nabokov

Syncope – loss of sound, consciousness
Oneiric - suggestive of dreams
Chasubles – preist’s robes
Roiled - turbulent
Ineffable – indescribable, overwhelming
Parquet – wooden floor
Linden – tree with fragrant leaves

I shall read Nabakov with help of a dictionary, then my life will be enriched like the post-composted university lawns

strict schedule

strict writing schedule. just keep forgetting to blog. have successfully stayed away from expensive gym, citing health care reasons - tooth reacting to cold air plus friend's advice to start eating healthy before exercising, which seems sound - obviously, utter bollocks of an excuse.

made list of writers i have to read soon as i can get library access again - Borges, nabakov, carver, irving. maybe mailer, though im not a big fan of war fiction. right wing action ones yes - loooved alistair mclean as a kid, read everything he ever wrote, but left wing agonising psychological political dramas.. well, shouldn't judge before i read should i? i did love Apocalypse Now, after a fashion.

too lazy to correct typo. should get back to novel.., i've been holed up in my room last 4 days, with no contact with humans xcept for regular msn and flatmates in the kitchen. working wonders for concentration..., im half in this world, half in my novel world.. wish i could completely go into it for a couple of months... but work descends with the onset of term 2, jan 14th. and oh hell, new years eve party to attend, that so gonna shatter my routine and concentration. and yes, running so low on food; have to flyvisit sainsbury tom morning - im thinking aloud. must stop. get back to writing. yoo hoo.. ok, pretending enthusiasm... writing is exerting.. and im a lazy bunny.

Beastly Chirstmas

This is my idea of a nightmare. Everything shuts down for the holiday season. I mean absolutely everything. I'm shut up in my room, sick. no medicines. worse.., no books, not one single book to read, no television, no internet, nothing. I'm not sick enough to be unconcious, I'm only sick enough to not venture out, plus I have toothache. Everyone's gone home. The whole world's gone home.

Straight out of a Stephen King novel.

Thankfully, there's internet, and i'm getting better. i have a couple of friends left, stranded like me, and my flu's goin away. But the book situation sucks. Been reading on the net, but despair at having finished sherlock holmes collection, and that was ideal for net. everthing else, i need physical book.

ah.... agatha christie. not in the same league, but will do.

need real books...

was lying in bed reading from laptop. simulation: lay on side, tilted laptop to simulate book, shut off vents, laptop overheated, tripped itself shutdown. Horror. Thankfully, switched on alright after it cooled down.

whew!

no laptop will equal total death in current situ.

asked dyslexic friend who's never been to library to borrow books for me - he goes 10 mins before closing time (final closing time before christmas vacation), can't find anything I want, stays till lights go off, triggers some alarm, gets caught by a horde of security guys, and calls me up to describe how he grabbed two books just as the lights went off, but wasn't allowed to check them out. urrgh.

Well meaning orphan friend (like myself here) cooking 'traditional' vegetarian christmas dinner tomorrow. Last year I couldn't eat a bite of the bland veggie nightmare. Tomorrow, I'm taking honeydew melon and chocolate cake and red wine for strength.

Burning Down

Went to bed sickie. Spent most of day in bed. No gym. Cold has ripened; fruits greener and thicker. More satisfying to blow.
Random bit of grossness please be excused.
Why am I writing in this weird disjointed fashion? Brain refuses to make effort. Numb.
Tooth behaving. Only hurts like a bastard when I let cold air waft over it, or hot. It likes things to be luke warm. Considering this is december and in student acco, everything is either too hot or too cold (radiator, shower, kitchen taps, basin taps, people's attitudes... now I'm getting carried away. So the trick to keep tooth happy is to keep my mouth absolutely shut.
Annoying about gym. Don't want to fall more sick by venturing in cold (5 minutes walk) to gym, exerting oneself on treadmill, take shower each time before entering steam, sauna, blah, finish with a shower, wade back in cold winds to warm filthy room and collapse sick again.
But come what may, I'm going to gym tomorrow. All that money!
Having said that, maybe I shouldn't mention that I'm venturing all the way into town to watch the Wallace and Grommit movie. Even if I'm in deathbed, I will drag myself to it. Been looking forward to see it since months. Went with cucumber man when it came to the cinema, but was soldout. Probably one of the few housefuls in the history of Lancaster Cinema. Usually it's empty, and stinks. And the usually practical Britons have slipped up this once where they have an 'interval' before the movie starts. I'll never be able to understand the logic of that. Why would people want a wee/snack break 5 minutes after they have sat down?
Anyways its now running in Dukes, and I love that place; they don't have weird intervals.
Going to see movie with this guy called Kuan Fu. Looks like Jackie Chan. I call him kungfu. Can you blame me, with a name like that? He is the first chinese (oops, Taiwanese, I think) guy in the world to fancy an Indian chick. Or thats what it feels like in this Indian/chinese proliferating place where they have absolutely no eyes for each other.
rrrrghhh..., must crawl back to bed to recover from exertion of writing blog entry, and be in presentable condition for kungfu.

