Raw Materials

Getting adequate sleep has become somewhat of a luxury these days. I find myself collapsing in the unlikeliest of places, falling asleep almost everywhere and embarrassing myself when I end up sleeping in the middle of doing something important. Even right now, I am extremely sleepy and I have readings to do. It is quite annoying because it feels like work never ends and the last week, I ended up leaving quite a bit of slack. So this weekend, I really need to work hard to get back on track. The thing with a course like Literary Theory is that all these texts mingle and talk and converse with each other. If you haven’t read any text, chances are you might get extremely lost in class.

I don’t like feeling lost in class because it makes me feel more dumber than I do on a daily basis. I then need to constantly tell myself, in quite an unconvincing way might I add, that I am not dumb. It just loses its meaning after a while, it just starts sounding extremely insincere and stupid. Anyway, it is not a big task to sound stupid, at least from my limited experience. I can sound extremely stupid without even trying, case in point, some of my own blog posts from the past and well, I still don’t know how this one is going to turn out so this one might add itself to that list. Regardless, I am quite stupid many times and today might just as well be one of those days.

What gives me some modicum of joy is the fact that I am quite wonderfully writing a story (around 500 words) every week. I have ended up writing quite a bit and that feels good, to have something to look at and say that I wrote them. Now, whether those are good pieces or not are yet to be seen. But regardless of the worth/value I assign them, they are still written pieces that can be worked on. They are extremely useful raw material and in the world of writing, raw material is great, it means there is something to work with. It takes a lot of pressure off the writer. You don’t feel as sad when you are not churning out something from time to time, you can work on stuff you started in a moment of inspiration (or compulsion, which is also a good inspiration sometimes, I feel) and never brought to fruition.

One of the primary problems with this blog itself is the fact that every day I write without much raw material to work with. The only raw material I have is the memories of the day and sometimes even that is extremely sketchy. With such a precarious position, it is quite no wonder that most of the time I have to force myself to type words. this compromises on stuff that I could be saying. It is really not about how frequently you’re producing, but rather, what you’re producing and how you’re producing. But anyway, this blog has been going on every day so far and hopefully shall continue to do that until the end of this year. Maybe next year, I can limit myself to weekly stuff. have a theme every week and write one post each time. It is all quite far off into the future and now is not the time to ponder over them. But nonetheless, sometimes the future and the raw material it promises, sound exciting and worth dreaming about, doesn’t it?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Hope and Worries

So I did a risky thing today and may have sent a message asking someone out on a date. It is one of the guys from camp (one of the two I had a crush on) and we had kinda been in touch all this while. Well, I do like him and I think he is cute and totally my type and well, it just happened and I have sent a message. I hope that we can be able to set up a time to meet (and that we will want to). But we live too far away from each other and I don’t really have much scope for hope. But that’s the funny thing about hope right? It sustains even when it has absolutely no reason to. I don’t know him that well, and in my head at least, he is way out of my league. So I don’t necessarily have many things to fuel my hope with, but hope still burns bright. And I am hoping that even if he rejects me or my offer, we can continue to be friends because I don’t want to lose that. But wait, have I jinxed it by putting it here? I don’t want to, I have enough obstacles and problems already.

Anyway, that part of my life aside, I also have been drowning under the workload, which is insanely high compared to what I experienced during my summer abroad course at King’s College London. I think it is all amplified by the fact that I have had a huge break and this feels like I am dealing with a hangover of sorts, that I have become so accustomed to inactivity that suddenly it feels like there’s too much on my plate. It doesn’t really help I am also sometimes daydreaming about certain people, and then I break out of it and then I admonish myself for giving in to such cravings. Well, right now, I am in a mental space where I find joy and this kind of beaming happiness when I think about it. This kind of butterflies in the stomach feeling and I do enjoy this feeling. Maybe when it all goes down the drain and I am left heartbroken, I shall tell myself that at least I had that feeling of happiness. Nonetheless, let’s not talk about it anymore because it makes me nervous beyond what I can explain.

I am also considering trying a semester abroad or something because I feel that would be really useful for me. I had initially rejected it because I was sure that I could not handle my family and my studies at the same time and moreover, the costs would be insane. But London is a wonderful city and I would really love the opportunity to study there for a significant amount of time. I am terrified though and I don’t know what to do. My mother has been bugging me to consider a semester abroad and I had told her that it would be difficult because I wanted to be an RA. But when I think of it, I don’t think I want to be the person chaperoning a bunch of second years and first years on my floor. I would much rather interact with smaller kids and children and well, I would much rather study in a place like London. Well, I have messaged my mother about it and told her that I am considering it. As an added perk, I would also get the opportunity to see snow (I hope, I don’t know really). But as of now, I am, once again, not fuelling much hope into myself. I have a lot of things to worry about already (one of them definitely being today’s message fiasco) and I shall wait until at least some things are cleared up before I do anything else. And well, I guess, sometimes, waiting is all you can do, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Fairy Tales and Unfailing Human-ness

