Random. Structured. Haphazard. All Me.

A Tangled Yarn of Thoughts Being Unravelled…

Recent Posts

  • The Joys of Living Alone

    I am not averse to sharing my living space with another person or other people. I’ve lived in a dorm, as a boarder and lived with my folks till I was an adult and those things really drill it into one’s head about the utter necessity of having your own space for your own shit. I mean, it’s critical!! Especially after a more permanent cohabitation starts with someone and they just leave their things all over the place like goat droppings. It can vex you like nothing else truly can.

    Picture this- a smallish studio space or Praise Be To The Gods Of Personal Space, a loft…a few bean bags or bean bag chairs scattered around the room. A few non-skiddy throw rugs with vivid geometric designs on them. A large white wall designed a la Jackson Pollock viz this-  

    There needs to be an island in the area designated as a kitchen for the cutting and chopping and sleeping is either a sleeping bag or a water-bed in a corner.

    Not a very pseudo boho-chic manner but a messiness that gets into every living space but also one which is just short of a tornado-hit area.

    Because at the end of the day it all boils down to this- my shit is my shit but your shit is just bloody annoying!

  • The Benefits of A Neverafter

    The Benefits of A Neverafter

    That’s right. Not getting your happily-ever after with the one you long and pine for or imagine yourself to be deeply in love with has tremendous ROI.

    Let’s take Romeo&Juliet as an example. Too bad they really haven’t found the Fountain of Youth else Will Shakespeare would have been a very rich bugger indeed, reaping benefits from all the royalty he’d have been getting from this one play he wrote. And it’s not even that a good one mind you. It lacks the depth of a Macbeth, the twists of a Midsummer Night’s Dream or and you don’t really feel the love. I know I don’t.

    I mean take a look at this- 2 teenagers (it could only be teenagers being this impulsive and stubborn) decide that they have a crush on people their families find unsuitable. Families turn into big baddies to keep them apart and teenagers manage to muddle through it till they both end up dead. Yay…have fun making out in the afterlife nerds!

    This tragedy of WS has been made into operas, movies, music videos, reenacted as a play and reread as a book and continues to persist even now. Why? Because a neverafter means the story can persist at least in your own head. A happily everafter means it’s over and done and you have no further role to play in it.

    Everyone who has gone through unrequited “love” or has “loved&lost” will forever be marked with the touch of that “what-if”. They may not moan and groan throughout their lives about it but they’ll wonder and they’ll hark back to that person or the people who “got away”, “could have been” etc etc. When you get the one you wanted, it turns into marriage, babies, mortgages and the story becomes dull at some point for sure. Happiness might still play a part in it but the depths to which your mind can run when it unleashes the potential of the unknown is massive! And I think it’s fun for people, from time to time, to wander off on this particular path.

    Unrequited love has spawned an entire era of work in English Litt from sonnets to prose to modern-day stalkers who have transitioned into very successful serial killers and creeps in the movies. The neverafter leads to illicit forays onto Facebook profiles of people you don’t have access to anymore, while you take in their lives as they pose for selfies or check into some minuscule coffee shop on social media or tweet about the time they last sneezed.

    You don’t always check out the happily ever afters…they got their happy ending and started a predictable new story of their own…where’s the mystery in that?!

    I remember going back again and again to read Love Story. Sad as shit but she died so beautifully on film and the way Oliver contemplated his life post Jenny dying…it was something. A man happy with his life doesn’t have half that appeal!

    We like a little bit of the unknown in our lives. The places we could have gone, the things we should have done, the lives we would have led…it’s a fun exercise on its own and doesn’t hurt anyone. As long as you know you got exactly what you wanted- alive, hale and hearty and not swooning and dying or spouting nonsense from balconies…your very own happily never-again-but-this-is-what-I-like!

    But going back to R&J, ever think what might have happened if they had ended up together?

    Image courtesy- http://transmedialshakespeare.files.wordpress.com/

  • Being An Indo-Anglian

    I am lucky to have friends who make me think and expose me to new lines of thought…invaluable in my book.

    Once such friend from the days of yore no less, shared this article with me recently and it beautifully encapsulates a large part of who I am in life.

