Joke’s on You, Joker

How long before someone becomes a burden too heavy for you to carry? Or how long until you yourself become that burden? It has been a question that has been plaguing me ever since I had the conscience to make friends. But it has been bothering especially after I made friends who I got close enough to be truly vulnerable with. Suddenly it is like I want to share my sorrows with them and seek support but it is simultaneously accompanied by the worry, “how much is too much? How long until they leave or decide that you’re probably not worth their time?” Not very encouraging thoughts, but then when have I ever cheerleadered (I doubt this is even a word but it is still a cool word to use) myself on?

It is quite funny because when I was younger, I was constantly told by my grandmother that I found it easy to make friends. She had seen me at the swimming pool one day and I had just managed to catch a couple of girls with whom I was talking (in retrospect, I believe one of those girls didn’t really like me that much and wished I would just leave her be). When I came back to the house, my grandmother just smiled at me and said that, with that ability to talk to everyone and anyone, I would go places. It is quite true, people can go places with the ability to talk to others, too bad that as time passed and I grew more aware of myself (a bane it truly was), and with that came the horrible withdrawing into myself that I had to effect.

I think a major part of this change in my behaviour was also the fact that I was constantly reminded, in many spheres of my life, that I was worthless and had things that were undesirable and worthy of scorn. It started from inside the family to outside and well, these were the only two places I existed in (or rather, could exist in). I never got the opportunity, I believe, to form deep friendships because I never let myself feel like I could show or should show vulnerability.  I had to stick to my role, the joker, the one the joke’s on all the time, because well, surely everyone loved the joker right? So with nothing else in me that could ever be loved or liked, best to make myself into something that will surely be. What a farce.

I think until now, part of being the laughing stock of anything at all only reminds me of my self-imposed typecasting. It only brings to the forefront the times when I had to consciously make myself the joke because otherwise I might not be loved as much. And so I think I unconsciously try to be the dumb person who fumbles and mumbles and is a bumbling babbling baboon because I have, for so long, attached my identity to it that to not have it is to feel empty. There, I have said it, I cannot imagine myself as being a non-joker or the laughing stock of a group. And no, this is not about my own sense of humour and ability to make people laugh by smart comments, it is being the cause for other people’s laughs by degrading myself (at least in my head) and being dumb. And when people reinforce it, the performative just becomes all the more believable, reified, if I may. It is a messed up logic, but don’t we all want to feel loved at the end of the day?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Third Day at Camp

Today was also quite an exhausting day, but I made some new acquaintances (hopefully friends). There was more singing today, more people commented that I was good, we had a debate and well, I like to think I made a few fair points. We also played this new game called Rounders, which was like a weird kind of baseball. Well, I say, weird kind of baseball, because that’s what people told me it was. I don’t know baseball, so I don’t really get why it was different from baseball. But it was a fun game, involving a smaller baseball bat, a ball, four posts, and lots of running.

The bowler is like baseball, but they can throw under-arm throws too. The person batting cannot use both hands to swing the bat, so it involves quite a strong bit of hand-eye coordination. They hit the ball and run to the posts. So they have to hit the ball and cross two posts to get a half-pointer, and all four for a full-pointer. If they don’t hit the ball, they can still run, but they have to cross all four to get a half-pointer. If they are running when they get stumped, they’re out. They can get stumped at the post they are running to, or any of the posts they shall be running to. If they get stumped, they don’t get any points. They can also stop at a post, and save themselves. It was quite a fun game and I liked running around.

It was also only there that I made friends with two twelve-year-old girls who have somewhat integrated me into their kind of group. They said that they thought I was funny and that I should think about writing comedy and performing more. That was one of the biggest compliments I have ever got. I performed the piece I had typed here yesterday, today, and it got quite a bit of laughs and claps. It was nice and I had quite a few people come up to me to tell me that I did a good job and that I was funny. I have never considered doing anything comedy, but I might try sometime in the future. It sounds like something quite fun, and while I know that it extremely hard and that people struggle a lot, maybe I can try sometime.

I finally submitted my story, I think I had been sitting on it for too long. I wrote a very last-minute summary of my story because I had to. But it is really not my fault because it is light off right now, and I had absolutely no time and I had to do this as soon as possible. I think I am beginning to feel the beginnings of boredom hit me right now, I am not exactly challenged much and I find most of the kids here kind of bratty and spoilt. But I have been seeing pretty great kids too so I am really not sure what side to take. I feel at a loss actually, I don’t feel very comfortable here, I don’t really fit in very well with most of the people here, even those who are my age. I am pretty sure because I have built this wall around me that people can very visibly see. Also, I am shy to just go and approach people and sit down with them.

