january friend

So far…

I stayed up till half past five in the morning, breathlessly racing through the admirable The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. The first thing I did when I woke up? Ordered books 2 and 3 in the series.

I similarly stayed up till the wee hours of the morning in a strange state that was a mix of wonder, hazy confusion and anxiety, as I followed the adventures of Paul Atreides in Dune.

I watched a terrible stream of the Copa del Rey game between Barcelona and Real Madrid, both terrified and amazed by the incredible football on display. I almost dared to think they could win right there in the Camp Nou – the closest I’ve come to harbouring such a hope in a year and a half of following them!

I was utterly and completely won over a second time by the wonderful Sherlock. Benedict Cumberbatch makes a sociopath look so sexy in a black greatcoat. Every time he launched into one of his monologues explaining the obvious solution to an amazed audience, I turned into a dreamy-eyed fangirl. Cannot wait for Season 3.

I reinforced my 2012 resolutions with Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord, which has to be one of the most heart-warmingly naive, unselfconsciously charming books I’ve read in a long, long time. Happiness is a way of seeing things, indeed.

Oh, and lest I forget, work and sociability are progressing very nicely indeed :)

I’m absolutely loving January.

after the profound, here’s some silliness

I’m in a silly mood.

This job does that to you sometimes, especially on days when you’re reduced to stalking authors in order to get in touch with them or changing all the lower-case instances of the letter ‘k’ in a document to upper-case (and you can’t cheat and use MS Word’s special tools for venal tasks like these because you might miss one, or accidentally change a k to a K when it ought to be a k). Or of course, today’s task: making ever smaller zipped folders of the figures from a textbook and uploading them to the web catalogue one at a time because the damn thing doesn’t like it if you try to upload 75MB worth of figures at once. It’s temperamental like that.

But better silly than disgruntled, eh?

As the first month of 2012 comes to a close, I’ve come to the following conclusions:

- There are some mind-bogglingly stupid people in the world. Whether it’s shouting about how homosexuality ISN’T A CHOICE, DAMN YOU, or worrying about how liberal philosophies and critical thinking are un-American, or even labouring under the misapprehension that all Indian women see their sexuality as part of the cult of Shakti (I kid you not), or lying to Salman Rushdie about all the big bad assassins out to kill him at the Jaipur LitFest, it all comes down to the same thing: sometimes, people just don’t want to see themselves as repositories of rationality, critical judgement and empathy. Ah well. Good luck to them.

- I’m even more hopelessly contradictory than I always thought I was. Show me a disinterested man, and I’ll pursue him to the ends of the earth. Show me an interested one, and I’ll find a million things wrong with him. I’ll read a million things into text messages and forget to actually listen to people when they’re right there in front of me, attempting to communicate verbally. Oh and my personal favourite, I expend hours and hours of energy, time and thought on things that, ordinarily, would recede to the depths of my terrible memory in a matter of seconds. It is my fervent hope that somebody in the wide world will look past these hideous traits and see the hapless idiot within, take pity on her fumbling attempts to connect to other human beings and say ‘here, honey, don’t try so hard. I love you anyway.’.

- It’s all in the mind. Whether it’s exploring new genres or meeting people whom you have nothing in common with or having a sucky day, what you say to yourself has a lot to do with it. Actually having to type this here makes me feel like one of the stupid people referred to in point number one, but it had to be said. As Hector discovered in the book I finished last night (Hector and the Search for Happiness, by Francois Lelord), happiness is a way of looking at things.

Back to building web pages now!

there’s a fire starting in my heart

I’m reading Dune by Frank Herbert and it has such glorious glimpses of truth. Stark, naked, beautiful and terrifying truth. I love books that do that.

Extracts:

“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man–with human flesh.”

“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.”

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

Also, someone posted this recently, and I love it so much. So much!

“The fault of our society always seems to me to be timidity and self- consciousness; and I feel oddly vehement, and very exacting, and so difficult to live with and so very intemperate and changeable, now thinking one thing and another.” – Virginia Woolf.

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who told you you’re allowed to rain on my parade?

[Don't Rain on My Parade - Glee cast version]

I’m so happy.

This is such a novel state, considering the hell that most of 2011 was, that I feel a blogpost is in order to commemorate it. I spent a lot of last year feeling badly about the rut I was in, and it burned slow and steadily into a perfectly horrible period that I can only call depression, for lack of a less overused term. I couldn’t really talk about it to anyone because they seemed to me to be part of the problem.

Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge now. Ever since my better self came to the fore and kicked the other, weepy, whiny half in the backside, I’ve been almost sickeningly optimistic (life’s-candy-and-the-sun’s-a-ball-of-butter optimistic, if you want to know).

I mean, I’m 22. The crabby 40-year-old inside me ought to slumber on for a decade or two more, at least.

:)