In one week I have  

i.              come down with fever

ii.            blacked out thrice and fainted twice

iii.           uprooted my toe nail and kept bleeding till I slept off and the blood coagulated sealing the wound. Something like that.

iv.           blacked out in the washroom and fallen on my ass twice and almost sprained my ankle

v.             suffered from extreme dizziness and nausea caused by extremely low blood pressure

vi.           been scratched by a mad woman in the local

vii.          narrowly escaped getting stung by a scorpion

viii.         gotten into two huge fights with one friend

ix.           watched people cope with bad breakup induced depression

x.            struggled to find words to comfort a nineteen year old broken heart while remembering a time when I was nineteen and heartbreaks were a dime a dozen and always swept under the rug lest people found out and laughed   

xi.           watched a friend deal with brain tumor and homophobic parents while doing little more than standing back and well, offering some well-meant, but clichéd and tired words of comfort over the phone from office at 10 in the night

xii.         lived on only cold soggy Maggi and Dunhill Switch

xiii.        met parents splitting up with kids left to deal with the situation on their own

xiv.        argued with roommate who came down with viral trying to get her to do the whole steam-Vicks-Crocin thing  

xv.          dealt with clients making your life look like a ppt on How-to-spot-the-workaholic

xvi.        realized my father is growing old and I have not seen him in seven months and that these days the only words I speak to him are “Had dinner? Yeah even I had. Going to sleep now. Good night.” while struggling with a broken umbrella in Lower Parel station

xvii.       spoken to journalists abusing me in a language I do not speak and hence could not salvage the situation

xviii.      effectively ended a not-so-long but very intense friendship and did not have the time to give a fuck about it

xix.        realized one never really completely stops being sixteen; one simply learns to ignore and never talk about it

xx.         cried only once when Gandalf the Grey fell into the abyss in the Mines of Moria

I think I wanna go to Israel now. 

I just realized...

...I don’t like weekends much. I mean people crave for weekends. Even I do. Sitting in office till late at night slumming it out over reports that can bring dead people back and kill them all over again out of sheer boredom, all I crave for is glorious weekend when I can get an extra hour of well-deserved shuteye before the bai comes at an ungodly hour and wakes us all up with Didi Rin sabun khatam ho gaya in such an injured voice that you almost feel sorry. For her. Self pity comes later on Sunday night.

But I digress.

Yes so I realized I dislike weekends. You see on a normal office-going weekday I have to wake up at 7, take a shower, make breakfast, eat it, make my bed, iron clothes, deal with bai-garbagewallah issues and I am out by 8.30 sharp. Even though it sounds boring and mundane and I complain about it, I like it. (I complain because you know, complaining is so much fun, sometimes.) This routine, this is almost like a comfortable space. It is predictable, safe, comfortable. The nice kind of predictable, if you know what I mean. 

You know it can’t go wrong. You shower on time, you eat all your meals, you get enough sleep (actually *I* don’t but that’s not the point I’m trying to make here), you are never late for work etc.

But weekends? Bah. Your Saturday morning goes in catching up on those lost sleep time. You wake up at 7 (because of aforementioned bai), get up at 11.30 feeling like a dump because you haven’t showered or eaten any breakfast. Then you are too lazy to shower and fix something you call lunch and your mother shudders at (read: cold, soggy Maggi/cereals) and eat. Your face looks all puffy and you have bags under your eyes. Your hair looks like vegetable. By 2.30 your head starts hurting again and you feel woozy because either you have had too much sleep or not. If you have a non-existent social life you stay at home and try to read/smoke/watch something on your laptop but you can’t because that head-throb has turned pretty bad by now and you feel tired and listless. But you cannot go back to sleep because hey it’s Saturday and it’s a weekend and you are supposed to do things you don’t get to do on normal weekdays-like staying up really late reading/watching something/talking to people and by the time you do manage to crawl to bed (or in my case, slump onto the sofa with the laptop on my tummy almost burning my flesh) your eyes burn like hell.

Sundays are even worse. I mean, it is like Saturday only but somehow it gets worse because probably you have been doing the whole getting-up-late-not-eating-not-showering-nursing-headache thing all over again but it’s been two days in a row and by Sunday evening you get that ‘what am I doing with my life?’ feeling.

And if, you are this social animal/person who really enjoys a healthy number of nightouts every month/person who hates or sucks at socializing but will because someone told him to get a life, you will go out on a Friday night which means you will spend your Saturday morning at a friend’s place feeling that horrible feeling you get when you really just want to get some sleep at your own place but you can’t. Then you drag yourself home and do the whole not-showering-not eating thing again because you feel sick and sleep-deprived. Then god forbid, if you again go out on a Saturday night you wake up with an alcohol induced temporary blindness/blackout/something to that effect on a Sunday morning. And because pretty much everyone around you is in the same or much worse state of inebriation, you don’t get the motivation to get up, shower, eat and sleep like a human being who wants to live to see his/her grandchildren.

