Entropy

What will it take for us to understand that love will resist all definition. It exists beyond our attempts to mold it into form, names and time. We try to claim it and conquer it, to find answers and meanings when it exists in a void beyond questions.

Love laughs in the face of our nets and snares; it answers to noone. Love is imperturbable chaos, it is reckless calm.

What will it take for us to understand? We will lose ourselves again and again, to drown and surface in this same murky ocean, and float adrift in the vast cosmos of love, until the very end of time.

Circles

Sometimes the best gift you can give yourself is to take that gift you thought was everything you every wanted and carefully wrap it back up, typing a perfect ribbon on top of where the old ribbon lay--and give it away.

and even though hurts you, still smile.

Small Happies

Spent two hours at the Superstore, ended up picking up just two things: sundried tomatoes and imported cheese. My sandal broke while roaming - the heavier wooden bottom went rogue and disengaged from the sole, but just at the back, so instead of hobbling, sliding my foot behind me or clacking around, I just looped my hair-tie around both pieces and I was good to go, until I got off the bus and stepped into a thunderstorm at its prime and realized I couldn't even walk in my sandals because I was sliding around on that smooth wooden surface. With my bag of cheese and sundried tomatoes, I danced home singing, of all things, "kuch to hua hai."

The Quandary of Survival

Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn’t do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel. — Junot Diaz, This is How You Lose Her

Sometimes when I look at the kitten who followed me home, I wonder what brought us together. She was starved, half-alive, having survived a harsh subzero winter yet she still battled each day and one day followed me across 20 minutes of frozen terrain.She was — is — a wild one. A ferocious, independent, and keenly intelligent creature. Maybe, in this way, she is only myself in animal form.

At times, though, I cannot help but look at her and wonder if it is possible for a human to come back as an animal. Often, when she plays soccer with her bell-ball for hours on end, I am reminded of the brother I lost so many years ago. He, too, was a dark and quiet creature, and spent hours playing solitaire foot hockey with a tennis ball.

Or, at those times when I feel her jagged tongue scratching away at my cheek, licking away my tears, I wonder if she is my mother; watching over me while I sleep.

In this way, I often find telling traits for many of those I have lost, and perhaps this is all transference of various internal feelings and thoughts that I do not dare allow myself to dwell on.

It is around this time that I observe the loss of the most important person in my life. The pain of that loss is as ever crippling, even 25 years later.  This is a pain I once felt was, if not healed completely, absolved through the nurturing care of another person I believed was my soul mate. But that person too, for reasons of his own, decided that I had weathered so many losses that one more didn’t make a difference; I was already stained and blemished from the wounds of the past and having risen each time I fell, of course I would rise again. Once, a few months ago, when I tried to communicate the destruction wreaked, I was told, by this person, disinterestedly, that it gets better with time.

I have wondered each day how it gets better with time. Does the ability to rise and go forth as opposed to wither away in a dark room mean that it is better? Does the impact of internalizing this pain and not expressing it mean that it is better? Does laughing and making other people happy, therefore the self happy, mean that it is better? Because happiness itself is so transient, and does not exactly correlate to that other pain so well hidden.

I feel sometimes that we are only given a certain amount of time with other people as they become a mirror or window, depending on the lessons learnt. As I observe one person grow into the cold, hurtful and distanced parent they never wanted to be, I realize that I should take heed and learn not to do the same. I am learning to detach myself from the emotions that have haunted me in the past, those of others and the emotions that have caused me to act out irrationally. I have ceased to abhor loss and struggle against aligning myself with pain. Instead I have acceded in the realization that this too is part of my identity. This is not necessarily better, but this is how I survive:

I rise each day ready to go forth and conquer, not because the pains of yesteryear have healed, but because I have come to accept them as part of who I am.  I continue to fight with broken ribs and open wounds because these wounds are the very things which have caused the biological heart to ragingly pump blood to these wounds in the hope that the delivery of oxygen and nutrients will one day heal them. Once healed, the heart would cease to beat so ferociously.

Short Shorts

Traitorous March had started; when you had no damn clue what the weather was going to be like. Either it would be blowing cold or blowing warm—like a fickle lover, you could never trust it.

