Old Notes:5 I Have a Lover's Quarrel With The World

"Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 12:46am"

                                          "And she powders her hair in gold"

The epitaph for one became the definition of life for another.

I have recently come to find, by the aid of a pop-up internet psychoanalytical quiz (!) administered to me by a friend (!) that the problems in my life are merely as big as the deer I see when I walk on an imaginary pathway through a make-belief forest. Which on hindsight, was only a small doe, with glittery eyes and nimble feet. Perhaps a female chitra horin, shining brightly with an aura of its own. I had stared at the doe and it had stared right back, with utmost curiosity. And then with a sense of great bravado, the beautiful shonar horin had leaped and fled back into the depths of the woods. My interaction with the imaginary animal supposedly represents the way I handle these problems in my life. So what does that mean? I stare my troubles down without solving them. I look at them and think about them untill they become an unsolvable enigma. They eventually realise I am not the one to walk away so they flee? Idk.

Recently, I have managed to find myself in a rather awkward fork, in the twited road of life. Initially I thought that I had taken the road less travelled but that is proving to be harder to handle then I had expected. My impateince gets in the way of my sensible decision making......a lot. Confusing me, destroying what little confidence I have left. My emotions fly every which way and I get stuck in this abyss of indecision. I overthink every non- existent sign and find symbols in the wind.

I usually walk around aimlessly in the afternoon snow with my ipod stuck on the same track; "La Valse D'Amelie (Piano) by Yann Tiersen". I imagine Paris in the spring. The chill of the cobblestone sidewalks and the fresh scent of the early morning blues. Somewhere a wood stove has been cleaned and the ashes smell like home when truck drivers sit around a small wood fire, warming their cold fingers during a cold spell. I imagine an unnamed dock, a grey horizon changing slowly into a bright yellow sunrise. The sky with its many many colored facets. I imagine living in an old attic studio filled with paints, paintbrushes, rollers, papers, bins of brilliant acrylics and many semi- finished, finished painted and sketched on canvases that range in size from huge to tiny.Here every day I re-invent myself and question my existence. I can close my eyes and see the slanted window that graces one of the walls that face outside. I can see the little prismatic cut glass charm that hangs from the window sill. Every morning the sun disperses off the little charm and swarms the wooden floor with small rainbows. Every morning I miss home.

I now know that these images are my way out. Every time my brain fails me and I see the haunting golden doe of troubling thoughts, I retire my senses. As a defense mechanism the back of my eyelids become projection screens and I see my happy place. A place where in real life I would only end up if every major decision that I have ever made in life was cancelled out and re- evaluated. Thats how I fight my troubles,i stare at them blankly, with utmost respect and curiosity. Then I retreat to a place where all my troubles are non-existent. I hide.

Which is going to be my solution to this next dilemma I face. I am retreating. Finding my sanctuary and re- evaluating my choices. Not giving up. Never giving up.

Old Notes:4 Reevaluating the White Picket Fence

Friday, July 4, 2008 at 11:09pm

I consider myself to be a fairly logical person. Most of how I think and almost all of my ideals are based partially if not completely on an action versus reaction sort of equation. I tend to think and rethink the cause and effect of all that happens in my life. Surprisingly, I am also a spontaneous person. Don’t ask me to explain how that works, but apparently it does. So, sometime in the recent past I had started questioning the fiber of me. Basically asking the why, what, when, how and more importantly who questions directed towards myself. It may sound easy, who would know you better then you yourself. But, since the questions started flooding in, I found out it was quite possibly the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do. The difficulty mounted more once I discovered that the questions have no right or wrong answer, and it’s hard to forgive yourself when you are the only one making the judgment calls. I hate it. The obsession to figure out who I am only seems to lead me closer and closer to insanity. I call it a midlife crisis, one which at least for now seems to have no apparent turning or focal point.

In trying to find myself I looked at what I like to call the final product. The sparkle at the end of the tunnel. So I questioned why I was doing what I am doing right now. I am in college, studying a science; initially I had wanted to move on to medical school and someday become a doctor. My parents would be proud of me, my cousins would look up to me and as conditioned by culture, I would someday be able to attract a good fellow who’d be lucky to marry me. Jack and Jill, sitting on a tree…..and the rest is history. My very own white picket fence dream; the perfect husband who’d marry me for love, a beautiful house, a successful career and eventually (more sooner then not) children. By the time I had turned 10, the social format had already turned me into a conformist. Society needed me to believe that this was it. That was all that would and should make me happy in my life. I not only accepted the pretty picture, I also started to judge anybody who thought otherwise.

Every girl has their own white picket fence dream, their own destinies to fulfill. Some of those destinies have been conditioned and probed into them like mine was. Some are more free willing. For one the dream may end in a house in the suburbs and a minivan. For another it may end on a Buddhist monastery somewhere in the Tibetan plateau. No need to specify that there are infinitely different combinations that exist in between. Since I started to figure out what I really wanted of life, I also started to examine my dreams and goals. Breaking them down, condition by condition, stripping off all reasonable doubt, taking off every pretentious peel to find out exactly what made me happy. Imagine my surprise then, when I found out that I did not care for anything which thus far I had thought was right for me. To begin with, I did not believe in love. The all magical, all curing, tremendous power that supposedly engulfs and destroys all negativity. I never could figure how that worked and quite frankly, I don’t much care for all the crazy things people do in the name of love. Self doubt reassures me that I’ll never get into a medical school. To keep it simple; I do not want to get married, I will most definitely not marry for “love” (for convenience maybe, still considering that attitude), absolutely never want to bear children and have no want what so ever of settling down in a house. I shudder at the thought of any commitment, get bored by any relationship more then three months of age, cannot trust myself with any responsibility, get obsessed with certain facets of perfection and need to be constantly stimulated to retain a certain level of sanity.

Problem is, now that I have decided what I did not want, it has become harder then ever to try and set a different set of goals for myself. I never thought it would be this hard to find out what makes me happy. Imagine a hydro phobic’s worst nightmare; trying to swim out of a very deep, murky dark lake of sort. A lake that he voluntarily dived into. That’s what this feels like.

Dang it, I hate thinking.

Here’s a drink to solutions presenting themselves to me on silver platters, soon.