This week, now.

I am studying for my upcoming Java final exam with such sincerity that I feel like I am thirteen again. So earnest, so innocent. The grown up, cynical me has given up (its called depressive realism, in psychological terms). But my soul is a little girl- the starry-eyed optimist (I am always told that I am one, maybe because I grin too much-despite having such big teeth) And she is instructing the grown-up me to keep at it.

In about thirty-six hours from now the future will have come and gone.

I treat this blog as a space where I come to dump all the excessive emotions that make everything underneath the epidermis a homogeneous mixture, where you cannot make out the lungs from muscles from blood capillaries from bones. Its a sludge, thick, murky, sticky and very difficult to take off of you. And, I am the victim. (applause!) My aim for each day is to physically tire myself out so much that I am left with no energy, or will, to get into a fight in my mind, with myself.

Its 2:22 am Monday night, I was trying to (finally) (hopefully) get some sleep and get my body clock running on Pacific Time, but of-course it has a mind of its own. No one listens to me, not my head, not my heart, not my body. Like they are individually and collectively smarter than I am. (That's not making much sense)

I'm going nowhere with this. (ugh!) Isn't everything supposed to have a conclusion. If you took the class on theories of built environment with me you'd say, "No, not necessarily" , and you'd be right (Well, at least in the world of thinkers and theorists *that* is how the universe is constructed, and de-constructed..... and we end it with a food session!) With Java, I have to sacrifice the wings and be hard coded into reality. I don't know what I like more, its bits of both I think.

I hope for my next quarter I will ease out on the masochism. I really should like myself more.

And I will definitely make my next post more reader friendly. My last post, (which was very unsympathetic to the readers, my apologies) got me some peculiar reactions. I got hug emails, advice emails, unexpected adjectives, a whole bunch of things. One of my closest friends does not like my blog, and I send him links everytime I write something. Maybe I should like others more too!

I turn twenty nine

Its my birthday in India! and will be my birthday in the US in eight hours one minute for the time zone where I live. I don't know why I am writing this post. I am sitting in my rented room, feeling so alone at this very moment. There's only the wall clock ticking away seconds from this day and the sound of my fingertips hitting the keys to write the words my mind is dictating. A lot of these keys have similar sounds, and a lot of them have very distinct sounds. I've noticed this on other occasions too, but the sounds seem to be filling the silence around me more completely right now. 


I wish to hide myself from the love that will come my way, especially tomorrow. I feel so unworthy of it. I've felt on several occasions that I am not doing a great job growing older. There's come to be a strange (almost alien, for where I come from) desire to keep myself as the starting point of all that concerns me. What I want, how I want it, comes first. (When did I become so selfish, I wasn't taught to live this way)  Everything else comes second, third, fourth, or not at all. 


I just read an email from my father. I never knew Arial font could hold so much affection. Actually I do, Pa regularly writes to me. He fleetingly mentions a few moments from my childhood, they are such small insignificant stories, but he has talked about them with so much pride it just makes me question if I deserve so much unconditional love. 


I think I will call him right now.  

I come and go

I come and go and come and go, brimming with a million ideas about the million things I want to write. I start, and lose steam within seconds. Who exactly am I writing for? I would give anything to hear my heart say, "for me!" Oh well!

My journal looks forlorn, I haven't inked any of its beautiful white pages in my un-architect-like script, and un-grown-up thoughts, for a significant while now. It's an 11-years old's notebook, with sparkles on the cover, the size that can fit into a little purse, the kind that should be used to preserve beautiful leaves and memories within its pages.

Instead it holds, on occasions that I've felt generous enough to write, the accounts of my daily life. I'd vowed to myself that I will not be as heartless as to pour my heart bleedings into it and I've kept my promise. There aren't any emotional outbursts to hide myself from (and look back at, years later, amused at their innocence)

I like my account unworthy life. Lately I've been trying too hard to make it look golden, lately it has looked too grey to me. I should just let it be. Just be.

The battle gets bigger everyday. The magnitude that's coming into focus now makes me so aware of being terribly out-scaled. Of-course the battle gets bigger everyday. "Surrender!! You fool!" "You've no idea how huge this is!"

Perhaps I want to know. And so I will fight. Don't worry about me being alone, I have a fantastic support system to tap into whenever it gets too dark to see. And I'm buoyed enough to breathe-in oxygen for whatever's next.

here again!

