Tears dry on their own.....

You can feel it coming but usually it is a slow build. I’ll hear the news, say all the robotic responses I am supposed to say and then say good-bye. Then without the tinging fear in your voice to concentrate on there is nothing left to save me from my fears. Alone with my thoughts, I can’t help but replay the scenarios over and over again. The regrets, the worries, the pain, the forgotten promises and dreams yet realized. There’s nothing that can soothe the wounded soul.

So I’ll excuse myself. I just need a few minutes to compose myself. To wail and to rail and to scream and to complain and to whine and then I will be fine. Minutes pass and I feel a reprieve. I wash the smudged mascara off my face. Take a few deep breathes. I look at my reflection and see nothing but swollen eyes and a fake plastic smile. But it will have to do for now. I need to get back before too many people ask what happened to her.

So I head back. Tail between my legs. Head down; no eye contact. Just try to make it back to the safe haven of the computer without causing a scene. But as soon as I sit down I see the phone where the news came from. The harbringer of disaster: you feel like throwing it across the room in frustration. I see the balled up tissue I used before I realized this would be a “time out cry” not a “quietly so no one notices cry.”

And it all comes flooding back. First sniffles and then waves and waves of tears. Still, I make no eye contact with anyone. It seems like the safest route. Then my heart starts racing. I want to just get up and leave. I want to just quit and live under my comfy down quilt for the rest of my life. I want to do something but I can’t seem to help her no matter how much I try.

But I just stay seated. Take a couple of deep breathes. Stick my head between my knees and just try to calm myself down from the brink of delerium. But it’s not working. My attempts to remain inconspicuous have turned ridiculously obvious and I can’t seem to calm down or even just breathe evenly.

So I work up enough stamina to coherently say that I won’t be able to work the rest of the day and hightale it out of there. Finally beneath the shield of my sunglasses out in the open I can cry and sniffle as I please. And by the time I reached my car, my tears had dried on their own.

You Give Me Fever

Maybe it's the heat. Or maybe it's the constant barrage of weddings and babies and lovey dovey coupledom. But for some reason I keep noticing them. Everywhere. Cute ones, not so cute ones, ones that look like ones I've dated before, ones that look like ones I wanted to date before. In groups, in couples or all by their lonesome. They are everywhere. Ones that are looking at me; ones that are looking at someone else; ones that I wish were looking at me; ones that I wish were looking at someone else.

What do they like make up half the population or something?

Live Like You Were Dying

Everyone contemplates what they would do if they have only one or five or ten years to live. I would travel. I would call my high school sweetheart and tell him I still love him. I would sky dive. I would walk in the surf. I would give longer and tighter hugs. But would you do if you knew your mom had only five or ten years to live?

Would you still take that trip you’d been planning in the back of your mind for about ten years? Would you still skip out on Sunday dinners to go smoke pot with your ex-boyfriend? Would you remember the past since the future is just too scary to contemplate? Would you think about all the things she will probably miss or would think about everything she has already been a part of?

Take whatever kind of pull towards home that these thoughts conjure up inside you and then multiply that by 1,000. Now you know what it’s like to be an Indian daughter.
You know that 1991 song “Everything I Do, I Do It For You,” by Bryan Adams? Sure I guess it is supposed to be all romantic but from the first time I heard that song, I thought of my parents. If you are brown you know this old sob story. They left their upper middle-class jobs in India to come to Canada and work hard labour for 40 years in order to provide better lives for their children. And then we turn around and end up all emotionally unstable and (gasp) still unmarried.

Sometimes when I hear my mom talk about her nieces and nephews, I wonder if she is jealous that they are all married and settled. I mean at least I got my degree, but I am not exactly working a great job that she can brag to her friends about. I’m not sure how I turned out all weird and artsy and without an iota of corporate ladder ambition, but I know that it is not very brown of me.

Sometimes I think I will try and be a better daughter by meeting and dating brown people (such a bad idea, but that is a story for another entry), getting a better job, cooking Indian food and spending more time with her. It is exhausting. Most of the time I just want to cry and mope and curse the world. But there’s little time for that in between the visits, and the walks and the phone calls. Maybe that is a good thing but maybe not. The other day I found myself wondering when my life would be mine again and my instant gut reaction was in five or ten years.

The More you Ignore Me, the Closer I Get

When you sleep
I will creep
Into your thoughts
Like a bad debt
That you can’t pay
Take the easy way
And give in
Yeah, and let me in

Anyone who takes relationship advice from Morrissey has issues. I understand that. But there is no doubting that the Mozfather take on relationships is eerily akin to my own. However it would be sorely off base to say I enjoy the thrill of the chase. That would imply that the ebbs and flows of the relationship inspire a surge of confidence in myself and my pursuit of what I want. I liken the experience to that of a kitten nipping and meowing at its owner’s feet; following him around incessantly until he is so tired of tripping over you that he finally picks you up.

But then once he picks you up, you realize that in mere moments he is going to realize that you have kitty breath and can do little more than look at him quizzically. So you scamper off. But then you still want to be with him. So you stay close and jump up for quick cuddles every now and again.

