My suicIdal AnalogY

dillema

2008-04-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

So here i am in Singapore. Sipping my coke in my room and slowly thinking about my lousy shitty life in general, it's been a long time since i posted anything about myself. Counting the days, It's been like seven/eight months of me in Singapore? Yeah, so far life's good for me here, the pay's helping me to solve my life's problem most of the time easily. Buying things which i used to dream of due to the fact that i come from a very poor background. Hehe, despite all these, I'm sorry to say that i'm going back to Kuching for good in just a few days time, hell yeah. Yups, you're not hearing me wrong, It'll be another 10 more days of misery left for me to go before i end my contract with HP Singapore. The reason? It's simple, to perform my duty as a good son, sounds dope? Yeah, me dad has got two big hole in the heart this time. If it's a small holes it's easily operated by operating tubes which require just a small opening to make an incersion, kinda risk free. Me dad's case is different, the operation if full of challenges, let me chart out a simple procedure for the doctor's step:

1) stop body to a comma inducing state
2) cut front chest bones to allow access to heart
3) cut out the heart
4) mend it
5) put it back and reconnect the arteries & veins
6) bring back to life from the previous comma state

If all goes well after the operations, it will still be a hard job. Dad can't lift anything beyond 1/2kg due to the chest bones cut off during operation, it'll need some time to heal and at his age it'll be quite a long time i suppose. He'll most probably be wheelchaired for quite some time, as he isn't supposed to move around much anyway to allow maximum healing time. Then there's also the risk of infection, miscalculations of dosages, pills to be taken, mistakes and lots of other details. That's if the operation goes well, what if it doesn't..? That's the shitty part i wouln't wanna wander into.

Well surely you'll ask what if my dad were not to do the operation, would he still be ok? Yeah, he'll survive alright, but then he's gotta watch his diet carefully, not to perform heavy chores, not to be stress out, ample sleep bla bla bla and still risk cardiac arrest at times. Being him, i guess those of you who really know him shall know him really well.

Well most people see my action this time as another stupid, ignorant and a complete utter pile of bullshit. Most of the time, the general comments are like
1)You know you can earn much more in Singapore? Your pay will be like reduced to a quarter of what you're earning in Singapore le, can you take it?
2)You're taking the whole risk thing a bit too far, your dad's gonna be fine la.
3)There's no need to go back permanently, you can go back in the weekends right?
4)You're saying goodbye to your promising future here Jerry...

I don't deny that most of these are the people who are trying to look out for me, these kinda comments are comprimising my beleives. Well, what i'm trying to do is what i want to. No one forced me to, no one influenced me to and no one coerced me into it. It's like you see a blind man crossing the street, to help him or not it's your own decision to make, no one can make that choice for you. If you do help him, you're late for the meeting, if you don't you'll prob arrive at the meeting on time and feel bad once you've read the news about a blind man being hit while trying to cross the road. May god bless me this time around.

stupidity at it's best

2007-04-13T00:13:00.000-07:00

One very clever female lecturer once said to me during presentation:

You are suppose to be an expert programmer of a specific language in just 7 weeks, don't give me all the crap about your FYP, taking 7 subjects in a semester and how no one has even studied the language in this entire university before this. The internet has so much of resource for you to LEARN from already. ~~Yes, i don't give a fuck if you can do it or not, the thing is i am a bitch and so what if i want to be one?~~

The story : We are given seven weeks to learn, write and compose of a program that runs a robot maze like PACMAN game in both C++ and FORTRAN. The end, we manage to write the thing in C++ and we finished up the assignment report as well on time, unfortunately we have to ditch the programming in FORTRAN due to lack of resource and time. The only thing we did for FORTRAN was the report. So far as we're concerned we did quite well for this project since we've got the C++ and other aspects of the project covered. However, during our presentation the bitch decides to skip every other perfect part of our project and asked us to present the missing FORTRAN part only, well with quickgesture we did it and to our horror, we had the worst of all brainfuck from the bitch herself. Whatever i presented she will ask again and again for a few times until i myself got confused then that's when she will start to shoot. In the end, what we have left to defend ourselves are our C++ part and to that, she never even asked us a single thing about it. Damnit, the worst is that my other group mates tak kena the shooting cause i'm the presenter at that time, so that means my own personal marks will be the lowest among all.

