Everything's a misnomer. Is it a return-to-innocence day or a three-men-in-a-boat kind of day or a too-dumb-to-refine kind of day I'm trying to communicate? I don't think it matters either way. It's not that I woke up with a sprained back and was tortured into getting an ultrasonography and then tripped over a sleeping dog and fell down splat (and not even three days gone since I tried to sit on the same dog because it looked like a bag), it's not even the prospect of being allergic to mangoes, it's not anything palpable, really. Call it the happiness of everything not fitting into a torpor day. Call it happypanic part two. Call it anything you will but note, the dog doesn't hate me.

What a day for an ego trip. Up at five AM eating blueberry cheesecake and noticing heavy grey clouds hanging outside my window and this hell, yeah moment that translates into 0905 hours walking down Southern Avenue feeling like the Amazon just grew here, then in a bus full of shivering schoolchildren [(with bags) looking like hunchbacks] with raincoats on, it's almost like vindication except I'm not that dramatic or perverse. Oil puddles streaming out like rainbows from under autos, I'm still going hellyeah yeah yeah yeah. Plus frosted windows and empty roads and roaring and roaring and roaring, I can't remember a twenty-third that's been otherwise. As a young and depressed lass I could always be pushed to writing poetry about being a doomed stormchild. Besides there were birthday parties and things, no one came and rescheduling was the biggest embarrassment I could think of, I don't know why. As a sour old biddy, though, I can afford to go well to hell with that and sally forth in chappals and stringy hair. I shall jump in puddles. I shall walk through more rain, please let there be more rain. I shall write a story.

If my grandmother were Japanese I could write one about her telling me tales about cloud gods and cherry blossoms but I don't suppose it's necessary, no, it's raining for me today. In a moment I shall light candles in my room in broad daylight. In another I shall go and join the pigeons sitting rumpled in a row outside my window, only on this side of the glass.

My gym radio keeps playing that ahun ahun song from Love Aaj Kal all the time, it's HORRIBLE. Went to college with the song playing in my head, then it was ahun ahun ahun inside my brain all afternoon with worthier people discussing Modernism and ninjas and things around me, then came home and went to sleep and just woke up and noticed a square patch of crow shit on my foot and I don't know how that happened but everything's still going ahun ahun ahun. Haye bhogobaan, haye bhogobaan, eki ottyachar.



(ahun ahun ahun)

I want to run around hugging Sambit and Rupsha. I hope you know I'm not putting up any more photographs. My Facebook profile lists Jadavpur University as my only activity. I object but I also agree. Whattodo. I want a non-activity day on my birthday. I want to score and get onto a bus and go somewhere. I'll most probably end up at my favourite park (this is one of the things I don't tell anyone, I travel for an hour to get there but I still go once in a while) reading my book. Birthdays are overrated. I wonder how I'd react in general to a tiara-champagne kind of party. I want to do a Bookering post a la Sohini but I read so much trash, I really do. I want to write but I'm getting older and angstier and keep having these what's-the-bloody-point moments. I want to sleep and I want to post a picture I found but this will have to do.

I shall be twenty-one. I don't feel it, all I feel is love :)

asw

Two days to go, I will run out onto the road in the middle of the night and sing sing sing sing sing sing sing sing sing sing

and walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk till it isn't dawn anymore and time for morning tea

and I will cheer cheer cheer cheer cheer cheer cheer for every train (set and match-spied under the bli-ind, couldn't resist) that goes by

through two days and I explode.

I'm spamming my own blog, haha. It's been years since I've heard it but my shuffle played Janis Joplin's cover of Summertime and I've been tripping on it for the past hour, waiting for every inflection, every slur, e-v-e-r-y slur. If I could ever be in love with purring it would be her kind. It's probably my favourite version of the song ever, so much more powerful than the Nina Simone version, or the soundtrackish version that Colin Meloy did some time back. More chilling than the Miles Davis version too, but then with him it's the entire album that does the trick more than the song. The thing about Joplin, I think, is how in spite of the beads and the crazy hair and the hammy smile she could make a song sound like many more variations of itself simultaneously, you feel rather than hear her voice break and it's suddenly so much more than just a song. Uncluttered, stripped down, painful. That's more than a gift. Explains a lot, but surprise surprise, I'm unthwartable today and the living's so darn easy I could turn into a leech and still be happy.

