one of the greatest talents

is the ability to fall asleep. I am the most stressed-out person! At the moment I have empty hours at work, and my head is aching with lack of sleep - but can I curl up on the couch and fall asleep? no. Though I would love to. There was this cameraman friend of mine, and he had mastered the art of sleeping anywhere - standing in a crowded bus, or on a pile of oddly-shaped rocks in a dry riverbed in the Chambal valley. He was lucky and happy indeed.

Here are the things that go wrong when I try to sleep:

i) I need to pee at ten-minute intervals after getting into bed, even though I may not have drunk huge quantities of water.

ii) I start thinking about how miserable everything is. Naturally, this doesn't help in falling asleep at all

iii) My girlfriend lies next to me, deep in peaceful sleep and this, for some strange reason, makes me start thinking she doesn't love me after all (the reason is not strange when I think about it: obviously my illogical mind expects her to share my misery and not sleep either) and this makes me even more tearful and miserable

iv) I also think about all the stuff I have to do the next day

So the solution is to STOP THINKING AND STOP PEEING. I'm trying. I'm trying.

here is a something I wrote

I wrote it quite a while ago. Anyway. My girlfriend didn't think much of it, but still:

In my dreams my favourite ice-cream
Tastes like a bad hangover
And the faster I run from the monster
Of course I go slower and slower
And I miss by a second the familiar bus
That goes to the house of my lover
And when I do get there in the end
I find her dead in the shower.

At this point, I wake up, check that she's still breathing, and turn over.
And she turns too, looking like an angel, my otherwise psychotic significant other.

When I tell her about it in the morning, she takes out her Jungian de-coder.
The monster is easy: it's obviously my over-controlling mother.
The ice-cream is our sex-life, the less said about it the better
And as for "missing the bus" - she's been trying to expain that to me forever.
She frowns for a bit over her dramatic Hotchkokian murder,
And then says I should "talk more about stuff", not fantasise about killing her.

I watch her get ready for work, mentally kissing each little toe and finger
I would never never want you dead, my irreplacable, wonderful lover.

It took this long for my computer to be repaired.
Well the monsoon is here. No more watering the plants. My adenium bulbosa died because of natural over-watering, It was left out while I was away on holiday.
The monsoon means: drying clothes under fans, frequently upset stomachs if not actually full-blown gastroenteritis, quite nice mid-afternoon sex if it's raining and you're on holiday and the most gorgeous woman in the world is lying peacefully with you on a huge double bed with her light, flexible body wrapped around yours, both of you half asleep...
Monsoon in the hills - another world! Why did we ever come back?

my migraine trigger list

1. Foods
- cheese
- red wine
- chocolate
- anything citrus
- alcohol
- MSG
- overloaded sweets like, well, cham cham (one of my favourites).

2. life
- noise
- lack of sleep
- sunlight
- weather changes
- extreme heat
- heavy smells
- emotional stress
- tiredness (even mild tiredness is a trigger)
- eye strain

I have just read that one of my favourite foods, tofu , might be a trigger. Oh no.

after all that rhapsodising..

...I got a migraine!! But I don't care. I dealt with it better. I wasn't afraid of it any more. I'm going to do it, get rid of it. Just watch me. Was talking to a friend on the phone, and she said: "Give yourself six months on this." That's a good idea, having a definite time period to experiment in. Watch this space and see what happens.

To talk a little less aggro, I was feeling romantic so sent my gorgeous girlfriend this lovely little poem by Gavin Ewart:

Love Song

You've got nice knees.
Your black shoes shine like taxis.
You are the opposite of
all farting and foulness.Your exciting hair
is like a special moss,
on your chest are two soft medals
like pink half-crowns under your dress.
Your smell is far beyond
the perfumes at parties,
your eyes nail me
on a cross of waiting. Hard is
the way of the worshipper.
But the heart line on my hand
foretold you:In your army of lovers
I am a private soldier.