Could you please explain what point are you making when all you did was blaming us for the whole time? We did our C++ and other parts of the projects just fine and you never took notice of those. The only thing you knew was the lack of a program in FORTRAN. Sulking the whole moment asking for FORTRAN like a baby, "WHERE'S MY FORTRAN? WHY NO FORTRAN? HOW COME NO FORTRAN? TELL ME WHAT'S FORTRAN? " You basically skipped the whole presentation and asked us to present the report of what FORTRAN is only, when we present you keep on asking to repeat, until we ourselves got lost then you start to shoot, if this doesn't seem to sound like a BITCH at work someone please tell me she's an angel. I would like to make a few statement here to clarify myself:

1) 7 weeks and you're an expert in programming? who the fuck you think you are? Superman?
2) internet as resurce? yeah right, when we refer and come up with our own words, you shouted us as copying in our presentation.
3) taking 7 subjects is easy? you should try expanding your 8 hour a week schedule into my 30 hours a week agenda. See what kind of time you can get for your opinion then.
4) FORTRAN is extinct in MMU, no one studied it before here ok? How to just learn from online? You need more reference such as book and only MMU cyberjaya has the books.
5) This is a BETA subject and yet the difficulty level you imposed are of Delta subjects.

TO THE DUMBEST LECTURER I'VE EVER MET IN MMU
Your wings of flings and affairs with numerous students and tutors is not exactly a big secret, if i fail this paper, mind you i wont be a quiet chinese ah beng fuckhead. Your past of showing off yourself in Bangsar might just be the fuel to your destruction.

insomnia

2007-03-04T14:06:00.000-08:00

post suicidal tendencies

2007-02-27T06:21:00.000-08:00

Past few days has been a menace, days filled with tons of misfortunes or bad luck however you prefer to term it. The best of all things came first when i decided to fetch a friend of mine who just came back from kl, had to go all the way to town and only after sending him back, the tyres of my bike suddenly punctured and i had to push it a few kilometers to the row of shops under the hot streetlight. I suddenly realised that i only had about rmO in my account and rm4 in my wallet, it was suppose to be my pay day, but the check didnt get through yet, feeling dejected i almost cried in despair as i walk into one of my fravourite hangout shop. Luckily i came to someone's pity and he offered me a small loan of 50 bucks to cover my bike repair cost. My body quickly spring to action as i was late for my class which starts at 2pm after the bike breakdown, so immediately after the repair i went home to bath and recheck my schedule just to find out in horror that the class actually commence at 12pm and i've missed it for good, wahat an idiotic move, moving on it's almost 3pm at that time so i decide to just suck it up and attend my next class at 5pm. The best thing happen next when i went for my 5pm class, i was left all alone in the room, there seems to be no class as the lecturer is on leave, our online system is down for the past few days so i couldnt check the current news on my class.. Damnit, waited for half an hour like a stupid jackass, decided to go back but suddenly felt sick, food poisoning, great way to end a day of miseries.

To be continued....

green satria bitch

2007-02-12T02:37:00.000-08:00

One of my friend's birthday is coming soon, so i thought of buying a book or something from jusco to celebrate. Happily i went with my planned trip, anticipating a great trip to MP. Sadly, as i was slowly reaching one of the traffic light, a cibai, lanciau, pukimak, sial, babi, cicak, lansut, lampa, tiao nia ma green colour satria decided to make an illegal side turning in spur of the moment at the traffic light, i was beside him at that moment so i tried to avoid, but too late.. nevertheless i tried turning along with the bastard, which at that moment the cunt decided to slower down his turning speed some more, maicibai.. control macho he manage to turn behind and look at me some more while slowing down and turning.. you think you are some schumacher shit arr puki??

i hit, we banged, and my sweet loving bike lied down on the floor looking miserablely in pain. It's front cover is now broken and the remaining pieces are strewn across the road like sands on the beach, shit, i got up and clean myself, noticed that i've got myself some minor scratches but thank god nothing serious at all. The bastard at first kept going on, then hesitated and when i stood up, waving my helmet and shouted at him he decided to stop at quite a distance away already. I think he got scared cause all the other cars began honking at him when they see me fell down, or maybe because he knows i can see his car plate, or else guarantee run like a pussy already man.. i thought he decided to come over and talk it all out, but my god what he said to me was shockingly rude, for the first time in my life i've heard the best excuse a malay guy can give to me after violating me in public.

"Sana jalan tuh ada bumper la, aku hari hari guna jalan ini turning takde hal pun.. Engko pun takde hal kan?" picking up some pieces of my bike cover and gave them to me, while i remain silent, not uttering a single word because he never say sorry for what he has done while silently putting the blame on me... i am not a confrontational man, it's not my policy to go physical in public so i just pick up my bike and continue going on to buy my stuff..

