Opt to opt in

Options.

I have options. I could opt out of writing this weekend. In another hour I should be dressed and ready to leave for a short weekend trip with my girls. But. I’ve taken quite a few sabbaticals of late. Indiscipline and procrastination, like everything else, can very easily become a habit. Habits are hard to break; bad habits are especially hard to break. And I live to prove that.

The week was good. We narrowly escaped a super cyclone which mellowed and passed through as a regular cyclone. Lots of wind and rain leaving behind some battered trees and damaged property, but thankfully no loss of life. Personally, we got off real easy. Didn’t even loose power. And are now enjoying some lovely weather. While we don’t do thanksgiving, I will say despite the shitty year its been, I do still have a lot to be thankful for. Good health, an extra year of having my son at home, and the time to do some major introspection and reach some decisions which I hope are the right ones.

At any rate, its better to take a decision and live through the repercussions of those decisions, than to exist in limbo.

So happy thanksgiving everyone. My shower beckons me. Chao.

In response to Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt “opt.”

The mysteries of the night

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “the last thing you put in your fridge.” 

Image from wiki

The last thing that I put in my fridge was ‘roti’ or Indian flatbread.

Now if you are picturing something round and soft and fluffy – please don’t. At our place we gravitate towards the more abstract. No dull perfect circles. No Sir, we like our rotis in a myriad of shapes. When we pick it up, we like to guess which country or continent’s map it resembles. On other days it could just be the stages of the moon blocked by clouds (if you are feeling a little artistically inclined).

Sometimes, just to add nuances to the palate, we serve them half done or half burnt. You know, lest it be said that dinner is a boring affair at our table.

As for our fridge… Ah, what can I say about our fridge. It is that mysterious place where things go to miraculously disappear. Apparently, no body opens it at night. And yet…! I suppose the food gets teleported to where-we-shall-never-know and the dirty dishes get teleported to the sink. Now if only those dirty dishes would just as magically clean themselves… but hey, let’s not be too greedy for the paranormal.  

I find it more prudent (and peaceful) to just get up in the morning and take a fresh inventory before planning the day’s menu.

Of course, I also find it prudent to freeze anything that I want to keep safe from the mysteries of the night.

Written in response to the Stream of Consciousness Saturday

Aujourd’hui

This Friday’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “jour.”

My jour today was spent like many other journeymen dividing my time between journeyworks and the journos; wondering if a certain individual will complete his sojourn in a certain place and adjourn to somewhere else, which many of my friends are journaling could be anywhere else as long as it’s a place of no return.

There – my SOCS target is met.

I’m afraid that I cannot say the same for many of my other targets. My journal aka my phone, has this pesky ToDo list that refuses to shrink. Knock one off his perch and another one pops up, sometimes bringing along a few other entrants just for shits and giggles. Tenacious b***.

One very persistent document has taken up sojourn on my system’s screen and keeps trying to grab or tab my attention even while I am tending to matters of far more importance like this little journalistic entry. He too refuses to adjourn without a forceful dismissal.

Some jours are just destined to be boring!

Que sera sera

Magic. How mesmerized we are as little children. We believe in the magic of fairies with their fairy dust, Santa on his reindeer sleigh, and even the magician as he pulls rabbits out of his hat and cards out of some audience member’s pockets. As teenagers we believe that we have become smart. Smart enough to outsmart them all. Magic is merely a sleight of hands and if we look closely enough, we can definitely figure their trickery out.

Then, we get to the age of ‘intelligence’, when we finally realise that the biggest tricks are played by the fates. The ultimate karmic magic show where we are the hat, we are the rabbit, and we are the shocked audience. We watch intently, we anticipate every move and take possible precautions, and yet…

Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera…

Well, today I am in my stage of ‘wisdom’. I may not have bought the tickets, but I’ve accepted that I am a part of the show. I play with the cards dealt to me and I play with hope and caution. But when my chosen card ends up in somebody else’s pocket, if my favourite scarf becomes a dove and flies away, or even if my companion appears to be cut into two, I continue to sit back, make my moves, and hum the tune… Que sera, sera.

2019-2020 SoCS Badge by Shelley!

Written for the Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt “trick.” 

A ‘ecial’ confession

This Friday’s Stream of Concioussness (😉) prompt is “a word you have to look up.”

I shall therefore post this prompt without any spell-check. What can I say but – Linda, you asked for it!

I don’t know if it’s a universal correction notation, but in my school, the teachers marked spelling mistakes with a bright red ‘sp’, which they then went on to underline for emphasis, just in case we were colourblind and didn’t notice. Which is to say that the corrected books that came back to me were rather colourful. To the extent that this lethal combination of alphabets has scarred me for like. If they had at any point accidentally even written ‘special’ on my book, my mind would have blanked out the ‘ecial’ part.

Suffice to say that if I actually went on to compile the list of words whose spelling I was unsure of, I would merely be reproducing the dictionary, albeit abridged!

The day that I could finally migrate to a computer was my happiest day. I type with 2 fingers, and am rather slow, but finally I had spell-check. The greatest software that has ever been invented and one that we take for granted far too much. The second greatest software is the one that does autocorrect. Now, nothing is my fault. Spell-check fixes most of my fauxpas (😊) and the rest I blame on Auto-correct.  

2019-2020 SoCS Badge by Shelley!

No medium required

“Sister, you need to pray more. The Lord has shown me some things about your family…”

I am a believer, yet even I knew that the Lord at work here was not the Master of the Universe but the Master of her House. “What did you say?” I asked her. She shrugged her shoulders with the apathy of one who had lost hope. “I feel betrayed. Instead of talking to me he has gone and complained to the priest. I know it is him. When I looked at him, he couldn’t meet my eyes,” she continued after a long pause. “How is it that when something good happens God is pleased with him, but if something goes wrong then it’s my fault?”

