Easy way out

You hate being fat.
You don't like the fact that other people take decisions for you.
You dislike asking your husband for money.
You are bored, and would rather be at work.
You are terrified of change.
You don't want to be stuck in this country where you have to ask for employment.
You want to get off your medication.

Everyone wants- Shinier, brighter, better lives. Too many people I know complain about the way they are 'forced' to live. Responsibilities and obligations and lack of choice.

Here's the easy way out- Pick up all that baggage and take it with you. Go chase your fantasy career, your thinner, more fulfilled self. Following your dream is really far, far easier than being miserable about not having it already. It is discouraging, and terrifying, and requires big, untiring effort. You will slip and fall on your face, have bad moments and wonder whether it is worth it. But I promise you, truly, that you will be happier and stronger, shinier and brighter and better for it. If you're not, I promise to listen to you the next time you cry. But first, try taking the easy way out.

Only human

I don't want to be satisfied about this. It feels too much like leaning back on my laurels, self-assured and pompous, just asking to be taken down a peg or two by the young seeker who brings the naive daring that only the fearless can know, to solve these age-old equations.

I tell myself I am only human, when I reflect on this glow I feel within after our conversations. Only human, to feel glad at your fumblings, like a baby learning to walk. I smile at your cuteness as you stumble around trying to learn your balance. And what is wrong with being human, reminiscing on this glorious sameness that all relationships go through as I watch you with your new girlfriend/boyfriend?

I have heard your judgments about other people's immaturity. You have cast your vote on tradition and the correct way to behave in relationships. Declared your hatred for flowers and gifts and mushy endearments. And today you tell me of this beautiful, wonderful human being who is your significant other, so sensible and mature despite what happened today. And you say you will never use such callous words with them, the kind I just told you worked for someone else. Your lover is far better, more refined and urbane and genteel.

I tell you love is love, and bills and insurance and the trappings of life will always be what they are. I tell you that regardless of degrees and paychecks, a broken heart will always feel what all broken hearts have felt, independent of space and time and language. But of course, the two of you are different.

So I lie back on my tales, smile and wait for you to catch up. A chronicler of stories, a gatherer of life-experience. And I try not to be too self-satisfied about it. But I am only human, just like you and your lover and everybody else.

Oof

A grey Friday morning, cold rain, and the promise of a night snow. Hot coffee, the house to myself. Half-remembered songs hunted up on YouTube bring back childhood crushes and family dinner time in nostalgic smiles. Such a contented space, quiet and welcoming- a time to give thanks for all the precious moments and the promise of so many more.

Given the setting, wouldn't you think sending polite thank-you emails to virtual strangers would be a breeze ?!

Haunted by words

Fishing is a metaphor, and the words of the speaker resonate with my thoughts about writing. Just as he is haunted by waters, I am haunted by words. And some of the words reflect so deeply what writing means to me, I would put them down here to remind myself. Some of my favorite quotes from 'A river runs through it' -

"Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart - I don't know what it is or where, because sometimes it is in my arms and sometimes in my throat and sometimes nowhere in particular except somewhere deep. Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect."

"All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible."

"I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river."

"As the heat mirages on the river in front of me danced with and through each other, I could feel patterns from my own life joining with them."

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

The practical reader

A recent blog post reminded me of the many reasons 'practical' people dislike 'poetry'. The words are too confusing, the meanings too obscure, and the entire melange is nothing more than an attempt to obfuscate the simplest observations. While I accept that a lot of bad poetry exists, most of it seems like the result of people 'trying' to be artistic. Are words more lovely or more meaningful only because they rhyme?

I believe the principles of good writing- clarity, sharp editing, every word responsibly contributing to the meaning of the whole- apply to poetry as well. And the following poem makes part of this the point better than I could :)

A Practical Reader
- Carl Dennis

I'm willing to buy your book of poems
If you can promise that whenever you liken a day
To a coin that cant be hoarded,
You spell out exactly what I should buy with it
In the few hours left me before the sun
Sinks behind the garage outside my window,
What items more valuable than those in the shops
And mention where they're available locally.

I'm a plain person, I admit, with little patience
For vague suggestions, so if you believe
Poems need to be vague to be suggestive,
I'd better save my money for something else
(Money I dont have endless supplies of,
Not with my job as bookkeeper for a hospital),
A work of history, say, or biography
Or a book of encouragement from the self-help section.

I could use a poem showing that those who seem
To be having a better time at work than I do,
Or a better time at the beach or hiking a trail,
Have simply learned to do more with moods
No better than my good moods,
While making less of the lesser ones.

I wont complain if your book has many poems
Praising the joys of giving so long as it has a few
On the joys of taking. How to choose friends,
For example, who wont forget me after I'm gone,
Who'll tell my story now and then to themselves
If not to others. Friends glad to remember,
Who believe their gladness would be complete
If I were sitting beside them sharing it.

As for friends I've lost, do you have some advice
For the times I'm asked to speak at a funeral
When my feelings, ardent before,
Suddenly seem too cool and measured?
Dont tell me to level my words down
To the flats of fact in the name of integrity
When the task before me is rising to the occasion.
If my feelings cant make the climb, inspire me
To send up some phrases that would be honest
If I were the person I'd like to be.

Please stay undercover

I don't object to stalkers, or people that keep track of my status messages or blog posts. (By putting this information out there, I am taking that chance. And I know who the lurkers are). I don't even mind adding the friend of a friend of a friend as a friend of mine. But some actions move beyond the realm of curiosity or gossip. Why does the luxury of anonymous, instant connection bring out the dumbest in some of us?