I prefer making friends with younger people, because a lot of the time they are more open to you and much more nice. Precisely why I am glad I made two friends today–two girls who are 12 who have been really nice to me. I spent a lot of time today in their company, I also made a friend with a small ten-year-old guy, another 12/13 year old, and then, one 19/20 year old. Well, at least I am saying they are friends, but at the moment, they are probably more like acquaintances. And well, today was the first day I spoke with them, I don’t know how tomorrow will be. Here’s to hoping tomorrow will be better. It is lights off from my side now. Somehow, I don’t feel quite as dark, maybe this won’t be such a bad week after all?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Old Writings, New Me

Yesterday, I had been looking through my laptop and I found this story I had started a few years back. I had started writing it on a whim, but I completely left it and I had forgotten about it. If I had not been as bored as I had been yesterday, I doubt I would have come across it in the first place. I do not remember what I had intended to do with the story. All I remember was that I intended for it to be humorous, easier said than done. I do have the humour of a depressed elephant, the only people who would laugh at my jokes were my parents, grandparents, and my brother. Even they would sometimes cringe and walk away, pretending they did not hear me.

My friends in college have gotten used to my absolutely dumb jokes by now, they always have a face ready for me when I make a completely useless (read, mindblowing) pun or a very inappropriate joke. I think the only times I have made them laugh was through my sad, pointless wit sometimes on chat. But even then, I get those lol emoticons, I never know if it is true that they laughed or if they were just being polite. But there have been times when they did reassure me sometimes that I cracked them up. When that happens, I take those nice compliments and carefully tuck them away in a corner of my heart–I am mushy that way. I like making people smile and laugh, I think it is a wonderfully underrated thing. I don’t know about others, but I would absolutely love it if someone made me laugh, it warms my heart. Also, it ensures my lifespan remains well and proper. I am not going to say no to free life longevity methods.

But coming back to my point, I had written two pages of that story, and when I read it, I cringed through it all. It was bad, so many punctuation errors and grammatical errors too. My paragraphs were messed up, there was a glaring lack of flow at times, it was very immaturely and childishly done. Well, not like I am much older and mature now, but I like to believe that I would be and had tried to be good enough. For that small Yashasvi, who had been filled with optimism and hope, I will give an A for effort. After all, sometimes you realise how cynical and jaded you’ve become (as if I am that old, hahaha), only when you turn and look back at how hopeful you had once been. But all is not lost, is it?

And that’s my memory for the day.

The ‘Best’ of Teen(th) Angst

I am still in disbelief over completing these many blog posts on this blog. It is surreal to know that just four months back, I had started this blog to give myself a reason to write every day. I also started a poetry challenge, one that did not come to fruition. But this blog has, and I think back to the time when I was so apprehensive about this whole exercise. I had thought that with the stress of academics, I would not be able to make myself find the time to write every day. During many points in the semester, I got very close to not writing a blog post for a day. But I managed to pull through, pushing myself to write every day.

This finals week, when I was stuck with a very scary and extremely weird writers’ block, that completely robbed my voice and left me struggling, I still managed to write every day. They will not be my best writing on this blog, but then that takes me to a conversation and realisation I had today in a conversation with my grandparents. They had asked me about my final papers and if I had done my best on them. As I was speaking to them, I realised a thing. I probably did not do my best, in a sense, compared to what I had done before. But given the time and circumstances that I was stuck in, I did do my best. I tried, stuck to my deadlines, and battled my way through it like a champ. And no one, not even myself can stop me from deriving some sort of validation from it. Yes, granted that I probably will not be getting good grades for those papers, but that does not take away from the fact that I tried, and to an extent, definitely succeeded.

It is a very liberating feeling, one that makes me feel victorious, and after these rather trying times, any kind of happy and liberating emotion is welcome in my life. It is actually quite funny to think about how when I was speaking to my grandparents, I started humming to myself. My grandparents’ immediate response was, “nee marupadiyum paadradhu kekardhukku romba sandhoshama irukku” (to listen to you sing again [after all this while] is making us happy). It was true, I am in much better spirits, it is like that one tooth that was bothering me and causing quite a nuisance to the other teeth around it had finally fallen out, or maybe it had been pulled out. In this world, how do we ever know if anything is pulled out or if it fell on its own–they say free will is a myth, an illusion after all.

