Many A Slip

That moment before you lose your shit.
That moment before you censor yourself.
That moment before you cast your vote.
That moment before you take that bite.
That moment before you lean forward.
That moment before you walk away.
That moment before you turn around.

Take that moment and stretch it ouuuuuuttttttt as if you control time, as if you are the queen of making clear choices. As if your mind has always had the right answer and your body has always been poised to make the perfect move.

To enjoy the delusion that everything you decided was right for you in that moment. To squash the idea that you made a mistake.
Or the opposite.
To know what's done is done is done and everything else is spin.

A Distressing Realization (in which she's becoming everything she mocks & mocks everything she's becoming)

The boy I am currently observing closely for the purposes of long-term-companionship-shortly-to-be-followed-by-imminent-rejection, has an intriguing habit.

We'll be coasting along merrily, when I will turn to him and EMOTIONS.

At other times, I might gently (or not so gently) CRITICAL DECONSTRUCTION OF SAID BOY'S BEHAVIOUR OR CHARACTERISTICS.

When this happens, he usually does a swift about turn and zips off into the horizon as fast as his Road Runner stalks can carry him.

Without so much as a beep-beep.

At this point, I usually take a moment - or several - to fall apart in a fashion not unlike that popularized by this fresh thing:

Yes, Uncle indeed.

  

Then I gather myself, wipe off the snot (or not - I work from home) and realize that there's a major part of my brain that's now freed up to think about other things. Like politics and my bank balance and travel & exploration. Yoga perhaps? Or Twitter. Aah Twitter. With a gaping boy-shaped hole in my cerebral cortex, other things of CNN-level importance can now pour in.

Over the last 5 months, these boyless interludes have resulted in (1) an accelerated rate of meeting work deadlines, (2) me powering through several unread volumes in my Kindle (including a David Foster Wallace book, which is worth not one but TWO 'boyfriend-stonewalls'), (3) writing a film script on ceramic crucibles made out of something called Mullerite (which I may have misheard as Miller Light and taken on), (4) planning a vacation to South East Asia and (5) being nice, in small doses, to my mother.

In contrast, when things are peaceful in the realm of boy, life takes on a decidedly free-flowing-no-responsibility tenor, where social outings and alcohol intake rise and a new daredevil attitude takes over me, where things such as caution, deadlines and reading the newspaper are thrown to the wind in lieu of weeknights out and pretending I still inhabit the body of an all-nighter-pulling 20 year old. There is sweet, sweet chaos in my otherwise ordered world - the kind that makes me wonder why I needed order in the first place.

Which all makes me come to a distressing realization. What kind of woman am I? The kind who can't function at her best when she's happy? Or someone who's governed so thoroughly by hormones that she has to drop practically everything in her life just to stay upright? Oh God - can I not have sex and a tweetworthy political opinion at the same time? Am I not - shudder - a female and hence a multitasker?

If this is indeed the case then I should perhaps, instead of weeping at the temporary loss of a cootchie-cooing counterpart, focus on all the things I neglect when in the throes of romance. Like reading a book, doing my taxes, taking in a show or an exhibition (haha who am I kidding, I never do that anyway), writing down all the wisdom I've gleaned from relationships with men and once and for all deciding if I want to audition for Indian Idol or not.

More importantly, just in case the boy returns before that hard-earned final chapter of DFW's book ends, I can always just EMOTION or DECONSTRUCTION OF CHARACTER more time to complete it.

Happy Festivus

It isn't festival season in India until you've been kept awake by the amplified yodels of a Bengali man channeling Kishore Kumar (who, in turn, built his career channeling Julie Andrews channeling lonely goatherds), which - even though the singer is situated half a kilometer away from where you attempt to sleep - reach you through the turbo-charged surround sound system that's been expressly hired to simultaneously please the goddess Durga and drive you batshit insane.

