Pounding The Keyboard

       So I was browsing through my Facebook this morning when two strange stories appeared on my News Feed. First story, Chris Watts, the man who murdered his pregnant wife and two young daughters so he could be in a baggage-free relationship with his pretty and young girlfriend, has been receiving love letters from many single women while in prison. (Netflix made a documentary about the gruesome murders, An American Murder: The Family Next Door ). One woman reportedly wrote “In my heart, you are a great guy” to him. Of course, this type of news isn’t new, lots of other prisoners (serial killers, serial rapists, etc) also receive expressions of admiration from many women. (Charles Manson, already married several times when he was younger, got engaged again to a 26-year old woman when he was 80.) But this is another reason for many single, honest, faithful, law-abiding men to lose faith in women.      And talking about men losing their faith in women, the second strange story that

       I just finished watching T he Queen’s Gambit, a miniseries with seven episodes on Netflix. Currently the most watched limited series on Netflix (62 million people have watched it in 28 days), it is about an orphan who turns out to be a chess prodigy and who becomes a world champion amidst her emotional problems and her alcohol and drug dependency. Story is quite compelling, the acting really good and the cinematography fantastic. I rate it 4 stars out of 5.      I think, like the main character in the series, everyone (those who become a master in it) learns how to play chess at a very young age. If you’re already a teenager and you’re only starting to learn it, you won’t be good in it. I learned playing it when I was around ten, I think, after my father brought home a brand new chessboard, but I didn’t become a master in it either. Lol. I loved the game but I started losing interest in it when I realized I could not beat anyone in it. I would get bored waiting for my oppone

         While on my bike on my way home this morning, I saw a young man riding a fixie ( fixie is short for a fixed-gear bicycle, it has single speed, its speed will depend on your pedaling power, it has no brakes and no freewheeling mechanism (the pedals are attached to the rear tire so as long as the rear tire is moving, the pedal will also move), meaning, you have to pedal all the time because you can’t coast on it and rest your legs. Yes, you have to pedal even when going downhill. The tagline for the Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s 2012 movie Premium Rush probably best describes what your riding experience with a fixie will be: No brakes, can’t stop. Don’t want to. Gordon-Levitt plays a bike messenger in the movie who (like almost all of the real-life messengers in New York) rides a fixie. Expectedly, because it is deemed dangerous, fixies are illegal in some countries.You can put brakes on  a fixie, of course. But then, it'd sort of defeat the purpose of having a fixie.     

       “I think you’ve got a problem,” my sister told me while we sat on the couch watching TV.      “Yeah? What’s my problem?” I asked.      “You’re addicted to it.”      “I’m not.”      ‘You are,” she said. “Yesterday, you bought plenty of it. You went out of the house just to buy it. And you’re a member of three private Facebook groups dedicated to it. And you already look high just by holding it."      “It makes me happy, it makes me forget my problems.”      “Yeah,” she shook her head sadly. “Soon, you’d be borrowing money, or worse stealing stuff to sell just to be able to buy it. Soon, it would affect your health, including your mental health. And when you’ve run out of stuff to sell, you’d sell your girlfriend. No, you haven’t had a girlfriend all your life. Instead, you’d sell your own body. But sadly, no one will buy it, for sure, even at a very large discount. Then, you’d be homeless, you’d live in the streets, together with your fellow addicts. You’d do all