But talking about tooth and teeth reminds me of the time I went to the dentist when I was a small kid of around 6-7 years old. I was in the third standard when I had two teeth growing right behind my lower incisors. My teeth weren’t falling off, so one day, when I had been in the hospital with my parents (I had told a story of how I used to go to the hospitals on weekends), they decided to take me to the dental doctor in that very hospital. We went there and the dentist’s name, incidentally, happened to be a combination of my mother’s and father’s names. It was decided that the tooth behind which the new one was growing had to be pulled out, along with the one adjacent to it. This was so that the new growing tooth would be able to move forward, uninhibited.

He was a nice guy, he made a joke about his name and I was as unimpressed and nervous as a 6-year-old going to the dentist will be. He told me that the injection (local anaesthesia) would be as painless as an ant bite. Of course, I thought, it will be as painless as an ant bite. Yeah, I was a pretty snarky kid, I still am salty many a time, but that is another matter altogether. This first time went pretty smoothly, it did not hurt as much, I had been sitting on my father’s lap and he had closed my eyes with his hands so that I won’t be scared. This reminded me of how sometimes sacrificial goats’ eyes are tied with cloth so that the goat will not see the blade. But nonetheless, I did not comment on it. It was pretty fine, it went pretty smoothly and I got to eat ice cream for being a good kid. I liked it, I wasn’t scared anymore.

This was just for one tooth, I still had another lower incisor to pull out. This was also the time when I had a problem with one of my upper incisors. A freak accident as a small child, when I had been around three years old, had broken the tooth into a crescent-shaped monstrosity, and it had been filled by another dentist. But, I being me, who was completely a nosy, annoying child, managed to dislodge the filling. I spent a good part of my early school life with a crescent-shaped front tooth. The expectation was that the tooth would fall off, but it didn’t. In fact, I reckon, I still have some milk teeth left which haven’t fallen off yet.

The next visit was to pull off that tooth. Now because of my breezy first experience, I felt like a queen, a bold young lady and I said to my father that I will sit alone in the chair, no assistance was required anymore. His help before was appreciated but right now, pretty unnecessary. So I sat in the chair, the injection was put, I kept my eyes open throughout. I was a bold child now, wasn’t I? Here’s when the problem started. The tooth wouldn’t come out, and it started hurting a lot as the dentist tried to pull it out. I don’t know where the guy put the injection, but it clearly was not where it was supposed to be. It hurt so much that whether my tooth was coming out or not, my life definitely was being pulled out of me. Finally, that tooth was pulled out–I was scarred for life, scared about the dentist and terrified at the prospect of coming back for the final teeth pulling (the second lower incisor one). Finally, the doctor had the audacity to say to me, “You can have ice cream now”, the nerve!

My last tooth pulling went relatively smoothly, I sat with my mom now, this tooth also took time to be pulled out. But it wasn’t painful, thankfully. I don’t deal well with pain, I am easily moved to tears. I can cry and create a nuisance for everyone, yes I am quite capable of that. The number of times I have thrown a tantrum over fear and pain is quite embarrassing. I like to think that I have grown up now, beyond those kinds of childish expressions. But here’s the thing, it is a key part of my personality and one that is, quite honestly, not that bad, at least in my opinion. Yes, it probably was not my ‘best’ behaviour, but again, given the circumstances, I did try didn’t I?

And that’s my memory for the day.

 

Being Dramatic and a Trip to Kashmir

I have always been quite a dramatic person. I loved to set myself up in scenarios that are far-fetched all because it gives me enough material to imagine and dramatise inside my own head. I live a lot in my head, I’ve realised. And maybe that’s why I felt so trapped lately, I was living only in my head and I couldn’t find a way out of the dump I put myself in.

It is scary, how much power your mind holds over you. It can make you feel cold when it wants to, hot when it wants to. It exerts its supreme authority over you and your body, like a slave rushes to do its bidding. And maybe that’s why they try to bring them both together, to hold them in a relationship linking them together for life. And all attempts to bring about equality are pushed away, especially by those pesky philosophers (cough cough, Descartes and others, cough cough).

Also, let me paste here a small verse I wrote, out of boredom in 2 mins over a text conversation with a friend. I love to rhyme and this was one of my rhyming exercises.

