a requiem for the living.

and it has been exhausting. to think that this is just the breather before the real deal..! but i'm happy to be back among my friends.

kitchen adventures

I last did that in 2006, even so, i think i am an idiot, because I forgot how to cook rice today.

It came out as sticky grainy porridge, which wasn't very nice. I think I will stick to takeaways.

It's a strange thing to have all these expectations, spuriously egged on (by yourself), and have them all sink, like a very bad dinner, right in the centre of your tummy, and then, the somersault of an hourglass, these are no longer yours, but their expectations. Not stolen, for nothing can ever be stolen from you if it hadn't belonged to you in the first place. That is called a delusion, a flight of fancy, shameful naivety, or at worst, the secret lining (self-deceit) of packaged hope.

exasperated.

Over something very silly yet important. Tempted to unleash the fury within but as we all know, quick-fix-its cost the skies and above, something all too familiar, this currency of vanity.

On the next crochet, I find myself impaled on a fork that screams WORK and all my plans to meet old friends this week have gone kaput.

I could do with a social life planner, methinks. And a coffee from Nero. And a magic wand. And the brain of Charlie's.

keeping it real, as they like to say.

It's too easy to blame my nature, as if it is a separate entity and not a living part of me. You know. 'Useless appendage.' 'Cracked glasses.' That kinda thing. Not that those are excuses, but I think you kind of get what I mean, even if I'm not saying it very well. I'm talking about thought slavery. I think.

Sometimes, the words pour out of me. Redundant, irrelevant, pedantic, as I leapfrog all around, muttering the same thing over and over again, the hoarse litany that trails off unintelligibly at the end. Whatever for, and whom to, and the unspeakable, that is a sort of a secret within a secret within a secret. Russian dolls! Fundamentally empty at its very core.

There is much that I feel today, great big globs of gooey stuff that spurt geysers of hot nothingness, for they have no form without the correct turn of phrases, without the discipline of rhythm and feminine cadences, and in this case, since there is no form, there can be no substance, for the former gives it its definition, and ultimately, its canned life.

I am feeling strange today, my friends, but not very much more than usual. Just enough for me to say it out here, and enough for me to scrawl profuse letters of _____ and _____ on the yellow walls.

dreading

so many things! but namely, the beginning of term, which commences in a week, and after that, i shall have no life to speak of.

still - i'm approaching the end of one year. five more to go. somehow, that doesn't quite make me quite as happy as i should be. should i?

at moments like these (cue _______ )

just for fun.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude (I have this lying somewhere, but not read)
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A novel
The Name of the Rose (I will borrow it from Ivan, well, sometime soon)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad (I just bought it, not read yet)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner (This is lying somewhere around)
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods (I borrowed this from Gaurav, but I've not started on it)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera (I have this too, not read yet)
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange (I gave up on this book, and gave it away)
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984 (I have this but not read, book is with Tian)
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Tian's copy is with me, not yet read)
To the Lighthouse (I have it, not read)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: A memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves (About to borrow from Ivan)
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth (Jess's copy is with me)
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

I know, I haven't been around, no thanks to a major bout of fever and NIE. Thankfully, it's the death throes that are in session now, but it's still very painful and frustrating.

But I'm learning to look on the bright side of things. Something along the lines of Beaumarchais's Figaro, "I forced myself to laugh at everything for fear of having to weep." Not that I am close to being weepy or tearful or sentimental ala Richardson's Pamela, but I am distinctly not close to the other side as well. Just saying.

Whatever time I have on my hands right now is spent researching. That's right, kids, researching. For work that will land itself on my table in an unceremonious heap in a couple of weeks, hence the tomes of books and stacks of opera dvds. I am freaking out at the workload, but also, perversely excited at the prospect of surviving the killing over the next few months. Next year will be the major challenge, but it is too early to speak of it, or so I will have it be.