wannabe intriguing title

maudlin shit, urban fatta, faux deep insight, faint mention of lost love, architectural observation, maudlin maudlin maudlin maudlin, moralistic closing.

like arthritis in old age

like arthritis in old age, you hurt me more in winter
ghostly, you rise from carefully interred ashes
mocking the sensible epitaphs i surround you with
smiling radiantly, just out of reach
calling to mind balmy Mediterranean winds
or cosy armchairs and beloved books

a snatch of remembered cheer courses through memory
making me frantically seek you in old emails, old blog posts, old pictures
a snatch of you, and hope, and daily joy
which would warm me like mulled wine on a cold December day
as the happiest year of my life

dies

[this is mostly fiction.]

christmas list

rebelled against the 9 to 5 workplace on friday and went for christmas lunch (which was disguised as a meeting) at the saturday job headquarters. i love them there. they appreciate good work, don't have crazy insecurities, soothe my permit-related insecurities, have a great sense of humour and good choice in salmon. stayed there for the rest of the day saying nyaaah to the work piling up at the 9 to 5. i don't feel particularly responsible about it anymore.. wonder why... praps because they stabbed me in the back? (oo dramatic)

saturday was lazy and gloomy at home with the tv and the distracted mind. i can't be alone at home right now. when i'm there i feel like meeting people but as soon as i make a date i feel like hiding in bed and if i'm actually out i feel like ditching people and escaping. nutjob.

sunday, i had a lovely walk, a lovely time and made a new friend. but praps i lost him afterwards. the ending was a slightly surreal experience.

sunday eve, christmas eve, midnight mass with a believer, blessings and frankincense in a well kept, organised church in the wealthy parish that i lurk in as a foreigner and lodger. i felt guilty for not going to a temple at diwali, but the fake durga puja at camden town centre was scarily ghettoish enough. i'd love to go to a real temple if they had one hereabouts, where i'd be free to believe and practice my hindu-ness in my own way.

monday is christmas day and i'm sharing a lovely cosy lunch with a friend at her place. the day has already involved christmas traditions like opening presents, eating, watching christmas movies and so on. yummy.

next post should be about resolutions maybe?

distracted, so posting anything that pops into mind

- 'is you is, or is you ain't, my baby'.. who sang this song? i mean the slow, kinda black folky version? it's been spinning around in my head all week and i need to download it. point me someone; better still, send it to me!

- There's a new cutie at the sandwich place. turned out to be the owner - looked much too young i tell ya.

- work is in a mess. can't concentrate on anything since the possibility of leaving london for an indefinite period happened to me. mind keeps changing track from work permit websites to hsmp consultants to job applications to airline bookings to weather websites. just.
room is in a mess. can't bring myself to clean up.

- 2 ideas for PhDs fell into my brain yesterday. one had been stewing awhile, to be fair - finding a normative multidisciplinary framework for creating cities. it would be about the urban designer's role, splitting it and re consolidating it.. 'gardening community consultant' may be an acceptable job title in future, after i publish the phd that is. this would be a useful study, and would have lots do with designers' egos, designers' roles and the morality of design at an urban scale. pooh.. booooooorrrring. so thence came the other idea - how to spend 4-5 years reading books and watching movies that i like and talking about them wisely? the plan is to do a study of how the cities of delhi and london look at each other, and the implications of their respective images of each other, in the contemporary world with it's increasingly fuzzy boundaries and moving populations. it would have to be done in 3 parts. first a semiotic and possibly anthropological study of the existence of either city in the other, physically, in literature, in popular media, in the people, in the policy, in the governments. this part would have to end with a set of rules, or 2 sets of rules (which would be a hypothesis for the next part) saying delhi thinks such such and such of london, and london thinks such such and such of delhi. second, an analysis of a built project, testing it to see if the hypothesis is true. now i have no clue if this built project would be in delhi or in london, or anywhere else, built by londoners or delhiites, or anyone else. all i know is that it'll be of urban scale, it'll be contemporary and will have some major relevance to both cities. maybe it'll be 2 projects? hey! what about comparing delhi's commonwealth games strategy with london's 2012 olympics strategy? third, a final set of rules which say how to prevent the bad things about this 2 way looking and how to keep the good things about it. whoaaaaa stop. this sounds like 6 phds now.

- to get back to the point - delhi exists in london in champa trees on gloucester road. but also in the latest immigration rackets. london exists in delhi in chanakyapuri's DI / DII bungalow flats. but also in nightclubs which play britney spears songs.

