End of another year

I haven't updated this since July I see, and another movie post is just not right so lets at least have a few words before the year ends.

So this yeah has been pretty eventful for me personally. Started it off in a whole bunch of confusion as to what I wanted to do, and by action or inaction I made a decision and stuck with it. Was it wise? - only time will tell I think but so far I don't regret it.
Was able to go to a conference and present as well. Now that was exciting! There was some sense of accomplishment in doing that. Conferences are a good experience but they are far easier to get accepted for so, New year resolutions - get some papers published.
Completed all my modules this year too which means hopefully no more written exams! - dare I say forever?

One thing is I wish for a nice long rest after all this is over, but that is still a long way to go. Our perception of time seems to vary with how we want things to be, and seems to flow contrary to how we want it to go. If you have had a long tiring day and and you want to go home the hours just stop moving, but if you want more hours to finish something under a deadline everything just zooms by (or at least thats how it seems). Life however always seems to be moving faster and faster. Though it feels to me like just yesterday that I came here, I realize it has really been a very long time. I don't even know who the first and second years are and when introduced they always look at you like they are looking at some ancient tree with some sort of reverence. I don't feel like an old tree yet!

The perception of your age is also very confusing. Working in the lab although stressful and all that, you never feel live you've left school and entered the real working world that you still tend to act and talk like you were an undergraduate. We aren't exactly irresponsible or something but there seems to less real world worries plaguing us. When I compare that to some of my high school friends who are married have kids, buying homes ... it seems like these tasks are so far away from us and the worries they may have still elude us.

Re-reading this bit not a lot of it makes sense to me but I'll leave it as it as a reflection of this blog's title finishing the year on a random note.

Sinking to someones level or rising above it?

There might be certain things that you wouldn't do because you consider them wrong or unacceptable to you - they might not be wrong in the sense of "rules and law" and some of it might even be encouraged, but its still wrong in you book. However you sometimes find yourself on the receiving end of such behaviour and feel wronged or angry and have the power to give the person back some of their own medicine. - Do you stop yourself? After all there might be a lot to gain - you might be seen as standing up for yourself, or be able to erase / create impressions different from those created by others actions towards you. But to get there means having to stoop to the level of behaviour you yourself detest - is that realy worth it? The whole thing of rising above a situation sometimes feels highly overrated! - oh conflicts - how I wish things were much simpler sometimes.

Words

Words can be powerful things - so we've heard time and time again. Very obviously we use our speech and writing to communicate our ideas, feelings, thoughts to others but its much more than that. What we say can leave a person feeling happy, hurt, angry or sad; and sometimes we don't even realize the impact our words have had on another. In certain instances we do indeed say things to comfort someone or if feeling particularly nasty to hurt someone or instigate an argument, but quite often we say something and happily walk often not realizing we may have made someones day or realy dampened their spirits. Sometimes its just the case of not thinking before speaking but at other times it might just be that the other person analysed your words much more than you had given thought to. We can only try to our limit of communication and giving thought to our words to avoid misunderstandings but they are inevitable at some point.
People who have a good command of language seem to do better over others - if you take debate or argument between two people where the command of language is clearly not equal between the two, you will notice than even without many relavant points the person with a better command can convince the other or other people that his point is correct just by communicating his few ideas better or by using more convincing statements and words. In most languages (at least the ones I know) there are many words which can mean the same thing but some carry the meaning across more strongly or leave a more lasting impression (for example if you say someone is uniformed or something - using uniformed or naive would be a nicer way of saying it rather than calling them dense.) If you do get down to accurate vocubulary yes there are differences in the way words that mean the same things are defined but we do tend to use them more depending on the impression we want to create. This vocab also comes in handy when people want to "sugar coat" or say nothing at all. When someone is avoiding an issue they sometimes say a lot of things but if you strip it down you realize they have said nothing at all or made no comitments!
** would it be ironic that my playlist happened to come upon "Words" when I was writing this?