Tisha's diary - being young

i've written a lot of stuff earlier...in my head. i did type one long back. 1
i dont know why i have chosen to type and store my words again. maybe because there is something on my mind now that is worth remembering later.
i am twenty now. a strange age isn't it? not a teen anymore, and yet so young. my parents refer to thirty-something people as "young". i wonder when one actually stops being young...forty? i have a professor who is forty-five...he is quite attractive.
anyway, the whole concept of not being a teen anymore is weird. i may not get away with immaturity anymore. what is funnier is that i have to think twice before referring to any grown-up guy as "uncle".

dada had this friend. he used to visit us often when dada was in the country. i was 13, he was 20. i loved being around him. he was a smart guy. i was a vivacious teen. he was probably like another big brother to me. and i never really ended up having a crush on him. he is still here. he works here somewhere, and has a 24 year old girlfriend. i would have called him every time i missed dada. but i see her frowning at me the very moment i go near the phone. it is weird. i have never met her. she does not know me either. i would not have thought twice if i were 13. i guess this is what is funny about being 20. you cannot be a sister to random grown-up guys. you are either a prospect or a threat. or maybe i am reading too much into being 20.

i do not miss school. i loved school. i detested the days when the teachers chose to ask us questions and make us stand if we could not answer, but i loved school in general. we were a bunch of 18 year olds when we finished school. there was a lot of grief all around. "i am going to miss you tisha" sobbed a classmate. she is probably on my orkut friend-list. i loved school. but i embraced college with such open arms that the grief of leaving school got lost in the excitement. i had called dada when i got through a couple of places. "i am going to study what i love. bol kon university ta better." he gave me some advice. (wait a minute, had i called him? maybe i had mailed him. either way, he did give me some advice) he was very busy. he had left when i was yet to spend three more years in school. he had left to study what he loved. i guess i had only one thing in common with him-we had both ended up studying what we loved. we had both not weighed the consequences of doing that-dada ended up going far away and being very busy. i ended up staying in my beloved room and being perpetually free to read as much as i liked.
having free time, like being young, is a relative concept. some housewives i know say they hardly have any free time, dada once said he keeps sundays free. i do not call him on sundays though. it is never a good idea to steal a busy man's free time.

if you ask me whether i feel 20, i'll say pretty much. i feel 20-or else i would not have felt the deep pangs of not being a teen anymore. dada had turned 20 in 2000. we had celebrated. i was a new teen. not 12 anymore, and yet so young...so very young. dada must have turned 27 with style...his birthday this year was on a sunday. i had wished him...i had mailed him an e-card. he must have used up some of his free time to view that and smile. i have travelled from 13 to 20 as he has done from 20 to 27. he has travelled faster. i have stayed put in my room-my dear old basement...so very young and so free that i still barely understand what i would do with my thoughts. perhaps when i just have sundays to deal with my mind, i'll stop thinking so much. i'll probably be 27 then...but i'll still be very young.

June 2007
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1 read Tisha's first entry here.

dark circle

As the bones broke
I got my diamond tooth

As the marks gleamed fresh on skin
I got the foreign-currency marked set

I prayed with boiling blood
For some boiling spit to drown the darkness

Now I keep my hands in check
As break bones with my mouth

Cut his skin in gashes with words
And then say "hit me!"

Hit me with what?
What do you have with you really?

Then ignorance hits with its cool waves
And I dish out goodies

Buy my glib tongue baby!
Buy my voice? My sugared apology?

He buys and I smile
"I have bought some forced kisses! Yay!"

We both buy till I look
I see him with the tooth and the set

But he bleeds just the same
And I see I have sold nothing at all

I got to stop trying to sell and buy
The spit glistens close by as my past self prays.

self-love

The words went from bad to worse,
So let me bring in some mush
To cover up the counted minutes
And then go back to work...

What work is that?
The decadence is your work?
But they sleep, or they earn their brain's worth...

But I don't want to cross that stupid door
To go and waste some time out there
It's not the same here; it's so much better

You know they do what they do...
Time ticks away as they huddle
With their ill-seasoned spice bundles

I have not enough time with me
And you want some of that?
Is your home more cluttered than mine: that's a shame

Okay we lack our private little corners.
We have ghosts lurking down our spines.
Our history scares us out together; you mind?

I will not answer anymore.
I wish you heal and return.
Smiling, I'll lie in my prosperity.

I can hear the music, I can read and see the films
As my mind speaks to me about a thousand dreams
The mush stays where it should...
And love swoops down from hearts, old and good.

To edit, or not to edit, that is not the question ... / : / !

I have already let a month of 2011 pass. I shudder to think that my blog is probably listed as "dead" now, but the novelty about a blog is that you can pull it out of its grave in a jiffy.
Since I am learning editing now, every unnecessary punctuation bugs me and I have had to say goodbye to my once-favourite ellipsis which I inserted here and there... it's not a favourite anymore i guess.
Saraswati Pujo allowed me to have this free day, which I spent as it should be spent - without doing anything. I figured I do much throughout the week anyway: attend college, read a bit, attend the illuminating classes on editing and publishing, watch TV, spend some time on the phone and stuff like that.

but honestly, this editing-my-blog-while-i-write-in-it is a menace. it hinders the flow. and now i know why authors need editors. it would murder their thoughts if they had to edit while they wrote :P and where would my blog be without smileys? so yea, what was i talking about?
this year i did not have to make a fresh idol coz we used the collage i made last year, and that made the 'pujo' a little less fun for me. but never mind that. (the comma before this 'and' is NOT an oxford comma or so i believe :P)
...i am running out of topics because i just noticed the freaky ellipsis at the start of this sentence which bungled my thoughts at 'i am'.
so, what's my next course of action? it is to notice that last month i would have probably left 'what's' at 'whats' and happily gone on to the next thing...

OK :P I need to write first and edit later - thereby wasting some time, but I guess i can afford it today!
The shutterbug that used to bite me every hour at one point of time has matured considerably. So I do not click random roads anymore. But I still do it with flowers - random flowers I mean. Among the new things that happened in the last few months would be a minute-long speech I had to listen to by a pretty little girl working for an entertainment company who said how the industry led her to "newfy" her ideas about offices. That certainly renewed (sorry, newfied) my ideas about pretty little girls who have nice jobs, but let me not go into that.

College: it is a place I can never stop calling awesome, so let me not repeat those sweet little anecdotes about it either.
Life at home: it is good; actually better because now I have the perfect amount of free time instead of the scary presence of too many hours and too many plans that were never fitted into the hours. So, like I said before in my rigorously edited paragraph somewhere above, free time lets me be absolutely free these days, and that's incredible.
To think that a few more months will conclude my life in JU is not sad; it is plain strange. It wasn't even close to being strange or sad when I left SPHS, even though I have had some great time there, which probably exceeds the time in JU. I cannot explain it, and I will not explain it even if I could.

dragging this topicless, edited/un-edited post is pointless. i could have talked about cricket i suppose, with all the big tournaments looming ahead. i could have talked about what i am planning to do after JU says farewell (nay, i couldn't have :P) and i could have dropped this charade about editing my blog to give this post some other perspective :P but it's good to have one quirky post or two, innit? reading a text and trying to catch the errors in it red-handed is major fun! i tried it, i loved it! now, is it more fun than resting your faith on the book and just reading? yes and no. i just have to learn when to do which, and till then, its a bit of both. yay for the loss of faith in those horribly translated books, those great books with a single error on page 208 et al. life is going to be good at least till May. and i gotta sign off now... cya on the other side of the thought process, where things don't get mixed. ;)