She’s my closest friend, and while I have a few choice words for her husband, I know that this is not the time to rage. The best thing that I can do for her right now is to hold her hand and just ‘be’ with her. I watch a single tear fall. A drop laden with hopelessness, helplessness and the weight of a breach of faith. I watch it land and get absorbed into the fabric of her dress, just as she had allowed her family to completely absorb and eliminate the person that she once was.

I am not one to judge another’s marriage. God knows that I have made enough mistakes with mine. But I think of those who profess to be a medium between us and God. If you want to be a shepherd, then know the right direction to herd your flock. Do it with the same love and compassion that Christ showed. When you interfere in a relationship as sacred as a marriage, do it to heal the cracks, not to tilt the balance.

“For the Lord of hosts will have a day of reckoning Against everyone who is proud and lofty.”   

2019-2020 SoCS Badge by Shelley! 
https://www.quaintrevival.com/

In response to the Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt “medium.”

Half way there

I’m So Excited…

Today (technically yesterday) we went to inspect our new apartment.

I am really excited because this symbolizes a step towards a new future.

To be honest, I love the home that I live in now. It’s my home of 25 years and a place of great significance. It was gifted to me by my father, a man who I adore and miss so much. I brought up my beautiful baby boy in these very rooms. Each brick here can tell you the story of our lives. Yet, this beautiful edifice is also the very place where I chose to hide from myself, from the world and all its cruelty. These floors are soaked with my tears. The dreams of my early womanhood lie buried beneath this soil.

But now I have opened my heart again. I have dared to hope again. Liberating myself from this prison of my own making, I have decided to spread my wings and take a leap of faith.

I love my old home, the sense of familiarity, security and comfort that it effuses me with; but I am also excited about my new home, from where I will have new adventures and fulfil new dreams.

This apartment may not be it. It may only be another step in the journey of my life. But that’s what really matters I suppose. That I don’t stagnate and atrophy but instead keep moving forward. Life is a gift and I intend to honour that gift by actually living it.

It took me a while to understand this one simple truth, and now that I understand it, I’m excited.

2019-2020 SoCS Badge by Shelley

In response to the Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt of Oct 3/2020 “new/old.”

Circumvolution

Procrastination – I have a predilection for procrastination.

Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after – that’s my mantra

I’m a true procrastinator. Not one of those half-baked ones who have so many ideas but don’t act upon them. I procrastinate in both action and thoughts. I mean, why worry about crossing the bridge until you actually get to the bridge…. Once you get to the bridge you can stop and worry about crossing it… and as you worry about crossing the bridge, you get to delay crossing it… and maybe, just maybe, while you’re worrying, someone may come along who will cross the bridge and do whatever the heck it was that needed to be done, and you will no longer even need to cross the bridge.

Speaking of bridges brings me to my next word – destination.

I’m not one of those people who navigates through life with any clear goal or destination. I figured out long ago that no matter what I set out to do, life comes along like one giant wave, and then I’m just tossed around by the currents like some flotsam.

Which brings me to my next word – station.

I am flotsam… that is my station in life. And before you start clicking your tongue and pitying me, let me tell you that being flotsam is not all bad. Flotsam is free. Flotsam sways to the music of life. Sure, sometime we get entangled with some muck, but hey! What’s life without a little dirty dancing.

Now to my final word – exasperation. Or irritation. Or vexation.

Which is probably what you are feeling if you are still reading my rambling stream of unconsciousness 😉 I’m sorry but the streamlets of my stream have no correlation.

2019-2020 SoCS Badge by Shelley!

For this Stream of Consciousness Saturday the prompt Linda gives us is “-tion.” Find a word that ends with “tion.” Bonus points if you start your post with it.

The world is collared

O dear! Linda has given us a Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt as “collar.” 

A month or two back that would have probably had me picturing the tailor’s shop with their many patterns for necks and collars, or perhaps an Elizabethan film with those fancy frilly high necks that look so elegant. But considering that a pet cone is also called an E-Collar, we can imagine how comfortable the poor ladies felt.

At that point I would have gone into a rant about how collars and corsets were yet another tool of the patriarchy.

But today a very different thought flows through my mind – of the state of post-Covid economy and its impact on livelihood. Just yesterday I was listening to a talk on how the rigid Indian lockdown has rendered lakhs of blue collar workers jobless and that it was going to take its toll on the white collar workers next. This one little invisible virus has affected the entire world, and yet we refuse to learn any lessons. We continue to over-estimate our importance and rights as a species, refuse to acknowledge the damage that we are doing, stay oblivious to the fact that we are so tethered together in this global economy that the days of ‘his problem is not my problem’ are long gone.

Covid-19 has collared the entire world and brought it to its knees.

Hope is tenacious and I continue to pray that this too shall pass.

But dare I hope for us to come out any wiser, is the question.

My pen is blunt

I am not feeling particularly sharp right now. It’s been almost a year since I logged in and I just spent the last few minutes looking around to see what’s changed. For starters this ‘block’ editor appears to have become the default. I’m more of a classic person, being a baby boomer you know, but post-lockdown the world has been screaming that we should up-skill. So ya, this is me up-skilling.

Happy to see that most of my old friends are still here. I had signed up at a time when I had shut out the world around me and embraced a new virtual world. So even though you don’t know me, in my story, many of you are my friends… Friends who got me through one of the toughest periods of my life.

Lockdown has been tiresome. But ironically its not been hard. My self-imposed lockdown was hard. This is just necessary.

So I have mopped up the spilt ink, reached for the sharpener, and resolved to write again. Now as Susie very eloquently puts it – tits up.

Linda hosts Stream of Consciousness Saturday. This week’s prompt is “sharp.” Use it in any or all of its definitions. Have fun!