Cigarette Girl

Hey there, hi
I seem to know you from long by
Your memories are like ashes
From my cigarette last night

Smoky, hazy, delicate
Like its flame that rustles, intimate
You slowly burned the night away
And glowed in darkness of my love

Smoke and fire
Nicotine desire

The Unbelievable Hattrick

What happens when the name of a place matters to you enough to make you want to dedicate seven months of your life to writing a paper on it? You are torn apart, ravaged by love for it, but you are happy.

Whenever Sonu, Sharan and I have reached the tipping point of beginning to research or write our previous papers, we have always had a blinding, extremely unsettling and frightful dilemma. It goes a bit like this:

Oh, my god.
Are we truly, madly, deeply insane?

What the hell are we doing?
Why the hell are we doing this?
How the hell are we doing this?

Why?!

***

In the end, it has always worked out, somehow, someway. We've been scratched, bruised, heavily bandaged - but we're still alive! This time we're probably throwing ourselves for more than we can possibly handle, and

"Christ, you know it ain't easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going
You're gonna crucify me!"

but hell, we're in. For good now, so

"She's got a ticket to ride
And she don't care!"

Because some day

"It's been a hard day's night
And I've been working like a dog.
It's been a hard day's night
I should be sleeping like a log!"

Behind Blue Tiles

Tom Petty - Freefaller
Elvis Presley - Bee-bap-loola
The Steve Miller Band - Joker
Aerosmith - Dude Looks Like A Lady
Beatles - Yellow Submarine, Help!, Can't Buy Me Love, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Come Together, Hey Jude
Low Millions - Eleanor
Lynnyrd Skynnyrd - the guitar solo at .36 and then again at 4.56 of Freebird
Matt Monro - Born Free
Bob Dylan - Tambourine Man

What is your favourite song to sing in the bathroom?

Shift+Del and a five second brain strike

"Cup-per!"
"What a perfect idiot."
"I mean.. come on!"
"Did you.. really.. do that?"
"That's pathetic. I mean really, pathetic."

And the classic,
"You're just really stupid."

I've been called so much and much more in praise. And many times, I've forcefully rebelled against any slurs on my mental abilities (despite knowing deep down that the only person I can never beat hollow in a test for Forgetfulness and Absentmindedness Quotient is myself). But today, I'm going to personally accept every scathing remark that Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain and P. G. Wodehouse ever made on Forgetfulness and Absentmindedness. Gracefully.

What happens, I mean, what can happen when you have to shift the entire contents of your computer to another one? It's not very different from moving houses; you discover some incredible memories, really, really old, forgotten things tucked away in boxes and boxes locked with time. But if you have neurons that scatter like millions of ping-pong balls down the Niagara Falls, disappearing forever into the depths of uselessness whenever you are faced with a suspiciously simple task: Ctrl+A, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V and then Ctrl+Del, you're very close to letting loose your bungee jumping cord.

Because if you're me, you'll copy the shortcuts and permanently delete the root directories, thinking they've already been copied.

And when Windows mocks you by popping a message on your screen saying, "I'm searching for your directory called 'Stuff'. And if you want to locate it yourself, be my guest. Or click Browse. Any which way, you're screwed, baby." You see Windows cruelly rotating a faux torch all around the message box, as if to tell you how hard it's trying. Yeah, you know you're screwed.

You feel shock dropping its anchors down deep inside you, when the entirety of what you've lost hits you. It's at these times when your heart doesn't seem to matter as an organ, because the full force of everything is taken by.. yes, your stomach. It just really, really hits you.

Then you listen to godforsaken, teenybopper songs like So Yesterday by Hilary Duff (yeah, I know) and feel worse when she sings, "I'm just a bird that's already flown away.."

This has happened to me before. I've lost data because I haven't made back-ups, and you'd think I learnt something. I thought I'd learnt something. Apparently, "At least not today, not today, not today.."

I've lost some really beautiful, heart-breaking, lovely things today. These two things helped me to a fair extent, and I'd like to share them with you. I'm positive you won't be as incredibly dense as me, but these will be helpful if your anchor drops too.

Recuva - helps recover (some) deleted files, even if they're not in the Recycle Bin any longer.
Xmarks - saves your internet bookmarks to an online profile.

Take care.

