Today I am nothing at all because it is a Sunday. On Sundays I cease to exist and every Sunday is a diary entry going lorem ipsum and so on till it is just a test, a text that is a test of the text that is to follow, this is how seven days usually go by. Alternatively, if you follow my timekeeping tactic that is best called the Snow White theory, some days I am Happy and some days I am Grumpy and some days I am Sleepy, but in all permutations and combinations, it doesn't do to follow a set schedule ever. On Sundays I usually am lorem ipsum plus Doc. The glasses go on and I grow a beard and sit and read all day, and eat, of course I eat.

This is ridiculous.

I have spent an entire week wearing socks at home, and it shows in the posts. Major literary influences. Haha.

It is an incredibly sad thing that of all the dreams I have had in this life, the one that persists is that of the cottage. I have these other, more intense dreams, like the ones where I catch trains to remote corners of the country for a living, or sample suspicious-looking food in a strange land, wondering whether I have time for a puppet show in the evening before I take a boat to, oh, somewhere else. Those are the kind of dreams that linger and gnaw till I know I must find some way of getting to the person I see living it up in them. The cottage is something else altogether, an old sock lying underneath my consciousness for ages. It has always been there and I don't have the heart to get rid of it now, perhaps because I know that somewhere in the end it is where I am meant to be. It's a calamitous thought at times, the fact that I'm studying for a degree and dreaming of bigger, grander things, and acting out award acceptance speeches while in the shower, all in order to build a perfect little cottage in the mountains with a fireplace and a never-ending library and a paved pathway lined with rhododendron, and live in it till I'm hungering to run away again.

Sometimes it seems I shall spend my entire life loving things intensely for a while and then abandon them for newer things. It's the most reassuring thing ever, barring maybe bread-and-jam, which is the kind of love you can carry with you to your pyre.

In keeping with Sambit's posts on things he loves, I've decided to write a general happy post, mostly because I think I need it. My feet hurt. My feet hurt so much I think I might have either juvenile arthritis or a deeper, more horrifying malady, that of making bad footwear choices. Or maybe it's just a week spent in the most insipid way possible, I don't know. Either way I want to hammer a huge nail into the wall slowly and insistently, that's how bad it is.

But that wasn't the point at all. I'm such a whiner sometimes I think I'll get NEEDY tattooed on my forehead. Gah.

So. I love the smell of lemon, and of the season's first cauliflowers as they fry on a flame. I love that one particular twang of a guitar right in the middle of a song which turns it into something I will look all over the internet for. I love, love, love watching colour around me in a way that scares me sometimes, I get royally ticked off if things don't look like they're the exact colour they were meant to be.

I love raw guavas and I love the things used to decorate public buses. Also cabs. Images or statues of gods, right in front of the driver, with flashing lights going red-blue-green-purple in that hypnotic way, it's therapy like no other.

I especially love socks and underwear with cartoon characters all over them. And the slow way in which ground sandalwood paste dries up.

I love writing, but I can't seem to do much of it nowadays.

I love the fact that this post would have had different loves on it had I started writing it ten minutes before, or ten minutes after I actually did. Physics, existence, the human brain, whatever, I increasingly think the only way I can be happy is to work for a nerd channel on television. Or NatGeo. But that is another parallel fantasy altogether.

Five epiphanies off my shuffle this morning:

1. Free Ride: Nick Drake
2. The Trapeze Swinger: Iron and Wine
3. We Will Become Silhouettes: The Postal Service
4. Hard to Concentrate: The Red Hot Chili Peppers
5. Tourist: Athlete

Why this is important is because it's today and it's raining and I'm going to spend another half an hour sitting on the floor with the curtains drawn. There is a very good chance I will get up and dance around in striped socks, give it another seven minutes. Sometimes I think I shall die of this euphoria but there is always solemnity around when you don't want it to be, like a black hole at the end of a tunnel all lit up. Another seven minutes and I shall be goofy as I want to before I get down to crossing streets and watching where I walk in case I'm stepping on a pool of spit again. And in case I didn't mention it, tralala.

Were it possible, I would acquire a sharp set of canines and a white moustache and bite all the people I don't like. I think Dracula has it easy. Real easy. To fly and to crawl and to disappear in puffs of smoke, it seems the kind of life worth having. You own an empty castle in Romania filled with antiques and libraries and tapestries and things, and get to live with wolves and bite people. If there's a higher power he would let other people be this way too, let everyone turn into vampires. Dracula has it so easy it's frustrating.

Bone tired day and I'd like to be slathering lotion onto my feet and massaging them till they stop hurting, but one must read film theory instead. Life as an enlightened intellectual is hard. Even getting new glasses doesn't ease the burden.

Today I hate time limits, existentialism, and toilet pots. In exactly that order.

Sometimes I like acting stupid just to see how far I can push it. Exactly like the times when I'm a little bored, I lie to someone in the way where I can feel the words w-h-o-p-p-e-r flying about my head. I tell them something completely ridiculous, like I've worked as a film extra, and then zoom in to see if they can tell. It delights me to push people more than rules, as far as I can, just to see if there is a retaliation. But, but, somehow in the most bittersweet manner imagineable, they do things that make me feel like I should fall at their feet and bake them cheesecakes. Just a general observation.

It's like sitting on the floor at home, a music shuffle determinedly throwing up song after song from the Juno soundtrack. Just when you're in the kind of mood where you wonder why you can't remember movies with bloodcurdling, ominous organ music in them on your p2p outings, Juno it is. And there's nothing you can do. It is inevitabl and inexorabl and more than a little like chocolatl. Life works on you till you grin for it and go, emo face? I speet on emo face.

I think I'll paint baskets of fresh fruit.

There is something I love about those funny dangling things that hang from windowgrills in certain houses, like indicators of a relaxed, stand-and-stare kind of life. It just strikes me as the best concept in the world to have a swirly thing doing its swirly thing in your room and yes, I wrote this post just to see how this sentence looks written down.

No matter what you say, happiness is a warm jalebi on a rainy morning, a weak sun shining in through rows of wet clothes hung out to dry.