On Mysteries That I'm Too Scared To Solve.

Why does my father have a cd in his drawer labelled Pintuda and Bubbles?

'Twas a good morning yesterday because of cloudy sky and perfect tea and psychic shuffle, don't you love it when that happens? Good morning yesterday because of neck pain being only just about discernible, and good morning because of good breakfast and lazy day and so on and so forth. But that was yesterday.

I love this city, but this city's killing me.


Get miles away.

Come to think of it, today's a good morning too, song discoveries always turn the tide of mood and so on and so forth. Good morning.

Sunday afternoon fights tire me.

The household help seems to know more about science than I do; nothing else ties up with why she'd tell me to close the windows during a thunderstorm. My argument was that in the event that lightning struck the glass I'd have to deal with sharp shards heading straight for my face, but it was waved away with disdain because, apparently, the lightning in all likelihood would come into the room, stay there, electrocute everything in its way and then leave. Or so I figured from what she was saying. Minatidi has a voice that defies human voices - it is a screech when it is a whisper - and a stream of thought that defies human thought, at its most coherent it's a babble. If I'm lucky it goes up one rung and becomes a rant. If she's agitated it becomes a fit of hysterics.

Anyway, my point is, I told her to shut it and please leave because she was clouding my astral (or something of the sort), but turns out she might've been right. Wikipedia is annoyingly accomodative of every theory about the universe, but then I'm daft enough to look things up there.



Ball Lightning definitely explains everything.

That's not to say I believe in it.

Which is to say, I should listen to Minati di.

I should also dust all my old Tell-Me-Whys and read them.

Goes to show I'm getting old.

It has come to pass that I have been talked to, and scared about, my future (or lack thereof), and therefore I have had to give an entire morning up in searching. For prospects. For ideas. For inspiration.

Having done this I made up my mind to either a) open a cottage industry or b) join an obscure expedition to Africa and live with the people there and drink out of ostrich eggs. It will happen. A straw hut or two with a lot of dust everywhere should be just the right thing for me. Turns out I need to have fancy degrees to do both a) and b), but I have decided to be a Pioneer and build a Glorious Career on my own, even if an Erasmus Mundus evades me. Even if I have to eventually report for The Telegraph and kill myself out of mortification. Even if I have to die a thousand deaths in order to eventually reach Iceland. I shall do it and spend my retirement baking cakes in the Himalayas.

But first I shall kill my father for playing Kaifi Azmi this morning and putting me in the Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi mode that ghazals - and Urdu poetry in general - bring with them. What a waste of a Sunday morning; the rain right now doesn't even come close to comparing with the waste that it was. Tchah.

Past Midnight.

Yeh tamanna hai ki azaad-e-tamanna hi rahoon.

As a birthday present I get my computer and internet connection back after weeks of silent tantrums. This should be a sign that I don't get birthday cakes and bags of Eclairs to distribute around in school any more, but it's not like I had the most perfect birthdays ever. Waterlogged streets, apologetic parents, incessant rain, the works. Budday parties never really worked, contrary to the photographs I have of them; there was always the necessity of scouting around for a dry day, so in keeping with that, whether tomorrow is dry or not, I shall celebrate. I shall wear what I want to wear without worrying about whether it will rain and make my bra visible through my shirt, I shall not attend class if I don't feel like it (nerd alert, yes, this actually bothers my conscience a lot), and I shall stay out and sing on the streets and hug strangers if necessary because, BECAUSE, for once, I shall celebrate my birthday on my birth day.

It never does to let the excitement go. Even if you're becoming an aunty.

Ok, Sudden Discovery.

THIS IS THE EXACT KIND OF MOUSTACHE I'VE ALWAYS WANTED.

It's even orange.

This is where I write everyday as a sort of redisciplining, trying to salvage what I remember of spewing out words without turning them into an organised blogpost, like some annoyingly cheerful article with a beginning and an end. See, I'm doing the whole introduction-to-a-post's-subject thing already. What a monster I've become.

