Crazy work day

Crazy crazy day at work today. The second crazy is because I thought I could function normally with just 2 hours of sleep. Turns out I can, just that it puts me in a foul mood and I survive the day only by pulling long faces and longer silences; smiling and cheering up only when I talk to students. Had three classes today and I came out of each feeling I could have done better. The first week is madness because I am still settling into ‘holidays are over’ mood. The second week is suicidal because I am a lazy ass and won’t get to preparing until the last minute. 

Nothing helps procrastination like procrastinating. 

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I was attacked by squirrels today

I am sitting at my desk minding my own sweet business like a good person and the next thing I know, Sherin starts screaming like a madwoman. She had her finger pointed at me and was jumping in her chair. I looked down and found one squirrel trying to work its way up my thigh and felt another one move past my neck and head and in no time it had hopped onto the table and was looking for its next target. I jumped and made tortured noises and then ran out with such force, I must have scared the bloody squirrels which were skittering all around the floor. One ran past all the legs and sought refuge behind one of the many shelves. I lost track of the other one because I was busy cursing the world and muttering nonsense under my breath.

To top it all, one colleague smiles away to glory and gives me a much needed historical tour on how back home she used to feed nuts to squirrels and how apparently they don’t bite. Another said that they bite. Another said that if they bite, you could get rabies at which point I left the room with Sherin. Soon as we left the damn zoo, 2 more squirrels leaped out at us from under a table. We ran across the corridor like mad things and decided to leave the planet for good.

Even now as I have bravely made my way back to the department and have reclaimed my chair, checked – double checked for all furry creatures, I have only one thing to say – Squirrels are NOT cute. They are vicious creatures who think that every person, sitting or standing and minding their own business, is a tree so they will climb on top of you and try to kill you.

Bah!

Amélie

Amelie brings back some fond memories from a time that I don’t really want to remember. My high school was a series of disaster after disaster, embarrassment after embarrassment so I’m not particularly thrilled that some bits of happy events that occurred around this time also forcibly bring back a sudden tightening around the chest area and oodles of goofy smiles.

Even so, Amelie marks a huge coming of age moment for me. Until then, I never really watched movies. I sat through them waiting for a moment to take home, and usually these moments were romantic oscillations between the hero and heroine. I would later relive these moments with superb memory. With Amelie I felt compelled to pay attention; to details, to colours, and because it was my first foreign language movie, to dialogues and subtitles.

Late afternoons during holidays at home were woozy. Everybody would be asleep and I would have just woken up, hungry and aimlessly walking. On one such woozy afternoon I caught Amelie when I was lazily flipping through TV channels. I am an impatient buffoon when it comes to waiting to watch something. So if I stop flipping through channels and decide to abandon the remote control I must have been crazy hooked. And because this decision of pressing the next button has to be taken in under a second, I was surprised at what made me stop.

The movie had already started and Amelie was looking for Dominique Bredoteau. The name baffled me, the colours thrilled me and the language confused me. And so I spent the rest of the afternoon feeling all these things at once and I found myself enjoying a movie in a language I had never heard before and despite the fact that it lacked traditional romantic oscillations I never once complained.

Amelie inaugurated in me, an interest for unknown forms and unknown cities. I liked the narrator who would come in and go everytime a character was introduced. I liked that I didn’t have to know their names and that the movie was giving each of these characters – important or not – ample time to be introduced by the narrator – what they liked doing, what they didn’t. I am curious about shit like that.

Amelie is not simple, she is not your girl next door, she is not cheerful and she is definitely not a do- gooder. Amelie is just curious. And she does what she does to see if they will come out as brilliantly as they did in her head.  Even lifeless characters in the movie seem haunting, like the gnome, like the fruits and vegetables, like the dead roast chicken, like the streets of Paris, like Lady Di’s pictures in newspapers too.

And now, after all these years of watching some seriously psycho stuff, I still love Amelie. Some kind of exciting ritual that I look forward to once in three months has been initiated. I look for tiny opportunities to screen this movie for students, watch it with my sister over and over again, and watch it every time it plays on world movies. I never tire of watching this movie. Along with such loyalties I also resist an immediate urge to smack people in the head when they say that the movie is boring.