Free Part V

Laugh
and throw yourself off the cliff
Dive into the sea, drip-dry on the clouds

Shake
off all the stares, skid across their ice
You fluttering scarf, you've got it just right

Bright
red crayon swirl, on the cement wall
Wink at everyone's 'kind attention'

Four-
letter word, holding you by the door
Stick out your tongue and say goodbye!

You
are free to be wrong, free to go anywhere
For time is the blue-green ribbon in your hair

a paperpin's lecture on the importance of system and organisation

"ever since paperpins had come into conception some 50 years ago, they had diversified greatly in form and function. such had their popularity maxed, that they were even picked up by the one hit wonder bill gates, one fundamental difference being that bill was a far inferior creature. not to say that the Human Being was an inferior race, it's just that paperpins associated simplicity with brilliance. Human Beings were too complicated and hadn't yet reached the oneness of mind and spirit, like the paperpins already had.

the paperpins were popular at the offices, but among people who called themselves slanted, nice-weird, loony and et cetera they were quite unpopular. paperpins were twisted and shouted at. they were called names - they were called the Commas in a Long Sentence. simply said, it meant that paperpins were like lots of Commas in a Long Sentence, like grammatical paperpins which never allowed a sentence to come to an end, making it more and more inexplicable and multilateral, holding compound meanings and contextual leanings together with a single, deftly-bent, snap-clasping inch of aluminium alloy.

however, paperpins had been created for an important reason - systematic organisation of paper. words, and the papers they were written on had to be neatly ordered and re-neatly re-ordered. paperwork would be lost without them. red-tape bureaucracy would become a carnival ribbon without them. paperpins effectively held entire nations together. could you imagine a world without paperpins?

Human Beings, however, have been known not to like discipline and order; some of them quite hate dealing with organisations which, for all practical purposes, exist on filing systems (paperpins being their basic elements). these organisations include banks, courts, schools, universities, public libraries and any sort of government-like offices, where Human Beings seem to be their most distressed, suppressed and harrassed selves.

to them, i have but one question: is life possible without system? is it possible to exist without structure, rules, foundations, regulations, stipulations? what would we be able to ever achieve without a formulated plan in life? filing systems form the core of organisation, the greatest mental ability of Human Beings, a concept so abstract it has yet to be mastered completely. we cannot, at any point in time, allow ourselves to simply.."

The so on and so forth continued for a long time that day. The paperpin was a brilliant speech-maker but became quite complicated and winding in its meanings, not quite unlike its physical structure. Its speech was given sparse applause, as predicted. But one thing remains quite unblemished, despite the paperpin's overtly preachy and quite boring speech - that a (long, burdensome, obsolete and frustrating) system is important, if only to create the purest of magic, escape, spirit and freedom within ourselves. Whenever we get the chance, it's the system we break free from, and we enjoy it, don't we?

(Picture Source)

I think I've officially lost it

I think I've officially lost it. I was told this unofficially, around four years ago but this time it has finally sunk in. For the past three minutes of having lost it, it still feels as great as it did that precise moment when I realised it.

It's not that I haven't lost it before. I have. I have lost it, I have seen myself losing it and I definitely see myself losing it in the future. But this epiphany, while drinking coffee and studying the Direct Effect of Emotions on Interpersonal Attraction suddenly came to me and left me surprised, despite having subliminally suspected my self of having lost it for the past four years. For some time now, I suspect. Or even longer, I suspect (even more sublinimally now).

I'm not sure about losing it - it feels like an uncapturable, strangely ephemeral feeling - but having lost it feels quite peaceful. Like I'm finally agreeing with this voice inside, which has been incessantly trying to make small talk with me for such a long time now, till about nine minutes ago when it suddenly grinned at me and disappeared, nevertheless to come back and wink at me.

Yes. When you will have lost it, you will feel like writing some good old undiluted nonsense right in the middle of quite sincerely studying something. You will also, quite sincerely subliminally suspect yourself of an obvious truth (that of you having lost it) and then go ahead and become sublinimal about it. You will hear voices in your head, indeed, this voice will try making small talk with you and not just that - it will also grin, and then rush back to wink, at you. You will also, find a quiet satisfaction in endlessly repeating and reiterating and resaying and retelling and finally in a flourish of rehashing, recapitulating it all.

I think I've lost quite a bit of it now.