Journeys End in Lovers Meeting.

So, I'm abandoning everything I've ever believed I needed to start over new. Simply because I'm tired or, even worse, lazy. Ever been stretched so bad that you thought you'd snap? Ever hated everything about you so much that you needed to stop, step outta your life and disappear? Well, I've decided to quieten all the sane voices in my head for once and do the craziest thing I could possibly come up with. I've decided to brush off my system the idea that some things/situations are necessary for my happiness and install in its place the idea that most of these things are, at best, desirable. I'm quitting and I'm at peace. I will be with him and all will be well with my world.

What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.

everything has an upside. except teen anorexia.

everything has an upside. everything. war and terrorism. corruption and anarchy. genocide and moral policing. there's nothing that doesn't present an encouraging face to the optimist on dope. except maybe, teen anorexia and exhaust fumes from the vehicle in front of him. what is a cynic but a realist with a warped sense of humor? you've to be a cynic to look at the upside of living in a hostel. a prison cell with roommates far less interesting than child-killers with a cross tattooed across their chest. or gay hustlers with asthma. the hostel. with a crumbling remnant of the forgotten art of brotherhood passing off as an excuse to borrow your soap, its not always the flowerbed where personalities bloom or the shower booth outta where real men with hairy chests walk out. heads held high and diplomas held in their armpit. not always. for me, living here was as fruitful as lookin at the sky with the hope of being blinded by stardust. flightclub warns us against everyday being a copy of a copy of a copy. out here everybody is a copy of a copy of everything you despise about humanity. the nerds and geeks with binoculars for eyeglasses. the professors who keep forgetting they are not life members of the third reich. the food that tastes like baked shit on the better days. and women who were better off being victims of female infanticide. everythin out here was a fucking violation of my rights as a starry eyed 18 year old stepping onto the deceptively manicured lawns of the campus. its true. i did not know what to expect. i remember clutching at the hackneyed imagery of productive college activism, a group of close knit buddies and the possibility of young love. it was not to be. and how! six months into what turned out to be half a decade of solitary confinement, i decided to withdraw. into my own six by four. scrawled from roof to floor with the scribblings of the voluntarily deranged. seeking asylum in my own private nation populated by movie posters and undemanding play lists. and this my frend, was the upside. this and the fact that you aren't required to flush in a hostel. the hostel was blessed with a local area network that in turn blessed me with timely supplies of personal entertainment. the college housed, what was a behemoth peer to peer network with a sharesize running into thousands of gigabytes. cinephilia was my escape. and alternative rock, my cpr. for a long long time, movies were the only audience to my display of any personal emotion. i crackled delightfully as billy wilder herded me through the next plot twist. i stared awe-stuck as bogart wondered if his was the most popular gin-joint in the world. was inconsolable with disappointment at how unremarkable the shining was. while shaking my head in disapproval at the ending of the conversation. movies for me were more important than those petty antics for survival as eating and having a social life. my six by four and an endless supply of cinema were all that i needed to counter the debilitating effects of mind-numbingly inconsequential local mediocrity. i feared conversations with familiar people. shirked away from academic requirements. honed what she calls a fiercely non-conformist point of view into an all-consuming hunger for an alternative reality. where people just don bother you with as much as their sorry existence. spent countless hours in an endless riviera, lamenting, among other things, the progressive loss of style in the cinema of the late 90's and the lack of availability of terribly good indie cinema. the sojourn into alternative rock had equally rewarding consequences. anti-establishment stems, not from the hatred of a machinery that doesn't care but from a state of lovelessness and the threat of dying alone. and the knowledge of having nothing to blame for it. warmed up to anything that sung in praise and proof of the sentiment. loved everything that put protest to tune, that sang my fears, and made music out of melancholy. strove to drive away the discouraging pallor of the sense of unsharing with a blanket of sounds that were supposed to be keeping me company. when you've decided to keep people outta earshot, you tend to take what you are listening to that much more personally. with a seriousness you'd prolly accord being held by a breath that cares or being kissed by the lips that warm. a lack of everything is the freedom to do anything? exactly. a hostel that was supposed to be the end of my human fervor wasn't without this upside. the upside of a meaningful loneliness.

