some 'chairs' are not worthy of that title.

I recently spent some money on some beautiful brown wooden chairs, made in malaysia. spent a couple of hours assembling one yday, soon after I fought with the heavy parcel, arguing with it to first get in to my car and then in to my bedroom. skipped a couple of nylon bolt protectors and realized it later.

had no patience or energy to assemble the other. hubby will come tomorrow and assemble his before he sits down.

and then when I carried my new royal seat to my table (dining/study), it put the ikea thing to shame. the erstwhile 'chairs' that stood by it looked like neanderthals next to a New Yorker.

the seat can take 1.5 times my behind, even after me cross-legging on it. and its nice and low, for my short stumps of legs. it literally glows gold in its oak stain color. and the back-rest, ohhhh, as if someone's massaging my much-abused spine.

read about some sacred Brooklyn bookstore shutting down, not because it could no longer compete but because the husband-wife owners simply wanted to retire. it apparently "smelt of hard wood floors and books".

aroused a momentary fancy in my head. what if I owned and worked in a bookstore, a beautifully wood-fragrant place with oak stained tables, chairs, bookshelves, many many of these, with the sole decoration of books and readers. oh and yeah, oak stained church-pew-like-benches too, along any windows. maybe some plants, the green offsetting all that brown and gold.

an early morning call with confusion, hurt, and despair in her voice, cloaked with a blankness that reflected shock. and me wondering how it felt, to her; this, that I had known would come, had been inevitable, but that she had been denying, refusing to accept, still hoping for a revival, from a near-demise, metaphorically.

some messages, many messages, full of sadness, hurt, accusations, helplessness. and me wondering what this meant, why it happened over and over again, what she was missing in having the protagonist's view, what was haunting her, and how this would play out, when it would stop. and also of course, whether i was being harsh in my judgments, in judging at all, in trying to empathize by putting myself in there, and also in trying to show her an unseen perspective, from where I could see.

and here i am. at the end of this day, tired, with aching limbs, with a sense of dread and of disgust, with my own life. and neither of them would understand. just like i don't understand them.

and there goes, my subconscious proves me juvenile to think I revel in self-sufficiency. I had a dream last night, of being a new student (an oft-repeated experience) in a dorm in a boarding school/college, with some faces from my past, lots of new introductions, hanging out, reaching out..., confessing my sense of being lost, and in turn, being led around.

I woke up suddenly, with the alarm, with still the lingering euphoric  emotion of camaraderie .

I do really miss being a student.

students are needy. they are obliged to seek connections to fill their needs. and it's good, its mutual. grown up life, in becoming self sufficient, also becomes a world of nuclear islands - each with spouses/partners and babies..

I've been wondering lately if I'm a horrible person. whether I do really chastise people for their lack of precision or getting their facts right, especially when they come to me with their troubled hearts. whether my sense of being special and my perceived self-singularity is not naturally human but especially nauseatingly my singular characteristic. whether my life alone is not more than just circumstance and chance, and is in fact a judgment on my caustic-ity. i.e. I'm alone cos no one sticks with me.

but worse yet, my satisfaction in being alone, is worse than all above thoughts, more so, when accompanied by all those above; cos it proves them all to be more than conjectures.

I just read these words in Andres Neuman's book: "An American tourist next to me vociferously demands his lost luggage."

that line makes me smile. and simultaneously, both together, makes me empathise with the rest of the world that makes such observations about Americans, and empathise with the American who is the victim here of the incompetency of the rest of the world. funny, human perspectives, and the judgments that arise from it.

yes, I can see why life in America gives us a sense of entitlement. on the other hand, like in this example, it's usually an entitlement expressed for something intrinsically owned being snatched away... and vociferousness? a protest against the snatching.

haha.

I remember myself being similarly vociferously indignant once, at Barajas airport, when each item in my suitcase was pulled out, and left out, thanking me for my patience (and for my re-packing skills), while I was already v late for my connection, after having missed a flight cos the gate officials messed up some communication and barred me from boarding.

ahhh lost in cultural translations of efficiency and etiquette

so far I've lived in a dozen cities/towns, in a lil less than 3 times that many yrs in life, some for merely months; not counting the different locations, apartments and houses within them. the longest continuous stretch being some 7 yrs. some of those places I forget that I ever was in, some feel like vacations, and probably were cos I was visiting my parents on n off while they actually lived there. but there's this one place, I keep squinting at on google maps nowadays, wondering why it feels so alien when it was home to me for a year. bangalore.

so of course, I didn't look at google maps when I lived there, or if I did, I have no recollection of it. I lived in two neighborhoods, a month in benarghatta, and the remaining 11 in koramangala. and I depended solely on local autowallahs (or pillion on the bike of my broker in search of an apartment) for my sense of direction and for my means of navigation. while I was there, it felt like I commuted far and wide, it felt like I knew the place, it felt like I was getting out and about. and now, staring at its map, I lack even a basic sense of east and west. I can't even locate my erstwhile neighborhood on the map, forget my apartment, I have no idea what the distance to work was (only that it took half an hour in an auto), I don't remember street names (I barely remember the names of 3-4 neighborhoods), and to make things worse, the city seems to have changed so much in the last 10 yrs. almost like it underwent puberty, and has a cracked voice, and unrecognizable hairs and curves.

and yet I clearly remember days. in places. the outsides of those places elude my memory. I remember Koshy's and in fact the crowded MG road and Brigade road, our fav restaurant Spiga (that always felt like a house party) and our always getting lost trying to get to it (that was one address the autowallahs never got), loads of other eating holes - chinese, mallu, andhra, even littis, bong, barbecue, ... (blore, even then was eclectic in its food scene). I remember clearly the interior decors of these places, the atmosphere in each, the sense of high I'd get on andhra chilies in one much frequented place, but no idea which side the sun rose from in each, no idea how far and where (except the much frequented andhra place Maharaja, which was just steps away from our apartment, and of course, my daily run route). even the place I most frequented, Forum mall, I can only picture its entrance and the street corner right outside and a lil bit to the left and right, and then suddenly it zones out into blackness. no idea how many and which turns led the auto there. even the old airport which was like a local bus stop then, apparently down a straight airport road after a while on the ring road, but where? why can't I trace my tires back? not even when I spent so much time at the airport, not just flying in and out of the city, but seeing bf off (don't remember receiving his arrival ever though) every time with my fav american cheesecake in my hands (forgotten the place that used to make it, aaaarrrgh) and two lil plastic spoons, the two of us sharing it while we waited to say goodbye. for many yrs after blore, in fact, I couldn't bare to look at cheesecake, let alone eat it, I always felt so overstuffed with it.

some weeks ago I drove about 470 miles in a day. that is about 750 kms. it was tiring. but also exhilarating. I started out early morning driving west against the sun on a beautifully cloudy and windy day. that's the best way to do a long drive. drive against the sun and back again, against it, by the way. its amazing that despite so many yrs in this region, I hadn't traveled west in texas. it was beautiful. forgotten and lonely and green. and of course flat. but also undulating. with eyes revealing the land for miles on either end. and this city ends very soon to the west and then its like nature lies untouched around the smooth paved steel grey road, curving with the yellow and white stripes on it, cutting into un-trampled wildness.

I was scared and excited and sweating like I do when I'm a combination of those two. it was just me and my faithful car. with the radio playing. and that stopped catching signal very soon (I did realize that I could still catch npr at a different wavelength). I didn't stop too much cos I was trying to avoid a sleep-over somewhere, cos despite a grown up job I'm still always short of money. and when I did stop, ppl stared at me almost as if I was an alien. a brown girl in and orange flowery skirt and a pink tank top, amidst truckers, mostly older white Texans, and some Mexican/Texans. I felt foreign. I felt like an explorer.

but at one of these stops a car stopped behind me, just as I was getting back into mine after clicking left and right randomly, my windows phone camera doing no justice to the panoramic views around me. a youngish hispanic looking guy was driving and talking on his phone, and then he hung up and got out while I could see him in my side mirror. he gestured to me to show that he was coming to me, I froze for a minute, trained by years of cat calling and sexually threatening strangers, and gestured back that I was driving off. thankfully he turned back to his car and I did not see him follow me after that. he probably thought I had car trouble, and maybe stopped to help..? or maybe the alternative, who knows..

I stopped to pee and grab a donut at a strange Chinese place just off the road at one point. the lady had a small praying display with donuts displayed in front of it, and I didn't stare at it too much fearing I'd cross the polite-line, but a customer before me commented on her deity being El Trump. I was amused more than horrified, but even more at the similarity of that display to what back home would be called a 'puja-ghar' with lil lumps of fried dough instead of the yellow laddoos one would see back home. like I've said before a million times... ppl are the same everywhere...

oh ya I did reach my destination unhurt and un-lost. and I did see the breathtaking water lilies that were the reason for the trip. but they aren't the point of this post. cos, although that was beautiful, it was the journey that jolted me into wondering why I don't do this more often. with more years tucked under my belt, I'm becoming more and more a misanthrope, and I realized how much I like being on the road by myself with the radio in my car.