I think one of the wonders of fairy tales and oral lore is how accessible they are for people from all walks of life. As a girl from India, I was exposed to quite a few of the major, popular ones, the same amount as someone else. Fairy tales, as I knew them, were tales of wonder and mystery, set in mystical worlds that I could only dream about. I was first introduced to fairy tales, as a young child of maybe three years old, by my mother, who used to tell me stories like Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, etc during bedtime. I remember how I used to be curled up near my mother, one of my legs thrown around her, one of my hands holding or touching her nose, and one of her hands around me, soothingly tapping my back with a slow, regular beat. I remember this one position really clearly because it was my favourite position, and it was always the one that put me to sleep really fast.

As a young child, I had a curious habit of not being able to sleep unless I held my mother’s nose. I did not properly outgrow until my brother was born, when I was six years old, and I was forced out of my mother’s bed into my own. Somehow, I developed a fascination for noses in general. My mother’s nose took the brunt of it mainly because I slept near her and I would hold her nose through the night. But I recall holding my grandfather’s nose too, during one of my afternoon naps. One incident I remember quite vividly is me rubbing his nose and scratching it by mistake, scraping the skin and drawing blood. I hated blood all my life, almost. It was one of the key things that made me intolerant of violent movies and even my period when it started. Now I bear it patiently because I have no other choice, but there are times when I curse periods and think of how much life would be better if my body did not decide to bleed internally once a month.

So I remember freaking out when I realised that I had managed to draw blood from what I thought was a little harmless habit. My mother disagrees, she tells me that my habit has made her find it difficult to breathe many a time. In fact, when my parents found that they were going to have their second child, the first thing they did was tell me that I should be very careful and not hold the nose of the little child. I remember feeling very offended at that, not because I was not being allowed to hold the child’s nose, but because they thought me immature enough to attempt to do such a thing on a harmless baby. I may have been six, but I thought and tried to carry myself with the air and maturity of a 16-year-old.

My brother was born without much fuss, and I also outgrew my habit of holding noses in my sleep. We bought a bunker bed and I was pushed to the bed on top while my parents slept on the bed at the bottom. During the first few days, I had been thrilled with that arrangement but like most children, the charms of the bunker soon died down. I felt that I was being unfairly robbed of the chance to sleep with my mother, listen to her stories, her songs. My whole life was undergoing a rapid, radical shift. What was going to happen to my stories now? Who was going to tell me those stories now?

For me, that meant the start of finding the joy of reading. I had started reading properly in school, turned out to be quite skilled at it too. My Tamil knowledge was improving as well. There was a library near my house, that my father went to often, to bring home books to read. I started my acquaintance with books during this time. Writing, as an exercise I would find myself occupied by, was something quite far off into the future. But reading is something that has kept me in good stead to this day. In a way, my tryst with the world of literature follows the trajectory of the development of fairy tales as a genre. From orally transmitted pockets of knowledge, it moved to small pockets of knowledge in the form of print media and then, to other kinds of media. It just goes to say that the fairytale is as human as can be. It is reflective of something deep inside us that makes us all unfailingly human, the wonder and bewilderment, the adaptiveness and the flexibility, the changing worlds and the infinite possibilities. After all, it is a human creation at the end of the day, isn’t it?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Mails, Memories, and More

Today, a friend of mine had a bit of a crisis situation with his email. He had typed a large mail he had intended to send to someone, putting in a lot of effort into it. But unfortunately, when he sent it, it vanished. It wasn’t in the sent mail, or drafts, or anywhere at all. He had been messaging me at that time and he told me about the tragedy that befell his email. It was a very important email too, one that was to be sent to a very special person, and he had put in a lot of thought and time into it. I was moved by the story, so I also joined him in helping to search for the mysteriously vanished mail. We checked everywhere, but we couldn’t find it at all. I was looking at my own inbox too at that time, trying to see what places were there where emails would/could get moved to. It was during this search that I happened to find some very old emails in my inbox.

These emails were correspondence that I had kept with a childhood friend of mine who was in the UK. I was all of twelve years, an angsty and lonely pre-teen who was desperately holding on to her friend, when I had written those emails. The correspondence spanned a few years, till 2016, in fact. It was a very large part of my life, sending those emails and receiving replies. My childhood friend was my closest confidante for a very long time. I was a lonely kid in middle-school, was not given good looks or great talents. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about me that warranted any kind of attention being paid to me. I never had any attention from guys either, and fortunately, I also did not like most of the boys in my class. I found them all to be too rude and mean, and just overall sexist a**h***s.

