New love, old love, older loves

I wondered why I continued to leave things at his place, while I was growing more and more attached to you.

I wondered even more why this continued, as I kept trying to figure out who I was more loyal to - me, you or him. Even as he was fast fading.

I knew he was truly fading as I failed to leave something behind for the first time in weeks.

I knew I had turned wholly to you the day I forgot something - not at his home, but at mine and ours.

Do you know what you are? Do you know that you are? You, who will forever remain an enigma, provoking actions and reactions that only few can sense, understand and explain.

Through my old, old love, I discover you... you, both inside and outside, everywhere and unseen.

What not to do while giving a face massage

• Keep hands clasped right in front of the face being massaged
• Spend 50% of your time squeezing the nostrils shut 
• Press down with all your finger strength on the hollow of the temple
• Keep up the same repetitive motion on neck and cheek, ignoring the jaws that are completely tensed up thanks the nasal shenanigans
• Work as if you were being paid by the stroke rather than for the package as a whol

And what to do?

• Communicate! Ask what feels good, and what doesn't. 
• Feel for pressure points, found by testing on self and multiple others
• Go slowly and carefully, working out kinks
• Spend time on forehead and neck, where stress accumulates
• Work along the jawline, loosening a clenched jaw
• Use feather-light touches under the eyes, over eyelids...
• ... anything that puts the massage-ee to sleep!

Multilingual bombardment

When 90% of the Tweets on my page are in a language I don't know, what do I do?

Answer: 

a. Sharpen my Google Translate skills. Tap-drag, Cmd-c, Cmd-v. 

b. Buy a Larousse Anglais-Français dictionary

c. Learn my way around typing special characters on the Mac's keypad - THANK YOU APPLE for the keyboard map!

d. Learn how to say "Je ne parle pas le français" and "no habla español". 

Clearly, the dominant unknown-language in the equation is French. Now, how do you say "I speak very little French", hmm? Google Baba says it's "Je parle très peu le français" :)

Do I need to go to the Alliance Française? Ah, if only Google would teach me to "PARLER" Français instead of just "lire et écrire Français".

As for Español? That might have to wait!

More resolutions

I haven't been doing too well with the "Sleep-instead-of-procrastinate" resolution, but I haven't given up on it either. Slowly, things ARE getting better. Even though I ended up sleeping at 5 last night/this morning, I'd been fairly productive through the night.

Now, I'm making another resolution to somewhat the same effect.

I am going to shut my Mac down every night. 

I've left the Mac on sleep mode whenever I'm not using it - in fact, I've probably booted it a total of 5 times in a month and half. I'm not sure I shut it down while flying, either. I know, kill me!

Enough is enough. I just calibrated the battery, and now I see 92% battery health on just 50 cycles :(. Wish the battery was user-removable. But since it isn't, I might as well minimize my comp use and maximize its health - as well as my own!

Trip Tidbit #1

I realized that blogging coherently about the Mumbai-Goa trip is not going down well with me right now. My mind is working like Scrivener does - in bits and pieces, which need to be arranged to form a whole that makes sense. So, I'm going to give you scrambled impressions, in bits and pieces, about the trip.

Here's a brief overview/itinerary because I'm a crazy rule-bound organization whore.

• I left for Mumbai on 16/12/2009. Touched the airport at nearly 3 pm, an hour late due to runway delays etc.
• Stayed with relatives in Mumbai
• Left on the morning of 19th, met up with Kiran, Ro, Krish, Ayaan and Baby T, and then rushed to meet MrS at the airport. I'll add here that Ro dropped me off, and got to say hi to my sleep-deprived, click-happy boyfriend :P.
• Stayed at a hotel near VT - a Hotel New Bengal, absurdly cheap and seriously nice though the staff seems badly clueless. I have fallen head over heels in love with Mumbai's dairy - the yoghurt is fantastic! Oh, and the hotel's restaurant Zaffran deserves good mention. At hardly Rs 250-300 per meal for two, they had such brilliant food that we ate there three times in a row, completely forgetting that other places to eat do exist.
• Left for Goa in a train on the 22nd, and had a gruelling 12-hour journey that left MrS with hundreds of photo ops through the Western Ghats. 
• Chilled out in Goa until our return(by air) on 27th.

