topotales

Wanton wraith wrangles
with wauling washy wasteland;
wake’ful, winter wans.

Since watching Slumdog Millionaire (best movie EVER) in Chicago I have been slightly obsessed with this song by M.I.A.

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If you haven’t seen the movie yet, turn off your computer because you need to go see it… RIGHT NOW.

I’m feeling a bit rubbery and tendonless today.  I have that distinctly uncomfortable self-awareness that comes in the middle of a hangover as you try to replay the evening before.  You’re almost positive you made a fool of yourself somewhere along the way, but not sure exactly when or how.  Except I’m not hung over, I just do this after almost every social event.  It’s a social hangover for the emotionally unevolved extrovert.  At least I can count myself among the blessed few not suffering from real alcohol poisoning today.  Paolo is still in bed moaning for ibuprofen and juice and it’s past noon.

Two friends at our party last night each recently ended five-year relationships seemingly headed for marriage and family.  One of those friends commented that he had underestimated the importance of communication in the relationship.  That he had all of these feelings he thought he was expressing, but in the end it turned out he wasn’t expressing them in a way his partner could understand.  It seems to me that I’ve been through several important relationships that ended for the same reason.  That little communication crack turns into a deep divide.  You ignore it most of the time because you love the person and they love you and clearly the relationship is right.  But one morning you wake up and you’re lying next to somebody who might have been your soul-mate but who is now a stranger.  And things are too complicated by life and by habit to go back.  And then the divide starts nagging at you every minute of every day because you feel lonely.

What effected me strongly was the way this friend expressed himself.  It was clear that he had spent a long time thinking about what went wrong, exactly, and he was full of regret.  And I know that sorrow too well, of losing somebody that feels so perfectly yours.  Of letting go somebody so beloved that it’s more painful to keep them the wrong way than to free them the right way.

As part of our lose-weight plan, P and I have signed up for a pilates class.  It takes a good no-bullshit workout to sell me on this kind of thing, because I find fitness fads super annoying.  For example, paying to sit in an enclosed room and “spin” on a stationary cycle in front of a mirror sounds just fucking stupid when you can hop on your bike and get the same workout for free, plus… get this, people… fresh air!  Considering the fact that I’m Indian and my dad used to be a yoga buff I also find yoga pretty boring.  Especially the bits that Westerners think makes it so cool.  There is no faster way to put me to sleep than making me stretch and breathe deeply while you hum and OM, talk about chakras (snore) and pull words like DHARMA from a ten-dollar-at-the-airport Bhagavad Gita.  And that’s pretty much what I thought of pilates before the first class - yoga PLUS fitness fad.  But I have to say I was wrong.  It’s intense.  I never raise my heart rate but still manage to sweat like a pig and think wicked thoughts about core muscles I previously could not locate but which now are throbbing furiously.  Okay, I’ll admit that a lot of the fun is in watching Paolo try to stretch his abnormally long legs and abnormally long arms without thwapping the people around him.

Well, that pretty much sums up our weekend, and I have to say that it’s nice to be a bit quiet.  The only excitement of the day was just a few moments ago while I was sorting laundry.  I was making a stack of my underclothes when P shouts “Hey, what are you doing, those are mine!” and snatches a pair out of my hands.  And guess what, people - they most certainly were NOT his.  They were MY panties.  And after I proved that to him (three holes, not four = topopanties) he admits that he HAPPILY wore them ALL DAY yesterday WITHOUT EVEN NOTICING.  And now they most certainly ARE his.

I really wish I were back home for this inauguration.  Obama is a real mutt- mixed races, mixed cultures, raised a bit here and there.  And guess what, that’s what a real American looks like these days.  I can’t wait to see the straight white plutocrats pack up and take their party elsewhere.