I cannot exactly tell when I started to write to be read. I was reading my posts a few days ago and it hit me hard, that I had given-in to the pressure of being a sunflower on my blog. Perhaps it is another reason why I have stopped coming here as often as I did at one point in time (I had decided to write at least one post each week, managed it in January, reasoned with myself that two posts weren't too bad for February, it was a short month after all, and that March will see more of me here.)


Well.


I am also behind on my (ahem!) daily journal entries by a couple of weeks now. Everyday that I miss (or deliberately chicken out of writing) takes me further away from the hopes of ever being able to catch up. (My enthusiasm falls behind quickly when I am unable to do something in the exact manner in which I idealize it.) I cannot boast of an enviable success rate.


There has been a dichotomy of sorts in my approach to keeping a blog. I had started with the desire to keep everyone I know abreast with everything thats happening with me (I abandoned it, it was just too much work and I already had enough on my plate with my studies and living on my own for the first time in twenty something years.) I decided to use it to clear my head (it was all hush-hush, no one knew, I had it hidden from showing up in search results.) It proved quite effective, especially when even a visit to the UW art gallery didn't help.


I changed my blog settings on just an impulse one day. I am not exactly sure how I feel about it. While its not a life altering event by any measure, I am unable to use this as a release anymore. Perhaps the medium was wrong to begin with. (In my defense, since Architecture happened, my fingers can hold a pencil and draw more effectively than write; and with the fraction of my day spent in-front of my computer, it just seemed like an easy thing to do.)


Perhaps, perhaps not.


I don't like being the subject of photographs, am slightly uncomfortable with the attention they garner (I am hoping the innocence with which I have penned this will be appreciated, and not perceived as a 'hence-proved' of my conceit.) No one likes bad pictures, and its especially difficult for women to handle their unflattering documentation. I am very proud of the moment when I stopped buckling under the pressure of looking nice in photos.


I will *really* *really* welcome a similar breakthrough in my writing.  

something. something nebulous.

Today, I was just ambling around in my mind (whats new?), and my brain drew a picture for me explaining how it functions. It was strange to see it graphically, but it made sense when I added the missing bits. I wanted to write it down in words.(I am not promising that this will make a lot of sense.)


One of my resolutions for the new year was to document each day before my goodnights; all the significant (or not) things that I feel would be nice to look back at, stuff like the food I eat or something I notice....just about anything I my fingers want to write in one page or more of a square notebook. The insides of my head feel scrubbed clean post spending some time outside of me (when I am writing about the day). 


Lately, the entries have become sporadic and I have begun to bunch a couple of days up and write about them in a single go. Its a terrible terrible thing to do, because I miss a lot of details that I would have otherwise written, and most of my entries begin thus, 'I have no recollection of what happened that day (so I will make some stuff up)....' 


This defeats the purpose of keeping a journal. But I know me, and I know me very well. I find it impossible to stick to a good habit and require jet propellant thrust to get me off my procrastinating butt. 


What flashed in front of my eyes was this; after I have poured my mind out, the next time I am binging on thoughts (its involuntary, a sand-clock that is programed to flip over every-time the lower chamber fills up) (This is beginning to not make sense already) 


So, the next time when thoughts knock around in me, they scribble themselves on a fresh page (in my head), with a sharp pencil (again in my head). Eventually,with thought overload, the scribble becomes illegible, the pencil becomes blunt, and my head feels heavier. Thought strings get entangled and lose legibility, and are pretty much ready to burst out of me. Usually at such moments I am absolutely willing to trade my brain for a new, tame one. The pattern is recurring, with no set time limit for any aspect of this phenomenon. 


The point is,(I think), that it will be nice if I get into the habit of regular clean-ups of my mind. I think I owe it to myself. I am very heartless while dealing with me, and this can perhaps be my first step towards being less cruel. I could also try and accomplish this with better accountability of my time, but I cannot claim to have lately done anything about this more than a couple of half hearted attempts. I keep telling myself that I will be back to being me once I engage myself in something productive (like a job, for instance). 


I don't have a concluding statement for this post. 

I could think of nothing intelligent to say.

"So, is it true that there are cows just walking about on Indian streets and people are starving?" 


I wasn't sure if I had heard the question right. Or if an earlier part of the conversation had clues to what I was asked. I am slow by a slight when talking to the locals, because I still find myself acutely aware of the assumptions I have to deal with before I can speak to the actual person, then too with an impregnable coat of 'American sensibilities'. I have so far managed to befriend *one* American who doesn't mind my saying like it is, and who tells me like it is. 


