A Bang and A Whimper

I have this clingy problem. I get into things, hobbies, people. I throw myself into them.I find other people who are just as involved. Then something happens and just like a delicate floating balloon that was getting bigger and bigger as you kept feeling it with air, it blows up and all that's left are colorful shreds. Like take my Deutsch class ; I was on top of the world when I wrote my A1 exam and now that I can speak some too, I couldn’t care less. Ok, I hope my Lehrer is not reading this. Ahem!!

Lately, I've lost a group of people that I was very attached to. I have probably driven some of them away, others have driven me away, and I didn't even realize that until a few days ago especially after we’ve rocked some legendary crazy nights together, getting knocked off all possible liquor.

I spent some time in a weird disbelieving stupor, thinking of what really went wrong. I fumed at myself and others. I started hating people I thought I liked and who I thought liked me. I doubted. I tried to rationalize, I tried to explain and I actually tried to ask for explanation. I got a bucket of insults poured on me for simply trying to understand. I've mostly stopped keeping up with blogs, I stopped writing and all of it was killing me. I called Ma a bit too much now that I am in HELLORE which made her strangely suspicious (she always thinks I need money again!!) but also happy given that Baba doesn’t fit anywhere into my scheme of things.

I think I'm finally moving to acceptance. Admitting to myself that all the signs in favor of the good times were there and I just chose to ignore them. Embracing, that not being universally liked doesn't make me a bad person. Writing down a huge rant about everything that was wrong with them doesn't matter and it will not change anything, other than blow up the bitterness I'm trying to move away from.

The problem is - I don't always have a good way of dealing with unexpected reactions from people I've considered my friends. Most of the time, I do the only thing that always helps me. I retreat into this awesome invisible pseudo-shell where I always ran to as a scared little stuttering shy kid and removed myself from the situation. I leave. Sometimes leaving merely means stepping away for a few days, taking a break, cooling off, thinking things through before finding a better way of dealing with them. I leave so I make it through the rough patch.

I've been told to stop being bitchy and accused of always complaining, never being happy. Well I’m not. I guess it doesn’t come that effortlessly for some people. Now I feel a little bit like as if I just broken up a long painfully-romantic relationship, full of good memories, but simply too broken to fix, cracks of which I've been trying to ignore, until the pieces crumbled around me.I feel drained.

I look at my login screen and I have no idea what I'm about to do. The good thing about hobbies is that you can always pick up a new one. The bad thing about hobbies on cyberspace is that they are full of human ties, friendships,strings attached and all that and its simply impossible to let go of them, atleast some of them.

But one thing that strikes me amidst all feelings of loss and regret is relief.
Relief. Like when you come back from this long trip and you find all your stuff neatly unpacked, your bed made so you can just snuggle under covers and wait to fall asleep.

Yet another rant....

I sometimes wonder how long I’m going to sulk and consequently listen to blues, binge on zinger burgers, French fries and chocolates, have crazy cravings for things I can’t do on my own.

And friends keep blogging about how opening up helps and how friends are always there and all that.

It feels like a crime not to be happy; and with the whole NDTV thing coming up; after I fought with the world convincing them that it was I was supposed to do all along and I’d be good at and blah blah!! I guess the hunt is more fun than the kill, huh??

Lately all I’m doing after my lab work is getting a whole lot HIMYM and SCRUBS watching done and even people in sitcoms are falling in love, making babies!! Lately a close friend is expecting his first kid and send me some pics of his wife and it made me go "Awwww!! i want one of those!!" .All my girlfriends are “committed” and to quote a really close friend she’s supposedly “making out like bunnies” in Europe. That gives me a horrible visual btw. Phew!! Why me??

I started freaking out people at home so much so (given that I didn’t speak apart from monosyllables) that I was forcefully taken to Shantiniketan because Ma insisted that I needed a break. It was a good break away from all the cynical people I know and concrete jungles and all that but now that I’m back I’m onto it again, as a somebody aptly puts it I’m “feeling sad about the same thing once again”. I had promised myself that my blog won’t be a shithole for my psychobabble and here I go ranting again.

Last time I remember I was sulking because I thought I was in love and now I’m sulking because I can’t go out with my phenomenally hot neighbour on our customary walks all over Salt Lake because I’m leaving the city :-) and the outcome of it all are my regular visits to Someplace Else and rush headlong into pitchers of gold and tell off some poor friend (read Crush) because he’s happy with some chic!!!! I so want to undo that; if life would just be like my Ipod…..rewind, fast forward or shuffle.

Well the bright side of it all is I’ve watched a lot of good cinema, thanks to Max Mueller Bhavan and its Docu-forum and the upcoming “Dialogues in Diversity” featuring a series of short films selected from the 5^th Asian Women’s Film Festival 2009 supplemented by two relevant German films as well. Each of them has touched me in some way or the other, made me a little better or worse.Also I’ve done some quality reading, Franz Kafka’s Amerika, Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke and Mohammed Hamid’s A case of Exploding Mangoes among a few others. The last two being the finest political thrillers I’ve come across in a very long time.