The last ten days were very tricky. I cat-sat for a friend, spilled tea over my laptop, had the laptop and my phone repaired, filed a cybercrime complaint against a person who had defaulted on money he owed me. I also went into a fin-tech rabbit hole, installed and uninstalled apps, reached a breaking point from which some etizolam brought me back to stable ground.

It is too tiring to talk about these events. Earlier they exhausted me and recalling them now will exhaust me again. Secondly there are just too many things to write about. Thirdly the keyboard, after being washed in sugary black tea, has stopped bouncing back, so the keys are barely responsive and I feel that I am typing on a glass slab. And the webcam does not work anymore. It stays slightly submerged and hidden in the bezel, only making the creepiness appear more threatening.

I do not have to think about anything for the image of a lemon squeezer or a garlic press without the holes to appear in my mind. At most times there is too much demanded from me—my presence, really. I realise that what’s tiring me is not the cognitive load of doing things, but the pressure to respond to the demands made for my presence. This presence business is a slippery slug that jumps out of my grasp. It is difficult to understand this—at best it is experienced.

I take etizolam every day in the morning so that it releases a steady stream of drug into my blood and reduces my anxiety. This is all good. No major side effects. But I have no control over the rest of the world which demands my presence. I would rather go to a hill station and lie down on the large green prickly grass and look at the tops of the mountains and at the blue sky through a pair of dark sunglasses. The catch is that this needs money. Money and happiness are in a steamy incestous relation.

I am reading the novel which I shall write about in the third (and hopefully final) chapter. Well, I am supposed to be reading that. But my research committee decided it is a good time for me to return to theory, because by now I have demonstrated that I have a grip on the entire chapter-argument business. So I am reading Heidegger to understand what a thing is, and I have been reading Bill Brown, who, to be honest, is more confusing than Heidegger. Heidegger is dense, but he is methodical and logical. Bill Brown is a little bit of a playful person and does not give away his moves right away. He hides them and jumps from one place to another.

Add to this my brain which feels like it has been overclocked and running too many processes and that if someone pokes it a little bit more, the place that is responsible for controlling anger and aggression will let go and I might really push someone into the path of an oncoming vehicle or do something similar that would make me a murderer.

This is a little funny, but the goal is just one next point in a row of points. The bursting of the atom bomb is not the end product, it is just one point for which all the previous points have been done already. Just like that our ‘goal’ for ourselves is just one point after we have done all we can.

Well, I am back to this piece I was writing for the last few days because…because I need to figure out whether having two identical pieces of wall-warts, c-c, c-lightning, a-lightning cables would make me happy. I imagine it this way: I keep a pair of wall-wart+cables plugged in next to my desk, and another pair that travels with me. I do not have to fish the wall-wart-cable frankenstein out of the bag once I am back in my room. The only fishing of cables and chargers happen only when I arrive at the coffee shop, the lab, or wherever. This will set me back by about 4k rupees.

Another way of finding happiness, I assume, would be to have a working keyboard and a working webcam. A working keyboard needs 12k, and a working webcam would set me back by another 2k minimum, but the idea is to go with the cheapest repair, which means I buy a small jingmajing that clips onto the laptop and holds the phone. Well.