When me met his first disciples at Benares after his enlightenment, the Buddha outlines his system, which was based on one essential fact: all existence was dukkha. It consisted entirely of suffering; life was wholly awry. Things come and go in meaningless flux. Nothing has permanent significance. Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong. […] The Buddha taught that is was possible to gain release from dukkha by living a life of compassion for all living beings, speaking and behaving gently, kindly and accurately, and refraining from anything like drugs or intoxicants that cloud the mind.- A History of God; Armstrong, p. 32

hmm, been thinking alot lately about religion/what i "Believe" in.
but it's so presumptous to come right out and say that i'm a devout ______, well, simply for the unaffected reason that i'm not. i don't go to church, i don't visit the temple, i don't pray at the mosque every friday. the closest thing that springs to mind when i think about God is the silver grey monster i kowtow to every evening. indeed, life is not one damn thing after another, it's one damn thing over and over. once again, been hearing/reading/seeing everyone around gushing about universities and educational paths. gahhh, am barely getting through school these days, i try my darnest to get out of school before the sun sets, on the pretext of going home to study, but i always falter. (that's the most wrenching thing - that i seem to "study" so much, but i don't have the results to show for it).yes, i do get home before my mother, but the minute i finish my daily dosage of worthless gossip from the newspapers, i flop into bed and promptly indulge in sleep until 7 pm, which is the time i get up to eat my dinner and watch tv. good grief, this does seem like a banal existence, because there's nothing to look forward to. i've not really looked forward to anything for a really long time. something that hits me with such an impact that i drown under it's enormity. i've not been out on a really refreshing event (the carnival misses that by a few notches) or read a wham-hityousmackinthemiddle book in _____. the time period's irrelevant, it's just the ebbing away of all that is spontaneous, that's perhaps what's slowly killing me.

the elddfs party is going to be this sat, but i doubt that anything revolutionary is going to come out of that. hopefully the science people will turn up and we can all mingle in a pretense of friendship and fellowship. "make the society more coherent and bonded". bah. i hate that word - "bonded". but maybe i'm being too difficult on things, that's why i'm permanently in a horrible mood. expecting great transforming and life-altering events to occur every other week seems to be the only way to extricate me from this vapid, pedestrian life. i wish someone would come up to me and convince me, indoctrinate in me the dogma of the modern capitalistic society. stop being a whimisical, lyrical, romantic, astral and foolish dreamer. strive for the free market ideal of perfect competition. perfect competition isperfect, isperfect, isperfect. and you ask yourself where do all these dreams go. or, if you have already been converted into a jaded, cynical city dweller, rephrase the question in another tense - "where did all those dreams go". but i digress.

whoever that person may be, or maybe i'm the already the one assuming that role, only without my inherent knowledge, perhaps that's why i always sit uneasily by myself with too much time (uninvested in more pressing matters), maybe that's why i'm always at odds with myself. self-annihilation irks me. i do know/think i love myself. i am sensible, right? right, maybe in retrospect, that's the problem, i love myself too much. u know of how some lovers always complain about being suffocated and drowned by their over-possesive partners, that could be applied to me, depending on which perspective one chooses to adopt. grapelling with what i want, what i should want, and how i intend to obtain them sucks. i look around the room, and the table is perhaps a reflection of things. it's supposed to be a paradigm of rectangular, clinical neatness. that's how it's shown in all the ikea catalogues.but there're all these .....horrible, disgusting stuff that's cluttering the table. but who's to say that this tender mess is not what characterises the table. sure, it lends individuality and all that crap, but it's ultimately not a table i would show to guests. perhaps a more cursory arrangement of things? ultimately, i'll just have to make do with this table, since buying another one is not an option.