I had another whimsical stop at a self-proclaimed 'red-neck' barbecue place for a late-lunch on my way back. where I almost left my credit card, I was so overwhelmed with the tender brisket and so intimidated by appearing so different from everyone else around.

there was one really sad bit to the whole day, one that I slowly got used to too (even more saddening, my getting inured). there must have been at least 30-40 small dead animals on the road in those 470 miles, squirrels, possums, armadillos, ... god knows what else, one freshly hit with its tail furiously wriggling while its body was pasted to the road by its blood and innards. it was mostly an empty road, except when it passed through some small town, and cars drove at 80-90 miles an hour (yes, me too, although I swear I didn't hit anything), way past the speed limits; and its sad to see that human life has such a casual destructive impact on the world around us.

I'm getting older. But still, many firsts in my life yet to go. Bring it on, fear is only exciting.

wrote this on the last flight back home

We are each a lil speck. Sometimes down below, when seen from a skyscraper window, or from a new York city fire-escape. but not just then; even in a window seat looking down on the world. A lil thinking speck, looking down on the seemingly unthinking expanse of curves, scratches, abrasions, in an ocean of blue-green-ness that we know better as earth when we are down there ourselves.

We become a body when in close proximity with others like us. When we are hugging, when our hand brushes onto our lover’s, when our lips touch, when we meet, and say goodbyes – and walk on, to become specks again. Or all that in between, when we ‘socialize’ consciously and unconsciously, living our daily lives, when we are in the same room, at the same crossing on the street waiting for that white man to appear, in the same line, across a table, each of us with our own thoughts – private, yet affected, with lil screens and filters, with sieves and walls – both transparent and opaque.

Who are we? Who am I? where do I end and you begin? In our conversations, on our shared bed. In our arguments. Tomorrow I’ll repeat with conviction, what today I’m vehemently disagreeing hearing from you. We merge, we separate; we are gas, in liquid containers.

Like that blue water below, mirroring the sky, appearing isolated from the green pock-marked grey-blue-ness around it, but secretly seeping into its boundaries for god knows how far, and sheltering it in turn, under itself, owning it up as its bedrock. Threatening haughtiness at the same time as a sense of rooted humility.

It’s all inter-personal angst, once the stomach is fed and there’s no perception of immediate danger or threat.

But till then, fear and bad luck lead to mistrust and violence. And yes of course, history, the center where everything leads to and returns from. The stories of scores of specks. Fighting for and with and against each other. Loves and wars; of bodies and specks. Points and lines, and circles, and undecipherable shapes. Bloodied and saved. Pictures and cries and songs.

heard this is Harlem, in one of those corner basketball courts, on a Sunday morning, right opposite a church that had mass going on with lots of tourists walking in (including us). blasted on full volume. catchy tune, slay lyrics. been humming.. is it just me ..

been a summer of reading

sometimes I feel this very strong inward tug, toward something external, to imbibe it, make it part of me. right now, its black literature. I haven't read much of that. strangely, many yrs ago I tried reading Toni Morrison but could not. just could not. don't think I got it, and I abandoned it.

things have changed. plus, with all the racial tension in the air, I've been feeling disconnected reading Franzen. as if its for people who live in their cocoons, immune to everything else outside the window. 'white literature'. luxurious - the very metaphor of reading something like it.

plus, I'm visiting Harlem later this week. one of those neighborhoods that white people and brown people and other lightly colored and non-colored people hesitated to go to some years ago. and now as they say, its been 'gentrified'. makes me feel like a racist ass. and reminds me of a day many years ago, when I was new in this country and I got frightened by a black guy asking me for change. things have changed, like I said. last year I got mad at my dad for getting scared of people darker than him, and for getting scared for me when a guy asked me for college money at a gas station in L.A.

of course, I got led to Harlem by something. someone rather. Luiselli's book. and the pointer in it that I was unaware of the Harlem Renaissance. and of course, you can trust Teju Cole to keep that going in my head. I've been looking at his books and those of James Baldwin's and because of the abundance of choice, esp in the latter, have been living with that restlessness of the inward tug, unsatisfied. (I did read Giovanni's room some yrs ago, but again, don't think I fully got it, although I did finish).

and then I was jubilant today for reading before an interview (Cole's) about the comparison between him and Coetzee. yes! I'd got that too, with one book of each, probably, coincidentally, the one (in each case) that is (are) most related.

guess it will be Baldwin for now, cos Cole being contemporary is not running away.

the internet brings famous people closer home. they reply, strangely, to sincere efforts at connection. Amitava Kumar wished me luck for my work too. I wonder if he knew that I am lost. what is my work in this world? reading others'?

'Go tell it on the mountain' or 'The fire next time'?

and then, these words:

"Statesmen have known visions. And, not alone,
Artistic men prod dead men from their stone:
Some of us have heard the dead speak:
The dead are my obsession this week."

- Geoffrey Hill

are we selfish even when facing death nearby? do we really think as much about those gone, or is it always me. death is particularly harrowing because it makes me feel completely helpless against it, because it fills me with guilt, toward the gone and the left behind. because it makes me feel powerless, unable to reverse it, unable even to understand it.

till death hits home, it is only a metaphysical concept - an idea. that arouses philosophy.

each one of us processes death in personal definitions. what the gone meant to us, what we meant to them. which of his words ring in our ears, while his eyes shine, although the words were surely said to us on the phone which meant we didn't see those eyes, not then at least. what the absence proves about us as people, what it says to us, how it calls us - as always - in life. it is always apt. what it says about distance and past and memories, also those that weren't formed.

and when people die on us unexpectedly, peacefully, do they smile as they go away. like they always did in life, with every cackling joke?

more even than the words, why do their signature tones speak still

Jonathan Franzen: Books Made Me Survive

and this will be shared on my blog, because no real person in my life shares my enthusiasm for this writer

"I get affected", she said. as a reason for being insulated. as if it was a thing to be avoided.

I did not quite understand. of course I get affected. why won't you? why won't anyone? or why shouldn't anyone? its to worry if someone doesn't, or ceases to.

like that day when I was walking with hubby and two sisters in law (one by marriage, one by marriage-squared) and we stopped for ice cream. no chocolate ever for me. and if there's salted caramel, then there's no choice to be made. the guy asked us if we had tried it, almost as a warning. as if he was saying, "do you know what you're getting yourself into?". he said it was intense. my sincere reply, don't you worry, I'm intense. laughter from my ppl, attributing it to the dinner cocktails. the guy's face falls, as if I'm pulling his leg. but I was doing just the opposite, expressing sincere affiliation with the forewarned loner ice cream. bring it on, I want to be at its mercy.

like when I read fiction about relationships shattering, and behave in mine as the words move in that. start to wonder about all that sex we didn't have this week (maybe longer). imagine the possibility or consider the eventuality of us not being 'us' anymore. and then if the book ends with a return to the absence of pain, I look at him with tenderness again. and if it didn't, we'd probably be fighting right now.

it was all meant to be. every wave of emotion that rises in me has a stimuli somewhere in the world that I touch, I occupy. how else would I be alive? is there another way?

and the exotic from around the world was strangely although faintly/vaguely but also tragically disappointing.

on the other hand, the recommended, seemingly mainstream and boring and commonplace and unattractive, turns out to be riveting. and brilliant, more so, precisely because it is so rooted.

in the years of my youth I was more receiving, more open to recommendations. I will have to go back, to that judge-less-ness of what people point out to. there are gems I am unaware of.

it may have occurred to me in many different ways before, but the first time the thought clearly hit was a couple days ago when hubby and I were watching Life Story narrated by David Attenborough, on netflix - we humans think we are the smartest, but is there a very deep illusion there? are we actually dumb? and worse, making ourselves dumber using little skills to replace what intelligence and natural sense we did have?

I had resolved some days ago, that I would get out more often, out of the apartment, out of the suburb. spend more time in the city, awake, unlazy, out in the world, and more importantly, doing more work than I was getting done at home. today I set out around noon in search of a public library, found it, sat around for a bit, even figured something out in the literature I was unsuccessfully reading so far, and felt good. I noticed there seemed to be a lot of homeless-looking men watching stuff on youtube on the public computers. it set me thinking to what extent the whole internet revolution had touched the poor in this rich country. a couple other lone students were studying around, definitely younger than me, one moving rhythmically almost like Indian kids did when they memorized stuff. an Asian student with an exam coming up. another asked me to 'watch his bags' while he looked for some documents (I wondered if he was hitting on me).

there were announcements about free lunch somewhere in the building either for those aged less than or more than 18 (I didn't quite catch that). I got up to get some food for my grumbling belly too. found the neighborhood around a lil seedy and yet colorful. also emptyish. again, that luxury of being free to roam on a weekday afternoon. the Thai restaurant wasn't bad. big windows, lots of light, small tables, three couples lunching and some loners on the bar and me with my hardbound reading and watching Obama in Dallas on the big TV. the duckrolls were not the Vietnamese rolls that I would have liked and had expected (god knows why) but lil paratha rolled around strings of veggies and minced duckmeat. I ate, carefully pulling out the noodles of ginger from my rolls. that had a strangely meditative effect on me.