I hadn't gotten any sleep that night. Nil. Nada. In fact, I hadn't slept for a few days, and the sun was the only thing that I really wanted to see. I squinted in its light, standing in the middle of the road, waiting for the oncoming lane to empty so that I could cross over to the bus stop.  An old grandma was already inside the bus stand, and she was fidgeting with her glasses, trying to wipe the lens clean. She would put the lens on and then take them off again, wiping, wiping. As far as I could tell, the lens were crystal clear, and felt a pang for her poor bleary eyes.

She looked over at me."Yuh wearing yo reg'lar coat, dear?" She queried, most randomly, in her Jamaican accent.

There it was. Human contact. I squinted a little more, and cast her a sideways look.

"You never know," I said cryptically.

She seemed overwhelmed with this profound statement, and lapsed into a silence until the bus came and took us away.

*****

In the middle of March, I was on my way home, and though we had some mild weather through the day, as the sun set, it had been snowing again.

My stop was approaching, so I grabbed my bag, descended to the lower level of the bus, hit the button and stood at the back doors, waiting for the bus to stop.

The bus kept going.

I raised my hands in exasperation. Uh, Hello? The bro standing nearby shook his head dismally. I rolled my eyes and made my way up to the front of the bus, and leant against the driver's wall.

"Good nap? You just missed my stop, man." I said, almost conversationally to the driver.

"Oh. Ehm. Ah. I'm sorry," He looked abashed.

"Now I get a NICE, LONG, LOVELY WALK BACK," I said to him in the same almost-friendly conversational tone, my icy smile punctuating the statement with the sarcasm it was meant to be.

"Uh. You ... want to borrow my toque?" He offered his hat to me.

"Nah, don't worry about it," I gave him a sideways look.

He sighed in relief, and opened the doors.

I stepped off.

His hat? 

*****

Now it was* April and the weather was amazing!

"Bye!" I chirruped to the random lady clumping down the staircase from the upper level as I ran up the stairs. It was around 6 pm, and she was clearly on her way home, laden with her bags.

"Oh," She blinked, "Bye bye to you too, dear."

I was a complete stranger.

"Have a nice weekend!" I called as she went down another few stairs.

She stopped again, and looked up as I opened the door at the landing, ready to leave the stairwell.

"But, dear, it's only Monday."

"You can never start too early!" I grinned at her, and with a wave, left.



*is

Ma

"Really yummy. How did you manage to get the paneer so crispy and still so soft and flavourful?"

And I smiled to myself, because while making the dish I remembered his mother's tip, and lost in that special world in the kitchen, my dish became infused with a hint of love mixed with bittersweet loss.

Cooking has always been an independent venture for me. From the age of 6, on a makeshift stool comprised of random pieces of wood stuck together, I was making roti—rolling away with the belan as well as I was able to with my little hands, patting the dough primly with a dusting of flour and carefully shifting it onto the hot tawa.

To date, I still have a faint scar on my chest from where the edge of the tawa burnt me as I leant over. The symbolism of the act, the pain, and the scar, is as succinct as it could be.

Making roti is the one thing that has ties with that Other World. It's one of the very few memories that I have with her: standing on a chair and rolling a small glob from the big portion of dough in the bowl, and happily rolling it, flattening it, making my very first roti, only for it to come out in a very strange misshapen triangular form. But that memory is so much more than the detail. It is adorned with her gentle grace, her loving patience, more that overwhelming warmth than the accuracy of her face. She praised me for my Christmas Tree roti and commended me for my creativity. "Let's make it green!" she suggested, and got out the food colouring, so that when my father finally returned from work that evening, there among all the well-formed round rotis was a special little green Christmas Tree roti.

Things changed drastically soon after, and our family, smaller by one number now, moved to a new neighbourhood. I began a new life at a new school in a totally alien landscape. At home, I soon learnt to do the chores and cooking. I was in first grade.

When it was warm enough, we played in the streets. It was a way of getting out of our father's way. 

"She has no mommy," I overheard another little girl tell the other kids on the street. And that information made them all avoid me, as if it was a contagious form of a shameful disease. 

In those young years I became the object of passively aggressive bullying. I didn't realize that was what it was, but for some reason, my newfound tendency to cry easily seemed to be a point of amusement for the other kids. I cried every single day in school in those years. That the other kids thought that mocking me for not having a mother seemed the best joke did not help. I remember being completely ostracized in 5th grade as a clique of 'popular' girls chose to disparage me on my lack of femininity, loud gossip and meant taunts of not being able to go shopping with a mom. As we grew up into the pre-teen part of elementary school, I shied away from the female teachers' attentions and stayed aloof from other children's mothers who volunteered at school events or joined us on trips. If another kid's mother was extra kind to me, I had to shoulder the additional grief of that particular kid's glares at the perceived invasion of territory.