I have let go of the expectation of hearing my name said correctly in firangland. Everyone here calls me She-leee-nee, when I am actually Shaa-li-ni. (Really, how difficult is that?!) But then again, its so similar in spelling to most of the Italian food (specifically pasta) that I cannot blame them. I don't notice it anymore either. This one guy who I had met on a bus ride back home from school had said my name exactly right in his first attempt. Ironically, he was an Italian (and amused at how happy hearing my name said correctly had made me)


I should really stick to what I was saying at the beginning of this post. So, a couple of days ago, I was at the volunteer thing and watching this deft  plumber person at his job (Skilled crafts like plumbing and electrical work earns you ~100$ an hour, I should have got my MS in some such skill. At least I would be making money then) I was asking him some questions, like the gauge of the copper pipe being installed, the material he was using for insulation etc etc (I can be quite nerdy) (And I like that about me)


It was his turn to ask me questions then, and he asked me what I did and where I came from. And then he asked me if it was true that there were people starving in India and there were cows on the street.  I swear I blanked out. This was perhaps the most original question I had been asked. EVER. 


So I started mumbling something incoherent in reply, starting from "umm...hmm....(confused look, brain processing a LOT of information)...umm". "Well, most Indians are vegetarians, and most of those who aren't certainly don't eat beef. Cows are considered sacred in our scriptures, actually the bull is a mode of transportation used by one of our Gods. And usually the cows on the streets are someone's property. So you can't just take them home and cook them."


Could I have given a stupider reply? I think not. I guess I cannot blame the Western world for their assumptions about  the East. I can still not think of an 'intelligent' reply, something that wouldn't have made me (and Indians in general) look like a moron. 


Apologies to the world. And to fellow Indians. 

not been here for a while..

February comes to a close in less than two weeks and I have not had the chance to drain my mind. Well, actually I have been coming here, staring at my edit posts list (I had started a few quite enthusiastically but lost steam soon after, so I put them of hold till my next brain wave. Which never came and I lost the line of thought.) So while deleting a couple of them today, I was swept in a wave of guilt, and annoyed with my incapacity at pinning down *all* my mind wanderings with words.

I am writing without a specific agenda . Its strange because usually I nudge myself in the direction that is attracting my thought molecules. Since I can be quite a scatterbrain, I find it impossible to go back to revise a post, or save it for later.

I have spent most of my childhood and adolescence being completely opaque to the idea of fitness and well being, mostly working on the assumption that my metabolism will take care (after all, that is what it is for, right?). And Yoga (the yoga bit still holds very true). I was never introduced to the idea of playing a sport for the sheer joy of it. I have dabbled with basketball and badminton, but have never known the rush of playing. ( I dislike myself for it.) Things only got worse after graduation and when I got into my job. Work was all I did and work life was the only life I had. For three years. I probably aged by a decade in that time span.

One day, for no apparent reason, I went for a jog. It was my first time, and it took me a while to teach myself how to run without ruining my knees or ankles. I have been more or less regular about it since. Running makes me happy and my sense of self worth takes quite a leap. =)

Sensitivity to my health and psyche has seen a considerable improvement over time, it started with acknowledging the idea that as you get older, the body has to work more at keeping fit. I decided to help myself, did some reading on Ayurved, fitness and food (still do it with reasonable regularity) Indian cooking is so versatile and healthy that an average person like me needn't necessarily put a lot of thought to whether the body is getting the nutrients it needs. But I am working on slight improvisations for more benefits, adding more raw foods to my diet, specifically fruits. I am more aware of what I eat and find myself calculating the amount of work I should do to burn my food intake.

I want to keep a written record of what I eat, but have still not got down to doing it. Perhaps that will prove my paranoia on the subject. Yesterday, in a phone conversation with my dad, I mentioned to him that I have resolved to eat one fruit in every meal. (This was one of my several 100-watt light bulbs for my health.) I have quite a list, (like) consume two liters of water per day, eat a very light dinner at around seven in the evening. I haven't yet been able to achieve these targets completely, but I try.

The silence on the other end of the phone told me that my father had reconciled to the fact that his twenty eight year old (still unmarried) daughter has finally lost her marbles. Not that she had many to begin with, but she should have dearly held onto the ones she had.

a conversation, an interesting one.

I have been unemployed since I finished my Masters five months ago. Somehow I am not a big enough person to find solace in other's misery. I have been advised on several occasions to look at people who are worse off than me, people who have real responsibilities they are accountable for, and feel happy about not being in that situation. I do not comprehend this argument, and I don't think it is very humane in any case. Each one of us has our very own, customized-to-fit-personal-grievances hell, don't we?

