Ta fete 2023

That song from a decade ago in Singapore is on my mind as I sit now in KL. 

 

Its time for some music, a little cruising on the yellow couch (not orange but then, that particularly dated colour fetish has passed), and daze-looking at the Petronas Towers. 

 

A view to die for. 

 

A song thats just universal enough - it could be English, it could be Portuguese, it could be Bahasa, or Nigerian, or Punjabi. Is there anything better? Peace, quiet, bigsmol and DH out on an errand, me, my fantasy book (Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House) and my germs sit and rest. Listen.

And watch the clouds go by and feel happy. 

Happy, right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am the largest size I have ever been and if this holiday is not an exercise in practiced self love and affirmation, I don't know what is. Fat and fabulous? Nope. Just fabulous.

All of life's a circle what

What <yet-to-be-determined-punctuation-mark>

It's my new thing these days. My new word accessory of the -till-whenever-I find-a-new-one.

For the past many weeks or so, it was 'and so on and so-forth', and you would think adding it to every other sentence would induce a rather overwhelming sense of elegance and a wisp of nonchalance when I speak, but sadly, it turned into a crutch I clung to while refusing to let my on-holiday-come-back-later brain really try to accomplish more than mango-eating.

My new word therefore is what. Its not said as a question, as in "What is wrong with you?" or even an exclamation "Whaaaaaat." its more of a mocky-sarcastic, drawl that cool people have and that I am now going to try to emulate. What.

***

I have eaten many mangoes, but none have come close to achieving the perfection of the Banganapalli mango from last summer. Just saying.

***

Suddenly feeling much deja vu. As I sit on my living room floor in front of the TV and type this out, its raining outside, and I am suddenly transported to Spore just after I quit when all of the city was rainy and I was sitting on my living room floor and writing a blogpost about quitting. :)

I was listening to Samba Noir then, but for now, I feel this is an age+ time -appropriate piece of music. Failing which, we'll always have Toco.

***
I've had the time of my life the last few weeks. I don't know why more adults don't take summer vacations, and I have to say, truthfully, DF has been the best for sponsoring this break of mine. Totally - ja, jee le apni zindagi type moment, and all I have to show for it, is a long list of youtube videos we have to watch when he comes back home everynight.

FYI, this marriage rox.

All your knowledge are belong to us

Somedays, while I am supposed to be revamping my CV but I idly chase a stray thought through the freescape of my imagination, I am struck by how little I know about the world.

Truly, and despite spending an inordinate amount of time on the interwebs (going from CV writing tips (bleargh) to reading about B-52 Bomber updates within the span of a couple of minutes), I know less than what I think I should about the world. 

For example:

1) I don't really know how electricity is transmitted. Or radio waves. Or sound waves even. Or light.  I can't really prove the Big Bang happened.
2) I don't know how fossil fuels create energy, and why steam cars are silly, but steam turbines are awesome (er?).
3) I don't know how to construct a building. Or make bricks, or cement, or steel. And paint! How do you make paint!
4) I don't understand carpentry well. Or plumb-ery. Or electricty (wait, I already said that.)
5) I wouldn't know how to make a processing chip. Or wine. Or perfume. Or cheese! CHEESE. Or tomatoes. Or fertilizers. Or refrigerators. Or bras. Or tampons.
6) I don't know how to set a bone. 
7) Or write music.
8) Or make a candle from animal fat.
9) Or make a fountain pen.
10) Or ink. Unless I catch a squid.
11) But how will I make a net?
(old joke: Sew some holes together).
12) OMG. needle and thread.
13) For which I need bones.  But where to get bones? :(
14) And fibre.
15) Rope! Rope-making is supposed to be an art. Yet another thing I have no knowledge of. 
16) And how will I ever build a raft. Forget a canoe, or a trieme, or a ship. OMG what to do about AIRCRAFT CARRIERS.
17) Bombs. Fission. Sigh. How to tell uranium 231 from whatever else.
18)  And how to make batteries. Spectacles. Torches. Matchsticks (phosphorous  - this I remember from Chemistry class but not much more).
19) Headphones. (by this point I am weary and am randomly looking around my study to see what I can make from the objects all around)
20) Post-its, no. PAPER! TOILET PAPER OMG, PLUMBING (already said that, didn't I?).