When I started high-school, I was just as aloof. This was a new start and I kept these secrets of my history  to myself. I became one of the class clowns, tomboy Jane, the go-to girl for crazy antics and hyperness, all in the most geeky ways. And I made friends. Friends who after a few years eventually complained that I was too secretive; that I kept my feelings to myself. By then I had told them a bit about my family life, but only enough so that the very deep and dark bits would not scare anyone away. But keeping such things to oneself has its own psychological consequences too.

That particular loss is one that has never been healed. And it continues to hurt, almost every single day. It is the one thing that I can never articulate to anyone, because the depth of that loss is absolutely endless. I don't want anyone's pity or sympathy, and yet, through most of my life, that is the one thing I crave instinctively: some form of maternal love.

The problem is that when I became close to anyone else, they sooner or later shared in this nugget of loss (as is natural in exchanges of personal data with close friends) but the problem is that soon, they too extended that holy grail: aw, it's okay you can share mine! Certainly, the offer was always made with the best of intentions, with a good heart and full of warmth and kindness. But somehow, time or other events seemed to break down the very structure of that relationship and along with the friendship went that maternal gift.

More than that, often the rational for the breakdown of friendships happened contingent to the nature of the maternal bond. Somehow, there still remained that sinister whisper of contagion which I first overheard on the streets as a child. One of the most defining milestones was being explicitly shunned and kicked out of a tight-knit circle of friends—at that time the only friends I had—like a dirty untouchable. 

You never think that people can have this kind of cruelty.  And perhaps they simply do not realize the extent of their behaviour, maybe because they do not know what this kind of experience is like. But it hurts more than I could say when you are given a taste of what it is like, when a friend says that their mother is there for you too, and then so easily take it away without even recognizing the emotional destruction they cause.

After these experiences I became a little more hardened. I remembered how to be aloof again. When visiting friends at their homes, I was pleasant and polite but always reserved and never opened up my heart again for a surrogate mother.

And then he happened. You could not talk to him—really talk to him—or get to know him, without him talking about his mother. His love for her is probably his quintessential defining characteristic. It absolutely shines. And you cannot help falling in love with her. So I fell for both of them. They both made me laugh like I never laughed before. This was a new kind of bond and relationship that I had never experienced or witnessed. I was in awe, and yet was head over heels in being blessed with her love, too. I felt like a geeky fan being bestowed with the attention of a mega celebrity. But it was more for me. So much more.

Sometimes out of the blue, her voice pops up on my headphones. An old saved voice message wishing me a happy birthday and telling me that innocent unknown lie: I will always be there for you. These are those times when I need to rush out of the room, or rush off the train, and hide. Sometimes, it is so hard to figure this out. You think it is just another heartbreak, but it isn't. It's much more. When I cry for him, I cry for her too.


What is loss? I could never figure it out, only feel it, again and again, in louder explosions, each time. 


I type the question, and pause, as my adopted feral kitten stares at me in consternation as I cry, trying to finish this. I am so sorry, baby, I will never kick you back out in the streets motherless for I know what that feels like. Is that why you followed me home?

Resilience

Perhaps it's okay to break, afterall. Maybe that is actually the true purpose of life, if ever there was one: that living isn't about finding a form or function that is impermeable, infallible, indestructible. Living is in breaking, in drowning, in falling—living is even in hurting.

Long time ago, when I was stuck deep in my med-sci studies, one of my university professors said something which, obviously after all these years, stuck to me. He said, "The Earth will become a huge snowball, we will all die. Sure. But who are we kidding? The Earth is more resilient than we give it credit for. It's going to perish, sure, but it will still be there, and it will thrive again, light years after we have wiped ourselves off the face of it."

Maybe it is OK, therefore, to let yourself trust and be broken. It is OK, to feel the fifty million thousand frequencies of loss and despair. It is OK to paint your world with shades of anger, sorrow, melancholy, and grief. It would almost be wrong not to. Like being able to paint as many colours onto a canvas and never touching all the colours of possibility.

