New Year's Eve Special Broadcast :-)
Ok ,so i am a self-confessed workaholic . Today is the 31st December 2003 , the last day of a month and a year and the last time when the last date of a year will match my age...in gregorian calendar years of course.And i am at work.So , it's a good thing i am a procrastinator . I wanted to blog yesterday and could NOT have written that opening line but ...... read the earlier sentence.And now ,since you are able to continue reading - you have hopelessly failed the turing test as ,if you had NOT failed it, you would have been banished into an eternal loop - which probably lands you pat in the middle of the sapien species that can read .You see it always feels nice and warm to be read by a fellow human being- what with all the dangers lurking of terminators !

Alright , i admit i find no segue to get myself to the topic that i want to write about so i dive right in w/o anymore preambles and w. sharp laser like focus ( so help me god ): Alan Sandage said the greatest virtue is discipline.However , it took me sometime to even understand what that means.Coz, i read that in "The Red Limit" by Timothy Ferris at an impressionable age of 12 ,but when i was going through my most disciplined years - w/o even knowing it. Here's why : In school we needed to have things straight. Which brings the adage of :Straight as in straight does ( robbed from Forrest Gump's more popular aphorism).
The straightness required straight lines - i don't know what that means after an advanced math course and reading lobachevsky math - anyway , so focus - washed,dried ,ironed shirts and pants in uniform.Assemble at a common place at 8:00 am in the morning.Sing a prayer and hear some thoughts ,speeches and rarely an act till about 9:00 am - all this while standing in lines w/ almost army standards which extended from the periphery of the centre stage around which we gathered around - till the end , height-wise! Immediately after we needed to pull out our homeworks(h/w) and put it on the teachers desk [ so ,you needed to have a homework and a classwork copy -or notebook].The teacher disciplines , chides or punishes the 'child' who hasn't submitted the h/w or whose h/w book is missing.Remember , children had no rights those days.They were slaves ;-) though i admit i didn't feel like one ! Actually i must have been scaled a lot coz , like today i couldn't remember for the heck of me to get my h/w notebook.Until i figured that you could combine the h/w and c/w by a simple trick - use one book for both .The front-side h/w the back classwork (c/w) or vice-versa.And submit that to the teacher's desk at the end of the class such that the h/w side had the front cover.Gosh, this seems tricky but i thought it was really cool.Except of course when those teachers did NOT do their h/w. and so did NOT get our h/w but insisted on seeing c/w done.This required lightning thinking to produce a different subject's[ yes , we needed to have c/w for each subject] and start from the middle pages.This would do the trick for most.Except when the teacher insisted on seeing yesterday's classwork and correcting it ,which could be sorted if you quickly copy that from a fellow 'upright' student , but failed miserably if your turn came before you could actually do that. More scaling*( this was quite like what you are thinking ,like a fish scaled .. you could get your skin really burning after some wood hits your knuckles or knees ! )
Anyway , it was all fun then . We really didn't care what 'they' did. And it wasn't all that bad too.Some teachers really liked kids . We used to have laughs. But , all this missed the point totally. The idea was to inculcate discipline.To drive home the principles of organized activity.However , for most of us , just the opposite started happening. We all suffered from cognizant dissonnance. A real world disconnection .Compartmentalized discipline,if you will.To the extent of schizophrenic.You lived differently and schooled differently. Extend this many years hence when you are in college doing your Msc Thesis.Then you needed to have a rhythm. " Dude- get into a rhythm " your buddy told you " If your guide doesn't see you when you have this brilliant idea you want to talk about .. get into a rhythm.." We forgot about having classworks , homeworks and corrections. Forgot to sharpen the pencils , wear the right clothes.We - the college dudes - became social anachronisms. And now work - sometimes i force myself to write things down as a list of things to do.However, i have so many ways of doing it today - like my machine which even has a reminder that can get down to the granularity of telling me - get up and walk , else you will be numb - and yet i don't find the things-to-do that i started the day off with.Or that list seems so small that i had finished in 2 hrs , what about the rest of the 10 hrs? Ahhh .. that's where this article is going you think : what to do w. the rest? Heck no: this one talks about those 10 hrs being consumed literally in writing replies to chain mails at work and doing your stuff.Then the paper pops up under a sheaf of other papers : todo list - and almost all of them are untouched - paying electricity bills, insurance ..renew the book at the library!
So you say : ok - so you don't have organization - what's the big deal ? What's the weekend for ?The weekend happens to be the time when you do what you want to do.And that doesn't include paying electricity bills ;-) .Don't get me wrong , i want to pay for what i use.But , i don't want to do that on a weekend !

Time for me to run to the tennis courts - yes , i got a call to play tennis on the 31st December 2003. That was also NOT on my TODO list for today , oh well sigh. New Year Resolution : TODO what is there in the TODO list. Hehehehe.

Long live resolutions ...