A little to the right

I am very pleased with this title, because it too, like my hassled sense of self right now, is one thing that actually is many things.

(I spent a whole minute here gentle reader, trying to figure out what this type of phrase could be. A pun? Too simple. A wordy clever misnomer. Not disguise-y enough. A metaphor? Perhaps a smidge. A midsummer gin induced hallucination by our friendly neighbourhood LLM? Alas. I concede. )

It is a merely the one thing that is many things. IT IS THE SWISS ARMY KNIFE of titles yes it has come to me now.

Firstly: 

(excuse me I am being told by my watch to stand so I shall take a stroll and be right back). 

 

Right, I am back 8 days later. Firstly:

1. Delays such as this happen when my time is not my own to waste anymore. Others now freely and happily make demands on me, requiring that I put aside the decisions and plans made of my own will, to instead say, check if all teeth have been brushed, and to immediately answer what word is queyey (queue) and why is it queyey.

2. I have had a few months of extemely stressful events. I am now on a work break. It is a beautiful time, if only to look back and see how close to death DH was, and to look forward and try to think of making the world beautiful.

3. Before my work break, that exact week before, in fact, life was wonderful, idyllic, and everything I ever wanted. If you hadn't guessed, it was on a beach with family and good food and sun and spray and water and sprinklers.

***

What I have been reading:

1. Life's lessons in the form of "Frank was a Monster Who Loved to Dance", and Frank, let me warn you, surreptitiously says "What the heck" on page 13, when he thinks we are not paying attention to him, but rather to his brains which have spilled on the floor, and I am sorry to say, we paid the mostest of attention, and we are most scandalized.

2. A few pages of Panthers in Parliament. The introduction alone makes for such fascinating reading,  and there is no much thinky material crammed into these first 3 pages alone, I despair of finishing this book. Reading, requires, some stillness? Some, stretches of breathing space? I do not know, or have. I persevere still. I am the main character of a sea shanty.

3. Ali Hazelwood's Bride. Ridiculously exciting smutty love story between a vampire and a werewolf. 

4.  Heather Fawcett's -  Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries and the sequel. Cute.

Every book I now read, after the initial euphoria of being part of a story well told, then leaves me with unhappiness and fear. Why, when, how will I find the time to write? Universe, help.

***

Bruno has constant itchy scratchy fits in his ear. Bigsmol has some weird insect bites on his forearm. Smolsmol (still the same amount of teef) has an itchy forehead from the summer sweat in his hair. Me? Itchy feet.

Send relief and soothing lotion and cold compresses and lay us all up in bed alongside a healing river. Barring which, send rains. Bangalore is hot and parched and dusty, and we are forever on the lookout for storms. Mainly climate kind.

Oh, lest I forget.

1. To the right - > I have a new hair parting, and after about 3 decades of wearing my hair in ONLY side parts, I am now moving closer to centre. Not so politically, but I have long since made my peace with my weakness on political matters. My portfolio holdings in large crony polluters are in the double digits. So it swings. I forgot what all else it was supposed to signify but 8 days will do that.

Monsoon grey

I'm sitting down with some paints and a sheet of blank paper. My current living room is a study in understated 90's elegance. Well, for a shell of an apartment, at least.

The floors are pale cream mosaic, the good kind. The walls are cream too, and the lighting is ornate. Furniture is sturdy and well made, some kind of sheeny expensive wood. There is no art on the walls, save a painting of cranes in the marshes - a blue and white soothing still life.

Amidst the mildy incongruous modern touches like a flat screen television, a space-agey heating device and an extravagantly crafted glass bowl centerpiece, there is a lamp that I have grown to love. A fishing pole meets the hunchback alien probe kind of lamp, strangely grounded in a hunk of marble.

On days like this, where the skies are monsoon grey, and the pool is limpid and quiet, and the fairy lights across the green areas are switched off, I pull one of the heavy chairs towards the lamp by the window, drag the side table so I can plonk my feet on it, and I feel a quiet happiness.

I wish you were here so you could be a part of this fleeting monsoon grey joy day. But wherever you are, I hope you are happy.

***
I don't really listen to much Coke Studio, but this one, which G has sent to me, is an excellent mid-afternoon rainy day song.

Sonu Kakkar and Vishal Dadlani - Coke Studio, Season 2, Episode 1: Madari

Who me? Busy?

Soul balm for Monday morning: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/

Note especially when he says:
“More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.”

And then he says what I believed all along, instead of the lies that this world fed me:

““The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.”

*BEAMS*

There's been a lot of criticism and analysis of this post, but its a definite goodread.