In breaking then, despite the many ways that the cracks seem irreparable, the way they creak and hurt again and again, like a misaligned patella that you fell on when ice-skating that many years ago and whenever you stand up or try running down stairs the pain comes shooting up your leg in remembrance, all it takes is not avoiding the pain but embracing it, exercising it.

Even when you feel that you have lost out, when your trust has been brutalized again and again, maybe sometimes the pain is the best opportunity for you to look it over and realize that those moments had more worth than you ever even knew, even (especially) when you were actually living it. There are moments that make you remember exactly why that trust was so deeply ingrained in you, why that Jenga piece was so vital to your sense of self. Perhaps that person gave you a mirror to look at yourself in ways you never were able to before. Maybe they gave you a blanket, just for a while, sometimes, if you were a bit cold. Maybe they lent you an umbrella, not expecting that the relationship would develop further than that casual transaction. Maybe you spent hours and hours, learning to be yourself for once in your life, because this person gave you the space to be that, with them.

These were beautiful moments, and yet moments always have an inexorable place in the past. There are echoes of that laughter which permeate even into the very present now, telling you, reminding you, that you have never laughed as much in your life or smiled as much as you did then—and even if it is gone, it had at least existed.

Perspective is such a compelling narrative.  Even that moment you fell, where you hurt so much and thought that was it: that was the end, that was life, goodbye, time and perspective allows you to see that 5 year old little child that you were, falling on the playground and skimming your hands with gravel embedded under the skin. Adulthood is no different from that child, because we are always lost children seeking something more: a best friend, or companionship, a better snack, or a great exhilarating experience on the slide; and we are always growing in ways even we do not know—until we break.

Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. — Corrie ten Boom (quote that popped up in my inbox after I finished writing this post)

 There is a reason we can forgive, and maybe even as we cannot forget because we are still scared—maybe now more than ever—to trust again, we learn to forgive ourselves. We are all broken children, but in breaking, and breaking again and again, we have learnt to become a little more accountable to and for ourselves.

Sometimes you realize that the trust you thought was shattered is actually only a small dwarf planet compared to the huge expanse of a neverending universe of that patient, deep-abiding, resilient love within which it revolves.

Safekeeping

One of the hardest things is piecing yourself back together again after breaking into a million pieces. 

Trust.

You can trust someone with information, or trust them to get a job done. Trust someone to have your back, trust someone to be there, no matter what. Or trust someone to keep you safe. 

The worst part in misplaced trust in a person is that when you give that trust to another being, that trust is completely contingent in your very own personal trust of the self. You are trusting yourself, your sense of judgement, in being able to believe that this other person is worthy of keeping your trust.

So, when they decide they no longer want that burden, when they decide that hurting another person to relieve their own stress in life is OK, because they have already done the calculations and decided you will be OK even if your trust in them was wrong all along, they forget that the implications lie on a much grander scale. Because, even after the damage is done, and they have moved on, that huge earthquake is only the start of an avalanche of aftershocks: you are left stranded in a place where you cannot even trust yourself.

When you have moved from a space of casual acquaintance, slowly and systematically ingraining everything inside of you with this person's aura, their function in your life slowly becoming part of the very equation of who you are, so much that you would bet your life in that trust, nevermind your own sense of identity and trust, it goes without saying that once that little piece of trust is removed like a Jenga piece down there below the other million pieces which comprise you, of course everything, absolutely everything, collapses.

But it is all inside of you. And not any other person ever could imagine what it is like beyond that outer shell.  Inside, you are juggling the pieces that have not yet fallen, and yet you are trying to pick up, and catch, the other falling pieces which are sharp, fatal, piercing you with pain. Inside, you are slipping trying to escape falling completely and utterly to that bottomless pit where your sense of self can never be resuscitated, and yet you are slipping on the shards which make up the slopes you are trying to keep a grip on with the soles of your already-ripped and bleeding feet, and mutilated palms, slipping on the blood, bringing you to your knees, on which you continue to struggle up. Inside you are suffocating, as the atmosphere around you is a vacuum-sealed vessel of building pressure, toxic fumes of self-hatred, green gaseous canisters of laughter assaulting you with no remorse. Inside, you don't even know which part of you is really you, and inside, you don't even know who you are anymore, not really. 

Can you ever really—really—trust another person to keep you safe?

Enduring

"Now, just turn your head a little to the left...Yes! Gorgeous!"

The photographer beamed at me from behind his camera, while I wondered if I was allowed to scratch my nose. He was quite particular about his subjects.

