Christ. I think I'm in over my head.

Sound the sirens, it has happened

In a few months, I officially come of marriageable age. According to my mum. And since my last (and only) 'i'm sure this is it' relationship sank like the fucking Titanic, she has little or no trust in my ability to find a suitable boy in time to have babies before I have osteoporosis.
She has begun looking up the matrimonial section of our weekly parish news bulletin. She wants me to get in touch with a 31-year-old engineer from an oil and gas company.

"The only thing is you'll have to move to Quatar."

"But I'm 23, Mama!"

"So you think if you sit at home like this, someone is just going to waltz into your life when you're 26 and good and ready to be married? Life doesn't work like that."

I have a feeling this bad mood is going to last me all year.

Dil hoom hoom kare

I watched Confessions of Shopaholic yesterday. I wasn't feeling intense enough to watch Gulaal and certainly not breezy or bored enough to watch Pink Panther 2. The movie turned out to be strides better than I'd expected. It had several funny parts, and I do love the formulaic improbability of chick flicks. Isla Fisher as Rebecca Bloomwood is alright, no great shakes. This role had Reese Witherspoon's name all over it. The clothes were very New York leathery-skinner socialite offspring variety, think Nicole Richie circa her Simple Life days.
The winner for me was the beautiful, almost-delicate, lovely Hugh Dancy as Luke Brandon, Rebeccca's editor and love interest. He is...ok, I need to stop or I'm going to have a verbal orgasm. Look for yourself.



So naturally, I come home and Google his hotness expecting his real life interest to be very Emmanuelle Chriqui-ish. And what do I find? He's engaged to the asexual, dry-bread blandness that is Claire Fucking Danes. You know how sometimes you look at a person and get annoyed. Claire is that person for me. I don't understand the purpose of her in Hollywood. She's so damn annoying to look at. She reminds me and could easily fit the part of those annoyingly masculine, flat chested gym instructors who think having curves is a sin and who will chirpy-talk you into murdering yourself on the treadmill and finding your inner wind with some unpronouncable yoga pose. And she's got a certain Gwyneth Paltrow 'I'm above looking pretty, let me embrace the coarsest, harshest looking side of myself' thing going. As I type this post, he's beginning to look less attractive to me, just because he finds Claire Danes attractive. He's not my type,. That's right, HE is not MY type. I spurn you Hugh Dancy, spurn!


Working that gym instructor look.

One of those days

It feels strange when you wake up one day and realise how much you've changed over the years and just how weird you've gotten, or rather how you've swapped past weirdnesses for bright, new, scary ones. Yes, I have lists to illustrate.

Past strangeness
I ate coffee powder
I ate tea powder
I was terrified of flying balls (Every possible joke you could think of making has already been made, rest assured)
When I looked in the mirror, all I saw was fat.
I was cripplingly shy. Most conversations I had were with people's shoulders or with their feet.
Having to speak up in public would reduce me to a cold, sweating, fidgety mass of nervousness. I'd go days without saying much.
I hated the idea of someone looking at my face for more than 40 seconds at a stretch.
I was a creepily good listener. It didn't matter who, even people I didn't know would walk up to me, you know, 'just to talk." I could go through conversations that lasted hours without having spoken more than a few words.
I hated phone conversations.

Present Strangeness
I am completely at ease with strangers, more so those I know I'll never meet again. When it comes to talking to people I know and have known for a while, I'm uncomfortable and want to just run away.
I have no idea what to say to people anymore. They tell me stuff and for some reason, if I feel the need to reply, I invariably end up saying the absolute last thing they wanted to hear.
I want to be listened to all the time. I get annoyed listening myself. In some way, it's as though I'm trying to make up for all the years I never ever talked about myself.
I rarely feel the need to communicate with people. The times that I do, I get sick of it five minutes into the conversation.
I smoke two cigarettes every night before I sleep.
I'm nervous and on edge almost everyday. Before I sleep every morning (4am), I feel a sudden rush of panic.
I eat a cube of cheese everyday at about 4pm.
I have a very strong urge to become an actor. Based on almost nothing at all.
I am obsessed with knowing inane facts about people. Sometimes I''ll stay up nights just looking up random subsidiary characters I've seen in films.


I scare myself.

Current song fixation: Let my love open the door by Sondre Lerche

What's everybody got against the money?

