But while you wait for that to happen, you have no choice but to live with your thoughts. Thoughts that seem to be all around you, in your head, out of your body, ricocheting off the silent walls, creeping into your brain and draining you of any semblance of hope or happiness you might have left. You wonder why it has to be this hard. Why, after all these months of struggling to get here, now that you have it you wish you didn’t. You wish you had something better. Human nature. Never ceases to surprise you.

The clock is at 8.42 now. You are surprised that it took you this long to type out the few sentences above, even though your mind is flooding with thoughts. The pain, the longing, the solitude: how do you express what they are doing to you? How do you explain why it is that you made this particular choice? Does the alternative seem more appealing now? Certainly not. Logically it follows that you chose well. Then why is it leaving you feeling this lousy?

You pick up the phone. You want to call the one person you know will make you feel better. And yet you don’t. Because calling him will only serve to emphatically drive home what you already know.

It’s 10 minutes off 9. You decide to get something to eat because you need your body functioning normally if you want to get through this week. And then the phone rings. You smile. Because, after all, you wouldn’t have this feeling of pleasure and hope, of the joy of your next meeting if you hadn’t chosen this path.

I’m back.

Updates:

• Things are moving in the right direction. I’m happy. Will tell you more about this when the time comes.
• My blog had an anniversary. Oct 11th. I missed it. Sorry, blog.
• I turned 25. Feels about the same, except now the pressure is building. Everyone’s asking me when I’m getting married, like it’s the ultimate path to Nirvana.
• Missing the bitchiness and the madness terribly.
• Spoke to DDD for the first time ever. She sounds exactly as I imagined her to be.
• I recently discovered that I have some of the most amazing friends. My gang at school all celebrated my birthday even though it was 2 weeks late. And the two most amazing people that I’ve been living with for the past few months are more special to me than they will ever know.
• I’m gonna miss New England.
• Tried to watch ‘Kidnap’. Couldn’t. Someone please explain to me why since times immemorial, it has been taking exactly 3 minutes for the cops to trace a call in ever Hindi movie? One would think that with the scientific and technological development achieved over the last few decades, this detection time should have been reduced?? Gah.

I am sorry to say, but I’m going on a break. I am going through a bad phase in my life right now, and I’ve decided to take a beak from blogging until it’s over.

This space shall remain awaiting my return. I will still follow all your blogs regularly.

Please bear with me. And pray that my break doesn’t last long.

Cheers,

G.

Btw, to all you people who were in the same city/state as the hurricane/bomb blasts, I hope all of you are ok and you suffered minimal or negligible losses. And I hope none of you staged the bl**ts coz if you did you’re bad bad people and your pictures are out and we’re right on your heels baby (of course by we I don’t mean me and my immediate peers, I just mean the general good, anti-evil side).

- So we attended this show organized by the Indian Students’ Association. And, no offense, the only part I enjoyed was when I jumped the line to exercise my highly useful ex-committee member status to nick bhel-puri and aloo papdi chaat. The masala chai during our tenure was better, in case the current committee is listening. Ohh and does anyone know how to sue your juniors for plagiarizing the Mahabharat spoof word-for-word from your time?

- While we’re on that subject, what is with the pseudo ooh-I’m-so-american act of showing up in jeans and a t-shirt/spaghetti for a show by the ISA? Isn’t it like an unsaid dress code to dress like you have some remote association with your home country? It’s not like we’re asking you to get bedecked in bridal finery, even a damn kurti would do just fine. Or are we all just morons who wear Indian clothes to Indian events while clearly comfort casual western wear is the order of the day. Why didn’t we think of that before???

- You know what I hate about the chat-sms (ooh, text-message, I’m American. NOT.) age? It’s this whole unwarranted shortening of the English language. Of course, why would you type two whole extra letters when you can do with typing just ‘u’? It makes the same sound doesn’t it? Saves you a LOAD of work. And what is WITH people saying bubye? Is that someone with a bubble for an eye? Ok, really really bad joke, bt u gt wt m sayng dnt u? (Did I get that right? Was there one consonant too many in that skillful saving of text characters? Is that gonna cost me 10ps more now? Damn.)