***

After having met him and having a little chat while we settled on my outfit, he had positioned me in my chair and fidgeted around me while I told him to make sure my hair looked good—because I knew my face was quite excellent already, just, my hair needed a little loving care because of medical conditions—but he instead started paying more attention, strangely enough, to my necklace.

"Just need to make sure it's captured perfectly in the picture," He mumbled as he adjusted it, then stepped back, examining it from different angles.

Umm. What about my hair? I thought. What about, you know, me? I need to be captured perfectly too!

"Just got to get it right," He said, stepping behind the camera to see how it looked behind the lens, then again stepping quickly to the window to check how it looked in the light.

"Hmm, just a...yes, that might be it," He said, again, brushing my hair behind my shoulders so that the precious necklace got to be center of attention.

"Um, it's okay," I said. "It's just a necklace..."

"Just a little bit more this way..." He was totally focused on the silver necklace with two hearts intertwined (ostensibly forever) together.

"No really," I said a little more forcefully. "Just take the damn picture, leave the necklace. The...the man who gave it to me dumped me," I said as bluntly as I could, verbalizing in the very words I could never bring myself to say until then that most private of information now being proffered to this stranger, hoping the the shock value would stun him into retreating behind the camera and taking the goddamn pictures.

"Oh," He looked up, yes, stunned. He looked balefully at the offending piece of jewelry, now, as if it had broken his heart.

"Yeah, so it's okay," I nodded at him.

"But you still love him," He said, looking at it sitting in that hollow above my heart. It wasn't a question.

"Of course I do." Definitely not up for debate.

He nodded, briskly, somberly, understandingly. There really was no need for anything else to be said.

"So! Then, will you be taking your photos with smile, or no smile?"

"What are you, crazy? Of course a smile!" I beamed a 100-watt at him.

"That's a girl," He said, somewhat admiringly. "You keep that attitude!"


Honestly, though? I was secretly glad, deep down inside, that it got that much attention; it felt sort of right: that in trying to capture whoever I was, that one thing, this emblem, was made to shine brightly.


So, of course I smiled.



~in memoriam of a breaking heart, 6 months to the day.~

Thought of the Day

Little things can become the biggest things—can become your whole world—when you have almost nothing.

Palliative Care Therapy

"If you died.."

"When, you mean..."

"Well. When, but let's stick with if, OK?"

"OK."

"If you die, what do you think he would say?"



"Nothing."



"Hmm. Nothing at all?"

"Yeah."

"Why do you feel that?"


"I just know. What is there to say? I... hmm, I don't know. Yeah. "

"What are you thinking?"

"What's the point? If there was anything to say, why not, you know... when I could listen?"

"Would you listen? Or react, though? From what we talked about last session, I mean."

"I don't know."

"But you think he wouldn't say anything."

"Yeah. Because he doesn't say stuff, anyways."

"Then, let's ask this: what do you think he would think?"

"He.. would ... think ... I don't know, he would probably think 'Oh well' and go on with his life."

"Do you really feel that? Or are you transferring feelings again?"


"There are no feelings in this case."

"You seem to be feeling a lot, right now. Hey, it's OK, take a breather."


"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ..."

"You don't have to apologize. Come on, have some water."

"Yes."

"Yes to what?"

"I really feel that."

Propa

Hunger is a feeling that has double-standards with me. I don't actually realize it's there, most of the time, and I go through my days often without remembering it, until sometimes at that moment when afternoon meets evening, something happens to my insides, sometimes it is a plaintive meowl, or my head aches more than usual, and I remember that I have not eaten all day. But truly, I have lost any inclination for eating and even in feeling hungry, even when I idealize some really great foods and crave them theoretically, when it comes to the process of putting food in my mouth or eating, something else seems to repel the action. My whole being has been on a hunger strike for so long it almost thinks it is a way of living.  Then I came across this yesterday—some time at around 4 something in the morning because apparently sleep, too, is not something my body wants—and I remembered one of the many reasons why

Real Talk 6

As my life isn't an easy one, now is the time to tell you that while I was working my full time day job at HotlineBling central (not real name, do not google this on Google Businesses), I was also working an evening job. My "glamour" job.

No, I was not a strip dancer.

But I was the "face" of a cooking show and got to be on television and go to shows and stuff; this job overflowed onto weekends, so that's pretty much where all my life was at that stage.

