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.

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.

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.

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.

Something which I thought of today, but the thought has been surfacing and drowning in my head for quite some time:

I am that girl, that friend, the colleague, who is good for some amusement, some revelry, some shock at vulgar behavior, some laughs, maybe some witty comments. Or, I'm the friend you cultivate because you think I am broken and helpless and need to be kept together and taken care of, a burden that is friendship. Some times used because I can never say no.
But when you need someone to hang out with, or tell your innermost thoughts to, or consider a romance with, someone you want to exclusively be with, its always the other girl. There is the prettier one, the one who giggles, the one who is more lady-like, more normal, less thinking, willing to talk about completely inconsequential things, who is put together, doesn't have issues, who doesn't look like a monster. The one who depends on you to do things for them, ask you questions to make you feel important, does not have an ego that makes her feel guilty when you do something inconsequential for her because she knows she can do it herself, and dammit she should.

Don't get me wrong. Its not a pain or a heartache anymore, this realization. I'm almost thirty. I realize this is what its always going to be like. Its been accepted in the head. So what it becomes difficult to see into the future knowing this is how it's always going to be. So what then it becomes difficult to create, or imagine, and dream. So what.

I think I come here to moan a little, cry a little and then go back and forget this a little.
Maybe its the steroids that I have been taking since april that's the problem. They are supposed to make you depressed. P asked me if I was sad, when I she called me. I just garbled something at her.
I have been garbling a lot lately at people. I've lost the skill for articulate speech. I think I need this time that the brain takes to transfer thought to speech and then the written word to be properly understood.
All these inspirational things that people who are famous on youtube tell me about just taking the risk and just start being famous for something you did, by just doing it. They absorb me when they are talking but soon I have to come back to my one room, and the deep feeling that I can't breathe properly, and I don't have a table to draw on, and I SHOULD move, and the  thought of moving into a new place fills me with a deep sense of foreboding. But I should. I should buy a new computer but that cannot happen because I need to move, and I keep putting it off.

I went to Rajasthan

I was just going through the archives on this blog looking for a post from the older and much tragically deleted blog when I came across a post from October 2011 which is titled 'I want to go to Rajasthan'. And the jarring and awesome thing is that, as of December 2013, I have been. That is one thing which I can tick off and feel a modicum of happiness over. Usually, this blog is a study of whining and melancholia and bad grammar. But hopefully, this post is a spot of sunlight and hope. I have been to Rajasthan, with a part of my road trip crew and it was awesome.

So, I take resolutions every freakin day and never stick to them. These days I'm not that worried that I'm not really that creative. But there is a "task" in my head which says "make something". And its no longer a compulsion but a chore and something I dread. I have stopped dreaming of becoming a concept artist and waiting for some external impetus to quit my job and do something else. To the point that yesterday I got fuckall drunk with colleagues and might have said extremely questionable things to my boss and might have behaved highly inappropriately. I hope it is all ignored, but knowing my luck it wont be and it will be a fucking awkward Tuesday.

Maybe it's time to start listening to the subconscious.

Shocks that I got today

Most recent: Just discovered that Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are in an open marriage. I don't know if I am freaked out about this or happy (considering my, er, less than congenial feelings about their marriage). I also discovered recently that I would find her, Amanda Palmer, quite a kickass personality if not for my predispositions. Nothing doing there, I guess, since I only came to know who she was because he married her. I have known him longer. sigh. (Only in my head, people, only in my head! I swear, these days everything I say, feels like needs a disclaimer.)

More recent: There has come that horrible moment when you discover a fatal character defect in your partner/spouse and you cannot un-see it and you know that the world will never be the same again. I just put all the pieces of the puzzle together in my head. They were there lurking around at the back of my subconscious all this time and it just took one tv interview for all of it to click into place.

Shahrukh khan could possibly be a sociopath.

