Sunday, August 15, 2010

Casualty

He was awakened by mortar fire.

"Boom boom boom".

Thinking "What the hell?" he yanked on his pajamas, and rushed outside, where he found a young guy sitting in the street before a plastic replica of a mortar, making shooting noises. When he saw where the mortar was aimed, he realized his house had been shelled.

He raced back inside to check his email and, sure enough, he saw that he was dead. He ran back outside to confront the young guy who was now taking aim at his neighbor's house. "What the fuck do you think you doing, asshole?" he shouted.
"What's it look like?" said the guy.
"Where did you even get a mortar?"
"None of your business, dude."
"Fuck, now I've lost a whole year. I have exams next week!"
"Should have filed for an exemption then." He finished taking aim. "Boom boom boom!"
"In the middle of the city? What the fuck are you doing here shooting heavy weapons anyway?"
"Urban terrorist."

At that moment, he realized how much trouble this idiot had caused him. He would have to reschedule his exams. He'd had a couple of interviews set up with companies for after his graduation, which he would miss. Also Shelly would not be happy to hear he had been killed. And by such a stupid idiotic prank, too. The kid couldn't be older than twenty years.

Right then, he would have liked to punch this asshole right in the mouth.

But he couldn't.

He was dead.

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Wednesday, August 11, 2010

It takes as long as it takes

I just discovered an important skill.

If you're doing basic, hindbrain work, such as sorting mail or something similar, your brain is likely to fire at some point and go "What are you doing? You're wasting your valuable time! This has to go faster!", causing a sense of dread and anxiety to rise up and threaten to engulf you.

If that happens to me, I'll end up doing a botch job of the tedious work, and start working aimlessly on something "more important" to make myself feel good.

That is, that's what I used to do. Now I tell my brain to STFU, adding "The work is proceeding at the right speed. You don't have to do everything as fast as humanly possible. This is going to take a couple of hours, but then it'll be done, and the world will not have ended because I took so long".

It helps, believe me.