My Life In An Instant

A couple of days ago I had me a moment, which perfectly encapsulated the sad reality of my life.

I was out shopping with one of my closest male friends (he and I are each other's backup plan, should our love lives be at the same pathetic place five years from now). We entered one of my favourite stores, Anokhi, and I made a beeline for the section that sells cotton boxers. As I was browsing the merchandise, I saw this fantastic pair of French knickers - words cannot describe how amazing they were. Beautiful Rajasthani blue & the softest cotton imaginable. It was true love at first sight. Unfortunately they were Rs. 300 - a sum of money I cannot even dream of spending on a pair of chuddees right now. I looked to my potential future husband with great sorrow and explained to him why those knickers could not be mine. He looked sympathetic and since he's a rich (or soon to be rich) doctor in the US, offered to buy them for me.

That was the moment - in Anokhi (a place where all my retail dreams come true), standing in front of a man who I love but am not in love with, too poor to buy myself underwear and too proud/ inhibited to let him buy them for me...all the while pining and despondent because the man I'd like to wear them for has not called me in over a week.

(The one that got away: Imagine this very same scarf as a pair of divine French knickers...)

Getting to the point

Watched bits of Moammar Gaddafi's UN speech last evening. It was the most entertaining bit of television I'd seen in a long time. Delegates in the audience were laughing, others sleeping. He looked a little insane, ripping out pages of the UN charter, talking about JFK and jet lag. Great theatre.
But then, when I watch Obama speak, it seems just as theatrical to me as Gaddafi's vaudevillean act. The idealistic tilt of his head, the tone of idealistic seriousness, the political correctness, the diplomatic hoops he makes us jump through without saying a thing.

It's just a question of language. Both talk a lot of shit. Both also make sense - in a way that's bizarre to the other. Both are sincere and speak from the heart. Both mince the truth.

But if you ask me who I'd pay to hear - my money's on Gaddafi.

Please Write

Unanswered phone calls,
Unacknowledged texts,
Uninspired filmscripts
Unexciting blogs
Unfinished stories

The not writing is killing me

Thoughts Post Watching P.S. I Love You

It would be very nice if I could schmeer Gerard Butler's lips on a toast and take a big bite. Maybe I could frame his eyes and keep it on my work desk. Or fashion his arms into arm rests on my chair so that we could hold hands between changing channels or get a nice cuddle while I watch a late night movie. Make a pillow out of his torso so I could hold it as I fall asleep.
And assemble him back together from time to time so that we can slow dance to Iron & Wine.

So pretty...sigh...

Hic

...this girl's had a bit too much tonight...


(Trust me, if my life were indeed a highway, this is what it would look like after tonight. Amidst the shards of glass are shreds of my dignity and any chances of a bright romantic future...)

:)

She laughs a lot at the jokes he makes. Ironic, since she'd imagined he had no sense of humour. But the more she laughed, the more jokes and funny stories he began to come up with.
Now they laugh all the time.


Note: I am SO not the type of person to put up photographs of kittens, but you have to admit, this one is the cutest.

A new low?

For some reason, I've never really had a lot of money for a consistently long period of time. It feels like I've always been struggling financially for as long as I've been working. There are, of course, many reasons for this.

Louise Hay (self-help guru) says that we only get as much money/love/success as we feel we deserve. By that equation, I must have really felt I deserved a lot of money in 2008. Then in 2009 I must have rethought the pedestal I'd put myself on and returned to the familiar feeling of poverty. Have to admit, it does feel like home.

The other reason could be my brave-but-stupid insistence on being a freelance writer. Sounded glamorous at the time (still does unfortunately) - 'I can't do a 9 to 5', 'I can't have people telling me when to start working and when to finish it, watching my every move, making me do 3 people's work at the salary of half a person's', 'I need to be able to take off whenever I want...go wander...get lost somewhere...sigh..'
I wish I'd had the foresight to understand that I'm not one of those people who knows how to market herself. And since there's no money coming in, I can't afford to go wander and get lost somewhere anyway...

Of course, then there's the forces of nature, by which I mean the blood-sucking TV producers who will use any and every excuse to cut corners on your penny. I remember this one time (not in band camp) when a producer who owed me money said he'd diverted it to an alcoholic editor because he needed it more ('wife and family - you understand'). I was only 20 then and actually accepted his sorry-assed excuse. I felt guilty for having non-alcoholic parents & an air-conditioned home to go back to.
I also know (& trust me, I've often agonized if I'm being too paranoid) that many times I've not been paid as much or as frequently as my male counterparts. Perhaps, because of the same subconscious notion that I don't need the money. Perhaps for their own twisted reasons. All this has made me distance myself from the rogue-producers...unfortunately it leaves very few names in the hat for me to go after...

This morning, I hit a new low. A client of mine (someone who routinely asks me to do little bits of inconsequential work) asked me if I wanted to tramp two hours away from home in the rain to come meet him for lunch and discuss a project. I wrote him an absolutely pathetic, bottom-of-the-barrel email telling him that I couldn't afford an autorickshaw to his place so could we please meet halfway? I felt sick to my stomach doing it, especially since I'm not that poor yet. I remembered all those times I swore to myself that I would insist on being paid, NOT because I needed the money but because I'd earned it. It was such a betrayal of myself, I can't tell you how awful it felt.

But here's the thing: his assistant called me up within 20 minutes of recieving the email, to ask for my account number. Turns out boss man wanted to clear all my past dues. Yes, it still makes me sick to my stomach, but you know what? I now have money to see me through October...

