Chickens!

Isn't is strange and interesting and weird how when we talk about the food, it's always singular, "chicken", but when we speak of the creature, it can be plural, too?

~Sam, who has a marching tune stuck in her head and can't stop marching (though no one around here seems to consider that unusual, strangely enough).

Best feelings in the world.

• Long Hot Showers. Feeling the tension ease off as each drop of water acquaints itself with your shoulders.
• Macaroni and Cheese when you've been starving for hours. 
• An incomprehensibly good song that drives you insane.
• Books that make you want to scream out for the character's agony or burst into flames for their happiness.
• Slowly crawling back into your warm sea of blankets knowing that you have more time to sleep on a cold winter's day. 
• The scent of rain and feeling its spray touch your skin.

 Most other people would probably say that Love is one of the best feelings in the world, but I don't know anything about it, so I don't believe in it. But for now, "These are a few of my favorite things" as Julie Andrews so beautifully sang in The Sound of Music.

This is Malko saying 

Maytheforcebewithyou

Why must I always want to write when I have nothing to say?

Choices

This is slightly more personal than my other stuff, and up here solely for the sake of posterity, and perhaps as a caution against the twin evils of indecisiveness and impulsiveness that so love to plague me.

So I've spoken about how I live in a state of constant indecisiveness, and that is more true than you can imagine. Constraint of time is the only thing that makes me hurry up and make a choice, which, like everything else I do, I make at the last possible minute.This is true of pretty much every choice I've made till date, whether I'm deciding what to order at a restaurant..or what career to pursue.

This story is about the latter.

So, rewind a bit in my life. It's time to pick a college/university/whatever you refer to them as. I'll stick to college. I'm eligible for two equally brilliant ones, and it's time to make a choice, that much detested thing. One of these colleges is what I specifically prepared for, and far beyond what I'd ever hoped to reach. The other offers me the course which I love. Why was I preparing for a course different from what I love? Well I prepared for both, but my focus was on one. There was a choice involved there, too, another one-foolishly-taken at the last moment, but let's just say that reason led to this one. The whole brain v. heart conundrum again. This one had better prospects, and I liked it well enough; that one was the eternal love and passion of my life. If I was to pick the first, I had to start preparing, and soon, and so I began, without quite realizing that this was one in a line of choices that would determine the course of my life. Without thinking about what I was losing. I had been slightly hesitant, and thought I'd leave myself open to both my options, what I liked and what I loved, and pick depending on where I got in-thought that I would decide later when, if I got in.

That first step in the sea swept me away though. The fact that I had a goal in mind,  something to work at; the fact that I invested so much in preparing, all sort of cemented this option in my mind, automatically relegated the second option, what I loved, to second place. A back up, a second choice. I'd dreamed about making it to a certain place: never did I dream of getting accepted to a better place. When that happened, everyone, everyone was overjoyed. Except me: I was still in shock I think. I don't remember much, but I distinctly remember that I wasn't..happy. Just numb. I had found out earlier that I might eligible for the place I loved-I wouldn't know until later that I might have been accepted there had I passed the interview (which I didn't attend, having already made my decision by then), and I wouldn't regret it until even later than that, when life and consequences had caught up with me.



This story is still incomplete. And I think it always will be, because I will never know where that other path would have led. I don't even fully know where this path is going. Maybe they'll merge somewhere, though. Maybe I'll be sure somewhere.


~Sam

Post 'The Book Thief'

You know what authors are? They're the biggest manipulators of all time. The things they can do with human emotion. Take your heart and twist it and wring out all these feelings, all this attachment, towards people who don't exist, but who are still people. So much investment in a world which doesn't exist, but one which is still real. Often much more love for this fiction than we ever feel for the real world, the real people. Anyone who's been half awake on the internet and seen all the various fandoms-Harry Potter comes to mind first-would know that. And it isn't just authors. Every type of artist. Painters, musicians, directors, actors. They all make us..care. And isn't that what I want to do? Make people care? Make people listen. Make people cry.



~Sam, whose heart just finished crying over The Book Thief. 

The Difficulty of Explaining Something to Someone on the Outside

Well the title sort of says it all. I just finished reading The Devil Wears Prada (not a good idea, should've finished Lolita instead) and the main character, Andrea, talks about how her work life is so completely insulated from the outside world, and how no one on the outside can understand her, not even her best friend.
And that is so, so true. I highly doubt I'm the only person who relates with that. People keep asking me how life is, how things are going, how I like this and that, how I like my new place, and how do you explain? How do you possibly put all the feelings into words and explain them to someone who isn't there and will not be able to understand (and usually, who isn't even listening, which is just pissing off)? When you put something into words, it becomes so real, so understated, so..incomplete. Because you can't speak someone a blogpost giving them a complete picture of your life. Can't answer a "How are you?" with a thousand word reply of how, exactly, you are. You just say "Fine" and move on with life. Because even if you gave them the thousand words, they still wouldnt understand, wouldnt be there, in your place, feeling and seeing and being.
Much as I value words, they aren't the same as feelings, as participation, as presence.

~Sam