Off the wagon

I seem to have fallen into the bad habit of vomiting god-awful first draft of my posts and then spending forever cleaning them up. Its beginning to seem like work. I dont like. The latest theory attributes this obstruction of ahem... literary flow to withdrawal symptoms - I havent touched a book in a while. I should have known i'm not strong enough for cold turkey.

Men at arms, here i come!

An Englishman in New York?

I'm on my way to the gym. The sun is peeping out sleepily from behind the clouds, debating whether to rise or indulge in those two precious minutes of sleep. In spite of myself, my spirits are lifted. The sun is no longer the enemy, the harbinger of morning, the siren for respectable people to be out of bed. It is just one of us, a co-sufferer, someone with unreasonably early work hours. I give it a metaphorical i know, life sucks pat on the back and move on. Up ahead i see this lady and her daughter standing on one side of the road, probably waiting for the school bus. The lady looks up at the rising sun, closes her eyes, bows her head and folds her hands together in prayer.
It should not come as a shock, but it does. At that instant, her motivations, her feelings, her actions seems so alien to me, that thats exactly what i feel like - an alien.
I suppose at some point in our lives all of us have felt it - the disconnect, the separation, this distance from everyone around us. Which is why even those small, meaningless connections you make with random strangers become all the more important. It is why i love watching Tamil movies in Pune. Being surrounded by all those Tamil speaking people, I feel like i belong. Or the reason why i like Chennai more than i logically should. Which is strange because i dont feel at home with the language itself!

P.S. I wanted to write about how every generation tries to find its own ways to deal with this alienation, to find something to belong to. Be it family and society, or rebellion or a caught in the middle generation that seems wants to belong but but is equally afraid of being bound. To anything. But i couldnt write it without seeming that i was a) being pompous and b) making sweeping generalizations.

Tit for tat?

The age old question again. If someone tats you, is it okay to tit back? Should you stoop to conquer? Or should you just stand straight, taking it all like a fool, hoping to shame the tatter into better behaviour? It doesnt work, this nobility. Except of course, in Hindi movies involving the Mahatma. I'm not arguing against his ways, all i'm saying is that they are not very effective when its one individual against the other. But the question still remains. Does the fact that you are reacting excuse the level you have sunk to? Or do the same standards that apply to your actions apply to your reactions?

I dont like questions i have to find my own answers to.

The messiest of them all

You know the person who exists just so that people can look at him and feel happy that their life will never be that bad? My desk at work is that person. With everything that lies on it and underneath, on a typical day at work, I will, at least once:

trip on the mouse wire
kick my CPU shut
go underground in search of the other end of some cable
pull off the network connection

Its a good thing i dont work on the top floor, people there have whole civilizations under their desk! Just looking under makes me feel like i'm "in" AOE.

(Look at the lame name dropping! Once she has played the game, years ago, by herself. But i guess its better that than pretending to be on first names terms with CS, after months of nothing but second hand association. And anyway, who plays these games nowadays?)

One and a half green bottles...

Know what i've realized after a shamefully large number of years of existence? I suck at keeping in touch. I know, its kind of like "discovering" in the 11th standard that you are left handed, its not like life didnt give you enough opportunities to find out. But thats just it, i think life didnt. Being the kind of person who does more of her talking in her head, even if people have moved out of my life's current window, they are very much a part of it inside. So if you ask me, i'll never admit to being out of touch. Plus, there has always been a current set that takes care of life outside my head.
What then lead me to the realization of left handedness? Remember that 10 green bottles standing on a wall rhyme? Well, it looks like someone seems to be very systematically playing that game with the people in my life. People are "accidentally" falling off. Not anything new, but in the past one green bottle would always be replaced by another. Different, to be sure. but essentially it would still be a green bottle. Now for variety of reasons the replacements have stopped. Or rather, just gotten bizarre. Sometimes there is just a bottle cap where a bottle should be. Sometimes its a green eyed bug. And empty space, lots of that too. And some that i know are green bottles, even though they dont look much like one right now, if i could just get it together to work on them a bit. I could of course go pick up the fallen bottles, none of whom, touch wood, have actually broken because of the fall. Which is when i realize how much hard work that seems like, how used i have got to drifting through life, to taking whatever it gives, to not sticking my hand out and asking for more.