poem about me without using the pronoun "i"

one hour left for my interview
in an empty house that is not my own
up since 8 AM to wait for 4.30 PM
feeling like one of those movie characters
played by actors like bill murray
clink of a single spoon against a single plate
one bottle of water, one waiting book
one cigarette for the nerves
one lit lamp
one pair of shoes by the door
a wait, a sweater
and the cold.
soundtrack and all.

just back from jaipur lit fest, channelling "indian author" voices, writing in style of "reading of excerpt from her novel on futility" or somesuch

today i am in delhi, in vikram’s house, enjoying sitting next to—because i can’t sit in—the only patch of real sunlight i’ve seen since i arrived here day before yesterday. i am expecting a telephone call from my university; they are going to interview me for the course and this talk will decide the course of the rest of my life. no pressure. “informal chat” they say, of course. it is 12.30. the interview is at 4.30. I am experiencing a very contained kind of hyper-nervousness where i am nervous but unable to truly allow myself to internalize and therefore deeply feel it but also unable to not feel it and relax and watch a movie or something. what a shit in between way to be. i’ve experienced it often in such make/break situations and i know it’ll go as soon as the situation begins, within seconds literally of the interview starting, and then i’ll be fine. unless i royally goof up and make a giant ass of myself. which has also been known to happen.

i am arranging and rearranging my space, folding the clothes and blankets, shifting my chair first to one then the other side of the table, creating the perfect sitting in which to continue to sit. and wait. i even felt the need to dress well. i think it will make a difference to how i sound on the phone.

luckily, the maid has come over to make lunch and the house is filling with household smells and household sounds, which is making me feel not quite so lonely. if she only knew what a difference she is making in my life. helping me get into university! yet this poor toothless old woman in a thin cotton sari and short-sleeved white blouse-sweater underneath, who first arrived at 8 am in a heavy fog and biting cold, will only trudge to the next house to make the next stranger’s lunch, and every day until the day her limbs don’t move.

now i’ve depressed myself. which is not good but a far more tolerable (and handle-able) emotion than nervousness.

dinky pictures

i take lots of bad, random pictures with my dinky 2.0 mp cell phone camera.
today i gave them their own blog.
just!

in keeping with the adjective + noun = blog url format, i bring you, http://dinkypictures.blogspot.com.

hee.

'postcard'

it was after six in the evening, the sky was that yellow it gets sometimes that can make you feel sickly and pale and remind you of books you read as a child that scared you. walking past the kala ghoda steps where some people lay taking naps and a few kids smoked cigarettes, i met a boy who really likes postcards. i didn't see him first, i saw his postcards first. many of them, hand made, tacked to small cardboard sheets suspended around the pavement. i had never seen so many postcards in one place before. many pictures with small stories in pink and green ink, dancing around the empty pavement, all lit up yellow. he was behind me and when he looked up to see who was looking at his postcards, i looked up to see who was looking at me. i wiped my toes on the back of my skirt. he said he really liked postcards. i said i could tell. why? i asked. he said, because they force you to be honest. i wasn't sure what he meant. he said he liked pavements too. but it surprised him how such few people notice when you put pictures around a pavement. he said most people walk with their eyes staring at the ground, no one has seen my postcards yet i think. i said, why don't you put them on the ground. all the yellow of the sky lit up inside his face. that's brilliant, he said. i laughed and curled my toes and said, no it's silly. he said, here, take my postcards. but you must pay for them, i made them to receive a payment for them. i paid him sixteen rupees and took four postcards. he smiled, thank you, i'll think of you every time someone remembers to look up he said with a ripped pocket. then that is not so often, i thought.

structured serendipity

i recently discovered siteinspire.net, which is a (somewhat limited) database of interesting websites. nothing new about that, except that the sites are categorized really nicely. instead of the typical categories of 'personal', 'business', 'retail', etc., they have infinitely more useful categories like 'unusual navigation,' 'feminine,' 'big background images'. it just seemed like a much more useful way of finding websites, especially for people who make websites for a living. i think we need a way to extend such useful categorization to other media as well. every time i'm going on a trip, for instance, i spend a seriously unholy amount of time trying to find just the right book to carry with me--i have to find something that is not too heavy, because i can't really focus on airplanes, so it has to be fiction, an absorbing, simple tale; then it has to be not too heavy weight-wise so i can carry it easily down train stations and airports, so it should be paper back and also preferably under 300 pages; and then maybe it should be relevant to where i'm going, either set in the place or somehow related to it. sometimes, only sometimes, i've managed to make just the right match, like when i matched into the wild with ladakh or, too obviously, the beach with goa. but mostly i've failed at this quite miserably (i carried stieg larsson's third to bhopal; it was the totally wrong weight and size to hold lying flat on a hard train seat and only at the last minute i discovered character-fatigue had set in after the first two parts). this is of course just one kind of situation in which you need to pick a book based on useful criteria. and likewise for music. i happened to hear a really awesome song sung in pashto a while ago and want to listen to more pashto music but sadly i can only browse for music by 'artist' and 'album' and 'year'. or like maybe i'm going on a road trip and i want to create a playlist of good road songs. and then there are movies and and it can all get infinitely more specialized. sort of like a greeting card model for media. or a directory with logical-emotional categorization.

i wouldn't want this to be mixed up with social networking. sure i can go ask questions on forums and get people's opinions and all, but i don't want people to have to go through that mess and spend all that time. the experience should be one of flipping through a directory. simple. the results could be improved by having users vote on them but that's about it. and for people to be able to create their own categories, like amazon lists but more searchable, useful. moderated. curated. serendipitous.