A sentimental blues
Will wet your eye
You wonder why
You heave a sigh
You start to cry
Each time that you
Hear these blues

i cried for an hour. then i realised the futility of choosing to feel sad instead of angry. then i cried some more.
its raining outside. round drops of rain suddenly find themselves squashed flat against the pane. they make a soft pop. grey days and wet winter nights make me feel very lost.

i got a miles davis cd and an italian movie. and the normal quota of existential blues and random flak and tummy cramps.
and i finally confessed that i'd always liked madonna, oh the relief of getting that off my chest and then laughed hysterically when chipmunk told us he likes kenny rogers. hee hee har har. BUT what i haven't told anyone is that i kind of liked paris hilton's thing too.
i hate the thought of tomorrow and day after , but of course not sunday, and most definitely monday. once that is over, i'll have a whole new week to hate. but there's always zoning out.
in the meanwhile, as an oasis of constancy in my life, my irritation with the weather continues. my next home will be somewhere that has a decent winter, maybe a couple of weeks of snow (only if there is central heating) and a coffeeshop at the end of the block and a pub with reliable grub for sunday mornings. proximity to sea is optional. if i can afford the home, then i'd bloody well be able to afford a beach holiday now and then. i hate seeing people dress up in 13 layers of mismatched clothing in this pathetic excuse for a winter, hah, winter, that the weather gods or the scary schizoids at alipore weather office has thrown in calcutta's way.
there was actually a man who wore a cable-knot sweater AND a fleece-lined parka walking by the office. he stared at my cigarette, i stared at his outfit. eyeball for fucking eyeball man before the heat makes the fluid evaporate and the shrivelled eye falls off the socket i thought. but then the paper truck came and spoilt my view.

2006 - emotional rollercoaster. utterly exhausting, yet extremely enriching.
2007 - have a feeling is going to be even more eventful. omegawd!
only baggage carried over from last year - a sense of well-being which is also intimately connected to people who i'm learning each day are hard to lose.
and this new year's eve - no i didn't get my 16 hrs uninterrupted sleep despite manic manipulations, but it was a night memorable for its intensity if not anything else.

on the wishlist - more time, more travel, more music, longer winter, more letting in, more getting in, less of aishwaya rai, vast quantities of sketchpens and sequinned slippers, more nicotine (yeah i wanna smoke, i won't quit, i won't even pretend to want to quit, so there, what can you do?)

how can two little bits of roshomalai makes me throw up 6 times? there should a sense of proportion in things. and the next person who nudges a notun gurer shondesh my way will get a serving spoon jammed down their throat.
no presents today, smoking medium high, bullied people, million people to visit tomorrow and a million and one things waiting on monday. if i can't discard my life and get another one, then the least the world owes me is a spare clone kind of person to live parts of it for me.
i'd send the stupid clone to work and visit people and run errands and i'd stay at home, lazing in the sun on my favourite arm-chair and listen to old-fashioned acid rock. i'd read a fashion-magazine and eat grapes too, just to complete things, but i don't like the latter and the former would be too much like work.

this is unfrikkinbelievable. i sat up and made my calculations. i had an unbroken 22 day stint of getting presents every single day !!! and everything so far has been stuff i absolutely like, which is not a very usual occurrence when random people give you things. not that i'd ever concede that a normal existence is not traumatic, but this part of my life ... i'm lovvin' it.
today's booty: orange-pink cotton top, one asterix, rod stewart cd.

who do you give yourself to?
not in the virgin sacrifice kind of way, but really who do you give yourself to?
do you give yourself to you, keeping the rest of world at bay, keeping you safe and maybe lonely, a bit cold?
do you give yourself to a few, letting go in spurts, feeling warm in sporradic bursts of animosity?
do you give yourself to everything on the canvas - the causes you support, the vices you nurture, the friends you miss, the lovers you don't understand, the person at the other end of the wires, the person who's cut off all the wires, the dead and the living, the sunny mornings and warm water on your feet that try to balance on shifting sands, intense feelings, intense absence of feelings - and watch your anger when you can't pick up the strands of your life because the yarn has been woven into a tapestry you don't know how to unravel?
do you fight against detachment or do you fight for it?

i want a largish cardboard box or one half of a sewerage pipe where i can put up a blue plastic sheet and stay undisturbed and out of the world's way.