And the longer he stays away the more I wonder what he’s doing. Even if just a day goes by without a phone call or a text or an email I find myself unconsciously heading to the Market on Yates, or the Black Stilt or even just a wanderlust walk that lands me smack dab right in his neighbourhood.

It a bit sad, I guess. I mean what would my women’s lib sisters say if they heard me comparing myself to a kitten and referring to him as my owner? Not good.

He’s not that great, I know. It’s a go nowhere situation. But there’s something about him that keeps clobbering me over the head and dragging me back by my hair.

So uncool it’s cool again.... The personal blog is resurrected

I think it was Plato that said nothing is officially dead until someone says it is. By today’s standards of cyclic trends and mass consumerism, I think the more apt statement would be once the media says something is dead it’s time to bring it back to life. If personal blogs are really dead as most media savvy pundits are claiming (http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2008/06/24/PleasureBlog/), then I believe it’s time to resurrect what has died.
There will be changes. No more drunk photos; there’s always flickr for that (http://www.flickr.com/photos/preetadelic/)! No more boring, “this is what I did on the weekend” diatribes. If you want to know what I did last weekend, call me. No more lambasts about Britney Spears’ latest trauma or Amy Winehouse’s weekly conjugal visit to go see Blake, my Blake incarcerated. This is a blog about me. ME! If it interests you, great! If it makes you laugh or think even better. But ultimately it is for me to sort through my issues and go on and on about ME. Self indulgent, self-obsessed, over contemplating ME.

ENJOY:)

When I close my eyes I see ELECTRIC......

Okay, like I'm no scientist and not good at math and whenever someone says I am a genius or a brainiac it's usually because I added something wrong. But i think, sometimes at night, when I close my eyes, I can actually see my brain working. Like these electrodes passing through my eyelids to my brain. It's like all these different rainbow colours and they look like veins or something moving at light speed. It's crazy, right? Or is it? Everything has to go through your brain to happen. And things still happen even when you are asleep. Maybe I am seeing the signals that are sent to my brain telling me to go to sleep or to breathe or to make sure I locked the front door.
They go in all different directions but always up usually stopping at one or more dead-ends before heading off my eyelid path into my brain. Maybe it's like a lot of different signals that meet in my eyelids before travelling together to my brain.
And what makes these signals choose a certain colour? Like is Red an emergency? Or Code Blue? Or is it different for each person?

Skinny jean Dreams Do come True... in Record Format....

Have you ever seen a pair of jeans that you just MUST have? They are so cute, so soft, so cheap, so perfect except for one thing: they don't quite fit, YET. As soon as I start getting back into my gym schedule again, they will fit, you rationalize. The next three months will be a no potato chips zone you promise. So you go ahead, all in all it is a good deal. These jeans won't be on sale when you actually fit them. So you're saving yourself money in the long run, right?

It all sounds perfectly rational EXCEPT when you get home and realize you have a whole closet of "One-Day" clothes. Every morning when you look over your wardrobe of clothes not yet ready for public consumption you sink lower and lower into a hole of depravity and the first thing you want to do is reach for a bag of Old Dutch Ketchup chips.

So instead of faltering into a sea of ketchup-stained excess you hide those "one-Day" clothes away so you are not confronted with everything you are Not every time you open the wardrobe in the morning. Every once in a while when you are looking for a screwdriver or you randomly get an urge to polish furniture they pop out of their hiding place. The red pumps that are one and a half sizes to small but still so cute!!! The hot pink jeans that will make you look like a high-class Fergie when you can finally manage to get the last button done up.

Usually this type of shopping is a bit like throwing money into a black hole, but on the rare occasions that it actually works out, you feel like the frog prince. You get a surprise bunch of new clothes that you didn't ask for or remember for free. What could be better.

I started taking the same One Day approach to records when I was about 14 years old and saw a DJ spinning for the first time. He was everything I was not at the time: cool, calm, hot, mysterious. But "One Day," I would be. And it all started with records. I remember going into Boom Town Records as a bored teenager and giggling with my pubescent friends over who was the hottest cashier. We pool our money and spend hours pouring over records and sometimes even bravely asking for some help. The tiny fact that I didn't have a record player, didn't mean much at the time. The covers were cool and "One Day" I would have one, and it would be awesome!

I was often scoffed for my predilection towards vinyl. I may not have had a player yet but I still knew a deal when I saw when and I knew a classic album when I saw it in a sale bin for $0.99.
Finally, this Christmas after 13 years of scouring record bins and scooping up free records off dirty sidewalks, my skinny jean dreams of a record player have come true. And it is glorious.

Yesterday I listened to the Dirty Dancing Soundtrack like three times. And then I played a little RedMan and then two Happy Days Albums. Sure I had to keep turning the record over a\every thirty minutes or so and some times the music sounds like it is two chipmunks singing on speed but it's definitely worth it.

My One Day dreams of a record player are now a reality. Now about those skinny jeans.......