    I am a Bengalee by birth. Born in the motherland and lived there for all of 5 months. Thereafter it’s been a nomadic existence, largely spanning the northern and western part of India before the southern part became a permanent fixture almost 14 years ago.

    Married a guy who’s had a solid South-indian small town upbringing; and have a kid who doesn’t embrace either of his cultural or linguistics legacies much and is entirely his own person with the language he prefers to communicate in and the food he chooses to eat and how he wants to live.

    When I was growing up, schools weren’t that much of a head-scratcher for my parents. English medium was a given, co-ed or all girls wasn’t a criterion to be factored in…it just happened if one got enrolled in such a school. What was a preference was a convent school from the standpoints of discipline and learning propah English…it was propah only in terms of syntax and composition, accents in the Indian subcontinent are a whole different ball game and I have never come across a “neutral” accent while I was a student. And what’s fun in being neutral anyhow?

    Anyhoo…fast forward to circa 2014 and Red and I were drawing up lists for our kid’s entry into a proper grade school. I cross referenced distances he would have to travel with tuition fees, school curriculum and also by how the schools fared in the rankings taken up yearly by well-known periodicals and publishing houses.

    Why did I do all this? Well apart from wanting to be comfortable in my mind about making the right decisions for him, I had the freedom to choose and therein lies part of the problem or the “problem of plenty” as my mother is wont to pronounce every now and then as she takes stock of our lives.

    We aren’t rolling in it. We aren’t hard up. We have enough-ish (because when is it really enough after all?). And as a result I get to choose something which will cater to my single-language-speaking, gadget-loving, reptile-obsessed child who needs a good, strong academic foundation without regimentation.

    And on he went to mingle with similar kids for 8 hours a day for the last 3 years…these kids who comprehend their native tongues, or one of their parent’s native tongues but reply solely in English. These kids whose idea of ancient encompasses the cartoons of my childhood which aren’t passe thanks to the trend of retro being chic.

    Comic Cons, speaking accented Hindi or any other Indian language and looking googly-eyed at anyone attempting to speak any other language apart from French or Spanish and you have our Gen-Z’ers. And we mold them into this kind of life by not necessarily insisting on adherence to any specific customs, languages or lifestyles. Theirs is a smorgasbord of experiences that we lay out and have them feast at will.

    And while I don’t regret it; am wistful for the silliness I don’t get to indulge in with my child by speaking to him in my native tongue. I had these hopes of my mother reading to him, the same stories she read to me when I was a child and him experiencing a bit of my life via those similar experiences but that didn’t happen.

    So we did Jack and the Beanstalk. We did Panchatantra with Winnie the Pooh when the animal phase was in full bloom, we did Goldilocks and 3 Little Pigs but didn’t do Vikram-Betaal because he seemed more Geronimo Stilton than Tinkle and Amar Chitra Katha.

    And yet there’s till time. To add more items to the menu. Maybe give him a little nudge when it comes to picking them, the same way I transmit my “eat your vegetables” look at him when choosing his dinner items…but there’s still time and here’s to hoping one day when I speak to him in my native tongue he’ll speak back in the same language instead of nodding at me or saying, “You got it dude!”

  • Burying The Hatchet

    It’s inevitable that when people live together, work together, do stuff…again together, there’ll be occasions when there is acrimony.

    Acrimony can get bumped up into enmity or also a severe case of I-don’t-recognize-your-existence yada yada yada. But in the whole scenario, the one thing that no one quite figures out how to do is burying the hatchet.

    The question now comes- where the heck is it to be buried? In the head of the person you’ve had the falling out with or just in some neutral ground where it doesn’t bother anyone anymore?

    Well till the hatchet is good and ready to be buried, we are ill-fated to carry it around like those unimaginative serial killers, dripping with blood and guts aka our angst and ill-will.

    The hatchet bumps into things, nicking stuff, causing bleeds which are some extremely out there metaphors for saying it causes us harm in turn and growing heavier by degree since the ill-will hasn’t been washed away.

    Laughter is an exceptional antidote for the hatchet. Either at yourself or at the object(s) of your derision. Laughter caused by the prolonging of a situation where even the absence of the provocative stimulus causing bile to surge up in your gut without any occasion for letting it out. Essentially at the futility of things.

