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?