S.O.S. I live with positivists!

So I agree that girls are bastards and guys are sluts (see sarah). But as for the assertion that we'd all be happy productive humans if relationships weren't messy, I say a big "NA-UH!" We'd be little soma-fied lemmings that screwed (excuse my french, ahem, "procreated with") the first thing that came along. Or say, we were all sane and balanced enough to wait for something good - 'perfection' as wonderwoman would say - to come along. We wouldn't actually go for it because as soma-fied lemmings, we wouldn't play all those titillating, tantalizing sadistic games that we all, regardless of gender, find fascinating and attractive. When it comes to sex, we're animals. Face it. The game is good.

Most relationships are messy because most people are 1) with people that they shouldn't be with or 2) in relationships where there is an inherent imbalance of power or sentiment. So deathly afraid to be alone, the vast majority of people (I know) end up in relationships of convenience, not of love but of mutual fear of living a life of solitude in a world geared towards the marketing of the couple. And of course those are going to be messy. Half the time you're looking at the partner and thinking "how the hell did I end up with you?!?" or as Chris Rock so succintly put it, "you're not her first choice."

I do believe in love, but I would never presume to equate love with relationships (much less assume that sex is any indication of love). Rare is the relationship where true love is present, where you end and the other begins and where giving is nothing less than receiving. But still, I can't say that I'm less...jaded than wonderwoman. I believe in love, but I think people are shit. Not fundamentally so, but they're so blinded by the superficial and unreal that I prefer to write them off immediately.

movin' on up

I be moving to the nomad neighborhood: lacontessa.nomadlife.org

stupid grin and languid thoughts

It's been so beautiful in London the past few days, it reminds me of spring in Madrid. Head is full of tiny iridescent bubbles, high on sunlight and crisp air. Productivity is impossible when coherency is utterly lacking.

synchronicities

Went to an introductory meeting of some educational forum with Kate. After a career with an organisation whose requisite devotion bordered on the cultish and 4.5 years of contact with the techniques of marketing and business, I was thoroughly skeptical. But my m.o. is to listen with an open mind, judgement in reserve. And what a pleasant surprise. It stirred issues that had arisen before (issues that I had become adept at suppressing) and the respective reasons whose clarification have not freed me from an unconscious cycle of paralytic behaviour. If a group can provoke one's sensibilities thus, it can't be all bad, can it?

And this all in a moment of reflection. The intense philosophical discourse of Tagore's Gora coupled with a timely conversation about nihilism and personal outlooks with Stupid Kenyan Boy brought to surface the age-old spiritual quest that I had consciously put aside. Wandering cluelessly in the present and staring down a barrel of blank vastness, what is more important than realising the true meaning of Self?

Cannot seem to stem the tide of one overwhelming thought - everything has a purpose, everything is meant to be.

psh, typical

In the end, all we can do is to use ideological concepts as a means of transcending ideology. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! I could have concluded as much without paying 15 quid for 30 pages of mind-numbingly repetitive Marxist literary theory. Yes Karl, I paid 15 quid to read regurgitated ideo-babble that constantly harps on one point. Are you happy now?

don't waste your breath

Am definitely not feeling 'integrated and relaxed'. It's been one of those days - nothing seemed to go my way despite a great deal of spent energy. Been having a lot of those lately - the planets must not favour me. Called the bank and said they wouldn't consider my app without a utility bill. How do I get a utility bill if I don't have an account to pay from? Can you get a bank statement with your UK address? I obviously don't have a bank account in the UK so how would I get a bank statement? Can I get a letter from the estate agent? That would work. Oh sorry, we don't handle the property directly, you have to get a letter from the landlord (who lives in Essex).

Went to the SOAS library (1 hour). Queued up for a day pass (half hour). All the books I need are reserved in a special section that is accessible only to SOAS students and staff. Hence I cannot get in. So what am I supposed to do? You're supposed to get this orange form from the registry...UCL should have explained this. UCL didn't explain jack.

Take a deep breath.

That didn't work. It only works when you want it to work. Shove in the earbuds, crank up the music, shut out the world. Pounding the pavement, clenching my teeth, finding every excuse to be irritated. Got it in my head that I needed a cigarette.

It was a beautiful day. Sunny, warm, shifty puffs of clouds. Difficult to stay annoyed. Opened the windows in my room completely and perched myself on the ledge. Stood up for a moment and realising that the sight of a girl in an orange sweater standing on a ledge 5 floors up was not unlikely to attract unwanted attention, I sat back down. Cranked up the music, lit a cigarette, inhaled, exhaled. David Gray's guitar mingling with the acceleration of traffic, the fat buzz of jet turboprops above. Such a perfectly gorgeous day. Sigh.

What was I saying?

non sequiturs left and right

(As fair warning, a good amount of future posts will include quotations from articles and novels) With age seems to come an exponential increase of confusion and indifference. Changeing scenery seems to sharpen whatever fragmentation and alienation being experienced at the moment. A few nights ago, I was asked about my dreams, my ambitions. We were sitting at the sky bar of the Park Lane Hilton and at our feet, London by night. The man strumming a guitar, singing Van Morrison's 'Brown-Eyed Girl' seemed grossly out of place amid the chatter of older couples and groups, predominantly anglos dressed in suits, tuxedos, and gowns, the acrid aroma of cigar smoke, bartenders in short black jackets wiping dry champagne flutes, the night lights of London illuminating the darkness outside. A feeling of emptiness. Or clarity. I don't know. The future is not real for me. I don't have dreams because I still don't know what I'm searching for. Yet I find solace in the strangest (or perhaps, the most appropo) places. In the literature and voices I have been reading over the past few weeks. They're all writers of South Asian origin, a fact that is both comforting and unsettling. There is such a strong, yet unconscious desire to identify with something, but that desire is not realised until it is sated. But then comes the fear of losing one's individuality, of being pigeon-holed, categorized, compartmentalized. American. not American. Indian. not Indian. Neither here nor there. Hating one, feeling guilt about desiring the other. Because even that Indian-ness isn't true. Mom is Indian in name only. She may say I am from India but she will never say I am Indian. Where she comes from, the Indians are just another colonizer. Where she comes from there is a special word for Indians, 'skinny oily man'. On bad days, the layers of self-loathing and incomprehensibility take over. On good days, I revel in the ability to appropriate the best from each culture.

I used to try to integrate my overpowering heritage, feel relaxed and easy about it, but I've discovered I'm not supposed to feel integrated and relaxed. It is not only inevitable, it is also perfectly natural for the inheritor of one of the earth's oldest and most complex inheritances to feel fragmented.

- Nayantara Sahgal, The Schizophrenic Imagination

Shizophrenic. Egg-zactly.

Brownies rock!

THIS is why I'm going to love my South Asian lit class:

He was a mathemetician, an astronomer. But he was also a Sanskrit scholar, an expert astrologer...I (and my generation) was troubled by his holding together in one brain both astronomy and astrology; I looked for consistency in him, a consistency he didn't seem to care about, or even think about. When I asked him what the discovery of Pluto and Neptune did to his archaic nine-planet astrology, he said, 'You make the necessary corrections, that's all.' Or, in answer to how he could read the Gita religiously having bathed and painted on his forehead the red and white feet of Visnu, and later talk appreciatively about Bertrand Russell and even Ingersoll, he said, 'The Gita is part of one's hygiene. Besides, don't you know, the brain has two lobes?'

- A.K. Ramanujan on his father in the essay "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?"