P/s - let me tell you one thing you fucking son of a bitch, dont you ever let me see you again in the road or elsewhere, for i swear im gonna break those sweet glass you use to see who's behind you in the car you retarded asshole..

controled and then he

pretentional `emotional assholes

2007-02-07T01:14:00.000-08:00

a type of person which i hated the most, one of the low bastard which coincidentally appears in this entity we live in, sucking the H2O out of our shares and slowly parasiting his/her way into our lives to meet their own demands. I am sick of entertaining and giving my pity to low life existance like you. My advice is, stop all your bullshit pretention and get a life, im sick of having you around,may god bless you with early death.

characteristics of one:
- will look like an otaku, (the looser in drama's)
- will pretend not to know much and at times can become the webster dictionary (75% rubbish ratio which makes it usefull in presentation)
- will not give a damn even if you fell into a big drain while you are right beside him/her (not a single word or help) usually accompanied by sharp criticism..
- will turn info which you shared to backstab you as everyone buys the pityful looking fella's story
- will never ever offer much but will boast of the act which contains 75% rubbish
- very usefull in ruining your life (sort of an activator for an internal bomb)
- will usually backstab you in front of the opposite sex to gain brownie points
- takes pride in how much ~~they know~~ you told them
- if you tell them abt saddam hussein's case today, tomorrow they'll be back and ask you if you knew that saddam hussein was hanged.
- will not even know this article is him/her even if he/she is reading this

I've trouble getting used thesae kinds of bastards, they seem to be appearing everywhere, like mushrooms after the rain, or is it just me?

like they say, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. It was my shame to bear anyway, so fuck you asshole...

**rents...

2006-11-13T06:59:00.000-08:00

I wonder why my **rents kept bugging me all the time, even when i vowed to make a difference in my life so honestly. In my 5 months experience in Kuching this time I've tried my very best to comply with every single bullshit that they hate about me, these includes changing my : "earrings (no more), dressing (smart working attires all the time), hair (cut to 3cm longest), shoes (black slick leather shoes only all the time), speech (no more tiau-ing around), overweightness (lost 28 kg), work (attending all of it on time), discipline (no gangster friends invited over anymore), curfews (back home by 12pm)" & in the end i learnt that my father will seriously stop at nothing to destroy me mentally, i learnt an important lesson that is "HE'LL NEVER BE SATISFIED WITH WHAT HE GETS" so tell me how can i fight this fucking sick theory from my father? Even now when i'm settled back here in Malacca, they just woudn't stop, calling everyday to make sure what their CIBAI spies tells them are in sync with what im saying, planning to come to just see me and make sure everything's alright?? yeah right as if i beleive that cause everytime they appear in my life, everything just fucks the hell up.. I still remember the last time my dad showed up in Malacca, immediately i lost my gf, kicked from church, humiliated and a lot more shits i don wanna think about anymore.. So should i just shoot myself in the head? Sometimes i wish i have the guts to just throw away my phone and dissapear into darkness... Fuck this shit, everytime i pick up their phone or sms it will always come down to this ugly feeling, someone please help me...

2006-10-17T11:39:00.000-07:00

If thou has done it yet critisize those who does it - hypocryte
If thou shall not admit lose - ego-ism (aka) green face
If thou brags a lot of self - show off
If thou speaks a lot but are not to do them - boasting or lazy
If thou speak of not the truth - liar

You know who you are....

We are all not born perfect i know, but as of late there has been people which tried to keep me on the edge, testing my patience, misuing my love and interest for music to sacrifice everything i have all just for their own sake. You do know who you are, you know what you've done, you can just stop pretending now, you can stop bragging and lying to everyone you know, you can stop asking for more from me, i've given all my best to you just to be returned with big pile of dogshit..!! yes, you may contradict m statement here, you may shoot me from the back too, but rest assured your worries before you sleep at night are what haunts you all the time, you friends list has thinned out as you can see, your reputation has gone down the drain though you may not know it, you may not realise it but you've got a lot to change my friend. I hate myself for ever trusting out a person like you..

