Mono no aware

There is sometimes an urgent need for melancholy in my life, not with the unthinking yet ceaseless necessity of the daily milk or the three newspapers, but with a more gentle kind of longing, that builds up slowly, bit by bit, only to deflate gently and evenly at a somewhat unexpected time: like today morning, when I became very overwhelmed, cried because I read a beautiful essay, had some tea, a quick shower, and am now cheery enough to write a blogpost.

Hi!

***

The Perfect Pound Cake and Chocolate Cake (or more recently, chocolate cookies and oatmeal cookies) are the most recent thing I have mastered. I am now more confident of being a mom. I can solve any problem my baby will pose by throwing sugary baked goods his way. Now I'm just waiting for his teeth to arrive.

YAY. #futureproof

(I doff my hat to Smitten Kitchen here and here and Rose Levy Berenbaum for all the cakey goodness.)

***

The cappucino maker made a gurgling sound and I nearly jumped out of my seat because I thought it sounded like a baby crying. EVERYTHING sounds to me like a baby crying. Given that I live at home with a (my) baby and my next door neighbour has a baby that's a few weeks older, phantom crying is probably real crying. That or I'm going a little crazy. Both are possible.

***

I'm becoming moved by art and music more and more of late, I take this to be a good sign that I am not dead inside. Indeed I feel gradually more alive and inquisitive, birdlike even, chirpy and sharp, as the end of my maternity leave approaches.

What kind of art, you say?

Like the final notes of this piece, say, or the exquisite wistfulness at the end of this piece , or this album which is perfect for sitting on my couch and watching the chromecast wallpapers scroll:

HD earth and HD sky
glorious resolution
lets pretend its real

Haiku nice?


***

Since the pregnancy, everything, every moment is now more exquisite. I observe and have become mindful of my own mortality and fragility, I see it when I holdmy child - a visceral gurgling reminder of how fleeting and fine, this life is. I couldn't articulate it of course, nearly as well as the Japanese can. Mono no aware.

***

Excuse the Japan references, I am researching for my trip there and it is everywhere in the nooks and crannies of my mind.

Hello, is it me you're looking for?

Righto.

1) Firstly, I'm really sorry if you have me on Google Reader (why, why would you do that when this header and bloggy design are so pretty?) and I've 'published' about 131 posts today and you missed out on the important news-bloggy stories out there.

Anyway, calm down. I, even I, am not that prolific. They're re-posts (as you already know).

2) Secondly, I know I went away, but I couldn't write on my new secret blog on wordpress. It was a short-lived affair but I am back to my current and usual true love - blogspot bloggy.
(Also, I like tinkering around here better). Also, I heard you missed me. I missed me. So I had to come back by popular demand. Sigh - fandom.


3) Thirdly, like, have you been reading the news? What an AWFUL world we seem to live in. There's been way too much abuse and grief and sadness on the news for my liking. Only the Higgsteria made up for it. And Aung San Suu Kyi. And Santorum withdrawing (horrid man obssessed with vaginas and foetuses and uteruses). America - don't become the Knife of Never Letting Go.
(shudder)

4) Fourthly, I have been reading a lot. Feed by MT Anderson was brutal and honest in a way that little else I've read recently. Except Charles Stross's science fiction which I liked and then immediately unliked and you'll see why.

5) Fifthly, I have had a lot of time to think. Serious think. Like, I read Saturn's Children and I was like wtf is it with female sex robots and why tf do sci-fi writers write semi-porno-sadistic-abuse crap about them? (See below). I mean, is it because you won't be respectable if you write about semi-porno-sadistic abuse crap of male sex robots?  Why dude, why? And The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. Why talk about their perfect breasts and mango smooth skin and perpetuate body imagery that is patently illogical. WTF is mango smooth skin? And these books are insanely famous. Promethues, Hugo, Locus, Nebula - you name it they've been nominated.
This is not fiction. This is Cosmo + Fifty Shades of Grey.

And lets not even get into gaming and quizzing.

