being lazy.

So go back to work.