Fear and me are over

Now I wait for whatever will arrive to occupy its place.

Skinny Soup

"Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering -- this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary daytime advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work -- and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. " - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Amen.

Sweet Heart. Sick Body Part.

I am beginning to feel the years creep up on me. Creep up on my body, to be accurate, actually. My mind continues to stay simple enough. My problem-solving skills still pretty much involve the 3 easy steps of Repression, Passive Aggression and then eventually, Indifference or Boredom. And I am obstinate about always having the window seat.
But my body, it has begun to tell.

Everything's begun to droop juust that bit. I can no longer bludgeon my metabolism with sacks of potatoes and my eyesight is now a big ol' laugh. I feel like my body used to be this big quarterback of a thing - strong, stress-absorbent, formidable even. I could walk ridiculous distances, eat myself unholy, smoke my lungs sooty and then wash it down with a tall glass of aerated anything, no problem. But after 25 years of my punching it, it's noiselessly fallen backwards.

It feels tired and uncared for. It feels withered and drained of all that is young and good and fresh and renewable. Suddenly I am aware of its limits, its wincing and when it is telling me to put. that. bagel. down. I am terrifyingly conscious of the incredible splintery nature of the physical form. Not just mine, either.

The skin is this thin, tearable material. Everything inside is so soft and easily squishable and connected with almost unbearable delicateness. When my heels chafe against rough ground, I am aware. When I'm fitting my spine around the rude train lady with a heightened sense of entitlement, fine tickles of stress run across it so accusingly. The other day I was looking out a bus window and saw a couple of little boys play punching each other. I stared, fascinated by how it would take a single blow dealt at just the angle to kill one of them. But more importantly how I knew it wouldn't.

You cannot acknowledge life's fragility without being awestruck by its resilience. It shouldn't be possible to not die almost the instant we're born.

When we perish in car crashes, fall down and break bones or develop heart conditions, we're shocked and outraged. 'How could this be?' How could this NOT be?! These things were much more likely than years and years of staying untouched. Being able to keep as a whole, being able to continue to be alive. We're essentially bags of liquid and squiddy bits slung on a skeleton and we're still here.

It would have to be something else that's making us endure.

Still no words.

I made that. It is supposed to be a chocolate cake.

Well, hello again.

I think this is the longest I haven't posted on this blog in about a year and a half. I just haven't had a lot to say somehow. Been pondering life, work, weight and love with no iron conclusions, only ironic ones. I have also been under the weather, then travelling some and otherwise mucking about with work, not doing, mucking. I have recently discovered a love for cooking...potatoes, so far. I believe I am keeping the tater industry afloat in my part of the world with fried potatoes, potato pakodas, potato salad, potato vegetable and potato parathas. Correspondingly all weighing scales are being avoided with great care. This may seem most mundane and it is, just not in my world. In my world, it's like the collective relative brigade can now take a great big shit of relief - "she can cook, she can be married". Now if I'd just start combing my hair and giving a toss, I'll be well on my way to being hitched in no time at all!

Anyhow, that's about it really... here's a little more about how I've been spending my time. These pictures are about as organised as I am.

The potatoes I made today. They turned out quite well in that they were edible with no muffled gagging sounds emanating from the bathroom thereafter.

The wizards of UU have decided to play football and a dangerous orc is the appointed coach. Except he will not tear his team's heads off as is traditionally expected of his community but will scare them into compliance with his frightening erudition. As is Pratchett's own tradition, the book is a poignant scream. I did notice that he has begun to resort to puns that are cheaper than some of my friends (you know who you are) and I did stop to wonder if this is him degenerating or me starting to outgrow him. Scary thoughts both.
Sam sand dunes, Jaisalmer, Rajasthan.
En route to Mehrangarh Fort overlooking the old city, Jodhpur, Rajasthan.


Hotel Pushkar Palace, Pushkar, Rajasthan.


Feisty granny showing me I'm not the only one with a camera around there. They're not in the picture but her grandkids were facepalming furiously :)
Pushkar, Rajasthan.

This is exactly my mum's expression when I break out my threadbare harem pants. She's hoping any one of these days I'll get real. Joke's on her.
Pushkar, Rajasthan.

