Inconsistent

One is quite, quite alone. The process of growing up ensures that. It is a process that will eventually strip one of one’s fondest illusions. But one learns to adapt. (But at least, I am writing about being inconsistent, not incontinent, thank gawd for small mercies.) In adapting, one learns to appreciate the many, many ways in which a thing can be said. Which isn’t equivalent to appreciating the people who produce these fascinating observations out of their hats. Or erm, brains. I am made for simple, desultory conversation, I’ve come to realise. And increasingly, I find that I am unable to hold on to a train of thought long enough to sufficiently exhaust all of its possibilities. The mind is restless, Krishna.

I am uncomfortable in my skin at the best of times. But I haven’t been, with you. Thank you.

It isn’t.

Love.

I know, darling,

but do lie.

I don’t want a thing. I don’t want friends. I don’t want anybody to know me. I don’t want anyone to read this. I don’t want anyone to go out o their way to do anything for me, to even leave me alone. Its okay if you call, its okay if you don’t. I’ll just go about doing my thing as unobtrusively as I always have. Just don’t ask me questions. Don’t try to make conversation with me.

Sudden Rush

of affection for this time, this place. Engulfing. The grist for nostalgia. In my mind I am rearranging the memories to give them that wonderful retrospective goldenness. Its late. No sleep. Must sleep. Want to. No dinner. A banana and chocolate in the evening.

I have now attended two surprise birthday parties for two friends. Both planned by people I know. With zero participation on my part. I have had zero suprise birthday parties thrown for me. I haven’t had a birthday party thing for the last four years. I cannot recall the joy I might have felt in all the preceding ones. Which isn’t that alarming. I can’t recall much. Memory is indistinct. The last four years, yes, the other unconnected thing about them: unrelenting unhappiness. I don’t know how it is. Are people generally happy and become unhappy by disrupting the order of things? Or is it the other way around. Solid blocks of what seems to be insurmountable unhappiness and rare flashes of joy? This latter thing is me. Which is odd, because I remember most of everything before five years ago as one prelapsarian solid block of happiness. Okay, a solid block with features of cheese, then. Ever since then, I’ve been analysing and reanalysing in a bid to correct wherever I went wrong. But five years is a long time to not have found out. And considering the tricks my wonderful memory plays on me, its not unreasonable to think that there really wasn’t any definitive going wrong, that its just another case of retrospective rearrangement of memory. A truly despairing thought. All that analysing in vain. It would have always been like this. Periodic rewiring: after every sufficient number of years, preceding events would remodel themselves into something approaching perfection in my mind, and the subsequent years would be spent in seeking to regain this ‘lost’ secret. Dreary.

I should be happy.

But at least I’d think I was happy now, five, maybe ten years from now. We cannot be getting unhappier in relation to the preceding years of our lives all our lives until we die. Or maybe thats it. We determine when we die by that measure. Debilitating unhappiness. We die when we cannot get any unhappier.

This is too grim, or too depressing.

I want to have friends. This is why. I have never been a good friend to have. Too aloof. Uninterested. Or something. I don’t know. You are with friends, you forget, you think about them, you have perspective. Or you are forced to pretend. I don’t know. There is something about friends.

My keyboard just slid off and fell with a surprisingly loud crash onto the floor. I haven’t really cried for a while: no access to appropriate reading material/movies. All this morning, I was trying to pick the story I was going to be in for today, and I couldn’t make one up that would do the trick. Imagining powers aren’t working as well as they did. Its easier to be happy/sad while being someone else. I should stop chewing the inside of my cheeks/side of tongue/lower lips. I can do a very authentic retarded listlessness.  I can stare and stare and stare for hours without fidgeting at all.  My eye-sockets feel very hot all of a sudden. Maybe I should sleep for a while. Its easier to imagine just before going to sleep. Although mostly, I just talk to people. Its not a very good habit. Always wanting to talk to real people. If I was better at imagining, I could hear anyone’s voice I liked, saying anything I liked. I always smile involuntarily when I talk to people on the phone.

I’ll walk with you if you lighten your pace a bit.

Grief.

Consider the previous post. Would I yearn for the food items listed, some day, when I look over my endless ode to self-absorption? I can’t answer that now, and therefore, I am asking, again, a rhetoric question. Free webspace brings out the worst in me, I’ve noticed.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I am indeed a rather inhumane person. It makes me uncomfortable.

My mother had an epiphany today. She reckons all her grief stems from the kitchen. That we, that is to say the other members of the family, oppress her by expecting her to cook for us. I hate the kitchen too. I’ve noticed that when she isn’t around, and therefore there isn’t any compulsion to eat certain meals at certain times, I don’t eat at all. For days. Its only when I go out do I feel the need to stuff myself with food.

I was reading Adhe Adhure for the test yesterday (which, needless to say, was a complete washout). An almost unbearable exercise. The unfamily reminds me of mine. I like it when I’m left alone, rather than having to pretend otherwise.

Ki khai, ki khai!!

I skipped (read flushed unceremoniously down the toilet because of the absence of supervision and enough time) the morning meal (khichuri+half a cucumber) today and had instead, throughout the day:

• One tall glass of milk
• One Banana
• One 5-Star Fruit and Nut, the last of which was in mouth stuffed right before entering the examination hall to ensure non-occurrence of empty stomach induced headache/ chewing of the inside of cheeks in the middle of said exam.