Everytime I watch this movie I also start wondering if there are more movies like Amelie that I can accidently ‘find’ on lazy afternoons. Anyway, my sister’s fondness for the movie has taken a whole different angle. She now wants to name her child Dominique Bredoteau. And I want to have a child just so I can name it Dominique Bredoteau.

First days

It’s June already! Where is my list? Where are my ‘To dos’ for the holidays? They are all laughing at me. And they are doing it very loudly; so loudly that I cannot hear my own irritation. The holidays are big messers of lists. I got nothing on my list that I can scratch off because I didn’t do anything. Official first day of classes today and I feel the exact same way I did on my first day. Nervous, excited and suspicious about how I am doing what I’ve been doing for so long.

Can’t really say I wish I had more holidays because I am absolutely unproductive during holidays. All I care about is eating and sleeping and watching. Such a bulk waste. In other news, I had a great first day! And I’m not crying about having to wake up early, thanks to the trip with the family right before college reopened. 

It’s June so soon. Let the games begin! 

 

 

I am not PMSing

And then there are days like these when somebody who really cares about you will strip reality and lay it bare for you to look at and wonder. It’s not something you have never heard of before. You have heard of it, but just in twisted ways. It is just something you have been taught to be really afraid of, something that your parents dread happening to you- which is the simple happiness of being alone. Now that I’m beyond being mad at society and all, I can look at this shit and continue being mad at them.

I mean, look around us – everybody and everything seem to be fixated upon instilling this fear of being alone in us. And they are doing it beautifully. They won’t come to you directly and tell you that it sucks to be alone, They will fill your head with a whole lot of crap about marriage and kids and family and love and this paranormal idea of ‘the one’. It’s a freaking conspiracy. Movies will take away 3 hours from your goddamned life just to tell you that there is someone out there for you and that your sole reason for existence is to go and find this person. T.V shows will be named after finding somebody significant in life and they will also run a whole set of 9 seasons to bloody tell you that the idea of ‘the one’ is real. And we buy this shit because we have been trained into believing that we need love and nourishment and that family is the most important thing and that human beings are incapable of living alone.

The only argument they have for pulling this shit is that we are not animals. And that because we live in society, we need order. But aren’t animals way happier than us? Why does this gross insistence on family life not acknowledge beauteous things like choice or options or even priorities for that matter.

Why does living alone have to be dreaded? Are we so disgusted with ourselves that just the thought of spending time with ourselves drives us into manifesting a whole civilization hell bent on forcing people to live with each other and produce babies? And aren’t there enough babies already? Somebody seriously has to start working on that. I mean, why are there so many babies? Is it legal?

Why are people force fed into this condition to have babies and in so much excess? First, you complain about not getting paid enough, then you go have babies? Why? Because some lame ass man wrote something crappy about marriage and kids? This baby thing is seriously scary man. And nobody seems at all worried about it.

Some really unhappily married couples couldn’t see that the others were unmarried and happy so they had to pull them into this mess. Whatever the reason, all around us is the barking mad view of a culture that doesn’t see choice as a way of life because it sees itself way too much.

Yes I am ranting because I am mad at this. I was 16 when I first fell in love and went straight into believing that I would live happily ever after with him. And I am still with him. So this is not a post break up angst. I just really think we need to look at living alone as a choice and not something that we should run away from, all our lives.

 

 

Crying

There is nothing in the world that I hate more than crying. And feeling stuffy but crying comes naturally to me. Just as naturally as feeling sleepy which requires no stimulus really. My biggest stimulus to be able to cry is me with a good memory. You don’t have to do a thing. On bad days, I can wake up crying and go on for hours together and nobody, including me can tell you why I am crying. You know how articles on thought catalog claim that crying actually helps reduce stress. Buggers are lying. Crying has never helped me. It has made things go from bad to ‘I want to kill myself – bad’. It makes me a huge drama queen. Not because I can cry and I do but because I cry about every damn thing. I cry when somebody I am fond of yells at me, I cry when I find out that I have hurt them, I cry when they do a nice thing for me, unexpectedly or otherwise, I cry when I am incredibly happy, I cry when I am at peace, I cry when I am in love. My tears are guaranteed to make guest appearances at all kinds of occasions.

