A little less conversation

I had decided I would hold off blogging until CAT was over, but now using THAT as a benchmark seems quite meaningless. I guess it's not for nothing they say when some doors close, some others do open, if only a teeny tiny crack. Then it becomes your business to pry it open with all you've got. Life has been a succession of worry creases lately, I don't even know what to feel panicky about anymore, there are so many contenders. And just when I should be trying to cut costs, I seem to be dragging in as many complications as I possibly can to further entangle an already mussed up status quo. I wish I woke one night from a deep dream of peace and saw, within the moonlight in my room, an angel writing in a book of gold, and when asked what he wrote, answered "The names of those who know their minds" and lo! my name led the rest! :s

Home was a lovely place when I went last, all freshly painted and birds twittering all over the place, greedily collecting booty lying dead from the previous day's rain. One little guy actually came right up to my leg simply because there was a particularly juicy insect lying somewhere there. Talk about cheek! I counted 6 varieties of them in my front yard itself, littoe, yellow breasted ones with big tummies, pitch black lookers, bulbuls, the huge thing that looks like a blown up sparrow and that I call partridge because that's how I pictured partridges when I encountered them in books, the bright blue and green, long beaked fellow who Mr. Marathe categorically said was not a kingfisher, the mynah, a dove making her nest, and the ubiquitous sparrow pairs. I cheeped at them and one of them actually cheeped back! The animal kingdom has been rather benevolent to me lately. The hostel cat who's always running away scared stopped and stared hard the last time I mewed at him/her. (I'm just going to stick with him because it's easier that way, Mick being a guy dog and all...) Then he decided there was prudence in running, but just could take his eyes off me, he was so fasicnated by whatever I was saying with my mewing! (Or so I would like to think) Then he did run, but soon stuck his head out of a bush and riveted two huge green eyes at me, simply enchanted by the fact that something so ungainly looking couls speak his language. The first time this happened, in Chennai, it made my day. Made my confidence in winningover the animal kingdom shoot up, and the next times over the years, with my baaing at the goats and my whining to interest the dogs only vindicated that confidence. It is so amazingly gratifying when they turn their attention to you and keep it there for more than a few seconds. It was only after coming here that that confidence has taken a huge blow. Most animals I extend a friendly hand to either run away or stalk off disdainfully. Maybe I've lost my touch for it.

I did nothing but sleep at home, blissful in the knowledge that there was no need for power naps at home. Except there was, I had to wash up and pray and help mom with the diyas, so I was woken up, but quite apologetically. Everytime I light those things and see them flickernig in the night, they fascinate me. It's inconceivable how something that looks like an ordinary candle flame at close quarters suddenly turns into a brilliant star if you're just a few yards away. And makes a perfectly ordinary house with a perfectly ordinary wall look like a festive banquet hall. My dog was driven comepletely crazy by the 'bombs' as usual, he's eight years old and still bawls like a baby when one of them goes off too close to our house. We couldn't stand the infernal noise he was making inside the house so we had to let him out and distribute it among the neighbours and hope they wouldn't think bad things about us. I tried talking mom into bundling him up and taking him to Delhi on a plane and giving my Dad a huge surprise/OMGWhatamigoingtodonow-feel, but she was skeptical. Didn't want to disturb dad while he was swamped with work. Bah. What's work when compared to a perfectly good shocker?

I tried to remember when I starting giving a hoot about festivals and the like. It was a depressing line of thought, one that made me wonder what other colourful things I'd crossed out of my life. Just regurgitating it now brings a few to mind. Not good. The capacity for levity is a strange thing- you have it and you want to lose it and be the intense, focussed person you always admired, you feel like you're losing it and you want it back in its full vivacious glory. Realized I haven't spend one Diwali in college and felt rather sad, like I was already leaving, and thinking about what could've been in one of those supremely deflating moments that come and go in a flash but don't really go anywhere. How can someone think within thinking within thinking? How can I think how I'd be thinking about this very same thing ten years later while I am thinking about it now? Or maybe it isn't simulatneous but so close to each other that they seem that way. It's like the world exists because I can think about it. If I couldn't, it would be a phantasm other people talked and theorized about. Like God. God doesn't exist for me because I can't think about a concept that has neither form, nor character. And till I can form concrete thoughts woven around it, it doesn't exist for me.

And now I've to go about tellin a bunch of universities what my purpose is in doing what something that I'm supposed to want to do and I haven't the slightest clue what that is. "You should first figure WHAT it is that you want to do." everyone says patronizingly. Really? You don't say?? The idea would never have crossed my mind! : Really, it is quiet annoying when you're at your bluest and the best people can come up with is stuff you've told yourself a zillion times and feel like they've done you the greatest favour in the world by imparting their wisdom to you. And I feel bad when people start talking about things that obviously are close to their heart, and want my opinion on them, but I've left them behind me long ago. I've obsessed, been concerned, agitated, angry, had a hundred thoughts about them, and they just don't mean much to me anymore. I don't have any new impressions to share and I'm loth to rehashing old ones beyond a certain point. What can I expect with half my brain occupied with thoughts how I can get better at division and multiplication in this old age, and the other half wondering whether I should be worrying about it at all. God. I'm an acad spaz. I want out. I want to go to Tahiti or one of those oft-quoted islands and lie on the beach and blink langorously at the palm leaves above me and not know what date it is. I don't think. I've done one thing that can qualify as langorous in the past month. There is very little left to talk about that doesn't involve either countries or people bickering, people going on a shopping trip and dying over the new clothes, a horrible bully who considers itself the saviour of a world it came into yesterday or the thousand inanities that every person has to go through in her life to catch a flicker of one novel ray of pure radiance. Less conversation and a whole lot more muck. But hey, on the bright side... er... there are chocolates. And the fervent hope that Paisley saved Rosemary in Time. In the words of the amazingly insightful Ogden Nash, "purity is obscurity".

Diversions...

You can't not want to work because then how would work to earn enough money so that you won't have to work? *So, so true*

I find it very difficult to enthuse
Over the current news.
Just when you think that at least the outlook is so black that it can grow no blacker, it worsens,
And that is why I do not like the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons. *Giggle*

Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.

Oh dear God.