Everyday, around item no. 20 on my list of things I don't know, I give up on the pursuit of useful knowledge, and I console myself with the fact that some disaster-preparedness star American has figured this out, and collected books, and built bunkers and so on. If the world ever sort of ends, I will just have to find this person (but what to do about compass and sailing and processed and preserved food and emergency medication and nets and all?) Sigh.

What if I end up in Australia instead and get eaten by a jellyfish. Life is treacherous, you know, and its just the kind of comically-ironic event that would happen to me.

Anyway, I don't know why, but everytime I think about all of the awesome knowledge out there that I'd like to learn (like transistors and submarines and stocks and monetary policy and the concept of private property!), I feel bad that I'm instead becoming the kind of person who's writing a CV.

Screw the CV, I want to say. My CV should say.

SPAAX:
Address / Ph / Email :
_______________________

I AM AWESOME and funny and I like dragonflies. I am also very smart and I think you should talk to me because I like lots of interesting things and can tell you about them (like nets and jellyfish invasions ). Bye!
_____________________

But it doesn't. Someday when I have broken the system responsibly from the inside, I will make a CV like this one. Unless a jellyfish has eaten it. 

Uçuş puan kazanmanın en kolay yolunu keşfedin

I have no idea what the title of the post means. I could google translate, but I'd rather not. You see, early this year, I went on an amazing trip through Turkey, which involved making bookings on budget (?) domestic Turkish airlines, like THY and Pegasus. Both were a pleasure to fly, and I have wonderful memories of the trip, the airports, the train stations, the newspapers, the TV channels, the food, the colours, the food, the food, the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea, and the sheer kick one can get from travelling in a country where most people dont speak English as a matter of course.

Anyway.

In making these bookings, I used my primary email address to create an account, and I must have inadvertently clicked on the 'Send me a newsletter in a strange language with vivid yellow pictures' checkbox, because every other day, Pegasus emails me in Turkish enticing me to oh, I dont know, fly from Antalya to Bodrum maybe, or announces rapid fire sale tickets on flights from Selcuk to Ankara, (I think) or strongly urges me to sign up to a Pegasus Plus membership.

Usually, I delete the emails, but sometimes I read them carefully, particularly on days when I need a little cheering up.  I imagine the Pegasus email telling me I'm getting too cushy in life and I should use artillery and wage war (punlar ve artilar var...), or that I should really go back to learning magic (I used to know some pretty good tricks as a child) (Uçuş puan kazanmanın en kolay yolunu) or that I should feel free to sin, lie and since its winter, go ice-skating and glide (Sizinle ilgileniyoruz...) or that the world is a wonderful place so I should stop sulking (Dünyanın En Güzel Hediyesi).

Sometimes, I'd like to believe, like so many people I know, it too has taken its responsibilities in the world seriously, considers me to be the definitive girl whom people send poetry to, and regularly sends me yearning love poetry.

(Kart yok, vergi yok, karmaşık mil hesapları ve kontenjan sınırı yok ...)

Maybe its not yearning love poetry though, that one has the potential to be a koan. One can always hope.

***

I started reading the Player of Games yesterday, and at about 1:08 am (Yes, I checked the clock), I became so unsettled by the book that I had to take a walk around the room, then that walk being unsatisfactory, I walked into the living room and then into the kitchen, drank a glass of water and tried to calm myself down. The Culture seems to be everything I thought it would be. Everything.

The book is much better than Consider Phlebas, and I can't wait to read the third one (chronologically only, as apparently the reading order isn't particularly relevant).

Hoe Hoe Hoe

Excuse my terrible pun. I had a point, and it was a deep philosophical one about bland-ery and whether emotion is over emphasised and really why the Savage would claim the right to be lousy, and thoughts about self-preservation, moral superiority and the unflappable power of self-rationalisation and I was going to write a furious deeply incoherent essay post.
Instead, gentle reader, I remembered this (and the new bloggy has thus far not had a Huxley quote - for shame!):

"But the tears are necessary. Don't you remember what Othello said? 'If after every tempest came such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death.' There's a story one of the old Indians used to tell us, about the Girl of Mátaski. The young men who wanted to marry her had to do a morning's hoeing in her garden. It seemed easy; but there were flies and mosquitoes, magic ones. Most of the young men simply couldn't stand the biting and stinging. But the one that could–he got the girl."