My monkey friends outside the popular Gayatri temple. Getting up here took a 30 minute trek and the nice corpulent pandit asked if I could read or not when I took my shoes off in the wrong place.
Pushkar, Rajasthan.

Yes I read her second book based on the first. Does she always make sense? No. Can she be a tiresome statistic-spouting paranoid idiot often? Yes yes. Is she razor-sharp, funny, tart and do her words sink like hooks into me anyway? Yes, they do. What I like about her is she belongs only to herself. Her work is self-indulgent but it always tries (and often fails) earnestly to be something more. I like that. Read Committed if you want to journey through somebody else's premarital neuroses so you feel better about yours.

Hannibal Luca. He was attacked by a couple of dogs a few weeks ago when he pranced up to them for a friendly butt sniff. Has to be kept muzzled so doesn't lick his battle wounds. Enjoys wearing it entirely too much if you ask me. Freak dog.

This is my foray into Dickens' world and already I'm breaking out in sweats. A very dehydrating experience. Let it never be said that my sentence construction is too long and cumbersome to keep up with. For I will show you Charles Dickens. Stand down.

One of us is physically sick here and the other one is just sick in an everyday overall sort of way.

You want to gently suggest I take another lengthy hiatus don't you?

No questions asked.

Tonight I'm thinking about love.

Ever held a live fish? Love feels like that sometimes. Like I only have a slippery hold on it at best. I tried to make a spreadsheet of it, to happen upon it nonchalantly as a flyaway strand of hair, to freewheel with it, to control it like a evil puppet master - all worked and all didn't work.

Studied love is love. Instant love is love. Fleeting love is love. And so is love that endures across many lifetimes. Love is teeth and flesh and filth. Love is silence and awkwardness and adoration. Love is revenge and hurt and self loathing. Love is abandon, recklessness and meticulousness. Love is leeches and five star bathrooms and medieval ruins.

Love will destroy you. Love will resurrect you. And love will make you wish you never lived and then make you wish you could live forever. Today a bandit, tomorrow a sage, Wednesday a gurgling infant, all for love.

I've decided to take the easy way out. I'll stand very very still and let love have its way with me.

What can all of this mean?

"We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. "

When I wake up in the morning and those fleeting moments where dreams and reality segue have dissolved, I wonder what the day will mean. Not what it will bring, mind. But what will what it brings mean.

My life could hardly be called routine or in fact, monotonous. I travel a fair bit, do different things, meet an incredible variety of people in very short spans of time and I have a mental dog. Still I have to wonder where it's all leading to. My mother thinks I spend way too much time obsessing, dissecting and generally making a kachumbar of every situation "...like that stupid woman Elizabeth Gilby..something." But then she's also a lady who believes there isn't a single case of the blues a good spot of house cleaning or a fat little financial crisis won't remedy.

But I like my experiences to be immersive. And that can't happen until I fully understand them, understand why they are and why they must be. It's like with words: I like to understand what they mean, how they're pronounced, the contexts they can be contortioned to; then only will I press them to my tongue. Sometimes I like to think, quite narcissistically, that I can derive more meaning from a single word that the next person because of how much I try.

It is this need for some greater consciousness of things, some higher understanding, a certain feeling of being-in-the-know that has me lost completely. Life has become a desperate experiment. Hold this against my inherent recklessness and masochism and I'll do anything to make them wrong.

Those who firmly believe there is no higher truth or profundity or anything. Whatever is, is whatever it is. No more, no less. All primary-coloured experiences. Work yourself to the bone for what you never really needed, just always assumed you wanted. Eat for sadness, eat for guilt, eat for love, eat for jealousy. Fuck for duty, fuck for thrills, fuck for boredom. Tell dick jokes and reduce everything to a punchline. Die for nothing at all.

Is that it?

A Row of Stiles

There's an aching I feel inside these days. It doesn't matter where I am - lying in bed in the dark, on a yacht in the South China sea, or drinking beer in a ramshackle Shetty bar somewhere. The mind deflates, the hearts sags, yet another place I'm only passing through.

Goodbye.

I remember you from a long time ago.

