Ashtami

Its like my skin is flayed so that even a light touch of the wind in the evening can push me to tears. Let's not even try to gauge what my general feelings are. They are even more on the edge. Yet I want nothing more than to be where I am, all by myself. Its a heady feeling this loneliness.

That new routine I talked so big about in my last post? yep, that didn't happen.
What happened was an epic fail to the point that I am now only reaching office at about 12.30 to 12 40 pm. You read that correctly.

But I need to step back. My sister visited this weekend and it was really exhausting. Especially emotionally. And I'm so wrung out. I love her, obviously. And I am ecstatic that she visited. But then the result of that is that I'm now facing uncomfortable facts about things which I have been willingly blind about.

Certain things I have just been allowing to happen, even though I feel horrendous about it, but I make no changes to anything. The main one being very codependent upon P and basically letting her life and her shit dictating my own life and feelings.

Intellectually I know that I do enable her. And allow her to dictate what I should and shouldn't be doing. I recongnise that she is a little too needy. I always did. But I refuse to do anything about it that was positive for me. This weekend I talked to my sister, after dinner on sunday, when P acted like an attention seeking drama queen that she is and proceeded to ruffle M and S's feathers to the point where M tells me that I need to stop being protective of P's behavior. And when I told my sister about it, she also told me in not so many words what is true and logical. My sister has a great knack for this.

Its not my fault that my situation in life financially is different and definitely not my responsibility to prop up someone else. I need to be a little selfish. And combinded with what M said, it also smacks with whatever I have been realizing for over the 10 months I have lived in this house.

P is not perfect. She can be caring and nice to me, and she truely and genuinely loves me. But she also is act drama queen and not the most mature and logical person on the planet. Also her wants and needs cannot dictate who I am. No matter how much I try, I cannot be whoever she wants me to be. And I don't even want to. So I should not feel guilty for it. Its not my responsibility to stick her broken pieces together. And its definitely not my responsibility to financially keep on supporting her. She needs to pull her weight. She cannot be perenially codependent on me. I know her patterns. She truely is a person who needs to be constantly codependent to the point of suffocation of the other person in order to functions successfully with other people of the world. Be it a friend or a boyfriend. I do not need to be the host/friend. I will not be able to survive that way.

And since M told me about how P needs to grow up, suddenly something has been ripped away from my eyes, which i was previously physically keeping in place. I am apparantly more grown up that she will ever be. And its not something that is pleasant to realize. And once it has happened, I cannot not see it . And all her foibles are being reinforeced the more time I am spending with her.
And this puts me in quite a existential quandry. I hate that M has pointed this out to me. I resent it. I resent her. For being so judgemental, and then also being so right. I cannot let go of this resentment. And its poisoning me unnaturally. And I am equally resentful of P for constantly taking advantage of me. Consistantly for the last 10 months and even more. And never realizing that she isn't as wonderful as she seems. Actually it is my fault. I know that no human is perfect, but this level of delusion on my part is extremely scary for me. Because I had no objectivity. Now all I notice is her neediness and fake nice behavior. Its not fake because she means it, but because she is at it 24/7. And her constant craving of approval. I think a little consultation about opinions makes a friend feels wanted. But constant seeking of the "yes" makes it annoying. And high handed attitudes of telling me what to do and not to do. I allowed such a lot of that. to the point of stupidity. Because she doesn't allow half as much as I allow. And her inability to listen or understand a logical arguement. gets very tiring.

I need to to shut some of me out of this equation or I wont survive. I need to reinstate some boundaries. Other wise, the little things that remain in my life will be gone. As it is I feel like I have not been living my life but P and R's life for the last 10 months. And I really hope this realization sticks.

Start, experiment.

Going to start a new routine(s) in a general attempt to organise and sort out my life and increase productivity.

This is a blog notification to myself and a start of a stopwatch or sorts to see how long this lasts. Don't think im not optimistic because of that last sentence.

Will update this space as a progress report, and to form a habit.

Key is to take it one day at a time, obviously. 