walking around after, updated my information as the neighborhood being more Latino than it looked before. lots of hole-in-the-wall places to eat, can try in the future. a cafe sign caught my eye at a crossroads and the walk sign to it was on. why not? not a soul inside, although empty chairs spilled out into the lil courtyard outside. Brazilian owners - a young girl and her mom/aunt - and their tiny lil dog (I'm not good with breed info). I got a tea and settled right under the TV talking about giant catfish eating or penetrating humans (?) in the Amazon. I must have sat around for at least a lil under a couple hours. aunty gave me a brochure for the lil cinema next door. the girl made some chore phone calls, they talked about some financial processes. a couple other relative/friends of theirs dropped by, more to chat, than to buy. one with two kids. the lil boy as boys are let be probably teased or kicked the dog (I didn't see anything cos I wasn't paying attention, nor did I hear any whines of any sort). boy was also excited by the giant fish on TV. after a lil while, the dog, snoopy, just jumps up to where I'm sitting and lies right next to me, his body kinda snuggling against mine. I was touched. all the dog-phobia that I've been infected with being with hubby so many yrs went poof and I stroked it very gently. the boy tried to reach out to snoopy, snoopy makes it harder to be touched, and I figure maybe this is harassment of some sort. I ask the boy if the dog is scared of him, he says something about maybe cos he kicked him or maybe cos he is standing, taller than the dog and if he crouched to the dog's height it wouldn't be scared). thankfully, boy's mom takes him and his sis away soon and I become snoopy's savior, by coincidence.

I'd hardly coochie-cooed to snoopy for more than an instant before this, but he knew. I wondered while I stroked him, how he knew that I would stroke and not strangle. people take so long to trust people, and maybe that's smart cos people do strangle. are dogs simply more naive and therefore trusting, and pay the price when it comes to it, or do they know better than us, in an instant? the question isn't do they know better? I'm sure I can find some answer to that with some research into the repository of human knowledge, the question is how do they, what is intelligence, and should there be a common definition across different species? I'm sure even that question will have some answers, somewhere.



I also ambled around, picked up some produce from a tiny organic market run by two young women, walked more, saw some plants outside another market shouting to me across the street. crossed, stood by them, wondering which one was willing to risk death while it added some life/color to our lil apartment. finally got a tiny pot of African violets, believing they are easy to raise. kept also wondering whether it would last enough to be reason to buy a pretty pot to put it into, reached home while thinking "there must be something at home practically unused that can serve exactly that purpose", after being dropped off by the bus at a strange corner I didn't want to be dropped at, retracing my map and figuring out the right bus by the same number that got me home. and ya, attracted attention from a couple more black (always) guys - one waved to me from behind his wheel, another after receiving a hi and a small polite smile from me in response to his mini-stare started to ask me my name. I laughed and said I didn't want to buy anything, somewhat disappointing him. some days.

I remembered why I liked Teju Cole's Open City. It was like Youth by J. M. Coetzee, which I'd liked a lot too.

and yes, I found something at home in the recycle bin that at least now is serving as a perfectly sized tray under the violet pot. this wouldn't have happened in my own apartment; no material lies around unused for future creativity. I throw, very often.

the abstract idea of reading is consuming me. I have to write that book. before my mind gets some degenerative disease and all those memories of notes get erased or lost. strangely, a pure strategy price equilibrium is known as a degenerate price equilibrium.

books pile on hubby's bedside table, which is chivalrously/generously given to me for the summer of my stay. one I'm forcing him to read, and he, despite hating it, is probably reading cos he wants to know what I saw in it. but is not really reading it, cos he keeps picking up his 'other' book piled on top of this, that he is repeat-reading; that one is boring to me and after he asked me two hypothetical questions from that, and I tried reading two different essays in it for a paragraph each and saw no point, I am ignoring with undiluted indifference. it is full of essays on pop culture (I don't understand that anyway).

another one is what he gifted me on my birthday just gone by. I logged into his amazon to order some bras that very day, cos he has the prime account, and I noticed it was arriving. I looked it up, wondered whether to keep the finding of the surprise a surprise or not. didn't really make a decision on that, and just blurted it out to see how that would go. and then I wondered, whether the book was some sort of nudge, an inspiration, to get me to take myself more seriously. no, not that. I take myself more seriously than I ought to, in many ways. then maybe, a nudge to get me to shake that laziness off, get on my toes. cos its a female economist's feminist memoir about breaking through (and keeping the door open). its actually much better than I thought it'd be. not written like a practiced memoir-ist, but way more real precisely cos of that.

the last right now, if you have read the last couple of posts here, you should know is a Valeria Luiselli. a new-found love. I hope it lasts. or was it for the voice of the narrator (which is partly she herself but partly a storyteller a liar and a chimera), cos another voice is replacing that one and since I realized this was happening, I'm not picking it up.

I was thinking my blog is my collection of notes like Luiselli's post-its were. but would I ever sell any of this? am I asking myself if I would ever be able to sell any of my writing, or if I would ever choose to sell my writing given someone would want to buy it?? two question marks for those two very different questions. do I write for the rare spike in website tracking views that I sometimes get, or do I write to be able to sit down on those days and read what I wrote years ago, also spiking the view-counter as a by-product? I've told it many times not to count my page-views but it ignores me and goes on counting me.

Keywords here (like in academic journals): degenerate, read, write, essays, surprise, nudge, feminist, liar, questions, sell, spike.

and I just bought another book on someone's recommendation. rare that, people who recommend books to me now. hope hubby and I will both read the same book at the same time, and I of course will be still reading the beginning while he finishes. I am the tortoise, yes.

there's an exhilaration in finding a contemporary writer, not my contemporary, but that of my age, or 'the' age in which I live.

I'm memorizing their faces, so if I walk any some day I'll know.

cities I visited this (academic) year: Lisbon, Los Angeles, Denver (& Golden), Santa Fe & Albuquerque (& Taos & in-between & around), Seattle, DC, and maybe NYC next month. not bad. yr end bank account fiasco mystery solved.

next yr (academic yr again): Delhi (& Bombay & Bangalore??), Assam (not a city), New Orleans/Lima, and of course DC.

I make plans. as one vacation comes to an end. always looking forward...

will I ever publish? will this wannabe academic ever be one?

back to Luiselli. am I aping her style?

the life that I have does not suffice. neither in spirit nor in capacity. I want to be this, and also to be that. I want to be here, to be there, and also to be home. when 'home' is many places, all at once. I want to do this, and to do it well, but it takes away from doing all those other things, being in all those other places; I can't then do this, can I?

and this is when (or because) I have been many things, many people, in many places. my pasts fascinate me, haunt me; leave me dicontented, and incredulous. I have been the quiet, the ignored, the geek, the malleable, the popular, the snob, the misanthrope, the idiot, the hated, the despised, the loud-mouth, the mysterious, and the failure. I am also, the critic - but not the enemy, no.

I was to be somewhere the coming Sunday but I will now be there no more. was that stupid, haughty, immature? I will never know. but this I knew long before, that I would regret both being there and not. that in the larger scheme of things, it was irrelevant. I am irrelevant.

guess its finally time to read 'The Bell Jar'. or to go (more than I have been) peripatetic like 32 yr old Valeria Luiselli. I choose Luiselli over Plath; life over death.

walking with people

'walkability' is a growing determinant of housing location pricing in the country. to live where you can walk to get some drinks, or brunch, is a big plus, or walk back when drunk so no one has to go dry to drive. that's why I pay almost double the rent (pointed out to me by uber drivers who pick me up) to live a city apart from where my office is. but cities in the dallas metroplex don't really deserve to be called that, on their own. whatever.

so you get brunch together (or maybe dinner or drinks or a combination) and you end up walking together. to coffee. to drinks. to one person's home. one of those. group walking. 2-3 pairs of ppl, some pairless. sidewalks are just wide enough for double walking, but if the group is an odd number of ppl, you squeeze three in a row. the doubles usually are couples or those who have known each other really long, long enough to not wonder whether they are friends, whether they enjoy each other's company. the three in a row will usually be awkward together. neither can tell if the conversation is flowing between all three or it is forced between all three, or if one of the corner thirds cannot hear, doesn't care, is wondering if he should just stop pretending to be a part and walk on, alone, between two pairs of ppl he is with.

some ppl are great at small talk. others are super bad. and some keep wondering if they are doing it right. keep tuning in and out.

when I walk with ppl, I don't know where I'm going. I stare randomly left and right, letting myself be led. especially if I'm the one that knows the city less, I'm the visitor. and if you ask me to retrace my steps without help, you will be setting me a big challenge. when I'm on my own, on the other hand, I realize I'm quite good with maps, I smile even at roadside bums until one calls out to me.

its somewhat like how women used to being on their own are suddenly with their partners. every physically demanding, sweaty task - no even the small easy ones - are suddenly handed over to their partners. without thought. when on their own, they could move mountains and the thought of calling for help wouldn't occur.

or like older men doing odd jobs and suddenly visited by youngsters. they have a sudden desire that the youngsters pick up their tools and walk after them, even if their hands are empty and as dirty as the tools they just finished with.

and its Teju Cole's birthday today.. feel a strange affinity with cancerians born at the end of June. happy happy.