If thou has no intention of loving music as it was in the first place, please dont waste my time, i'm sick and tired of having to put up with people like you all the time...

fuckers

2006-05-25T13:20:00.000-07:00

"love thyself first before expecting others to love you", a man once said this to me, i was hoping for him to be wrong about it, for all i know deep down inside i am a screwed up bastard who has nothing left in this planet to live for. How the fuck am i going to love myself then? Most of my friends may not be as close to me you feel you are to me, not to be too judgemental or criticising but seriously it's true, i am a far different person than what you see in the day of light. At the end of the day when i go back to my room all alone, i sense fear taking it's toll upon my tiny little soul, ripping me apart in the cold dark planet of loneliness. Deep inside, I am neither funny, humorous nor outgoing, i am just a sick pathetic psychopathic bastard for my mind has been fucked up since a long time ago. It's a part of my past of which i wouldn't want to rekinder the painful memories in this blog, nothing can complement the demons i faced. Not that i am willing to let it empowered me willingly, but for some reasons people never seems to care about the things i say or do. It makes no difference to anyone whatever deeds i do, be it good or bad cause nothing seems to matter at all. At the end of the day, i'll just be known as "the Ciggarette provider" or "the chinese ah beng" among my friends. What good does it do when you give charity for the needy? All you get back is an abuse of your sympathy ten folds in place for your care upon them. Nothing in this world works the way as the bible prophesized, the world is doom towards the fiery burning fires of hell.

It's pathetic to know that no one reads your blog, it's even sadder to know that no one cares about the human existing in the world you trample your feet on. Why would i even care about you at all? it doesnt even make sense if anyone would be reading this, as i hope for beter future nothing seems to fall in place.. I should have commit suicide a long time ago, those bastards never see the consequences of their actions, painfull and slow death is what awaits soon. The indegenious trait never fail to cut me up in pieces again everytime i pick up the remaining pieces of my heart together, making a total mess each time i rebuild the arteries and veins. The devil is with me through all this i know, for all i beleive there is no pardon from heaven this time, i am a lost soul of which i enslave myself to this enchanment for life...

I have lost my ability to love now, for i have been rejected by the ones i hold on dearly to and backstabbed by the ones i put my trust in. Even if someone would try in vain to instill love in my cold fragile broken heart i dont trust the sheer pieces of my broken heart would hold up to contain the newly ejected breath of life. So until the day i die, i hope i can get this message out for you to see, you who backstabbed me, you who crushes me to lift yourself higher, you who stabbed me from behind all this time, you who became the fox in sheeps skin, i hope you'll die in eternal pain and suffering, your families will feel my wrath due to my afterdeath, you will get back what you deserve but for those who trully search for the way out, they will not live to receive or feel it for they are the ones who fill this world with filth from their sick minds, die asshole...

Fading Dreams

2005-12-19T03:06:00.000-08:00

Castles Made Of Sand

by N/A
Down the street you can hear her scream "you're a disgrace"
As she slams the door in his drunken face,
And now he stands outside and all the neighbours start to gossipand drool.

He cries "Oh girl, you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?"
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green.

And so castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually.

A little Indian brave who before he was ten, played war gamesin
the woods with his Indian friends, and he built a dream that whenhe
grew up, he would be a fearless warrior Indian Chief.

Many moons passed and more the dream grew strong, untiltomorrow
He would sing his first war song,
And fight his first battle, but something went wrong,
Suprise attack killed him in his sleep that night

And so castles made of sand, melts into the sea eventually.

There was a young girl, whose heart was a frown,
Because she was crippled for life, and couldn't speak a sound
And she wished and prayed she would stop living, so she decidedto die.
She drove her wheel chair to the edge of the shore, and to herlegs she smiled

"You won't hurt me no more."
But then a sight she'd never seen made her JUMP AND SAY
"Look, a golden winged ship is passing my way"
And it really didn't have to stop...it just kept on going.
And so castles made of sand slips into the sea,
Eventually

The anthology in black

2005-09-18T21:59:00.000-07:00

First of all i would like to welcome you all to my second blog. It's been a while since i've blogged about my private life in my blog, this feels like the place where i can pour my heart out. It does feels like i have been trying to cover the sweet details of my life up as much as possible, fear not earthlings for i have return to satisfy the itchy sense of keponess within you. First of all, many ask me why would i even write the private details of my life online for everyone to see, isnt it a bit like budak kurang perhatian? Here's my ~~arguement~~ excuse for now would be, this is not my main page, so if:
1. you found this page by accidently through any search engine on the web.
2. you found me through viewing my proflie though you don know me or you never read my musical website before.
3. you found me after clicking my profile, you knew me already and you want to know more about me..

IF you are in category no.1
Welcome to this site, hope you can share with me my feelings of angst and anger in times of stress and tension. Hope you can release your feelings and get connected with me through the comment box... Remaining anonymous is not a crime unless you spam..

If you are in category no.2
Well, same as no1 but if hearing sick boys runting about his average looser instinct bores you then you should check out my other page for a higher kick on the arse.. http://analgestic.blogspot.com

If you are in category no.3
Congrats, this blog are created especially for people like you, people who cares and gives a shit on what i am and what am i doing currently.. You really like to know more about me, and i thank you for that for you are the people who makes my life so brightly shinning with glee...!!!