We were little. A bully was all you knew how to be. As the grown ups patiently herded us into a corner where we could make nuisances of ourselves, far away from them, you were the unspoken leader. 'He'll know what to do," was the unanimous feeling and we fell behind you as you plotted how best we could ruin everyone's evening next. I wasn't sure I liked you but I was sure I admired you. There was something equally sunny and evil about you, that we all gravitated towards in spite of ourselves. You and me, we only noticed each other from the vantage of our extremes. You were just 3 feet but your presence eclipsed the room. I was known to sit in a room without being in it at all. You were the only one who could ruffle me, I was the only one who'd never show you you could. Veiled respect I think they call it.

One day you were installed in a big car and taken away to seek your fortune in places that would rearrange themselves around you. Months lapsed into years and years lapsed into decades. In our part of the world we heard unsurprising tales of your glory. Perfect musculature, jumping out of planes, making impossible bank shots, curing sick kids. And everyone spoke of you as if somehow they had a hand to play in your greatness just by virtue of knowing you, by having once said hello to you. I had to imagine you were bored by it. The inexorable numbness of consistent perfection gives one a glassy quality.

You became a traveller and who isn't nowadays? But for some of us it isn't merely about seeing new places, having our horizons stretched taut and all those other Chicken Soup for the Wandering Soul things travel is supposed to do for you. For some of us it is simply about the Leaving and Going Away and the Farness. For some of us it's about finding new things to leave behind. Was it that way for you? Or maybe it's to do with how little currency glory has begun to have in my life that makes me think everyone dreads it. You probably were looking for new challenges. 'Been there, done something worthy of two-three-four dinner table conversations, next.'

But this is all conjecture. This is all extrapolating, romanticising and fiction writing. I didn't know you, not even in a way that could make me cry when I heard you had died. Sadness felt too farcical for this. My life remains unperturbed, I didn't even cancel my movie plans that day. But I miss you in a way you can only miss someone you never knew - like something's dropped off your consciousness. Something that made a difference to you, just you don't know how. And the only thing you're left hoping is that wherever the person's gone to has been much better than here.

Rest now brother mine, it's been a while.

I kind of love you Chloe Sevigny

I don't know what it's about Chloe, but she had me from the moment I set eyes on her in Boys Don't Cry. In Big Love, as a young fervent polygamist, she blew me away. She possesses this illicit beauty that if you appreciate it, says more about you than it does about her. It's some sort of irreverence mixed with innocence mixed with seriously damaged mixed with defensive intelligence that I find so very intriguing. Although some limited experience tells me she could just well be and really probably is a dreadful bore. For now I take heart in the fact that she and I seem to share an affinity for nudes - no really, almost everything I've purchased in the last couple of months has been some shade of skin.

Don't believe everything you've heard

Sometimes I feel like I've, in some misguided attempt at chivalry (a signature of mine), taken on everybody else' share of pessimism. I mean I think I'm being realistic, but placed against vox populi, my opinion's always the one closest to the floor.

You'd think I'd gone through some deep psychological trauma that had caused me to be diffident, wet blanketish, cynical, annoyingly even and whatever other euphemism people use when they're much too cultured to use that word that rhymes with 'runt'. And I can only hope that that is true.

