2010 in my head.

I just said all that. But what would sum it up is, I have lived, loved, felt loved. Searched till I was made to realize I didn't need to. Learnt some lessons, hope to remember them. I don't remember forgiving (maybe I forgave and forgot) but I have had to be forgiven, ask for forgiveness, yes, more times than one. Lived and learned, in my head. Still learning, always figuring it out. Never knowing what's right, probably because nothing is. So yes, it's been an interesting year.

I can't word it very well, but, I love you people. You people who've loved me, forgiven me, surprised me, uplifted me. I even love some of you people who've made me feel like shit (for no fault of my own) and need to be clonked over the head.

Thank you.

It's not very articulate, but it is heartfelt.

What I want for myself from next year is to screw up less. With myself and with other people. Be wiser. Face up for whatever I do. And make use of the constant reminder I've now given myself.

Dear SPai.

Stop seeking it. Stop seeking fluid for your words, eyes for the images you want to create. Stop searching for things, people, to complete you, for you are whole. Stop looking to fill the emptiness because your eyes are closed to the fullness of your life. Stop looking for love from others, because all the love you get won't matter if you have no love for yourself. Stop trying to be me and burning the bridges back to yourself. Stop seeking to be someone else, a shadow, a projection, for you have nothing to be ashamed of or to hide. Stop shutting away your joys and your tears, your smiles and your fears.
Just stop.
Stop. Let everything be still, and look forward into the wind and the waves and everything will be better than just okay.
And as long as you have me, you'll never be alone.
Love, Myst.

It's been an insanely happy day. Very balanced. Just. I *studied*. And I had a Double Chocolate from CBTL and a Bachelor's Special on the same day. Yay!

Rage against Machines.

Power on.

A screen lights up.

Why get out of the house, or even her bed, when she has the world on her lap?
Good Morning.

Outside is inclement weather, traffic, stress. A hundred people with a hundred different demands. Outside: Bad. Inside: Good. In here, she can sit in her soft bed, with the A/C on, with a mug of coffee by her side, and watch the world unfold.

Windows popping up. MSN, oovoo, Facebook, Twitter.

Friends? They're all here, all of them. Who else does she need? She can talk to you, typing is talking, isn't it?
What? You want to hear her voice? Fine, then, she'll switch on the webcam, plug in the mic. Video conferencing is a wonder, isn't it?

Outside is limited. Stepping out of the house, she can only see so much. Just one city, just the rain, the trains, the same people everyday. The same language, same college, same routes. After a while, it gets old, doesn't it?
The world's on her lap, she's connected to everywhere and everyone, it's magical and wonderful and she doesn't have to move an inch. A few words typed in, a tap of the Enter key, and she can see geisha from Kyoto, and Valentino's fall line. Read newspapers from New York and London side by side. Watch movies that released internationally months ago, but still haven't come to her city. With a little patience, she can have her favourite TV shows without having to hunt for the remote.

So connected. She can access everyone, and everyone can access her. Even more, maybe, than if she actually went out. Isn't this so much better? So much less effort? Twitter, FourSquare, Facebook. What wonder. She knows what everyone's doing, even if they're a continent away. She has them tracked.

She hasn't been out of the bed in a week, there's a pile of dirty dishes on the floor and a pack of cookies by her side. She's gained 10 kilos in a month. She's smiling, the glow from the 13 inch screen illuminating her face. Her eyes ache....
She will power off only to sleep at night.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A rather disturbing half-piece that came to me just before I woke up. (Yes, the dreams HAVE gone, for now. Joy.) It seemed much better then, as always, I should just have written it down.

I finally got a new laptop battery, and it doesn't seem to be working. The laptop doesn't boot, and when it does, it takes aaaaaaaaaages. It works just fine with the old battery, though. I'm a little disturbed that I liken this whole situation to a transplant, where the patient doesn't accept the transplanted organ, or something like that. Likening my laptop, in effect a machine, to a sentient being. Who can maybe hear me mentally, and sometimes loudly, curse and plead at it.

That's how the above bit came out, in a fit of anger today, I was grumbling at this generation's almost-dependance on...well, I suppose computers is a given, I guess...Facebook. The internet. Connectivity. I hear last week, many celebrated Quit Facebook day...though I don't think anyone I know actually did it. We're too scared of losing out, aren't we? Especially people like me, and so many others I know who've shifted cities and leave old friends behind...we live our lives, but FB's a boon to us, isn't it? We keep up, kind of.

It's rather sad, actually. And the most we'll do is deactivate our accounts for a while, and then get back on.

It's really quite tragic.

------------------------

Now Re-reading: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Now Feeling: Tired. I should sleep less. And write more. Like, physically. With pen and paper.

Beep.

Disclaimer: For censorship reasons (obviously) we have had to replace a certain four-letter word, crucial to this piece, with 'beep'; we apologize if the impact is lost.

Beep.

Bee Eeh Eeh Pee. Beep.

Terrible little four letter word that taints my soul each time I utter it.

It's almost become like a mantra now, we regrettably admit, and only the clenching of our teeth stops us from spewing it out at the worst of times, in front of family and impressionable children.

On bad mornings, the first thought one's mind articulates, and one's mouth mutters, is a long-drawn painful 'Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep'. Beep dances in one's head, and rolls on the back of the tongue till one has fully woken up.

As the heat grows/you get irritated/NOISE grows, the one thought mulling, fermenting in your brain? Beep. Beep me, Beep you. Go beep yourself. I don't give a beep. Beep, beep, beep.

And with every bee eeh eeh pee, your headache swells. And why not?