See the problem? You get no rest, something you have been pining for the whole week. You don’t get to eat because, well, I just explained why so please scroll up and read. Your whole weekend is a haze where even your existing bank balance on a Sunday evening does not make you jerk into consciousness. And basically pretty much all you think all this while is…well…yes the same old ’what am I doing with my life?’.

I don’t know. Don’t get all judgmental. I have tried reading on weekends but the headache gets so worse and I feel so distracted all the time that all I manage to do is keep reading one line almost thrice before I realize I am doing that thing where I read one line thrice because I am plain distracted. I have tried getting some sleep but even that doesn’t help much. I have lied to people who want me to attend their parties that I have other plans just to stay home but even that doesn’t help. (I am sorry and I love you all even though I really don’t understand why some of you are still friends with me because you clearly see I am lying and I don’t wanna come to your party) Because even at home I feel listless. I make it a point to not check my mail or go online even once during the weekend.  I never ever make any plan unless it involves me and only me going to a bookshop and reading quietly, not taking calls, not replying to text messages or anything. But I don’t even have the energy for that kind of thing these days.

And now with all the religious frenzy the good people of Dadar have worked themselves into for Ganpati (accompanied by loud beating of the dhol and the loud singing of bhajans as if their life depended on it), sleep is a distant never-to-be-fulfilled dream.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for festive euphoria and shor sharaba during festivals. I mean, hell, I come from a place where during pujo we shut down offices, banks, schools, colleges, maybe even hospitals and police stations going by the spiraling crime rate at that time...so I am no one to judge. But you do get my predicament now, right? RIGHT?

I should stop whining and go beat up whoever gave me that stupid crap about my life being too predictable and the importance of going out there and doing something and feeling upbeat all the time. I want my weekdays. I want my meals on time, regularly taken showers and everything.  I want my routine. I crave for my routine.

Now go. Go start judging right away. I won’t hold that against you. 

I just realized I like doing tags. No really.

1. Pick out a scar you have, and explain how you got it:

Right ankle, fell on the floor from a desk which then fell on my ankle

2. What is on the walls in your room?

Posters. Paintings (ahem) by roommate and yours truly.

3. What does your phone look like?

The metal casing is chipped in places. The screen is scratched.

4. What music do you listen to?

Anything. Well not really, but I am too lazy to elaborate

5. What is your current desktop picture?

Benedict Cumberbatch in and as Sherlock with a violin

6. What do you want more than anything right now?

Go home for Durga puja, earn more, go to Israel.

7. What are you listening to?

Some electronic music (I think it is called EDM) being played on co-worker’s computer.

8. The last person to make you cry?

Last time I cried it was because a friend was sick. No one made me cry per se.

 
9. What is your favourite perfume/cologne?

No such things as favorite yet

10. If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?

Meat. Fish. Alu posto. Pasta from Mumbai Deli. Salad. Roast chicken from Piccadilly.

11. Who was the last person you made mad?

I don’t remember. No really. I don’t remember the last time I cared enough to get mad at someone.

Today someone I once used to be very pally with randomly pinged me on Facebook. Normally I do not bother to reply to Facebook chat messages (or text messages, mails, missed calls….and now I seriously wonder how I still have people in my life who I call ‘friends’. But I digress.). But this is someone I had once decided to share an apartment with and we bonded big time over our futile attempts at house-hunting in town (err…not so much of a rookie mistake this time as a stubbornness to accept our church mouse poor state and a desperate attempt to not leave town and move to *shudders* Sion.).

But the moving in together bit did not happen since we disagreed over rent, location and logistical issues (she refused to leave town; I realized I cannot afford it etc etc.). And I chose to stay in this suffocating, minor claustrophobia-inducing, plastered-with-saffron-political-posters-propagating-distrust-of-the-north-Indian-immigrant-influx-in-this-city, cacophonous crowded urban hell hole called Dadar (which, btw I like. Call me mental but I like Dadar.)

We had a minor argument. And then we stopped talking. Or rather I stopped all forms of communication with her because I have the attention span of a 2 year old and very very limited capacity of caring.

Today she pinged me out of the blue and I was pleasantly surprised to note that the old camaraderie which I thought had effectively died that one unpleasant evening was still intact. I was happy. And immensely sad. And it is not my neurosis speaking.

It sucks to know a person your age does not hold back grudges and can sort out past issues (however trivial they may be/sound to an outsider...which in this case is you dear non-existent reader) and you cannot. It sucks to know there’s someone your age who does believe in getting in touch with people he/she once fell out with and all you do is cut people loose from your life if things do not go your way.

 It sucks to know you are not one of them.