Baarish

(Things that may just be funny to me)

Blue Stockings

It has been a while since I saw any plays. Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis had a good thing going for a while, where they gave students discounted tickets but alas no more. They have something for under-30s but I haven't really checked it out although I should probably take advantage of offers like that while I can. I've seen some interesting plays for really cheap tickets and once even for free right in front of the stage for a phenomenal play whose name I don't remember now. I recently had the chance to watch Blue Stockings at Guthrie for a Gender and Policy class I am in. We decided to go a few weeks ago and at that time it had seemed like a perfectly normal thing to do. 

Love After Love

This poem found its way into my life twice this week and it was the kind of wonderful serendipity that makes you wish there was a less fancy/pretentious word for it. Simply put, it has been a rough two months...

Rains

Rainy days bring their own comfort. The downpour is almost cathartic; the calm after the thunderstorms settles down both dust and feelings. I open the window a crack, to inhale the smell of rain meeting earth. It has been constant wherever I've lived and traveled, soothing in its familiarity. I push all outdoor tasks to another day; being cozy inside is a rainy day must (unless of course, real life insists otherwise). All that matters is a steaming cup of tea and warm, comfort food. A chat window pops open, and I feel remembered for the moment. The calm is temporary but much wanted.

Shiny pink disco

I was watching Frasier and I remember seeing a Walkman pop up in one of the scenes. I remember my first Walkman, a black, slightly battered gadget. I am not even sure if the memory of it is real or stolen from someone else's remembrances. It starts a cascade of memories of cassettes, of waiting for movie scores and albums to release, of wondering if my parents would give me money to buy a cassette, of listening and re-listening and re-re-listening to the cassettes till the spools wore out. I remember making copies of tapes (mix tapes were a thing of my teenage years, only I made them for myself)

You Who Never Arrived by Rainer Maria Rilke

One of my favorite poems:

“You who never arrived

in my arms, Beloved, who were lost

from the start,

I don't even know what songs

would please you. I have given up trying

to recognize you in the surging wave of

the next moment. All the immense

images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,

cities, towers, and bridges, and un-

suspected turns in the path,

and those powerful lands that were once

pulsing with the life of the gods--

all rise within me to mean

you, who forever elude me.

On brownness and other things

Sometime in December, when I was back home, I remember drafting a piece, almost hastily, so as to not lose the words and sentences that had been floating in my head for a while. It has now been published.

Travel and other irritating things

(I was looking for a document and found a piece of irritated writing from a recent trip)

I have forgotten my charger; this is new, usually it is the adaptor that I forget. It happened during my trip to Ahmedabad in the winter and I spent a night in a hotel room, unable to use my laptop, and starting to grasp that I am partly fighting a losing battle. No matter what I remember, there is always that one more thing.I try and be so careful, I make lists and lists but everything fails when I switch bags. It is always a bad move and I am blaming Spirit (for some reason I keep calling it Sprint) airlines. I am en route to a new city, for an interview, and I am nervous. 

...

The Last Lap

This is it. It is the last lap of my Master's degree, of my time in graduate school (or so it seems at the moment). It is impossible to believe that in May I will graduate. the years have both ambled along and whooshed by. Some days, I remember in great detail. Others, they have sped by, leaving no memory but a blur of faces and voices and places over weeks and months and seasons. Hurtling towards graduation is my stock answer to every time someone asks how things are going. Hurtling is an appropriate word; it captures the speed and intensity of the feeling of this semester.