It's a terrible thing, this bee eeh eeh pee, and we don't seem to realise it. Don't seem to realise that it has infiltrated our vocabulary, that for some of us, it has crossed the line, from being a cussword to a mere punctuation mark, a vocal tic in every beeping sentence, and I just illustrated that for the reader's benefit.

It's turned genteel ladies into foulmouths. It USED to differentiate between the well mannered upper crust and the crass low class, but apparently not any more. Now we're ALL pretty much beeped.

Beep doesn't discriminate by caste, class, colour or gender. Beep is a virus. Uttered by the 11 year old schoolboy who's trying to be all badass to impress, by the frustrated college student with deadlines, everyone.

So here it is, BEEP. We've reached the pinnacle of the cussword hierarchy, after decades of politesse. We've done something great, we've reached up to take that unattainable elitist bee eeh eeh pee and its relatives, and we've brought it down to the masses.

What next?

Vouloir

I ache to write. I long to get the spark of an idea, it doesn't have to be phenomenal, any idea, and I want to catch it and trap it down on paper even as it struggles to escape me, pin in down with the lines and curves that form my near-illegible handwriting. I will write about people I know, and the people that come out of the depths of my head. I will...create.

I long to do random dance steps everywhere, but I don't. I'm waiting for the moment when I realise that my body is finally one with the beat.

I want to click. To capture light and shade. To freeze time into millions of pixels. To see the unusual in the ordinary. To frame life as it passes me by.

But I'll never get any of it done if all I do is want and wait.

Epiphanies

Those who know me will know that I'm not the biggest fan of organised religion, or even religion as a whole. I'm not atheist, but God, to me, is kinda formless. I don't even give it a name....

I've almost always shied away from poojas. When I've gone, I've always been in another room, playing with the other kids around. I haven't attended a pooja or a satsang in more than two years.

So I wasn't too pleased when my aunt, who I currently live with in Bombay, decided to drag me to a neighbour's place for a Ganpati pooja thingy. I sat awkwardly for a good half hour, right in the front, as others around me chanted, some mantras known, some alien.

Even the 7 year old kid next to me knew exactly what to do.

All I did was admire the decoreations and the pure white orchids used. Yeah, I checked, they were real.

And in the middle of all the noise and the chaos, my mind throwing up random bull, I looked into the compassionate eyes of the idol...and I had a conversation with Lord Ganesha.

Naah, it was probably the deluded mental diarhhea.

'Enjoying this, are you?', I asked the object of worship.

'YES!', he replied.

'But seriously dude,' I say, 'Why do people go through so much trouble for you anyway when you'd be just as happy even if they didn't?'

'Because,' and I could almost see a grin very familiar to me from somewhere else, 'I'm AWESOME.'

One of the best bloody quotes ever....

"Me, I'm dishonest. And you can always trust a dishonest person to be dishonest. It's the honest ones you can't trust. Because you never know...when they're going to do something really stupid."
- Capt. Jack Sparrow.

Well? I've ALWAYS loved that line. Because it's rather true.

Groundbreaking proofs 2

In November, I posted S's almost flawlwss proof for why god is a woman.

"Listen up", Jan said. "He's got a proof now for why God is a man. Though he'll probably kill me if you post it."
Thus, of course, I'm posting it.
THe proof goes thus:

Consider rain to be the pee of God.
It doesn't rain everywhere at once, does it? Thus, rain is direction-specific.
Men can ain while they pee. Thus men's pee is direction specific.
Thus, God is a man.

To this, my (flawed) contradiction.

Let rain be the tears of God. Let cloudy days = bad mood of God.
Rain falls unexpectedly and erratically. When you're expecting it to fall, there's always a dark sky.
Women cry unexpectedly and erratically. When you know they're gonna cry, they're always in a bad mood.

Hence, God is a woman.

We're so jobless na?
Even better than our theo-gender theories is Rushi's theory, which if true, makes life very very sad.

The greatest fear that was.

I had this fear, a fear of losing my self, my being, the whole persona, freedom, the way I look and the free-spirit way I think.
Maybe you can call it a fear of getting old, because as I age, somehow someday I'll lose it all. A desperate, clawing need to hang on tightly to what I am now, stay like this forever......

But then last week, I remembered an old box.....found it, dusted it off, and uncovered 4 year's worth of memories. Pulled out the latest, a diary I'd written in 9th grade, and in its colourfully inked happenings I saw....well, a stupid kid. A kid who cared too much about all the wrong things, a kid who didn't THINK at all! More happenings, events, kiddish excitement. OMG this and OMG that.(I still have the excitement.)
But by God I'd changed, and you know what, I liked it. I liked what I saw in the mirror now, I liked myself a little better, okay, much better, than I liked the girl who'd written in that book.
I'd kinda lost a whole self. Gradually,like cats shed their fur, like snakes shed skin, scales dropped off, rubbed of, and I'm reborn from the ashes.
And even in 9th, wasn't that my greatest fear? Losing my self?
And I'd never even noticed. So painless. Kinda like an injection, you know, you're waiting, cringing, dreading, anticipating the needle into your skin, and then suddelny they tell you, it's over....and you go "wha'?? when??"
So I think it makes sense to drop that irrational phobia now....
I guess change is inevitable, what we define is its direction.

Pain is good?

Ah.... so the brace wires are in...and it kinda hurt yesterday and all....

so yesterday I announce, just thiking aoud kinda thing, "Pain grounds you....I mean I feel now I couldn't lose my head, can't fly or whatever, the pain'll keep me on the ground"

Both parents give me proudish looks like I've realised some deep adult thing

"What...?"

"Now you get it?" Dad says.."not just pain. hardship, difficulties, all ground you....that's why we need some difficulties in life."

Hmm....