So I FINALLY decided to stop kidding myself and hit the books.

It's funny how everything seems so much more interesting now. Like, I never once thought of blogging in the past month(sorry, but its true :P ), but hah, I open my STLD book and with it comes the memory of a blog! SO here I am, typing out a completely random post. And as I type, I'm trying to think of something meaningful to reflect upon, because I vaguely remember saying something about trying to make my posts as effective as they can get. Although, keep in mind it is me, I'm not very popular when it comes to efficiency.

And about whats been new this sem:

1. I got a new phone :D
2. It's been a complete fail.

Not that there aren't any cherishable moments, but compared to last year, there's nothing happening! It's been boring. Well, with the exception of Techtatva, Nettech and Aaina( which btw, is never boring.. )
But they're meant to be interesting, I mean, if THAT fail to interest you, you might as well quit college.

*sees that this is going to be one of the 'this-sem-sucks' talks I've been having- put to paper(or the monitor)*
*thinks of something else*

Ah, SKITTLES. And Ketki.
Well, Ketki came to Manipal for three days, FINALLY!
Ketki, by the way, is my ex-roomie. We've had some stupid times behind us, but now we're all cool. :D
1. She came at the WRONG time, I was completely busy, although I did try to squeeze some time in.
2. SHE CAME. Thats the important part of this.

The first two days, I barely had any time with her.
But I must say, the highlight of her trip for me was Deetee with another friend and waiting for her bus!
And how the three of us, Mom, her and me, kept thinking every vehicle was a volvo because of a street lamp! You can't expect anyone to be alert enough at 1am now, can you?

Damn, Ketki, we NEED to party. Get here soon(again!) or pray that I get to bangalore!

Oh, and for the skittles.
I want to try skittles and vodka.
(Yes, yes, I've never tried it -.- Don't blame me, Manipal alcohol menus are fit for a fruit fly.)

WHEN will these sessionals end? -.-

I really just want to skip the rest of the semester(minus the parties) and relaaaax.


S K I T T L E Art! 

Yes. I'm jobless! :D 

Dinner's ready! 

Thank God for that, or I'd continue with things more stupid than the above.

I'd like some magic please

"There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics."

- Richard Feynman (1918-1988)

I wonder why that makes me sad. 

Rantings

I like to think of myself as someone who is not influenced by others. No, I did not say I was, merely stated that I like to THINK of myself as it.

It would be wrong to propose that things around us don't change us unless we want them to. Like flowing water caving a canyon, it is a slow influence. Inevitable.
Truth is, it affects me. And a little too much I think. And  maybe its not even that slow.

So much for the things outside us, for within the problem is more difficult.
Life seems like a bitter jest. Forgive the bitterness and remember the jest. That should work.

***

***

Impulses. Don't ask me why I started thinking about it.

Our impulses are what drive us, like wind in our sails.
But if let to go wild, it will drag us after it. Haven't we all seen men after men fall victim to greed and play?
While impulses and instincts have saved the lives of many, there is one basic flaw.
Human impulses have remained almost changeless while we have transformed the world around us, they are like our responses from yesterday, not today.
Someday, our minds will catch up with the technology it has created.
Someday our purposes will match our powers.

Impulse, I believe leads to character. Partially at least.
Between knowledge and desire, the very reason to reason, we build a character.
We build a fashioned self, fashioned from impulse, reason, knowledge and imagination.

I wonder what they mean by individuals fail but life succeeds.

It makes me want to look at life like an evil player, I don't want to. I don't want that. 

I don't want a day of dark, depressing thoughts. I don't want to be anywhere near dearkness. Metaphorically, of course. Otherwise, taking that literally, I think I quite like the dark. To walk around in the night, and look up to the sky, I like that very much. 

Okay, its the lack of sleep talking now.
4:32 am, I should leave. 

Sister, sister

I really don't want to write about it. I just had to get it out of my system.

There are feelings I don't understand, attitudes I can't figure out. 

It's not  the actions, its not the words. It's the absence that kills me. Like nothing happened, like nothing ever did. 

