the ridiculous age

There is something about going back to the things you wrote when writing was the thing you did. By "something", of course, I mean "something embarrassing". It isn't only that you see the starry-eyed optimism of youth from the cynical-eyed viewpoint of your old age, but it is that you can no longer relate to it. And you can no longer write with the same ease and disregard for typographical errors that you once did.

I used to write emails to strangers on the internet. There are chances I have said this before; I don't think I will bother to check. Why can I not repeat myself on the internet? It isn't as though someone is going to come up to me and say, "Hey, lady, you've been telling that same story for decades and it's getting old." Actually, that would be kind of awesome, because it would mean someone's actually following my blog. This is even more unlikely, because of the number of times I've:

a. changed the name of the blog

b. deleted the blog

c. changed the address of the blog

d. written somewhere else entirely.

So I will return, thoughtlessly, planlessly, grammarlessly - because I'm uncool like that.

just some regular feeling sorry for myself

Today I was on the phone with the ex-boyfriend (the one I thought I was in love with, remember?) and he told me he would be out of town this weekend because he was travelling to Mysore with his girlfriend.

Score!

Who feels like the hugest horse's ass in the country?

decisions!

I have just been over at Allie's and I have realised some very important facts:

1. I was never as funny as I thought I was

2. The first-and-only-boyfriend-who-is-now-ex kept me away from the internet and my blog and that was a bad thing for me to have allowed anyone to do

3. I have forgotten all the html that I once knew

4. Allie is awesome! And inspirational! Also there are real people who still care about language! (I don't know if you still check links, Allie. Chances are that you do because you have comment moderation, so if you are here... Welcome! I was not always as incoherent as my latest posts might make me appear to be. Once upon a time I was prolific, if not very interestingly so. Also you are awesome.)

I have also made some resolutions, viz:

1. No more zynga games

2. A return to the blog! That means the first blog and no making new ones just because I want to re-invent myself. That is not allowed.

3. Re-learn html and make the blog look like I've actually put some effort into it, for God's sake.

4. No whining about lack of blog-friends. They may never come, but whining will help nobody.

5. No more falling for jerks and making them the centre of my life! I AM SERIOUS T YOU HEAR ME.

These are my resolutions.

I had better stick to them, or else, etc.

hello!

The odd thing is that it takes a very large irritant (for example, in the shape of my sister) to actually get me blogging again.

Things have been relatively good in my life lately - I have a new job (which I enjoy and I'm good at), I have supplementary sources of income (which I also enjoy and am good at), the boyfriend and I are on a "break", but I'm pretty sure I'm breaking up with him in the end unless something drastic happens to change my mind.

What is getting slightly closer to unbearable is the situation at home. The fact that so many people who know me in real life read this blog should be a deterrent to my outpourings, but "frankly my dear," and the rest of it.

"Even now I'm bearing with your short temper."

It seems to be harder to live with a twenty-year-old than to live with a teenager. Why is this? Because there's virtually no difference between her two weeks ago and her now except for what she'll be filling in the "age" column of paperwork, is why.

The question of privacy rears its head again so I'm going to stop now.

g'day.

I will write again when I want to.

women's days

I have been working three weeks without a holiday, and yet I have found the time to visit India Gate at midnight and eat meetha paan while boys with accents played hotel California on out-of-tune acoustic guitars nearby and great shiny lights lit shiny construction sites; and I have found the time to take walks through the market during Tuesday haat with flatmates and drink bitter carrot juice at roadside stalls and be overcharged by fruitsellers; and I have found the time to be a Shoulder to people who told me and told me and then told me they felt better because they'd told me; and I have found the time to watch Slumdog Millionaire on somebody's laptop on a bed with people i had known for less than a week; and I have found the time to split a meal four ways with strangers when I ordered vegetarian and the others did not, and the time to complain to other strangers about it.

And today and tonight I met old and new geeks I would be a groupie for; and made hypocritical conversations on the bejewelled sofa of my landlady; and wandered the streets alone in the dark with clenched fists afraid that someone would step out of the shadows and I would be stuck in a strange city with nobody to turn to; and I called and called the one person whom I promised I would not, because I knew he would be the Shoulder I needed when I needed, and I needed him.

