Take it, take another little piece of my heart.

My sister's birthday is coming and it's as terrific an opportunity as any other to buy books which I want to read and gift wrap for her. Lucky we more or less read the same stuff or rather I bulldoze her into reading what I recommend. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, fantastic people, nice little book I stumbled on thanks to fly and I think there's something in its awkwardness that exists in all of us, especially if we dish out a blog post every week or so.

While planning her party, we decided on Chinese food which somehow brought back a memory of this store in Pune from where we'd get Chinese take away frood. I used to be fascinated by this place, it wasn't a restaurant in a market, it was just a take away shop literally in the middle of nowhere. It was so noisy and steamy and small and they'd take your order and pin it up on a rope and it would be ready robotically in minutes. So numbskullsister and me would play 'takeaway' with our puzzle pieces and mix them around in a tokri. The only plausible explanation for a tokri in our house I think could be because we were living in Maharashtra after all. (egad, images of kim sharma as a fisherwoman are coming to me after those 5 horrifying minutes of some random movie which permanently and irrevocably burned some of my brain cells.)

Also donated blood today! Yee haw, did it for the cool red tshirt we all know, and while I was lying there pumping my fist tiredly instead of feeling righteous as I should have, I was like dude, I just have a needle in my arm, someone who needs this is going to have all their bones smashed in . Count your blessings, name them one by one, thank the Lord for what he has done, kept playing in my head.

On a crankier note though, I am being forced to go out to my mothers friends house for dinner. She has this daughter whose a couple of years older than me, looks and dresses like a model, and has had sex several times with several different boys and was caught in school with her bra undone, which is public knowledge to everyone except apparently our mothers and mum dearest insists she's such a nice girl, I should try and be friends with her. Fuck, glad they're all so in sync. I'm sorry, not that there's anything wrong with her but some people I just can't take seriosuly, and she's one of them.

Something I'm really beginning to believe in though is All In Good Time, truly, life eventually calms itself down and things happen in their own time. When I was in middle school, in Bangalore, I always always wanted to become a senior prefect, not head girl becasue that was so passe but house captain, because that meant something, and I loved my house captain, she was so cool man, she'd run the captains relay on sports day, and march with the house flag. She'd sit on the steps of the canteen (for seniors only) with all these boys and I'd always wonder which one she liked. She'd come to my class and ask for me and badger me into taking part in elocution or something which I gladly did for her. It was so cool the way they'd stay back after shcool, and make those charts and practice for house competitions and stuff, and the 11th and 12thies were allowed to come on their bikes and so casually afterwards they'd zip off to some place to eat.

I left though, and I had no idea untill I was away how fucking impressionable I'd been. I got to be house captain of another school though and it meant shite, really it meant nada to me, which is not as awful as it sounds, it just was that way.

*Remember those shiny coloured Add-Gel pens in 1999? They were such a rage and I had a purple one and wrote LP in big bold letters on my arm and walked all over school one day. At band practice after school, Music Captain comes in and after he does his 'duty' and yells at us for not practising hard or long enough, he hangs around to chat and he says, so you're all into heavy rock and metal and all? and I'm like no ya, just Linkin Park, he's like what's the name of their album. FUck! I didnt know, lol, but anyway, Dad took me on a sunday, to music world I think, not the (then) new Planet M on Brigade Road, and I bought Just Push Play (Aerosmith) and Hybrid Theory and on the way back in the car, dad suggested that I play the tapes, and I slowly, delaying it as much as possible, unwrap the flimsy plastic wrapping and Papercut starts up..the sun goes down, I feel the light betray me, I hastily ejected and put aerosmith in which was no better, but thankfully we reached back because then you could actaully drive around in Bangalore and reach places in minutes not hours. Atleast it wasn't Public Service Announcement on the Marshall Mathers LP.

So into Jaded was I that when we came to Delhi on our summer holiday, on the customary annual visit to Dilli Haat, instead of yet another name necklace, I had jaded written with those alphabet beads, and Dad says do you even know what it means? I didn't.

Man, I was quite the emo kid. Today though, I'm somehow very happy to be me.