i'd trade the last five years in this shithole for a three minute long freefall. if an instantaneous and painless death came with the package. with freebies like one last cigarette and a scoop of peanut butter thrown in. and here's the irony. this was supposed to be the privilege of higher education. this was my window of promise ( and the other way around ).as i look back now, clouded by the anger at an absent nostalgia and wandering aimlessly across a mind space left barren with the sheer lack of any hint of memorabilia, i don't know what went wrong. i don't know if i am guilty. of closing in on myself far too soon. or if this is just a case of a self-scripted tale of emotional impoverishment and self-styled misanthropy. but am sure of one thing. this wasn't how i saw myself turn into an adult. this was certainly not as seen on t.v. this was harsh reality. more harsher than reality. and i am pretty unsure of its long-term effects. i may not turn into a psychotic doom sayer hoping and prophesising an accelerated demise of humanity due to the exhaust fumes in question. neither would i check myself into an art of living center expecting a spiritual car wash. but i'll certainly live with a silver bullet permanently wedged in my insides with "everything has an upside" inscribed on it. because at the end of the day, all said and most of it leaving me alone, i love myself for having stayed alive. if only to be able to watch vanilla sky for the umpteenth time, fifteen minutes from now.

Why, man of morals, tell me why?

Minneapolis and its horrendously cold winters don't lend themselves very well to walking while lost in thought. I've noticed lately how difficult it is to avoid those small pools of what looks like water but is, in fact,(oh, it surely is, now that's it spring, oh snap, it's) ice while compulsively making lists of five people whose presence my life could have done without or five creative ways to die. I wonder where this obsession with lists of five began. I always ask people for five good reasons to do something I don't want them to do. Three when I want them to do it and there aren't five good ones. But then it's always seven or a multiple of when asked to pick a random number meant to be manipulated to demonstrate my brother's newly discovered math skills. Maybe it's just about odd numbers,then. Or, perhaps, it's about having some illusion of order to my life which is not all that confusing in the first place. All the minor acts of rebellion against the painful normalcy of my life are in turn so normal and so common that there seems to be no way out. Five years ago, I wouldn't have imagined that I'd feel the need to be someone/something/anything else so desperately. I guess, that's what being with a fiercely nonconformist partner does to a hassle-free existence. I discover new oddities every day and then analyze them and blow them up till they become distinct parts of my identity. Even though making lists of five isn't necessarily a character building activity or really a quirk given the sheer number of people who can think and know how to count, I imagine I'm the only one I know who does it, just to feel special. Just to be like him. And then there are things that everybody I know really does. Like studying for years to land a job. and then taking that job to live the life. and then living and wanting that life even though it's probably far more difficult than just doing nothing or even dying. These have come to mean nothing because everyone does them. Even though, what I've been learning and the life I was assured of by going through six unkind years of college almost completely influence what I am today, these parts of my life are to be subdued or ignored because they involve this other trait called ambition and ambition is never cool. yes, I said cool. Because an engineer is neither endearing nor interesting to anyone, but a fan of snow patrol is, perhaps, both and more. The love for the right kinda movies and music says to some, here's one with good taste. The love for, what I think is, the right kinda education and a real career just says in large neon letters: ordinary.

I zoned out for a while here, censoring myself and using the backspace button fervently, and had this blinding moment of clarity. yeah, the one followed by a resounding thwack to the forehead for not realizing something so simple earlier.

I have gone from being torn between wanting to please my parents and wanting to do what I like even though it hurts the health of my relationship with my parents to being torn between wanting to please Ashok and wanting to do what I like even though it hurts the health of my relationship with my Ashok. Every single time I manage to do what I like I secretly think of myself as unimaginably heroic. Even though it involves something as un-grand as finding and falling for Ashok(in the previous case) or getting sloshed(in the latter). My parents always said they didn't really have a problem with me finding and falling for someone, they just weren't happy about a few things: like timing, Ashok and his general influence on me. Ashok always says he doesn't really have a problem with me getting drunk, it's just the timing and alcohol's general influence over me that riles him. Oh, you and I know what else is gonna rile him, this comparison and this blog post. But, today I can be reckless coz tomorrow I could be jobless and, subsequently, broke and internetless. I go get pasted and try to hug the My Chemical Romance star on First Ave's walls (when sufficiently drunk I feel the name has special meaning given this thing we two have going here) because I'm never going to get to do it again. I dance like I'm possessed from the moment I start buzzing coz I have trouble even smiling at people when sober but I really like people, I like being around them, I don't like sitting alone, constantly trying to please people who're important to me but don't really like me unless I'm the way they want me to be. Drunk people love each other. Drunk people don't care what you are. There's no real need to be unique when you're moving with a crowd. There's no need to watch out for death traps set in ice on the sidewalks coz there is no embarrassment or pain until later. Five good reasons to fuck up your liver and lungs? I'll give you one. For jus those few hours/minutes it doesn't matter if you're ill-equipped in every way for the life you're being asked to live.