And she replied: "There is no army, and you are the only soldier!!" Made my day.

migraine relief

Life is beautiful. I prop my sheet music up on a stand, sit down with my guitar and play, and know that this time, this sound has nothing to do with money, with "goals", with "success".
I feel fortunate. At the moment I have loads of money compared to many people I know, and hardly any compared to many others - whom I know also. But money is meaningless. It's all in the head. A new dress is not going to make me look any better, and me looking any better is not going to make me feel better.
At the beginning of Tarkovsky's mirror, this man says that we have a lot to learn from trees - the ability to be silent, to be still, to not always be busy and talking. He says we've forgotten all this. It's true. What if we planned our otherwise wasted time around these silent moments of being?
I've put myself on this path now. Hasten slowly. Don't worry. Relax. Laugh. It's all an experiment in curing myself of the migraine. Be like a tree. Be like music. Be yourself. And today is the fourth day running that I haven't had migraine. For me, that's an achievement. I sprained my shoulder two days ago, but had to go to work. Once there, I told myself: it's only pain. It's only a sprain. It'll go away. And it did, with minimum fuss. Then came a crisis - the beginning of a migraine: a feeling of unease, heightened sensitivity to everything, dull pressure building on one side of the head. I talked to myself again: easy does it, girl, I said. Palm your eyes. Think cool for your hot head. Breathe in and out slowly and gently. Don't worry about the time. be kind to yourself. Drink peppermint tea.
And it didn't arrive, the migraine. This was a little miracle. I almost didn't believe it, but then I did, and I also knew that I had done it myself.
I've never been interested in the harum-scarum scrambling of contemporary life, but I think it's only recently that I've given myself permission to approve of this lack of interest. I used to wince each time I thought of my scholarship interview for Oxford some fifteen years ago. When the committee of stern old men asked me what my interests were, I said "reading, music and gardening." Consternation over gardening. How could it be? The answer should have been : Reading, music and mountaineering/ Reading, music and masturbating/ Reading, music and genetic engineering. But gardening!
Well, I still love gardening, and today my answer would be: I'm interested in music, happiness, reading, gardening, watching my two silly cats, protesting against injustice, being alive, being in love, hanging out with my friends...I did get to go to Oxford, and am eternally grateful for the kindness of those unimpressed old men, because Oxford was wonderful , a beautiful and wise dream, an example of what people can do for each other. It actually made me think and be more alive, more motivated, more critical of fuzzy logic, more appreciative of the powers of my brain and sheer hard work. Leaving Oxford made me miserable, but now I'm discovering that the process never ends. Some part of me is always there, with my stern and disapproving tutor shaking her head over a wishy-washy piece on the middle English lyric, and the same tutor exclaiming with delight over another essay on oral traditions and reading out bits of my own writing back to me to tell me how much she liked it. And that Oxford part of me, sitting with my tutor on a dark four o'clock winter afternoon with thick rain beating on the windows, still keeps me going, telling me that I can do it. I can do whatever i decide to do. Because that essay on oral traditions was the turning point. I woke up. I decided I was going to work hard and deserve the place so many other students so separately wanted to have. And I've now decided that I'm going to deserve my life, and get rid of this blasted migraine that has plagued it for twenty years. The way seems so clear now. I wonder I never saw it before: be peaceful inside.

midnight posting

Just got back home in the middle of a kalony power cut. Everything was dark, gloomy and quite dangerous-looking to paranoid, alone me. I was also carrying two loaves of bread, Nanda Devi by Eric Shipton, a creeper ready for planting, my useless handbag, and my house keys. Had to drop everything else on the ground, while trying to get the keys to work in the lock - they are these weird 3-d uncopyables, but also a real pain to align in the lock, in the dark. Thankfully I made it into the house, without encountering rapists, burglars or serial killers. In Delhi one man can usually be all three , if the newspapers are to be believed, and if the general expression on the faces of men in Delhi is anything to go by.
So the frequent power cuts tell me that summer is here, and now that the bijli is back at half-past midnight, my ac is also on. I think if I ever emigrate to some paradisiacal (yes I know there is no such word, but still) mountain country, I might even be nostalgic about all this. Who knows. It feels like home.