Anyway, this is to remember a delightful conversation from just a few days ago. Conversations with strangers are usually so pleasant, perhaps because they are seldom tainted with our expectations from them, or from ourselves with respect to them.

I volunteer my time at the Habitat for Humanity, they are building houses in Oakland. I go there for several reasons, from the practical 'to-keep-my-VISA-intact' to 'I'm afraid-I-will-lose-my-sanity-if-I-don't-do-anything-with-the-time-I-have-at-hand' to 'I-like-to-work-with-my-hands'. I rely on public transportation system to take me there and bring me home, its a twenty five minute BART ride followed by a fifteen minute bus ride and ending with a quarter mile walk to the site of work.

This particular day, I was doing carpentry, not making furniture, rather straightening walls for the next level of work, putting the floor above in place. The residential construction industry in America is mostly wood based, as far as I have seen, and with a very few exceptions to this rule. I think it has to do with the seismic zones, the climate and overall simplicity of building with wood. The systems are strong and durable and I have a *lot* to learn about them, still.

Its very intensive labor, and by the time I am heading home, I am famished and ready to rest my limbs. And happy about my day being well spent. I was waiting for bus no. 45 heading to Coliseum. I boarded it and said a cheerful hello to the driver. This is how the conversation went,

Me: "Hello!" (paying fare, $2, into the machine)

Driver: "No I don't go to Fruitvale"

Me: "I want to get to the Bart Station"

Driver (handing me a transfer ticket)

Me (nodding a 'no' with my head saying I don't want it.)

Driver : "NOW you don't want a transfer, why did you ask for it in the first place"

Me: "I am sorry, I think you are mistaken. I most certainly did not."

Driver: "Of course you did, you first asked me if I was going to Fruitvale and then asked me for a transfer."

Me (very very confused): "Do you mean today? For this bus ride?"

Driver (exasperated): "Are you telling me you didn't say these things?"

Me (still very confused): "Yeah I didn't, all I said was a hello when I entered the bus"

Driver (still exasperated) : "I don't believe this, you think I am messing with you?"

Me (having taken a seat, confused, and also slightly alarmed, not sure of the sanity of this person) : "Yes I think you are joking with me"

Driver (laughing): "You bet I am!!!"

Me (grinning) : "And so I wondered!"

This dialogue doesn't sound a fraction of how interesting it was. There was more, but I am unable to translate its goofiness. I was genuinely confused and also felt slightly hallucinated in the head.

The driver later told me that he had noticed me boarding the bus on several occasions, and struck a conversation with me ( a perfectly sane one this time around). It was a delightful 15 minute journey and another seven minutes of talking after having reached the final stop (which was my destination). When I bought a BART ticket for the train ride and was waiting at the platform, he waved a good bye at me from his window. I was strangely elated.

The world is so full of good people! =) I am one of them!

endorphines

A friend told me that most of my posts freak him out about how mentally imbalanced I can sound with my thoughts coming from depths deeper than the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench of the Pacific Ocean. (This is not verbatim really, but I guess you get the idea). I must be crazy to be thrilled at such an observation. =) So the yellow me is writing today!

Everytime I chance at a happy interaction that gets added to my "People are unbelievably nice to me (I wonder why)" list, I relive moments that are already on that list, and my faith in all the good that dwells in the heart of people becomes good as new again. The faith has always been (I am convent educated), but moves into the corners of my mind if I don't keep a tab on it. So I wanted to list them out for me.

This one time, when I was in the 11th grade and struggling with the 'what next' questions about my career, I was walking to my tutorial classes for Chemistry ( I still don't understand organic chemistry) and I had to go cross a very busy street to get there.

The Indian Democracy has made it a free for all. On the roads (as almost everywhere else) you can pretty much do as you please. As a driver, its totally up to you if you want to wait for pedestrians to get across a road or you want to scare them out of their wits by not slowing down at all. Not that the pedestrians feel the need to use a crossing even if they see one; its always the shortest distance across to get to the other side, irrespective of the volume of traffic. *This is only my humble opinion.* (I would like to see someone trying this in firang-land).

Coming back to what I was saying, there was this busy road that I needed to cross to reach my destination, and quite unlike anyone around me, I was waiting for the traffic to lighten before I attempted it. A white maruti car stopped (it took me a while to comprehend that someone behind the wheels had actually stopped to let me go). I did, and when I was on the other side of the road, I turned around to thank him. He was still there (many people had jumped at the chance of safely crossing that road). I thanked him with a little smile, and he smiled and nodded back.