- i have to make something of this.

just a little moan. here because no one's online.

i feel sick. think i have a bug. been traipsing around in less layers than i should have done. sitting in library trying to concentrate on a covering letter i have to write, for a job i may get. but eyes are burning and head is throbbing.ugg. mummeeee.

graduation without constantine

because if i took him, he would have been a heavy little tin bottle, (sloshing with canadian whiskey), and i couldn't have drunk him in my robes! and if i took him, and then didn't pay him attention, and drank whiskey out of glasses (which i did), how fair would that be? but as i didn't take him, everyone asked after him, (namesake included, with an upturnment of his nose), and constantine was missed.

bedroom noises

My bed is snagged on a sliver of solidity in a world that’s a raging, roaring hurricane. It howls, it beats, it drums. i can easier suffocate myself with my pillow than keep its sound out. I put on headphones, i stop the door, but the crazed threnody waits for the gaps in the song. The gale scratches at the crooning voice inside the music, impatient to get at my brain again. it doesn’t stop, it can’t, it has the pressure of the whole universe (76 of them?) coming through a small fissure in the world, directly attacking my sleepless rest.

There’s a weird aerodynamic condition in which air increases in velocity and therefore sound, when it passes through small orifices. Bernoulli?... anyway, my bedroom has no windows and 2 skylights with a total of 8 narrow vents. flatmate climbed up to loft and sealed 7 of these. So on a normal night my bedroom sounds like a pleasantly breezy perch. However London is now prone to gale force winds so last night was something out of where eagles dare. Don’t they say too much sound can drive you mad?

dinner at 8

2 huge organic onions, chopped;
2 huge vine tomatoes, chopped;
6 long organic kail leaves, courtesy of your generous closet hippie friend's 'standard veggie bag' because she's out of town and cannot avail of the weekly earth-friendly bounty she signed up for;
10 huge poisonous looking brown mushrooms;
4 misshapen mutant (yet organic) carrots, caked with mud;
1/2 kilo lamb cubes from the newly discovered turkish shop on s n high street;

fry onions till light brown in extra virgin olive oil (this is a morally upright recipe, can't have slutty olive oil). load washing machine and dishwasher at same time. do not, repeat, do not experiment with swapping tablets for either, just because they look similar to your indian bumpkin techno-unsavvy eyes. it DOES NOT work that way. jeez... Of course, your onions are on the brink of burning now, so soothe them with the tomatoes. sizzle... frantically chop kail leaves now, since you only have one small chopping board. wish you had 10 arms like ma durga so you could stir, chop, chat on gtalk and wax your moustache at the same time. then rethink the wish on grounds of practical considerations like clothes, and boys being scared off. once tomatoes and onions seem nice and friendly, add the kail and shake it all about a bit. then start exploring your overstocked and completely haphazard masala cupboard. once you've realised that most of the boxes of cream left behind by inky contain ground pepper, decide on simple ingredients like ginger, garlic and coriander powders. add almost fistfuls of them, totally eyeballing it (i swear, i'm really good at this. and to think i spent my early teens wondering how i would ever know how much of what to put in what and trying to observe and note my mom's methods.) oh and also add 2 pinches of hot chilli powder and one pinch of turmeric, for luck. then of course, you realise that you had forgotten that you were almost out of salt, so after putting in what you do have, you cut open the container and scrape the far ends for coagulated remains. then pop in the meat which has been soaking redly in the sink in a colander. add some boiled water, just enough to make the meat peep over it like icebergs. again mess the whole thing around with a spatula for a bit then cover it and put on low-ish fire. did i mention you need a biggish vessel with a biggish cover, and well matched, so that the stupid cover doesn't float? anyway, while the meat is stewing with the kail shail, cut and peel carrots into big pieces. halve the huge mushrooms, and try to avoid attempting to scrub the brown off them compulsively. it really takes time and is quite pointless. annyway, pop these last bits into the pot, move it around with said spatula, cover again and leave on even lower fire.
go watch tv and come back every 10 minutes to taste the soup seeping around the floating cover with several small spoons so that your saliva doesn't go into the mix.
watch more tv and check email and stuff for 45 minutes, then remember that you forgot to put the rice on the boil, but that's a minor thing, because now the pot is emitting lovely smells! after correcting the rice problem and letting the meatpot stand for awhile, help yourself to good, wholesome, yummy food, while watching sex and the city, and wonder why the fuck you ever think there's something wrong with the world.

growing up, growing up.. it'll happen :)