The main problem with disappearing for well over a month is that you then feel the need to come back with a BANG! To rehash all the exciting things that happened over the last few weeks. To excite your loyal audience (hi Chelsea!) with titillating observations and snarky commentary. You get all hyper about how to do it. You construct run-on sentences in your mind. You edit them. You delete them completely and come up with a new subject. You do this pretty much every day until you realize that everything you’ve been wanting to write about is utterly meaningless in comparison with the bag of tortilla chips on the coffee table and the cushy couch growing out of your ass. You compose tender and reassuring poems to your growing ass. Finally, your ass gets so big it doesn’t fit on the couch anymore and you have to get up and go to work. Dammit.

So as you can see, I have returned to work now have nothing better to do than post.

I’ll just give you the overview of the last eight-ish or so weeks. First, I got depressed. Well, actually I got depressed sometime in October. Instead of waiting for Total Meltdown this time, P found some cheap tickets and shuttled us both off to Chicago for Thanksgiving. I saw the whole family, which was really fun except my mother’s version of “hello”, which was as usual a lyrical exercise in criticism. This time it covered (primarily) my knack for losing things and my lack of common sense. Always a good time. After the US, I had one week of pretty happy. Then I crashed into Total Meltdown mode for all of December (in case Ian Curtis below didn’t clue you in). TM mode means I walk around the house bleary-eyed and crying a lot for no specific or apparent reason. P looks at me and I cry. I put my shoes on and find it incredibly sad. I comb my hair - waterworks. I come home and go straight for the couch. P hugs me, I cry. P makes me dinner, I cry. I go to bed and bawl all night. And this whole time sad-me is being watched by psycho-me. Psycho-me turns everything I do into a potential act of suicide. Drive to work- why? when it would be so much easier to drive into a tree. That would quiet things down. Then I feel this incredible bourgeois guilt: “What the fuck is wrong with me? This isn’t the 1800’s that I can inherit my uncle’s money and check myself into a sanitarium for le malaise. I’ve got this thoroughly rich life and I am being a big fucking baby about it. People are suffering all over the world and I’m blubbering about jet-setting around Europe.” Unfortunately, depression is a disease, people. And you can’t really apply logic to a brain that isn’t functioning properly. Unless that logic happens to involve ways to kill yourself.

I feel absolutely horrid writing about this. Because I find it embarrassing to be a weak, whiney baby. Because I have no less than three friends who have lost their parents or other people close to them to this disease. But I don’t want my life or what I write to be bullshit. I want to have real friends who know and love me for who I am. Who love me when I’m fucked up and depressed, and not just when I’m running around making up fun magical adventures. And if you decide you still love me, well - thank you, please leave me a comment so that I know who you are, and I love you too.

Moving on… this TM depression state lasted pretty much through New Years, which was a total effing disaster this year. Pretty much everybody we knew left the country. We didn’t really have the money to go anywhere because P’s divorce got finalized suddenly and he had to fly to Italy to sign the paperwork in front of a judge. The few friends that we do have here were doing their own traditional things (Belgians, like St. Louis people, have this annoying tendency to keep hanging out with the same people they went to highschool with… not that I’m bitter about being left out!).  I was so depressed and couch-ridden for the week P really did everything he could to get me out of the house. A colleague of his was nice enough to scrounge us up tickets to a VIP erotic party. Let me say here - not something we do. But we went to a club earlier this year out of curiosity and thought the people and the ambiance were really relaxed and interesting. Besides, it was P’s only option apart from a) staying home listening to me cry or b) knocking me on the head with an ice axe. The party was not relaxing and the people were not interesting. It was a meat festival and at some point I just gave up and started downing Vodka/redbulls.  After I was altogether too drunk I had a massive freak-out and P drove me home. The end.

I guess the freakout I had at the party was cathartic, because I came back to life sometime last week and started feeling human for the first time in months. I finally managed to detach the tumor - I mean the couch - from my ass and found that I had gained 6 kilos. That’s a lot when you’re five foot two and started out at 50 kilos.  So I started climbing again, took up Pilates (which is a real workout, unlike the “breathe, use your mind” yoga crap I hate), have done a few woodcarvings already, and …well, voilà… poorly written stream-of consciousness, but at least it’s a post, eh?

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Feeling broken and healed all at once feels almost exactly like this perfect rendition of Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley’s version of the original Leonard Cohen song.