"Charming! But in civilized countries," said the Controller, "you can have girls without hoeing for them, and there aren't any flies or mosquitoes to sting you. We got rid of them all centuries ago."

***

You gotta love the first world  :)

And some more

As if it weren't enough that the miles and the oceans and continents between us keep us apart, as if it weren't enough that reason more than emotion, (or is it the other way around?) keeps us apart, and as if it weren't enough that there is this vast chasm of irregular human connections (191 at last count), a hundred-odd ways for you and I to keep tabs on each other, to consume this desperate need to peek into lives on quiet sunday mornings, when the newspaper simply won't cut it and you stare (or I stare) hungrily at the phone, willing it simultaneously to ring and not ring, to simulaneously want to call and not call you, when the subscribed datafeeds throw up an array of things, to cherry-pick the crucial data packages I know you and I will find more amusing and to share and not want to share these with you, to want you to laugh or not laugh at a common comment of a common connection that means little to those not in the know and then wishing that either you or I were not either or or in the know so that the the commoness of the comment was to us, either or or, nothing more than a comment of commonness,  to wonder how much more music is yet to be discovered or not, and upon chancing to find something individually, not pointed to by the feed gods that control the data flood, to wonder if or if not, I would have unlike how unaided I am now, found it otherwise, to tell myself, soothe myself, occasionally, by affirming to myself that I like more than not like not having, more than having, a virtual together space, that I want, more than I not want to go out there and create more such virtual spaces and populate them as chance and otherness will will it and not feel a deep longing at the loss of a regular, much-loved arm, maybe, or spoke in the web that we each draw, creating such virtually mutual datapools that perhaps, though less than perhaps not, I find that each day the irreplaceability waxes and wanes in sync as much with the eurozone woes as of tremulous phone messages from the eastcoast to londontown to back home and from back home to london town to the eastcoast and all the other variables in between, tracked closely.

As if it weren't enough.

But Harry doesn't mind

"But Harry doesn't mind, if he doesn't make the scene, he's got a daytime job, he's doin alright..."


aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

"I tell myself this was a day job, tell people this is a day job, that I have projects I am working on, myserious things to do with my time, until ten years pass, and you realise, this isnt a day job anymore, it is your job, and it is all you'll ever do." - loosely transcribed from memory, how to live safely in a sci-fi universe.


aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

***

I think I will restore semblance of calmnness by getting a haircut now so I have something substantial to complain about.

Diary Entries

1) When wearing chic-ly long cardigans, do not wear short skirts to work.  The effect is worrying.

2) Sleep takes precedence over everything. Including blogging.

3) Do not shower with lenses on, your eyes get cloudy and misty and you effectively reduce your proof-reading capacity by 80%.

4) I am always on the lookout for gym songs to match my cardio routine.   I hate the ones I'm currently listening to, so all my endorphins are used up in trying to not get angry at STUPID ITUNES AND ITS STUPID SYNCING SYSTEM. 

5) I want to commence yoga classes, but Aks thinks that its a sure sign I'm becoming white. (or kinder-egg like, as DF said). She says salsa is preferable, while I politely snort at her. But then, I think to myself, why NOT make a fool of myself in front of some perfect strangers and learn salsa? We shall see.

6) Lisboa holidays are coming up.

7) Do not launder muchly-loved shiny sequinned top from Splash in laundry machine. It will die a painfully unshiny death, and leave you endlessly depressed. You may have cried.

8) I haven't read a book in a week and a half.

9) The Harrods sale did not send me into raptures. I did get to touch a Dior bag though, one which costs as much as rent for 2 months.  It was an interesting experience.

10) I hate my life today.

begin PAINFUL REALISATION

11) I have a FULL TIME JOB. This means I cannot also be a writer at the same time. I simply cannot put myself though the torture of wanting to write, while also working and reading and relaxing on the weekend, and travelling. And laundry. I CANT be a writer and a lawyer here.  I am working myself into a nervous wreck.

end PAINFUL REALISATION

12) NJ is 5 hours behind London is 5 hours behind India. Ish.