Long Overdue in 2011

Between two holidays, visiting family, entertaining visiting friends, usual shit at work, fervent onanism, watching anime and otherwise languid laziness, this page kept being relegated further down the to-do list that I don't even have. All the same, here I am now. Late, never, better, blah, bah.

Of the vacations gone by already, I ain't gonna really write about. Except to say that they were both awesome. The breathtaking salt desert and ancient excavations in Gujarat and a drive from Bangalore to Kanyakumari, with most of the time spent in the backwaters and beaches of Kerala. The only common trait between the two places: pretty hot for the most part.

I would have liked to put up my new year poem here, but I can't find it on my office computer or email. So I will give it a skip. As it is, it would have been more than 2 months too late. Screw that. Couple of things I have been contemplating though, in this calendar year. Maybe I should get those off my chest.

One, the idea of seeking company for entertainment, as opposed to entertaining the self. (The perverted reader is free to draw conclusions from the onanism reference above.) Living all by myself as I am now for the first time ever, I was a bit apprehensive about the pangs of loneliness that had troubled me greatly once in the past. But I was also sort of looking forward to it too, to use my time in a way I deemed fit without being encumbered by someone else's choices. I thought I could be a lot more productive towards personal causes (such as writing) if I wasn't always spending my time in company. However, this post comes after a gap of two months and about the only thing I have written in the interim was the new year poem. I haven't done much else either, except sort of vegetate. What I have been contemplating (another form of procrastination?) is how do I actually make good of this time I now have for myself. In other words, how to throw off these shackles of sheer lethargy that are weighing me down?

The other thing is my supposed charsi look. I happened to run in to acquaintances from school days, guys I hadn't seen in over 10 years, at the least. Three of them were over at my place one evening, two of us drinking whisky and the other two relishing their Breezers. One of the Breezer drinkers also partook of a spliff, which he himself had asked me to roll, soon after which he proceeded to the toilet to throw up, after which he passed out. Then he called me a week later to tell me that I should take it easy in life and that I looked like I was in to drugs and that my enunciation of the desire to maybe do a PhD some time in life confirmed his apparently ancient viewpoint of my being mad. When I rose to my defence about drug consumption, he said he was only doing his duty as a friend by warning me. Couple of evenings later, the younger brother of the guy who drank whisky with me some evening ago came over to my place for 10 minutes, in which he told me how the brothers had both lost 25 kg each in the last 6 months (and they both are still more than just your average plump) and then went on to ask me why I looked so malnourished, and that I should go easy on the drugs. Once again, I began a cursory defence but abandoned it half-way. Couple of days later, the elder brother calls me up and tells me how his younger brother told him I looked drugged and haggard, and that I really ought to take better care of myself and that I should also put on some weight. And this, after he had himself seen me twice in the preceding three weeks. Was he too blind to notice it himself then? Or did the brother confirm his lurking suspicions? Suspicions? Of what?!

I can't decide if my external appearance has, in fact, changed, unbeknownst to me to resemble that of junkies, and I am too blind to notice it, what with it being my own face and all, or if it is, as usual, just the world around me that still hasn't found its marbles, tied up as it is with typecasts and preconceptions, even if it about things it has not the foggiest clue about.