Well, I am still quite unlucky on the romantic prospects side of life, but currently, it does not quite feature in my mind that much. I have come to realise that there are many issues I have with myself, too much self-hatred that I have harboured, that to love anyone else would be a slow incineration that would only leave me in ashes on the floor. I would like to grow up, find comfort with myself before I seek it with anyone else. I think that’s one thing I am sure about, I would place comfort as my primary criteria, always. Looks like my undergraduate life will not open that door for me. But honestly, if it means that when the door does open, I shall have a beautiful garden on the other side, I am more than ready to spend my initial college life as an ‘innocent’. Somehow to call me an ‘innocent’, seems an affront to the sensibilities of the word.

But coming back to these emails, they gave me the courage to battle through the hard days and the bad days. I remember days when the first thing I would do in a day would be to check my mail (much like what I do with WhatsApp right now). To see an unread email from her would set my heart flying and I would open the mail and delight in the words, send in my reply and wait for the process to repeat itself. Today, when I revisited those emails, I found how cringe-worthy those emails are but there was also something quite endearing about them. I had been so uninhibited in my emails, writing about how I got my first period, how there was a time when my shaking hands with a guy had started teasing that quickly subsided when news came that he liked the popular girl in class, how she was troubling me a lot, and so on. They recorded the lows and highs of my life, my disappointments, my sorrows, and my hopes and dreams.

It was quite a gossip treasure, those emails, that I was initially very mortified, at my language, my grammar, my thoughts, everything. But I was also extremely glad to have those emails there, for they document an important phase in my life. A phase where I made friends and finally, in some capacity, went from being a caterpillar to a butterfly. I think there are times, even now, when I look at myself and wish I were indeed a true butterfly and not a cheap substitute. When my friend was freaking out and panicking over the email, I wished that there would hopefully come a time when I would be that distraught over an email, and when someone else would be so distraught over an email they were supposed to send me.

It is a small thing, isn’t it, to want to say something to someone, to want to share something with someone? A small action, but one that is infinitely meaningful and wonderful. I was feeling quite overwhelmed when I found these old emails, I couldn’t help but message my friend and tell her that I loved her and was grateful for her presence. I am a sappy and mushy little thing, so sue me. I love sentiments and the small things in life that show that people care. I am all for the surprise hugs, the pats on the heads, and the secret smiles. They give me joy, they are the little emails that I look forward to every day. Sometimes, ‘you’ve got mail’ actually works in making you happy, doesn’t it?

And that’s my memory for the day.

 

Projects Well Done, Friendships​ Maybe Not Quite

The production actually went quite smoothly, without any obviously visible mishaps. In fact, I thought it went quite wonderfully. This is an experience I will never forget, especially because I made some new friends who I have grown fond of. They are some cute people who made the whole experience fun and enjoyable. It was so much fun working with them that they made the exhaustion bearable. My brain is just happy about today, precisely why I am awake at this time and typing.

I have a paper due tomorrow and I have not even started yet, but that is okay. I had to prioritise the production over everything. It was a very conscious decision, a decision I made voluntarily. That speaks volumes about how much fun I had with the production. I was a voice actor, my job might seem quite easy. But it was a challenge. It was about a video game, so the stage had the video game scenes while the voice actors were the players themselves. So we had to act like we were playing the game getting acted on screen. My co-voice actor and I had a lot of fun together, improvised a lot and went wild with it. It was an enjoyable exercise that I cherish and will probably miss, now that it is over.

There are so many cool and cute people around me, people I don’t even interact with much. I realise that every day– whenever I have a great conversation with someone, whenever I am forced to interact with people outside my circle. Take my co voice-actor for example, he and I are so similar and share a lot of similar habits. Both of us have an obsessive nail-biting habit, both of us are hoarders, childish to a fault (we fought ruthlessly over a broken prop, a sword handle), ordered the same thing when we had a team dinner, and so many other little things and instances. It was insane. The kid is also a lot of fun to just hang out with. I was shook! I found a person I could have made friends with quite easily, way before today, if I had just tried. But then, I think we all have the habit of sticking to people we think we will be more familiar with. There are times when that instinct of yours really works out and you are able to maintain the friendship, but sometimes your instinct can lead you down a path that could end up being toxic for you and the other party.

This comes from the fact that one of my friends is currently facing such a situation. They are stuck in a friendship, they really love their friend but the other friend is getting slightly out of hand. It is apparently taking a toll on the both of them, and the friend feels bad for whatever’s happening. It is not fair, for that friend to undergo such shit but I honestly don’t know how to help them out. The best I can do is be patient and lend an ear to their troubles. But I guess, sometimes, having someone’s ear is enough for us to figure out a way ourselves, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Personal Jinx and Simple Joys

‘I don’t have a picture for this post. Mainly because I didn’t know what picture to use for ‘jinx. I mean, I could have found a picture of a lady with a witch costume waving her wand about and claimed that it was a jinx. But then, in my head, it does not relate at all to what I mean when I say ‘jinx’. Jinx was something we, as young teens in middle school, used a lot.