I am tired and sleep-deprived and overworked and underpaid and all I'm thinking is that I miss the one I love.
What does it mean to be a woman?

And I have to speculate that God himself
Did make us into corresponding shapes like
Puzzle pieces from the clay
True, it may seem like a stretch, but
Its thoughts like this that catch my troubled
Head when you're away when I am missing you to death

:) Ow.

tired.

I am alone and far away from home and I have gone a week without a whole night of uninterrupted sleep.
The only thing that really bothers me is the amount of money I'm paying to stay in Delhi.

sigh. I just cried a few tears at the unfairness of it all.
Well, and back to work, and work, and another Sunday of work. Isn't my life wonderful?

a domestic mind

I have begun neglecting the T - not in an I don't have time for you now why don't you go play there's a good child sort of way but rather in blanks and absences - the way one is supposed to let go of imaginary friends. I am forgetting what I used to think she was.
I suppose this is good in a small twisted way, because most of the things she thought and felt I find I let myself feel without proxy.

I am I.
It is a new way for me to be: to be me.
Me to be me.

I think perhaps I have always been myself, only - selectively and in bits and pieces; and that is not bad, not bad precisely, just less than healthy. To split myself up into seven blogs speaks not so much of a desire for order and control (which it is, you know, mostly it is. the question is not "why do i categorize", but "how do i choose to categorize", and the answer to that tells much) as of a need to feel all I feel in parts; in manageable doses.
(worlds collide. i know half a dozen people i love who will know what that means. isn't a sally shared a splendid thing?)

I am happy again. Happy in that painful-feeling-in-the-chest feeling-like-floating sort of way. Not all the time, and not as much as I have felt before, but the recognition acknowledges it, and it is what it is.
And this time I am happy because I made myself happy.
There! What an admission, to be sure. :)

working in nightclothes!

Dear Ones!
And of course by "Ones", i mean "People who no longer read my blog".
I have returned!
No, really.

The T has spent the better part of this year in a moping haze brought on by THE SAD TRAGEDIES OF LOVE, where there is pain for unnecessary reasons which is something I learned from Heyer and when one is the villain both coming and going, but NO MORE! The time has come to realize that loving someone does not make them a better person and jerks are jerks even when they're not really jerks, OR RATHER IN OTHER WORDS a person may be perfectly wonderful in generic terms but a person who treats you like crap deserves to be thought a jerk SPECIFICALLY even if you are the kind of person who tends to think more in generic terms than not. In other words, I love him <3 , but he's a jerk and doesn't deserve me, so there. Meanwhile, I have been sucked into that hideous no-man's land of feeling sorry for myself, and neglecting the poor T sadly until she could no longer remember who she was or where she came from or even to smile for more than a second at the spectacle of being beckoned from one bus to another which was so splendid, my dears.

Have people heard of what happened with the Gmail archiver? Horrors! The T's beginning to almost maybe come around to MJ's paranoid view of Google, and regrets it mightily. She was such a fan! If anyone knows of safer alternatives that are as well-organised, be sure to let T know. Outlook is an unholy mess and not in the same league at all, pah.

Anyway, there is work to be done, but many things remain to be said, so the evening looks like it might be spent trolling blogland telling people I'm alive while SIMULTANEOUSLY postig posts that are proof of the same e.g what happened at the hospital yesterday and about the teapot and the fireplace with the iron grill etc.

:)

this moon

Tonight, the night is wearing her prettiest moon.
Not full, with the werewolf light you could almost read by; nor yet gibbous, with that asymmetrical plumpness that sets one's eyes on edge; nor even Cheshire, with all its connotations and annotations - no, tonight's moon is the moon of December two years ago, of moonlit night rides on the back of strangers' motorcycles, of T on her first real grand adventure.

It is this moon, and this moon, and this moon.


:)
And tomorrow, pictures of fireplaces.

returned

Not to write, but just to stay.

something to look forward to

There is a letter expected. It will arrive in two weeks, yay! Yay!