• Four Daal Puris
• One Fish Fry
• One Egg, curried, with half a potato
• One Mishti Doi
• One Frooti

(all of the above from Milonda’s. From 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM)

• One Choco-Truffle from Flury’s
• A bite of horribly buttery walnut pie from Flury’s

• Right at this moment, I’ve been given dry khichuri which looks like its been deep fried in ghee and sprinkled liberally with Haldiram’s potato chips, the ones that look like miniature frenchfries, very crisp and spicy.
• One Banana
• One tall glass of milk

I think I may have some sort of eating disorder which makes me crave food compulsively- whenever I’m bored, for example. Its perfect, even the illusion of hunger without setting eyes on food visits me all too frequently. The Flury’s guy tried to sell us the ugliest baguette ever. Now I am thinking about the crisp crust I could be munching upon, if he’d been persuasive enough. We ended up buying a shapeless loaf of pockmarked masala bread instead. I am thinking of tomorrow morning’s peppered broth and masala bread already. Ack!

Also, an incident marred the usual goings on. I discovered a thick line of ants on the window frame surrounding the a.c, to get rid of which I sprayed some kind of foul smelling insect repellent. Only, instead of the fine aerosol, a gush of liquid emerged from the nozzle, hit the frame, and immediately rebounded on my face and arms and went up my nostrils with angry ants in tow, secreting all the toxins in their little bodies as they shriveled up and died. Much scrubbing with all kinds of solutions later, my face has many slightly raised little red maps on it, and my nostrils feel raw and dehydrated.

I have an exam tomorrow, and I haven’t started studying in earnest. Which would be alright if I hadn’t gone and made a mess of my last undergraduate semester already. A mess beyond reparation right now. Or so I’d like to lead myself to think in order to ease my conscience. Taking Journey Through Western and Indian Thought, I knew, would put me behind considerably in the numbers game. Tamil got fubared. Bangla lit in translation was never something I could claim to be thorough at. And yet I was reasonably well-prepared. But that went down the drain as well due to the usual inability to restrict showing off in the first answer and therefore being unable to do justice to the other two. I wrote the first answer in one constant, possessed, preternaturally inspired flow, I kid myself not. But there was so much I was bursting to say and could not. About the second one that dealt with “Nishithe” and “The Hungry Stones” too. Sigh.

And yet.

Yet I cannot will myself to start studying in earnest. Because everything feels so already-studied. Though I remember nothing, I’m sure, of whatever I did for the internals. So i reread Deathly Hallows for, I don’t know, the 6th or 7th time, maybe. Funny how I cannot bear to read the plays I’ve already read only once before for the internals, and happily bury myself in the HP books over and over and over again even though I know all the plot twists already. How simple of me to like the HP books better than pterry or even the granddaddy of them all, Tolkien himself.

In the shower just now I thought of so many things, starting from why certain people might want to immerse themselves in an alternate bookish world right before distasteful confrontations with work in the real world. It really makes me feel good, Deathly Hallows. I think I really want to be pure and noble deep down and know that I am not. More, much, much more than The Alchemist it makes me believe that everything will come together in the end and that I am shielded from the truly horrific tragedies. I think its important to believe that everything won’t go wrong, like you fear. These children’s books set in an imaginary parallel universe calm me, scrunch back paralysing despair/fear/indecisiveness/offer as pleasurable a means of procrastination as any.

Its all about procrastination, I know. But all other forms of procrastination make me feel acutely aware of the waste I was subjecting my brain to.

My mind, the wonderful thing I am constantly engaged in atrophying to nothing more than a useless lump of tissue. Its all about finding shortcuts and evading, as best I can, the point at which I’d actually have to use it, until its absolutely unavoidable. Sure, I’d use it to imagine myself anywhere but in the present, having the most engaging conversations with the ones I am most unlikely to ever steer, in the course of normal conversations in the real world, towards the matters I’d like to discourse upon, in my head. The imagination, it is a wonderful thing. You create gods, nations, values, art by the force of it. It is how you discover, invent. Every new thing could perhaps be traced to some germ of it in someone’s mind.

But the fact remains, that little germ of thought would forever remain unknown to the rest of the world, if it couldn’t make the transition from thought to being. If it weren’t expressed in some way. Hence, the analogy, in Socrates, with labour-pains. I, who want to immerse myself in intellectual midwifery, feel like a continually pregnant thing, completely unable to birth. Socrates claimed to be barren, in keeping with the philosopher::midwife analogy. The problem isn’t quite as much the fact that I cannot birth (continuing the analogy) but the dread and anticipation of labour pains brought on by contact with things that make me ask questions. Its not as if I am constantly in an imaginary dialectic with my personal Socrates-figure. I am always running away from that. All in my most beloved, wonderful mind that provides me with endless entertainment/fascination. When it is not paralysed it is talking so fast I cannot keep up with it. And momentary connections seem lost when I try to reconstruct the reasoning backward. But I live in those brilliant moments of illumination, when its absolutely clear that this is how it is, because that caused this and these other effects.

I just wish I could work myself up to express all of it, limited though my facility with expression is. Neither with language, nor with numbers. Its maddening, studying literature, when the rest of this vast world remains dark matter to me, unknowable, unexplorable, not in any satisfying way, no matter how much lateral thinking I might engage in, when the world of math is sealed off for me.

But I have strayed quite far enough. And finding myself able to be sufficiently capable of hammering all of this out of my brain, I shall now go and pore over hideous translated poetry, and jaded arguments for an ‘Indian School’ of comparative literature, and against ‘single literature’ departments.