Sister, sister

Don't leave me alone

Sister, sister

Don't forget me

Or maybe its the paranoia.

It's okay, I'll bottle it all up. 

Nothing new.

Blah

I hate it when you can't put your thoughts down on paper.
I started with the intention of blogging about my awesome, adventurous day at the farm with my cousin, but- nothing.

I swear when I was sitting on the little bridge over the stream, and when I was in the car on my way back I had what could have been a fun post. The sentences came easy, emotions flowed.
Now I sit here, laptop on my lap, and I can't remember a WORD. =.=

I know what it was, I know what it felt like, but words don't seem to like me today. Because what I have is probably worse than a third grade essay.

So, blah.

Oh, what a world

 The only thing harder than waking up is staying asleep in a nightmare.                               

                    

So I woke up this morning and I just didn't feel quite right. I felt like I was drowning in a pool of muddled emotions. Nothing really HAPPENED, just one of those days that you get caught up in your own depressing thoughts and nothing seems to set it right. One of those days where everything seems to be going downhill,   when everything you don't want to think about just crashes in. Really, I just wanted to enjoy and have a nice day with my cousin, but somehow my life seemed to be in the way. 

Its days like these when I feel that its not worth it, nothing is. That life is completely pointless. I mean, after all that you are put through, after all the pain, heartache and agony, what do you get? Death. Even if we suppose that there is life after death, we have no idea what it is going to be like. Will there be less pain? Is is going to be easier to love? Will anything, anything at all make any sense? Will I feel like there is more meaning to living, more meaning to being me? But these questions of mine have no answers, not in this life, and not in (if there is one) the next.  

So all day I've been thinking of a million things;

Is there really any meaning to all of this? 

Why do bad things happen to good people? 

Who am I?

Is there anything called the absolute truth? 

Infinity, eternity- do they exist? 

Why was I born? 

Why do we exist?

Would I really want the change the way the world is?

When will what we are living on the outside meet what we are on the inside? 

.

.

.

 There are trillion books out there telling us how it is all based on just us, on how nothing matters except our attitude. The world is filled with people telling us how to be happy, they are preaching about how easy it is to live an ideal life. And that, we all know, is a big fat lie. 

The world is full of people, struggling to comprehend the meaning of happiness and its many facades, people who appear successful but are aching on the inside. People with whopping bank accounts and great looks who have no idea who their real friends are. Couples who look perfect on the outside but have marriages that only end in pain and heartbreak. People who are struggling to get on with life, people who are feeling empty and lost. 

But its life, shit happens, you can't walk away from it. It is not something you can put aside and go on to something else that feels better. When life sucks, its serious. You can't just sit there and do nothing about it, no one is going to come and fix it for you. Get up, and do something different. Because times like these can only enhance what you already have.

And when you do decide to move your lazy ass and do something about it, you can't just get out there and change everything you built through the years. Its easy to get wrapped up in the details. But how does everything add up to what we call life? 

Its is the most profound question humanity has ever come up with. And when asked, you don't exactly get the cleverest of answers. In fact, I think there is resistance to answer. 

And somehow even if you gave me a whole month to answer that, I'd never come up with an answer I would be satisfied with. Because honestly, even with all the layers of illusions peeled off, what the hell is it all about?

I am okay with going over my daily tasks and trying to think of the little things, but when it comes to the big picture, I go blank. 

And I think its mostly because we have grown so used to defining ourselves in terms of something or someone else, that its starts feeling like extensions of our self. To us, if any of these are subjected to any change, our world is unstable. We seem to treat people around us as objects that make us happy (or more often, don't), possessions that we couldn't define ourselves without.

Maybe we should try looking at it a different way. Maybe if we addressed the question with our own actions, we would see the things we do that make life worth living. You'll know that you can enjoy the journey, and laugh along the way. And when you make a little detour for something or someone, and however much you try its just not right without it, You know you found what makes life worth it. 

