Punctuated Scoop

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again - Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

These are lessons I swallowed up along the way and lessons in the making that I scribble on grocery lists, the back of an old economist, on a memory charter that grew dysfunctional in time and on walls yet to crack open

The first one is a weird statistic I have been musing over ever since I have had the luxury of time on my hands from not having to fix broken pieces of a vase that I once thought to be my raison d'etre

Little did I realize that these pieces were never meant to be fixed and their beauty lay in hopelessly lying around. 

My vase was a gorgeous cerulean blue in its prime and the beauty that seeped from its nearly perfect shape and form was astonishing. 

But the more I look the more I realize how perfect each broken piece of the same vase is and how each broken edge adds to a finish that seems nothing short of breathtaking and yet surprisingly and holistically complete

 

We are all vases – tall blue, short green, luminous, crimson, earthy, glass, Greek, porcelain, brittle, broken

Back to the weird statistic: the number of smart, single beautiful and genuinely interesting women I have known are hopelessly vulnerable to bouts of incredibly low self-esteem and are living with a horrifyingly flawed assumption of not being ‘good enough’ for themselves and the people around them. This statistic has been disturbingly gnawing at me and sometimes I wake up to be such a woman

I love how dangerously forgetful men can be in the matters of their heart and their own taking. The only time you know they are acting stupid is when they confuse ambition and foresight

And yet it could only take a man (a man who we all wish would exist more often) to culture and grow a feminist prerogative, because only then would it be appreciated and not taken for granted 

So here goes an honest confession made well before its time: I am sorry I cried foul. I am sorry I said it was all about sexism because it isn’t and it never was. I do not defend my gender anymore.  Selective sexism is here to stay. I think I appreciate the fact that we are all terribly flawed and the only way to deal with this massive unfairness is to know where each one of us is coming from.

What I do, however, defend in all honesty is courage in the face of defeat and a kind of rare courage that will never show, but will glisten on your forehead and trickle down the back of your ear. You know this is a defeat that will have a brighter tomorrow

So I decided to take a step back, to look at the world as you might not see it. There are traces of your own life missing color and you have to fill them up – that is your streak of madness, your streak of sanity waiting to be withheld, waiting to be snatched away and yet so desperately wanting to stay

And I was a child again, running back to where it started, prioritizing aspects of my life I have no control over, giggling until the alcohol wears off, filling in journals with details that define the infinite aspects of pointlessness, falling asleep at odd hours, dreaming big, clutching at my coffee mug like there is no tomorrow. This was healing I suppose

This time I pack my bags humming ‘the Voyager’ by Jenny Lewis

She asked to be ruined after all. Yes she did, she even begged for it

14:23 hours. Sunday.

‘’The fact that you are so neurotic about your past lovers makes it both fortunate & predictable that you have so few of them.’’

-          Ned Beauman

From here on each of my posts would be flagged by a quote that left me wide eyed and scrambling for a pen.

Also, you don’t need to write a book to use a quote. No pressure.

14:23 hours. Sunday.

I was am a wreck, I can’t possibly expect a half-baked blog post to come to my aid. Not even the half bottle of Vodka that my dimpled boy left over from the night before, not the ‘not eating’ and not the trying to sleep my life away. None of it sweetheart. None of it you whore.

All the while I was writing this post I must tell you I switched screens thrice to work on an email and never got around to completing it.

Thought: Obsessive compulsive cleaning doesn’t work out too well when you deprave yourself of caffeine.

Ever tried making a list of Murphy’s laws that apply to your life? I tried mine over the weekend and I realized this could just be ‘the book’ that I never ended up finishing.

My ‘Warhol’ course evidently added to the blur. The blur and the preoccupation that always was, and only until recently that which turned out to be the mainstay of my half-baked existence. It was a beautiful blur though.

Week one of the course was reading, reading and more reading followed by interviews where Warhol knew better than to make sense. The handouts included a section on ‘The Pinocchio theory’ (I could take these thoughts to bed, night after night)

Warhol says that each of us has an exchange value – a fetishistic aura that far exceeds its materialistic and utilitarian properties as objects.

The argument of ‘cult value’ v/s ‘exhibition value’ was a loss/loss.

At the end of it, we conclude that your ‘aura’ is different from your ‘product’ but both of them are for sale.

I tried to use the phone less, I knew I sounded a mess as well.

This is my third black coffee at the café. It would be incredibly embarrassing to down a fourth cup, but to hell with it.

My idea of vacation would be a sabbatical. On weekends, I study art by myself. There is nothing entirely wrong with me. I haven’t swallowed up the bitter pill, not as yet. Don’t intend to. They make you slow. (PS: This just happens to be the era of microblogging and four worded sentences are absolutely not retarded anymore)

All of this would have been incredibly funny if it didn’t come with a clause. A clause that claimed that my best attempts to organize myself were falling off the hook. That’s life and that’s art – colors, lines, textures and hues. Sometimes there is a pattern to it.

A conclusion: I did fine, I think. I didn’t wreck a marriage or cheat on the love of my life or kill somebody or vandalize property.

My life isn’t that bad, but hey, at least I am trying to be creative about it.