A person always said ‘personal jinx’ whenever he/she and another person say the same thing at the same time. The person to say ‘personal jinx’ first was the ‘winner’ in a way. The other person had to keep quiet and not speak at all till their name is called three times by the person who jinxed them. If by some unfortunate circumstance, they do end up speaking something, then they would get hit by the other person. The number of hits was based on the day of the month. If it was the 1st, you were lucky and would get away with just one hit. But if it were the 31st, then I would be very sorry to be in your position.

It was a fun game we made up and played only within our close circles. After all, you could not go around beating people you do not know. We may have been hormonal teens who were close to losing whatever we imbibed of civilisation, but we weren’t quite there yet. In my shameful recollection of this childish entertainment, I remember how for the longest time I did not know that the word was ‘jinx’. I had, in all my ignorance, thought the word to be jeans.

I even had an explanation for it. In my head, I said by saying personal jeans, one was staking claim over jeans and when someone spoke before their name was called thrice, they were committing a crime equal to stealing those jeans. Hence, the punishment of beatings. In retrospect, my interpretation probably was more logical than ‘personal jinx’. I mean, why ‘jinx’?

It reminds me of times when we were so bored by everything that our mind creatively came up with the most random ideas to brighten up and enliven us. I remember, with joy, the times when I have ‘personal jinx’ed a friend and how we found some kind of sadistic fun in it. The personal jinx was a way we used to good-humouredly shut a person up. It was all part of the game, we all understood it and we played it with no malicious intents in mind. And I think, as we grow up, it is this ability of childish play and joy that we forget. This ability to take things lightly and not view everything seriously. Yes, there are matters that demand our attention and things that we have to take seriously. But, is it all worth completely disregarding the small things that used to give us joy?

And that’s my memory for the day.

PS: I am not very happy with this post, but writing consistently is more important for me than writing amazing pieces. I knew, when I started this, that there will be days when I will not be able to devote as enough time as I would like to. But the fact that I have managed to write something consistently is something I am allowing myself to be proud of.

 

Swinging My Way To Independence

This bamboo swing was bought nearly 25 years ago by my grandparents. It has been my source of joy ever since I was a little kid. The swing used to hang in different places in the different houses my grandparents lived in. And wherever it hung, I would hang out too. The sound of it swinging, the ‘kadak kadak’ sound was my lullaby. I would fall asleep in the swing, eat while swinging, watch TV sitting on the swing, read books while swinging. I did everything while I was in the swing. The swing is very old, its design is perfect and comfortable and it still is as strong as ever. It could carry the weight of a 3-year-old me and it can carry the weight of a 17-year-old me and I reckon, it can carry the weight of a 60-year-old me too.

As a kid, one of my favourite pastimes was to bring bedsheets from the bedroom and drape them over the swing. I would drape them from top to bottom, creating a cocoon that was perfect for me to sleep in or just sit in. I called it my ‘house’ within my house. It would fall over the sides, no one would know if I was in there or not. I would painstakingly pin the entrance once I was inside. And I would carefully let one leg down to start the swinging and then pull it back up. For anyone walking by, it was an elaborately covered swing, swinging. But whether it was inhabited or not would remain a mystery till I chose to reveal my presence.

It was the perfect spot for me, it was peaceful and I could just exist without doing anything at all. It is so hard to find such peace these days. Even now, it is holiday time but I am writing this post because somehow, I have equated doing nothing to being worthless. And I don’t want to be worthless. Even as a little child, independence was something I really sought. My own space under the sun, my place that I could call my own. And this seeking of security, of peace and independence, is something I am still doing. I am still not comfortable with letting myself be vulnerable and dependent except to close family.

The swing brings to mind, the thousands of memories I have made while swinging in it. I have spent afternoons drinking cool tender-coconut water and complaining about the fan blowing away the bedsheets and complaining about the fan running too slow and making the inside stuffy and hot. I have spent afternoons napping inside the comfort and darkness of the cocoon and waking up to find that my swing was still swinging, courtesy of my grandparents who pushed it to and fro from time to time. It made me so happy and content to realise that there were two souls, who cared the world about me and were pushing my swing from time to time so that I can continue to sleep.

They understood my fascination and the comfort I drew from the swing. They never used it themselves, it existed for me and me alone in their eyes. Once the bedsheets were draped, it was claimed territory and they let it be that way. They understood my need for a personal space and they allowed it to me, a characteristic I find very hard to find in many other parents and grandparents. They let me have my space while carefully looking out for me and in many ways, this freedom they gave me has shaped me into who I am. My search for independence continues but I know I can afford to fall back. I know I have people who will push my swing if and when I am unable to do it myself. And really, what more could I need?

And that’s my memory for the day.