Dark and cold

Like the inside of my soul

Painted in a black so bold

You would think I was too old

The seers once foretold

That my soul to the devil will be sold

But enough of my mindless (see what I did there?) drivelling about philosophers and their trysts with this concept of the mind. I do have more greener fields to graze in, to not borrow a phrase. It is indeed very fascinating for me that today, a conversation with a friend reminded me of a trip I’d made to Kashmir in India. Beautiful place, I would recommend people to visit for sure. Especially for a girl who grew up in the tropical, humid climate of Chennai, Kashmir in the summer is a godsend. Well, it is cold and I do have a love-hate relationship with the cold but I am not going to let that stop me from reminiscing about it.

I was reminded particularly of this nasty experience I had in this place called Gulmarg. It started first with our waiting in a long line to buy tickets to get to the cable car (or gondola as they called it) to get to the top. The people are horrible, they cut lines and buy tickets and just behave horribly. And the worse part is, they cut the lines to get to the gondola too. And the gondola lines are really, REALLY long. So after nearly 3-4 hours in the line, we finally got to our cable car and we got in.

To go up there, we had to first rent warm coats and rubber boots because of the cold and the snow. Snow and cold temperatures in the middle of peak summer, how great is that! Anyway, dressed as we were in all these gear, we finally got into our cable car and up we went. The scenery was beautiful and as we moved up the hill, we started seeing the snow and like the little kids we were, my brother and I got super excited. We kept on whispering and muttering and just being on the edge of our seats. We just couldn’t wait to actually see the snow and touch it and stand on and hear it crunching beneath our rubber boots.

We finally reached the first phase and we though we’d get off there and explore some time and then go up to the next phase. It was said to be more colder, with more snow, basically it had things we’d only dreamed about. But as luck would have it, a storm started and the top phase was shut down. We were asked to get to the gondola station (again standing in a LONG LONG queue) and then, even those gondolas were stopped. So there was this LONG queue of people stranded there, temperatures got colder, and there was no way we could get down. And then people started fainting here and there and there was general chaos and fear. We all thought something bad was going to happen. Remember my imaginative brain? I decided that I needed to document this in writing so that when people found my body, they’d find the paper and know what happened. I thought I was going to die that day, I cried a lot because we were stuck and I felt that we would all perish in the cold.

Now, important details that should be provided. This was a day before my birthday. I was scared that I won’t live to celebrate my birthday, that it would be my regret that would stop me from passing on to the afterlife and instead render me a soul wandering the pathetic expanse of the world that had killed me. Yeah, I was quite dramatic, still am to an extent. There was cover over our head, there were Admin people on top who were in constant touch with people below. We wouldn’t have necessarily died. In retrospect, many of us overreacted. When people fainted, they were carried and their family was taken to the front where they got into a gondola and were sent down. I desperately wished to faint or for one of my family to faint just so that we could get down. I screamed and created a scene, then had a hot boiled egg to eat, because the weather was cold and the egg was hot and nice. Yeah, those vendors were also calmly there selling their food that were quite literally and figuratively hot commodities.

Anyway, needless to say, I survived. I lived to see my birthday and have lived for three more birthdays after that one so far. As soon as we came down, after a harrowing nearly 12 hours altogether, I promptly got inside our car (ie. the one we’d rented for sightseeing) and curled up on the seat in the warmth and slept. I didn’t wake up till we reached our hotel. And we all went to the room and I proceeded to curl up under the covers and continue with my sleep. After all, the trauma I faced made me extremely tired and I needed to sleep to be in my best health for my birthday the next day. And that was the story of what happened in Gulmarg.

I do have a lot of stories, I see. I think, as a friend pointed it today, the fact that I survived to tell the tale is what makes the whole episode funny. How many times do we go through life not knowing if it was the last moments of our life? A friend commented that I had a dark mind, but then it is a dark mind that absorbs most of the light. I just have space for more light, I guess. There are stories in our everyday life, so many experiences. Everyday writing these blog posts are part of my attempt to try and tell myself, remind myself of things that have happened. It is my way of trying to keep myself sane and in a weird way, strangely in control. It is funny because the blog is the furthest I can be to control. I just type as I think it and I believe that shows a lot. But anyway, like Descartes said, I think, therefore I am. What better way to keep my memories in a form I can revisit than this right?

And that’s my memory for the day.