The Art of Warfare

The way to a man’s heart has always been through his stomach, I know, but sometimes, given a guy’s penchant for indecision, this route seems fairly fraught with trouble too! Especially when the guy in question is your five year old li’l boy.

My pride and joy, one fine day, concludes that I’m slacking way too much in the culinary department, and decides to take matters into his own little hands. So he comes up to me, and with some hostility announces that he’s had enough of me taking short-cuts with meals and calling French toast and pancakes dinner, and that if he needs to become strong like them power rangers, he needs to eat chicken and atleast two types of vegetables every day. For the briefest moment, I wonder if the big guy had been coaching him with this little speech, but then change my mind. He quite follows the stomach to heart rule without much ado.

So, I stare incredulously at my brat for a full minute, allow some mental wheels to turn, click into place and then with a big grin, agree to help him turn into ranger material. He scoots, with a bigger grin plastered on his impish face! As far as he knows, he’s won the battle. And all this drama because he hates eggs in any form, even in pancakes! Go figure!

Thus begins the veggie onslaught at A-102! You name it, and I cook it! But like I already know, while I’m quite the wizard (albeit lazy and uninspired) with cooking foodies, there’s only so much veggies a five year old can take.

Two days and five different vegetable preparations later, said little boy returns. Oozing confidence, he informs me that he’s had enough vegetables to give him ranger muscle power, thank you very much, and if I so wish, I may now make pancakes and French toast again. Ask him if he’s sure he doesn’t want more veggies, especially greens, and he’s quick to tell me that he’s sufficiently nourished to last a year. (Yes, for the tiny mite that he is, he does use rather big words)

Yes, I do wish. And I agree.

So maybe every now 'n then, we gals ought to stop and let the guys win a few battles before we subtly win the war.

And what’s for dinner tonight, you ask? I dunno. I’m having trouble deciding between take-out, ordering-in and driving thru…

But in the end...

...it doesn't really matter.

"I'll take a quiet life
A handshake of carbon monoxide
No alarms and no surprises
Silent, silent
This is my final fit..."
 
♪ ♩ ♫ ♬ ♪...
 
Listening to 'No Surprises' by Radiohead. You wanna?

The N,N-Dimethyltryptamine Trip

Last night I had the strangest dream. No, not strangest…I’ve had stranger ones before, and I do mean the kind where you see your friends supporting a few extra appendages, fancy tentacles…that sort of thing, excavating on the surface of Mars, all the while dressed in some kinda shiny fireproof outfit that does much to enhance their appearance.

No, this was different. This saw me laid to rest in a coffin, peaceful and stone cold. With people walking in an orderly line around it, to view me!! View me!!! And at one time I remember yelling at my parents when the topic of marriage had come up, that the only way anyone could ‘view’ me was over my dead body! (Hmm…maybe the things you claim have a way of returning to claim you!)

Well, whatever. The point is not that I’d died, but how! Because, that, my dream did not reveal! Ah, that makes for interesting discussion over a hot cup of tea. Yes, the beverage and the temperature it’s at are both important. Coz if anyone bugs you too much during the course of said discussion, you proceed to make yourself a hot cup of tea and pour it on the lap of whoever’s stressing you out!

Oooh wayyyyt! There you go…maybe I just discovered cause of death! Simple retaliation from injured party with blunt, heavy object! Now, did that turn my frontal lobe into putty and deliver me immediate vegetable status or did it give me a decisive shove towards the light and ‘up, up and away’ me? (For a moment there, I felt like superman! No, it wasn’t the vegetable part that did it, coz I’m not sure whether superman’s abilities here on our planet can be linked to vitamins obtained through ingesting carrots or okra…but the up, up and away bit.)

So, ah! I see the light. Rather, I saw that bright light which apparently guided my soul in the direction of St Peter at the pearly gates, and left my earthly form in that coffin, to be viewed (by me in my dream?!)

However, I’m awake now, and technically my mug ain’t grinning at you from the obituaries column in the papers, so I’m thinking... (Thinking…which means my frontal lobe, pea-sized though it may be…is still in working order! Mass relief…knowledge, that.)

Anyways, I’m thinking that this dream has left me with one displaced, yet disturbing thought. About the vegetable state of being…and that I wouldn’t ever want to be there. So, here’s my declaration, just in case…

I, Chellsie, being of sound body and mind, declare that in no condition should I be kept alive artificially; under no circumstance should my fate rest upon doctors who would simply like to see the length of their bills grow, and lawyers who couldn’t affix a light bulb to save their lives. Hence, when atleast seven days have passed and I have failed to request even one of the following:

Chocolate

Tea

Pizza

Cosmopolitan

Sex

Chocolate

Chocolate

Muffin

Cake

Chocolate

Sex

Ice-cream

Dad’s chili chicken

Chocolate

Breezer

Sex

Chocolate

You may safely presume that I have fallen off the road to recovery and won’t be finding my way back ever. After such has been determined, I hereby instruct my next of kin and attending physician to yank the plug, save the environment some energy and call it a day.

PS- For the morons who are clueless about what N,N-Dimethyltryptamine is, but are hesitant to ask or too lazy to google it, allow me put you out of your misery.

Quite simply, it’s the stuff dreams are made of! ;)

Now if you want the science…It’s an endogenous substance speculated to play a part in dreaming as well as near-death experiences. It’s naturally produced in the human brain during roughly the first month after birth, following which it is stored there and released only at the moment of death. How neat is that!