    Once the laughter bubbles over, a spot magically appears bearing the words, “bury hatchet here”. And thus it ends.

    Till something or someone causes you to go medieval on their ass and again swing the hatchet.

  • Get Your Placebo Groove On!

    “This is the follow-up post to this one. Both were written a while ago…am currently meandering down nostalgia lane at a less than sedate pace.”

    I tried out a detox routine for a day. I did it all day yesterday and let go of my precious java (the drinkable kinds not the geeky one) as per the norms of the routine. And before I get to my observations on this I want to get on my soapbox for a few sentences and just say that our bodies are precious. We literally aren’t going to get another one. Might as well take care of the one you have or at least love the taste of the grub you put into it if you aren’t going to maintain it in a manner that gets you the most mileage. Because it’s no fun to be an adult and feel like you’re compromising on things on a regular basis especially highly personal things like food. It’s just NO FUN AT ALL!

    Back off the soapbox and down to reality- I can’t lose weight. I can’t diet effectively. I need a whole new infrastructure and logistics around me to exercise in a manner that I want before my body becomes fit again. I have two adorable lumps at home- husband and child. They are lazy, complacent and very loving so me trying to be a hardass falls flat more often than not. The husband can’t be bothered to find stuff-essential stuff, on a regular basis and usually forgets things if I’m not around to marshal it all into place where he can trip over it and therefore remember to take it with him on his way to work.

    The child needs work because he’s a child and doesn’t know a thing about the world. Loosening the reins at this juncture means he grows up to become his father, the less than attractive aspect of him i.e., and more work for me when I’m older and menopausal. Sounds like a recipe for murder at first glance.

    Anyhow, various factors get in the way of my getting into the gym, working out, walking, dancing- whatever! On a regular basis. And while none of those factors are critical, I still haven’t been able to offload them courtesy the lumps I mentioned. So the looking better, feeling better has been taking a hit consistently and my perseverance has eroded over the years. Easier to be an overweight housewife in soft track pants watching tv while I fold laundry or vacuum the couches. Not a very sad or dreary existence. It needs to be done and I’m the one who has to do it. Period.

    I thought trying out a detox might “fix” the problem, as it were. Give me a little edge or boost before I start the actual process of toning, slimming, getting fitter. But I realize that I don’t feel all  that different. More than anything else, the thought of actually doing something and getting off my cellulitey butt had me feeling better. Honestly, my body doesn’t feel so much lighter today than it did before. Whatever minute differences there are, are too slight for me to keep investing this kind of money (not cheap this treatment) on a regular basis.

    But the fact that I tried something out has done more to release endorphins for me than a lot of stuff of late and that’s where the placebo factor comes in. I feel better without having done much to aid an existing condition of sorts. I took something akin to therapy and just the thought of it made me “feel better”.

    We all need some placebos in our lives at times I guess. One less crap to flush out of our systems at the end of the day.

    And what about my chubbiness aka lard? Well I’ve got a nice new playlist that makes me want to dance so I’ll get my jogging shoes on, pop the headphones in, ignore my kid and just walk. Not fast. Not slow but just walk.

    You have to play with the cards you’re dealt. Mine is telling me to take a walk. And dump some dressing (low-fat) onto veggies next time rather than blitz them into a homogeneous mess of a juice that I tell myself is “helping me”. A honey-mustard piece of lettuce never hurt anyone :)

  • Tox Or Detox

    “This was written a goodish while back but I wouldn’t mind taking a walk down that lane again..”

    Apparently a build-up of toxins in one’s systems can lead to a variety of undesirable behavior. I don’t mean murder and mayhem necessarily but it can make you meaner than usual and paint the world a bright shade of jaundice.

    I’ve been grumped for a while now; on and off. Stuff piling up. Normal right? Maybe not. Things fall short of my expectations or go bust altogether. Been on a single parent-like streak for a while too although that’s not at all the situation at home. There’s only so much a woman can take and added to that the in-built hormonal imbalance my gender is infamous for and you have a recipe for sulks, pouts, blues, anger and a general snit like a  3-year-old coming off a sugar high post the Halloween candy getting over!

    Ergo the looking for modes to offload the weird miasma of stagnation and generally not feeling cheery for too long. I found a leaflet in the newspaper about a detox program that didn’t seem too tough and too quacky and actually seemed like something I could do without it taxing my routine entirely.