I love him. Don't get me wrong. The relationship exists. But something is broken. I came back from work and turned on the TV to find a rerun of Koffee with Karan playing, featuring Gauri Khan and Suzzanne Roshan. As the spoke about their respective courtships, Gauri tells of how she broke of their long relationship for a bit and almost didn't get married, and how she ran away to Bombay to get some space because SRK was getting too intense and possessive and she couldn't take it anymore and how he followed her to Bombay and hunted her down and then would pretty much stalk her wherever she went until she relented. Or something to that effect. Now this is not a new story. We've all heard this from the man's mouth and it probably sounded romantic. But coming from the mouth of a woman and her now matter of fact jokingly narration of the incident gave me little chills. Lets face it ladies, we have all been in that situation at certain point of our lives. A little too intense and stalky a boyfriend who really needed a restraining order which the country's penal system doesn't have.  Also in the light of the very real danger to women and the current state of the country and its men, its a more sobering story. And she has been living with him for over 25 years!

That was the missing piece which clicked everything into place. If you watch the older interviews of SRK ( pre Dilwale) you will find an arrogant, rude and uber intelligent young man who doesn't suffer idiocy too well. Now watch any of his recent interviews. Its not the same person. The man is now a picture of humility who loves and loves and only loves. He has admitted to the fact that he used to be the typical delhi guy who could turn violent at the flip of a coin and some part of that still lives on.

My thing is people don't change that drastically. So what we see now must be the mother of all social engineering and acting. Again, this is not new. What is new is I just realized how brilliant and calculated it all is, so insidious that none of us noticed it. And how difficult it is to imagine the SRK of today as the same pre dilwale egoistic, slightly obsessive guy. That is why I find it slightly scary and sociopathic, that a man can be so cold and calculated and shrewed and can do a whole mass charming of fans so silently and insidiously that no one would notice.

What are the general signs of a sociopath? They are highly intelligent, and utterly selfcentered, yet completely capable of charming anyone if they find it necessary. Does that sound like someone we know?

QED

( I still love him tho. Something about the crazies that brings out the hots in me more. Talk about a deeply dysfunctional relationship)

Recent: I have been watching these Jay Z interviews and the rap meets performance arts videos and finding the man intelligent in a very rough and uneducated way and some of his raps very disturbingly captivating.

My youtube watch history is pretty frightening right now. sigh.

I shudder to say anything about the state of the world, the state of India, poverty, intellect and all the things which would either paint me as the right idiot for not being learned enough, or paint me as the type who has THOUGHTS on things. God forbid if I open my mouth and people realized that I do not read the newspapers, tho by some cruel planning on someone's part the daily papers are delivered every morning to MY desk of all places ( I have to move it to the unoccupied table very sadly. They should know that I don't read the papers by now. Only Bangalore times. I call it the porn papers).
I shudder more to say or think anything about the state of politics, poverty and any other P you can think of, for a simple reason:
I am a 27- year-old person, who earns a certain amount of money, who owns a computer, thinks in English, and the only poverty and misery I know is having to eat cereal or biscuits for a meal in dire situations. I have no spiritual beliefs and I have voted exactly once in my life. I have never had to think for a second about healthcare. And, if I choose, I am equiped  to read all those debates about it in the papers, because I'm not living it. Hence I have no right. Hence my mouth will remain shut.

This week.

It's been emotional.

And it isn't over yet.

Damn.

Note to self

Its 6.41 in the morning. I haven't slept yet. Or more like, I slept for a spurt of 15 mins at about 3, but woke myself back up to finish watching a movie. I am two toothless and its not hurting as much as I thought it would, but the day is still young. Oh, I'm also home, in Calcutta.
And I seem to be convinced suddenly, more than ever that I don't want to keep on doing what I am doing. I need to take some risks, make some preparations and jump into things which actually interest me. Things that  I think are cool. Workwise. Somehow, the last year seems to be a bit of a waste, intellectual stimulation wise. But I have a feeling that I will have to hold out a little longer.
There is a battle going on between my wanting to do other things and my crippling self doubt about not having enough skills and not enough talent, aided by the fear that I don't have the talent to develop those skills. But its time again to state to myself here, that I need to shut up and do what feels right and exciting to me.
Because the life inside my head isn't what it used to be.