It wont be updated on basis though so do check back on it from time to time, for i am not melancholic everyday but on certain days only when i either got jacked, pissed at, taken advantage, loosing something, reminded of something *you know what la*, and moody.. So, stay tune for updates...!!

3 piece of advice...

2005-09-13T13:48:00.000-07:00

"i am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. i never graduated from college. truth be told, this is the closest i've ever gotten to a college graduation. today i want to tell you three stories from my life. that's it. no big deal. just three stories.

the first story is about connecting the dots.

i dropped out of reed college after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before i really quit. so why did i drop out?

it started before i was born. my biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. she felt very strongly that i should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. except that when i popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. so my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "we have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" they said: "of course." my biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. she refused to sign the final adoption papers. she only relented a few months later when my parents promised that i would someday go to college.

and 17 years later i did go to college. but i naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. after six months, i couldn't see the value in it. i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. and here i was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. so i decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out ok. it was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions i ever made. the minute i dropped out i could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

it wasn't all romantic. i didn't have a dorm room, so i slept on the floor in friends' rooms, i returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and i would walk the 7 miles across town every sunday night to get one good meal a week at the hare krishna temple. i loved it. and much of what i stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. let me give you one example:

reed college at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. because i had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, i decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. i learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. it was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and i found it fascinating.

none of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. but ten years later, when we were designing the first macintosh computer, it all came back to me. and we designed it all into the mac. it was the first computer with beautiful typography. if i had never dropped in on that single course in college, the mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. and since windows just copied the mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. if i had never dropped out, i would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when i was in college. but it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. you have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. this approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

my second story is about love and loss.

i was lucky that i found what i loved to do early in life. woz and i started apple in my parents garage when i was 20. we worked hard, and in 10 years apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. we had just released our finest creation - the macintosh - a year earlier, and i had just turned 30. and then i got fired. how can you get fired from a company you started? well, as apple grew we hired someone who i thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. but then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. when we did, our board of directors sided with him. so at 30 i was out. and very publicly out. what had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

i really didn't know what to do for a few months. i felt that i had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that i had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. i met with david packard and bob noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. i was a very public failure, and i even thought about running away from the valley. but something slowly began to dawn on me that i still loved what i did. the turn of events at apple had not changed that one bit. i had been rejected, but i was still in love. and so i decided to start over.

i didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. the heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. it freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

during the next five years, i started a company named next, another company named pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, toy story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. in a remarkable turn of events, apple bought next, i retuned to apple, and the technology we developed at next is at the heart of apple's current renaissance. and laurene and i have a wonderful family together.

i'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if i hadn't been fired from apple. it was awful tasting medicine, but i guess the patient needed it. sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. don't lose faith. i'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that i loved what i did. you've got to find what you love. and that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. if you haven't found it yet, keep looking. don't settle. as with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. and, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. so keep looking until you find it. don't settle.

my third story is about death.

when i was 17, i read a quote that went something like: "if you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." it made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, i have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "if today were the last day of my life, would i want to do what i am about to do today?" and whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, i know i need to change something.

remembering that i'll be dead soon is the most important tool i've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. because almost everything that all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. remembering that you are going to die is the best way i know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. you are already naked. there is no reason not to follow your heart.

about a year ago i was diagnosed with cancer. i had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. i didn't even know what a pancreas was. the doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that i should expect to live no longer than three to six months. my doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. it means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. it means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. it means to say your goodbyes.

i lived with that diagnosis all day. later that evening i had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. i was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. i had the surgery and i'm fine now.

this was the closest i've been to facing death, and i hope its the closest i get for a few more decades. having lived through it, i can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

no one wants to die. even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. and yet death is the destination we all share. no one has ever escaped it. and that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. it is life's change agent. it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. and most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. they somehow already know what you truly want to become. everything else is secondary.

when i was young, there was an amazing publication called the whole earth catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. it was created by a fellow named stewart brand not far from here in menlo park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. this was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. it was sort of like google in paperback form, 35 years before google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

stewart and his team put out several issues of the whole earth catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. it was the mid-1970s, and i was your age. on the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. beneath it were the words: "stay hungry. stay foolish." it was their farewell message as they signed off. stay hungry. stay foolish. and i have always wished that for myself. and now, as you graduate to begin anew, i wish that for you.

stay hungry. stay foolish.

thank you all very much."