There’s no space more private than a bathroom. Different genders, and different cultures use them differently. Over and above how they defecate and bathe in them. From the beginning of the idea of bathrooms in open fields, river/lake banks, a community/courtyard tap/well, being in the open was not only unhygienic but also not private. You could observe the world while doing your job, but you couldn’t look inward, you couldn’t look at yourself.

Indian homes always have a small mirror right above each bathroom sink; usually too high for children and short people, usually with rusted edges and silvered out bits. You can barely see your face. I’d say the sole purpose is for men to not cut themselves while shaving. You come out of the bathroom half clad, managing to hide yourself as best you can because outside that bathroom door, is the whole world. Even if you live in a nucleus family or with friends/roommates. Bedrooms are not private spaces at all. At the very least, you never know when the bai/help/maid is swishing around your bedroom floor when you make your exit. Bedroom doors don’t really shut unless its those sleeping hours and you discreetly use others’ unconsciousness to have sex, masturbate, read/watch illicit material, etc., or simply breathe that rare being alone.

Or you could use the bathroom for that.

If it is clean and nice so you want to be in it. Which is more than you can say for many Indian bathrooms, where stains, broken and blackened tiles/buckets/mugs, make you want to clean yourself after you’ve touched anything within.

Soon as I stopped sharing a bathroom with my sis, and with everyone else in the house/hostel, so that I no longer had to rush through the washing of the behind or the hands or the hair or the pits to the sound of fists on the door peppered with half-audible yells of “hurry up”, I started spending time in the bathroom. I didn’t realize it then, that I was using the sacred space as my escape. I’d often read on the seat in my heavenly dry tiny white/grey spaces (plural because moving from one home to another is the only constant I’ve known) and often get carried away and end up being late for work.

Maybe the rarity of the private space is why Indian women don’t shave and prefer to wax. I mean why else would you go through the humiliation of letting stranger hands deal with your limbs, especially legs, like they are gourds to be peeled. And tolerate their incessant commentary on them, that your body hair is too thick, too much, too hard, too untamed, too difficult to pull out; while they pour burning wax on you and pooh-pooh your complaints as coming from a weak heart. As soon as I learned that you didn’t need a parlor license to buy wax I started buying my own and started shutting even that bedroom door.

In America on the other hand, women go into the bathroom and come out transformed. They shave in the shower, and all others can see is that lil pink razor with the bottles of shampoos and shower gels, lying around innocently. American bathrooms also have huge mirrors, sometimes covering a whole wall. You can use it for more than shaving, and applying make-up, and drying your hair, and plucking your mustache, and when all of that is done (or maybe before) you look into it, and if you concentrate, you realize you can see beyond. Beyond your hair and your face and your skin and its detested pores, and maybe your bare shoulders and breasts (or chest hair and nipples if you’re a man), maybe your whole body if you tiptoe and come up higher, those self-loathed hips or knees or the way the bones jut out or just don’t show anywhere under your handles and flab, the color of your skin, and its different shades in different spots (how it darkens exactly where you’d like it to not), and then if you’re still there you start to think and to look within. to dream, to reminisce, to flinch, to ponder, to wonder, to remember, to connect and weave, to regret.

I had puppy fat when I was entering my teens. I remember in that strange national dress which was also the school-uniform in that other country, I used to feel like I had oversized boobs for my age. Just like I felt I had oversized feet for my gender and size. And like I had way too much limb hair for being a human. Each of these I could observe as pieces to my whole, cos the bathroom mirror was too high and too small, and the bedroom - I shared with my lil sis.

When we got back to India, I got jaundice after a year. That’s the first time I remember forcing a privacy for myself, not sure the disease had anything to do with it other than the fact that I was home when much of the world wasn’t. I lost a lot of weight from that, and from then have I, my earliest memories of my whole self in the bedroom mirror cos I started shutting its door. That was my beginning, of learning to accept myself – my body – for what it was or for how it looked and how it changed under different influences. That was also I think the very beginning of me trying to give myself space from the world, whenever I got it, of learning how to preserve that.

Much later, in a girls’ hostel when I had a room to myself where I could in fact lock it from within, I would often pretend to be still sleeping and remain unresponsive to early morning knocks at my door – invitations simply to companionship, someone else’s plea out of loneliness – only because I wanted to be alone.

with age, new languages become not just difficult to learn, but also difficult to try and introduce to one's mind as a language. one's sense of being is too old now to understand even the idea of speaking in a foreign tongue. almost like learning to swim when an adult; one's reflexes and natural responses refute the possibility that water, a foreign medium, can be conquered, 'walked upon'.

no matter how many french/spanish words I will understand now, my mind will always treat them as extensions of my vocabulary of english.

sylvia plath ted hughes interview 1961

this country makes you such an outdoor-phobe. after ages today, I found two mosquitoes trying to bite me. I killed one on my face, flicked off the other, and started reconsidering the pleasurable nature walk; worrying about zika, west nile, etc.

but something or the other caught my eye, and thankfully I diverted but went on. and then I saw these, they reminded me of the lines "tiger tiger burning bright" and of Pollock's painting titled 'tiger'. they were just like audacious flames in the surrounding greenery. and I surprised a snake hiding under the flaming bush.




Fort Worth is the greener and more western (also cooler, and less xenophobic) cousin of Dallas. no wonder the temperature is a couple degrees less here more often than not, despite it being further south.

we often think we like certain people for who they are, for their nature, their qualities and characteristics. without really thinking about it. but often we give ourselves and them too much credit, us - for thinking we knew them before we liked them; and them - by crediting to them characteristics that we admire. we create stories out of the people we think we like, we shape them in our minds into what we want them to be. we probably do that to ourselves too. in order to like ourselves or to justify doing that.

but some day those layers will peel.

will we then trash them because they failed while being oblivious of what they were being measured up against? or will we discover them for what they are and humbly concede our own dishonesty? will we ever find out?

are we really intelligent beings, who can reason our likes and dislikes, or are we simply better off for being animalistic and failing to explain.

JF on reading and writing again, in 'Why bother?', quoting an anthropologist to describe not just himself and his relationship with the world (at least he made something out of this identity) but that of many other inconsequential ppl like me (where are you guys?). just had to post this (blame it on my period, and me trying to jostle my attention away to the much too familiar smell and feeling of a hard bound, a comfortable couch and a grey weekend):

"her (Heath's) research effectively demolishes the myth of the general audience. For a person to sustain an interest in literature, she told me, two things have to be in place. First, the habit of reading works of substance must have been "heavily modeled" when he or she was very young. In other words, one or both of the parents must have been reading serious books and must have encouraged the child to do the same. On the East Coast, Heath found a strong element of class in this. Parents in the privileged classes encourage reading out of a sense of Louis Auchincloss calls "entitlement": just as the civilized person ought to be able to appreciate caviar and a good Burgundy, she ought to be able to enjoy Henry James. Class matters less in other parts of the country, especially in the Protestant Midwest, where literature is seen as way to exercise the mind. As Heath put it, "Part of the exercise of being a good person is not using your free time frivolously. You have to be able to account for yourself through the work ethic and through the wise use of your leisure time." For a century after the Civil War, the Midwest was home to thousands of small-town literary societies in which, Heath found, the wife of a janitor was as likely to be active as the wife of a doctor.

Simply having a parent who reads is not enough, however, to produce a lifelong dedicated reader. According to Heath, young readers also need to find a person with whom they can share their interest. "A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight," she said. "If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise, she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them. Finding a peer can take place as late as college. In high school, especially, there's a social penalty to be paid for being a reader. Lots of kids who have been lone readers get to college and suddenly discover, 'Oh my God, there are other people here who read.'"

As Heath unpacked her findings for me, I was remembering the joy with which I'd discovered two friends in junior high with whom I could talk about J.R.R. Tolkien. I was also considering that for me, today, there is nothing sexier than a reader. But then it occurred to me that I didn't even meet Heath's first precondition. I told her I didn't remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child, except aloud to me.

Without missing a beat Heath replied: "Yes, but there's a second kind of reader. There's the social isolate - the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don't like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different to an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can't share with the people around you - because it's imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren't present, they become your community."

Pride compels me, here, to draw a distinction between young fiction readers and young nerds. The classic nerd, who finds a home in facts or technology or numbers, is marked not by a displaced sociability but by an antisociability. Reading does not resemble more nerdy pursuits in that it's a habit that both feeds on a sense of isolation and aggravates it. Simply being a "social isolate" as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading - to reconnect to that community.

According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety (she calls them "resistant" readers) are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety. If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness. What's perceived as the antisocial nature of "substantive" authors, whether its James Joyce's exile or J.D. Salinger's reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that's necessary for inhabiting an imagined world. Looking me in the eye, Heath said: "You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world."

I knew she was using the word "you" in its impersonal sense. Nevertheless, I felt as if she were looking straight into my soul. And the exhilaration I felt at her accidental description of me, in unpoetic polysyllables, was my confirmation of that description's truth. Simply to be recognized for what I was, simply not to be misunderstood: these had revealed themselves, suddenly, as reason to write."

Why bother?