Maybe some day, that epiphany will come. Maybe it will be on one of my travels. We'll be in the airport terminal awaiting the exact same flight, this serene-looking older gentleman and I. Suddenly he'll notice the spot on my chin, grow visibly pale and say, 'You...you're not Wanda are you?" And I'll be all "Ew, no." And he'll go, "You didn't by any chance used to sing O-bla-di O-bla-da at every single school talent competition till you were asked to stop...?" And I'll turn horrified and twitchy, my pupils would dilate and I'll say "Hey! You're just trying to freak me out. There's no way anyone could know that." And he'll sink into the vinyl and clutch his head in despair saying "Wanda, I'm so sorry, I'm so so sorry." And I'll shrug and say, "Well it's not your fault, I really should have had a wider musical repertoire..." And he'll stare at me, thrown by just how much I've repressed and say slowly, all ominous-like, "I'm... Dilawar." I'll turn to him slowly, tears springing to my eyes and say, "Oh my god, that must be tough." And he'll start to get agitated and say, "No! You stupid girl, it's me Dilawar. I was your backstage hand?" And I'll start to guffaw because my mind is a bit of a toilet and only stop when I realise how silent Dila...the man...has gone. He'll look at me meaningfully and I'll say 'No, no, no." and he'll says "Yes," and I'll say, "so then two bad things happened to me that dreadful night?" And he'll nod ashamed, but say quickly, "I had nothing to do with the O-bla-da O-bla-di bit, I only diddled you. The rest was your doing." And I'll sit down weakly. "So.. my affinity for double entendres? M-my...wariness of boys... my unexplained nightmares about a certain Molly and Desmond Jones were all...?" "Yes," he'll nod morosely. "What about my alarmingly low levels of faith in humanity?" I'll say. "No," he'll shake his head, slightly indignant. "That's definitely just co-incidence." "Oh," I'll say. "Well this was totally unnecessary then, wasn't it?" "Yes," he'll says. "Yes I suppose it was."

OR!

I'm just used to calling things as I see them. Haven't you ever been to a party that everyone else thought was 'INSANE!!!' and you thought was only okay? What about the first time you had sex? Was it everything Joanna Trollope said it would be? No, stop lying, it wasn't. And Tina Fey. I was in danger of riding the general orgasm over her when a friend stopped me in the nick of time. She isn't all that. In fact she's not very funny at all. And that's what life can be sometimes - it isn't all it's cranked up to be. You're not all you cranked yourself up to be either. Hey, I thought I'd be a 'loyer' or a 'none' and all I ended up being is a 'no one'. Life isn't all rainbows and Follow Fridays. It's disappointments and split-ends and boys liking you pending what you weigh and the few people you care about thinking you're disgusting.

Like my favourite fictional cynic says "Think white and get real."

Death Wish

I bathed with spiders
under mournful elms
And pebbles questioned
the balls of my feet
The air singed,
rain drops dripped reproachfully
My own breath felt like cacophony
My body, an excess
Sometimes I wonder
what the last silence will sound like.

I'd felt we could be something.

Yes I liked your slanted features and you, my nose ring. But our bodies were ancillary, a nice side effect, a welcome addition, nothing more. The first time I saw you, I felt my stomach flip, your force field blazed and inside it and close to you was the only place I knew I should be. Common sense slid off me and cynicism understood what it was up against and dried itself up quickly.

Every syllable that dropped from your lips collected in a pool in my mind, not one anecdote lost, not one pause forgotten. I kept my gaze trained away because I don't know what falling in love is supposed to look like and I embarrass easily. Still there was a taut sense between us that physical touch would only dilute. The jokes got you at exactly the same time they got me, the other faces at the table blurred and the alcohol had only half to do with the night's intoxication.

Usually I have my game face on but I couldn't muster it this time. Because if ever there was someone who had to be shown what lay beneath, it had to be you. I'm not excessively clever, never read the classics and am not even alluringly damaged. I'm quiet not because I'm intense, I just don't know what to say. Truly, I have never had a sense of occasion and supposed-tos have been my particular failing.

And even while I'm trying to show you all of this, I know I'm being that guy who's telling a joke his audience has heard before and they're humouring him anyway. Because you do right? You know me already and I don't know how that could be. Scares me to the bone, too much time I have spent staring from safe distances and your nearness is closing up my windpipe and if I don't get out, I'll choke.

Wriggle free.

The world we're living in, by now we should've been gloriously scaling the acme of individual courage.

Think about it. We have next to no socio-cultural restraints left to speak of, just about anything goes. We've got all sorts of technology doing our work for us, whittling down our actual physical effort to a series of finger clicks. In fact we're a generation whose biggest legacy will be its ability for The Grey Area - we've rallied against stereotypes, sometimes even when we weren't sure why - don't laugh at a sensitive, philosophical biker dude; that lady is just attached to her flannel shirts and billowing leg hair, it says nothing about her sexuality.

And only recently it has dawned on me what our other big legacy is going to be - pussyfooting. Excuse my Truck Driver.