Lately I find myself surrounded by women who seem to have a healthy aversion to prospective dates/ boyfriends/ fiancees because the person happens to be loaded. And I, for one, don't understand it. Their reasons are generally that money makes people too snotty/ spoilt/ lazy and makes for gargantuan chip-on-shoulder potential. I think that's a sweeping generalisation. I get the sense that these women think it's the higher-order, moralistic thing to say.

So where am I going with this? Championing a cause for the rich? Well, sort of, yeah.

I think rich people have it pretty bad. Well sure they have gilded cars, South Mumbai houses and have a weekly clubbing fund that would comfortably take me through my month, but they also have to deal with stupid unfounded prejudices like these. So they had better opportunities, inherited already flourishing businesses and have probably never known what being on a budget feels like, so what? They didn't choose it any more than poor people did their own backgrounds. If it's so terrible to discriminate against people who've had it hard to no fault of their own, it should be just as awful to discriminate against people who've had an easy life to no fault of their own. So why are rich people having to take the rap for something they didn't do. A rather well-off close friend of mine is regularly treated differently because she happens to come from money. If she fights for a bonus after a month of working hard, she gets a 'but why're you so gung ho about this? It's not like you need the money." People regularly fleece her because "she can afford it." It's stupid.

And since when have people's characters become so entangled with how much money they have.
I have met rich people who're so endearingly unapologetic about their ample means yet so humble, and have also met the kinds who think you shouldn't be allowed to breathe without owning atleast one branded item. Similarly I've met not so well-to-do people who are unbelievably cool and a fair amount of tedious, bitter sorts who make you want to shoot yourself through the head just so you've wiped out even that .0 percent chance that you'll ever meet them again.

If you're going to discriminate, discriminate because he's an A-hole and hasn't got one interesting thing to say and isn't in the least bit attractive to you. Don't discriminate because he happens to like his Glenfiddich and has paper towels in his car. Ok the paper towels thing is weird, but you know what I mean.

As for what I'm looking for? I'm looking for someone to make me laugh, do fake accents, love my dysfunctional family, find my dog's flatulence cute, turn me on and talk, really talk to me. If he's not loaded, that's fine. If he is, just show me the dotted line. I'm there.


Ps: I watched Slumdog Millionaire again with a friend who hadn't had the chance to see it till now. Yep, I still don't get all the fuss. But for fear of being called obsessive (again), I'm making this a P.S and not a post.

I look around me and everybody has aged. Glaringly obvious, yes, but now I can actually see it happening. My mother seems older, slower and more forgetful to me. Everytime she breathes heavily in the night, I find I have to look over just to be sure, you know, nothing's happened. I watched Amitabh Bachchan on TV the other day - he's been old for a while now, but yesterday I actually saw how old. I thought about him dying and it scared me.
My friends have aged too. I've aged. It's harder for me to take off the extra oodles than it was two years... even a year ago. We have grownup issues now. We still discuss boys, but now it isn't about like like, it's about like-enough-to-marry, like-his-bank-balance-enough or like-is-he-really-ending-it-with-me-to-settle-with-her? Before I could go weeks with just four hours of sleep a night, no problem. Now I have 'aches', yes.
My dog doesn't frolick anymore. He's not a puppy anymore. He's turned into a quiet, older dog - well behaved, even. Eugh. There isn't nearly enough frolicking right now. Not with him, not with me, not much. Frolicking is nice. I'd like to frolick again.

Fuck.

I spend all my time trying to get noticed as little as possible,
Yet I live in constant fear that it will work.
I'm scared noone will notice if I disappear.

Hi Daddy,

It's been a while since I thought of you. I feel guilty about it sometimes but then other times I forget about that too. I feel like nothing should change the equation we shared when you were here, now that you're gone. I still want to tell you it's all your fault. I still need a punching bag. It's easier that way.
I think you going set the trend for 'quick and painful' for my life. I turned around for a bit and you were gone. Everything that does go, that means anything, goes that way now. Before I have a chance to make things right. I think worse than not having done the right thing is realising what the right thing is and then not having the time to do it. I was always a little slow on the uptake, you know that about me. And then having nowhere to send those new constructive thoughts, I put them away in the '?!' section of my mind, small regrets and questions that ferment and bubble and I know will rise without warning. And then I'll shake with sobs so gutteral, I'm shocked they're coming from me.
But don't think I'm unhappy. I'm not. I'm doing well, I barely cry at all. You'd be pleased to see me now, I think. I don't really blame you for anything, but you already know that. I can only hope you also know how much I cared without me ever having been able to say it. Because you cared more.

Bye.
Till I need you again.
Or think about you.
Whichever comes first.