I just had a really good day.

That almost never happens!

Wrapped up alot of work, worked out (WADDUP!), ate no junk food or in between meals and talked to my favourite people :). Now I'm going to bed. At 1.30am. That's about three hours earlier than I usually do.

Huzzah!

For an introvert, I sure yap alot.

I remember these soul-sapping conversations I used to have with this one acquaintend (She was my acquaintance, I was her friend) of mine back in college. And by conversations I mean I would emit a series of 'hmms' at various pitches and different intonations while she would painstakingly drone over every last tedious detail of her life.

There was the one time I ended up lying next to her at a sleepover (Nothing sexual. Though I would have considered it in exchange for her silence) and she had been talking for about 3 hours straight. The others in the room (one tiny mutant and Tata Young's lookalike) excused themselves with a simple "sleepy now, bye" but yours truly, going-to-be-canonised-any-minute-now-wait-for-the-invitation was feeling bad to interrupt her. The all pervading night didn't interrupt her, what chance did I have?
Finally, about an hour later, long after I'd safety-pinned my eye-lids to my forehead to hold them open, she fell silent. I would have screamed 'Hallelujah' except my brain threw in its chips, sat down stubbornly and refused to have a single other thought. This girl had actually talked herself to sleep. The sound of her own voice had lulled her brain into a coma.

So why am I putting you through this agonising anecdote?
To point out that sometimes you can become what you laugh at.

I have become my acquaintend! These days I talk involuntarily. The brain is willing me to recognise the weariness in the listener's face, its saying "Don't say that, DON'T SAY THAT. Dammit you said it! Okay, it's alright, just don't say that next thing! DON'T SAY THA...". The mouth has gone batshit crazy and is swinging recklessly from one topic to the other leaving in its wake a loud resounding "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" Tarzan style.
I feel like I'm constantly in one of those badly synced Chinese films. I can say what I want in 2 words but I'm prattling on regardless.

To those who've chosen to endure, remember, death comes eventually.

Some things never change

When we were little, my best friend and I drew up a prototype of what our perfect guy would be like. We were dorks, it goes without saying except I must say it - we were dorks.

There were detailed physical descriptions:
Must be taller than but not tall enough to make you feel short. Must NOT be shorter than at any cost. Same height is frowned upon and will only be excused in exceptional cases.
Must be big built but not muscular in that when he hugs you, you feel safe but not endangered.
Must have Bryan Backstreetboy (for her) and Kevin Backstreetboy (for me) hair, no compromises.
Must not have strange girly voice like those NSync faggots.
Must have more hair than us. (This was before either of us had experienced the sweet pain of waxing and after we'd had a couple of embarrassing incidents with our main crushes.)
Must not sweat. But if he does, he must sweat sexily.
Must dance awkwardly. Super smooth, hectic dancers were not for us.

Behavioural descriptions:
Should not patronise us or let us win. Except, he must. But do it in such a way that we never find out.
Must have a foul temper that only we can dissolve.
MUST.NOT.CRY. Yeah this one was underlined so much, she tore the page and I broke my pencil point. Then we added brackets: (Can well up. Slightly. But if tears leave the eyes, then it's just very over.)
Must be possessive. For example, broodingly nursing his glass of Pepsi while watching other guys make a play for us and then looking appropriately crestfallen is good. Holding hand protectively to let people know we're with him, even. But wear-your-salwar-kameez-in-the-pool possessive and expect some serious laughing and pointing.
Must be take-charge because that's responsible. But more importantly, hot.
Must not be named Prakash, Monty, Leslie or Kiran. Yes, this is a behavioural trait. Think about it. An amazonian, guitar-playing, sexily-sweating Prakash is just not the same as say, an amazonian, guitar-playing, sexily-sweating Nick/Kevin/Bryan/NOT-AJ.

Ability descriptions:
Must be musically inclined. Must play an instrument so he can tour with us when we're on the road. Must carry all the Grammys we win. Must sing like a Backstreet boy with a hint of any of the Code Red dudes and if we're being unrealistic, then the 98 Degrees fellows thrown in for good measure.
Must have a sense of humour. If not, why're we even talking?
Must play a sport. Preferably football because cricketers are unattractive. Uno and carrom don't count. Table tennis totally counts (you had to know the context) for like a hundred meellion points. Especially "doubles".
Must speak perfect English. There are many deep, accepting girls in the world who wouldn't mind 'a-POR-tunity' and 'I propose her and she say me this and that'. We weren't two of them.
Must...(then we got distracted and started practising our Ya Mustafa Ya Mustafa Raveena Tandon moves. I'm fairly certain that somewhere some guy has that on his 'Must Not' list.)