    20141208_185453 20141208_185503 20141208_185513 20141208_185520 20141208_185523 20141208_185553 20141209_070455 20141209_091328

    So I ended up signing up for a no-solids, only liquids detox plan for a day to test drive it, if you will. Am on my third bottle of a health drink that doesn’t taste half bad but would taste better with more stuff added in. But this apparently will (can) make a difference in my system and my mood. I’m skeptical but hey, what do I know? Am the moody chunky female who’s been cussing more than usual lately :(

  • Broken But Kinda Intact…

    It goes without saying that if I blog when my kid has a cold or sneezes excessively, a post has to be forthcoming when he breaks his wrist.

    The miniature love of my life was zooming away on his cycle when he swerved hard to avoid an oncoming bike and fell on his wrist- neatly breaking 2 bones and causing himself a world of grief.

    And here I must interject with how good it is to live amongst a community of people watching out for each other because while my mind was shooting blanks, a friend told me which hospital to take him to and another one just turned her car right around and took us to the ER and paid for his xrays while we waited for Red to show up. I just had my phone and was keeping MLM company in the backseat with no wallet and essentially no worries barring what his x-ray should end up showing. And I could focus on my kid and his pain because there were people looking out for me. *Thankful to the nth power!!*

    Anyhoo, we reach the ER, confirm the break, put the offspring’s hand in a splint causing him pain beyond what he and I both anticipated and then get back down to getting him settled in with his pain and eventual surgery.

    The surgery went off well, the tears have dried up and we’ve come back home and I’m almost at the point where I can look at this as a rite of passage for a small boy while he’s  growing up. But the rite of passage of being a parent never gets easy. Seeing your kid’s body arch like a bow while he screams in pain is just bloody awful and gets seared into your retina.

    But what’s amazing is how resilient kids are…they can have a cannula stuck in their arm, cringing at each and every minute move which no doubt sends pain running up and down their bodies but they will still be smiling through their tears once cartoons are on.

    They will eventually recover enough to ask for extra tv time, or iPad time or for the extra chocolate you wouldn’t normally give them and they will do it in that soft, sad, little lost child tone with those puppy dog eyes that beseech you. Man! kids can play us but good!

    Amen to that!

  • Joys Of Being A Sourpuss

    Joys Of Being A Sourpuss

    Another reblog from another time…

    Been a long time between posts. I wanted to write but people and things kept cutting into my bloggy brainwaves and once they were gone, they sulked till I came grovelling to get them back.

    Cognitions can be a bitch that way. You remember things you would much rather not; not because they are unpleasant but you don’t want to be stuck replaying the same happy shit from 5 years ago in your head. You want new happy shit! You also want, need, desperately crave your own bloody, friggin’ space!

    I finally know which way my life is going. I’m a bag lady in disguise as an urban woman. I’m cranky, I want to wander about when I feel like it. I don’t particularly want to feed pigeons and smell of stray cats but I want the freedom to sit on a park bench and watch life go by from time to time.

    This particular epiphany occurred a few days ago when I was being talked at (not talked to mind you) from all directions. I hate being talked at. I don’t talk at people unless I’m pissed off at them or I want to show my derision, disdain or other words starting with “d” having negative connotations. And having people talk at you in your own home gets you riled.

    It turns out I was in the wrong. I often am but admitting it is tougher as I grow older because as a kid you think when you’re an adult you can be as wrong as you want; unless that means you chopped off someones’ toes.

    I’ve been a mean grouch for the past few months. Moments of tranquility have been less because I didn’t know where to look but damn being a grouch can be fun.

    People give meanies a wide berth. It’s almost like you’re a monster truck everyone else makes way for. You speak only as much as you want to and grunt your assent/ dissent the rest of the times.

    You sink in silences which people can misinterpret as gloom or ire but actually your mind is taking delicious trips with glorious technicolor images and yeah, you down more quantity of alcohol than usual. The alcohol isn’t a must-do but if some worms its way into the whole thing so why fight it, eh?

    Another benefit of being grumpy is that you can bitch, moan and gripe to your heart’s content and NEVER have people question your need to do so. You’re a grump. Ergo you must exercise that grumpy bone.