From Wiki, a little intro:

"Emiko is a Japanese-designed windup girl (a humanoid GM organism, used as a slave, and programmed to seek a master and obey him; windups call themselves "New People") abandoned by her Japanese master. As such, she is illegal in Thailand. Raleigh, a sex club owner, gives her some measure of safety by bribing the police to let her live, but at the price of forcing her to work in his club, where she is routinely abused and sexually humiliated." - The Windup Girl


 6) Sixthly, the internet is a wonderful place because there are so many important ways to say what you can about the issues that anger you. Like, you can ready about the Bechdel Test and then say: I will legally only own copies of stuff that passes the Bechdel Test. And you can tell people about it on-the-line :). How wonderful a place is the internet. Also I am now a wiki editor. And a news junkie; seriously, I've read SO much news in the past few months. I've also completely STOPPED buying hard copy books. Ok, if I go on in this rein, this blogpost will not end.

7) Seventhly, I have not been shoe-shopping at all. I have disavowed the excessive materialism which characterised my life for the past couple of years. I like my simple (non shoe-shopping life now). I thought I should tell you this, in case you thought I was buying every pair of flat happy open-toed shoes I could find here

8) Eightly, I am in Singapore - did you already know this? I can never go back to living in a non-sun non-swimming pool place anymore. There is also less Asian vegetarian food in Singapore than in London (also less cupcakes - sigh) so I have been cooking more and I am an excellent chef. Really truly. I am on a new crazy eating and exercise plan though so I haven't eaten a cupcake in about four months. I didn't even eat one when I found out about my new job - though I skipped the gym for 8 days in celebration.

9) Ninthly, I am going to need to make new friends because I will be moving to Delhi.
(Sad face * 453867)

10) Tenthly, hey, hello, gentle reader!!!! Are you well?

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).

And that is the longing, and this is the book

I'm reading some wonderful poetry at the moment.

If you could write a poem to hum to yourself should you walk down La Ramblas, towards the docks, then this is what it would be:
(You'd have to make allowance for many of the brilliant bars that dot the place, especially one such as this: Obama, and Obama) though what the reviewers dont mention is the life-size statue of Obama sitting on a bench about 2 feet from our table.

***

You'd sing too

You'd sing too
if you found yourself
in a place like this
You wouldn't worry about
whether you were as good
as Ray Charles or Edith Piaf
You'd sing
You'd sing
not for yourself
but to make a self
out of the old food
rotting in the astral bowel
and the loveless thud
of your own breathing
You'd become a singer
faster than it takes
to hate a rival's charm
and you'd sing, darling
you'd sing too

Late in the night, I think of mountains and ATVs

When you are the only person left in the office and its around 1 am, when try as you might, you cannot motivate yourself to do a little bit of extra work until the taxi can come pick you up, your mind may wander to mundane matters of  no importance. Not me.

Nope.

I am thinking of Lagarde, and her appointment at the IMF even though she has no background in economics, about how she was a chair at B&M, and wondering how Greece got itself into such a mess.

I read reports about protests at Syntagma and blockades at Piraeus and felt curiously affected by the anger and frustration of the people. Is that what the IMF did with the SAP (?) plans a decade or so ago?

I was at Piraeus, and its unordinary and well, normal. I remembered distinctly telling DF that if you added a river to the right side of Mount Road (yes, the side with the LIC and the Cosmopolitan Club) and removed all the buildings on the right side, then it would like exactly like Piraeus.

We undertook an Epic journey from Piraeus to Monastiraki, getting very lost and then finding a Greek bus-stop with 30 kilo backpacks on our backs, taking a Greek bus, with Greek signs and getting off when we were told we couldnt buy tickets on the bus, and walking back to the port (roughly a kilometre) to buy a ticket from the same Greek Lady who gave us directions to the bus-stop earlier (utterly terrible directions) but didnt tell us we couldnt get a ticket on board. .

We had a phrase for the trip, conjured when we were stuck in a loop downtown in Mykonos and couldnt find our way to the hotel. The centre of the city, the main village is usually called hora.

Yes, you're right, we are that lame.


My taxi is here, so the rest of the story shall be told someother time, but I miss driving through Naxos in between giant scary deadly quiet mountains on tiny winded paths to visit a tiny village and eat in someone's living room cum cafe. Especially because the ATV was a bright red in Naxos.

It was bright orange in Santorini, and bright yellow in Mykonos.

Good times, gentle reader, good times.