- god
-yeah?
- perform a miracle.
- fuck off.
- no, seriously.
- yeah, seriously, fuck off .
- like hell. you fuck off.
- oh ok. cool. seeya.

even prayer has lost its power these days.

colour code for the day: navy blue and blood red.
what the fuck is wrong with me?

bright, nice, sunny day; clear skies; black and green butterflies; feeling like a jellybean (waking up at six thirtyseven tsk); the easy-chair by the window nicely toasted by the morning sun.
i need to find a good reason why i have to go work today.
i also need to find a shirt, a pair of red socks, thirty bucks, my keys and somebody who'll give me something to eat.

meebo isn't working, the ym never did work on this piece of junk. whenever i type my id in, it is showing up as already logged in or invalid password. i can't even open my mail. it shows the same bloody thing.
and i have to go back to work tomorrow and i exhausted my week's quota of tantrums in one evening.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhhhhhhhhh. pox on your polly, fate.

coffee, music, lunch, nap, tantrum, pizza, beer, music, sleepover and a repeat of the sequence today. taking two days off is so blissful. taking two days off when everyone else is on leave too - heavenly.
i heart mew.

i missed my chance today.
at the park street signals one of the urchins came and demanded two rupees. he assured me that by giving the money i would ensure that i'd get married or at least make lots of money in near future. but despite having control of my destiny, i could do nothing about it since the lights changed and the moron of a taxiwallah sped to overtake a scorpio.
when i'm old, single and penniless, i'll remember to put a curse on the driver of taxi number 8235 and the cop that was manning the signals on park street at 7:45 on 11th november, 2006.
just you wait.

amader barite mistiri eshchhilo

i live in an orange and white house now, as opposed to the gritty-greyish-creamish-pinkish-can'tidentify and lightgreen-that-was-once-pink house. you see, the workmen came calling.
i didn't know that my dreams were portent of something. now after sharing bed, clothes, bathroom and every waking minute in the house with an extremely large number of members of the extended family, i feel that i should have known.i woke up one day to find three kids - two skinny and one fat - scraping the wall outside my room. as soon as i glared at them they stopped scraping and started putting a scaffold up. i stomped downstairs to find out that these were our latest houseguests.
the progenitor's brother is getting his house constructed. now junior is a conman par excellence and generally is the sort that gets things done. he got bored of the lack of excitement that his constructions were providing and decided to infuse some change in his routine. so the paint guys were given two-hours notice and told to pack for a week (don't forget toothbrushes and a sheet each) and were brought down from some 230 km away. my kakimoni came along as well - a saving grace - she's a cook worth dying for.
junior took them on an exploratory tour around the block and my mother and aunt cooked alurdom and luchi for "the boys". suitably fortified, "the boys" started on a demolition operation. i was held up at work that first day and when i got back home at 11, i saw three beady pairs of eyes in the living-room, peering from under a heap of sheets that looked extremely familiar. the rest of the house looked like it had been hit with a bomb. and then it all began.
every morning started with the scrape of a metallic sheet against plaster and a cloud of dust. as soon as they'd hear me moving around in the room, they'd stop the scraping and freeze till i went downstairs. there, the kitchen would be a veritable warzone with suggestions flying back and forth regarding what can be done for "the boys". breakfast, lunch and dinner had to offer enough variety - since they were not at home and must be missing their mums terribly - and junior and the progenitor would be sent to the market 13 times. the fish consumption in our house alone must have done something terrible to the ecological balance. each night i'd return home to find them happily watching my telly and i'd recieve frantic phone calls in the middle of interviews with strict instructions to get bengali blockbusters with improbable names. i had to rent 5 DVDs in three days and the local CDwallah gave me a look of disdain that i'll remember for a long time when i asked for abhimanyu. it' maybe a hit philim, but it's still infradig.
then they all decided that it wasn't enough fun as it were and so invitations were sent out. our happy family was joined by five more people, with the cheerful promise that the next team was on it's way. result: we got a lurid yellow bathroom with a pink plastic mirror; a confusion regarding what my great-grandfather's real name was; eleven house guests; three visits to extended family members everyone had forgotten existed; and a great big war over the choice of colours which revealed that my father can't climb trees (o' the shame of it) and that junior's choice of friends have always been inappropriate and that my aunt is extremely scared of monkeys and that my mother had been a closet-worshipper of santoshi-maa even though she knows it was a film and there's no actual deity. her reason - you never know.
anyway "the boys" scraped and cleaned and tried to paint the house a horrible yellow before being threatened with violence. after much heated debate and barbed exchanges regarding aesthetics and artistic sensibilities, the colour for the outer walls were chosen. in a rare moment of unanimity it was decided that we're not getting any more work done and all the paint work inside can be done some other time.
much suscpicious prodding and probing got the real story out. my mother and junior had promised the boys that they'd be sent back this weekend. reason being the local club that "the boys" belong to are hosting a play with cast that's being taken from calcutta and our boys have been assigned duty at the ladies' gate on monday. it would be unpardonable to make them miss that. and of course since it's their first visit to calcutta they'd have to be shown around. so, that thankfully ruled out any more of the paint work being done. this afternoon they were driven around the city by sulky and junior. "the boys" went plane-spotting via the rajarhat highway, they went and rode the metro, they went to victoria memorial and eden gardens and strand road and millenium park and made a round of both the howrah bridges and saw nicco park as well. they were fed coffee and chicken pakoras and dinner was chicken biriyani.
"the boys" are leaving early tomorrow morning.