I want to say times have changed and the list is not relevant at all. I really want to say that.

The Wooden Four Post Bed

Noone will ever guess, is magical. It changes shape and form and everything around it. Last night it closed in on itself and turned a canoe. Fat black waves slapped against its hull but it endured. Cold, hard and unrelenting.

One forgettable June day it looked like a coffin, no jokes. Everyone would've laughed at me. But the body lent it credence. The four posters made over it like protective arms. This bed has intent, imagine that.

Other days it just lies there. Pretending it's ordinary, pretending it does only what it's meant to do. Be a bed. On those days thumping fists, heels dug in and soaking faces cannot elicit an answer. "I'm a bed," it rolls its eyes, "what did you expect?"

Yet yesterday as I approached it, only a door between us, I thought I heard an engine rev. I tip toed without a sound and then started running faster than I knew I could. I kicked the door down and screamed "Take me with you!". The silence didn't resound, it ricocheted. Off the four posts, grazed my shoulder and bounced out of the room taking the words with it. "I'm not magical," it laughs, "that's not petrol you smell and I am not talking to you. Beds don't talk. People are saying you're crazy. Stop it."

So I lay down and sank slowly into it. Into its big rumbling belly. That was the last night.

Today in its place lies a duffel bag bursting at its seams. I look into it. Nuts and bolts and wooden planks - it's the magic bed like I've never seen it before. Vulnerable. "It happens to the best of us," it says in a chorus of thin, smaller voices.

Yes, this is a magic bed. Because everyone knows that the most powerful magic is the most unobtrusive. It doesn't make a production of itself. It just leaves in the conciousness the conviction that something has changed.

"Good luck finding out," it's saying as I zip the bag.

Gut instinct or just my lunch?

I have always envied people for whom their gut instinct is like a lighthouse, helping them navigate through the choppy waters of contradiction and indecision onto the shores of resolution and clarity. These people always tell me their gut instinct is audible to them, ringing clear like a bell. For example, my friend, who I will hereon refer to as Fat Pants, is one of these people who as a rule functions on merciless logic to get him to that point just before he makes his final decision. Then he lets his gut (HEH) take it from there. I asked him once how he's sure it is his instinct that he's listening to and not just another line of reasoning. His said two very powerful words to me. "Fucking. Introspect."

"Lock yourself up in a room, cry your eyes out if you have to, scream if you must. But don't get out till you have your answers," he explains.

Now here's where it all starts to go pear-shaped.
For someone who blogs about what she's feeling and thinking and opining, I really suck at introspection. It just doesn't come naturally to me. I blame it on my daily-diminishing attention span, my soaring propensity for procrastination and my tendency to second guess myself all the time.
Plus I am someone who's always been unable to delay gratification - it's why I smoke, it's why I'm overweight, it's why I stay up late watching back-to-back episodes of Mother instead of writing my stories for work. So there's a very good chance that I could be mistaking what I really want to happen in a situation (want to feel the comfort of being in a relationship, want to eat fries, want to be liked) as my gut instinct. A very obvious and a very real trap.

I've swung by the seat of my pants for so long, but for the first time I'm feeling the weight of my malformed opinions and underdeveloped decisions weighing down on me. I'm tired of 'definitely, maybe' and I'm ready for 'definitely'.

To this end I've decided I need to first shut out the physical noise before I'm able to shut out the noise in my head. I'm withdrawing my cards, I'm leaving the building, I'm putting out the 'closed for business' sign. For a while anyway.

5.08 am.

Project Get Shit Together (TM) not going so good.

Some truths in the world of Gyuri

You're only as good as your last thing you said to me. You will not be held to what you did or said before that. It doesn't matter.

Having someone unexpected drive two hours, through backed up traffic just to come see how you're doing is humbling. Thank you, you made my day.

We are all like water. At some level, we're all able to change, adapt and still be refreshing.

Last night I thought my search for the perfect maxi-dress was over. Then I tried it on. The search continues.

Sometimes the suffocating familiarity of friends is furthest from what you need. Thank god there's the comfort of virtual strangers.

If you wake up to people watching you having drooled on your own hand, own it. Act like it was the plan all along.

Pretending you care can, on occasion, be the nicest, kindest thing you could do for people.

It's probably best not to accuse someone you want to date of paying for sex.

Watching friends take a turn for the pretentious or turn even more pretentious is painful. In a better-you-than-me kind of way.

My eyes are quitting me, one font size at a time.

I do not know the first thing about boys. I don't know if they want to be kissed, if they want to be pursued, if they want to be ignored, if they want to be smothered. They're like sensitive aliens.

