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

Until I find you

2008 ended with a loud thunderous silence. Something inside me died then. That presence inside you that holds on to faith by the skin of its teeth even when you're sure it has no reason to. That presence died. In 2009 I proceeded to destroy myself completely. 365 days spent kicking myself in the ribs - it was like that beach cliche, little hopeful kid painstakingly builds a sandcastle and a bigger brutish chap comes along and cruelly kicks it down. That was me and myself all of 2009.

I forged on or atleast I thought I did. I didn't believe in anything or anyone and if I managed to give the impression that I did, it was because I started to make an exercise of suspending disbelief. 'If I can't believe it, atleast I won't disbelieve it until proven otherwise.' What that meant was I was holding my breath, waiting for something to go wrong. Which ofcourse it did because I looked at everything as potential hurt and so I willed it to become that. I did that. Noone else did that, I did it.

By the end of 2009, I was struggling. I was barely there anymore. It was someone I didn't recognise. It was someone I'd set out not to be. The worst night came, dramatically enough, last night. The last night of the year. I had been hanging on to someone for dear life and realised he was already gone. And I slumped to the floor. Those many tears shouldn't be biologically possible. This time there was no silence, there was only screaming. "Love me love ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE" I begged at the darkness. I begged... of myself.

This was new. I thought I was crying for him but I wasn't. I hadn't realised up until then how badly I missed me, how much I wanted to feel like a living breathing emotional person again. I don't remember how I got to bed, when I changed into my nightclothes and snuggled upto my dog. But that's how I found myself this morning.

And so here I am, nothingness except a thin pinhole of hope, suddenly and very very slowly making the darkness lighter. I had banana milkshake this morning. And it was wonderful.

Happy New Year. I hope you find your truest self too.

Waiting in line

When I was really young, my idea of perfect love was straight out of the pages of my aunt’s meticulous collection of Mill & Boon books. A man (and oh what a man he was) and a woman met in imperfect circumstances and waded through their disdain for each other inspite of their initial attraction. Eventually they fell so deeply in love that they were alright with losing those parts of themselves that had been most vital to their earlier identities. Yes there were the bits where they compromised on self respect and addressed each others’ genitals quite a lot more florally than feels right - but those were the bits you appreciated because you hadn’t yet been introduced to the internet and its vast reserves of porn.

Years later, when I had graduated to more important literature (and had internet access), I too scoffed along with everyone else at ‘those crappy softcore porn books’ but somewhere I knew it was still the kind of romance I longed for. Then I met a man (and oh what a man he was), disdain inspite of attraction happened, and eventually…well I fell in love. I have to believe he did too, just not like in the Harlequin romances.That was the first time I felt faith falter.

I realised that love is not as easy as just waking up from a coma after 2 years to find yourself in the arms of the woman who put you there in the first place. Or taking over a multinational conglomerate only to fall hard for your archrival’s disreputable lawyer. Love takes time, and effort and bus tickets and cold dinners and clipped conversations and did you pay the bill because I didn’t and if we have to bathe in icy water one more time I’m leaving you.

That was when I met another man. Make that boy, I met a boy. There wasn’t initial disdain or attraction. But the conversations were refreshing, the jokes original, the comfort unbelievable. And I wondered if those M&B writers weren’t being too single-minded – uneventful romances can be just as exhilarating. Here there were embarrassingly floral descriptions too. Only not out of passion, or even lust. But because we both knew a lot of different words. In the end, they were the death of us, especially since he was saying all those words to someone else too. And faith took a tumble good and proper.

I gave up on even tidy romances. I started taking solace in being left to my own devices because while they made for ennui sometimes, they never hurt. Then I met another boy. Our conversations were stilted, just like me he was smarting from his previous relationships, our interests couldn’t be more diverse and he was…vegetarian. Still we co-existed, enjoyed each others' unfamiliarity and I’ll say it: if this were indeed a Mills & Boon, I’d want to very badly skip to the unholy parts. But it never caught and I don’t know why. With each passing day, I saw our potential for being the love of each others’ lives dim.

And so here I am once more. Come full circle you might say. Wondering if Harlequin romances do happen and if I just need to wait it out. On the other hand, and not to put too fine a point on it, my aunt did die a spinster.

Woulda coulda shoulda

Soon I will start my new job and I did a test run today, to see how long it'd take me to get to it. Considering I live outside Mumbai city, I should have known that it would take me either long or if there wasn't too much traffic, long.

I didn't mind it too much because I had my headphones on, my book slid comfortingly from one side to the other in my bag and watching the world go by on mute does really have it's own very special charm. In times like these I find I experience a silence that has very little to do with the absence of sound. It's a stillness that feels almost unbearable and sometimes quite frightening to experience. Especially because it lets me be absent from what is happening around me and invariably is the time the mind uses to say 'Okay you're here, shall we do some cleaning today? You really mustn't put it off any longer.'

Today I thought about regret. About the countless times I've heard people say 'if I had done things differently, I wouldn't be here today.' Heck, I've said it a few times and I thought today, well what's so special about here? Am I just afraid to let my mind even imagine the way my life might have played itself out had I done the things I most wish I had?

Years ago an easy decision I didn't make could have saved somebody's life.
Years ago just a little kindness might have made a man feel less wretched.
Years ago a little self forgiveness might have saved the best friendship I've ever known and never had again.

'Tch, why look back at what you cannot change?' chides the part of me that hates these unnerving processes. But to me these regrets aren't a way of berating myself any longer. They're my way of, on some really non-human level, letting those people know I still think about them, that they alone can allow me to visit those parts of myself that I can't stand to consider for more than a few minutes at a time. It's my way of letting them know I am becoming the person they had needed me to be all those times.