It was definitely a fun and cool job, and it was very laidback and sometimes all we seemed to do was go out to the back on off-show breaks and sit on picnic benches and sing Enrique and Adele and discuss our coworker's lovelife problems with his boyfriend, or every other person's problem with their boyfriend, and inhale the secondhand fumes of the great outdoors and marijuana while the sun went down.

But the job also required every member to follow up with anyone who was remotely interested in the show, especially as its main objective was to sell the very cookware line that we used on the shows. So this meant that we all to dedicate 75% of our time to sitting at a desk and....wait for it....making follow-up calls!

See where I am getting at? I hear someone singing that Lion King song, shut up.


OK the irony is that this is where I actually stopped being the desknerd and became a blossoming flower because I was great at talking to other people. Except that I was usually in my office spending all that time talking to my boyfriend.

Everyone knew this actually, and it was sort of an inside joke, but at the same time everyone in the office was in love with my love story and were all rooting for me.

Except the new recruits or boss who invariably picked up the line: "Hello?"

"Ehm, Priya please."

"May I ask who's calling?"

"Huh. Just...give me Priya, I need to talk to her about...ehm....pots."



This is Part 6 of a series of "Real Talk" pieces wherein I finally talk about my real life and share some (not so) scandalous short (and sweet!) stories. To follow from the start click on the "Real Talk" label below for all posts in this series.

Real Talk 5

So I find out that Andrew was an alcoholic and he once somehow fell from the top floor balcony down to the first floor. Great place to work!

The previous receptionist, too, seemed to like alcohol a little too fondly and one day, my second day on the job, if i recall, Andrew got a call from down below and then, hanging up, looked at me and told me that I was to run downstairs and fill in for the receptionist "because she just quit her job".


I was like, "What, I'm not a freaking receptionist are you crazy, you go fill the chair". And I turned back to my work, only to find out, going downstairs for lunch, that the big boss was sitting at the receptionist's desk.

Ho ho ho.

Anyways, back to the main story line, the day after I was "coerced" into calling random CEOs for soundbites that had nothing to do with our work at all, but try telling that to the boss: I was twirling away on my desk chair when I see the boss approach.

"Hey," he said, gruffly, "We're good, right?"

I responded, "What's there not to be good about?"

"Ah, great," he nodded and went his way.

After which I found out from the graphic designer who works alongside me that he was really worried about how he treated me, forcing me to make calls.

"Oh," I said, "I just pretended to be on the phone the whole day, but he doesn't need to know that."


This is Part 5 of a series of "Real Talk" pieces wherein I finally talk about my real life and share some (not so) scandalous short (and sweet!) stories. To follow from the start click on the "Real Talk" label below for all posts in this series.

Real Talk 4

With the brutal onslaught of "I want you to make 75 calls and get 55 quotes on the site today" I decided that enough was enough and I got up and walked out.

I went to McDonald's on the corner and ordered a coffee.

While I was there I saw the guy who used to have my job ordering a Happy Meal, clad in tshirt and boxers, no longer in the office attire he used to work in when he was my supervisor. But one day he just stopped coming.

So there I was grabbing a McCafe

(and coffee for the rest of the office of whom I politely asked if they wanted a coffee and instead of politely demurring as is normal they all chimed in with a resounding "YEAH!"

"Oh geez, are you all kidding me? OK, but make sure your orders are easy,  I'm not writing anything down."

 "IQ, I WANT A LATTE BUT I HAVE NEVER HAD A LATTE SO CAN YOU TELL THEM TO PUT COFFEE AND MILK AND NO SUGAR PLEASE, BUT REMEMBER TO PUT COFFEE."

"Daisy, I am pretty sure that is what comprises a latte but yes I will tell them.")

and I see this dude looking like a bum, and I could only shake my head, wondering what weird projects our boss subjected him to. Then I remembered the alcohol:

When my supervisor-for-two-days decided to stop coming to work, I was given the directive to clear out the guy's desk in order to figure out what had to be done. In the process, I discovered a couple dozen pages with our boss's "signature" copied out a few hundred million times, and then discovered a few copies of a "reference letter" that our boss "signed" declaring that Andrew (he who gave up the job), along with being bestowed with a grand intellect and cutting-edge mental faculty, was the greatest man alive (hey, why not).

Then I opened the bottom drawer of his desk and discovered a 6-pack of beer.




