Useless, Lazy Days

I sometimes wonder if moving on is really that easy, or if I had it easy or if I had only been fooling myself. Regardless, the fact still remains that I may not have moved on as quickly as I like. But that’s okay, it is still happening, I can feel it and while it is a slow process, I know that it shall yield its results soon enough. I have withdrawn because distance helps me move on and I guess, I can only hope that it gets to work faster. It is too slow for my liking, at least the pace at which it has been happening lately. The only thing that gives me any semblance of hope is the fact that I can visibly see that the moving on is happening and so I know it will come to fruition soon enough. 

Today was an extremely lazy and unproductive day and I probably should not be quite so cavalier about it. But I also think that a whole week of poor sleep led me into this—I was so sleepy and tired and exhausted and I fell asleep just about everywhere. I could not concentrate on my work for a sustained amount of time, could not come to write my paper and get my work done. In retrospect, that was an extremely dumb move because that means I will have work piled up for a long period of time. But in my defence, I really needed the sleep. That’s all the defence I have, which is comical, almost. 

What is the deal with life, really? You breathe in breathe out and suddenly you’re expected to pay for that oxygen you consume in the form of living a life. You have a body you’re supposed to feed and protect (assuming this ‘you’ is separate from your body), you have a role in the world that you’re supposed to fulfil, there are others whose role is to ensure you fulfil yours, we are all censoring and self-censoring and we all take joy in making each other pay for their share of oxygen. It is quite ironical that people say “live your life” like it is this freeing thing when actually living your life is as restricted as you can get. There, I have officially become the old hag on top of Oracle mountain now.

Coming back to my ponderations and considerations on the topic of my own uselessness in getting my work done, the wifi is not working on my laptop. I have legitimately tried everything, from restarting to disconnecting to everything and it still refuses to work. This means that this post shall go up only later, whenever my wifi connects. But because I have written it earlier, I shall use that as an excuse to pre-time my post, this seems almost like time travel and maybe it is, I don’t know. But I don’t want it to go unnoticed, I think that the fact that I am writing this despite not being able to post it shows my own dedication to this cause. That should show me that if I set my heart to it, I can get my work done. It may seem like I can’t and I agree, sometimes I fail miserably. But I have the capability to get it done, the capability to move on, and so I shall, come whatever (where is this fighting spirit the times I really need it, I wonder). Positivity is one thing, but blind hope is another. This isn’t blind hope, right? 

And that’s my memory for the day. 

Useful Little Things

I think it is the curse of a long break, that you struggle really hard to come to terms with doing work that had become everyday life for you. I am struggling to do a couple of readings for my course that starts Monday because I had not done much work all these days. It is hard to be able to concentrate and not wander off to the living room with the TV, or to my phone, or to the keyboard, or to the books I have borrowed, or to the thousand other things that surround me and capture my attention every second of the day. If I am not having my attention captured by these external things, then my mind is ready with a few thoughts, questions, and memories that inevitably end up making me move away from my reading material and concentrate elsewhere. This is frustrating work, I only hope that I start to be able to put in consistent effort and concentration into everything.

I still have a huge list of incomplete works, stories, ideas, reading books on my to-read list. The list is huge, and somehow, so much of the summer has passed me by and it feels like I have done nothing at all. I feel as useless as a cheap little ornamental plant made of plastic. Ah, wonderful thoughts once again, back to normal, I’d have me believe. Once some kind of work to do turns up, there comes the attention seeking, self-deprecating, whiny, complaining little girl who should have never been allowed to graduate from kindergarten. To be honest, I was a star in my kindergarten class. I was brilliant and smart, according to my teachers. They all expected things from me, truly marvellous. People had hopes and expectations for me, and I daresay I did too. But I think part of my growing up at least, I learnt the hard way that I was not worthy of that much expectations. That I was probably better off doing smaller things, and I mean that with a little bit of sadness and resignation, but also acceptance.

Even now, I can hear a few people say that I am being unnecessarily dramatic and maudlin and stupid. That what I am saying is not true, that I can actually do some great things. While I still cling on to that hope, I think I am finally coming to terms with the fact that I may not be destined for greatness. That doesn’t mean that I live a sad, pathetic life. If I can touch just one soul with something that I do, I shall be content with that. Wow, I am a philosophical, old soul now, someone should give me the monk robes already. But I would assume that would be pretty great, to be wise and mature beyond physical age. Somehow, like the bundle of contradictions that I am, I oscillate between the maturity of a six-year-old and a sixty-year-old woman.

I remember, when as a child, I used to be obsessed with ages and calculating someone’s age based on their birthday. I also had the annoying habit of counting months and days. So, I would ask a random relative when they were born. Then I would say, ‘oh you are 55 years, 3 months and 10 days old’. When I learnt the Tamil numbers, I started using this as an opportunity to practise my numbers. So birthdays and calculating ages became my favourite pastime. It was a harmless pastime, this job of counting, but it grew on me even into school. I had a weird affinity for doing calculations, especially multiplications of large numbers. I used to apply multiplication to cell phone numbers, 10 digit monstrosities that would occupy 3-5 minutes of my time.

