Sometimes when I am a spoilt brat, I forget to remember that my job isn’t a curation of my bitterness against someone else’s. It is freeing to return to this thought when I think of all the possible ways in which my work and my writing could get stuck in a permanent ode to my own miseries about other people and what they are doing in their worlds.
Sometimes when I am not a spoilt brat, I remember to look at the sun and smile.
This morning I sat in front of the TV with a glass of hot water and watched a bit of Gilmore Girls on Romedy Now. If I haven’t already said this, I am saying it now — Romedy Now is the best thing to have happened on television. Season 5, episode 14 was on — Luke and Lorelai have split because of Emily. Lorelai is broken and in bed with lots of junk food and chocolates and magazines, and Rory is being Rory – bringing tray full of more junk. When Lorelai is finally left alone, she can’t take it any longer. She calls Luke and leaves a long message. When she realizes what she’s done, she hangs up and runs over to Luke’s to get the tape. On her way back — she sees him, apologizes and hands over the tape.
When I first started watching Gilmore Girls, I was so much in awe of Lorelai that she quickly became somebody I could never become–she was that incredible. I think this is a mistake. I am always in such a tearing hurry to put women in lists and brackets that beyond a point they stop being human and become people I can never hope to be like. Of late I have been thinking about Feminism and how my understanding of it has changed over the years. There are too many women I want to be like but every time something dreadful happens, I forget about these women and just whine. When I watched Lorelai Gilmore today, she was a woman with flaws – who messed up and cried and apologized. Yes she was a woman with flaws even before this morning but something about watching this today put things in perspective. 
Some days, all I need is perspective. ‘I am not that girl – I don’t break and call my ex-boyfriend to come save me’, she says. And then, even though she is hurting and pissed – she walks away a more believable Lorelai Gilmore. That was my moment today. And for sometime after that, I gloriously believed that nothing will ever go wrong if I spend some time getting perspective like this every morning.
I woke up feeling threatened and depressed. When I sat down to do breathing exercises, I thought what’s the point, what’s the point at all if through out the day I am living more in my imaginations than anywhere else. I felt weak and stupid and vulnerable. But because I nurture hope now and then, I dragged myself out for a jog but an hour later when I am sitting down and typing this, I have no memory of how the jog was or what I saw.
Stepped in for a cold shower, because that’s a thing now; cold in the morning, hot in the night, dabbed baby lotion all over my body because it helps me breathe, sat at my desk and found this:
http://thoughtcatalog.com/heidi-priebe/2015/04/to-the-women-whose-lives-are-not-love-stories/
… and now my day is already smiling down at me. I have so much to do.
I have decided that nobody hates running. We may dislike it because we think we cannot run but we can. I have hated running with all my might all these years. As a child, whenever I would start running, I would fall on my face. My father’s theory was that because my head is bigger than my body, running would send my head crashing down to earth. I ignored it but it’s true. I did fall whenever I ran. Sometimes deliberately, because I thought I was going to fall anyway, why not just do it prematurely instead of having it happen to me without my knowledge.
I don’t want to jinx it but I am going to say this anyway. I have been waking up fairly early every morning since last Saturday so I can go jogging. It’s a good way to watch my thoughts and because all my thoughts are about me – the victim, in ALL scenarios, it becomes easier to ignore tear ducts when all your blood is threatening to fall out of your lungs and face. I took it slow the first two days, watching my breath as I slowly began to run out of it, feeling my face growing warmer, my armpits collecting moist, my inner thighs burning with itch, my forehead bubbling with hot blood, and now slowly I am beginning to pick speed. It’s just 2 minutes of jogging and 18 minutes of recovering from it. So far, so good.
Like prisoners, they line up one after the other waiting to enter space. Mind, body and soul. A thought, an image, a song, a movie scene and you feel the corners of your mind opening up to the clawing need of self pity. It’s 6 in the morning, you open your eyes to the yellowed darkness in your curtains. Gates open and close, school vans stop and honk, two-wheelers sustain their starting problems and you cringe. The alarm didn’t wake anybody up today. You wait for it to ring and turn if off. Last night’s thoughts crawl up under your thighs and mock the wetness in sheets, now they creep into your mind and the toying mirth in its blankness upsets you.
