Dirty Little Secret

Christmas is long past and it never even felt Christmassy. All I cared about was a break from work and before I knew it, it was Christmas and then it was gone. That was it and that was my “Happy Holiday”. Of course, things got a LOT better starting around New Year’s, but the season was lost. Again.

This isn’t my first Christmas crib and it probably won’t be my last, but then that’s what I normally do around here.
December is now the embodiment of innocence lost. The days I used to wait for with bated breath now mean nothing to me. In days afore, 25th November would start the warmth flowing as the month-long countdown began. I so miss the days when there was a Santa and staying awake till midnight on Christmas Eve was an ordeal, but well worth it on the off chance that I’d see the jolly dude. Childish awe, reverence and excitement bundled together to make one tingly kid. Or even waking up later at night and looking for presents that I may or may not have deserved, but nevertheless, got. So what if Santa Claus was more Mr. Christmas than Jesus? If you were naughty in one book, you were naughty in the other too!
25th November has been replaced by 30th March, as the end of the Fourth Quarter always precedes the annual appraisal. If you know you’re on Santa’s nice-list, Christmas is on 1st May, when you see the first deposit of your incremented pay. Joy to the world, baby.

Christmas is supposed to bring with it a sense of good cheer and brotherhood and kindness and glad-to-be-alive-ness along with the mandatory presents. Fine. So where does all this disappear to for the rest of the time? Christmas is not about a day, it’s about a spirit. Christmas is everyday because it IS about a sense of good cheer and brotherhood and kindness and glad-to-be-alive-ness. But I guess nobody much sees it that way. I think that’s why I miss Christmas every year. When you’re so used to seeing indifference, you don’t recognize the good stuff when it actually comes along. And then it vanishes almost as quickly as it appeared.

I’ve only been writing biographical shit lately and it’s tiresome. I need to get more upbeat. Next time.


At least this holiday season left me with one good memory. For the first time in a long time, I helped decorate the Christmas Tree. Mom and I, 1:30 in the am, listening to AC/DC and Bob Dylan, hanging sparkly stuff on the tree.
Until she started singing along to Highway to Hell. I didn’t know whether to be proud or afraid…


Merry Christmas, pricks... and goodwill to all.


More


No Doubt – Underneath It All
Bob Marley – Redemption Song
Jimmy Buffet - Margaritaville

“It’s not a pet, it’s a wild invalid!” – George Costanza


You weren't REALLY expecting a secret now, were you??

Quick quickie

Damn this time-flying nonsense!
I haven't had time to put together a decent post, but if I don't say something, the month is going to go by without me having said anything! And that hasn't happened in a VERY long time. So I'm not about to break that chain. I may not have much, but I do have my respectability.

So anyway, here I am, not really saying anything yet, but having already said enough.

Time to go. Until next time...


No songs this time. Wha...?????

'06, Out.

Measure of a Man

Defining moments are few and far between during a single lifetime. It’s nice to have them because they do exactly what they say: define you at a point in your life. They give you a sense of security, an important thing in a world which is becoming increasingly insecure. And I’m not talking about security in the sense of safety; I mean security in the sense of self.

I’m 23. One would say I’m not that old. But I feel it and I don’t know why. Although, I don’t recall an event that defined the metamorphosis from adolescent to adult, the moment when I became a man. It can neither be planned nor created, it just happens and you know right then. Of course, circumstances are such that I hardly remember much anyway, but I think this would be one thing I’d remember not to forget. Becoming a man is about taking charge of your world and accepting the responsibilities that come with it. It comes in different forms for different people: the first big investment, a fishing trip with dad, marriage, seeing someone close in deep shit and realizing it could have been you, your new baby, or wanting one and planning for it. Some would prefer less complex experiences like a virginal sexual experience or lighting up/downing one for the first time.
I think I’m a man, but I have no proof for myself. The shaving, the backaches, the hair loss, the evolving view of women, none of these is a certifiable indicator of a degree of manliness.