    You can start with injustices of your kindergarten days when someone got the last lollipop to when you had your last yeast infection and the world’s your oyster!

    Try to bitch without being a grouch and people come in droves and ask you what’s wrong. They start with the obvious- PMS and move into break-ups, fights, bad hair day, bloating, cramps, unending issues with the mother, or something to do with the person you share your life with.

    Seldom does one hit the nail on the head- you *want* to bitch and spread bitchiness the same way you do happiness when you’re happy. When the world seems brighter and you want to pull people into your little rainbow&unicorn universe…wait what?? Sounds like a bad hangover post too much girly time. Scratch that scenario.

    But grouches have it good. They can shoot from the hip, get excused for their behavior and can tell it as it is, be labelled moody and yet speak their mind.

    That’s 1-up from the rest of us yuppies who’re conforming with our smiles and hellos and air kisses. Think about it.

    Signing Off,

    XOXO (not!)

  • Lock’ed’ and Losin’ It!

    We had a very robust English literature syllabus while I was in school. Pope, Dylan Thomas, Matthew Arnold, Sassoon, Rupert Brooke et al.

    I specially remember Pope because just reading the title of his famous long poem ‘The Rape Of The Lock’, had us all giggling like silly school girls (which we were) and also because we had totally misunderstood which lock the poem referred to.

    Now, 20+ years later I know. Oh, HOW I KNOW!

    The relationship that women have with their hair is quite different from the one men have with theirs. While in both cases having a good head of hair induces happiness and a good amount of vanity together, we women cannot get away with being bald. There! I’ve said it. It’s a man’s prerogative to be bald. Its something he can feel bad about but it’s not something people will look askance at. But a women having bald patches, or just not having enough hair to cover her scalp brings about reaction ranging from, “Oh you poor dear! Is it chemo?” to “Damn! these cult-types give me the creeps.”

    A bald woman, unless gorgeous in her baldness quite like Persis Khambatta will have a TOUGH time getting laid; among all the other angst in store for her. It’s inconceivable for people to think of a bald woman without there being a less than extraordinary reason for it.

    Male pattern baldness? Hell, teenagers know about it these days; with alopecia having become a common word in all householders’ vocabulary. But baldness doth not behoove a lady be. Erm…you get the drift.

    I lost a lot of hair while I was pregnant. But a gained a cute kid so it was a sacrifice I was ok with. Thankfully he doesn’t show signs of being too light-headed trichologically speaking. And while he’s not headed into McDreamy land either, he’s just fine.

    So when I started losing hair yet again, often just at the thought of combing, I began to get very truly and thoroughly sad.

    The worst of it was when the offspring once came up to me with a clump of my hair that he’d rescued from somewhere saying I’d dropped it and if I wanted it or not.

    I’d have drunk myself into a silly stupor had I the requisite booze around. But I don’t so I’ll just focus on thinking thick-haired thoughts and try to not comb my hair as long as it’s possible. Who knows? Maybe dreds are my thing.

    *fingers crossed*

  • A Bloody Mary To End The Day

    It’s been a while since I had a drink. A good one. A nicely made one. When I needed it. When I wanted it. When I longed for it. Wait…are we still talking about the same thing?

    Some days are long. Some days are LOOOOONG. Everything seems upside down. Or downside up. And not many highs present themselves. The lows seem to abound and crowd the highs or rather the mezzos out of the picture.

    On those days a well-made Bloody Mary hits the spot. It might be a pick-me up especially the tomato juice bit, for a hangover but sometimes, at the end of the day…it is just perfection!

    I called the Significant Other home early today and it’s one of those rare occasions when he was able to oblige. Handed over the responsibility of the fruit-of-his-loins to him and made myself a cold one in the kitchen and for once had celery on hand to make it JUST RIGHT!

    A splash of vodka goes a decent distance when you’re tired. Whiskey takes things into another realm altogether. But the beauty of vodka is that it keeps things light and yet allows you to just float away if you so choose to.

    So here I am…watching the Big Brat feed the Small Brat his dinner and make funny faces while doing so. Am blogging and playing songs in my head because my shift is kinda over for the day. Or so I like to think. Another drink will make me believe it for sure.

    Salut!