Today there was a girl at college wearing a Depeche Mode t-shirt with no idea of who or what Depeche Mode was. It saddened me greatly, as did a sudden revelation that I need to exercise because I am now only barely thirty years away from menopause. Scintillating.

And now I don't even feel like finishing this, I think I'll go watch House.

The bell just rang and my grandfather knew who'd be waiting outside in a flash because of the time. He was sitting on the sofa and he said, "oh, it's Santosh" in the way one would announce the homecoming of a useless family member. Santosh the Iron Man is a streetsmart midget, a true-blue coolio with a moustache and a general air of defiance, and I know I'm labelling him and everything, but I can't think why he doesn't drive an auto in his spare time. Maybe I don't like him all that much anymore because I have realised my grandfather's been bonding with him all this while under our very noses - they talk to each other with the easy camaraderie you'd see in a man with his favourite shopkeeper. Or so I'd like to believe. It's not like I don't want my grandfather to make friends (what a horrible person I sound like) but I suddenly feel negligent, and there can only be one root cause and effect as far as the entire thing is concerned.

How pathetic, how needy, really, to be jealous of the pressman or ironman or whatever else the term is, because he suddenly knows more about your grandfather's joint ache. How strange to be so possessive about daadu, the world could go to hell for all I care.

Deep down inside I'm really scared it's guilt.

Haha, I just wrote a post about the man I love most in the world and made it sound all cranky.

If Mithunda is weed, Rajnikanth is LSD. That is all there is to it.
:D

University now is a sudden startled gaggle of unknown faces. Too many people around. Too many people around. On the flipside, of course, is the fact that the jheel looks nice and ripply when there's a breeze blowing, the rain makes all of campus fuzzier and prettier, and there is that fresh new shade of green everywhere that makes you want to, oh I don't know, go into nature-lover mode or something. Anyway. There are new people trying to find surreptitious corners to smoke up in and Worldview is a mela and Milonda's hiked up prices to the point where I'm considering carrying tiffin, yes, actual teepheen to college everyday. For one can't not eat, can one.

As a secondie now nothing scares or astonishes me anymore, apart from turning twenty, which is a different ballgame altogether. Twenty rhymes with aunty, oh the ignominy.

This has been a very diary entryish post, I know, but I'm feeling strangely chatty today.

Chatty rhymes with patty.

How come horror movies don't have toilet sequences? Fresh from a nightmare in the middle of the night, it is the most frightening thing in the world if you have a bursting bladder and can't bring yourself to walk out into a dark corridor to use the bathroom. And once you're in the bathroom after what seems like two light years, it seems the easiest thing in the world for pale hands to crawl up the pan while you're sitting on it. They could grab you in a clammy, smelly, vice-like grip, and then reach for the flush and suck you in with them, and no one would ever know, but it would be ghosts nevertheless. Or monsters. Or dead people.

If one takes for granted the fact that ghosts glide around elegantly and send you to your death in a mysterious, gruesome manner, one could also consider an undignified death, a bubbling toilet-flushing death. I mean, it's not like it's the ghosts that are made to look silly.

I am so, so scared of having to wear adult diapers someday. I shall kill myself at fifty-three. It's a nice age to die in. I shall research the most painless way to die till fifty-three, and on my fifty-third birthday I shall kick my bucket over with mine own two feet. The thought cheers me up immensely. HAH to all the ninnies who read my palm and said my lifeline doesn't ever end.

In other news, I am going to be a Reformed Academic this sem for real. I mean it.

APPLICATION FOR A DRIVING LICENSE

Two birds loved
in a flurry of red feathers
like a burst cannonball,
continuing while I drove over them.

I am a good driver, nothing shocks me.

- Michael Ondaatje

Read this today and it made me laugh out loud, so I decided to create this blog. Okay, that's not really the reason, but I'm done trying to write. No more writing, I want to have some fun. And take the world down with me while I'm at it.

Besides, I just like abandoning older blogs and starting new ones.