Aimless blogging

I haven't gone to the gym in a week now. I started working out this July, and I was very pumped about it until last week, going almost every single day. In my mind I thought that the first half of the year was about intensive learning, and the second half would be about intensive fitness, and I followed through on it for almost two months. Even the odd day that I wouldn't go to the gym to exercise I would at least go for a run outside, or go to the kickboxing place and pull some punches, let some steam out.

However, it's been a week now since I stopped. I remember when I missed the first day, that was the 24th of August, and I felt entirely entitled to do that. Everyone needs rest. Then the second day I just decided, well, it's okay, I can live with a little guilt. The third day I thought something escapist - something along the lines of "it's also important to study" to rationalize my decision, and then read a book, or part of it. Clearly, I was lying to myself, the motivation was simply to laze around at home. Then this weekend, I missed not only gym but my only 2 days of cricket per week, as I had to be somewhere. What was it yesterday? Yesterday, I did some yoga, yes. It didn't exhaust me at all, so I could have also gone to the gym, but then I told myself I did yoga today, and that's good enough.

And maybe it is. I used to study so much until June, when I started working out and gradually stopped studying entirely. Now I've kind of stopped working out, but haven't restarted studying either. So what am I doing? I started watching Quantico, Priyanka Chopra's US TV show. I have to say it's nothing too mind-blowing but I'm watching it anyway, you know, just being lazy. The only silver lining to the last one week has been that I have persisted with eating healthy and haven't gone back to junk food, at least not on a regular basis.

My posts these days are neither funny nor insightful, I know. Maybe things are going well elsewhere but my writing has certainly taken a steep fall. I sometimes read my old posts, and I find them so much better than how I write now that I wonder if it was really me that wrote all that.

This coming weekend I'm traveling to Cleveland to my brother's place, and from there both of us will drive to Toronto, where some of my cousins live. I went there at this same time of the year, last year, and it was very nice. I'm looking forward to the weekend. On my way back, I might first go to DC to some of my other cousins before coming back home. That should quell my yearly need for good old cousin comforts, I think. I've already been to India earlier this year, and it wasn't that much fun after the first few days. I came to the realization that the India I go back to isn't the India I left four years ago. Actually, the moment I landed back in USA, I was as thrilled as I was about going to India when I was leaving US three weeks before.

Oh yeah, I will go to the gym today. Do some curls. My biceps just don't get any bigger, though, no matter what I do. Anyway.

Yesterday

Yesterday, I went to this temple straight from work. After a little while of just hanging about, I felt terribly enervated. I left and drove straight to a restaurant, and ordered a chicken gyro. I had turned vegetarian sometime last year, but in this moment of feeling so exhausted all of a sudden, I felt like I needed something more strengthening than something vegetarian would be. Yes, this was flawed reasoning, but I'm not trying to win a nutritionist's argument here; just stating how I felt and thought in that particular moment. So I had a gyro, which is quite a lot in itself for a dinner, and before I had finished that I ordered one more. For yourself?, the guy asked, puzzled at the second order. Yes, sir.

I finished the second one equally ravenously and went home. I don't know when I fell asleep, but it was within minutes of reaching home. Before 7 PM, to be sure. 

When I woke up, it was 7:40 AM today. 12 hours and 40 minutes. I haven't slept that long in a long time. 

Something was strange, yesterday.

Moral of the story? I don't know.

retrospection(retrospection(janmasthami))

I was reminded an hour ago, out of nowhere, just sitting on my office desk, of this: http://theunsweptcorner.blogspot.com/2006/08/retrospection.html

That was 10 years ago. I was 20, and apparently was already feeling old enough to deem it appropriate to look back on my younger self. I was ruminating wistfully over a kind of life I had already left behind, one of being crazily excited about festivals such as Janmasthami, about the little things that made it awesome and, to be sure, about my own intense participation in them. At some level, I was also thinking about my 8 year old self, how I looked, how small my hands were, how short I was and how I had look up into the sky to talk to my dad. At 20, though, I already looked largely as I do today, so that difference is perhaps not as outwardly stark when I sit down looking back now as I did then. But the nature of my Janmasthami has changed again.

At 20, Janmasthami was still being celebrated all around me. My parents observed all the little things. What I missed was my own former enthusiasm. Today, there is no Janmasthami around me, except in the abstract. The people I meet and see on a day to day basis have no clue that there is some such thing. I live in a world far removed from it. The enthusiasm for Janmasthami, though, is discernably more alive now, despite that. Despite that, or, because of that? I can't say for sure. 

I will be leaving early from work today, because google helped me locate a temple where they're having Janmasthami celebrations. I admit it won't be a Janmasthami of great personal involvement that it was back when I was 8. In all likelihood, all I'll do is drive there, hang around for a little aimless while, and come back, hopefully with some delicious prasad. And that would be gold, too.

Happy Janmasthami!

YAAR! (yet another angry rant)

I feel like a phony coming back here. I don't relate to this writing your experiences thing anymore. I continue to do it all the same because, once, in a moment of clarity and some insight, I had decided that I should do it. So I'm back, and I'm ranting.

I don't know how people deal with numerous romantic relationships - I truly find it daunting. Even one is more than enough, it seems. Yet people all around me participate in this merry go round time after time, each time with an equal enthusiasm. My own experiences only informed me that the whole thing is akin to going out of your way to shop for defeats of different shapes and sizes, and the little victories once in a while are mostly accidental and always pyrrhic.

My parents talk to me about getting married every single day. For I can't even count how many days. Yet I can't see one really good reason for why I should. "Do it for them" comes the closest to convincing me to do it, but I know that it fails on the criterion of being "a good reason". For most people, I think, they get something from this and that's why they do it. Good for them. But if I don't derive anything out of it, should I merely follow the convention?

I suppose some people feel lonely without a romantic partner, but being alone has never bothered me. In fact, a vast, vast majority of my best moments in the thirty years I've been around have occurred when I was alone. Besides, those moments were the most real. Anything in the company of other people -- no matter how much I love them or they love me -- has always had a tiny winy tinge at least of something unreal, something fake, put on. And that stuff saps energy.

I'm not asocial by any means. I have some of the best people for friends, am well liked by most people I've known. Still, to subvert the arrangement of my life to an extent where my most personal tics and antics, things that I truly believe are nobody's business but mine, are also put out for someone else's accountability for a lifetime, is an action that I don't understand why I should undertake.

Rant over.

Back injury. Excruciating pain. Daunted by I don't know what. Leaking wall. Feeling insufficient. Seeking to discover what to seek. Decently happy. Lost.Vaguely disillusioned. Heavy air. The sound of insects from afar. Crammed days. Empty evening. The books I read. Reminders and questions. The books I didn't. Whatever. All that seems significant is invisible.  A dainty collection of screams that I did not scream sits portentously atop my throat, and I'll gulp it down again. Olympics are inspiring. I hope to sleep deep tonight. Tomorrow is simple.

Happy Idiot

I've been happy, as much is normal,
and most days sleep a full 8 hours.
When I wake up, and look at folks,
it seems to me their joy is a farce.
And whenever it is they look at me
with that air of inquisitive frown
"who the hell is he talking to,
this talking-to-himself clown?",

I am talking to you.