There is also an email expected, but I'm not so sure about either the two weeks or the yay part. I do have a few other theories about it, though.

It will begin:
Dear (T's full name)
At this point I will get up and take a few turns about the room to try and calm myself. I will do this because my astute mind will have divined that all contents following such an unpropitious beginning will cause nothing but misery and extreme vexation (do I mean vexation?) of spirit.
The letter will then go on to say (and I paraphrase in advance):
You are young and foolish and wrong and I think you should just stay away from me for your own good etc. etc. and die. (well, it might as well say that.)
And then I will say, "Well! I knew it." and feel superior for about a minute before I indulge in a few bouts of stormy weeping and mope around for a few months on top of the months I've been moping and not feel better until perhaps I'm dating four or five gentlemen at a time and being, as the rabbit says, "promiscuous with my affections".

sigh.
I don't like my imagination much.

it never rains etc

Dear God, but I am unhappy. I am stuck (oh, stuck!) in a job that I hate - that I hate mainly because I am expected to do my best for about as much money as the maids in my mother's school make; without any of the benefits e.g. vacations and weekends and the time for music classes spanish classes family friends sleep and the opportunity to take a day off and not be missed.

I am the only person in the office, most of the time. I am secretary and resident computer expert and office gopher and general draftsperson. I am expected to take initiative and learn as much as I possibly can in the time I am here. I am expected to be proactive and aggressive and focussed and determined and ONE-HUNDRED-PERCENT-CAREER-ORIENTED.
And all for the princely sum of INR 6000 a month.

Oh, I don't know. Perhaps money isn't the important thing as long as you're learning something. Then again, what am I learning, exactly? That my boss will cheerfully ask me to spend over a day uploading files to a client's server and then ask me to come in on the weekend because I didn't get any work done that day. It doesn't matter what the damage is to your sleep schedule or your health or your life, as long as the work gets done.
I feel as though I'm back at college, travelling two hours by bus each morning with my stomach in a knot with the fear of proving myself inadequate to doing a good job. And for what?

People tell me to quit; let it go; leave now; T, do the things you're really good at.
(like writing, for example? but you see, the writing let me go four months ago, and i was unwilling to let a profession, however unsuited i was to carry it out, go - for the sake of a talent that seemed to have disappeared...)

If I could quit, I would. but I am afraid of repercussions; of the small small world we live in; of what happens to people with bad reputations.
And so I go in to work each day with the hope that things will get better, and that I will learn something new about the world and my work and my self.

But all I learn is that I am lonely, and unhappy, and so very tired of being here.

right through the heart

You might make a joke on that - something about "rude" and "rued", you know.

*sigh*
poor bread-and-butterfly.

sodium chloride developments

Hot emo-tears!

I miss my support systems so much. Everything hurts.

ta-da!

The T has been teaching herself to read Kannada. (The script, not the language. She still does not know what half the things she reads mean. :( So sad.)
This is just to say that she has arrived! Today she read Kannada BACKWARDS THROUGH THE REARVIEW MIRROR MAY WE HAVE SOME APPLAUSE PLEASE LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.


P.S. There's a half-written post or two in the offing, one of which was started already and might have a publish date earlier than today owing to the reference to the date in the first line. O Kind Readers, if you do exist, do please pretend that I'm not demented and crazy and attention-deficient and in love with inappropriate people; and go reads them old posts after I posts them? ^_^
Thanks ya.

the day i said i was reconciled.

There is lightning in the air and the smell of rain in my face, and all I think of is that there must be poetry somewhere that can slip words around the way I feel. I only wish I knew it. Or could write it.

For even though I spent three hours this morning being lost and footsore in the middle of a wilderness missing lectures I wanted badly to see and consoling myself with the thought of someone I could write letters to again, today was a day that ended in the taste of thunder and an expansion of my heart. And any day that ends well is worth every awful moment you put into it.

