today i am sad

 quietly sad.

sadness that is useless - no real outlet, no real trigger (who am i kidding, look at the date), a low level fuzzy thin blanket sadness. 

im going to wear socks and drink tea. is this life. be sad. be adult, wear warm socks. drink tea. do laundry. 

 

i could cry.

snippets from 10 years of emails

aka 2-4 GB because I'm not going to pay for storage because memories are like wasabi, they're nice in small quantities.

Attempt one at reading thru about 890 emails from 2009 in 6 minutes and picking only the most important ones and the ones that dont make me cry:

Happy New Year! I'm guessing most people haven't finished/started studying. These are notes that I had made for myself for Clinic. I would suggest people read the cases from the Reading Material, but if you're in a mad rush to finish everything in one night, these may help. Please cross check though. No guarantee of good notes here. There could be mistakes.

Also three cases are missing: 1. Madras Refineries (which I didnt understand and so is incomplete and could be completely wrong); 2. Hemlata v. Collector and vice versa (which was too long and so I gave up).

Hope this helps. All the best!

***

Nave saal di tuhaanu vadhai hove
Heppy Ji

***

MCC@NALSAR: 

Please see your research passwords for LexisNexis, Westlaw, and HeinOnline
below.

***
I just heard that you won the Jessups round! CONGRATULATIONS! I just found out and was extremely happy to hear it. This is awesome news! Hope you guys go on to win the International rounds as well.

***

Book tickets for Ghajini Now, The years biggest release!

***

I'm ol.I'm invisible 

***

i wanted to tell you that you didn't call on my birthday and I
really thought you would.

***

Bommai stuff: here. of course you can plagiarise.

***

where are you? im beginning to freak out. whats your number? i am back in civilization and near std phones.

***
You never call me and I miss you. 

---fin----

Some sentiments expressed in these emails are by no means outdated. I wonder what that says about life and me, and my life. 

The Unbearable Conundrums of Birthday Week

As I write this on the cusp of my 32nd birthday, my thoughts go naturally to the year past and the year ahead.

But before that.

***

A thing happened to me today that made me feel sad. But then the fact I felt sad made me feel even more sad. It was an odd experience - this nested sadness, but along with it came, (with a sudden flash of bright light and a clear pure note played on a piano, if you will), that this swing - between wanting to be sad but also wanting to be high-quality sad, and grading all the sad - that this swing would just continue to exist unscathed by the piles of human emotional improvement I let pile all around me, and well that it should.

What good is fighting years of conditioning - might as well let the pre-frontal cortex take over.

Grading sadness is a useful tool however - and its one against which my future (present?) has no hope of winning against my past. Basically, no matter what (and I'm not tempting you, universe), having control, and being my own person is always better than being small and bullied.

***

Baby K turns one and it makes me want to weep. I cant explain why.

***
I miss being thin.

***
I am excited for the new year ahead. So many possibilities. But first, insurance.

***

Bloggy and me are like Scurvy haha

Ohmygosh.

Is bloggy my oldest and dearest friend? I suppose so, though like all of my other old and dear friends bloggy too has moved countries, and maybe gotten an iphone and an accent and a british passport and friends who it brunches with, snorkels with and posh new jobs at posh life changing institutions and generally built a life of urbane suaveness and winter coats.

Me? Hi. I'm still ...me. Angsty, curious, unable to fit into my sexy shorts, always on the lookout for great haircuts and sure there are days in which I wonder what the what the what the am i doing with my life but otherwise the same, only the Cranberries have been replaced by Mumford and Sons (Caro Emerald for when I'm feeling particularly saucy) and lullabies.

Ya. Also I had a baby. Also I moved. Also new house. Also somewhat new friends. Also more social media and less reading. In the last few months I have:


1) Read the Annihilation series and some other trashy scifi and fantasy and eh

2) Read Sacred Games and wow

3) Had my insides tickled in order by DF, a gynac, multiple speculum, ultrasound wands, scrape-y instruments, what felt like (and was I think) an entire arm of an entire human doctor, a moving baby boy (whose head, a few days before he was born, I compared to a musk melon sitting on the counter) and some needles.
(I say tickled but you and I dear reader know, that I do NOT mean tickled. This is classic, what do they call it? Understatement. Yes this old dog knows new trix haha.)

4) Watched Mad Men and Marvellous Mrs Maisel and some other soppy TV shows day and night  while nursing (this is the polite word for breastfeeding or as they should accurately call it breast plucking pulling nipple roughening milk clogs glass sandpaper bruising feeling cow like sweating).

***
The thing is, there's been more angst on this blog about an unfairly graded history paper (21/50 - come on!) than ...life since 2017 Delhi. Which, in all of its glory has been ANGSTONIUS ANGTAMAXIMUS. You should have been there, or rather, bloggy should have been there.

I'll say this, I'm only sad I didn't chronicle it all because so much spectacular lazing around was done and fun was had and assholery was dealt with. DF is still around. I think I saw Amelie lying around somewhere. And 202 has not one mummy now but two. Smoke that.

