I used to write such a lot of poetry at one time. I wrote about the wind and the sea and the sun and the moon and your moon and my sun and our winds and their seas and whatnot. I read my old notebooks. They're a scream. What is especially startling is that the things in them kept reminding me of a lot of people I know now. Interesting, I can preempt and everything. Now I have the shivers everytime I have to write something that isn't the everyday sameold and things like the sea and the sun when stripped of floridity are infinitely more beautiful but this is a now-thing and will probably be a scream three years later, that is how we live I suppose. I wish I were more histrionic, if I had the ability to throw myself before a bus and flail my arms and declaim about life in general I'd probably be consistently poetic or consistently maudlin, emotional nonetheless. Not that I'm not declaiming about life here, but this is more on the level than, say, writing from an in-front-of-the-bus pov. It might not ever happen but if someday you see me running amok on the road singing a song in dead earnest, take a moment to pause and congratulate me, all right?

Drink before the weather changes. Then what if I want to write an autobiography? And if I start at age one and take three years to write about twenty years and then another year to write about those three years and then six more months to write about that one year, just like Dr. J said, can I resurface in the world of 2015 and pretend I've been in a time-capsule all along?

Will I go mad? Probably not. Will I drink before the weather changes? Probably not.

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.

Itinerary: four hours of How I Met Your Mother for no discernible reason, then phuchkas, then a bottle of Thums Up guzzled idly under the peepal tree outside my building, then two hours on badassoftheweek.com, then despair. Currently, stiff neck and horror at vocabulary wipeout. I could swear I knew more fancy words when I was sixteen. Then again, at sixteen I was convinced I had better use for the world than most people; I was certain I'd study something cool, not be stuck in a nine-to-five job, be thin and famous by twenty-eight, prove my worth by being a one-man woman, the works. The sixteen-year old me would most certainly have received the finger from 2010 me.

So I'm thinking, maybe it's time for MS Paint.

No more loud humming. I'm being erratic even for myself, it's true, what can I say? How long can you pull through waking up and looking for amusement? I'm like that kid in the Gashlycrumb Tinies who died of ennui. Shit, I'm going to die of ennui. Even eating Maggi with bhujia doesn't help. I wasn't born to be contrary and I wasn't meant to choose random ice cream flavours but one can't always eat chocolate. Right now King Lear's depressing the hell out of me, no one will believe that it's my favourite Shakespearean tragedy but it is. Of all kinds of madness it's this form I'm most scared of, the kind where I only have my stupidity to blame. Oh wait, ha ha, opinions. A favourite right now may not even be an option five minutes later, what can I do? I'm not going to die of ennui or contrariness, just vacillation. Say you'll love me whether I'm being erratic or bored or contrary and I'll laugh and shut you out, how's that for a plan of action? Fifty pages to go. I wish the Fool would shut up.

Time to write a story again?

What is IT with everyone trying to take everyone's trip, it's really pissing me off. I want to sleep. I want confidence pills and I want to overdose on them. I want Plastic Beach now, right now. I want to live in a trailer. I've been watching Wonderfalls all over again, two years down the line I can see the flaws but I'm enjoying it. The occasional over-acting, the random shriekiness, the bad hair, I can handle all of it because the entire series is just so rooted in the fact that everyday things are creepier than nightmares, ditto for everyday happenings, it's a philosophy I completely identify with. Like how last week a girl jumped off the sixth floor of Block Four in my complex in a suicide attempt and fell on a car and had to go to hospital, and every one I told this to laughed, first instinct guffaw, almost incredulous but a laugh nevertheless. It happens, you'd think people would check for cars, or whatever you think the funny bit is. So yeah, tiny animal figurines talking to you, happens, why not. I've always hated showpieces so it fits.

The father came home at ten thirty in the morning all annoyed and walking like a zombie, turns out he tore his pants at the bum trying to get out of a cab on the way to work. I realise I'm proud of my parents at all the wrong times, just like I'm really bad at explaining why I find some things very funny. Pencils with rubbers attached at the end, for example. Or Mata Hari, or Jonathan Livingston Seagull, this is where I go away and pretend I've been writing an abstract for a conference or something.

