“When I look up at the night sky and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small because they are small and the Universe is big – but I feel big because my atoms came from those stars.”

Astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson on the most astounding fact about the Universe. This is one man that can express, in same sentence, the most intelligent, profound thought using slang like “dat dumb species”.

‘My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.’

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

- David Foster Wallace, This is Water

I

“the noble title of ‘dissident’ must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement,”

“to be in opposition is not to be a nihilist”

II

“there is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write;”

III

“It’s often been observed that the major religins can give no convincing account of paradise. They do much better in representing hell;”

“And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseperable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.”

“Imagine a state of bliss and perpetual hapiness and harmony, and you have summoned a vision of tedium and pointless and predictability,”

“Always look to the language.”

IV

“Again, it is a matter of how one thinks and not of what one thinks.”

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia, said Oscar Wilde, is not worth glancing at.”

“For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle.”

V

In the more desperate moments try to live as if your ideals were already in place. Cultivate some of this attitudes and find strategies in order to survive to those moments in which the fight seems lost or you can’t see a reason for further battling.”

VI

“Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question the obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim ‘de omnius dubi tandum’,”

XIII

“Those who need or want to think for themselves will always be a minority; the human race may be inherently individualistic and even narcissistic but in the mass it is quite easy to control.”

“In order to be a ‘radical’ one must be open to the possibility that one’s own core assumptions are misconceived.”

XVIII

“One should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with the maximum of iconic self-criticism.”

Hitchens – teaches you more in a small book than most History books. Dies at 62.

Yesterday I watched Zelig, a fake documentary written and directed by Woody Allen. The documentary portays a man (played by Allen) with a personality disorder that allows him to transform himself in order to resemble anyone he wants. The movie is filmed in  black and white, 20′s style and has loads of funny parts, in part, due to Allen’s fantastic talent of being able to observe whatever happens around him to the most irrelevant details, which gives him enough insight (adding his own wit) to make fun of things we are presented to every day. It’s very comic and a great late-night movie.

Near the end of the movie, after setting the record for the fastest transatlantic inverted flight (crazy, huh?), Leonard screams in what resembles a primitive press conference:

” But I’ve never flown before in my life, and it shows exactly what you can do, if you’re a total psychotic! “

I can’t tell completly why that sentence stuck with me but it just did – probably because it’s true. If you take the word ‘psychotic’ not in a lunatic way but rather in a free spirit, imaginative kind of way, it can’t hurt. The more psychotic you are the more things you will be able to accomplish…I don’t know, it’s just a good sentence.

“There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It’s not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us – these are just the hazards of being free.”

Genius at work inside David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest about the hazards of being free. What makes us unique and exquisite. Freedom.

Here I am again.

After months of unbearable procrastination I am back to doing things. I’m back to, once more, give a try at this writing thing. Because I love it and feel poorer if I don’t. It’s hard to understand why I stopped. Something happened and I used that as a lame excuse not to do something I felt like doing because, at the time, it didn’t feel real anymore. It felt vicarious. It felt like it wasn’t me doing it anymore. As such, the minute something went wrong, instead of trying to put it back the way it was I just forgot about it.

With it I also forgot a little about what I loved about myself – trying to do things, creating things. It was a time in my life where very little was done from my part to carve the path I want to carve for myself. I started using shortcuts to do things, abandon projects if they looked like they were too much hard work and say a lot of things that I ended up not doing. It’s a time that is past, and I present myself here renewed and ready for more.

Sometimes the hazard of being free is that we just become to comfortable with what he have/done. That’s what happened to me and it affected almost all fields of my life. It stops now.

This will be my personal blog – where I’ll write my musings and whatever comes to mind or heart. Also, noteworthy, I just cofounded a development and web design studio with a friend named Clock Fuse. I am also taking the pilot course at MITx about Circuits & Electronics which has been fun and interesting. All seems to be well and working now.

Here I am again.