We're going to go down in history for our sheer wealth of cowardice. For our talent for talking endlessly in circles without ever concluding with or even intending a solution. For being victims of our personal histories and for recognising that and continuing to stay that way. We've learned to say everything it takes to say nothing at all. But most importantly for turning the Appropriate Thing To Do into Whatever's Easiest.

Don't get me wrong. I will never trade the loosed leash I have today with what my mother had at 25. I love that my dark jeans can qualify as formals and sex before marriage no longer occupies a top place in Fallen Woman 101. But the things that require heart, you know? That require a strong stomach? They're gone. Buried under layers of diplomacy, suffocating self-consciousness and a misplaced sense of modernity.

Invisible mode on Gchat, silent mode on your mobile phone and accumulating lightweight, feel-good, micro relationships on Twitter are all the totems of our generation. "All touch-me-nots" says my mother, blunt, brave lady that she is and always has been.

But I don't want to end this as a rant. I want to make a choice, I want to take a decision. Any decision. I want to start saying what I really think. I want to start telling strangers they helped me without worrying that it comes off as needy. I want to tell a man I love that I'm going to be there forever without worrying that I'm overstating. I want to tell a joke and then be okay when noone gets the punchline. I want to stop scaring myself every day.

To that end I will start with one truth. Here goes. I have been meaning to write a book for four years now but have still not managed it. I have written untruthful samples that were bad. And truthful samples that were worse. And I still don't even have an outline yet. The real reason is that I am terrified that it will bomb catastrophically and that I will never recover from my own awfulness. So instead I sit and rib on Chetan Bhagat. But as of this moment, I want it to stop being my concern. I feel I have done my part and issued the world a sufficient warning. I am now free to start writing My Great Big Failure Of A Novel with reasonable abandon.

There, all better. Now you tell me something. I am a stranger and I'm asking you to tell me something. I realise you might think I'm due my stay at the funny farm, but I'm asking anyway.

"Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded."

We are not in the business of bursting bubbles. And we should not accept such a mantle. In these times, it is the highest feat of the imagination to be able to preserve your own faith. These are not people to be torn down, but people to be admired.

When, and less cynically, if, fall they must, let it be at someone else' hand. Bursting bubbles is the easiest thing in the world. But have you ever tried to preserve one? It takes the meticulousness of a surgeon. And then you get to walk away knowing you just bent time. You extended a moment by the sheer force of your goodwill.

That's at least a week's worth of that good feeling, right there.

Careful.

People have often told me I'm a sucker for pain. That in my dealings with people, I show a worrying lack of self-preservation. "Are you crazy? Do you not remember what she said to you?" "How far do you need to fall before you realise he's not good for you? What will it take?" And I have always said that grudges are not my thing. Neither are hostility, vengeance and issuing comeuppances. I'm not very good at any of those and I'd much rather read comics and worry my dog than hatch complicated plots to bring about someone's downfall.

And that is the truth but it's not the whole truth. Because I have been to the other side. Experienced the kind of anger, hurt and bitterness that you can will to become something physical and tangible because calling them 'feelings' doesn't even begin to describe their potency. And they caused me to say things that, to this day make me wilt a little even if I just hear them used randomly or playfully. One day, that person on the receiving end dropped dead. And how bitterly theatrical is it that earlier that very morning, I'd woken up to the vacant, white, summery feeling of forgiveness?

Then on I promised myself I'd let go, a kind of atonement if you will. And once I began, I didn't stop. In time, quite Gyuri-ly, I lost sight of my reason and took it to the extreme. Soon it became a game of 'show me what you got, I'll still come back. You cannot shock me.' And to my horror I found that there is no dearth of people willing to take you up on that kind of challenge. A point that was finally brought home to me only very recently.

For the first time in years, my very dormant sense of self-preservation took over and the only words I could hear myself think were, "you went too far."

Good thing is I'll never be that angry 17-year-old again, screaming, thrashing and foaming at the mouth. Because she grew up and was introduced to their effortless replacements: sarcasm, irony and stone-cold indifference. Don't get me wrong, I still have impossibly high levels of endurance but now they come with a tipping point. Just that you won't see it coming, you'll only know when it's there.

