a new blog for a new life

All good things come to an end and so it is with my Old Faithful, ladyashlee.wordpress.com. I started here in 2007, with both more and less than I have now six years later. Two degrees more and two boyfriends less, a few friends and family members acquired and discarded and three cities – these years have certainly been eventful. However, everybody deserves a blank slate and in that spirit, I must say adieu to the old life.

I’m not about to pull the plug on my presence on the interwebs though, so please check out http://experimentalathena.wordpress.com if you want to hear from me!

And so, dear reader, life goes on.

hey, I just met you, and this is crazy

[Call Me Maybe - Carly Rae Jepson] 

I’ve been meaning to write for a while but I simply haven’t had the time to stop and think long enough for the words to come. 

It has been little more than two weeks since I packed my boxes, said my farewells and moved to this brilliant, haphazard, confusing city. I arrived, I moved in, I went to school, I started teaching: it has been a fast-moving, blurry mess of images and experiences and conversations. 

And for a change, I’m not thinking. I’m not analysing, cutting up every minute and every conversation and every new person I meet into neat little pieces to put into boxes with labels on them. I’m not thinking, not feeling, not ruminating, not worrying, not a bit. 

For once in my life, I’m forgetting everything except the fact that I am alive and free and oh, so very, very happy. 

every now and then, you read a book that possesses you

My first thought upon finishing The Fault in Our Stars by John Green: this is a book I want to remember. I want to remember the way it made me feel and I want to remember the words that made me laugh and cry, sometimes together.

I want to remember the clever back-and-forth between Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters, the cancer-ridden teenage protagonists of this book that is romance, tragedy and bildungsroman all at once. I want to remember how important fictional narratives can become when you are uncertain that yours will come to its natural conclusion, whether because of cancer (like Hazel) or because you are terrified you aren’t good enough for this world’s requirements.

This is a difficult book to summarise the plot of because there is no real plot: our narrator, Hazel, meets the charismatic Augustus at a cancer support group. Their first conversation is about fearing oblivion and the pointlessness of fearing something that is an inevitability, after which Augustus and Hazel watch V for Vendetta and fall into an enviable courtship involving witty banter, Amsterdam, champagne, books, people in books and people outside them, life, the universe and death.

This is a book about loving someone and letting them love you, even when you know you could be the grenade that explodes their heart into a thousand pieces. It’s a book about accepting what cannot be changed – even if it’s as cruel as death coming too soon – with humour, with bitterness and agony and pain and fear because life is precious and it is stupid to act as though losing it prematurely is anything but disgustingly unfair. It’s about figuring out why people exist, why they continue to fight to make their mark upon the world, why they long for the universe to notice them, why they bother to bother at all.

But at the core of it, it’s a book that makes me happy, because it restores my faith in the possibility of two people falling in love just because. Because they met, because they spoke in poetry and quotations and ontological debates, because they understood each other in ways no one else could.

Just because and damn the consequences.

maybe this’ll be my year

[This'll be my year - Train]

The year is ending. Every time December comes around, I feel the urge to bookend my year with an end-of-year blogpost. There’s so much hope in the air, so much promise waiting for us in the minutes of the new year. It’s impossible not to feel like all the ills of the old year will be mended by the new.

I didn’t write a lot this year. Too many things couldn’t be articulated and I still can’t find the words.

But three weeks ago, as I sat in a plane that had been stalled on the runway for too long, I felt the words coming back. As I left a city I loved and knew I was coming back to, I felt lighter. As the plane climbed into the air at last, I finally knew I was doing the right thing. The right thing for no one else but myself.

So I’m saying farewell, to Chennai and publishing; to old friends and new ones; to the suffocating loneliness of not moving on and the painful knowledge that you don’t belong any more now than you ever did before. I’m leaving you behind, you old demons of fear and unhappiness, lethargy and self-consciousness. I’m letting you go.

Maybe 2013 will be the year I’ve been waiting for.

december is upon us

2012 has been a year of firsts, as I’ve noted before. From the fairly innocuous first science fiction novel and first real date in January to first birthday spent mostly alone in March, many firsts in May, June, July, August, September, October and November have brought me by degrees of excitement and apprehension to today, the first of December.

After the strength-sapping, execrable events of July and August, I resolved not to let this year be set down for posterity as the year in which I lost a parent in the worst way possible. I would not let Fate have that satisfaction. I would hold on to my anger, I would embrace my outrage and I would keep myself and my happiness intact in defiance. I have lived up to that resolve and more.

What a year.

And I know now that these are the years that change us.

These are the years that teach you how difficult it can be to simply wake up every morning and drag your tired body out of bed to face another bleakly mundane day.

These are the years that shatter your heart and your youthful pride; that make you stronger and tougher and wilder and better.

These are the years that make you snatch perfect happiness wherever and whenever you can find it and screw the consequences.

Catharsis and epiphany, arriving in the middle of a story that could be right out of a Greek tragedy, and you embrace them as your saviours and look to them to take you outside of your claustrophobic little existence.

I want to say something now about my friends, about the eccentric, clever, empathetic people I’ve been fortunate enough to find and keep interested in my paltry doings, but I don’t know how to put this gratuitous burden of love into words.

Because, you know, years like these couldn’t be survived without them.