Next.

I swam today.

It's been two years.

The water was as beautiful as always, the pool fabulously, invitingly, empty. Cold sapphire coloured water distorting the cheap granite facing on the tiles underneath. Little orange buoys bobbing at the other end, asking to me to lift a leg, stretch an arm, cut through cold fluid, come over. Come over. Little drops of water'd coalesced on my stubbornly brown skin, paling now because of the cold. Fine black hairs standing up on the tips of tiny white goosebumps. Orange sky. Faintly oily, slightly slick skin. So much for waterproof sunblock. Oily rubbish. Cheap shit.

The water is so cold, I love it, so cold. My arms are freezing. My mother will kill me. I began to swim. I swam. I was done in an hour or so.. I left.


I hated it. I'm never doing it again.


Inexplicable, really, how you can be so completely indifferent to something you once felt so much for. For all that I loved to swim once, I felt nothing close to enjoyment this time over. This is it, then.... swimming bores me now. I've been wondering when it will happen. It's not often that I sustain an interest in things as long as I have in this.


I wonder what's up next. And how long I will take to tire of it.

Indifferent and happy on facebook.

okay see.

This is my winter break. Considering I spend all my free time, and considerable chunks of my working time asleep, it is not such a very crazy idea to grasp that my legs/arms/fingers/etc have not sen more exercise than absolOOtely necessary, this vacation. I have spent as MUCH of my time as humanly possible, parked firmly between bedsheet and blanket. I have only bestirred my happily prostrate self to eat, drink, crap and stalk people on facebook. Facebook is most of the time, it's fairly passive, uniformly annoying self, not interrupting my voyeuristic joys except to log me out mysteriously or ask me What Kind of Boyfriend Will I Have?

BUT. But.

I am an observant person. I have, through my keen observational skills, noticed the presence of evil on this site. Evil in the form of persons whose lives revolve around getting other people to change their display pictures of the national flag. Or plain black. Or plain white. Or.. strangely, Red Bull (?!).

Now you know me. I have the same fairly spaz pic up on facebook that I have always had. I log in. I stalk harmlessly. I find out what Jaane Tu character I am most like, the type of boyfriend i am going to attract, what kind of car I am, what kind of gun I am, and what That 70s Show character I am like. I log out. (Sometimes I also not log out, but I fail to see the relevance of such in the point I am trying to make.)

I do not form Groups to End Social Evil. I do not Protest Evil Globalisation. And I certainly do not send my friends amusingly breathless messages commanding them to turn ur display photoz black to protest d mumbai teror attcks!!!!!! turn ur dispix white to pray 4 worldd peaceee!!!

I am not NOT cooperating because the connection between my changing my dispic and muslim terrorists dropping dead is non sequitor. I am not NOT cooperating because facebook is a social networking site, and there is nothing more annoying than a social networking site that begins to put on airs.

I am not cooperating because I simply don't want to cooperate.

And that, I think, is as good a reason as any.

Ta, ye faithful. Happy New Year; I wish you all sobriety at midnight.

I has read a book. REALLY.

Four, actually.

However, it was only the Twilight series. I suppose that doesn't count, that's like saying I listen to Contemporary Music and then bursting into Baby One More Time... hmm. I like that song. Fun tune, composed of that delicately balanced combination of sugarcandy and acid reflux that promises to drive you up the wall by staying in your head till kingdom come..

ANYWAY. Twilight.

Twilight is a story about an obsessive teen-vampire love thingy. Wallflower teen stalks broody vampire who wants to eat her cos she smells of flowers and other nice-smelling things, but can't because he's sworn off humans. Eventually he decides to address that problem by dating her (don't ask me, I didn't write it.) So then they have a true (and truly obsessive)love characterised by what characterises all true love stories. You know, the usual. The unearthly(unearthly-ly? unearthlily?) beautiful monster and the emo teen girl who pees everytime she sees him. Cos of his Beauty. And how it Overwhelms her. And cos of his Beauty. And cos of..

Yes, well.

But seriously, twilight starts off okay, and Stephanie Meyer can pull it together better than some (many) other teenfic writers I've read. And I get that Edward Cullen is supposed to be the unattainable: the beautiful, considerate and delightfully sarky boy with shiny skin and perfect hair. (And bloodsucking, of course. That's hot. That's just how we roll ;D ) It's just that there's only so far you get on the believability scale when pretty much half the novel is taken up in whinily insisting to the reader, in something like the mental voice of that ten year old cousin you secretly want to choke with rubber tubing, that Edward is beautiful, Edward is beautiful, Edward is unearthly, Edward is beautiful. Stephanie Meyer ends up falling from the precarious position of almost-successful-teenfic writer to the depths of the depths: yammering-Edward-groupie. Sad, yesno.

Oh, the rest of the series?

Ok, there's a bunch of werewolves who don't quite like the vampires, but of course they bond over love for poor fangirl here, and the four books (each one a little longer than the last, until the last is the effing Encylopedia Brittanica: Harry Potter Syndrome?) , after a torturous and largely boring journey, culminates in the birth of a bloodsucking fangirl; fruit of the union of guess-who and guess-who-again.

