Social Butterfly

Who the hell am i? Am i socially awkward? Only inwardly. I do things which make me cringe, take controlled breaths. But i keep doing them. So after a long time i went for a huge social gathering. I had abstained form them in my previous company, but since this is the first one in my new company i cant give it a skip. I have to give it a shot, and in all subsequent ones excuse yourself by saying i tried.

Well, it wasn't so bad, i might just go the next time it happens. But there is this bad taste in the mouth that stays the next day like a hangover. When you wake up next morning feeling that maybe you should have hob-nobbed a little less. Should have talked a little less.

Are there are two mes. One; left on my own i could just space out and stare at the sealing, just while the time away. But throw me among people, my awkwardness comes out by turning into this flitting social bug. My awkwardness is not with people, but with me. I am just not sure how to let out the other me in public. Or is it just two mes? Both of us dont understand each other. Sounding schizophrenic or Gemini?

Oh but i do understand one thing form yesterday. There are three kinds of people:
Those who will tell you what you want to hear.
Those who tell you what they want to say.
Those who tell you what they know you don't want to hear.

Crazy maybe i am

I am dying of boredom

I am so restless

I could burst out of the building and that wouldn’t be enough

This is like a pile of muck is piling exponentially fast on me.

Things are so still, among the clickety-clicks of key strokes that I might just drop into a coma and never wake.

The rant in my head seems to be receding quietly in a corner, somewhere I sit and watch dispassionately.

The faint voices echoing around me all speak this despicable tongue that it makes me want to stuff their mouths with old rotten rag pieces and then throw them in the elevator duct.

Getting rid of people cant become such a huge all consuming agenda, but God it has. Where have all of them come from, is this massive basicness going to suck the wind out of my lungs?

It is good if you are not spoiled by all the media hoop-la around you, but only if it’s a sage-like abstinence which drove you there not blatant ignorance.

When you are aware that Puri jagannath is a regional film director but not that it is actually a very famous place on the map of India.

When you keep asking what is F.R.I.E.N.D.S, maybe it is excusable but seriously where do you live, cause I know where you breathe the majority of your living day lights. And that unfortunately my co-worker is in this office space we share.

Scratching my nails on my cardigan laced elbow I meditate on this inward decay, taking in less and less of this stifling air but still continuing to breathe for eternity. Why have I slaved into this, where should I run to from here?

Would answers ever be equal to the question I have? Or will unanswered ever-spawning questions always haunt me?

I have no idea. This is crazy, things suddenly in this little moment seem to have gone out of control. But the strange thing is I know like a screaming lunatic is silenced with electric shocks, the complacency and insecurities in me will keep me tied to this dog’s life, cause I have become one.

On Talking

Strange exercises these conversations can be. I always fully participate. It’s just how cautiously I tread that varies. I never draw back. My ideas bounced across the wall of your sympathetic or well meaning or derisive or cynical, or stupid or bored or naughty face. You could be anybody, very rarely somebody form work. No I am careful. Very. Would never let my thoughts go on their abandoned breezy run in a place like that. It could mean death to them. But if you show an inclination, few of them might make a little sound and reach your ears and the rest of them take form eagerly but stay in their phantom bodies uncomfortably residing in my head.

There are times when upon meeting you they have built into this wonderful castle of impressive ideas, thoughts, observations, feelings, misgivings that I would just stand back and admire. That’s a beautiful whiff of life you gave them. Seeing it makes me smile and thank you for helping me understand them and understand me.

Deadened me.

It’s a Tuesday morning at office, worse than a Monday morning can be. It was a long weekend. Another year has started. And I sit here lost among people I don’t give damn about. Building packages and reports I don’t give damn about. I am lost in a sea of cubicles. There are voices and murmurs around me. I can hear people fretting over DART application not working. They are all in a panic to submit their DARTs which are their weekly activity vs. effort report. Our delivery manager had walked in. He was telling my co-cubiclee about some bug found in her application. I wanted to yawn and blow him out of the building. The deadness of the place has deadened me.

A sneaky restlessness started creeping in right after I declared to a lunch companion of mine that I felt complacent here. Settled with the way things were. Happy just following the routine. Having breakfast at home, spending some time in office somehow, coming back home to cook, eat watching TV, and go to sleep. Lazing around on weekends, shopping maybe(something that I despised, the sight of malls and happy people in it used make me make a disappearing wish.)

And now I cant take it, I don’t want to come to office anymore. I wish for different things. I want a life, where I don’t have to wear clothes which are called office clothes. I don’t want my work to be something which I don’t enjoy. I want to stop looking for gushes of travel escapades to bolster me up. I want to stop living life on little time which I take off from my work. I want my life to be lived every moment. I don’t want it to be rationed to me a morsel a day.