This is part 4 of a series of "Real Talk" pieces wherein I finally talk about my real life and share some (not so) scandalous short (and sweet!) stories. To follow from the start click on the "Real Talk" label below for all posts in this series.

Real Talk 3

This boss of mine was pretty crazy. Mercurial (huge temper), pompous (high-falutin ideas), rich (RICH).  And he was a mean ol' nasty grinchy scrooge if he felt like it. Actually, when I have the misfortune of watching Trump speak, I am totally reminded of this boss. He was like a bad combination of both Donald Trump and Nicholas Cage.

So he stood there shoving the phone in my hand every time it somehow made it's way out of my hand, telling me to google GOOGLE and call them, QUICK.

Let me just clear the air: most of the time he was actually pretty sharp and intuitive in business matters (that is, after all, how he got so rich, and also how our company was numero uno in the niche), but in this case, between you and me, I honestly don't know.

My coworkers, not having a grande huge floor of an office suite like mine, worked one floor down, so they obviously did not believe me and thought I made this up. But no.

It was sadly true.

I called up a few numbers while he stood there. I hedged around, not even sure what I was supposed to say, what excuse to give, what to ask. I mean, I was a freaking writer, not a telephone customer service rep. So he started wagging his head furiously, getting more mad each time I mumbled through a phone call. I started giving him the side-eye even as he was frothing like he had rabies. Maybe I should call 911, I thought.

For me or him, I don't know.



This is part 3 of a series of "Real Talk" pieces wherein I finally talk about my real life and share some (not so) scandalous short (and sweet!) stories. To follow from the start click on the label below for all posts in this series.

Real Talk 2

Soon after I was made the company writer at my new job (after a series of strange and fortunate incidents that accelerated the process which occurred in my very first week), I quickly adapted to my newfangled and interdisciplinary job functions and time flew.

Then one day, after a meeting in which I relayed the manner in which our company could take off really quickly through some strategically placed communications (and having ended the meeting rather tentatively as our boss was sitting as if paralyzed by my information), obviously having recovered, my boss came storming through my office.

"GRAB THE TELEPHONE, FIND SOME PHONE NUMBERS."

..Um?..

Basically, he decided that the best way to get "quotes to place on our website" (somehow this is what my comprehensive, informative, and statistical strategy boiled down to in his head?) was to call "famous people" spontaneously and ask them a question ("anything") real quick, then write down whatever they said as evidence of their endorsement and hang up.


And he picked me for the job.



This is part 2 of a series of "Real Talk" pieces wherein I finally talk about my real life and share some (not so) scandalous short (and sweet!) stories. To follow from the start click on the label below for all posts in this series.

Real Talk

Many long years ago, after working in various retail jobs during university, and having conquered all the customer service floors with my people skills and makeup artistry skills, I decided that I wanted to work in an office.

My reasons weren't exactly ambitious. I wanted a job where I could literally just sit down behind a computer all day and get paid for it. But then again, that already sums up what pretty much all of us want at one point or other.

As unoriginal as it was, this was the epitome of my 'working girl in the world' dream. To be sure, I had--and have--much more lofty ambitions as well, i.e. to be a high-ranking enterpreneur; a hotshot boss lady; a famous celebrity (well, at least that one I can check off), but there is this quiet, introverted me that loves, and prefers, being in the background, the backstage if you will, thus this was my quiet goal.

Point to be noted: this was my goal as soon as I realized what fun it was to sit at a computer all day, a feat very much assisted by discovering MSN (remember MSN?) very late in life--and blogging.


When I got called in for an interview at my First Real Office Job Ever, the owner of the company asked me what I really wanted to do: what were my unbridled dreams? So, I decided, rather than giving the usual answer tailored to the job description or company, to give the unbridled truth.

"I want to be a writer."

He nodded. Gave me an appraising look and said, "Come back tomorrow."

This is part 1 of a series of "Real Talk" pieces wherein I finally talk about my real life and share some (not so) scandalous short (and sweet!) stories.

You Will Be Well

I actually spend some time each day going back, retracing steps, remembering old times, rereading old words. There is an empty place where that time was given to other things: to other people/someone else. It feels wrong to fill it in with anything else, but even if it were possible, trying to cram anything else in doesn't work. That hole just keeps spitting everything else out like an inverted blackhole.

