The insomnia creeps up

It's kinda boring to be an insomniac. One spends the nighs wide awake like an owl, and the days feeling all tired and sleepy, except when one decides to hit the bed, one doesn't sleep for more than a couple of hours, after which one wakes up like one's been jolted with a micro ampere of electricity. (Seriously, even a single ampere will kill one.)

Insomnia makes one type long sentences with a lot of commas in them. One also looks up random and useless trivia.

When one spends close to twenty hours a day being awake, wide or bleary eyed, one is exposed to a lot of things that normal people aren't. (The assumption being that anybody who doesn't spend twenty hours a day awake is normal.) And this is fun. This is vital information that one can use to taunt the normal folk.

For example, if anybody says that Chennai is a concrete jungle and one can no longer hear the birds chirp early in the morning, they are lying. Well, they aren't, because more often than not, they aren't awake during these early hours. One is, and that makes one privy to the information that birds do chirp, rather happily if one might add, at around 5 am in one's neighbourhood.

One leaves work at around 1250 these days. One watches the first half of the midnight football match and leaves immediately to get back home before the second half starts. It's just five kms away anyway. The fact that one has to make it before the second half starts is enough motivation to torture one's bike to get one home fast enough, not that one needs the motivation, one usually rides like a maniac who's rushing to a hospital for a kidney transplant. When one rides that fast, there aren't really many things one can notice en route. But there are some startling things that stand out.

Like this junction in T Nagar for example. The usually crowded junction, which is literally packed with traffic that measures its moves, like somebody's going to nuke them if they move too many metres at once, is absolutely devoid of any human life. A stray dog is happily sleeping. A couple of dogs are probably engaged in coitus, it's hard to say when one's going that fast. There is a lone ice cream vendor who's cycling to wherever he's cycling. One stopped him once and asked him for something to eat and he said that only the ice creams above 15 bucks are available and since one doesn't earn and one is still shamelessly mooching off his parents, one refused to buy the ice cream. One put up a long face and rode back home in solitude.

Since one's house plays neighbours to a liquor store, one finds many drunk and passed out men strewn along the route to one's home. Usually, the drunk men have enough sense to pass out on the platform. Some do spill out to the road. Then there are those who are right in the middle of the road. When the head light in one's bike doesn't work, this can turn out to be quite a sticky situation. One is often required to swerve at the last moment, thereby either coming too close to the platform, or waking up a sleeping dog. The dog which was sleeping till one decided to wake it up then chooses to chase one down till it is satisfied that the noise of the bike's engine drowns its barks.

It is quite a different world out there when the normal folk sleep and insomniacs roam around clueless. It's a world that one must not miss.

"With the birds I share this lonely view"

A day of laxatives

What a day it was yesterday.

First, the old pint drinking men turned up in Red and played their hearts and dialysis machines out. It was agonizingly slow to watch them, but they seem to have found one of their balls and netted it. England won their first match 1-0, making it to the round of 16. All the barmen in England were financially secure for the rest of the year.

Second, the pipe munching, accent carrying, lip curling engineers from the fatherland threw a pie in their supporters face who lined themselves with White, Red and Gold by marching out in Black and Gold. With their oft repeated German Precision, they finally threw one back into the net well past the half way mark and made it through to the next round. To cap it, in the next channel, the Kangaroos defeated the Serbs, rejoiced and then cried as the news trickled in that they still didn't make it to the round of 16. It is back to bucketing kangaroo poop for them.

The best of all news though, came well into the night.

The Duracell bunnies now have names, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut. They played the most epic match ever. The match went on for so long that someone hit a bright idea and created a Twitter account called GrassCourt_18 and started tweeting the pains of being a grass court at the Wimbledon where two men played on like they had nothing else to do. When Mahut finally won, erm - the appeal to call it a day thanks to the deteriorating light, the match was suspended at the last set being tied at 59 games a head.

Court no 18 lives to be stomped on by an angry Frenchman and a resilient American for another day.

My Ineptitude

When do we start distinguishing between a pain that is physical and one that is psychological? There are medicinal proofs that psychological pains can translate into physical pains. That, by any stretch of logic, means that either your brain can't quite distinguish between the two or your brain decides that this pain is worth crossing the line into the other.

Is this rewritable?

*****

It's been fun the past week. I managed to hoodwink my colleagues to think that I can write something and that it is worth publishing on a newspaper. It was interesting in the sense, I realised how much of a non-fit I still am in this job. There are obviously lessons that I learned and lessons that I didn't recognise. Honestly, a byline is over-rated. So you wrote something and it came on the paper, big deal! It doesn't affect the way you process things, does it? It still doesn't change the fact that you'll throw up a million masks to every single new person you meet. It has no bearing on the way you look at life, be it welcoming on cynical.

*****

It's funny how one single conversation can have heterogenous responses. It's funny how someone who you thought had half-a-decent idea of who you were says that they never expected some action from you.

*****

There are some people who bring a smile to my face. Then there's her. She's never failed to make me gleeful. She's never signed off without knowing that I've smiled. I try hard to do the same to her, but she's charming beyond compare. There's no one that compares with her.

It had been close to a year since we had a proper conversation, apart from the usual hi and bye on chat. It was a chat again and it was just for some twenty minutes. But even she would've been charmed.

It's not the things she says, it's not how she says it. It's not even how she puts it. She makes me stop. She makes it hard for me to think away from what she said. It's her, there's no arguing with the effects she has on me.

And the best part, she has no clue about all this.

The Answer

I've finally made mild sense of what/who I am.

I am a cockroach in a toilet where the light's just been turned on.