a divine comedy of insignificant proportions
Sometimes, others articulate sentiments so perfectly that it isn't worth trying to find another expression. From V.S. Naipaul's Half a Life:
Beautifully articulated. It was a sign. The brunch had gone off well. Champagne flowing from 10am to 4pm. Wingeing about the crap English weather between puffs of rolled tobacco on the fire escape, 5 stories up. Frying up bacon, eggs and sausages for over 20 guests on the electric stove-top, hot oil spattering the tiled walls. Arguing about who has dibs on the big round cactus. Cameron calling the cabbage - no arguments there. Sarah branding me "vindictive" as Josi, Christophe, Andrew and herself loll about on the bed, attempting to theoretically decorate her room. Waking up for a late afternoon nap to go to a skeezy pub full of hairy old men to answer trivial pursuit questions and drink John Smith's. Did you know that Prince Charles was the first royal to give blood?
Saw my mother on Oxford Street today. Petite Asian woman, lost in billowing earth tones and black. At that age, she says, it's all about comfort and hiding one's figure, not displaying it. She walks against the flow of traffic. A teeny-tiny woman. On Oxford Street. At 3 pm. Looking not at the pavement in front or her surroundings, but at a book that on closer inspection reveals itself to be "Walks in London". She even reads the book like my mother. Specs riding precariously on the tip of her nose, she tilts her head down so that her chin is almost touching her chest. Are they ALL near-sighted?
Is Mel a bollywood fanatic? I would totally lambast her if I weren't guilty of the same vice. Absolutely HILARIOUS that she blogged about "Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham", which I watched with WoB shortly before crossing the Atlantic. It's all about loving your parents. We watched with a combination of mockery and unsettling empathy. The enigmatic curse that is the Asian woman-child-mother-whore-virgin.
Have been troubled by overtly sexual dreams. OK, OK titillated, not troubled. They seem to involve incredibly beautiful Italian men with the most amazing bodies. Adonises. I know exactly why I had these dreams. Apart from the wickedly long - I daresay I'm becoming a public threat - dry spell are the fact that the flatmate has been waxing about some Italian playmate. The body issues correlate directly with concerns of a potential playmate of my own. I hesitate because, despite a wonderful personality, he doesn't meet the impossible physical standards. I swear, I CAN'T HELP IT! Even A, having not seen me in over 2 years commented on my stringent standards and wondered if I wasn't afraid to live the rest of my life alone. This superficiality, matched by standards set by the most intelligent and generous of men - mon pere et mon frere - will no doubt be the bane of my existence, my Achilles heel. Perhaps these standards are simply a way to keep people out, away from this intimate bubble that has for so long been privy to me and only me. Never attracted to the people I like, never like the people I am attracted to. I HAVE to be doing this on purpose. I'm just too brilliant NOT to be complicating my life in such a way.
I can see the BT tower from my window. It changes colors every few minutes – bars of luminescent color moving imperceptibly from left to right – purple, fuchsia, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, fuchsia… The windows in my room face east, towards Regent’s Park, but no hint of the park is in sight. These 5-foot tall eyes see nothing but other eyes lodged in a multitude of brick faces, all sheltered under a gaping glorious expanse of sky. At night I sit with the lights off, watching the movement of others in the halogen-lit backdrop of their cubicle dwellings. Occasionally, frequently, a blinking light glides across the London skyline, made reddish-blue by the sparkling urb below. Frequently, but not as frequently as during the daylight hours when a silver bird enters and exits the periphery of these eyes every 10 minutes or so. When the sun is out, the view is stunning. There is absolutely NOTHING extraordinary about the view. A quadrant of apartment buildings and blinking lights. But then sky. So much sky. I was afraid that I would be homesick for big Texas skies, but now there is nothing to worry about. Clouds shift and swirl, descend and dissipate all with a rapidity and longeur that make it impossible to forget the dizzy twirl of this rock.
Today was not a good day. It started horribly as I was forced to wake up at 7:30 so that I could get to the Barclays at Knightsbridge the moment it opened. Of course, as I expected, they said that they couldn’t see me today as they were too busy and the soonest they could make an appointment was for Friday. Fortunately, I was with two Americans who weren’t willing to swallow shit with a smile and started wailing on the manager in front of all of the customers. I was both elated and embarrassed but they managed to get me an appointment for tomorrow morning. And this is where I begin my diatribe about British banks. And Britain in general. Oh how they LOVE their rules and regulations and protocol. Everything must be done in such-and- such way and to raise any questions or make any comments to the contrary would just be impolite and way out of the bounds of common courtesy. And heaven forbid one should raise her voice – that would be a manifestation of emotion, a downright scene, a tantrum of epic proportions! Ok, ok, the rules are fine. A bit constricting and anal-retentive but I accept it as a tenet of a well-functioning orderly western society. If only the fuckers knew what the rules were. And therein lays the problem. Because no one knows what the regulations are, yet they just go ahead and make up whatever they please, conveying it in a self-assured tone to get the person away from them as quickly as possible. It’s like a pathological need to appear knowledgeable combined with a genetic imbalance towards rules, laws and structure.
Fought the overpowering desire to go back to sleep when the phone alarm sounded at 8 a.m. But the thought of losing the coolest flat ever because we had failed to meet the landlady at 9 a.m. was enough to wrench me out of the caresses of slumber. 8 a.m.? What’s so difficult about waking up at 8 a.m. you ask, especially given the fact that I have no responsibilities whatsoever at the moment. Didn’t get back to the flat until 4:30 a.m. 3.5 hours of sleep. And no one who arrives home at such an hour spent the entire night sipping on water and sodas.
Words of motivation sprung from a typical convo between myself (henceforth referred to as "C") and the Whore of Babylon ("WoB," a.k.a. my favoritest person and my mirror)
