Hakim's Headspace

As I sit here trying to put into words some of the important lessons that I’ve learnt, I realize that a lot of them are quite complicated. They are also quite interconnected and relate to each other, but I’m not sure that I can be both coherent and brief, so for the sake of brevity, here they are, presented individually:

Love is not an emotion. It is an addiction. It is an addiction that plays with your emotions. Throwing you from the highest of highs to the depths of sorrow, sometimes in an instant. It makes people behave in strange ways, and do things they’d never otherwise do. People risk everything for love, they give their life for love, they kill for love.   Love is the most addictive substance in the world. Being in love shows all the classic symptoms of an addiction: dependence, tolerance, withdrawal, and relapse. When you’re in love with someone, they become special to you. The object of your desire becomes the focus of your attention, the motivator of your intentions – the center of your universe. They’re constantly in your minds, they’re the first person you think of in the morning, the one you dream of at night.

T his year, I turn 21. During the two decades of my existence, I believe I've learned a few things about the world, about how things work and what makes them work that way. Practical things like shouting at people doesn't get them to agree , putting your cigarette butt in a dustbin might just end up burning down the house ,  don't run with scissors , and always check the URL before clicking on a link if you don't want to get Rick Roll'd .  S ome of these things I learned at school, some of them I learned through experience. Even then, inexplicably, all the schooling and experience I've had haven't brought me to a conclusion about friendship . You'd think that they'd teach you something as fundamental as this in kindergarten, but it turns out that it's too complex for preschoolers to grasp. In the last few years, I've had some great friendships, some that have lasted, some that just discretely faded away, and some that turned terribly sou...

Hello friends, Happy New Year! Well, at least, I hope so. 2011 wasn’t a fantastic year for me; in fact, I think it was quite a sucky year, with lots of unfortunate and unnecessarily stressful events. Of course, it wasn’t completely horrible – there were some ups and downs.

When we make new friends, how often does it happen because we said " Shall we be friends? " I imagine the process of friend-making should go something like this: Person A: I like you. Do you want to be my friend? Person B: Okay, let's be friends. Person A: Hello, friend :) But this is the oversimplified version. Really, even though we don't say it, what we mean is this: I think I like you. Let's be friends for a while, and then if we like it we'll be friends for a bit longer until we get bored or until we stop liking each other. How's that sound?

Here I am in my room, trying to get work done since I got up at noon. It’s now midnight, so it’s been 12 hours, and one might expect that I would have gotten some solid work done. That would be true, if only I wasn’t so distracted and uninterested in the work I’m supposed to get done. It’s a presentation that I must do for English, and after much deliberating and half watched videos on TED , I finally decided that I’ll talk about Google’s self-driving car. Once I’d decided on the topic, I then went on to make the PowerPoint presentation. Probably about an hour later, I’d finished writing the title: “Google’s self-driving car”.