***

I said yesterday to one old friend that I had dropped the ball and he said so did he and I wanted to say YES YOU DID YOU DROPPED IT YOU WERENT SUPPOSED TO but instead I shrugged and sent him baby photos. It is truth but then what else does one do at a point in life when truths are self evident but the conclusions they take you on are anything but?

Love me pick me choose me? But time zones. And time sheets.

***
I confessed I was in a maudlin mood to a somewhat new friend but then I realised it was because I missed bloggy and being able to loudly shoutily complain here. So I'm back.

***
So apparently a deficiency of Vitamin C causes the collagen that repaired old wounds to dissolve, leading to bleeding and aches, which was thought of as a new disease called scurvy but was mainly just the old wounds coming up knock knock and saying hi hello ji whether vitamin C? Odd but nice. Just how I like em ailments and boys.

***
I must go, baby will beckon shortly. But I cant stop thinking of the Butterfly, Christina Tosi, and the gentleness of Sroyon's blog. Duly we are of course grateful to Double A.

***
Hai koi hamein yeh hatecopy ke chai plates toh dilwaein?

The quality of mercy

is overrated.
Who cares for mercy
as though it can help you when you need change
and you're standing in the cold and
it feels like all of your life's bad decisions are
laughing at you.
and you have never felt less loved and more hated.
Yes.
that.

Self-destruct sequence

I feel like I should be doing more than drinking sweet tea and eating khakras as the occasional tear pools in the rims of my large retro glasses.

I may also be the only one who remembers, well, me and bloggy. I just realised that of all the constants in my life, the only one that has remained through all of the good times and the bad, is the image of me sitting in front of a computer and tapping out on the familiar white and orange interface. Sometimes there are tears and sometimes there are such wonderful incredible highs and often times there is a wry smile and some CAPS LOVING. I love this image of me, and I should carry it around more and feed it well.

Five years since the first October 28.

I'm alone and angry and calm and melancholy, but not so much so that I can't laugh at myself and shake my head sadly.

My post after Diwali was to  be a fabulous one, filled with happiness and colour and light and the bliss of finding new family that is so so easy. But this is what procrastination does, gentle reader, and instead of bubbling over with mirth and eating homemade sweets and narrating jokes in broken Telugu, I am now sad-raging.

Appreciate, if you can, the understated tone of this post, for it is an expression of my heart's waxing and waning. I'm old enough to know nothing is fair and young enough to hate the unfairness of it anyway. Such maturity comes at a price - and that price I think is restraint, which should be the politeness of princes (not punctuality, because of course a prince(ss) is never late, the rest are merely early).

I think its time for more tea. And without sugar, I think, for the old masochistic joke about one lump or two comes to mind and we can all do without that, don't you think? xx

Moustache tales.

Appa is growing his moustache again!

I'd like to believe that my father is the most good-looking, charming person in our family (until I), and the moustache (which I've never seen him without) only added to his charm and general sense of wholesomeness. I could never imagine appa without a moustache, and I didn't know how attached he was to it, till he sat my cousin down, when he started to grow facial hair, to advise him on the merits of having a moustache. :)

And then October 2009 happened and Appa had to shave his moustache. Later, every few weeks I would say to him, "So, are you going to re-grow the moustache?"
It takes the attention off of the bald-head I reasoned, it makes you look evil if you don't have one, I insisted and your face looks angrier, I told him, without the moustache.

He refused stubbornly, every single time. And I let it go after about eight months or so. We have moved to griping about weightier issues.

Today, I saw him on skype after two weeks, and he'd re-grown his moustache. There really isn't a story to spin here, an elegant recorded moment of bereavement humour or even a note of poignant shock for three seconds when I opened that video call window.

I'm just very very happy.

As hard as it has been for me to [.] my mother, it has been infinitely more difficult for my dad to have [.] her. Our struggles in dealing with the events of Oct 2009 are similar, but our contexts are vastly different. I cry when an email from her email id shows up in gmail search results, but he finds old love letters from when they were engaged while spring cleaning. My cupboard in London is thankfully memory-free, but he shares his cupboard space with a set of shelves that used to hold blouses and matching saree petticoats, but now hold bed linen and spare towels. I carry around in my jewellery box a ring that my mother bought for me once, but its well hidden and mostly obscured by crap from Oasis and Topshop. My dad though, glances at the dressing table at home everyday, which still holds a half-empty bottle of perfume (the maid sweetly picking it up, cleaning the table, and placing it in the same place as she has been instructed to do). The mirror has a bindi she stuck on it the last time she was able to walk to the bathroom and shower by herself, but in London, I have no sticker bindis in the shape she used to favour.

And so we struggle, in everyday bits and pieces and we have been getting better, but there are days when I have felt that only I was getting better and my dad, in that house, in that city, in that bedroom and that kitchen, was never able to move on as I have.

Today I am just happy.

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.