Ask me no questions

And I'll try really hard not to tell you any lies.

I wonder why people think they have the absolute right to know everything about you. Today, I was struck by just how many things people ask you at first meeting, expecting you be willing to divulge without discrimination. This bit of world wisdom struck me today as I met someone new, and in the spirit of cordiality, asked her where she last worked. This unleashed a barrage of questions: How long have I worked, when am I leaving, where am I going, is this my first job, what was my first, blah, blah blah, blah, blah. As I brilliantly diverted her, my mind wandered.

Is it because, now, in the age of "sharing" everything, keeping info to yourself makes you an "introvert", even "a little shy, weird you know", "closed up"? We seem to be expected to tell all-who we  work with, what we do EXACTLY please, how much we make, what we want to do in life, where we WANT TO BE, who we're with, for how long, what the sex is like.We're even expected to rationalize our life choices and beliefs, explain why we go to our churches, give money to beggars, wear our hair this way, decide to not study, not marry, not have a happy brood of kids by the tender age of 22.

Someone called me "closed up" recently. A good friend too, at that. Well, hell, if I don't want to divulge it, you can't do a good damn thing about it :)

But tell me, really, where do you SEE yourself in 10 years? ;)

I love those moments...

When you want to bang your head repetitively against a hard wall. Really.

Or, as a happy alternative, lay your neck gently against the cold steel of a railway track. And then hope that Sri Lankan Railways is not on strike, again.

As a generally non-suicidal individual, these thoughts always fill me with a sense of being in no control whatsoever of my "Destiny" or life. Like today, for God's sake.

Assume you stand at a beginning of a branching in the road you're taking. Yes, very Robert freaking Frost and all that crap. So, then you try to take road A (Also here, it is assumed that you haven't spotted Road B yet), and as you're going all fine and dandy when POW! you trip and fall and fall face-first into...elephant poop. So now you're filthy and pissed and angry with life and yet not surprised because Life has so far been throwing dung in your face for a while now.

So, you trudge back to the road and stand there glumly contemplating, when it starts to rain, drenching you but also revealing...Road B.This reaffirms your faith in life and you happily set off down the road, picking flowers, strewing them at innocent bystanders, petting babies and other little animals and in general making a grand racket about how great Road B is.

Then, one fine day, you stumble across a by-lane, one that leads you straight into Road B. Straight, clear and obstacle free.

The point of this meandering analogy is lost even on me. However, initial sentiments remain firmly fixed in my head. As of now, listening to a Strauss marathon in hopes of reducing them.

On taking a big step

I don't generally like taking big steps; the idea of them are a little threatening to me and they make me feel like they should accompany big, life-changing decisions, of which I'm admittedly not the biggest fan :)
Big steps are all those which-in my head-are taken by people unlike me; you now, risk-takers, bungee jumpers, people who leave home when they turn 18, who go off to the hills with a man on impulse, people who do crazy things like I don't know, get a tattoo, pierce their nipple, have drunken sex on a beach in Hikkaduwa on an unforgettable evening.

Just not me.

Strangely though, what I have come to slowly but surely realize about big steps is that they are often not as daunting as they appear. Sometimes, in mid-step they are aborted, and you can only hope it's for a good reason.
Sometimes, you have to take a number of small, successful steps which will smoothly glide into a big, gliding glide-step thing.
Sometimes of course, as you're walking along alone, amid the aborted big steps and the mundane everyday steps, you find yourself stepping over a puddle, skipping over some rocks and suddenly on the threshold of something that promises to be a very big step indeed. At this point, the smartest thing to do is probably not ruminate over it too much, but to just say wtf let's do this shit and walk on, walk on, walk on because you can'r go back now.

Shame.

of all the various types and colours of shame I imagine a human can feel, the worst, the one which leaves you the worst off, is probably shame about who you are.

 this shame is accompanied by a litany of semi-shames; what you do, what you wear, who you drink with. why you wear what you do, why you speak the way you do.
who you look up to, who you don't. what you bother about, what leaves you with no sleepless nights. what you spend your free time not doing.
how you spend your talents, how you waste them away. what you spend your money, what you don't. what you don't do for anyone else.
what principles you forgo, what easy ways out you take.
which inner voice you listen to; inspirational, defiant, nonchalant or indifferent.

the same shame compounds itself with what you do, or don't,  to alleviate, move away, do better for yourself. 

Waiting

Single mindedly,
Unerringly
Waiting
Unable to move
Or do anything remotely productive
Vibrating inside like a string on an instrument
When the screws are tightened
And the pick, or the bow
Or whatever
Hasn't been place to make sweet music
Yet!
Single knee
Pumping endlessly
Impatiently
Heartbeat galloping steadily
But surely, skipping here and there
Stuttering when the possibility
Of final consummation of expectation
Arrives.

Waiting.
Impatiently! 

Small wonder :)

Highly inclined though I am to write another piece of "My life sucks so much" (only because it does), I want to write about something that made me inexplicably happy, yesterday;

 I felt a baby kick inside a mother's tummy :D :D

As I write this now, I can feel the little bump and the answering bumpity-bump in my heart. I'm not ashamed to say tears came in to my eyes then, as they do now :) My colleague is almost 6 months down the line now, and is rather heavily pregnant. Being the Strange Experience Whore I am, I've been hounding her ever since she said she felt the baby - it's a girl, they found out thanks to a filter-less doc- kick.
So far, the little imp has been evading me, to the point of stopping entirely when mom comes over to our section because there's so much foetal activity.

Aha, but yesterday I caught the little bugger in the act. My friend complained about how our little friend was kicking up a storm, upon which I did a bit of an experimental pregnant-belly-rub. Nothing. Try again, said my friend. So I did. And holy crap, I felt another, as yet unborn, human being kick feistily inside her mom's tummy!

In the midst of everything ugly we see around us, amid all the unhappiness we happily embrace as Karma, God has a sneaky habit of showing his face in sudden, unexpected moments of wonder in its purest, most iridescent form.

Dem Moments

You know those days, those unenviable moments? The ones on which you hear something, or see something that gives you a funny feeling? Like something clicks inside you, or you get a weird clutch inside your stomach. Sometimes it happens because you meet someone who you know will be in your life forever, or will affect your life inexplicably. I suppose Love At First Sight would work like that.

Other times it's because whatever you experience makes you realize how life could have been different if the cosmos - or God, or Karma- had felt a little different about you. A little more benign, a little less benevolent, a little more inclined to help you sort your shit out.

But well, that's life isn't it? Which is possibly the most TRITE thing you can say to make yourself feel better, but I have always maintained that cliches are cliches only because they're actually Universal Truths ;)