Who, in turn, is pursued by vampires but loved by werewolf and.....well, you get the point. There's Lots of Love. And Unearthly Beauty. And Descriptions of Unearthly Beauty. Long, Detailed, Oh-God-I-Get-It-Already-Please-Stop-Now-Please Descriptions of Unearthly Beauty.

I guess I've outgrown pretty boys with delicately sarky tongues and fabulous hair and Deeply Tortured Souls. Awwww poor me. This must be my coming-of-age moment. :D

It was nice spin anyway. Maybe I'm just pissed cos they chose Robert Pattinson to play Edward.

I'd have gone with Hugh Jackman. :D

Shleepy

Been a nice long time since the last post. Time to do one of those resuscitation things again, if only to save this nice happy soda-type orange template that sindhu gifted me when I was template-less and footloose and hanging to her door by my fingernails, whining to her to get me a sexy new template. Of course, she picked my fingers off her door and kicked me out with the least snazzy template she had, but whaddaya know, I seem to like it after all. Live another day, friend. ;)

Today is a feel-fat day. I don't have these very often...hell, they don't even bother me too much; being declared medically obese in upper kg kind of takes the edge off these things.;)

I've done my daily quota of blogsurfing and after eight posts on the unmentionable-event-in-bombay (yes. I said bombay. Not mumbai. Deal with it.), and an equal number of posts on proposition 8, I have decided that I shall not be left behind.

Proposition 8: Try all you want, gay people are going to keep having fabulous sex and living together if they want to. *Wave* to Ashim and Nishanth, keep showin' em haters. I know you're having better sex than them ;)

Bombay attacks: this to the newspapers: The 'Spirit of Bombay' thing is getting lamer and more annoying by the second. Give it up, nobody believes it anyway.

I want a nice cheesy pasta, garlic bread and poutine right now. Now. I also realise I have hit the bottom of the pit of coherence and articulation. I am going to toddle off and snuggle into a blanket now. Or two. Three? (What? I grew up in Madras! We don't HAVE winters!!)

Hands up, all you reading types.

It's been too long since I read anything in specific; while I acknowledge that the study (or whatever passes for it) of the law (or whatever passes for it :-D )sometimes allows drifting into land that can only be described as 'academic' by the most optimistic, I don't want to drift into it this time. I want to read...non-fiction is ok too, as long as it sounds interesting. I have some ebooks with me, and some ideas on what I want to read; if anyone thinks they have a better idea, would they please raise hand and give me a shout?

Here's what I have with me:

Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions (reading already)

Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman

George Bernard Shaw - Collected Plays

I also want the following:

Neil Gaiman - Neverwhere

Anything by Terry Pratchett and G.K. Chesterton.

If anyone has Neverwhere, or any Pratchett or Chesterton in ebook form or knows where to find it, please leave a comment. I will be yours for life. In the detached, long-distance way. :-D

May I make clear here that I am on a student budget. This means a total of 0.00 in cash of any denomination has been set aside to fund this reading. For the simpler of intellect - I am talking free ebooks here. Yeah I know that probably means piracy. Morality is the luxury of the rich, or something like that* said Goebbels, and my senile grand-uncle. I am aware it does not do much for my argument to rely on a Fascist war criminal and a senile geriatric, but an opinion is an opinion, yesno? I firmly believe in the democracy of bullshit. This is why I don't think idiots should be shot**.

Anyway, I digress. People, please find me books! Of course, if you love me truly you will buy me the book and have it hand-delivered with a hundred orchids wrapped in the finest Central European tissue, by a Hugh Jackman lookalike, preferably announcing his arrival and your eternal devotion to me in a Hugh Jackman accent, but yeah - 

I'm a cynic ya. I know true love is a lie perpetrated by the filthy capitalist pigs in Hollywood offices. I'm only asking for some online suga ;-) Cooperate, no. Please.

Please?

----

*He didn’t say ‘something like that’. I did. It doesn’t matter, the rest is misquoted too anyway. None of you is likely to catch it and I’m too lazy to make the effort. Cheers :-)

 

**I believe they should be laughed at till death***. More fun.

 

***I meant that we laugh and they die. You got it, no? No?****

 

****Yeah I know I should quit the pointless footnotes. Blame the mood and law school…they just make it that much easier :-D

Fuggoff : A Sonata in B Whine-or ;)

When pigeons flap (and screw and crap)
on my grill and window sill
When the wind beings the desert in
I'm tired of sand, I cannot win:

I say fuggoff.

When my project is a futile dream
I have a directionless team
Deadlines come and deadlines leave
I whine, and then I fail - I grieve:

I say fuggoff.

When September gets in line,
The sun gets bigger and ups the shine
My clothes are limp, my mind is dead,
I sweat, I tan, my feet are lead

I say fuggoff.

And then I sleep.

-zzz-

Mridula.

I did not know as well as I could have, when I could have. I messed up pretty substantially. I've been sorry for very long...I should have spoken sooner; it's amazing how easily youth believes itself to be immortal.

I know your passing was not easy, but I'm sure you were as spunky as I've always known you to be.

Here's to your rescuing many kittens, eating many puchkas and generally being your chatterbox-type four-foot-eleven brand of fabulousness in heaven (or its midget equivalent) :-)

Cheers..

-Peace-