I've been told blaug's looking all khadilike. Kaimra is dusty. Ipaud is dead. Cellphoun is bloated and puffy and hanging on through sheer obstinacy. Most of the instruments I own, mechanical or electronic, will someday rise up and attack me when I'm asleep. It's bound to happen. Neuroses that are championship winners almost, like stupid disturbing dreams, like sudden convictions about someone outside my room at three in the morning, like telling the mother she is to blame for suggesting it must be a bad stomach.

Tagged by VelocityGirl

“This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog’s content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.”

Wah.

Some rules of the Game:

a) Show off your honesty(and modesty) by thanking the person who gave you the award and link to their post. (Thank you Sahana, may your tribe increase.)

b) List 10 honest things about yourself. Cheating makes you lame, so just play along, all you taggees.

c) Select 7 other bloggers you think deserve this award and pass it on to them.

d) Notify said bloggers about the award and invite them to be the honest ones next.

-----------------

1) imho, sitaphal kulfi trumps everything else in the icecream bracket most of the time. This is because I like how uncomplicated it looks, it's very misleading. Also, it tastes like a smoother version of rabri.

2) I either live in extreme squalor or extreme cleanliness. I like cleaning but I have to notice the dirt first, which takes some time because I'm usually noticing dirt elsewhere =)

3) I cut my nails obsessively. I can't stand them getting that dead-layer white crescent.

4) I faze out of conversations more often than people know.

5) At one point of time, I loved Linkin Park.

6) If someone offered to pay me to get a boobjob or something, I'd probably accept.

7) I don't like the way Dylan sings or sounds. I don't mind the songs as such.

8) I'm scared of riding my bicycle.

9) I'm incredibly selfish about sharing things I love, especially music or poetry, you never know when it'll become a status. I believe in the hide-your-love-away deal, I'm that petty. I don't do this with books though.

10) I eliminated at least five points about myself while writing this. Honesty ek farce hai.


Tagging Sroyon, Roshni, Sugar Magnolia, Sherry Wasandi, Ahona, Anty and Rorschach, plus whoever wants to steal this.

Once I got through Everything is Illuminated I kept trying to build up a Book of Antecedents in my head. Or a book of something else, a book of remembrances in any case, and then it struck me that I don't remember her much anymore.

The pleasantest memory I have is based entirely on peripheral vision, lying on a mattress being ordered to take an afternoon nap, having my head thumped with all the anticipation of not having a bothersome kid around for a few hours. Flump flump. Stroke flump. I'm trying, can't you see I'm trying? I close my eyes till everything forms that strange shape when you're seeing through slits, your nose a slight bump, and then the rest of the world. It's probably because my nose is more of a bump than other noses, but beyond the bump is a hand, a brown hand with gold bangles on it, and you can tell it was once a beautiful hand. I never thought her beautiful or even once-beautiful but the hand has blue-green veins standing up all over it, fluid mountain ranges that you can jiggle around with a finger. Which is what I did, pushing and nudging every vein till sleep came every afternoon, looking for knots and intersections and branches and things, trying to make them meet, and it's creepy how some things remind me of those veins still, really dry Maggi and centipedes and Buddhist knots and paint coming out of baby-sized paint tubes. Of course I don't think I'm eating veins when I'm eating Maggi, that's just sick, but it happens sometimes. Just a passing thought, but that is all there is and that is the nicest thing I remember.

I noticed something similar happening with my hands, they're not beautiful or anything, just hands, but when I'm older and wrinkled I will have gnarly veins rising out of the wrinkles too. It's ok, I'll sleep easier.

Since I'm not posting all that much now and probably won't be for a bit, I was thinking, if you're a lurker maybe you could say hello and leave a song or link behind. You definitely could.

Spent the past two hours talking to Cleverbot. Reaffirmed my belief in internet therapy (such deepness, such profundity, sigh, etc) and of course my head's saying NANANA BUT YOU'RE A BOT all the time but I'm having this conversation about Asimov and peanuts and robot sex and roti-tarka and all of it makes sense. You can even make it write haikus with you.


User: Wow, you're clever. Really clever.

Cleverbot: *sneezes very quietly*



Agenda: if you speak to it only in Hindi and speak to it for long enough, is it possible that a sizeable amount of cleverbot users will gradually understand (and perhaps take to using) rude Hindi phrases?

So salty and so upfront you flare your nostrils and unbutton as many buttons as it takes to realise that more often than not, saltiness comes of being a mountain shaved down to hillside shaped into a rock, essentially mineral in any case.