Mine is your disregard for my poor heart which I gave up to you. What’s yours?

I have a steady static line that is lagging slightly behind in recent times. I press the on button, and speed into action only to be distracted by the bright colours streaming through the window. It has the soft glow of the evening sun’s last kiss and I must stand on the balcony and will the day good tidings. It rewards me with a cool breeze that momentarily lets me forget everything that is piled, pushed, gathering, and neglected in my life.

Via this wonderful site

The Daily Show Rocks!

I laughed and laughed until I cried and someone asked me, “What’s wrong with you?”

Implicit in the much-too-much quoted “factoid” (young people get their news from the Daily Show, Gasp!) is the suggestion that young people are stupid. As the years go by, I am beginning to think that the Daily Show is the only reliable news source on American cable television.

I am traveling again and caught a stupid cold-thing. I keep sneezing and growing red in the face. No fever yet, but head feels heavy and Chennai’s weather is not being nice to me. But other than that, the training is painfully boring. I will be glad to be home. There is something very soothing though about watching American television with decent internet speed. But I will be glad when it’s over.

This time around I traveled AC train. The things that make the upper class sections on the train special are simple things that could easily be incorporated into the sleeper coach class. Curtains, for example. And a more managed crowd. The AC is stifling. I hate being packed in a train’s AC. But I would go for that anyday, that the grim of the crowded sleeper compartments.

Via the Dish

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

For more images from this fascinating series, click here.

I meant to write about this last week. About how Diwali in India still sort of sucks. Picture in your mind a very old woman (90) walking. That careful, nervous way she is moving? As if each step is a little unsure of the ground underneath? That’s how I walked last week during Diwali.

Diwali induces this weird nervousness in my body where even if I know that a bomb will probably not go off, I am still anxious about it. It’s freaky. It does not help that my neighborhood was fucking crazy last week. At night, all you could see was fire and bombs. You could not go outside without risking stepping into a stray bomb. The scary part is when they simply light a bunch of them, there is some 10 minutes when it goes off, but not all of them goes off at the same time. So some stray bomb could go off several minutes later. It’s all fucked up. I did play with some fire-crackers, but mostly wished it would end already.

Interesting.  As I mentioned before, I have been fascinated by the writing process. And the causal way in which Waters describes the enormous hard work that goes into her writing is telling. Her books are so well structured and disciplined. Writing takes time and hard work and discipline—not just good ideas.

I am also struck that Waters is not bothered by the “lesbian writer’ label—to the extent that she feels the need to re-frame her latest novel as a “queer” novel despite a lack of lesbian (or gay) characters. (She has good points, but the explanation feels forced).  She even seems to feel the need to explain the heterosexual romance in “The Little Stranger” (as awkward). “Lesbian fiction” brings to mind a kind of novel that is largely reductive of the richness found in Waters’ work, so why embrace the title so. I thought it was interesting that while she had no issues with being pidgeon-holed as a “lesbian writer”, she corrects her novel’s characterization as a “ghost story”.

I loved The Little Stranger and was glued to it for much of the two weeks it took me to finish it. The ending did not have the grand splash that I was expecting, but I was satisfied nonetheless because the entire book was such a pleasure.

I actually like the idea, I just wish they wouldn’t call it “date rape-preventing lip-gloss“. Umm…

Managing director of the company 2LoveMy, Tracy Whittaker, explained that girls on a night out with suspicions about their drink can just dab the taper in, and watch to see if the colour changes to blue. “If they turn blue tell your friends immediately and get help from security and the police,” she explained.

This was cute. I don’t usually link to random blogs and quote them extensively (okay, no, I do all the time). But this post describes this middle-aged couple having a night out on the hip part of town while being hopelessly hip-free. I like to think of myself as above hip, too cool for anything in the world type. In other words, I sneer at everything. I am practically Buddhist without the requisite belief, faith or practice. It’s all in the mind.

Anywho. I especially liked this:

There were two sites we particularly wanted to visit. One was a funky yarn store my wife was interested in. It seems knitting has become not only a way to create thoughtful gifts for friends and relatives, but also an ironic statement on how life weaves together different strands of being and yet all you end up with is a washcloth.

and then this:

With no visible piercings and an entirely too sensible haircut, he was obviously not among the shop’s target demographic. When he had the nerve to ask the cashier where he might locate such a kit, he was told “nowhere in NoDa. You might try the CVS drugstore. We don’t carry that kind of thing at all.” Now if he wanted to knit himself a shirt from scratch, and use genuine virgin alpaca to do it, this would be the place.