And I used to be good and fast at it too, I would be accurate most of the time. The seed was sown by a teacher of mine who had said that doing a few problems like that every week would help us in doing calculations faster. It did help, I improved in accuracy when it came to calculating values. It helped me in math (chapters like mensuration, probability, etc), helped me in solving physics problems, chemistry problems, just a lot of school work in general. It also started making its way into my everyday life, like at a store or anywhere. My calculations were fast and accurate. In fact, the other day, here at the store, I calculated something mentally by the time the manager put it in the system at the till. He just looked at me in wonder when my answer was proven right, while I just shrugged because it was just something I had trained myself to do. I think that’s the wonderful part, we just do different things in our everyday life, even when we feel like we didn’t do anything. Right now, it may feel like a useless thing, but there will come a time when it would be put to use. So technically, that means that everything we do, has a way of coming back and making sense to us, doesn’t it?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Frustrated Castles in the Air

Sometimes I wonder if I am wasting my life, that I am not doing anything worthwhile at all except to breathe, eat, read, sleep, interact with parents (a little bit), do some menial stuff that doesn’t exactly help anyone but myself. Even for myself, what kind of help does it do except provide some mediocre, low-grade, temporary pleasure? There are people out there doing many things, accomplishing many things, getting recognised, putting themselves out into the world, impacting people. And they are doing it at ages much less than mine, or at the very least, they are the same age as me. They are out there going on trips of a lifetime, representing countries in the international platform, becoming global leaders, leading companies and coming up with ideas of their own, getting published, standing for what they believe is right, protesting and working, and so much more. Is this an unfair comparison? I doubt it.

Why is it that I have not been able to do anything at all, except maybe complain about having not done anything, on a comfortable platform, seated on my well-privileged derriere? Derriere, I have to be ‘decent’ about my word usage, can’t say ass or butt, has to be derriere. Maybe it is to make up for my own glaring incompetencies in ‘areas that matter’. Using quotation marks because I don’t know what I am feeling. I doubt myself too much, I want to hide behind these marks instead of saying “that’s the conventionally accepted meaning, decided by the status quo, that I am a willing slave to, which I will protest against on the outside but I will internalise and propagate it in my own life”. Jaded and disillusioned, maybe that’s true. Things happen, castles in the air don’t hold for much time.

Castles in the air remind me of this Birbal story (I think) about the king Akbar asking for a castle to be built in the air. Birbal, being the clever man he is, ties a kite, fixes a bell on its tail and lets it fly. When the kind comes to supervise the construction, he hears the bell ringing as the kite flies in the air. He asks Birbal where the sound is coming from. Birbal says that it is the sound of the construction workers, calling for more materials. He asks the kind to order men to bring the materials and to climb up the string to deliver them to the workers up there. The king has to accept defeat (and part with some valuables, because apparently, you reward people for handing you your derriere on a silver platter) and everything is alright with the world again. How simply delightful a story is that! So simple–it teaches you about the absolute fruitlessness of wishing for a castle in the air, tells you that you have to be smart to survive in the world, it tells you that there will be people who hand you your derriere on a platter but you have to learn to suck it up and be gracious about it. Life lessons 101, truly.

I really don’t understand what has brought about this absolutely jaded post, but something inside feels very disillusioned and angry. So very angry. Maybe it was the fruitless fight I had with my parents today afternoon because they were making some rude comments about fat people (still manages to hit a nerve with me, maybe its because I see myself as a potential target) and some things like that. I was trying to tell them that those kinds of comments are in bad taste, that to look at things with a patronising attitude (something they do with me many times these days, and something they say I do with them too) reflects badly on them. I was told that college has changed me (maybe it has), I have become arrogant and who am I to correct them, who have lived and navigated society (that I am beginning to despise) for far more years than I have. They are making comments inside their house, to each other, don’t they have that freedom? And here’s where a malicious comment comes, “why are you feeling offended? We weren’t telling anything or commenting about you.” They say they are educated too, that I should not think that only I am and that I know everything (I never have believed that, I only wish I did for it would give me far more confidence). Well, that conversation was destined for failure from the start I would guess. No one likes their mistakes to be pointed out to them, I don’t and maybe I was at wrong here. I need time to think it through, but I am scared of the results because I am afraid my castle in the air will come crashing down. What if it wasn’t even a castle in the first place? Questions, questions, questions.

This post was difficult to get started with because I was holding onto so many frustrations, looking for a place to dump them into. This blog is not exactly a private space, I would want to open this to my friends someday. I need to decide and fix things, choose what to put out there in the world. There are too many frustrations in my everyday life–friendships, families, food, myself, everything has something to add to that pile of garbage. Today is not the day for motivated, unicorn Yashasvi with hope for the future, who sees rainbows coming out of shit-holes. Today is the day for a disappointed, annoyed, frustrated, disillusioned Yashasvi, who sees a pot of garbage at the end of the rainbow, who sees not even a kite in place of the castle in the air. Maybe it is a stone up there. But to think that a stone can fly is to be hopeful. Maybe an empty string works better as an analogy. This is turning out to be frustrating in itself. Please let these frustrations be blown away by the wind, please?

And that’s my memory for the day.