I'll Have Me a Helping of Gratuitous Violence, Please

A couple of days ago I did a Facebook Rorschach test that declared I was an insane psychopath.
This evening I did another Facebook quiz to determine the exact time & circumstance of my death. January 17th, 2021, 5:33 am, by lethal injection. Consistent as only Facebook quizes can be.
But not as off point as some might think...
...because I've recently got me a hankering for some blood & gore.

Was having a low moment ("why hasn't he called?") when HBO started showing the James McAvoy-Angelina Jolie action movie 'Wanted'. All my sensitive, 'The Hours'-lovin, bleeding heart, arty-farty illusions went flying out the window (like McAvoy's father towards the end of the movie..but I'm not going to spoil the film for those who haven't seen it). Everyone was kicking everyone's ass, bullets were flying in slow motion, guns were being bandied about like chocolate bars, explosives were being constructed out of peanut butter-addicted mice and even though all the make-out scenes were cut by HBO, it still got my heart racing, wondering what other destruction was up next.

Now, I have decided I want to be an assasin when I grow up.
I want to be the 'perfect weapon' (again, see the movie to know more). I want to karate chop and kung fu with the best of international secret agents. I want to not feel pain and miraculously heal my body even though I've been punched, drop-kicked, stabbed, shot at, blown up and pushed off steep cliffs. I want to curve bullets, hurl knives across kilometres of crowded city and still hit my mark, I want to launch bazooka attacks & carry tampons that double as RDX-loaded explosives.

Fuck, I wanna be BadAss.

(This is a character called Anaksha: 'A beautiful but deadly femme-fatale who embarks on a brutal, bloody-thirsty rampage through the city of Santa Lina, delivering her own brand of justice to social parasites who've avoided punishment.' http://www.anaksha.com/)

And true love waits
In haunted attics
And true love lives
On lollipops and crisps

- 'True Love Waits' by Radiohead

Conjoined

Saw a fascinating Natgeo feature on conjoined twins and the surgeries they'd had to separate their bodies.
The one that stuck out for me was a case of a set of American twins whose torsos were fused. The heart of one of the girls lay 3/4ths inside the rib cage of the other and they were sharing the same liver. The doctors thought that they had a good chance of separating the two without major permanent damage.
Needless to say, the girls were absolutely the cutest things that ever lived. They'd spent the earliest months of their lives facing each other, separated by mere inches. Talk about getting in your sibling's business. Talk about twintuition.
Anyway, so when the surgeon opens them up, everything seems to be going according to plan. The livers are divvied up and they turn their attention to shifting one of the twin's heart back into its own ribcage.
That's when they find that the two hearts are connected by a single nerve. The nerve is sending the same signal to both hearts, making them beat as one.
The doctor has no option but to say a little prayer and cut the sliver that's joining the two vital organs. He severs the connect, the hearts still and Natgeo takes a dramatic pause with a dramatic voice-over. Close ups on the faces of the other doctors and nurses. And then...
The hearts begin beating again. But no longer together. They pulsate in alternating rhythm, still harmonious but now very, very separate.

Really, people....

....for the last time - Global warming and unnaturally rapid climate change is real. It's not a dirty lie created by solar panel manufacturers, it's not propaganda launched by organic cotton farmers and it's not an urban myth perpetuated by Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri.

It is unbelievable the number of people I've met who're in denial about this...the same people who're wondering why it's 'so hot' in september...I wish they'd pick up a newspaper once in a while or do something else on the internet besides playing Mafia Wars. And I really wish they'd think a million times before procreating.

Someone once said to me - "Nostalgia is so passe, darling!"
Never did I feel this more than this evening when I dug deep into my cupboard and unearthed old photographs from school....
I really thought I'd look at them, sigh and say - "We were so young, our skin was so tight, our eyes so bright...look - doesn't it seem like the whole wide world lies in front of us?..."
Except, I stared back at a bunch of kids, who looked lost and scared and were definitely not all that great looking. As for me: I have never looked or felt more miserable as I did at 15. I hated my body, I had a terrible hairdo and an even worse attitude.

30 is an amazing age for a woman to be in 2009. It pisses me off that we're brainwashed to believe anything else. Everything starts now...

The Men I Once Knew

I once knew a man, who noticed me in a crowd, stole me away from daily drudgery and filled the workday with sweet surprises. On my birthday, he bought me the biggest bouquet of flowers I'd ever seen and made the guys in the restaurant sing 'Happy Birthday' for me. He loved when I grabbed his ass and found the time to tell me I was a 'good person...perhaps one of the best he'd ever met'. But he insisted that we remain a secret...in order to try his luck with other women, as it turned out.

I once knew a man, who made music. He called me his best friend and said I knew enough about him to "write his autobiography". Once, when I told him my close friend was depressed, he called her up (STD) and sang 'Yellow' just to make her smile. But then he locked himself up in his room with a bottle and made me throw away the key.

I once knew a man, who told me he loved me the same evening we met. He spoke of me in metaphors and similes and referred to me as an 'orchid'. One morning I woke up to his sms - 'I'm standing outside your door and I'm here to marry you.'. He wanted me to get an MBA (Masters in Business Admn) and have an OBE (Out of Body Experience). Throughout our cross-country relationship, he kept tabs on what I was doing & who I was meeting. 8 months later I realised I should have been keeping tabs on who he was meeting & doing.

I once knew a man with whom I could conduct conversations in broken French for 15 minutes at a stretch. He introduced me to Joni and Ani. He supplied me with a steady stream of Himachal's finest. He taught me about warm sake and chopsticks. He had the face of a cherub on crack. And the demeanour, I discovered to my horror, of a demon.

Not one of them knew how to hold me.

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PS: This post is dedicated to a friend who listened patiently as I gave him a lecture on alanis' music being whine-fests about men.