Today, I went back to my old - much older - blog posts. As I've mentioned here a few times, these are hidden in my lucid iridescence blogs and some older tidbits where I used to post 'thoughts of the day' are hidden in my golden memories blogs. Each time I revisit, reread, I am so mesmerized by that person who is speaking - even though it was me.

I actually have a bad habit of never editing any of my blogs. I write whatever that comes to mind and other than the perfunctory skimming for spelling mistakes, if any, I just usually submit without further revisions.

Sometimes I feel like I would love to have an interview with myself. The younger me with this older, somewhat more cynical (though I averred I was the most cynical when younger) me. I have a lot of posts that are dedicated to love and I used to write a lot about this enigmatic prince charming/soulmate who I knew would be mine...one day. If I one day forgot this fact then maybe I would in future wonder who I was writing to, where did that person go. And the stranger thing now is that even with a flesh-and-blood model, the substantiated version of those dreams, I could almost ask the same thing. In fact, one of the problems I have with life is that I could pretty much ask this of everyone I've gotten close to. "Where did that person go?"

Maybe, just maybe, I could ask the question of that young and dreamy-eyed writer of posts. Maybe that is what I am doing when I go back and hover my cursor over the words she once wrote - sometimes with big grin, sometimes with a quiet smile, sometimes and too often, with a lot of tears. Maybe this version of me going over those words somehow, over a time-space continuum, actually makes contact with that younger girl who scribbled down words while tears coursed down her face; maybe while she was writing, she was able to compose herself and find a way to straighten her shoulders and face the world again because, if no one else did, this older me was able to peer over her shoulder, to caress her head, to tuck away a strand of hair tenderly, to kiss her tear-stained cheek and tell her, telepathically, that you will survive because you are my reason and remembrance for continuing ever more.

Moments

I've become so habituated to turning to word as recourse for when emotional deluges overwhelm. It often seems as if all I am filled with is heartbreak, grief and misery, and that may be a fault of mine when it comes to writing. Though I am inclined to think otherwise (it is almost as interesting to witness the many ways audience decide to judge or assume based on what they read; how they interpret your art; the many ways it almost interprets the interpreter - but these deep thoughts are for another day alas), I do recognize that I haven't been writing when I am in love with the moment, and to that pregnant pause I assert, there have been many.

It might have been, for example, when I got onto the wrong bus somehow, by accident, last Friday. Living on the edge of a conservation park, I have to navigate a number of different regional transits, so when I hopped off one after sleeping the whole way through, I might have been still half asleep when I boarded the next bus. And instead of taking me all the way to the downtown core as it was meant to do, it started going north, and then a little more north. I, snug at my usual elevated back of the bus corner seat by the window, just kept listening to my music, letting the quiet morning sun shine beatifically on me as I shone my own beatific smile back, as I stayed on the whole route until the end terminus, whereupon I hopped onto the train to speed back downtown.

Or it might have been that evening when I trudged on my long walk through the snow, where the whole world seemed perfectly blue hued: the sky, the snow, the air itself. That moment when it isn't exactly dark yet, and yet the sun has bid adieu. Again, living where I do, I have to hike through a number of quiet suburban streets, cut through a few alleys and parks before I get home. Considering that there've been those moments when that same path holds past memories of sharp cutting minus 30 degree painful tearful heartbreaking walks, the ability to walk over that same past and rewrite it, superimpose the ghosts with new emotions is exhilarating.

It might have been that early quiet morning, when suddenly it feels like spring, when the air isn't cutting cold slaps, but a balmy, almost lazy, playful thing, when I could literally walk outside with my hair still damp and feel the thrill of having the wind's fingers intertwine with my hair and tug it gently, where walking into that mellow yellow light, the sky is filled with a long line of a hundred Canadian geese, perfectly linear and yet collectively a whole.

It might have been discovering that one song that so perfectly fills your heart with an ineffable feeling of joy, a joy that is never pure joy but brushed upon with all those gleams of silvery sorrow. And the impurity is not ugly, it almost makes the feeling greater, heightened, and you know that no one else can ever feel the greatness of this feeling. Or turning the pages of a writer you cannot believe you had to date never discovered, and absolutely ecstatic in being able to feel like the poetry itself. Or remembering that your own patience is the key to it all, and that it is OK to feel less than perfect, that it is OK to be broken, that it is OK to feel sad or unhappy, that you can be everything that you are, whatever that is and that is absolutely perfectly fine.