Mood has been altered because I went through my bookmarks and found this. Strange how two French artists can produce such mind altering yet different reactions in me.

I think about drawing everyday. Yet I never do it. And when I do force myself to put pencil or pen to paper, the creation that is resultant is always stilted, and all the worlds that I ambition to create in my head falls into dust of the realization that I really have no skill. If I manage to convince myself that skill can be acquired, and I force myself to stare at the daunting mountain of the white page, I am faced with a monster which is impossible to surmount with sheer bullheadedness: A severe lack of imagination. Sometimes my dreams of being another Moebius or working in the concept art department of Weta Workshop or Massive Black are in the danger of disintegrating because of reality forcing itself in. And if they disintegrate what am I let with? I am nothing if not for my day dreams. These are the things that make me stick with a day job and not just give it all up (screw subsistence) and just do whatever. These are the things which tide me through the crippling loneliness of adulthood and not having too many friends.
Yet, I fear the dream is breaking. I don't do nearly enough to make the dream stick together. And one day all that I'll be left with is dust. And that day is not far off.

Discovery of the real joy of reading

There was some jacking about today about Post Modernism. Now that sounds extremely pretentious but trust me it is not. I don't know anything about Modernism or Post Modernism or for that matter Post Post Modernism other than the fact that these words exists, and there are complicated theories about it which people who are very intelligent and like to dabble with intelligence as a gentlemanly passtime talk about them in casual conversations over a bottle of wine and sweetly scented candles. I am obviously not one of them. I'd love to be one of them, for the simple reason everybody else wants to be one of them. Who doesn't want to be more intelligent?
The thing about knowledge and learning when it comes to me is that I don't retain anything. My mind is the proverbial sieve that a people talk about. I read, then I think that I know something and then I systematically proceed to forget to retain anything of what I have taken in. I have been trying to go through my college text books for the past couple of months and I believed, as I read them, that I was understanding a lot more than when I haphazardly read some of the material when I was supposed to be cramming for examinations. But I just don't remember. I remember odd things from them. But facts and figures still elude my memory.
Post Modernism and different -isms, I have vague ideas about, and I should probably read more about it since in my line of work, its a sacrilege not to be conversant with different schools of thought and basic Art History. But I'm afraid that I am an abject failure in this and always shall be because of my lack of retention of anything.
I believe I will just stop the pretension of wanting to remember things and just read for the pleasure of the experience of reading, which is: the momentary illusion of believing that I'm learning something. Not remembering should just be looked upon as an added advantage. I can keep going back to the material again and again and be equally excited about reading it as I was the first time I read it. Who knows? Maybe upon the millionth read, the sieve will finally clog up and I might be lucky enough to be left with a massively gross hairball of accumulated knowledge.

Suffering from deep jealousy of not being in conversational popularity with people who I think are veritable celebrities and over all famous persons. In other words, there is a deep envy that there are people who I know who are friendly and conversational with people who I read and are semi famous. I just get ignored or (oldest grudge in my book of hurts) get labelled and shooed off as spam.

(Please excuse this. Its the middle of the night. And I am a stalker.)

I have developed certain favorites when it comes to tweeting. Warren Ellis is the current favorite. Its like I can keep listening to him grumble and rant forever. Such a bad tempered man. But also strangely harmless. Adorable.

The decision to write everyday isn't going so well. Yesterday was spent in a state of fugue, where I occupied one spot on the bed for the entirety of twenty four hours and then some, with a book, and then with a computer, I forget which, without wanting to talk to anyone. Today was brighter and shinier. So, I ventured out to meet M and walked around commercial street a bit.
I am still eating the gigantic quantities of pizza that was ordered yesterday, and which formed my lunch, evening snacks for the entire weekend. And I come away with

1) currently wearing a watch that is the most expensive thing I have ever owned in the way of apparel or accessories.

2) a stomach full of burger and no space for dinner which I fought for unnecessarily downstairs with the landlady.

Gah.