Grainy pictures

Why is life in 2015 a increasingly a series of low resolution, half blurry, nonsensical instagram photos which are stuck on the phone and on the cloud? Essentially you can't even print it out and touch it! The details are lost, upon enlargement. Like fading memories, there is an impression in your mind but immediately lost in a blur of pixels the moment you try to examine it closely.
I just find it extremely disturbing. 

Its time to admit that I come here when I'm angry.

I do.

Right now I have this slow acting anger inside me, which is a lot like saying that I have slow acting poison racing through my blood stream. The effects are the same.

I kicked/forced one of my housemates out of the house on the behest of the other one. Without actually witnessing the altercation between them, and only on the sayso of violence from the other. But since the sayso was that of a girl and the person accused was a guy, it was pretty much a blind decision. But I did hear the protests of it being an equal opportunity violent session from both sides, but I chose to still make the decision. I chose to ignore the logic and niggling doubts that told me that what he was saying is probably true.

Its so fucked up. I feel extremely unhappy and confused. And angry. I'm so fucking irritated. They have been at this for months. Years. And I'm angry at her for putting me through this. For making me take her decisions and making my position untennable. For getting me to destroy a really old friendship. Two, if i'm being honest with myself.

Somewhere, that ugly truthful part of my brain has started ranting at me that she is toxic. And this happened once before and I ended somthing with someone who did love me unconditionally in spite of all her faults. It became permissible to give up the most precious thing in the world: unconditional love. And this is happening again. There is this ugly part of my brain saying horrible things about her that is also making another part of my brain cringe in shame and horror.

The anger is starting to leak. I don't know how long I can keep it in check. I really don't want to take responsibility for someone elses problems. And I'd do it willingly if I wasn't being forced into it. Now I just want people to fuck off.

I am feeling guilty for being angry and hurt, where I have every reason to be. And this is also her special talent.

Fuck my life.

Saw this today on the behest of the roommate:

This is a reply to this:

I am not as incensed by the reply as my roommate is. But I despair. Because we all know the general IQ level of the average TOI comments section. 

Among the things that I have to do is the task to cut up curtain materials and then go to sleep. But in the reverse order. But my enthusiasm to write something every day has me tapping away at this key board. I know this will peter out tomorrow. Day after, latest.
This keyboard used to feel strange and suddenly now it feels less so. Its the new computer, you see. I think I'm a cheap date. Give me a laptop with the scroll function working and I will conveniently forget that I didn't like this one at first.
There is a definite cold war brewing in this house. One of my roommates is definitely treating me horribly. I still cannot make up my mind if I should take it or just cut off all contact completely. We used to be friends for over 9 years now.

There was an intellectual discussion in an email chain over an angry article about the mediocrity of the middle class Indian and how R.K. Laxman's common man had fed it into a big fat immovable cow. And you can see in Google's beautifully tabulated email format, my friends' personalities and their basic ideologies and intelligence.The evidence presented itself to me in a such a clear graph that I was quite taken by surprise.

Morning,Computer.

Slowly but surely this has become a part of my daily reading:

http://morning.computer/

I like that there is a famous writer who cannot but help write stuff. All the time. And he has a morning musing page which he just updates for himself.

This makes me want to do things everytime I read it. I could update a blog every day. Draw something. Or write something. But no.

I live in a house where three people exist, where only two at a time talk to each other and the other one is shut in the room. We live like refugees. And the token effort made to remedy the refugee-like situation on my part is buy a book shelf and take a week to assemble it and finally put it up, unloading two cartons of books.

Its wobbly and wonky and I have a deeply unsettling sensation that it might come toppling down in the middle of the night.

Thoughts on the Charlie Hebdo killing

This is one of the rare moments I find myself at a different pole in terms of opinion than the most intelligent of people whom I look up to. It almost looks like we live on two different continents... oh wait.
I really love Stephen Fry. He is brilliant and erudite and logical and well exposed to the world. At least that's how he appears to an audience like me. He is so much of these things that I forget that he is, after everything is said and done, a white man, who conveniently lives in a first world country, where even being gay, isn't as difficult as being gay in any south east asian country. Then he says something like this:

http://www.stephenfry.com/2015/01/10/you-must-mock/

and I am immediately made aware of the differences.