Many people probably get through their life without having had such a defining moment and never feeling the need for one. But I need it. It’s not a matter of insecurity; I just want to know that when the time comes for me to take up something big, I will not hesitate. I have had very few challenges in my life up to now and this has left me devoid of crunch-time-performance experience.

On the other hand, there’s this.

Childhood is on the other side of the coin. I look back over 20 odd years and there’s not very much that stands out. There was no adventure, there was no journey of self discovery, there was no innocence lost and there were no surprises. It often makes me wonder what I missed out on. Of course I will never know and there’s no way of ever finding out.
This is made even more depressing by the fact that we are living in the age of the undo. No matter how bad you muck up, you can always undo, re-format, or simply use the backup disk. Having got used to that you tend to expect the same out of life, which only leaves you disappointed.

George Bernard Shaw hit it on the head: Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

Stupid kids.


Watch The Goonies!

Green Day – When I Come Around
Eric Carmen – Hungry Eyes

Avenging Avengers

It’s late in the afternoon
I’m wondering what clothes to wear
I don’t need no make up
I like my unkempt hair

Saturday and I realize a bit too late that I'm too late for work.
That darn Lily Allen.
So here I am, at my desk, not working, in my bedroom slippers. Not that I mind too much. And they’re cool, nay, sexy slippers too. They’re Ralph Lauren slippers! I don’t know if Ralph has ever launched a line of bedroom slippers, but if he ever did, they’d look exactly like mine.
They’re sleek and black and fit me perfectly and I’ve had them for around two years now. No, that’s not too long to keep a pair of slippers, especially when Ralph Lauren is wanting them. And they’re shiny too, with that hand gesture popularized by Churchill and Nixon, right on the top for all the world to see.

You say you want a pair just like these? Well you can’t have them. ‘Cos I have the one and only. The others were all destroyed in a fire at a Polish warehouse and the production firm has since decided to stop manufacturing this model in commemoration of the highly skilled immigrant workers who didn’t survive the blaze.
Hmm, I wonder if there’s a Schindler out there somewhere…

So there. These are lucky survivors and you can’t have them. Good Day, Sir.
I said Good Day!



I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger… Ooh la la, ooh la la, la la yeah.


Wyclef Jean ft. Claudette Ortiz – Dance Like This
Fallout Boy – Dance, Dance

And in case you were thinking it, NO, these picks were not VMA influenced.

Criminally Crimson

Indian advertising campaigns have lately reached a new low. As if girls making randy sounds at a watch or tittering over an unremarkably average small car wasn’t inane enough, Pepsi, yes, none of the [insert giant cola brand name here] crap this time around, have come up with a new ad slogan that just hit everything else out of the park. The blue billion is coming. Detestable cretins.
As if it isn’t bad enough that this country has more than a billion mouths to feed… imbeciles want to publicize it. I’m pretty sure dysenteric circus elephants could have painted patterns more sensible than making light of your own country’s population crisis for commercial purposes on national television.

Try and imagine the blue billion… coming. One thousand thousand thousand sweaty, belching, swearing, mostly blue collar South Asians moving as one. Almost brings a tear to the eye, doesn’t it? Run Forrest, ruuun!

Now, I’m not ashamed of my country. I am however, ashamed of the way its people are fond of behaving. For example, too many Indians think they ought not to be Indian, which is a great loss to the nation. If they put the same determination into making a living in the land which fed them at birth as they do in trying to escape to foreign shores, my head would hang much less lower and not without good reason. India will forever be tagged a “Developing Nation”, as long as the majority of its population doesn’t realize that it needs to be contributing something to the country instead of feeling cheated out of a birthright. This is why we continue to advance at the speed of dark, while the rest of the “Developed” world surges forward with every passing day. Congratulations. Blue billion my ass.