"All of a sudden it seemed as if the friends of mine who used to read no longer even apologized for having stopped." Franzen is talking about America but this is global. same goes for blogging.

on a related note, so far in life I always found ppl like me, and felt at home with them. at least for a while before we changed. Very few have stayed. But they've changed too, and I have. And now there's no one like me, neither the old nor any new. I miss that.

and I feel offended when someone assumes I'm reading a self help book. yes I will always remain enough of a snob to think that beneath me.

and given that my blog is becoming my diary of sorts, I might as well record this here. I'm having sleep issues, a "strange kind of jetlag". and then I find myself dozing off behind the wheel, at 70 miles an hr. that sounds so funny.

as a result, I read more.

and yet, there is fate. or more simply, a chain of incidences.

years ago, I wrote a post about how I thought I was not a feminist. and in fact, when I wrote that, I did not understand feminism as I think I do now.

for a very long time, I also ignored or waved away any claims to persistent and pernicious racism, especially here in the US. I thought that many years of discrimination had messed up with the minds of those discriminated against such that they failed to realize that it was over, that they should move on.

I have to say I was wrong on both issues.

plus the white conservative ideology of preserving and sustaining the rights of the privileged in this country, hurts and sets back any efforts to restore rights to those who have been so far deprived. whether we talk in terms of race, gender, or even gender identity. they see the total sum of rights as a constant, and giving someone new rights so far unknown is perceived by them as taking an equal amount away from those privileged.

plants, pets, and offsprings

even my cactus is dying on me. the succulent I couldn't bear to see falling limb by limb, so I put it down. the cyclamen has more yellow leaves than flowers in it, and I can't decide which it likes better - the texan summer sun or the american indoor atmosphere. only the money-plantish-es are going strong, sprouting leaf after leaf after leaf. I'm not even sad, I'm disgusted with myself. especially when I look at the cactus, that once had a huge orange bulb-ous-ness on it; now has lost color, become flaccid, and is slowly shrinking away into the lil bit of earth in that tiny red pot. is it dead, is it gone? should I throw it in the kitchen bin now? the only silver lining is as if these suicidal plants are just paving the way for my easy getaway to my summer home, cos I hate texas in the summer. (I shouldn't with the same vehemence anymore though, cos now I'm a spoilt elite who doesn't really stay outdoor long enough in the heat, who has a car for all weathers, even a tiny pink-handled car door umbrella that stays there so weather doesn't sweat me either way. compare this with when I was a car-less student, poor so no cabs either. but memory works with a strong bias, all that's forgotten, not to be compared with. I still hate texan summers.)

house greenery is lovely to have. but is a huge responsibility, almost like pets. I mean, now they have some self-watering pods etc. etc. but they don't seem to work too well for too long of a missing human presence. I forgot this when I brought these plants home, forgot that my life was still nomadic, forgot that although I wasn't bringing home a pup (which I never did for travel and potty reasons), these would need me too.

I'm a bad caretaker. dunno what kind of mom I'd ever make.

when I was lil my biggest ambition was to get rich, be a wife, be a mother.

now I've resolved the opposite, for one of those above at least. I don't want to be a mother ever. rich - I now don't care to be (still holding onto the philosophy that money is critical on the negative side, not so much on the positive). a wife I am, and that in many ways cannot be reversed.

having kids is not only a big responsibility that I may never be ready for, but there are a couple other serious stuff involved. first, what haunted me for years - what if my kid turns out to be a demon, a human devil, a murderer, rapist, abuser, narcissist, a hitler, ...., .... what if. but these days its another very serious, non-paranoid thought. having kid(s) makes people risk averse. very risk averse. and materialistic. yeah I know, I know, you will say it does the opposite - self-sacrifical and all. not denying that. the mother can go hungry to feed the kid and all, but can at the same time 'do anything' to buy food for her starving kid. to say the very least, having kids robs people of their independence in making their life decisions, everything is then motivated by a sense of security, of well-being, for their offsprings. people cannot risk losing their jobs if there are kids waiting at home. people cannot afford to be idealistic with mouths to feed. people cannot afford to be heroes when their kids are at the mercy of the heroism. money, purchasing power, well being, becomes the dictator then. you then have to make compromises, you have to settle, you have to be realistic. or you could be like Gandhi, and earn the simultaneous reputations of a 'mahatma' and a bad father.

aaahhh, but I'm not destined for great things anyway. but I still like my rebel-attitude, my middle finger, in response to things that leave me with a bad feeling. or maybe I still simply like to believe that I have control, that I am not beholden.

food and peoples

I'm raving about this documentary right now, another solo movie watching in my new-find The Modern art museum in FW. hardly 20 odd ppl in the auditorium, just about half of them alone (one reading a book while the ads played before the movie started). I like such crowds, we laugh together, share the space a lil more privately, a couple of voices get louder than in other movies - ppl repeating dialogues for those who didn't catch them.

I love movies about food (one of my fav Chinese movies so far is 'Eat drink man woman') .

top that with a documentary about the streets and cultures of LA (my fav amongst all the cities I have ever wanted to move to). man, I had to see it.

and now I'm in love with this guy Gold. not in that way. its very like how I feel for Anthony Bourdain and Michael Palin. there's something about each one of these guys. watching them travel and sample different things and places (for Gold all of that is in LA itself - a city of countries and ethnicities) makes me salute them inwardly in admiration of their openness, frankness, a very strange combination of self-confidence and self-effacement when facing the wide world in front of them.

Gold's love for LA and for people of the city and of the world ("we are all citizens of the world, we are all strangers together") brought me to almost-tears (especially in these days of growing xenophobia), while his humor, procrastination, doggedness (he eats at a place many times before reviewing it; his record is 17 times), kept me grinning throughout. "you could take notes while you're having sex, too, but you'd sort of be missing out on something".

sad I'd never heard of him before I went to LA. I'm thinking of taking a sabbatical there in the near future, maybe a semester of driving around, walking, and eating out.

I got so hungry watching the movie (was a noon show too) that I headed straight to my favorite Korean restaurant and for the first time in my life devoured two portions (kimchi fried rice with beef, and a bowl of spicy pork & rice) alone. (won't try to review the place, cos Gold's professionalism and standards made me realize how presumptuous I was in reviewing any place ever). even had the owner(?) come up to me to ask if both were for me and if I was a Korean food fan. in this life I can't decide which things I love most, but food definitely tops that everchanging list very often.

Thompson's bookstore

this kinda may be a review.

the first time I heard of this place (I'm sure I saw it a couple of times before and thought of it exactly what it looks like from the outside: a fancy place. and given that I don't tend to usually like fancy places, I dismissed it in my mind) was when a server at a downtown (Fort Worth) restaurant chatted with me and sis asking us where we were headed after devouring those delicious fried duck legs, and recommended us to try this 'really cool place' for drinks: Thompson's, a few blocks down. and he told us to go to the basement bar that had a stairwell leading down to it from the street level. we were anyway headed in the same direction to another new and recently cool discovery of ours (not me and sis), a door away from this place. there was a burly guard/bouncer/usher standing right out the front entrance of Thompson's and we asked about going into the basement bar. I thought he asked for my passport, which annoyed me a lil because only a foreigner (hah!) carries a passport for a drinking id, and I told him that I had my state id and showed him this. he was friendly, even looked at it and then repeated again his demand: "password". I went "uh what?" only to hear the word again. password. sis and I looked at each other, and then got the story out of the guy; apparently you could enter the basement bar only with a password. whoa. the password could be found on facebook or from someone who knew it etc. etc.

we didn't want to go to the regular upstairs bar/lounge, because I still thought it looked too fancy for my taste, so we just went where we had planned before: La Perla Negra (another cool place, worthy maybe of another review another day). but of course, I felt denied. and yes I had to look it up later to figure out the password mystery of this place. the place is actually called Thompson's bookstore because at some point in history the space was used as a bookstore. incidentally, the basement was used as a chemist's or a pharmacy of some kind. and the password is to keep it feeling like a mysterious and secret speakeasy. although on weekends you don't need the password and can get down into the basement from the upper level lounge through a secret door. I'll get to that.

so I'd been wanting to explore this place since I read about it and since I was denied entry.

we happened finally this last weekend to try it. it has a dress-code, so don't go in your flipflops and cutouts please. maybe it was that, or maybe it was my first impression of its fanciness from its name on that building so simply and yet pompously written, that as soon as we were inside I whispered that it looked pretentious. there were about three seating areas in the small lounge space, each with a sort of circle of an assortment of ancient sofas and armchairs and footstools with a solid wooden coffee table at its center. in short it was like a large living room segmented into three seating areas for a large gathering of people. the decor is really old world, muted lights, oldish lamps, leather and ornate mismatched furniture, polished old wood, large bookshelves (full of hard-bounds) along most walls, with the bar running lengthwise through the whole room along one wall. so you often end up sharing a coffee table with other guests, couples or sets of friends. and the sofas are really comfortable. the first thing I did was to set out looking for the door that led down to the speakeasy. none to be found. hmm. we asked the lady usher at the door this time, and she said the bar down was full (to capacity) at this point in time.