I read recently that every city, every person, every experience has its own word. A word that belongs to it and it to the word. If Europe's is Flamboyance and Obama's is Charisma, what is yours? I think mine maybe Whimsy but I'm not sure.

Where do you get the best chocolate cake in this city? I want to know.

Delicious dread

I don't store most people's numbers because then I'd lose all reason to pick up my phone. I really love and hate not knowing who's going to be on the line. Everytime my phone rings, I get nervous. Until I see a name and then it's all shot to shit.

Everybody's somebody's fool

My aunt used to wistfully sing this Connie Francis song to me from a tattered book that had taken her through her loneliest times in the army. I was just about six, or maybe eight, but even I could tell there was a sad story in there somewhere. Over the years we heard murmurs of a certain Captain Y and a Lieutenant X and a whole string of other designations but she took her secret with her when she died an old spinster four years ago.

Cut to 2009, and I am finally seeing that this Connie person was really onto something there. Everybody IS somebody's fool, everybody IS somebody's play-thing! And there are no exceptions to the ru-u-ule. Yes everybody's somebody's foo-ool! It really is a very catchy song.

Anyway.

Like I was saying. I've realised the hard way, that we all have one person who makes self-respect seem like a bell and whistle. It doesn't matter that you can list ten reasons for why this person doesn't deserve even your memory, without batting an eyelid. It matters even less that your friends are wincing at just how many times he/she shuts you down. And should this person make a gesture that only technically, after really having searched for it, qualifies as a nice thing, to you it's the equivalent of a kitten and a puppy baby, a kittuppy! You can't remember why you even considered considering cutting this person out of your life. Until he/she does it again.

Are these people walking genital warts? I don't think so. Are they awesomeness-incarnate? Nope, that they're not. It's what we ascribe to them that makes them so irreplaceable. And when you figure what that is, this person begins to unravel before your eyes. And suddenly it's blindingly clear that this person is just another person. And you were here before him/her and you will continue to be here now that he/she is gone.

That is closure.

Need. Air. Now.

In my observations of human behaviour (which generally involves watching friends through the comforting haze of beer and then extrapolating the conclusions to cover the whole of humanity - yep, it's a science), people derive almost sexual pleasure from knowing they have friends in common. There's gasping, impassioned name-calling, heavy breathing and such other excited noises.

I used to understand this peculiar behaviour once. Who doesn't like a good co-incidence to break the drudgery of the day? Noone likes to turn down a 'What?! Really?!' moment. But once, thanks to Facebook, BMM, a suffocatingly small media industry and overzealous Contact Whores, knowing people in common becomes the rule rather than the exception, I'd expect the thrill would wear thin. Not so.

As for me, I've come to dread this particular strain of conversation. EVERYBODY knows EVERYBODY. It used to be that you could just hang with another group to escape hearing the same anecdotes, the same names, the same thoughts. Now you must physically saddle up and ride out of town to find people who haven't heard of you or 'know your second cousin from your Mama's side, what a slut she is!'

I remember my Junior college self and how I longed to be on backslapping terms with everyone. It's funny how you can hate the things you think you want most. Now I just want to stop people when I sense they're about to know someone I know.

'NO.'
'No what?'
'No you don't!'
'No I don't what?'
'No you don't. Want to order the um, platter?'


Life's a clown.

Do you think that maybe?

Our biological clocks are bitterly divorced from our psychological clocks?

If English were a brothel, 'I Love You' would be its most hard-working trick? Costs almost nothing, takes instructions and is dead in the eyes.

Euphemistically speaking, we're all assholes?

Life should keep its lemons and hand you a stiff drink instead?

Billy Joel had the right idea?

Panic is a necessary precursor to the best things to happen to us?

That the power of speech would be more apt in reverse? As you grow and your mind gets more sophisticated (baseless claim, I know) you need words to get you by, less and less?

This blog has run its course?

I do.

I'd like one sense of humour to go, thankyou.

I've lost the funny, I have. I'm just not funny anymore.

I say things and I think "Well, that's not funny. Did you mean it to be funny? Because it's not. It's unfunny and tedious and practised and you should just stop talking."

I am finally that person I have feared I would some day become - A funny sounding person who suspects, and is joined by a great many in this suspicion, that she is not really funny. She falls just short of hitting the spot. Every single time.

I'm actually talking about being unfunny. Now a naturally funny person would not have to talk about being or not. It would just be something she did or didn't do.

If I had a dime for every time I said the word 'funny' here, I would BUY a sense of humour.

You see what I mean? Do you think this is how Russel Peters feels?