Same goes for Neil Gaiman. He is perhaps one of my most favorite authors of all time. But how he is going on on his twitter feed is seriously making me aware that how much of a first world advantaged person he really is.

I do not doubt for a moment that these two men are not geniuses or for that matter very very kind and thoughtful men. They are all these things, but they are all these things in the first world.

The thing that they don't seem to consider is that it is a privilege of only a few, the fact that one can choose to believe in the existance of a God or a higher being and choose not to be religious. Most of our realities deal with the fact that we, here, are almost born into a religion and are forced to deal with it on a daily basis for the entirety of our lives, weather we want to or not. In fact, the government has made it mandatory. From the time you are born, right through the times you would need anything official done, be it examinations, taxes or for that matter anything that would have you filling a form, you are required to be a person of religion. And this is in India, where we pride ourselves in having a "secular" democratic frame work. Imagine living in a country which is not even trying to play act at being secular in its political framework?

This brings me to what I thought about the nature of religion and religious practice in the east and how it differs so much in the west. The western religion is not a intrinsic part of a mans life in the west. It is a subsidiary. Their culture has never been spun from the cloth of religion and hence religion has never managed to permeate the very fabric of people's lives there.

More often than not, religion in the east is almost less religion and more culture and lifestyle. People's ways and mannerisms are crafted by religion. How they talk, eat, sleep, where clothes, how they live is defined by religion. I think its fundamentally impossible for western people to understand how the other half live and think.
And this is what is behind the root of what these great men mentioned above have said:

#JeSuisCharlie

Hence they fail to understand how Charlie Hebdo's systematic vilification and satire of anything Islamic or some people who are not western and white,
Because we can never be charlie. We cannot think about the right to free speech is in danger and this a bigger catastrophe, than say, the recent Boko Haram massacre. Because we have never known anything other than a tenuous version of free speech. Given to us one day, and the next day you are in jail.

I think both Mr Gaiman and Mr Fry has been expressing opinions. And that is a first world problem.

There are so many things to care about on this planet. I sometimes feel that my head will burst for trying to remember to care about things. Its like I've got a Damocles sword hanging over my head at all times: If you don't care about the children in Africa, you are not human and your human license will be revoked; If you don't care about the disappearing dolphins, your human license will be revoked and you will be the worst excuse for a human that can be; If you can't remember that farmers are dying right at this moment/the Narmada is drying up and villagers are being displaced all the time, you are not a caring and well rounded individual.
The thing is that I'd like to think that I'm a caring and human as anyone can be. But I don't think its humanly possible to be agitated and thinking about things to agitate about all the time. Its just not humanly possible. The brain does not work that way for most people. How is it possible to be so empathetic to things that you are not actually experiencing that you can howl in agony as if its happening to you? You just don't have the requisite life experiences to relate to, most of the time! At least most of us don't. You can be shocked. You can intellectually disgusted and even scared about whats being written about, in case it happens to you, but crying like its your leg's being cut off? I'm sorry I find that hard to believe.
So when I read all my social media feeds, I feel like the right scum for just being bored by everyone agitating all the time. I feel no normal sympathy for the things being agitated about even if I would have cared about it in normal circumstances. It just feels so useless. Its not even logical to rant about important things in social media which does nothing, and affects nothing.
If you wanted to do something worthwhile then do it at the playing field on which the problem is currently happening. Not on the bloody internet. Especially when the people you are agitating about definitely does not have access to the education or the technology you are using to see whats being said.

New Year Revolutions

I promise.

To be More Active.

To actively Seek and Do What I want to do.

To Draw more. To Look better.To Create regularly. To Feel Better.

Ambivalent enough to make me not feel guilty when sluicing my way through those loopholes.