Hold on there Free Willy, don’t look at me just yet. I’m presently counted among the thinking-but-not-acting slobs who have too much to say but not enough to show for it. Wait till I’m good and dying and if I haven’t done anything worth a mention by then, you can point those curvy index digits at me and loudly proclaim “Hypocrite”. But for now, I’m proud to work for a company founded by smart, enterprising Indians, in India, that has graduated to an international base and Market Leader status.

I don’t remember who it was, but I once heard someone say (I’m honestly hoping it wasn’t just David Blaine) that life isn’t worth living if you haven’t found something worth dying for. It’s a cool thought but simultaneously scary because not everyone has identified their worthy goal by the time they first read this weighty statement. And that’s depressing.

I’ve actually always been searching but can’t admit to having found it. Close sometimes, but never right there and definitely not worth dying for. It’s unfair really, that supposedly, unless your life is centered on one particularly spectacular goal, you could be deemed a waste of perfectly potent sperm. The altruists would tell you they’d devote themselves to family or friends or some other unwarranted sentimental crap like that. The social screamers would always claim to have something worth dying over… some human/animal rights cause, environmental cause, political cause or some other bullshit that the average shmuck doesn’t give a flying fuck about. So let’s tone it down a bit. Maybe you don’t quite have to die. How about moderate-to-severe wounding? (Hospital time means time away from work!) No?

But really, I would like to have that thing which involves me completely while drawing on my talents, however imperceptible they may be; my refuge from the asphyxiation of enforced conformity and a hidden fountain of indulgent intoxication. I’ll have to write that one up as a knight’s quest, to be undertaken when I’ve grown woefully weary of worldly endeavours.

People have many opinions about the force that turns the earth, but I haven’t yet heard this one and I’m pretty sure it has been largely ignored. Penis envy. Yup.

Penis envy doesn’t necessarily have to about a penis, but it is still about the size. Money makes the world go round, love makes the world go round… yeah ok, but take this into consideration too. If penises were never envied, so many millions of men wouldn’t suffer from low self esteem, leaving psychiatrists virtually jobless. Unemployment is better than listening to women whine the entire day.

I remember my school days; the time when I would be insecure about guys who were taller than me or who had bigger feet than me, meaning almost everyone. To top it off, family genes gifted me with unusually small palms, so I really had no physical field on which to compete with those bastards. Pretty sucky times, sizewise.

Competition has got to be one of the strongest factors driving every single human being. The biggest package always wins. How else would you be motivated enough to work at getting better? If there was no penis envy, you wouldn’t have the skyscrapers and super towers that bejewel the skylines of the world’s richest cities, each of which was built in an effort to out-do a similar effort by somebody else. You wouldn’t have limousines and you wouldn’t have Big Macs. And you wouldn’t have the slimmest cell phones or the tiniest palmtop computers. Works both ways, this size thing.

You gotta face it eventually, things don’t quite work the way Tex Avery made them out to be; Droopy doesn’t really slay the dragon and ride off with the hot dame while the Big Bad Wolf sulks in the corner.

So the next time someone has to tell you “Don’t worry, size doesn’t matter!” be ashamed. Be very ashamed.

For over a year now, I’ve been talking about virtually everything, with the exception of religion, politics and my family; three topics I’ve been careful not to stray into because they are respectively A: too vast to cover and might just involve more mindless drivel than actual sense, 2: uninteresting, leaving me under-opinionated because of said disinterest and 3: unfair to the folks at home.

Although I have actually written stuff which did pertain to one or more of these subjects, they never got past my pre-posting review and were thus dropped. They’re still lying around somewhere, so maybe if I change my mind I’ll take a shot at putting them up. Possible, but not probable.

Take a walk on the wild side, baby

but don’t forget to pack your raincoat, trekking boots, insect repellant, Swiss army knife, vitamin pills…

Green Day – Jesus of Suburbia

Justin Timberlake – Sexy Back (I know it’s cheap to jump onto the popularity bandwagon, but in my defense, I didn’t really jump onto it, more like I booked an early ticket)