You went too far.

The colour of Not There

You paint houses for a living. Wash walls with colour. Bring life to something listless and dull.
So what happens when the child of the house stumbles up to you, and asks if she can paint too?
Your hands inside her pants in exchange for a few brushstrokes seems a steep bargain.
You're a painter and with your bare hands you've painted her over forever.

Stay still

I find it's all very well to say that you must keep the ground beneath your feet. But what if all you've ever been standing on has been broken tiles at precarious angles? These days I have mustered a level of quietness that is a far screech from just a while ago when I was climbing up walls. Still I cannot say I know how to...be.

There's too much going on around us. A couple of kids walked into their favourite bakery and got blown to smithereens. A baby who doesn't know that his longstanding Tummy Ache is actually liver cancer. Less dramatic events like excruciating deadlines, falling hair, heart marauding loneliness.

There is greatness too, I'd be a fool to deny it. Complete strangers being able to spot in you what only should have been visible to lifelong companions. People showing up to their jobs every day for love and precious little else. Supernatural endurance? All miraculous.

It's just marrying the two that has got me in knots, you know. How do you make it through your day? What do you focus on? If it's just everything close to you, you stand in danger of becoming grossly insulated. If it's the world at large, you could start feeling very badly like a whiskey at 10 in the morning. Is the ability for balance a talent - you either have it or you don't?

It seems to me we all have to reconcile what we thought everything would be to what everything is. For now I take respite in the fact that I try, every day, I try.

If there is anything I want right now, it's the ability for grace. I think in my dealings with people I've managed to let near me, I generally think it's alright to have them see that unfettered, potentially vile side of me. I imagine that if they've come this far, they're willing to be privy to the awfulness as well.
Which they often have been and grateful as I am for that, I have abused it from time to time too. In the process I have been nicer to people who've never really cared for me, and the handful that have, I have tested them over and over again.
I always feel the need to test people who make it halfway across that moat that separates me from the general noise of the world. In the bargain I've let go of grace. I have spat, hissed and pummeled at them with fists, detailing their every failing, poking crudely at their every weakness. To fall like that from your own grace is painful. To step out of yourself and watch yourself become everything you hate, is frightening.
Over the years, after the disappointments and going through the motions, it gives me some solace that I have begun to get better but I'm not nearly as close as I'd like to be.

Grievance

I just finished reading Marguerite Alexander's Grievance and it has been quite a revelation. Apart from its actual plot, politics and characters, the larger strain of the book is grief and how people deal with it. On being dealt a personal blow, some people might spend years walking about with a sense of injury, believing that that particular incident has forever entitled them to no longer be accountable for what they do thereon. If such dastardly fate has been visited upon them, then it's only right that they go through life with more concessions than those who've had it better.

Others spend the rest of their days dealing with it with exemplary forbearance. But dealing with it so consciously that it erodes their naturalness, because every moment is spent on guard, manually and mindfully 'managing' their emotions. They can't relinquish control and ironically have done the exact opposite of what they'd set out to do - let the incident define them.

And then there is, in my personal experience, people who do neither, choosing instead temporarily gratifying and often self-destructive diversions. Still others will ply themselves with self-assurances so hollow, meaningless, even facetious, that you're frightened to think about what will happen when they do eventually crumble.

So what is the right way to deal with something bad that has happened to you? Do you keep running till you find you're all alone? Do you make it you get-out-of-jail card for everything? Or do you just let time take the reins, letting it choose how and when you will finally be free?

You live, you learn

"You have ugly fingers for a girl. Actually for a human being."

"Your brain is ugly."

"Anyway what's your mom's maiden name?"

"D'Silva."

"And your dad's?"

"My dad's not a maiden."

"Sorry."

"You're weird."

"I'm falling for you."

"You're really weird."

"Slut."

"I hate you."


There's stranger relationships to be in than the one you're currently in.

Why?

I stared down at my foot.

A blunt, dry twig had pierced through the skin at the top and now poked out the other side. Bright blood had risen and pooled around its girth where the skin had split. It looked like it should've hurt but it didn't.