five minutes of settling in, getting used to the darkness, finding an unoccupied large seat for the two of us, I started to change my mind. there seemed to be no bustle of servers rushing in and out. only two bartenders who left the bar now and then to ask about the other guests. there was a hardbound encyclopedia on the side table to my right, and also a lamp on it that would not light, and there were books - Shakespeare, Homer, lots of classics, also Sidney Sheldon and John Grisham, and just a lot of books. and no one cared that I hunched down by the bookshelf and leafed through, only to have postcards, photos, exam questions, notes, fall from the pages. even something about the caste system, where else but the Indian caste system and something about India and China trade, etc. etc. one book had a handwritten line on its first page, "If you give this book to someone else, let me know who its with." just lil tidbits of personal histories falling from those pages.

part of the ceiling is also done up in old books. full yellowed pages, torn from books, stuck haphazardly on top of each other like a random collage, some with pictures, that you can stare up into.

its a strange place that really felt like a house party.

they are known for their cocktails, named after songs or books. ours were "actually tasty" according to hubby, unlike drinks usually. I had a regular Negroni (two; after a couple of glasses of wine earlier that day) because I'd been hearing about Campari lately and wanted to try, and hubby tried Killing Pablo and one more (forgotten). but for me the best was feeling so much at ease in there lounging around. you can pull up a leather-topped stool and stretch your legs without asking/bothering anyone or calling attention to yourself. actually that was it. you just did not call attention to yourself in that place, everyone just let be each other. at the same time smiling or looking at each other as at intriguing strangers at a party.

oh yeah, and the secret door. a wall of bookshelf near the entrance swings into a door, down to the basement, just like that. and no one gasps and exclaims at it. its just so normal in there. the basement did not have the same Victorian armchairs and couches, its a lil more sparse but brighter down there. with sheer curtains separating lil circles of barstools from each other. no smell of the spirits/chemicals that I had been told about, but yes the same feeling of easy anonymous camaraderie as up above.

deja vu

some things I'm coming across so frequently these days, its eerie. as if they are following me around.

1. the mention of 'Echo park'. what's with it. I stayed not far from it when in LA, but didn't visit it. now suddenly everyone is talking, writing about it. so much so I had to check where it was, and then remembered its mention on the LA map when I was there. and I found a breaking news of a dead body found floating in the lake in echo park recently, of a man gone missing sometime ago.

2. dead squirrels. rather squirrels killed by cars. probably one lil kitten too (was difficult to tell in the brief glimpse I got yesterday driving past). is this an unavoidable consequence of the abundance of spring in spaces where the urban borders on the wild (the wild that doesn't threaten us that is, or you know how that would go). in fact, this is getting so bad, that the remains are no longer being removed and are being left (sometimes in the middle of the road) to change color, become dull, and slowly decay(?). I try to both avert my eyes from the splayed innards, and try to look at it with respect for the life that it was and regret for how it was probably killed.

3. recipients of voluntary contributions (public goods that I consume non-rivaling), or charity. this is the first time in my life that I can probably afford to contribute, if my job stays.


aside: the faculty member in the office next door to mine is trying to explain (arguing with a lot of agitation) to a very calm student why he gives points for questions left blank and why the student got less points for a question he attempted to answer than he would have had if he had left it blank. I am with the student on this one, in his words, "this discourages one from trying to answer the question". the logic of penalties for wrong answers should only be relative to a perfect answer; or if relative to a 'no-answer', should only be applicable to multiple choice questions where an answer could be a totally random guess that may strike lucky (and therefore to discourage such 'answers'). I'm judging, again.

long alone phase again. makes me terribly introspective. and hence, the over-exploitation of this blog's presence.

school is one of those commuter universities. people drive long distances, both students and faculty and staff. neighborhood around not too desirable, with news of robberies, etc. etc. as a result, unlike my phd department, here people don't socialize with each other. random lunches on weekdays sometimes, if schedules permit. but other than that, everyone else has a spouse and kids (or maybe grandkids) tucked away somewhere far away in this huge urban metroplex. other than me. and yeah this other guy too, next door to me, who still lives with roommates. well technically, flatmates I presume but that's what you call them all here. I mean come on, who lives with roommates past 30, that too in texas, where you have abundant space, cheap(ish) rent, the works. I mean, maybe NYC would need one to compromise on space, privacy, etc. but not in the lone star state.

anyway, so I'm left to my own devices. I found this cafe lately, a place run by Italian American brothers, really chilled out and cool. been going there a bit, now and then, to sit and work, or to really quench that evening tea desire, even took parents there, and sis. and yesterday, Sunday afternoon I found a crowd of people like me there. I mean there always are some people there sitting alone and working, but on Sunday afternoon at about 1:30pm this whole place was full, including the chairs outside (given that it was kinda hot and muggy, maybe not intolerably so), and most people were sitting alone with a laptop or otherwise and seemed to be working. for a minute I thought I needed to go somewhere else cos I couldn't see a single table available. but of course, I squeezed in at a running window counter-space with barstools alongside. and I had to. this is the only place that gives lovingly brewed tea in this goddamn coffee world. in a proper kettle clothed in one of those kettle-sweaters. and proper tea, various choices, sri lankan, darjeeling, etc. etc. the kettle thing is super nice because one can often have two three cups of tea in the one that one ordered. of course the price is such that that doesn't hurt them.

plus they have these amazing croissants and other baked stuff. yesterday I got some raisin stuff that had all this powdered milk sprinkled on it. like, I dunno what it really was, but it so reminded me of when I was a kid and I loved eating powdered milk, and it was similarly sticky in my teeth and gums such that the guilty pleasure lasts for a while after.

I sat there for a couple of hours, working on editing and correcting my paper, noticing the differences between the men and the women sharing the space around me, each alone. the counter/bar was a lil high for each of us women, who preferred the laptop where it belongs, in the lap. whereas the men to either side of me had theirs up on the wooden surface. their feet rested on the ground whereas ours was mostly up on this lil ledge under the bar. have so often wondered how/why women are so creative and contortive in their sitting positions. like this one that often relaxes me - one leg up on my chair in a half cross-legged-ness such that the knee points right out forward and the other crossed over it really close-knit and then dangling down from the chair on the opposite side. and then after a half and hour, switch the legs.

..

there was this guy who lived in my building, probably till December, in the floor above me somewhere. a violinist. used to be beautiful to hear him play sometimes, especially on quiet weekday afternoons. and then some days he would give us a special treat, probably liked practicing there, by playing in the parking garage, on its first level a lil inside the entrance to the left. so when you entered driving, you were met with this beautiful, sonorous, echoing, sound of music. the garage is a brilliant place for that, with its interconnected levels that trap and empower the sound before releasing it back again. a lil bit like the space in the arches under the Bethesda terrace near that popular fountain in central park in NYC, where you often see and hear musicians.

I just realized it today while I drove into the garage that this guy probably lived here no more, cos I hadn't heard him in a long time. that's the thing with one-two bedroom apartments in a place like TX where everyone eventually wants a house. no matter how nice the apartments, it will only have young people, even a lot of students (sometimes sharing, to normalize the rent), mostly people who have yet not 'settled' in life. I hate that. that idea of settling.

words are haunting me today. so I add words to my header as well.

on the day osama bin laden's death was announced, hubby quoted this to me:
"One is still what one is going to cease to be, and already what one is going to become
one lives one's death, one dies one's life"
it was apt. since then, every news of death reminds me of it. it is always apt. moreover, I see it as something that connects abstraction with life. its simply a description of continuity, from one moment to the next, from living to dying, or backward from death to life. its almost like a math statement or a proof. because there is continuity from one moment to the next, therefore there is continuity in the wholes too - of life and death. people die the lives they lived, they live the deaths that will come to them. because when they die they're still who they were, until they're no more.

strangely, I found different people interpret that quote above differently. to me there seems to be no other meaning. but that's me, my life, my death.
oh btw, Jean Paul Sartre said that above.

someone (JC) posted something on fb today that had another quote that will haunt me a long time. and unlike the above that haunts me in a pleasant comforting way, this fills me with dread:
"Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared." - John Steinbeck

I so know what that means. I so remember those times when I have dusted myself up from a big fall and started again. and yet I also so feel like I'm eroding. aaarghh. its so scary. or maybe even worse, maybe I only imagined my ability and brilliance etc. etc. and in reality I'm a nothing. like Shreeram Lagoo in this movie I once saw, 'Ek Din Achanak'. it was a strange questioning of the celebrated versus the ordinary, of ambition and routine, of suspense and meaning and triviality, of pretense and self conviction and family awe and respect for the ordinary, and everyone's denial to see the ordinary for what it was, almost bordering on sacrilege when one of the daughters puts it into words that maybe her dad was just a plain ordinary man. (sorry for the spoiler if anyone was going to see it)
or maybe I was wrong in how I read it. but it filled me with similar dread.

and then these words in the book I'm reading (that I didn't want to start reading because lately I've read a lot of depressing and real stuff; but also I'd been wanting to read this for a long time and I finally bought it when its kindle price fell; I rarely buy a book for more than $9.99):
"We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact." - Hjalmar Soderberg

a lighter thought: facebook cashes in well on this above.

reading my older posts I realize I'm becoming more verbose and less spontaneous.