Wake up! Now here’s the really cool part! It can be synthesized externally and yes, you can smoke it to dream up some wild, psychedelic stuff! But people, please! Say NO to drugs. Help bring the prices down!

End of science/economics lesson. Feel free to get back to your mundane, boring lives.
Cheers!

Heartache

Pain…It hits you sometimes, when you least expect it. A word that stirs a memory you’ve tried to repress, a date on the calendar that used to hold some significance, a song that carries you to another time and place…

And when it does, what do you do? Do you stoically veil the pain with a smile and hope that the smile will turn real in time, or do you let the weight of the memories crash into you and run you down?

Maybe you just have to live through it. Let it wash over you before it leaves you, hopefully taking with it some of the hurt, the anguish and the disappointment, so that the next time it strikes, the intensity would have dulled. And you’re left with something resembling hope, not for what is gone, but for the things yet to come.

You realize that maybe you were destined to be together, but only for a while…That though your time has passed, it has left behind with you, answers to questions that used to haunt, and lessons that perhaps no one else could have taught. And finally, you understand that having your happiness so contingent on another person is what eventually breaks your heart…and that it should never have to be that way.

 

Pain…There are no shortcuts to overcoming it, and there are no quick fixes. Maybe you just have to swim through it and do your best to keep from being sucked under. And wait and pray for the wound to heal and for your spirit to be restored.

But then again, who’s to say?

Because sometimes, you don’t recover. You simply survive.

it's Complicated!

A friend called this morning, simply wanting to know if it was worth all the pain, the ‘it’ implying love. This was the same someone who’d called three days earlier to tell me she was on top of the world, thanks to a certain someone. And then another friend tells me that she’s done being alone, that she’d give anything to meet her special someone now.

So what do I tell her? Do I give her the assurance she yearns for, and say that in time, things will be alright? Or do I tell her, rather heartlessly, that fairy tales and happily ever afters are quite simply that - make-believe stories. And do I tell the other, the same thing?

From the time we were little, we’ve heard and read fairy tales, with the same saccharine ending to them all, and nursed dreams of a prince charming sweeping us off our feet and carrying us off into the land of eternal happiness. And then one day, ‘life’ happens…and we grow up.

So what happens to those fairy tales and the happy endings we’ve always carried in our minds? The love we’ve secretly, desperately craved for in our hearts? Do they die a natural death or have their life beaten out of them? Or, is it hard to let go of that dream because there’s this tiny ray of hope that keeps it alive?

Maybe we really need to mark, learn and inwardly digest the fact that being alone doesn’t necessarily translate to being lonely, but at the same time realize that personal spaces, though closely guarded, need to be invaded every once in a while, for our own good.

Maybe at the end of the day, it’s simply enough to know that love turns up in the most unexpected places, and looking for it will only make the wait more cumbersome, and the heart more restless. That the fairy tale may not follow the same storyboard as in the classics, and that the knight in shining armour may need to be traded for an ordinary looking guy in ratty tees and scruffy jeans. And that the happily ever after ceases to be important in the light of happiness now, in this moment.

And whether love is worth the pain…maybe every story is a fairy tale in its own right, and whether it ends well, or doesn’t, is simply a matter of perspective.

The real question however, is this. When we have found the person we are seeking, how do we know for sure, before it’s too late? Maybe we don’t. Maybe we never will. And therein lies the tragedy of it all.

Remembrance

Ever experienced that perfect moment when time seemed to stop just for you? When you wished you could somehow capture the essence of that moment and bottle it so you could lift the lid off and breathe in the fragrance every time you needed to feel that magic again?

It’s that slack tide moment, when the tide is neither coming in nor going out; when everything’s simply calm, still…perfect.

The flip side is that it passes so quickly. And as much as you may want to hold onto it for just that little bit longer, it slips out of reach and loses itself in time’s ever-rolling stream and becomes a memory.

I remember, once again.

That perfect moment.

And you.

the storyteller and his chronicle

We are all stories, unfolding day by day…

Is yours worth telling?

Friendship

It is indeed a universal truth that like poles repel while unlike poles attract each other. Three people from three different corners of the country were put together because of that one beautiful place called home. It felt like this friendship was just meant to be.

I met Priya and Purvi in the summer of 2008. It’s funny and bizarre how the three of us gelled well immediately. We had nothing much in common. Our religion, native place, personal interests, taste in guys, even ages are different. Purvi and I are both Gemini and Priya, a Scorpio, balances us.

In spite of conspicuously contrasting tastes we get along like a house on fire. Between the three of us, we don’t know what embarrassment is. We believe in enjoying ourselves and very selfishly do only that. With Priya and Purvi I can never worry about what the world shall think about me. It feels like we were just put together in the same place and accidentally, we bonded well. Maybe we were just meant to be friends.

I have never opened up to anyone until I met them. Whenever I pause for a second and look back at the past the very first thought that comes to my mind is of Priya and Purvi.

I don’t remember most of my experiences before 2008. Maybe I learnt how to enjoy the journey called life after I met these fantastic people.

In times high and low they’ve been there for me ALWAYS!!!

We’re like three differently shaped and colored fridge magnets sticking to a common surface called ‘The Woods’. Try as you might we just cannot be separated. We may be miles apart but we’re still tied together by a strong bond.

 

After all, isn’t this what a great friendship is all about?

_________________

Vianca Damani

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  ________
 
Shoumik De
http://shoumikde.blogspot.com/