i dreamt of snowflakes. stinging and burning on my tongue. i dreamt of vast open spaces, except it was just knowing that there was a space. all i remember of the dream is the feeling - nothing else. not much of a dream. yet waking up from it turned it all blue.
sometimes it feels like being rinsed with that purplish liquid - a faint blue patina over the normal colours. something you can't do much about.

Your Sloth Quotient: 59%

You're definitely lazier than the average person, but you're able to live a somewhat normal life. All your life needs is a little more effort and variety, and you might see that doing hard things is actually fun!

How Much Sloth Do You Have?

i need to concentrate more on not doing things. i wanna 99%.i just wanna be the supersloth.

a gruesome next day is truly appreciated when u are obsessive and insomniac.
sometimes i surprise myself with the profoundity of my thought process.

i found an idea i like very much. pigs fly when i'm not looking. what's to stop them? i like it. the possibility makes my life seem richer.

how can it be that after more than two decades, make it two point five decades, of education and constant hammering of concepts like self-worth, security and success, my only - one and only - ambition is not to do anything, ever? read books and raise dogs and sit and do nothing. yes, that's what i want my life to look like. and i can't even feel apologetic about it. how can it be?
i live for the day - that one day - when i'll stop and do nothing. and i don't want to be all old and washed out before i do that. i want my retirement now.

i am happy at the moment. ok, this has been one of my trademark drunk as a fish lines. but this time, i am sober and i mean it. the last few weeks haven't been too great.
work, toad, tempatation to walk away, restlessness, missing things and people and places i'm not supposed to miss, guilt, weariness...
R's father passed away a couple of weeks back. it was heartbreaking to watch her deal with it. it was even worse to watch her kid brother trying to be a "man" about it. none of us knew what to do, how to make things better (like that can be done) and felt like utter failures as human beings.
this evening was different, more relaxed and pleasant.
it seems like ages have passed since i had time enough for myself. which is sad, considering all major decsions i've made in the last two years have been geared to one goal - having more time.the other day, me and the southern wonder were mourning the fact that no-one recognises the fact that wanting contentment, wanting to be just happy - no more, no less - is a legitimate ambition.
time, people i care for, time for people i care for, and a good book or hundred when i get a bit tired of them - should be quite simple actually. except its not. there's some elusive ingredient that's always missing. but not tonight.