"it’s not supposed to be perfect, and no one is supposed to understand it. it’s meant to be chaotic, and it’s meant to make you cringe. if you haven’t cried in a while, or felt like shit in even longer, then you’re most likely doing something wrong. this isn’t there for constant perfection, or some cliché happy ending. it’s here to be real, and to keep your heart beating, and to keep you wanting more. there is supposed to be a bright light of hope in your heart, and a black hole of the unknown in your mind. none of this makes sense, but all of it is worth it."

For life must be lived inside out.

Balloons

Time has a way of breaking up our memory into fragments of miniscule pieces.

Trying to capture and preserve them becomes exceedingly difficult. But sometimes something comes along your way and the little fragments play in your mind again, like an old forgotten video tape. 

This morning as we sat for breakfast with one of our favorite hindi songs playing in the background, we talked of how I was such a difficult kid, of how I hated to be with anyone except my mother, and how it was so difficult to get me to do almost anything, even eat. These talks aren't very rare at home. Mom loves to tell them over and over, and I love listening to them. Its a different kind of happiness- little chunks of memory playing again. 


This time it was of our days at Infantry road at Bangalore. I was in upper kindergarten, atleast I was supposed to be because I went to school, but not literally. How? I was studying at Little Rock Indian School, Brahmavar and I lived around 300 kilometers away, in Bangalore. I didn't have to skip a year or anything, they would let me give the final exam and if I passed, I could enter first grade, with the rest of my friends :D 


So I had a one-year long fun-filled holiday.
Dad would leave for work before I could wake up, so when I did it would just be mom and me. I'd go straight to the TV, flip to Cartoon Network and sit there laughing away for most of the morning. It was the only way I'd have any breakfast- when mom pushed morsels of food into my mouth whenever I laughed at Tom running away into the horizon. Around two hours later there would be a roar, one that the whole of the neighborhood could hear. To me, it brought excitement. My (cousin) brother's friend would come on his bullet ( which was one of a kind, the noise it made - like a jet and bullock cart combined :P ). He came everyday, how he had the free time for it, I don't know. But he came every morning, and every morning he asked me the same question- " Still watching cartoons, Janet? " only to get the same excited nod from me. "You'll become one soon." I liked that idea.


I don't remember when he left, but soon an uncle would come. He was a family friend of ours, and with him came the happiest things of the world- Balloons. 
And loads of them too. 
Together with mom, they'd blow them all up and put them in my room till it was full. Big, bright, small, polka-dotted, patched and colorful- they were all there. And I'd just jump right into them. It was the best feeling in the world.  
I was a kid of four and I had a room full of happiness that I could just splash into. EVERYday. It could't have been better. 


But it wasn't all games for me. Late in the afternoon mom and me would sit down with walls of color around us. With a slate, a few colorful chalks and an unbelievably happy-looking abacus she'd teach me everything my teachers 300 kms away did and more. 


Some days, a boy who lived nearby would come to play with me. I remember one day in particular. We were playing doll-house, as I'd suggested. But he might have been in one of those evil 'lets-destroy-everything' moods guys seem to get into because soon he transformed my happy story into one with wars and guns, I didn't like it but I played along. Before I knew it, the head of my favorite Barbie was thrown away (literally) in a 'bomb blast'. I stared at my headless Barbie, looked at him with disgust and burst into tears. 
I don't think I've ever really forgiven him for that. 


Anyway, before I knew it it was evening. Time for dad to come home! 
Every evening, once he was back he would take me out for a drive, and on our way back we'd stop at a little shop and he'd buy me a packet of cheese balls. Peppy
To this day, I've never had cheese balls that tasted better than them, even if I buy the same pack. 
As I grew older I realized it wasn't the cheese balls, it could have been anything. It must be the innocence and the love. I've stopped buying them, I now just look at them and smile.


The day had ended and I was soon tucked to sleep. 
Cartoons, chocolates, balloons and cheese balls. I was the most content kid in the world.

A lot has changed over time. 

I don't need balloons and cheese balls to keep me happy anymore.

I look around myself and I know that my family and friends now take their place.

But these memories will keep me going.

I will keep them, because it is a happy place that I can escape into.