Notable happenings from Mumbai, Relatives Phase:
1. Asking my granddad ("great-uncle" for you non-Indian peeps) how far we'd travelled after a 20 minute trip, and being told "Oh, 20 km?". That distance would take two hours in Calcutta. I kid you not.
2. Meeting shooting coach Sanjoy Chakravarty, who is also my grandfather. It was pretty amusing to hear him describe his job as "Oh, I just sit there. They come to me when they want to." I didn't know you could make a shooting range sound like ... meditation camp?
3. Ending up completely exhausted after working AND going out on the 16th and 17th, to hear granddad say "Oh, I thought you were leaving on the 18th, or we would have fixed up a program for you!" I was extremely glad I hadn't enlightened them earlier :P

Meeting Satru-dida was, without a doubt, the highlight of this leg of the trip. "Satrudida" to me was Reba Vidyarthi to the Kathak circuit, was the guru of my only dance guru, is my grandmother's second cousin in ways that I haven't bothered to understand. Dida was "kind" enough to remind me of a highly embarassing, fairly amusing story involving me, my guru and herself, but I'll save that one for people who email me to ask :P.
Memories tumble out everywhere as I think of Dida and the time I - it was we back then - had at that house in Laxmi Nagar. After an hour of torture dance class on Sunday morning, Mom would take me to Dida's place. Dadu - Govindji as my grandparents called him, and Govindji-dadu as I called him. There would always be some food from Dida, books to talk about with Dadu, and in short, ample consolation for the torture I had been put through before.
Ma, Bhaiya(my maternal granddad) and I had gone to their place the night before she died. I suppose he thought that Satrudida or Govindji-dadu would be able to... console her? knock sense into her brain? I don't know. I don't know if he knew.
I wish Dadu had been alive. Their son, my uncle but someone I invariably think of as "Ashish-dada", has put up a poignant little writeup in his memory. To me, however, Govindji-dadu will always be the stately figure in the big chair, with dark skin, white hair, white clothes, spectacles and so much interesting knowledge.

It takes effort to pull myself out of 1997 and into the present, but it must be done. I can only hope that some day, this excess of love, sorrow, joy, pain and tears will cease to leave me exhausted and.. dry, incomplete.
As I said, it must be done.
Speaking to Satrudida did two things. It reminded me that I am very, very, very glad to have chosen my own love and goal, and it showed me once again the wonder of people who live completely dedicated to one passion and one cause.
Satrudida has spent her life dedicated to Kathak. I will not go into details of her own tutelage, because these are things I know only from hearsay. What I can and will treasure, instead, is the memory of an old, toothless old lady, animatedly telling me how she devises ways of teaching children dance even when she can no longer walk. I connected with her after all these years, the moment she said that she wanted to teach her students the basics of dance, through one and only one lesson. It reminded me of the professor I revere today, the man who now smiles and says "I have taught you to read. So read!"

Dida made me proud once again by her reaction to my confession that I hated dance, and will always hate dancing. She admitted that I had been forced to dance when I didn't want to do it [Note: AND I was woken up on Sunday mornings. GRRRR], and that was more than enough reason to hate it. I suppose I'll be this zen about people not liking psychoanalysis when I'm 80 years old.
At any rate, we spent some lovely time talking about dance, and the process of teaching. I agreed with her at some points, disagreed at a few, and tried hard to explain to her what psychoanalysis was. I realized then that some memories are worth reviving, and that the bittersweet pain is worth feeling instead of blocking out. I may not see Dida again, but at least I can live on with a clear image of an intent face, mobile eyebrows and graceful hands, trembling ever so slightly as she demonstrated the very first Kathak lessons she gives to beginners.

