Here is No Chat

The air is barely cold enough to feel like New England winters. But I remember those because my thoughts are with you. Sleepless nights, trite work, bare bottoms, cool air, no money, warm bodies, smart lip, messy hair, you cry, I tear, we wait, for the sun to come up. For the sun to come up, is a sign that the goodness of our sadness is only going to get farther, and farther, away. Woo hoo.

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Brown hair, Potter's glasses, sweet heart, smiling like there wasn't a care (there wasn't), kitty cats, medication, deep stares, sleepy nation... did you learn much over there? Do you feel less lost, more adjusted, better kept, and doing just the right thing, right there, where they sent you... we need that drink, I want that kiss, we need that talk, the way we felt, back then, was it Seoul, or Ginza?

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Grey dog, who are you...? You knocked, I was thrilled, three years since it happened, and still now, I don't know who you are. I don't know who you are. I only know that you're in control: of clustered thoughts, of urbane strangeness, inner eyes, mirrored glances, no one can see inside. I still don't see inside.

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Starry eyes, sugar gliders, cups of coffee and a forlorn gaze. Silly smile, underweight you said, growing out was the way to be. Fair speech, belief, found a soul who will make you grin? Farewell, hoary speeches, nasi lemak and a thousand ways to leave...

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Punk ass - where's it been? Sultry smoothie she's a hipster slave. Sneakerhead, hair-dyed, once a feeler now less so, she says, she says, but her logic lies.

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Yawn 10

I am beginning to lose faith in my ability to function efficiently at one third of my preferred daily organisational throughput. Because once daily effects are compounded, projects move at an eight of competitive speeds.

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Ok, can still deadlift the 25kg curl bar. Being grounded in bed for almost a week didn't quite cause irreparable damage to structures in that dimension. Hopefully, less regression, more growth in uptime.

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Let's see how may iterations it'll take to opensource our food and beverage production.

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While I'm glad for everything that DSNY has brought to the growth of Marvel's movies, I'm much happier that DC has made better adult movies since Synder got involved. The comedies and tragedies behave respectively well.

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Reprieve. Briefly. And candles lit for the restless.

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As a services business, our people are the product. Anything else that looks like a product exists merely to deceive the market about the true nature of our business.

So far, we have not often pitched our core product. It is simply not ready for market. We only offer simpler goods: food and beverage, with some freebies. If we succeed in bringing the core product to market before we run out of resources, then the startup's business model will finally have been validated. The startup may fail before this occurs. That is the normal course of startups.

In order to understand how out of whack this is, relative to the next F&B brand builder, consider the following notion: their long-term growth strategy is to franchise a F&B brand to third-party F&B outlet operators. We don't want to do that at all. We are built from the ground up to franchise a services brand to third-party service providers. We want our staff to be our franchisees, as they go about the world building their own business of providing services to other people. (For this to start to make sense, you need to be living in the world of the RM40/hour barista or cook or manager.)

In that other industry, this is called building a platform. You don't want another cab company - you just want comissions from a million unlicensed cab monkeys. Except that you don't really want to deal with monkeys, so you just want to be the high-end of the street. Who's done this before? Oh, no one... just every High Street bank and the better-known management consulting firms on the planet.

Meanwhile, we have not yet achieved our marketable product, so there's nothing to see here. Carry on. Drink more coffee, and try the food, if you will.

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I always remind my staff, that in many cases I want A, but they can have B as long as they do it, because the company is mostly the result of the people that join it, not what I want. However some items are non-negotiable, such as matters of law, and logic: if you want to stay alive, don't make losses. I do not often bother to repeat myself, and I certainly do not care much to change other people's minds. I have my own mind to change, on a daily basis, and that is already a consuming challenge.

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Horror is clarified fear. Fear is simmered wit. Wit is our only reprieve from boredom. Unless you prefer the simper things in life: I'm not sure if I do, but some are sure that I don't.

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Against petty human weakness, I must discipline myself to care less about work, in order to focus on doing the right thing, be it creation, destruction, or waiting.

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Making a note to do that thing where I wipe my shortest term memory in harmonic intervals over a second, increasing in speed. Visual modality particularly, aural next, then haptic. It helps to decouple the conscious and subconscious imaginations, aiding R&R, and sleep. The pleasure increase is apparent - not sure if it's specific to any variety of neurotransmitter of course, since I don't have test facilities. The muscle reaction pattern seems to indicate that this is related to induced REM phases. I wish I had a bigger budget for studies. Oh, well.

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On shift for 27 hours between now and 7am Monday. Sleep has a high priority. Coaching comes next. And then?

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Let the next circle of hell begin. This is one of the waiting ones.

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"There's a squirtle in the greasetra..."
"Shadap."

I don't need an app... I have a shop full of strange creatures in training... lol

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Back to work, early. Entropy is rising.

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Base food. Extra protein, B complex, caffeine... and then we start cleaning.

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If I wake up in time to volunteer at the college fair (philosophy major booth), perhaps I should carry a placard with something like this on it:

"History is like a giant piece of software. If you want to understand how it got here in its entirety, there's only the entirety of the past to be considered.

As a kid*, I was told that getting a scholarship to college was my best chance of getting into a decent education system. By SPM year*, I was already tired of the idea, but I applied anyway, receiving some RM500,000 from private sources to attend a four-year liberal arts college. After the second year*, I concluded that few people at my college cared about the history of ideas, and the structure of the university syllabus as a whole, so I would have to study it on my own anyway. But there was still a free degree, and much infrastructure to be taken, and so... [* 1993, 1999, 2003]

... I ended up majoring in Philosophy because it demanded the least amount of homework for my final two years at college. Ask me anything."