Second Holi-playing chance today, am wondering whether to let it go or not. Second day of bhaang? Can't handle. Third two-hour scrubby bath in two days? Can't handle. Running around on crampy stomach and then stomaching biryani? Can't handle. But then it's homemade biryani after ages. Ma claims we're all secretly Mughal in nature. We like our saffron and we like our mutton and we like small paintings and in an earlier age I'd definitely be an annoying courtier-poet. More avenues open, more cattiness, I'd have had a ball.

My dad's been giving me guilt about dissing his idea to go watch Holi being played in the northeast; I only have his word for it but it's apparently very different and very picturesque and more than a little mindblowing. I had fourteen years of school where I played Holi nine times, that's five Holis gone where we could've been in the northeast. But this is a relatively new travelplan. We played in the para then, kids versus chengras, and it was like fighting a war. Here in the complex it's more Bollywoodish, with gulaal flung in the air and people jumping into the fountain at the end (na na, ota toh Fellini) and feeding each other laddoos. College tops all else in spite of the eggs. But I only have three years of college Holi, two down already, and given that this is one festival that gets me more hyper than Diwali I can't go away now. Even if it's to Arunachal.

The second-hand bookstalls in Gariahat are bittersweet because it always hurts to come across a book you like, someone else didn't think much of giving it away. There are some authors that keep reappearing, though, I located no less than twelve copies of War and Peace. There were a lot of orphaned Dickenses also in addition to the usual thirty-buck pulp. I wanted to buy a bunch of Tarzanses but I was looking for a volume on Milton's poetry instead so I desisted, then I saw a couple of Penguins that I'd read a long time back, tiny pocket classics that came in boxed sets, Kipling's Baa Baa Black Sheep and Herriot's Yorkshire Tales, but I have the Herriot so I kept hoping Gigi would turn up. Nothing happened. No Milton, no Tarzan, nothing. I ended up buying a copy of The Little Prince because it's been a really long time since I owned one, I lost the first copy I had and the second never came back to me after Sonali or Puja or someone else borrowed it. It's Second Unluckiest right after The Catcher in the Rye.

This copy has a dedication inside in blue and green ink that reads,

To
My one 'n' only
Dada
With lots of
Love 'n' hugs -
Koko
Tokai
Puchku
Bujbuj
February 4th 2k2.

Right, so, my point is, at least I lose them. Some people just seem to have strange priorities and yes, this is supposed to be a layered sentence.

I've been listening to a lot of slow jammy jazzy music lately. Tea Leaf Green, Steely Dan, Miles Davis, Erik Truffaz, also Corinne Bailley Rae because her voice is one of the best things you can wake up to on a winter morning. For songs that are so mournful in general the music as a whole never fails at achieving all the non-paranoia and un-nerviness that I want, so there are quilts and blankets and there is the music and there is a happy little feverish blob somewhere in the middle trying to read Greek tragedy. Sometimes I'm inordinately proud of how nerdy I can be because it's all I have till the non-productivity kicks in. I'm fine this year, six days and I can tell I'm fine and that I'm going to be fine. I'm going to be so darn fine that there will be nothing but nauseating finery and fineness all around.

I could do with a copy of On The Road to call my own but I need to watch fussday fussshow Sherlock Holmes this Friday, hence I am a tangle of wool. Come next week I shall jobhunt to the point of slobbering over not nice people, three times over I swear it.

I walked an insane amount today, stupidly and impractically and along this strange route that, now I think of it, makes it look like I was trying to shake someone off my back, but then that isn't it at all. What is it is my nose. Walking on a road, any road, is assuming stranger proportions all the time but nothing, nothing I tell you, nothing beats today. I looked down suddenly and my nose was in the way and then I was fascinated by how it pre-empted every step I was taking, and before I knew it I was at 8B and then home, and home was smelling of baby vomit, which I then found out was Horlicks spilled over the kitchen floor and mopped up inexpertly, and, basically, there is nothing much to write about today.

There's always a place in the sun but sometimes you're under the flyover and there's a kid trying to sell you agarbattis again, you know? These city metaphors will be the death of me.