Round Table

He usually seemed to be in control of the emotional baseline that he so carefully had established over the years. The idea market he lived in encouraged him to champion a way to automate his business rhythm. He was the moderator for the not-so-round table session that managed to attract 2 subject matter experts, 3 not-so-expert passive spectators, and 2 not-so-passive 'wannabe' participants. Each played an important role in the virtually popular session when you looked at the big picture. The moderator, co- moderator, rapporteur, facilitator and the contributors, with their diverse mindsets, synchronized, deriving metrics to establish their confidence and utility. The goal of the session was probably re-imagined and re-communicated by each of these individuals in their own empirical way, answering every question that was not being asked. They claimed to follow the "google 8" model for innovation dedicating a prescribed percentage of their time outside the normal discipline. This session, then, could be viewed as a testbed for their collaboration exercise as per their job jar. Grey bearded, cognitively defected, high level anticipatory intelligence officers of the nation, these men briefed and debriefed their enterprise management motivators quarterly. Their tasks and workload were carefully binned for strategic positioning. During this session, however, they detracted from their normal roles putting on a taxpayer's hat, confounding unconventionally 'big' problems and ingesting stove-piped relationships. Traditionally considered, bringing such a diverse skill set in the same room was a work of art in itself. The possible end-state could be characterized by multi-disciplinary knowledge capture but their enthusiasm and energy deep-dived, incentivizing the very interaction they feared the most. 

You might see this as a futile endeavor taken upon by esteemed leadership in the community to justify their moral commitment to the nation or a sincere cry for help seeking change. Either way, if you had been there that day, you'd fall in love with each of these unique characters playing their part in the game, unparalleled trailblazers in their own way. 

Strangers on a plane

At 17, the munificent open-handed 30 year old, adjacent to her on that flight, seemed comfortably archaic. She was traveling alone for the first time with a myriad of emotions pent up inside as she transitioned from one culture to another, home to a foreign land, friends to strangers, childhood to adulthood, her mind and body entangled in that web of lies she had been disillusioning herself with. This disenchantment was foreign to her nature and yet she continued to indulge in it, finding herself in a well-situated exaltation that was undefinable. At 30, he was neither old nor young anymore. It was what he thought a very die able viable age. He was an associate professor at a, what he thought to be distinguished, university almost tenured after tumultuous number of years running behind conferences and published papers of both sides of his brain. He was also, to embellish and give credit to his personal life, almost engaged with the consistent thought of marriage proposal to his almost fiancé of 5 years. As a third party spectator to this theatrical scene, I felt they were both suffering but honestly speaking I did not want to see a pain which I could not help. But in my heart there was the egocentric desire to see how they were taking it. 

Her docile nature subjected her to a constant purchase of Starbucks mocha cookie crumble, the sweetness of which, she deliberately confirmed not infrequently. Whether or not you will be able to relate to the complete knowledge of her domestic calamity, you will find humor in her using warmers for her cold mocha that leisurely read: "No experience is ever wasted. Everything has meaning." 

She seemed to anxiously wait for an answer in the dark night in the airplane, calling up all her strength of mind not to bolt out of her subconscious. She thrusted confidences in her new friend in flight, partly because she had no choice and partly because she had the hearts for him. With his expletives and indignation, he continued to confuse rather than inform her about his life goals and aspirations. 

As  their cognitive state transitioned from persona non grata to an ally, they traveled onward in time and space, pretending to maintain an unaltered condition, preserving home-confected peace between them. Who am I to adjudicate their relationship as they amicably co-exist, passively enamored by each other's mere disembodied spirit, enjoying proximity to a world they would never live in. 