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790, 700, 800, 770, 730
A mediocre athlete's dusty medals from decades past. Tis the season for farting around with memorabilia.

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Designing an installation of empty photo frames for our wall: loneliness, pain, grief, poverty, sickness, death.
Pentameter + 1. Hmm.

These are the things I concern myself with, because others appear to shy away from them. The attention of society must be balanced. And then I have to go to work and get questions about why? I'm afraid, while I'm thinking about work, I probably won't remember why. Hahahaha.

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I know, I know! We can have a consensus... the DC movies need to be kept at least as bleak in tone, but for more traditional emotional arcs I think a viable swap would be Synder out (to please the haters) and Aronofsky in.

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Sleep needed. Conversations ex-work dead-ended. Invoking short-term memory fracturing... the only place to go for comfort.

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I should dedicate the first three waking hours of each day to staging. Max out on nutrition. Monitor budgets very tightly.

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Routines. Work life.

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Fire. Just on time.

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Troubled. But it is late, and there is no chat. Time for some exercise, food, sleep, and then back to the farm.

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Eight months of living in an office without WiFi. Well now, we have WiFi.

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Interesting how in primary school, a lot of focus was put on fixating short-term memory, "do not daydream." Whereas in my twenties and thirties, while I fixate short-term memory for most of the day, in order to earn a living, in order to relax for sleep/R&R, I must practice active fragmentation of short-term memory.

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I build relationships for business and love. Friends are folks I happen to have something in common with - few efforts are made to develop attachments here. Family adds nothing to the above. An infrequent pattern.

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Using a chess set to illustrate all the power relations in the company, during internship onboarding. Achievement unlocked?

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Yawn 9

Shooting point-blank into both sides of a car at the same time? Where did these guys learn to kill people, Hollywood?

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Our internship description: "accounting & finance"

Our intern ended up doing: spreadsheet programming, pivot tables, implementation of binary search algorithm, relationship counselling

I think we're pushing our luck here...

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Putin + Trump + ASSANGE = GG
LOL?

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Here's a cybernetic paradigm. There are three categories of staff in any organisation. Some companies split this into management-track (1. the more managed, and 2. the less managed), and subject-matter-experts (3. the SMEs). I tend to think of them as:

1. babies
2. babysitters
3. ghosts

If you're not sure which category you fall into at your office, you're probably #1.
:)

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Awake. Are we dead yet? Not quite, but familiar problems have recurred. (You know, the updates are going to sound like this for ten years even if we don't die. You know, like, we had no choice so to survive we had to X, where X is the growth opportunity.)

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Averaging one grain serving every two days now... remarkably helpful. I effectively work a desk job now. LOL.

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Boot camp:

"This hurts, that hurts."
"Keep practicing."
"But you don't feel anything."
"That's because I practiced. Train up. We're all lucky we got paid to practice at some point in our lives. Not everyone is that lucky."

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Oh yes, an elaborate nightmare I had recently... it was a bit of a "reflection while sleeping" of how some charities which are initially motivated by specific strategic initiatives eventually become so popular that they turn into social clubs with less clarity of purpose. LOL

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I consistently find my desire to be ordinary, to be destructive to my relationship with people who seek to be extraordinary.

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It was always going to be, death by poisoned fish head. Everyone knows where my food is.

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"Perghhhhh... whole month bank fees, GST input tax was unclaimed."
"How many cheesecakes is that?"
"I'm glad you understand that the base of any number system is arbitrary."

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Dinner. Smatterings of work before the system goes down. If I do normal things, I can become a normal person. So on we go.

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The stench of humanity. Ah, our daily bread.

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Servers going down for five hours. So... enforced break time.

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Random thought crossed my mind - might be nice to go full PhD track in math already. Looks left. Looks right. Nope. Ain't happening in this town.

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Six-and-a-half years to forty. I need to catch up on that undergraduate math major. Looking through that archive of textbooks now.

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Back to the farm.

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I shy away from most things that are difficult. Really, I do. What's easy for me, however, isn't easy for everyone. Menial labour, filthy substances, I can go about these without much ado. Caring about other people enough to want to persuade them of this or that normative belief... I could not be arsed, for the most part. And that leads me to the strange economics of going through most of life as a matter of formality. Very early on, I'd completed for my own benefit all the things in life that matter deeply to me - what is relied on for the preservation of personal happiness: an orderly mind, an optimised cost of living, cheap hobbies such as studies in general, etc. So that being taken care of, all that's left to live life for is other people, really... social work, a philanthropic retirement, if you will.

If a woman enjoys my company, a relationship is a possible investment. If clients, employers, investors, or staff, find motivation to participate in a project, then a business is a possible investment. And when such counterparties have moved away of their own volitions, our fellowships will surely crumble as well. So, would I go significantly out of my way to pursue such social ventures? Hell, no. One does not sacrifice personal happiness for a lark's chance at building some arbitrary community. Economics will prevail.

Choices may be hard, but at least conservatism will always have low-risk approaches to fall back on. Are we dead yet - I regularly ask about the current job? Not quite - and every so often, these questions and their routine answers pop up and fade away. Like clouds at sunrise, threatening to deploy rainfall. Not always can we know where we will go.

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Pain. Just the usual sick stuff.

Nothing like a few days of fatigue, punctuated by the occasional hour or two of pain, to keep it real.

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Not yet time to pull the plug. Maybe soon.

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I suppose, the point of strategic alignment is this: given that I place a low value on many consumer goods and services, I should therefore place a low value on people who place a high value on such goods and services. Perhaps, that changes everything.

But this is not very different from previous considerations. More tuning required.