Musings

I'm currently not in an overly "writerly" mood. What brings me to the blog then, is a lack of anything else to do on the Internet. And the reason I have to compulsively be on the Internet rather than indulge in any of the million other time-killers that humanity indulged in before the advent of the Internet (including some as shocking as picking up a book and reading it) is that I have a new laptop. Yes! A shiny, silver, sleek, light new laptop. I have to use it, and I am yet to transfer any files onto it for fear of transferring a couple of viruses. I can assure that my old laptop, after six good years of service across ownership by myself as well as my sister, has more than just a couple of viruses (or is it virii?).

Surprisingly, once you're done with your daily football columns, a glance at the news and a scroll down facebook, the Internet is quite a dull place. I have not yet reached the stage of boredom where I Youtube search "Random videos" so I turn instead to this blog, a way to kill time while I download the .mobi files of the Lord of the Rings Series of books, thus heralding my entry into yet another fandom.

I have seen all the Harry Potter movies and read all the books of course, read the entire Song of Ice and Fire Series (thus far) and of course, 56 short stories and 4 novels on the travails of Mr. Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I find the Game of Thrones TV Series too gory for my liking and I don't think the other little series I've completed (all PG Wodehouse Jeeves novels, Foundation by Isaac Asimov to name a few, Friends) really count as a fandom. A fandom, by definition, is somewhat tribalistic about their sense of belonging. Then there's Arsenal, a fanaticism rather than just a member of the fandom.

The mistake I committed was to crash a tad earlier than I usually do, giving me about an hour of rejuvenating sleep just before the beginning of the ungodly hours rather than an 8-hour blackout these aforementioned ungodly hours. If only Browsers could sense just how much I'm cheering them on to download stuff faster, they'd have all the self-belief in the world.

The download failed and my resistance has broken.

Good night then.

Mildly Upsetting

Have you ever had THAT "mild" illness, a soreness of the throat or an easily irritable stomach perhaps. A light fever that ever so slightly tires you out, but not enough for you to go rushing to the doctor, wait for a couple of hours for your appointment. What would you tell him anyway? "So doc, everything is fine with me, except that everything isn't, there's this small thing." Awkward conversation on the whole. You want to be a whimpering, sniffing, shivering, shaking mess when you want to go to the doctor really. Surely, the biggest fear after the oft quoted public speaking and death, have to be the doctor saying something is badly wrong with you followed by the doctor saying absolutely nothing is wrong with you. Life is hard.

I digress though. It is in the middle of one of these little bouts of illness that I write this blog. My stomach is upset, not quite Gordon Ramsay upset but not exactly Mahatma Gandhi calm. My throat is sore, not quite Napoleon's army after Waterloo sore, but sore enough to be noticed after about a week of soreness. And the fever is probably at 98.61 F.

At this juncture that my sister, at whose place I'm staying, found it fit to thoroughly bathe my scalp in coconut oil with a little herbal, home-remedy magic thingy highly recommended to her husband (my BIL of course) by some Ayurvedic doctor chappie for exactly this kind of malady. And being the open-minded, anything-that-works progressive minded young man I am, I dutifully let her oil my scalp,

Here's the truth though, it's not about whether the oil can take away the ill-health down the drain with it when washed off; I'm enjoying the beginnings of a long vacation, the time of a vacation when you stare dreamily at all the time you have rather than pelt stones at it because it makes you feel bored and aimless. If someone wants to massage my head, well who am I to stop them? The ideal holiday.

Then again, all this time makes me restless. I'd love to travel somewhere, go on a trek or something. Run arrraaaand a bit. I'm torn between these two choices of an ideal holiday. One says life is short, sweat it out, sleep less, do stuff, go places. The other says life is long, leg work is unpleasant, sit back, do nothing, it's very easy to do.*

It is all about the mood though, the psyche, the frame of reference mind. It's hard to switch from one mode to another. When I go to a new place, I sleep little, eat whenever I'm given food and have boundless energy. When I'm in a known place, I can laze forever. And a balance is hard to find,

Right now though, typing out a blog aside, it's all lazy mode. In some relatively heavenly Bangalore weather, a cool place in the tropics.
Cheerio

*My friend has a T-shirt with the words "Doing nothing is very hard, you never know when you're finished". Good stuff!