Thoughts become gestures, gestures become insults, insults become hot and burning tears. Rewind. You have to be properly upset, there should be more meanness in the enemies’ gestures. There should be more tears. How can you fashion a dramatic walk out on somebody without letting them know you are crying?
Fatal illnesses like cancer aren’t fun anymore. You have cancer, your friends come, cry, and then you die. Where are the bullies? The friends who become enemies on such mornings? Where is the evil in their villainous plans to ruin your life? Their actions aren’t knifing through your heart like you want them to. Try and harder. It’s 6:45 now. You have cried. The pointlessness in this exercise doesn’t bother its dramatics. As long as your face now is imitating the one in your imagination – sad, lonely and crying, it’s ok.
In the shower, steam seeps through your toes and you watch it rise up as your stories fall through all around you and vanish into the drain along with soap, dirt and hair. You feel new but it’s still not a new morning. You don’t want it to be, not yet. The pulling away from self pity can happen later, at a time when you have to think about work and life seriously. But now you just want to be left alone with the miserable liberties your mind takes with all the bad things that can happen to you. And they are rarely the very bad things that can happen to you in real life, like losing a limb, losing your job, not getting to go abroad to do that fabulous PhD. They are ridiculous, small and almost laughably petty: a friend choosing somebody else over you, them forgetting you and leaving you, them not remembering your birthdays. The fear becomes bigger along with more elaborate stories that you create, more details, more play on memories until you find somebody else, but the story is always the same, the fears are always the same, those of abandonment.
When you step out, you feel lighter because the day is starting to catch up and suddenly time is a real thing, like a problem, then you think about work and eventually the day becomes real.
I wake up to a woman fake-orgasming the crap out of her lungs on my sister’s laptop these mornings. If it was porn, I would have complained less. It’s some incessant chant to god, which is what makes this whole thing unbearably irritating. Wouldn’t prayers and meditation be a lot more worthwhile if they were done in peace, without disturbing other people’s peace?
Seems like only prayers and by that extension, religion have won this unquestioned, unchallenged privilege to obstruct other people’s peace. Everything is OK because you are calling out to fucking God. Even noise is OK, making ambulances wait because some people celebrate god on some inane day, dancing with idols on top of their heads is OK because you are calling out to God. Nobody cares that you could be dying.
Everything that religion and places of worship stand for seem adamant on destructing peace.
Anyway, what started out as a pathetic day became less pathetic after I stepped out of the house. I am becoming more and more confident about my riding. It’s beginning to get mechanical now and this scares the shit out of me. I don’t want to be thinking about almonds someday only to realise that I have crashed into a truck.
Also, the fact that my days seem to run magically smooth when I wake up early is starting to make sense to me now. My classes were fun today. Nothing was hurried or delayed, except for a work thing that managed to piss me off in ways that I haven’t been pissed off in, in a really long time.
But all was forgotten and all was well with the world again after I dined at the craziest restaurant – Zingron. Everything from the seafood noodle soup to the beef chilly to the pork spare ribs to the rice and chicken curry was delectable. I should shut the fuck up. ‘Delectable’ sounds too wrong a word to describe Zingron. It doesn’t do justice to the crazy that is zingron because it is too mild and polite a word to describe food that violated my tongue with its insane spice. It was killing me but I just wasn’t stopping. And, I do not know why.
The food was just unbelievably cruel. After a point, I couldn’t say why my head was feeling light- because of the rice wine or the food. I had menstrual cramps in my mouth when I was done.
I have never been a spicy food lover really, but Zingron has made my tongue and other parts go so numb with its overload of feeling that I don’t think they remember sweet anymore. I am not complaining. I do need a food makeover!
Rum Lola Rum 