In Absentia

Sometimes, I just want verbal chocolate. Not even actual chocolate, because it's sure to give my dehydrated stomach some pretty nasty treatment. Yes, I've been forgetting to drink water.

Sigh.

What have I been doing?

1. Hunting for Twitter desktop clients
2. Trying to make Mail(Mac's mail client) stop downloading Spam and stop creating annoying draft files.
3. Resolving to read Lacan, and going back to hunting for a Twitter/social media app.
   
4. Busy fighting the freakiest of technical problems, like my mail account that synced only the second time I followed the SAME steps, or the desktop client that accepted two Twitter accounts but not a third.
5. Realizing that there exists an extremely well-known set of apps that allow blog editing, social media and email. They're called browsers.
6. Realizing that Firefox is still pretty much unbeatable, and that Flock somehow manages to do little except taking FF and slowing it down with lots of features.
7. Wishing Mac users would get the pokers out of their arses, admit that Macs don't always "just work", and get to providing good support! (Yeah yeah, I know you want to kill me)
8. Not getting to bed on time. Sigh. 

Time to go, really. Nearly 2 am, and for some reason I'm stressed enough to feel the base of my neck prickling and burning away to glory. I need to get me a life.

PS: Handbrake - that's an app that needs VLC for some reason - isn't detecting VLC though they're both installed in the same folder. Kill me, anyone? Please?

I have a New Year's Resolution

I'm going to sleep when I want to if I'm home.
Damn the consequences.

It'll save the time I spend trying to work and procrastinating instead.

Mac life

M, to me: Suki, could you send me this text?
Me: Yeah sure... . Oh wait, it's on the PC. I don't feel like firing up that old hag!

Uncle: My PC is prehistoric! Pentium I, 230 MHz processor, 64MB RAM!
Me: I have... er... 20 times the processing power and 40 times the RAM you got.

Note: Major respect for the patience of people still living with PCs.

Coincidence, similar aesthetic tastes, or just plain annoying?

The boy is henceforth to be known also as Mr S if I feel like it. He and I have often been told by his sister that we look like siblings - and that she doesn't look like him at all; rubbish, in my opinion.

But after being told at a college fest early in 2008 that some strangers wondered what the hell the DJ was doing with his sister, we took a good look at ourselves and realized this - we were wearing almost identical backpacks, black-on-white bandannas, and similar fake Chuck Taylors.

Since then, we've got a bit worse.
Out to buy bandannas, we both go to Chamba Lama in New Market and hunt for the black-on-whites. Then, we step into Asian Arts right next to Chamba and pick up silver jewellery (no, it's NOT "jewelry", it's NOT!) - I love earrings, while his penchant is for finger-rings.

We entered South City Mall to buy ACTUAL Chuck Taylors - having attained requisite income levels by this time - and ended up with identical pairs. My defence? When you want versatility, you want black. And when you want comfort, you want hi-tops. And then, you will obviously prefer the pair with a lovely graphic over the pair with a single yellow line, right?

You'll be heartened to know that I'm wearing capris and skirts at the beach instead of sticking to the Mr S-style of beachwear which includes halfpants, swimming trunks and more halfpants. Well, and i do have a decided preference for reds, yellows(thanks, Ro!) and oranges in my wardrobe - a drastic contrast to Mr S' blues, greens and brownns.

But. BUT. We hit rock-bottom the day we went out for beach slippers. After a massive fight, barely speaking to each other, we firmly turned our backs on each other and... emerged holding identical pairs of red slippers.

He bought the blue version of those red slippers. We're yet to live this one down.

PS: This morning, 27th, the day after I published this post, the waitress at the shack asked me if Mr S and I were brother and sister.
Sigh.
Should I assume that they play safe and ask people if they're siblings rather than ask if they're a couple?