- And that reminds me, what is with people messaging you on gtalk and then saying brb? I mean, if you’re going to ‘be right back’ why say hi in the first place? Why don’t you just slide over the hi and just get to the brb? That way I’ll certainly notice you, but I won’t bug you with asking mundane questions and exchanging customary greetings while you’re being ‘right back’. But you’re there. You’re just too busy to continue a conversation you started. QED.

- Have you heard Hariharan perform stage shows? Ze Bee showed me this video of what rape really is.(Yep, you got it right, I only recently realized that you can embed youtube videos instead of linking them up, so I’m on a roll!) Of course, one shouldn’t just blame Hariharan, Mr. Mahadevan is equally guilty of abetting the main perpetrator. But SM usually doesn’t sing in his stage shows, he does get away with lip syncing and he usually ends up giving a reasonably good performance by the sheer virtue of NOT singing. It is egotistical (egoistical? I can never tell) musicians like Hariharan Saar who take it upon themselves to conduct seminar series on ‘How to murder original compositions and alienate your fans’ in the form of stage shows who give lousy performances.

And, of course, I forgot about the people who claim to love blogging passionately and don’t update blogs for weeks together. I would like to sincerely apologize on behalf of all these irresponsible peoples. I will talk to them and make sure this doesn’t happen again. You have my word. I promise.

Untl d nxt pst,

Bubye, tc, gn, nm, ttul, and whatever other ridiculous combination of letters you can think of,

~G

Dating: When is an appropriate time to start saying you’re dating? One, two, three dates? And, really, what does qualify as dating? Coffee, dinner, movie, drinks, thrown in with copious amounts of subtle flirting and double entendres hidden in every sentence we speak? Then does that mean that some people I know end up dating even their friends (or people they “claim” are their friends) ? A touch here, a naughty smile there, a peck on the cheek that lingered a moment too long? And how long does it take to actually proceed from “a date” to “dating” ?

Relationship: When does it go from “dating” to “being in a relationship” ? Is there an intermediate phase in between these two? And amongst all this confusion when does the first kiss take place? And how long does it take to move from the kiss to other, more interesting things? Does it mean that whoever you’re getting it on with is the person you’re in a relationship with? And what if you’re with them, have all the benefits of a relationship (well, I can only think of one big benefit, but for peace of mind, let’s add the plural) and yet deny ever being in the relationship/going around/blah-bloo-blah?

Commitment: We’ve all heard this word. And in all probability, more often than not we’ve heard it along with the phrase “not ready”. So when does a relationship transform into a commitment? And does making out have any part to play in this? I for one cannot imagine a guy being committed to a girl because she’s mind-numbingly hot in bed/makes love like a tigress. And I do happen to know women who would sleep with men and then claim to be “not ready for a commitment” leaving the guy gaping. But I also happen to know men who do the exact same thing. So what does commitment mean?

Living together: So do you live together once you’ve “committed” to one another? When you’re in a “relationship”? Please tell me you don’t move in together when you’re dating. Does living together require the relationship to pass the above two stages? Or can it be done in between one of these? So does it also signify that your relationship is definitely moving towards marriage? How much time passes between the living-in and the popping-of-final-question? So when you’re living with someone, you’re all but married right? So then why do people break up even after years of living together? And is it allowed to come back with the “no commitment” drill after you’ve lived with someone?

And, the most puzzling question of all…. Where does “love” fit in the grand scheme of relationship-y things? When is an appropriate time to say the dreaded 3 words? How easy or difficult is it to slide from one intense (emotionally and physically) relationship to another while having said (or at least felt) the L-word?

Maybe we should all go back to our parents’ and grandparents’ generations where life was simple and you didn’t have to think so much. Meet boy, parents say yes, you say yes, get married, sleep with the almost-stranger you just married, have kids, live happily ever after.

Pshaw.