I fucked up my earth day today. drove a lot more, and used a lot of the fuel to cool the car. it was hot today. went to school to meet a student (Friday mornings its difficult to get me out otherwise), student decided to change plans and ditched me. I sat in my office grading for a couple of hours with my door wide open. people were surprised I was there, and more. I hardly wear sleevelesses in school, what with not trying to attract too much attention, trying to look the role of a teacher, and when I do its usually more formal stuff. today I was in a 'ganjee' as we would call it, suddenly found these 100% cotton shells from loft that fit me! of course its petite xxs. plus I was playing some music very soft. this department is a greying place, I'm probably the youngest, plus I look younger than my age even. people stopped by today, to chat, or just to grin. it was nice. I felt like I was the spring/summer in this grey grave place.

framing shop didn't have my custom mats ready, not all of them at least. I feel stupid and yet didn't say anything; paying some $40 for just having someone cut some thermocol(?) (per piece) for framing maa's paintings, and yet having to pay with more waiting time.

the last two deepika movies have been nicer than usual - piku and finding fanny - saw them recently, one after another.

I've been wondering too much these days. and last night. went to bed well past my age. throbbing headache right now.

wondering whether to start on second grading set (TAs are useless (a lil harsh that)), or to frame the paitings, do laundry, cook (nah), read past blogposts, work on paper, stand in balcony waiting for the horses, nap (too late now), stop wondering.

I've been indulgently lazy today, it felt really good. already celebrating the yet to arrive summer vacation.
and here's a lazy post to commemorate today, spent at home. the first two below are lil things I got back from NM (quite proud of the printed cards of a local artist there that I framed up) and the last is simply a play of sunlight on my slightly ignored corner (don't know why I've stopped sitting at my dining table since parents and hubby last visited).

I'm trying, these days, to try and listen. to other people. especially those, who I don't want to listen to. or rather those I want to interrupt badly, with opposition, with passionately felt opposition. at a recent faculty (teachers only) meeting I realized I sometimes became what I would otherwise call 'militant' (if I wasn't myself doing it then or if I saw or believed in the opposite at that moment) in voicing my opinion. and I am not proud of that realization, or rather I'm proud of having realized it but not of what I realized about myself. and it is then no wonder, that I've had people glare at me in some such conversations, not wanting to ever talk to me again, especially when such militancy was expressed in opposition to what they were saying.

so after reading Teju Cole about the European-Muslim identity and integration crisis in Brussels (waking up after the first night of reading this as the narrator moves to Brussels from NYC, to news of the Brussels attack recently), and sympathizing with the underdogs in the story as I have a general bias toward them, I decided to give eyes to the opposite opinion. to another side of the story. and Flemming Rose so came in. after reading about a fifth or so of his book, I was shaking my head in vehemence again, almost yelling to make his one-sided story stop, dying to tell him he did not understand. that he was wrong.

and I wrote him a long letter. one of those, with links and examples to express what I was trying to say, to bring home the meaning to him, to help him see the only truth in this story. that he was wrong.

and I almost emailed him the letter. almost - I stopped only because I was hesitant to use my email address to send it, in some ways to use my identity to sign off with. I didn't know what that would entail, in the future. and yet creating a virtual identity or in other words to use anonymity to send it would be cowardice, preposterous to even think of. so I settled for middle ground, and procrastinated, leaving to a wiser future me to know better what to do here.

the very next picking up of his book that night took a sudden turn. he started explaining the why, of what he had done. the history behind the event. and isn't that where all meaning lies. I suddenly realized he was not so wrong, nor was I so sure of what was right or wrong here. it wasn't so simple anymore. and I understood a little bit.

I'm so glad I didn't send that email already. someone once told me, when you're really angry about something go ahead and write it all down, as clearly as possible, explaining as much. and then lock it up, and try reading it some days later, or maybe even better, just crumple it or tear it up and throw it away. it served its purpose while it was being written in fact, and there's nothing more sometimes that it can do.

and we are told that yoga originates from some concept of meditation. I always liked to think of it more as self-control, and of the body rather than the mind. but of course the two affect each other. but somehow I've been unable to meditate ever. so yoga does calm me down but only when it tires me, only when my mind's wanderings cease, and focus on how that stretch feels in those muscles, in trying to gauge and argue and reason with the body in how much more I can stretch it, how much longer. and this works best if I'm in a class with other people around me. or if at least I have one other person virtually there on video, so that I'm doing it with someone. in short, despite the alleged ascetic origins of yoga, I respond to it best in society.

moreover, very often I fail to do yoga well if I don't begin with somewhat a calm mind. especially when I'm doing it by myself. so, having learned enough to not have to pay for classes or an instructor does not help a lot.

on the other hand is running. even dressing and preparing for a run sends a rush of adrenaline to my head, which although excites me, also calms my anxieties about life and people and the inanities. running truly cures my maladies of thought.

I remember when I started running when I was about 24 I think. before buying a nice pair of nikes, I actually wanted to ascertain that I would use them, and therefore I ran for a few mornings in my red all star sneakers. really bad for my feet, but who thought about that then. I was kind of immediately addicted to it, but there were lots of mornings when my laziness would overcome that addiction. the one thing if I remember right that kept me continuing was the thought that I didn't know how many years I could actually run without having age become a barrier. in fact, I remember thinking that I had about 10 years that looked safe for running, after which I may or may not be able to do it too long. and that thought got me jumping out of my bed those mornings because I realized that 10 years were made up of so many mornings, bit by bit.

last two-three years I started having a lot of trouble with my knees whenever I ran, and I reduced the frequency and then just gave it up. my knees would kinda lock up while running and would then hurt even after I stopped, and especially when I climbed down any stairs. I think I partly over-stressed my knees because some years I started running with hubby, who is much faster than I like to be.

this last week I started running again, now by the river, alone again. new shoes, asics rather than nike this time to see if these understand the 'pronation' of my feet better and keep my knees healthier. no socks though, because I bought these online and they are tight with socks! and I'm taking it slow and soft and steady. and because I'm about 10 years older than when I started running, I can't somehow get up at the wee hours anymore. (I used to love running before sunrise, partly because it was cooler then, partly because I didn't have to bother seeing too many people, and partly because I hated running in sunlight even if it was cold). but now I'm allowing myself these deviations, and its just as well, because much of that river trail is shaded by these trees and the sun is still so low in its climb that I can't see much of it. until I come to the point in the trail where the trees end, and that's where I'd been stopping to look around and breathe the morning in, and then to turn back and run my return home. but today the clouds gave me an alibi to not stop and despite no-trees the sun was banished, and I kept on and on, and reached today again after a long time, that state where the legs run by themselves.

anticipation, desperation, denial, jubilation, and hope...

if only students realized that faculty members are often just as looking forward to those holidays as they themselves, or maybe even more, because after all a student can skip a class here or there with a self-declared holiday but a faculty member must wait for only officially announced ones.

I so wish I was (back) on the other side of this teacher-learner divide. why couldn't there be a profession of a student, someone who keeps learning different things, of interest of course, and maybe makes that learning available to others with least cost to herself. but I guess that is the idea of an academic, except that the cost is not small, and it keeps growing with competition for academia. and there are rungs on the ladder, and you find yourself in a place based on where you went to school essentially, and you keep dreaming of climbing up. but if you are in the lower rungs, the lower rungs being the slipperiest, their precise function is to keep you tired maintaining your position so nothing is left in you to climb. plus, there is a growing crowd for those waiting below to even get a hold of that ladder, and those far higher ups are not troubled by this because for them they are specks of dirt, but you can see better, you can see that it could be worse for you, you could be down there. or yet worse, you can still go down (rather than up) and then what?

or, on the other hand, given that you have in your life made only one or two choices ever, for the rest - simply either embracing what you found or rejecting it to meet the next thing you bump into, maybe something rejecting you would be a blessing in disguise (if you are still in denial of the more than partial rejection already from those upper rungs).

there was once in my life before that I was resoundingly rejected. from all the top Indian MBA schools. I was good but not 'good enough'. this is also the time, when I was dying to leave home, and an MBA education seemed like the only recourse that would take me away from the city that seemed to have all possible options of education on the face of it, but none too-good MBA schools. I remember those days, when I cleared the CAT and XAT cutoffs for some interviews, although not the IIMs. After each of those interviews I would come back home feeling scared and anxious, only to be met with questions and accusations from my dad of how I was doing it all wrong, and how I was inherently a 'slow' person; unlike my sis apparently who was 'unlike me so much quicker and brighter because she ate raw green chilies as meal accompaniment'. I'm not joking. and ironically this sis of mine grew up throughout her childhood and teenage being judged against me and some cousins by those very respected parents and adults because we were class-toppers while she wasn't. I'll leave you to decide how convoluted this is.

anyway, now it is an understatement how thankful I feel for having been rejected then. oh and btw, I'm still slow, and yes I admit that bit had truth in it, but I no longer see why its always a bad thing, in fact it soothes me quite a bit, I feel its often my strength.

maybe, ten years down the line I will feel the same about these current rejections and defeats (both those denied and those conceded).

on that note, most people I know can give a more than vague idea of where they will be ten years down the line from now, if they are then alive and not ailing. I do hope this one thing, I do fervently hope that right now I have no idea where I will be ten years later.

and yes, academic life, even the low academic life has its charms and freedoms. I technically go to work twice a week these days, although the other 5 days its working at home and not in the sense in which non-academics use that phrase as a euphemism for taking a day off. that still gives me a lot of time, to read, to cook (these occasions are getting rarer though simply because of living alone), and to be slow.

and yet I haven't gone for a morning run in about a year now. nor do I get out in the mornings at all, unless my teaching schedule forces me to. I have a feeling this has something to do with the strange constant state of a stuffed and running nose that I have now cos it sort of started when the running stopped or got rarer. anyway, so today after putting to good use some of the extra time gained due to an earlier than usual opening of these eyes calling up my sis and speaking at length with her, I decided to get out, but not to run. and I had good reason, there wasn't anything to eat in my fridge.

it was raining, then drizzling, then gave way; plus spring has settled in. my car got (an otherwise denied) wash and my mind got an overdose of green.
it was beautiful all around, like an exaggeration of the youth of green. there's a very clear difference between the darker green of the mature and tired leaves, and this green, a metaphor of birth, youthfulness, of energy and anticipation.

