thoughtbook

Over the last 7-10 years, my taste in music has changed drastically. From boy band pop I moved to hip-hop, then to rock to heavy metal to folk-indie rock and currently, simply instrumental music, classical and occasionally fusion music. I chewed on each of them for 1-2 years. I don’t know what’s next, dubstep? Tribal music? I don’t know, I’m keeping my options open.

I like my beard, I also like myself without the beard. That’s not an issue. But, God, the dilemmas!

If I shave, I look like I’m sixteen. That’s kind of bearable, but it gets eerie when I realize that when the beard’s gone, I resemble a very pretty girl I once had a crush on back in high school (she was like my doppelganger, except for the long hair). So, from then onward, it gets really weird. When I’m driving and catch a glimpse of myself in the rear-view, I’m confused whether it’s her or me.

However, the problem doesn’t end there.

If I let the stubble be, I look like an ax-murderer and scare the shit out of grocery clerks (whom otherwise, I have no intention of harming). From the very moment I enter, they look at me like they feel like I’m going to rob them at gunpoint (even though the only weapon I’ve ever wielded in my life is a water pistol). Sometimes, when I’m wandering down an aisle checking out the kitchen-knife section looking for a new fruit knife, I can feel their eyes on me, and I’m always like ‘GUYS I’M not gonna murder anyone with these! Just CALM down, don’t panic, OK?’

If I let the beard grow (which takes a very long time because I have a patchy-scraggly Matthew McConaughey beard) then I look like a hunter-gatherer and you can’t go to job interviews like that, you don’t want your interviewer to be picking up a long beard-hair from your resume as you sit across from him or her, smiling and trying to be professional. Also, with that beard, you can’t get past any army checkpoints either (especially with the Afghani Pakol caps that I sometimes wear because they’re fricking warm and comfy.) They mistake you for some terrorist errand boy or something.

I’m not into that 10,000-years-into-the-future type of sci-fi. The kind in which robots have successfully colonized us and our blood is used to power their batteries. I mean, that’s a cool fantasy too, but it doesn’t interest me that much.

I like a certain variety of sci-fi, the kind of sci-fi that takes place, like fifty years from now, the kind that plays with the frontiers of science and tech as they exist today and lays out its story in the near-future.

I like the believable stuff or at least the more relatable stuff. Like how our emotional dependence on social media makes us behave and how, in the future, it may warp our sense of reality as our dependence on it increases.

Or how governments can use our phone’s location information, the content and the metadata of our phone calls, our microphones and webcams to monitor us; or how, as computers learn to speak in natural language and become capable of processing and reciprocating emotions, we may start to develop romantic feelings towards them.

As in the more recent movies like Her, Ex Machina among others. The Black Mirror TV series. But yeah, not all near-future sci-fi that came out in the recent years was good, though. I personally thought The Martian was crap. Although I did enjoy the meditative aura of Gravity. I found Interstellar to be okay-dokey in terms of the story, but in terms of accuracy and faithfulness to realities of space-travel, it was a great piece of well-researched film-making.

*dips foot*

AAAARRGH!