People talk too much, sometimes. They talk at you and at you and never stop to taste the shape of the words their audience hears. I wish I knew how to talk of things outside the moments they occupy.
I watched two men use a tree as a makeshift telephone pole because the one servicing their little town lay in two pieces on the ground. I walked three kilometres wishing I weren't; and part of the way I walked barefoot because my feet hurt too much. I built a brick wall while the masons sat on the edge of a well and laughed at me. I sat in a room with ten other people and watched myself be inspired. I sat in a car with strangers and had my handwriting analyzed. I smiled at a baby on the bus, and she turned her face to me and I saw she was blind in one eye. I watched people throw lit balls into the air while Chris Martin sang Sparks into my ears.
Somebody spoke to me today, and suddenly I wanted to write again.

I take every feeling and drip it out from my head - and still I feel only the inadequacy of the words I craft.

Somehow, though, it doesn't feel like the end of the world - even though I would have thought it would.
Why doesn't it?

all my pieces broken

However hard I try to convince myself that I am prepared, in every way, to face eventualities I tell myself I expect, the chances are that I will end up shocked anyway. Or jarred. Disconnected from myself and bereft of my moorings.
The truth is that as much as I hope (or despair) for something, I always put in that little catch, that clause that thinks it may not happen after all. However studiously I prepare myself to be let down by something (usually something I tell myself I shouldn't have trusted in the first place) there is a little part of me that will continue to cling to the hope that the fall will not, in fact, happen, that something will happen to turn things around:
perhaps i'm wrong; perhaps these vain hopes are not so vain; perhaps they are founded not on wishful thinking but on some signs my subconscious picked up that my waking brain didn't; perhaps things will work out in the end; it could happen.

Does it mean optimism or stupidity, that secret hope? Because it is a secret, or at the very least unacknowledged - something I will not admit to until the tears come to prove it was there.
And then I will sigh, and call myself stupid, and I will pretend that I learnt a lesson from the entire experience. Perhaps I do. I just don't seem to remember them later.

(and then i go, and do it all over again)

your word shaker

Once in a while there is a book that you will begin at midnight to help you fall asleep but will stay up until half past three to finish.
The Time Traveller's Wife was one.

The Book Thief is another.


I don't write book reviews, as a general rule. I don't write them for the simple reason that nothing I say can ever quite capture how special a certain book is, or how much it means to me. Nothing I write will come close to capturing the wonder that is stored in those pages that keep me, for a few hours, from thinking of all the stupid things I think of when I worry about the world and all the things in it.
They write it so much better than I can hope to. Why bother talking about it except to say that I am more grateful than I can say?

irony omigosh

I never get things done on time. When I do, it's rarely to my satisfaction. I have problems with time management. It is something I keep planning to wean out of my system, but I haven't figured out a fool-proof method yet. Guilt only gets me through the day before my deadlines.
Meanwhile, I have an unexpected extension and I've taken on a little more work than I had planned previously. Will it work out? Will I do what I'm supposed to?? WILL I KILL THAT FAT TOAD OF AN EVALUATOR????
Stay tuned to find out.

Here is a development - I know a person with no humility.
I don't know why I didn't see it before; I've spent enough time with him before. It was only tonight that I discovered what it was about him that rubbed me the wrong way entirely. And now I look to see all the people I like least - and they are all arrogant. Some of them with more right that others, of course
What strikes me as ironic (is it, Alanis?) is the fact that I might have turned out like that myself... Sometimes I try to remember incidents that might have changed the way I looked at myself and at the world, but I'm rarely successful. I do know that I was once more confident, and more oblivious to others' feelings, than I am now. But how does one weigh what might have been?
Have I gained in empathy what I lost in confidence?
Is it a fair trade?
Am I allowed to ask that question?

Tonight was a night of revelations. I've always known that I never let people in because I was afraid they will hurt me. Tonight I realized that wasn't entirely true: I don't let people in because I fear they will misunderstand me - and in my heart that is the bigger crime.
I don't believe people are capable of making an effort to understand someone who does not show what she needs seen.
I don't trust you to like me; any of you. I don't trust you to understand me.
Do I have so little belief in human intelligence?

Am I really that vain?

quotation

We're all made of quarks. In a lucky few, that's quirks.

:)
I wish I'd said that.