I ended up driving much farther, to never before roads, through a park bursting with greenery. I saw the duck pond drained of water (probably being cleaned out) and because this was a week-day, there were very few people around. it felt like it all belonged to me. somehow 'green' doesn't say it half as well as 'verde' does, the latter gives the sense of lush-ness that I'm talking about.

my 42

I woke up today, earlier than usual, wondering whether I should jump out of my bed and onto my yoga mat or should I laze around a lil more. I chose the latter and lay there, with the morning fighting through the upturned blinds to reach me, and the sounds of the early-birds dropping off their kids to school across the street from my window.

there were all these thoughts swimming in my mind then. I did not remember what dreams had come, but consciousness came thinking about my plants, and about how two of those pots now contained three different pieces of a mother plant in the department office at school.

my home has evolved somewhat like the earth did, if you subtract me since I am the observer. it started barren, collected some inanimate objects and then some little microbes probably, and slowly one by one - the plants. first came the cactus or the one that needed the littlest care, then the money-plant-look-alikes that just needed water (and have since been replanted in potted earth), and then a succulent and then a flower plant (cyclamen; its having trouble, its yellowing, feeding some parasites at the moment).

there can be no 'soul' to earthly life, no 'god' other than the laws of physics/nature, nothing beyond the vast universe because it ends nowhere.

when I cut a plant and put the cut stem in water, it roots out, for many crotons and money-plant-types. for others, they need soil directly to root out. but many many plants root out from cuttings. do all these cuttings share a 'soul' with the original plant? what is the boundary of one life from another, and what houses the 'soul' then? its not very different if you think of animals and other living things. a female human, when pregnant houses the baby within. are the two the same 'soul' then? or is one within the other, like Russian dolls? the only difference compared with plants is, the 'cutting' happens after the baby has been delivered out, as a separate individual, after having stored enough energy to grow and survive, with its physical boundaries defined away from the mother, only the umbilical cord still connecting, and so it is snapped, free.

the 'soul' and 'god' theory of life refutes logic. but so some would argue, its meant to. because you have to be blinded by belief to believe.

its not like this morning was a sudden epiphany or something. these thoughts have been in my head at least many months now. it all started with that 'energy theory' of life. according to which life is nothing but the evolution of inanimate natural objects in the path of the goal of everything to better capture, store, and use energy. rocks, sand, earth, and water warm up under the sun but cool down in the dark. life preserves the heat better, uses it, to grow and recreate, even exports it by becoming food for other beings higher up and lower down in the energy/food cycle. its pretty amazing.

but think about the flip-side of this argument. if so, what is the big difference between breaking a rock, cutting a tree, killing an insect, killing a pig, and murdering a human? its all killing, starting from the inanimate, going up the evolutionary chain, to the species that has conquered this earth by managing to group together, coordinate, cooperate, communicate, record, and imagine; and of course use hands to use other things, both living and non-living.

why is manslaughter so heinous, compared with every other kind of killing/destruction?

why, of course, because of all those years it took to evolve to reach a human. the highest-up in the chain. to achieve the kind of consciousness that beguiles the human herself to believe in a higher source and a higher purpose of/for her consciousness; to want to give it supernatural status and call it a 'soul', a piece of 'god'. but I am not contradicting. we each are a piece of god because god is nothing but nature.

some days ago I was watching a documentary about Jackson Pollock, after seeing his drawing/paintings in ink and oil and canvas and Japanese paper. apparently another artist once criticized Pollock saying he wouldn't go far because he "drew from his heart, not from nature", and Pollock replied, "I am nature".

strangers

sleeping in a stranger's bed at an airbnb, with torn sheets, and wondering whose hair is on the covers. oh yes, not a pleasant thought; I've usually been fortunate with airbnbs but these last two were uncomfortable in different ways - this one should have at least pretended to be clean, and the one before had a cozy and clean bed and bath but with the strangest empty rest-of-the-house (such that hubby just didn't want to step out of our room and not go straight out the house). two other strangers visiting/living there, and me one morning coming across another stranger in the kitchen gathering food and walking straight out the back door, leaving me wondering if he was a thief (he wasn't).

travelling in some ways means getting out of your personal zone. but its not just travelling, these last two weeks have left me sensing to an elevated extent my contacts with people (and animals) I know I will probably never see again.

from the young girl with blue hair who gave me a haircut before my trip and chatted with me slowly and softly (so unusual compared with the over-enthusiastic and full of compliments hairdressers I often get) about her mom and her own unawareness regarding her mom's schedules and holidays, about her long distance relationship and how people didn't often get why they were so cool, about coloring and bleaching hair, about her stepdad and traveling, about avoiding questions and coming back to them. to the energetic barking dogs who scared away hubby and kept trying to frighten me and getting frightened by me in turns, when I tried to take a random worn path after stopping randomly by the roadside in a small village by the river. to finding myself sitting next to a crying girl at the airport talking into a phone, after realizing (looking up from my tablet book) that she and I had been sitting around in a near-empty airport, obviously both of us spending more time than usual waiting for a plane; having forced to overhear much of her conversation with her mom and some friends narrating her story of cancelled flights and missed opportunity and venting her frustration, between sobs and angry tears. me wondering whether I should offer her some of my Mexican chocolate (that in turn made me wonder about the hands that hand-craft chocolate, esp. when we bought some from a local shop on the highway from the man who claimed to have made them; mashed-in thoughts of the documentary I had recently seen about the fermentation of cacao and the process of chocolate being made; all those hands of strangers touching those beans, making that chocolate that is playing on my tongue, plus these Mexican & New-Mexican ones don't melt so soon - I sort of got back to liking chocolate after many many years - dark, hand-made chocolate) to cheer her up, but only wondering.

to the short one-two line conversations with fellow gawkers at an art exhibition where I would say it was the artist's intent that we talk. "what do you see?" everyone asking each other, me talking to this guy, probably the only other person there, who like me, was scribbling some stuff down, more organized than me - he had a little diary, and he like me, walked back to pieces he had already seen, studying, comparing, trying to fathom something at least of what would have been in the artist's mind. Pollock is not an easy artist to view, and I don't think I enjoyed any solo artist exhibition so much ever. strangers coming together in those halls, scratching their heads to find meaning, in life, in art, in chance meetings. me wondering if any of these past chance encounters could ever become lasting friendships if anyone tried.

watching the crowd returning with me in the evening train, drunk and happy on St. Paddy's day celebrations (I had preferred Pollock) - a couple of separate women puking it all out, a different couple of them (together and sitting next to me in the train) observing aloud how much she had enjoyed watching "all these idiots today".

me watching people, a cat on a leash at a colorful park in golden weather, noticing just one other guy alone like me, munching on my gooey-butter cake wondering again about the hands that made it. thinking back to the forest ranger who gave us his recommendations about hiking trails some days ago around petroglyphs, his smile, his "my favorite is... ", me wondering if I'd want to know him better some day, or if I'd want to be in his place - watching strangers walk in every day every hour asking to buy maps, water, chocolate, hats, and asking which is my favorite trail.

that woman on a trail when we heard those inhuman voices in the distance, shouting out to us, that they were coyotes, probably killed a rabbit, "they have to celebrate". that couple, hiking up abandoning the trail, up up on those black cooled lava rocks, to the top of the table of the black plateau, the guy giving his hand now and then to pull the girl up, me clicking them sitting up there together, kissing, against the blue and black of the sky and land, wondering if I would go up there if I was younger or if hubby was a little more adventurous (most places where I do climb up I see him as a tiny fleck down below) and yet somehow strangely satisfied (satiated) with where we were, walking in the desert, me looking out for those holes in the ground - so many of them - rabbit holes, lizard holes, or maybe rattlesnakes. so comforting that where nature finds rattlesnakes, it also grows antidote herbs that were found and known by americans long before America.

through all this, reading Teju Cole and his meanderings through NYC, mostly alone, bumping into strangers, much like me, thinking, talking, keeping and taking away.