I knew I could cry easily even before I discovered the many irritating attentions that it pulls- from self and others. I cannot help but feel that longish, frustrating kind of guilt soon after I am through crying. Guilt comes just as naturally as tears. I feel guilty about having cried in front of people and embarrassing them. I feel guilty for forcefully demanding that kind of attention. I have tried, believe me, to see what is it about that heaviness that just has to come out no matter how hard I bite my lips and try to yawn to keep from bawling. The throat gets all weird and swallowing doesn’t help. My eyes go as wide as they can in the hope that the tears dry up in the eye balls or whatever part it is that they are threatening to come out from. I look away, fiddle with whatever entity is in front of me. Usually, it’s my bag, mobile, a book or a spoon.

Once, I touched an animal. A cat. I am not big on animal touching or petting but I did it that day because I didn’t find a spoon or whatever and I was in a public place. Have no idea how the cat got there. All I remember is that I was going to cry and my throat was heavy so I picked it up, put it on my lap and started petting it. I didn’t realise that this thing was on my lap until it got bored and leaped out of my lap leaving me curious more than anything. Still wasn’t enough to distract me from the waterworks that were beginning to shower.

Anyway, I have found that yawning and pretending to yawn are major rescuers when I want to hold from crying. The yawning helps me beautifully. I have gotten out of many crying sprees from just pretending to yawn and then quickly thinking of something funny.

Why am I writing about crying?

It was a choice between my 16 year old self in love and this so I chose this.

Coming back

I find it difficult to write when I am surrounded by noise. Like now, for instance. I am sure even these idiots don’t like what they are listening to. I am waiting for them to leave. I miss how this place used to be or at least is, every now and then. Quiet. Music in public spaces should be banned. What the hell is the point of banning smoking? People talking or playing insanely loud music in public should be banned. Bah. I’m crabby. Why can’t they just leave and let me be in peace?

I am very close to finishing ‘The way to Paradise’. I cannot help but feel relieved, the way I do everytime after I finish a novel. But this time, a little more because I have been on and off with this book for 3 months! I have literally exhausted myself trying to finish the damn book. I didn’t have to struggle so much with any of the other Llosa novels. This one took a long time. Even though I struggled a bit with ‘Notebooks of Don Rigoberto’, I didn’t regret how slowly I read it because I was paying attention to details. But I cannot, for the life of me, get myself to pay attention to details with this book because there are many names to remember and also unlike most other Llosa novels, this one is lighter on the imagery and heavier on memory. And because it is biographical, it is easier to read without paying much attention to descriptions and metaphors. I know it is meaningless to just rush through a book simply because it is weighing down on you and because you want to hurry to other books but I cannot bring myself to start another book unless I finish this one. And it is going really slow. Is it because it is a historical novel or because I am a lousy reader?

Anyway, I had a rather interesting noon. As I was inching closer to finishing the book, I couldn’t fight the pre-orgasm of getting my hands on the next book; the only time I am excited about reading a book, which is. I dug through my collection hoping I hadn’t left my copy of Nabokov’s ‘The Gift’ in the department. Turns out I had. Instead I found myself feeling enthralled with the idea of giving ‘Possession’ another shot.

I found ‘Possession’ way back when I was still a Princess Diaries freak. I was running around feeling waves of panic upon seeing 10,000 books at landmark when I came across the ‘literature’ section and on the top shelf, the most attractive book cover I had ever seen. It had the most brilliant shade of green with a remarkable painting of Victorian looking women. Or maybe one Victorian man and one woman, it’s hard to tell because they look so much like 2 women.

I remember having started to read this in my good old Jain days. But something didn’t stick. I guess it was the timing. There are so many names in the book I could have only caught after my M.A., I couldn’t last more than 30 pages. I’m through with the first 50 pages now and I am enjoying it. I don’t remember liking it so much then though.

I am waiting to read more. I like this woman already.