After working like a dog for the past few days,

whipping up assignments and going on till late at night,

I decided to let myself chill a bit and get by the evening watching TED talks.

Came across this one by Gordon Brown on how technology could be used to bring around important messages so to prevent a lot of unnecessary unfortunate events from happening;

where he is quite a powerful speaker (as with most leaders, duh)

I felt that it lacked concrete substance -

the idea was merely such as one of those comparative analysis essays you write in year 10 for cultural studies or whatever it is;

it's inconclusive.

That's when its come to my realisation that

everyone does something to get noticed;

whether they are shining the spotlight on themselves,

or are 'hiding' from the public,

whatever it is that they do, in the end,

there is really just one ultimate goal that they want to achieve

- there is a desired effect, certain response they want from the targeted individuals.

Sadly, no one gets everything they ever want all the time,

so sometimes it depends on fate,

or purely, in the case that the signal has been received,

whether the recipient wants to give into his/her needs or not.

I read somewhere that eversince we were babies,

we've developed the concept of deceiving people, deceiving our parents,

so we get what we want.

It comes with growing up and being alive,

being assertive/aggressive with our wants is as primal an instinct as running away from potential harm, distracting predators, searching for food,

which is why a story like this really impresses me.

Christopher McCandless was able to throw away all he had,

literally, run Into the Wild,

begin living a fresh life,

starting from zero.

Even then,

there is still a part of me that is convinced that deep down,

he wanted his parents to be reacting to his leave in a certain way,

so he becomes the catalyst of their desire to fix things within the household,

and not let the so-called 'family' crumble as it did when he left.

-B.