Misery...

I've never had a toothache before in my life. I have it now. It's not pretty. I also have a monstrous cold moving in like monsoon clouds. Heavy, with the flashes and chills and wind factor. The works.

Joined posh gym today. The first time in my life. Insane. Can't afford it; but convinced myself that I deserve to spend the money I saved by not attending graduation ceremonies by splurging on something luxurious, as well as beneficial. Loved the treadmill. Revelled in steam room, sauna and jacuzzi, hoped steam room will flush out all the viruses, but they've come back with full vengance now. Will go again tomorrow and stay in steam room till I feel the mocrobes boiling.

Now have to buy posh track suit to wear in posh gym, and posh two piece swimwear. Eurrgh. Upside - Theres a free fruit basket from which I can grab lotsa fruit, but attendees always looking; so will restrict myself to one/two. Damn.

Felt stupid when during induction, instructor had attitude that said, you little rich foreigner, you're never gonna use all the equipment here, you're just wasting my time. And I didn't have any intelligent questions to ask. Dabbled with cross trainer but forgot how to set it, so pretended to exercise diligently for 10 minutes whilst watching a rather dumb cartoon show on the mounted TV.

Tomorrow treadmill half hour. Row boat thing - 15 minutes. Steam and Sauna 10 mins each and jacuzzi 10 minutes. Havta get money's worth. Oh yes, 2 fruits.

woe this toothache and cold. can't afford bloody dentist.

GODDAMN Foghorn

Wish I would stop sounding like a goddamn foghorn. Deafening, nasal. Wish I wouldn't splutter out half chewed phrases that begin in a rush of heat and stop in awkwardness.
What I want to be, is thoughtful, considered, with lilting tones carefully weighed and gracefully uttered. What I want to do is sing out sentences in which every word is chosen, inevitable, lstring out into a gurgling lush river.
What I want to be is goddamned Oprah.

Wibbly Wobbly Christmas Do

Got a vibrating soap and extra large long johns for this guy Rob, Susie's fiance who I hardly now, and the bugger wasn't very impressed. 0 sense of humour. waste of £ 1.99 .

Got Alex, big Ed's girlfriend, wild cherry and strawberry flavoured lubricants, perfumed rose petal type bath stuff, and a counting book on bananas, he he. she i think liked them, but typically, didnt manifest any sort of enthusiasm.

Tony disappointed me. I was so thrilled that i got him the perfect presents. Jokey that they were. I even felt, all giggly and lightheaded while paying for them, that if I were him, I would fall in love with me the instant I opened the wrappers. Narcissa.

I got him a pair of boxers as he keeps forgetting to wear his underwear to work; a really cool 'Be a Detective' book with a file of info about a crime he should solve, complete with a Do not Disturb Detective at Work door sign, a badge, clues etc, in film noir Philip Marlowe style, wich is precisely why the gift, as his favourite genre in his film studies is that and we have been discussing Holmes and Raymond Chandler a lot between burgers.

Also a cute story book about a cat into which I slipped a written quote about the unadulterated cat thats there on top of my blog - this because he and Emma have 2 cats.

He just frowned several times, was insulted that the boxers were too small, that the quote was bizarre and the detective book childish. Even complained to me about the silliness of the things.

Hmmm..., why do I bother? Silly cow. Me of course.

Giggin' Frogs

http://www.nwmangum.com/Frogs/
I'm not sure how to arrange my thoughts about this webpage I came across. On the one hand, its monstrous (notice with particular intensity the captions), on the other, I made the bar frogs picture my desktop background.