1. "I met you on the subway in NYC last July, and you gave me medical advice for my mother. Can we connect?"
No, we cannot. I am not the random stranger that dispenses prescriptions (or medication) on the commuter rail. And if I were, you probably don't want to be linked in to me anyway.

2. "Can you send me the neutrophil killing protocol you used? And also, the PO numbers for the EMSA kit and antibodies and.."
I graduated. I wrote a dissertation and papers and left copious notes and CDs behind for a reason. Let's see if you can figure out what that was now. And if you can't, feel free to send me a polite, professional email at the contact information I left. Wait to see if I respond before bombarding me on Facebook.

3. "You used to write well. This is crap."
It's my blog. Find yourself something better to read if you don't like it. Constructive criticism is welcome, unhelpful, unpleasant opinions are not.

4. "Please tell me what _ was like when he was your boyfriend five years ago."
Yes, random stranger, I am itching to share the most intimate details of my past with you !! Let's find some pink pajamas and fuzzy pillows and have a girly party online, shall we?

5. "Will you marry me? I really think we could have something good together"
Sigh.. Hours of talking on chat and the phone, conversations heedless of time and time zones and cultural differences. The bonding when someone from another continent fixes your computer issues is a different level altogether, isn't it? But difficult as it is, I think I'll stay here and resist the urge to drop my life for the Dell customer care rep I think you are.

This is just a draft

First there is the crowning flush, after hours of painful inaction. A sign of life, there is SOMETHING here! It takes hours of agony, pained gasping breaths. Inch by painstaking inch she* emerges. Towards the end we are both confused and teary, just wanting it to end. And end it does, in a long endless sigh of relief. It is done.
Out in plain sight, confused and babbling, limbs askew and a shrieking head. Now, I rub my hands in glee. Now it begins.

Chop this end and place it there, the other one goes here and twist that around a bit. All that effort to come up with a mangled jigsaw puzzle. But wait, this piece goes here, doesn't it? And that, surely, is the corner piece that holds it all together!

When words are stuck and deadlines loom, this is my mantra- This is just a draft. Not a first-born miracle on the planet, nor a literary masterpiece. It frees me from the responsibility of the mother-instinct and the pressures that weigh down the masters of the craft. No need to guard these words, they aren't perfect. No need for these words to be perfect, this is just a draft.

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* My stories are 'she'. Simply because they are always as uncomfortably self-aware and confused as any adolescent girl I have ever known or been.

Out of books, to people orchards

Of course I have always loved to read. Words are as familiar and essential as breath, instinctive as inhaling air. In principle, I get incredibly annoyed with people who claim they don't "need" to read because they have instead lived life, as is the two were mutually exclusive. Their experiences are their own, they brag. They don't need books to teach them things.

Now I find myself echoing their speeches. "What are you reading these days?" asks a friend. "I have no time to read", I reply, shocking myself into silence. When I must write and write, words flow out like gasping breath, pause to catch up with thought and then run again. The run is exhilarating, even though I barely pause to inhale.

Words are like breath, cycles of inhalation and exhalation. And when I am spent, I will open my books again. But for now, when I close a book, I open life. I could teach no one anything with my words, except that I am living with something in common among men- When fighting with them, when saying all their say in my song.

Ode to the book
- Pablo Neruda

When I close a book
I open life.
I hear
faltering cries
among harbours.
Copper ignots
slide down sand-pits
to Tocopilla.
Night time.
Among the islands
our ocean
throbs with fish,
touches the feet, the thighs,
the chalk ribs
of my country.
The whole of night
clings to its shores, by dawn
it wakes up singing
as if it had excited a guitar.

The ocean's surge is calling.
The wind
calls me
and Rodriguez calls,
and Jose Antonio--
I got a telegram
from the "Mine" Union
and the one I love
(whose name I won't let out)
expects me in Bucalemu.

No book has been able
to wrap me in paper,
to fill me up
with typography,
with heavenly imprints
or was ever able
to bind my eyes,
I come out of books to people orchards
with the hoarse family of my song,
to work the burning metals
or to eat smoked beef
by mountain firesides.
I love adventurous
books,
books of forest or snow,
depth or sky
but hate
the spider book
in which thought
has laid poisonous wires
to trap the juvenile
and circling fly.
Book, let me go.
I won't go clothed
in volumes,
I don't come out
of collected works,
my poems
have not eaten poems--
they devour
exciting happenings,
feed on rough weather,
and dig their food
out of earth and men.
I'm on my way
with dust in my shoes
free of mythology:
send books back to their shelves,
I'm going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song.

A moment

An old friend of mine is now a filmmaker. Nothing you would have seen- She makes small-scale, independent films and conducts workshops on finding visual inspiration (or something like it). I would know her anywhere, and when I watch her movies, it is always a little surprising to find that she isn't on the screen. You see, they are just so very her, so full of her personality that it's easy to think you're seeing S. even when she isn't physically there.

Another schoolmate stars in music videos and jewelry commercials. Though I've seen the ads and videos, I wouldn't recognize her unless you told me her name. Strangely, she looks exactly the same as she did in high school. Unlike the rest of us, who have changed in so many ways, she still looks fifteen.

As for myself, I still write. I'm still learning to dance. Only more wholly than before. The rest of the trappings of being grown-up- a home, credit cards, a car, 'responsibilities'- still seem so very ephemeral, like I am yet to grow into them.

And when the late afternoon light slants in, all things in life turn back into the ache of adolescence. Adulthood seems a strange interruption, these lives with professions and pretensions of responsibility. How unreal, to think of the girls we were turned into these people in the newspapers that we as children dreamed of becoming one day. A deep, searing nostalgia fills this moment- I am filled with a sense of loss even as all my senses chronicle our achievements.

In the lengthening shadows and warm light, the dreams of old feel as unreal as the future that is now.