The Calculated Dream

Disjointed characters continue to float in three dimensional space hypothetically touching each other's realm of existence. Entity extraction and logical algorithmic model based behaviors can be conspicuously derived from their interactions. One absolutely odd character made her appearance in this sequence of other seemingly off keyed inherent complex mix of attributes, introducing a thematic keynote to the introductory phase of the dream. She and her family of three, including her better half and her 14 month old, seemed to be enjoying a traditional Mexican meal in a restaurant shaped cubby hole with irregularly notched and toothed edges. I couldn't quite tell if they were in my physical reality or not. You could say they were inside a speculative bubble, manifesting ethereal energy. The entire experience was characterized by lightness and insubstantiality, an airy apparition dissolving in celestial space. I started missing her as she began to disappear, an incomprehensible and disorienting feeling because she hadn't been a part of my life in 10 unexpended years. The only explanation that made sense was that she must have suggested consciousness of extreme importance at some point of my life, vital to crisis resolution. She disappeared as comfortably as she had appeared, leaving an air of pessimism clearly not conducive to the kind of high spirit I was aiming for. Mathematically speaking, there were number of probabilistic interpretations of this calculated dream. Rhetorically speaking, however, I would make the assertion that you and I undergo metamorphosis every night as we experience these dreams with measured irony. Yet, our waking subconscious discards this residual energy and adapts itself to our demonstrated and verified cosmos. If you gave me the luxury of dividing your dream into subsequent garbled phases using a threading key, advertently tying your Bayesian beliefs together, you would learn to dig deep into your soul. Whether or not that is in your agenda today is a completely different melodic motif. Let me leave you with a thought. Let me let you canvas the permutations and combinations of the dream scenarios as you've walked through life, wondering the effect they have had on shaping the person you are today.

People Watching

Seemed like a feather brained superficial endeavor to pioneer the iPhone recorded interview of the doctor. He didn't or perhaps couldn't reveal who his role model was when asked and yet he had skin-deep responses to her 'what was the front runner theme of your undergraduate thesis project' question. Adolescent immaturity matrixed with puerile behavior is not the ideal resume of an interviewer and yet she displayed a sense of perception, logic and reasoning that was inherent to her distinctive and stylish elegance. The almost toddler of Asian origin sat across from this duo mimicking healthy skepticism of her mother as she imagined the make- believe world of theater, dangling her pure ingenuousness from the edge of the bunglesome paraphernalia. The intertwined lives of the young mothers seemed business-like and yet purposeful, imaginatively capable of dealing with non compliant situations. They bonded over the intricacies of their rebellious and spirited girls who had the potential of being indigo children. You might feel that it is impertinent of me to form estimates on these distinctly separate world views, frivolously labeling and adjudicating their missions as I fill my own cognitive state of incertitude. But who are you to use the power of reason to make inferences and excoriate common sense.

So I implore that you not judge me. I people watch. It's not who I am that postulates investigation, but it's the driving force behind my quotidian activity engagement. Lyrics behind the eye movement as I religiously survey my milieu and stash away the accumulated plethora of cathartic emotions, voices the harmony of my earthly existence. This is a modest beginning to a new lifestyle, navigating unforested and untraversed paths creating its own trademark and niche as I struggle to find the larger, more substantive purpose of life. 

The Storm

As he tapped on my third eye with a faint attempt of restoring the balance of my emotional energies, something struck me and a peaceful wave of fresh air kissed my face reminding me of my dedicated and organized state of disorderliness that day. Uncombed conglomerate of wavy hair as it made its presence known to my face, spoonful of hormonal feature space, artistically crafted frequent outfit disasters, confident and yet guilt driven surrender to the closest thing to love, and the necessary publicly acknowledged display of so-called friendships all fit in the derivative of matrices i hid my impalpable self in. 

He had mastered the art of going off on a tangent in any given conversation. He spoke with flair and used metaphors and similes to extravagantly and surreptitiously portray an air of superior confidence hoping to continue living below the threshold of conscious perception. He arduously pitched a battle in close combat between mind and matter marking it by blithe unconcern of happiness of his being. His dialogue with the external world was polite in a teasing manner, questioning the basic tenets of his skepticism. His life warranted a given level of confidence that he inadvertently disregarded. And yet he made a difference that day. All the previous interactions with him had been like a humorous dry river bed, lacking natural moisture, depleted of all it's mortal energy. Yet, today I felt that the actual condemnation of him might have been just premature judgment on my part. But who can charge me with my inexperience in everlasting infernal political melodrama. 

This storm I had been actively participating in cannot be comically compared to nightmares of holocaust survivors. Nor did it have the first hand knowledge of the pain of hunger. Yet, it had the inexplicable potential of irreparably damaging your secular immaterial being. He had amusingly played the leading role in the creation of the conditions that had led to this storm.