annoyment

Our youngest aunt, Ranchitam chitti,said she had to go to Kattukolli to weed the groundnut patch, and offered to take us with her. Anand dug deep into his trunk and brought out his tightly wrapped newspaper bundle that contained many little bundles tied with cotton string. Each mysterious bundle of musty newpaper and white crisscross strings held a potent ingredient that went into the maanja. He alone knew in what order and in what manner each had to be unveiled and used.
So fresh after breakfast, my granny repowdered our faces, buckled my sandals, and off we went. we three, Ranchitam chitti in her yellow print saree with white flowers, red dot bindi and mallipoo carrying a wirebag with a pot with a broken handle and a blackened ladle, Anand in his black shorts and brown half slacks with brown stripes, me in my favourite sleeveless frock that mother stitched for last year's Deepavali. dark kaapi and light kaapi coloured bunches of little flowers all over, frilly sleeves and hem lined with lace that only reached my knees.
we had to walk on a narrow path, that led from the last house in the Marapattu (ours), bordered the rice fields of my granny, fallow fields of our neighbours of the Parvatam house, cut across the shopkeeper Kaali anna's mango orchard, rounded the big open well of our mango orchard, and reached the main road. the road connecting Madras to Bangalore. The main road that pushed lorry drivers to race like maniacs that had killed two of our cows (blackie cow and red dotted cow which had been pregnant) last year through the sheer carelessness of the servant boy, who we promptly dismissed.
The path was so narrow, so only one adult or two children or one cow could walk shoulder to shoulder. Ranchitam chitti walked first, holding the rope of the white cow that walked behind her. Ofcourse Anand wouldnt walk with me, he always walked in front of me, but behind the cow trying to avoid its swishing tail fanning away mosquitoes and carrying his newspaper bundle. I walked with my buckled new sandals, touching every bush of touch-me-not on the way watching it shrink with fear and shyness, and collecting little purple flowers and big yellow flowers for my Science Holiday Homework and secretly breaking off leaves of --- the oozed poisonous milk that I let drip fascinatedly squeezing all along the way.
Once we reached the main road, we had to cross it, then we would leave the village behind and enter the territory of the hills. after looking right first, then left and then right again, the three of us but not the cow that only kept chewing and salivating and swishing its tail, we crossed the road in a sprint, for the mad crazy lorry drivers would be driving so fast that they would be upon you and over you and away in a quick breath, and then where would you be?
From now on the path would be wider, for we would be walking along the sandy flood water canals. It seems that long long ago, the river Paalaru used to flood when it rained, so long ago when it actually had water in it, so they had cut these canals out of solid earth so that the water could be routed to the fields in Kattukolli and so that it wouldnt flood the villages. But now there were no rains, no water, only deeper and deeper and dryer wells, so the canal was safe to walk in, sandy and only strewn with dried hard balls of goat shit and occasional smelly lump of cowshit, strecthed on a winding route with scraggly bushes on both sides that the cow kept stopping to sniff at and to chew, my aunt muttering stupid cow can't you wait till you get to the field? and I kept stopping too at honey-suckle bushes to suck out the honey from the many tubes of tiny pink and orange flowers, and to pick red fruits that were edible, unlike other red fruit that could be poisonous and only my aunt could tell which was which.

Very Short Stories

I wrote a suicide note

And left my doors and windows open so the snow floated in and settled on my bedspread and arm chair and Oriental rug. It made for a much more dramatic abandoned room.

It was three a.m., and I had just come back, drunk, from a so-so party. The party was alright, the drinks were abundant, but the people were tiresome. People always are.

I first placed my little note on the bed, but the snow might have covered it up after I left, so I pinned it onto my dart board. Right in the bull’s eye, with a red feathered dart.

I fished out the car keys from my overcoat that I had just thrown on the floor. I didn’t take the coat; it wouldn’t suit such a mission.

I started my car after three tries, and headed to meet my maker. I had noticed several high bridges when I was driving to this place from France, three months ago. I had thought then that they were perfect jump off points. No I was driving to the nearest one.

The bloody car sputtered and died when I was still three kilometres away. Absolutely no vehicles in this time of the night. So I had to get off and continue on foot. I am still two and half kilometres away, it’s still snowing, and I really wish I had brought my overcoat.


That’s why I have to kill him

I could live with a snoring man. I have lived with a snoring man. I have lived with a man who used to snore every single night he slept. And I’m not talking about gentle fetching snores or that whispery snore of women. It’s a loud, shuddering monster of a snore I’m talking about. The kind that vibrates through wood. And walls.

Laughing is another matter. You might wonder how I didn’t notice James’s extraordinary laugh in all the three years that we were engaged, or why it didn’t bother me this much in the five years that I’ve been married to him. I don’t know.

All I know is that my love for him has gradually shrunk in these five years, and all that is left is a vicious putrid hate that focuses on just one aspect of his character.

His laugh. Early morning to late evening, at least twenty times a day. It starts from deep inside his belly as a slow rumble, gathers volume and girth as it moves up through rolls of skin, muscle and fat. When it reaches the throat, his shoulders are shaking in collusion, and it takes on a soprano timbre. He throws his head back at this moment, and as he reaches a crescendo, my head starts splitting.

I would be able to still tolerate it, if he didn’t laugh so often in early mornings, and catch my shoulder conspiratorially when he does.