Genes

For a long time, when I was little, I was convinced that my parents were 35 years old. No matter how many years went by, they were always, in my mind, fixed at that "magic" age. Now I'm actually coming up on that number myself. And my parents sent me a card this year that said (tongue-in-cheek, of course): "No more birthdays after this, understand? ... We're too young to have a son your age!"

And, in the past 3--4 years, I've been noticing my mum becoming, in her mannerisms, a lot like the way I remember my grandmother --- her mum --- used to be. And my dad like his dad, my Grandpa. And just the other day I realized with a start that my handwriting, spidery to begin with, had begun to look just like the nearly indecipherable scrawl that we used to always tease my dad about.

It's kinda fascinating, but also a wee bit jarring.

Life goes on, II

A prayer said at the funeral service of my friend Cheryl's father, earlier this year:

Grieve for me, for I would grieve for you.
Then brush away the sorrows and the tears.
Life is not over, but begins anew,
With courage you must greet the coming years.

To live forever in the past is wrong,
Can only cause you misery and pain.
Dwell not on memories over long,
With others you must share and care again.

Reach out and comfort those who comfort you.
Recall the years but only for a while.
Nurse not your loneliness but live again,
Forget not, remember with a smile.

--- Old Indian Prayer.

My life, in bytes

I churned out four blog-posts on my other blog this afternoon. Set aside my work to do it, because, for the same reason I carry a pen and a notepad around with me everywhere I go, if you have a thought and don't write it down, and then later forget it, then you effectively never had it. (I think I picked up this little piece of advice from a Tom Clancy book, as a matter of fact. Jack Ryan's wife, a surgeon, says it, in the book "Executive Orders", if I remember correctly.) (Hmm... this contains echoes of my earliest posts on the why and wherefore of blogging...) It made me suddenly realize that, starting from the time I left home to come to the US to study, and began corresponding regularly via e-mail with my family back home, and indeed, began to use e-mail with ever-increasing frequency to communicate with other people... that since then, virtually every facet of my life can be re-constructed from the vast, digitized archives of my various writings. From e-mails to papers that I've written for classes to, yes, my blogs. Oh, and digital photographs and video clips, too, in far greater quantities than previously imaginable with their chemical-film-technology predecessors. It's so easy now to go back to any given moment in my life and see what it, and I, were like at the time. My personality. My thoughts. My circumstances. Everything.

Mind-blowing stuff, when you think of the sheer scale of it all, compared to the pre-digital era. Historians of the future are going to have a field day. Assuming, of course, that our storage media survive till then, and the various encoding standards are still recognized. (Betamax, Laser-disk, DVD-ROM/-RAM/-D/Plus/-R/-RW/-R DL/+R/+RW/+R DL/Blu-ray/HD, anyone?) Ironic, that paper (and pencil!) remains the longest-lasting, and easiest to read, form of recording information around today.

The Wisdom of Mum and Dad

There are a lot of things that I never had when I was younger, and growing up. Things that my friends and peers had, and that I always longed to have as well. I'm not talking about material things, but the "intangible" gifts that life distributes randomly to different people. (I'm not going to be more specific with examples, because that gets too personal for this forum.) For many of those things, not having them was due, in large part, to my lifestyle then --- my life when when I was living at home, dictated -- and restricted -- as it was by my parents.

I have a lot of those things now. And because I never had them before, I appreciate them all the more. In the years since I left home, I've often, on many different occasions, stopped short and wondered/marvelled at the hidden (to me, at the time) wisdom my parents displayed, maybe conciously, maybe unconciously, in bringing me up. In retrospect, would I have had my life unfold any other way? I don't think so.