The good news this festival season is that Orissa (Odisha, whatever the chick's name is) managed to survive yet another devastating cyclone, all thanks to tweets like this:

This is the greatness of India. With all our seeming chaos & drift, our disaster management is better than any nation including the US!
— Malini Parthasarathy (@MaliniP) October 13, 2013

Yes, why should we not take this moment to pat ourselves on the back for being the bestest country in the world with the bestest disaster management that allowed us to have the bestest disaster-free 24 hours of our----what? What, Barkha...Barkha...I can't hear you...115 deaths you say? In a...in a...Navami-related stampede and bridge collapse in Madhya Pradesh?...

Dang. We almost made it.

But if you ask me, the best thing about this season (besides the results of my dengue test being negative) is how non headline-making-gangrapey this month has been. Of course, rapes will happen and what's a little ass-grabbery in a pandal once in a way? But by and large October, though only halfway through, has managed to be refreshingly rape-free in the newsworthy world.

The world celebrated one year of Malala surviving the Taliban's idea of tough love. She inspired admiration in the most cynical of hearts, when she went on The Daily Show and spoke about wanting to retaliate by throwing a shoe at her attacker but then rising above.
You're a better man than me, Malala, because here is my shoe and here it is being launched as retribution (for crimes far less severe than those committed on you) towards the skull of a yodeling Bengali man, whose time has come.

3 Books

I am reading 3 books at the same time:

1. Death By Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson

2. Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss

3. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

Depending on what meds and day of the menstrual calender I'm on, these books are fucking with various parts of me, in varying degrees of intensity.

Highly recommended all.

       

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P.S.: Do you think it's coincidence? Is there such a thing as coincidence? What is coincidence anyway?

the small print

some of us will learn that growing up means playing an endless game of tic tac toe, battling constant opponents engaged in ceaseless struggles to win the upper hand, always plotting, brains racing at a thousand kilometres an hour, never dropping the ball, keeping at least one eye open at all times. always fighting for trophies, always shielding from attack.

relationships are arrangements of convenience, strategic contracts between two lives - no matter how hard someone's beating heart echoes in our chests, no matter how easy it is to dissolve into their skin.

in spite of the exhaustion, the endless game is always to be played, new arrangements waiting to be negotiated, small victories to be won but never to be questioned: for what? 

some of us will learn that growing up means playing an endless game of treasure hunt, requiring immense energy for digging deep and hunting for clues in all the scary places - inside ourselves and others - with hearts open twenty four-seven, equally subject to gentle breezes as to harsh winds, always taking furious notes no matter which way the wind blows. always striving to be authentic, ever ready to confront the demons round the corner.

relationships are wild trails, bathed in fresh air and sunlight to illuminate unexplored parts of us - no matter how vulnerable it makes us to go off the beaten path, no matter how unfamiliar the road becomes.

in spite of the uncertainty, the endless game is always to be played, the fresh air & sunlight always available for renewal, small treasures to be found and never once doubted: for what? 

http://imgfave.com/view/1908076

Soap

Ask me again what I want to be when I grow up.

At age 34, I want to be someone who knows how to love and be loved. 

It is the simplest thing I can think of wanting to be. Certainly, also the hardest.

A magnificent thing happened to me while doing the dishes today. A fluff of dish washing foam fell into a vat of oily water and whoosh, like Moses parting the seas, the grease parted and a pristine moat of clear water emerged out of the mess.

Now, I know that soap is designed to make a hearty meal of grease. It’s what the label on the pack says. It’s what my chemistry teacher said in school. It can be proven with equations and formulae. There’s math to explain it. I've had a 25 year long career washing dishes so I’ve also come to place good faith in soap’s appetite for grease.

Yet, there was something about paying attention as it happened: a single droplet of lily-white decimating an entire army of oil & grease in one graceful swoop.

You really had to be there.

***************

(But of course soap doesn't really decimate anything at all. On the contrary, it builds a chemical bridge between natural foes - oil & water. Dang, science, you're awesome.)