I bent down and loosed the offender till it came free, a fascinatingly exact circular hole in its place. The torn film of skin had dissolved in the sanguine mess.

I stood back up to find A's horrified expression: "Are you..." she gulped, "...okay?"

"Yes, are YOU?" I spat back, slightly shocked at myself. Her wet eyes had irritated me more than they should have.

"We've got to get you to a doctor," she continued shakily, completely missing me. "This could turn septic."

"Just ask this guy where we'll find one," I told her, nodding towards the bored looking cashier of the chemist in front of us.

She hurried off and I turned around, hailed a taxi and left.

Here today, gone today

I feel very worried and vexed lately and I blame it on love. Lately it has got me thinking, which if you've been in love, I don't need to tell you is a pretty rare occurrence.
I just think the emotion has become much too fashionable for me. Everyday I feel like it just gets that much more ephemeral, that much more conditional and that much easier to just snap.
I heard of a man who changed his mind overnight, about the woman he was to marry. 'Too screechy', he said and walked away unhurriedly.
Another one, the day he found a woman whose favourite book was his favourite book. "Her favourite book is my favourite book," he cried defensively, "you don't even read books!" And he too was gone.
The woman was certain she'd found the one. Very easy on the eye, loves her parakeet and made her autistic cousin smile. Then the sex happened. His saliva is too cold and he's not thorough, if you know what I mean.
I once decided I wasn't gung ho about a rather nice boy because his jokes were too obvious.
Like I said, love's gotten trendy. It has its own zip code and favourite brand of post-modern poetry and if you don't fit, you don't fit, sorry chappie, go get an upgrade.
D'you think it's the reason we don't hear of those terribly romantic woodcutter-weds-princess style stories anymore? I think we just threw up our hands at some point and let it all go to hell. Sameness is comforting, sameness doesn't need work and when you come home after a 9 hour day + 2 hours of fighting for standing space in the Thane Fast, and he wants to watch cricket and you want to watch Dexter, you're just through.

Oh waily waily waily!

Is anyone else sick of how much I've been whining of late? I know I am. All this slippery emotional BS needs to stop. I am going to go back to being hardcore. If this was five years ago, at this point I'd have been done with sarcasm and moving on to irony already instead of breaking my bangles and wiping my nose with the dog's ear.I was perfectly okay with not being liked/ understood, etc as long as I got to say what I really truly meant. And when I didn't have anything to say I wouldn't. And it was nice. And simple. And cooler. Way cooler.

I read something very simple and straightforward by one of my favourite authors. It was something to this effect. He says that it doesn't matter to the universe whether we live or we die, whether we're good or evil, whether we have runny noses or whether we nicked that eraser way back in 2nd grade when that land whale Jodanna wasn't looking. We invented Mattering. We're the only ones who think we matter, we're the reason we're upset, proud, elitist, euphoric and so on and so forth. The world was here before us, and will continue to keep once we've unwittingly stepped into the street and been leveled by an oil tanker.

Liberating isn't it? Can you imagine a world where we died unto ourselves and therefore really, really lived for the first time? No wars, no heartbreak, no Paulo Coelho. What a beautiful thought.

My rebound relationship

I've realised that every time I'm really happy and occupied in my life, I stop updating this blog.
When I'm happy I have this feeling inside me of being very near the edge - a little too much goodness and I could keel over. It's this breathless, excited rush - I'm grinning all the time, letting all those doubts and niggles fall by the wayside. I am much too busy handling that happy explosion to get my thoughts in one line.
And when things fall apart, I come back here, tail between my legs, slightly sheepish and more than willing to spill my woes.
To come to it actually, I write most when I'm feeling badly which inhabits that cliche I've been shrinking away from years - I do not want to feel creative or expressive only when I'm miserable. Because I like writing and if the atmosphere that best brings that from me is maudlin, then I am doomed to be a very, very lonesome unhappy person indeed.
So to that end, the next time I feel euphoric, this blog is going to be my first stop. This is the year for breaking old cycles after all.

