may we all have our hopes, our will to try

Some times I think Sundays are the only thing that keep me from going over to the "dark side of the moon" (I'm quoting not just the Pink Floyd tune, but a line from Love the Hard Way, an extremely disturbing and yet somehow sincere film). Sundays are like a reset button in my life. No matter how disheveled it all gets, no matter how little I've accomplished over time, Sunday arrives and announces itself, demands to be acknowledged. Sunday evenings are a pinnacle of that effect. There are things to be done for the coming week, and they are ticked off like clockwork, like steps to a dance. It's like developing obsessive-compulsive behavior for a few hours.

After a long vacation, I get like this towards the end, aimless, wandering. It doesn't help that a new year has arrived in the meanwhile as well. I always start out a new year with a great sense of hope. But even though 2004 was not a crappy year for me personally, it seems to have been a piss poor year for the world, and so I haven't felt particularly nostalgic this year about the final days passing away. Nor have I felt particularly confident that things will get better this year. But there's always hope, right?

Like so many in the blogosphere, I'm not into resolutions. I have lots of hopes, but not much in the way of resolutions. 2005 feels like a year that could be fantastic or could be utterly gut-wrenching, depending on how it plays out. My future rests on the head of a pin, in so many ways. I have, in the past, been so averse to risk. Some of it must stem from being Gujurati, or so I like to think. The smallest chances felt like I was daring the unthinkable. But I was thinking today about the concept of activation energy, because, in so many ways, I will always be a chemistry dork, no matter how far I stray away from it in my daily grind. Activation energy, or even, when you think about DNA, the idea of cooperative effects, which, in some ways involves activation energy too. I'm babbling. Okay, the thing about DNA is that it's a helix made up of base pairs that essentially zip up. This happens because one set of base pairs match up. That first base pair requires a lot of energy. It's momentous. But then, after that, the rest of the base pairs link up almost without coaxing, like their fates were suddenly revealed to them, and they stopped trying to resist. Some times, I'm thinking about how powerful it is to be looking for that first base with which to pair. Other times, I wish I was in the cooperative effect part of the situation, just plugging along, everything falling into place. Why are human beings like that? We live in a world so ruled by chaos, entropy always wins, and yet all we ever seem to seek is order. And worse yet, when we've finally found order, our own personal streak of entropy seems to nag at us, begging to give in to another round of chaos. But to get back to my original point, from which I've meandered beyond reason, I know, it's funny how, after the first big risk I took worked out and the world did not fall apart around me, every risk I've considered since then hasn't felt so unthinkable.

Ah, lovely to start off the new year with a truly unintelligible post... maybe that should be my resolution- to write posts that don't seem like they originated from someone who has a weak grasp of the English language.

Oh, and yes, I did quote ABBA in my title... so there!