catch up time

I am dying to write something. The invisible ban is lifting. I want to write about movies, watching them, making them. I want to write about making a difference in someones lives. I want to write about travel, exploring new things, concerts, knowledge, entrepreneurship, languages and a million other topics.  This blog seems to be begging me for life, and I seem to be full of ideas I can actually verbalise.

Oh, and I want to play catch up and write about some of the events happening in my life.  I am not going to India. Not yet. I still want to go. Professionally I am dying to go. Personally, fun times are making Indiana more bearable. Career wise, I am in a rut but I rejected the Indian offer from my company. So next steps are any one’s guess. Job anyone?

I moved house twice in the last 4 months. And I move back again from where I had started next month. I have 5 times more people in the nearby vicinity that I can hang out with than I did last year. Or even early this year for that matter. I am shopping like no one’s business. Every weekend. Some bold outfits, some sensible and some very ‘jhatak’.  I am partying like I did not think I was capable of after 2007. . 

Which brings me to 2007, sucky sucky year until I went to India on an impromptu trip in November for Diwali. Gave my folks a super surprise, literally landed on the doorstep on Diwali morning. Fantastic trip, especially since my paspport issues kept me there for almost a month and a half. The first half of 2007 was me in shell, incapable of social interaction. I was in a made up land, where non existing relationships were cause for much agony. Thanks to Nirav for the last minute India plans, coz life truly went out of inertia after that. India meant hanging out with the kids, mom and dad, sanju, anu, and ambs in cochin. Back in US, New year was with two of my favorite people, Florida in February, Chilling with friends in March, and party non stop since April. There was some drama, it was dealt with and things went back to normal. Oh and two of my closest friends got hitched this year, so its been good times.

I started writing a fiction story, I lectured on a technical subject to a class full of graduate students, I have been going for fun concerts, experimenting with water sports, working out, learning tennis and more recently thai boxing.

And I have been thinking about making movies. Seriously!

Receding…

It’s surprising how small things make for big discordances. What’s more surprising is how easily I am willing to cut people from my life due to those discordances. How people just don’t matter anymore. My emotional investment has shrunk as I grow older, making me strangely detached from how people impact me. I get tickled, irritated, annoyed, frustrated, but then I stop. Beyond a point I simply don’t care. Be it someone I have been friends with for over years, or someone I have been intimately close with over two months. They cease to matter after a certain point. I move on. I step over those moments, I bring them to the front sometimes and smile or muse as the moment demands, but then they get pushed back firmly in some untouched recess of my mind.

Does that mean that the temporary thaw in my psyche has iced up again and I am back to being frozen?

Half a decade

I have lost the ability to read anymore. Or write. Words refuse to be manipulated by me anymore. Writing was one thing I always felt good about, not because I wrote brilliant, but because I never struggled with expression. It was natural. Like breathing. Maybe that’s not a good benchmark anymore. Especially since I don’t breathe right anymore. I stop in between breaths; I take deep ones to compensate for the ones I missed; I forget to breathe sometimes and have to play desperate catch up. It’s not natural.

 

 

I am having a great time. Directionless, sure. Inconsistent, most definitely. Super fun, YES! Its exactly 5 years since I came to the United States. I had never imagined being in this country for this long. I was going back home. I was packed and ready to leave. Yet, here I am. 5 years, and still in USA. Still in Indiana. Still okay.

 

These five years have not really changed me. There has been no profound lesson of life learned. They have not made me smarter or wiser. They have made me know myself better though. Just last week I realized that I am selfish. It was one of those moments, when I looked at myself from some odd objective distant angle and realization struck. And I liked it. I smiled, not because it’s good or bad to be selfish, but because when the objective person communicated my true self to me, I was fine. Not guilty, not embarrassed, not worried. I simply accepted it. I felt liberated.  

 

This year has been the most fun I have had in some time now. I am living weekend to weekend. I am experimenting. I am exploring. I am flirting and I am back to wanting to be the center of attention. It sounds crass, but I like it. I thrive on it. I am also very good at it. I feel like I am 19 years old. Like the decade that went by, does not matter. I am back to the best year of my life.

 

And when I can write again, I will tell you all about those weekends. More than telling you, I will write it here, so I can remember when it’s over. So, I know being 19 again, happened. It will make for a hopeful next decade.