A few thoughts

To begin with, people who tell me I think too much. Usually you are people who don't think nearly enough. I'm carrying your assigned mental load, so instead of bitching about it, be grateful and buy me lots of beer. And you know when it comes to it, I like thinking. I enjoy thinking. I enjoy thinking so much I want to flirt with it, get drunk with it, make some stupid decisions with it, have an unplanned thought baby. So shut the hell up. Go back to your stupid dark little dingy rooms illuminated only by the wan light of your TV/comp/game console and the piddly dialogues you will then parrot with so much ownership, it's really quite frightening. You are usually the sort with precious little regard for consequence, accountability or other people. And you pat yourself on the back because you mistake it for spontaneity and single-mindedness never once realising what an absolute germ it makes you. The good bit is your stubborn unwillingness to think will protect you from your own douchebaggery. I guess it all works out in the end.

I'm thinking of starting a food blog. From a very early age, I knew eating was what I wanted to grow up to do. And chronicling it seems like the next level. I've begun taking pictures of food. Haven't managed enough though, because I have a huge SLR-style camera. Not SLR mind, SLR*style* camera. 'Why Gyuri, that sounds absolutely daft,' you say? Blind adoration will do that to you. All mental faculties shut down when you're smitten enough and you begin to think with your loins. Only the proven WORST state in which to make decisions. I have grown up since then (somewhat). Anyhoo the camera is large and I have retired it temporarily after the third time I got asked if I was with Mid-day. At my own office party. Yeah. Maybe I'll sell it and buy one of those tinier, sleek ones which totally don't suit my personality.

You may have had the mild discomfort of reading the post where I went all Bjork on New Year's. Well I am happy to report that I have a great support system in place, albeit one that will wring the 'sharing' out of you, but once you do that, they'll rally around you, all dead ringers for maternal hens, many online hugs and 'hmms'. Even the guys :D. These are some of the helpful suggestions I received:
- 'You're a strong woman with good looks, talent and a great personality. Are you really going to let someone make you feel this terrible? Think positive, send positive vibes into the universe. Sometimes *cough* takes a bit longer for some, but you will be happy.'
- 'If this is making you feel like shit, you have more problems than I originally thought.'
- 'Positive vibes. Take, listen to AR Rahman."
- 'Life's too short to date every nice guy you meet. And you still haven't made it past the a-holes.'
- 'HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHH I'm sorry but Hhhahahhahahahhahaha he SAID that?! Dude that is awesome! That has to go up in your Hall of Rejection.'
- 'Positive vibes.'
- 'Jesus will never leave you.'
- 'Hello Leftover!!'

If I haven't said this before, I'll say it now. Books saved my life and continue to do so every day. When I am through enduring relentless support (I mean this in the nicest way possible :D), my books let me forget everything. My own life is suspended and the people in my books will walk that stretch of nonthingness for me. I am not one of those people whose books are covered with newspaper and are immaculate. All my books are dog-eared, discoloured and slightly tainted with drool. I have travelled with everyone of them and they're worse for the wear, having done what they were there to do - engulf and uplift the mind.

That's that.


If you have not heard New Slang by The Shins, you must.

Keeping it elementary

Have you noticed how songs today are just clusters of obscure words strung together? I wonder why that is. We don't think in clever puns, far fetched analogies and turns of phrases, no? Or say 'tree' when we mean boy and 'boy' when we mean chair. I don't. It's why I think no matter how much great new music I listen to, I'll never stop going back to the old simple stuff. Seems like back then words were used to express, not hide behind. It's why I like Colin Hay so much. Because it feels like he's conversing honestly and just happened to be strumming his guitar at the time. So here, this is my song.

I like you
I like you
I hear every word that you say
I know every pause that you take
I like it when you fumble
I like it when you stumble
I like it when you pretend I didn't see it.
I like you

Your hair is so nice
I can't help but think about your shampoo
And grey is your colour,
oh how it is your colour!
When you smile at me
Even my intestines feel special
When you forget about me
I stop existing a little.

I sound like a twat
but I like it
And I like you.
You know what the scariest word in love is?
It's not 'over'
It's 'technically'
You'll be happy soon,
light sabres and ice blondes.
I'll be happy soon,
my guitar and a burger.

But right now I like you
And not just technically.




*Okay, yeah so maybe I see why obscure lyrics are preferred :D