Oh, bollocks.

'I want a conversation.', he said. 'Nothing else.'

She didn't reply immediately. She didn't flee either, though truth be said, she looked like she wanted to. She looked at him, too many expressions fighting for precedence in her eyes for him to single out any one of them. Then she gave a shrug, not the shrug of someone giving up, but of someone resigning themselves for a drawn out fight.
'Fine.'

He sighed, and plopped down on the grass, stiff and itchy. Nevermind. He wasn't particularly in the mood for this either. But he'd asked for it. He sat and looked at a line of ants on the pavement carrying a bit of a leaf back to their queen mother, linked, as they were in comics, by the hive mind. Everybody knew everything. Boy, that would be so great. These situations would never come up. He looked back at her. She was staring into the middle distance, playing with her hair, looking supremely uncomfortable.

'What d'you want to talk about?'

Awkward silence I.

'Anything, I guess. Did you know that ants communicate by... wait, you didn't seriously expect me to sit and complete that, did you? You would've let me waste this conversation too, like all the others before it?'

'I would actually like a conversation like before. When you were happy, and we would talk about all kinds of random stuff, and laugh and i would listen to you ramble on about things that i understood neither head nor tail of.'

'Like an indulgent parent towards a particularly dense child who's just managed to memorise a nursery rhyme? How considerately condescending of you.'

The fact that he had taunted her sunk in only when he noticed the change of expression on her face. He wasn't a cheery soul, but he hadn't meant to be sarcastic. Well, not so early on, anyway. Ah, well.

'Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. I was just...'

'Whatever. Its okay.'

Awkward silence II.

'All right. Enough with the mushy pseudoemotional balderdash. I can indulge my endless need for self loathing and take it out on you, but i'm bored of that. We could try to thresh out our feelings, possibly fight over inconsequential differences, and feel that we've put it behind us, but that's not going to happen, and the endless cycle of disagreement, contained resentment and subsequent release is going to lead us back to this juncture at some point anyway. So lets try something different. Think about it, tell me what's going on in that mind of yours, and we'll take it from there.'

'....'

'I take it from your blank expression that you didn't really get any of what i just said, did you?'

'No, not really.'

She was smiling now. Good. At least his rant had served the intended purpose. He meant all that he had said, though he hadn't expected her to follow any of it. Reasoning, logic and other rational arguments apparently had very little to do with conversation, and it had taken him a while to understand that, and even longer to actually put it into practice. Earlier, he would've gotten frustrated and repeated the entire thing. Now, he just made a face and smiled back, and said,

'Well, crap.'

Awkward silence III.

He got up. Stretched, and then hopped around for a while flapping his arms and saying, 'Aaaaaaaaaaargh! Fuck. Fuck! Fuck!!', before banging into a lamp post and falling to the ground, twitching spasmodically.

'What are you doing?'

'I dunno. It helps.'

'Should I give it a try?'

'Sure, why not?'

And she did the same.

'You're not getting the flapping bit quite right...'

'Oh, bollocks.'

'Okay. I'll just shut up then.'

Awkward silence IV.

They sat together, huddled against each other, and watched the sun set. It was exactly like a thousand sunsets before, and a thousand sunsets after. That didn't stop it in any way from being spectacularly beautiful, though, as a giant ball of molten gases performed perspective tricks before vanishing across the horizon for the period of half a diurnal cycle. He felt something small and warm slip into his hand, further inspection of which confirmed it to be her anatomical counterpart.

He turned towards her, and saw twin suns setting in her eyes, and resisted running away, or jumping off the terrace, or picking his nose, or any of a hundred different ways to screw up the perfect moment that a hundred insistent voices whispered to him, coyly and enticingly. He turned a deaf ear to them all and drew her closer to him.

He finally understood. They didn't need words. Or actions. Or thought. They didn't need to spend time with each other, or demonstrate their feelings in socially accepted, and commercially encouraged ways. Permanence was overrated, forever was a very long time. They were what they were, at least, for the moment. Change happened, and could either be dealt with, or not. Tomorrow might bring very different reactions to the same sunset, though the sun didn't really care about that. What happened, happened, and indulging in counterfactuals and regrets just wasted the time they had now. All this, in the span of a few minutes, at the end of which he noticed she was staring at him in a rather amused fashion. 'Wajjap?', she asked. A smile played on the corners of her lips.

'I think a fly just went up my nose', he said. And sneezed.

bored at 4am #1

the ronald opus story. (incidentally untrue) | Rough model
(read about it on fb, or on wiki, or whereever.)

assumptions: no two factors have a correlation. if they do, then the prob. drops even further. i'll update this model someday, maybe, if i'm bored enough again.


suicide rate in america: 19.0(male), 11.8(total) /per lakh people

fictional story, assuming him to be middle aged, the sex ratio is  1.00(15-64), and 0.75(65+)
therefore, the probability that he commits suicide is 19.0/(2*10000)

now, the number of people on an average (civilians) who own a firearm in the states is app. 34%

the probability that a family member has access to this firearm is proportional to the trust they place in each other, from divorce rates, estrangement and breach-of-promise suits, and other such cases, an estimate of this would be roughly 79%

23,237 accidental shootings in 2000 (since no other data is available, i assume its remained roughly constant since then), where the population then was 281,421,906. => 0.00008257

last two things:
spatial coincidence(rough)
area of an average flat is between 900-1000 sq.ft
Wall height is between 9.5-11.5 ft.
hence, considering that the bullet could be fired in any direction (the bias towards the direction of the wife is ignored), the probability that it will choose a spot where the trajectory would take it in the direction of opus is (considering his area as around 1sq.ft -> fatal only)
total surface area => 30ft*10ft*4+900sq.ft
prob => 1sq.ft/tot.area = 1/2100 = 0.00047619

the last thing i could think of (i might be forgetting factors that could possibly reduce the probability even further, but i'm being unduly optimistic here.), is the time factor.

temporal coincidence(rough)
it was two weeks since the attempted motherkilling setup -> average manifestation time of depression is three days, so thats 11 days that he's been contemplating suicide. that's 11*24*3600 seconds
assume the father goes into a psychotic gun-threatening rage every two-three days for a span of about 15 mins, then the amount of time pointing the gun around is about 15*60*7 seconds
thus, the probability that the events will temporally coincide is
prob => 15*60*(7 to 4.667)/11*24*3600 = 0.006628788 to 0.004419508

from these, the probability that this incident would occur is approximately between, (considering that the time and place were exactly as is, for all time and space. read multiverse theories for more.)

0.210694*10^-7 to 0.261704*10^-7

factoring in spatial and temporal conincidence factors, the probability further drops to about,

P = [Plower,Pupper] == [0.47827E-14,0.82619E-13].

please do point out flaws/improvements if you can think of any.

References:
"U.S.A. Suicide: 2006 Official Final Data". American Association of Suicidology.
Lott, John, John E. Whitley (2001). "Safe-Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime". Journal of Law and Economics
"03: Housing space standards: a national perspective" Mike Roys, RIBA '08
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Opus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio
http://www.americanfirearms.org/statistics.php
http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/publications/by-type/yearbook/small-arms-survey-2007.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/17/us-usa-crime-shootings-guns-idUSN1743414020070417
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/opus.asp

ps. i've an exam t'moro. i should probably go study now.