Me- a living embarassment to me.

I have to try, I have to really try. I have a major problem, I always always fall for the guys who act hard-to-get or maybe, I hate to admit are plainly not interested. These would be the guys who I would think of as a part of the crowd, but then something about their seeming disinterestedness would draw me towards them, though I would be telling myself, no no I loathe this guy. Yuck, eiu, I can positively puke at the idea of even looking at him.

And then BOING!!!. Another BOING!!!. “Yes a little more of the doormat treatment, please. Thank you.”, now I am drooling at the idol’s feet. I appall myself. I get pushed more and more to the edge till I find myself hypothesizing and drawing conclusions from even a sneeze. Yeah and in this pathetic stage I find myself again. Sheesh!!! I am living embarrassment to me. You know the best thing right now would be to fall over the edge and then walk on safe grounds again, with a bruised soul, till I rise again to fall 

Need to keep moving.

I guess it bothers me to stay put at one place, it relly bothers , that’s why you have to keep moving, and there is no sense of belonging... :-). Not that I complain, you just have to get to know yourself I guess, you know whenever I have been on my roaming spree, I would notice there were a lot of people like me , a map or a book in hand, bag on shoulders, clicking here and there, noting down this and that in diary, and then these firangs , especially women who stand all the Indian eve teasing , the confusing trains, and still how much at home they seem to be traveling around, it really bothers you , you have to heed the call , and I guess though you don’t know anybody around you who does it, you might not see the logic in it, but once you get into it, you would immediately know, this is it, you don’t think of yourself as a weirdo anymore, you relax and are happy to be, and then it stops bothering you , and you just become more receptive to these calls, and I guess keep getting more and more fine tuned to what is that makes you the happiest...

Yeah i am busy, bye

Listen, when I said, ”Yeah I am busy, bye”, all I wanted to really say was as follows:

I aint busy working my ass off, like you do, I aint busy spending my time chatting with the 100 people on my list, fooling myself that they are so fun to chat to, I aint busy exercising my charms and my good natured-ness on some fellow without ever actually giving a dime about them, just like you do, I aint busy just enjoying every mundane moment of the corporate environment around me.

But I am busy, untroubled in my cocoon, gobbling up new books, new movies, learning from them, changing with them, partaking a part of me the last time I read catcher in the rye, and discover something within me when tears warm my face, when I watch Dancer in the dark, busy turning the lines and recreating the image from the God of small things.
I am occupied … with things which are cherished by me, maybe in some time a void will appear, a void created by people left behind, but I guess that void is always there, and I would rather leave parts of it empty than let worms crawl into it.

Random snips- from a conversation one day

1. We are called homo sapiens , but years of 'civilized' living has made one organ 'the brain' go so disparate that though still physically alike on a mental scale we can be classified into many species.
2. Just another one of the millions of samples of homo spaiens crawlingon this planet.
3. As in why are wearing clothes, animals are not, but if we dont cover oursleves then we are mad, as we are very different to not feel the need of it.
4. Lot of what we do is conditioned by the culture around, we never question it.
5. Sorry i know i do what comes within the least resistance path and gets me max satisfaction.

What about these songs?

Nothing compares to what you feel, when you just stumbled upon a song you absolutely just discovered and are going to enjoy for days to come. It started with Bob Dylan, Tambourine man brought me close to tears, I still cant say what it was, because I just would not call me a person who needs a little musical delight every now and then. I have enjoyed numerous songs, sang along at the top of my voice with my eyes closed, found myself short of sighs for few, gotten nostalgic, but the fact remains I cant figure out when would I need it, cause I have listened to it when I have a highly-critical need for it and what defines it, I have no idea.

Well, anyway while I was at it, Bob Dylan was the only one who made sense in the world; rather I was thankful that he existed and he wrote these songs otherwise I might just have drowned. Since I had been on the terrain of musical exploration which truly delights the self, I guess I added it to my list of basic needs now, just like other needs which we develop after a little familiarity with materialistic objects, it could be the longing for a certain cuisine, or the longing to be clothed in certain fabric. So every now and then over the past few months I would find myself band-hopping, seeking God only knows what, from Bob Dylan to Simon & Garfunkel to led Zeppelin to Pink Floyd to Bruce Springsteen. I would not be able to describe how great musicians they were, who a better drummer or a Congo player, I remember them and think of them as the emotions they evoke, as the rhythm they create, as to how pain-wrought or laze ridden the voice was. There was a certain fashion in which the words, the rhythm, the melody and the instrumentals would blend to create trademark music.

Feel like as Somerset Maugham said somehitng like, a fool who is moved by a work of art but does not know how to finger the techniques which bring to such heights.