That said, I did not disregard the characteristic of his human condition. And, I often wondered how happy he really was in his own skin, not that his happiness had any direct or indirect correlation to my state of contentment. It was just another fierce point of contention that violently challenged his innocence. But you and I both know this storm shall pass and we will transition to another awkwardly designed and permanently tattooed phase of life. Today, however, this consumes every particle of my existence. Today, I stand stateless and frail in the midst of this storm hoping for a better tomorrow filled with hope and promise. 

The Professor

Everything about him was off-kilter and yet larger than life, even from his earliest origins. One of 14 children, he quickly learned that education was his way out of his indigent human condition. His conspicuous, yet grossly unconventional, character made him a friendly eccentric. He carefully programmed three graduate degrees along with a high profile career in his life. Pedagogy, he believed, was the most important profession one could have. Endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights, he solemnly consecrated his life to educating the next generation, protector of his future as he liked to call them. It was not long until he came to be unquestionably and uncritically venerated by his students. One could say they worshipped him not as a material effigy but like an ideal instance that becomes an embodiment of perfection. 

Often he lived in concept space, modeling roadmaps, developing the necessary tradecraft needed in his personal profile that would help him plan his next logical step in life. Someone once told him that all models are wrong, but some are useful. That struck a chord with him especially as the parametric space he breathed in continued to be challenged by the unknown unknowns. Clearly, the phase he seemed to be paused at was at its "to be defined" stage attending "analysis 101" class mapping all the what-if scenarios possible. Repository of what he knew versus what he didn't could be incorporated by the relatively new capability passively monitoring his knowledge base. Propensity to not know what you ought to know does not add value, however. He knew that. 

Now if one considered the different stakeholders in his life, one could imagine the pie in the sky and all the objects in the engineering problem space filling that pie. Linear thinking people, without ability to invest in creativity, people who are on going continuous projects or those who can be seen as finished projects. All of these players were forced to deal with stereotypes, inspirational possibility of things. He was their therapist, advisor, consultant, coach, and teacher. He created ensemble of models boot strapping them while converting information to knowledge, all the while finding a home for their reference model in the n dimensional space. He, like his compatriots, knew, however, that people are not systems. If one can kill their frontal lobe, they probably can be managed. Accepting this and moving forward was his way of achieving a new business model plugged away from his past. His blood brothers, defunct creators, and his state of little or no material possessions were now all part of his  past, the dry and tedious past that had plagued him. He realized that fate had exhumed him from this state vector to assemble one of the largest bodies of mathematical data in human history. Believe it or not, his larger than life tendencies and runaway libido might well have been responsible for the science of abstraction and logic seeking out patterns in systematic study of shapes and motions. 

You may not know him by name or face but you have seen him and will continue to see different versions of him in years to come. He will cease to exist one day, but his legacy won't. You will seek his wisdom and be exalted by his genius immortality. And when you finally accept his presence, you will come to believe on the basis of indefinite ground the strength of the impact he has had on your human condition. 

Uncorrupted Intimacy

Graduated summa cum laude from the school of excellence with an unreasonable and inordinate self esteem, he had been practicing his own colorful commentary. Multi dimensional, multi faceted focal point of his day, nonetheless, was his interaction with her as he walked from the not so abundantly stocked bob store with a hot chocolate that he didn't necessarily care for. The sound of her politically astute voice gave him an unexpendable sense of belonging. He imagined how 'happily ever after' with her would be like or would life take it's own course into a different kind of a fairy tale. He had been told before that when one door closed three windows opened. But he was exasperated and his feelings seemed trite and commonplace most days. He had been repeating the same threadbare jokes that he learned in the years dedicated to "goodness" so to speak. Parroting axioms and metaphors he diligently noted in meetings with senior leadership, he had recently lost faith in the usual  band aid fixes to his ever so complex, not so personal anymore, issues. As he walked, however, he wondered if she took pride in her shopworn merchandise at half price and her out of fashion ideas that she ingeminated in those very meetings with the thought leadership where he fell in love with her. She somehow managed to quote those hackneyed phrases in a non-offensive heartfelt yet nomadic manner as if she had been carefully crafting it all night. But if he could sum it up for you, she was immaculate. She was the reason for that mundane walk from the bob store back to his desk where he spent countless hours planning the next walk. To him, she was an exhilarating absence of depression. To him, she walked on air.