I don't remember the face of this man, but I remember exactly the smile he returned. It was a smiled smile.

That was a moment of euphoria right there. It was like the colors of the universe had washed themselves afresh. A bag of endorphines had burst itself free in my head and I was at peace with my existence again. For a while.

That is a lot of word to use for such a small incident. But, I could write more about it!

I cannot live like this.

I have been gifted with a brain that I have lofty expectations from. For starters, I expect it to hold far more than what is fair, really.

I tend to lock things up into little boxes and chuck them into what I would have ideally liked to be a black hole in my mind. But, to my utter disappointment and dismay, the black hole in actually a malfunctioning blender, it keeps throwing things into my face from time to time.

Back in 1999, I took my first Art of Living course (completely my father's idea) (Like everyone else, I was also trying to get the answers to life's mysteries single handedly). I was perhaps the youngest in that bunch of really old, consistently-unhappy-with-life people, and therefore not exactly one of them. But I was there anyway.

For one of the group exercises, we were required to narrate our life stories for the benefit of our immediate audience. Poor me had all but only 17 years of experience at living life (and would therefore be expected to have the shortest life story)

BUT it was I who spoke for the longest, poured my heart out, and cried profusely.

My narration was totally about the fears I faced after my Nana's demise. I was in 8th grade when we lost him. I started believing fervently that I had to pray every night before going off to sleep to keep everyone I knew away from any kind of harm. I also distinctly remember that the days when I would miss out on this, I would be paralyzed with fear, expecting to hear bad news.

This insanity did not stay with me for long (Several other kinds on insanity have creeped in since, but this one in particular soon ended)

What was totally surprising to me about this incident was that I had no idea I had this in me, it was only after I had talked about it (and it wasn't a conscious decision to do so) that I could acknowledge its existence.

The malfunctioning blender spilled its guts again today. And made a fine mess.

I am afraid I cant live like this. I also pray for better confrontation skills. And a break from me.

a brand new year

Another year.

When I was a very little girl and still in the process of grasping the concept of time (I just knew my numbers till ten and I couldn't wrap my head around the idea that sixty seconds make a minute and sixty minutes make an hour. Therefore, when my mother would tell me to wait for a minute before she could attend to my tantrum and I was to wait for counts to ten done six times before I could call for her again) ( I still didn't get it then, but at least I was distracted enough by all the math my brain was required to do without a pencil)

I lost the original intention of writing this. (Funny how consistently I am prone to distraction, and have been so for as long as I can remember, maybe I should put it in my list of new year resolutions to get some improvement done in this aspect of my being)

Continuing the little girl story, when I was a little girl, years seemed so far apart, there was a WHOLE year of school to go to, two term exams, one final exam, one summer break, one pooja break, one winter break and several weekends. Time was a mammoth, a giant that was so proportioned that it could only move slowly, very slowly, from one day to the next, till three hundred and sixty five significant days had been counted before the next one arrived.

In a conversation on this topic, a wise man told me that humans comprehend things in relative terms. A six hour journey will seem terribly agonizing to a four year old, while people my age will see it as a relatively short drive. To be more lucid ( at least attempt it), a period of six hours is a bigger fraction of a four year old's age and will seem like a longer time to him than to a grown up. (The math would be thus : 6/[{(4X365)+1}x24] , the same thing , in case of a 28 year old like me would be 6/[{(365*28)+ 7}x24], the results are roughly, 0.00017 and 0.000024) I am not sure if I have been able to exactly explain what I wanted to, but the whole idea is that since it is all relative is appears different. (!)

Gosh! I wish I could put it better!

In a previous mulling on similar lines I imagined life to be a pinwheel, and focus on its rotation speed. From a third person perspective, I pictured it as starting slowly but surely and gaining acceleration with every spin till the life reaches its end. Strangely, I never did give much thought to the pivot in the pinwheel, and now when I am thinking about it as I write this post, I would like to call it, stereotypically, things that bind you to things around you. And having written that, it seems pretty inconsequential in the current argument.

I am not sure what was the original intention of this post. perhaps I wanted to tell myself that time is on the run, it always has been, and I have lived long enough in total apathy to the fact that moments are evanescent. That I should spend more time doing things I love and counting my blessings than I do kicking myself for not being as perfect as I would like to be. I am not talking about acceptance and a consequent complacence, I am talking about acceptance and taking charge and making change. The desire to be a better version of me.

Here's hoping!