Photograph

Another academic year done… another skin to step out of, another new set of clothes to try and fit into – and by the time the tucking in and the letting down and the smoothening of the pleats is done, it’s time to discard them again. Oh well, that’s life. But the last day of the academic year always evokes bittersweet feelings in me. I look around at the room which bit by bit I have made into an extension of myself, a familiar cocoon, a corner that’s mine and I realize suddenly that I have to tear apart my little world with my bare hands and reduce it to the bare walled blank slate that it was before I made it my own. Down come the posters from the walls (how we named each of the three koalas in it and came up with lame funds to justify the totally random nomenclature), the curtains from the windows (the extensive search my roomie and I conducted to find the perfect weave and pattern!) the timetables from the cupboard doors, the chargers from the plug points and the bags from the loft. The underbelly of the bed is swept out in one clean sweep exposing errant toffee wrappers, a cobwebby shoe collection, not to mention prohibited electrical gadgets stowed away hastily after news of the warden’s coming did the rounds. The always-overflowing laundry bag is emptied out and folded up – it’s neat flat folds giving no indication of the beer barrel it normally resembles. Trophies and bottles of deo no longer dot the ventilator, the trunk no longer doubles up as a couch with the blankets and cushions. The books have been packed, the sheets have been folded, the mattresses stowed away, the pile of clothes in neat suitcases. I sit amid an array of discarded papers and labeled bags. Bits and pieces of my life in the past year untidily summarized. The tree outside swishes in the midnight breeze as it will continue to in the very same place. It might have got the better deal after all.

(p.s. Then again, there is much to be said for single rooms :) )

Lazarus

Ok so my blog’s been as good as dead for quite sometime. But as we all know, I’m a busy woman with more things to worry about than a blog stagnating somewhere in cyberspace. Sure, you try waking up for lunch everyday, going through archives of webcomics (xkcd, je t’aime!), hours of gtalking, catching up on the books an erudite citizen of the world must be well-versed in, breaking your head over ps options (practice school – check out the funky new bits website ye unenlightened), dragging your backside to the occasional tut and of course, collaborating with a cgpa wise merge-sorted list of people for assignments, staying up all night studying for tests the night before, and I’ll see how much time you have for juvenile pursuits like blogging. Not to mention cultivating a sense of humour. See, I have a theory – if life’s being a bitch now, let her continue, don’t interrupt – soon she’ll get tired of it and then you watch! As long as I can keep that at the back of my mind, dealing with her is fun, and humor keeps popping up in the most unexpected of places. A baby-faced math instructor in a bright yellow sweater straight from the Kiddy’s World catalogue fumbling over the implications of ~p-->q (“ it’s ~p-->~q …. No wait it’s ~(q-->p) … ummm actually it might be q--> ~p”) can brighten up dreary January mornings. Wars over who stole a wingie’s bathroom slippers rage over gtalk status messages (Battleship: “fucken stop stealing my bathroom slippers! Tooooo cheap” Bounce: “I did not steal your bathroom slippers, bitch!” Baa:”Your bathroom slippers are with me”). Two stray kittens are suddenly discovered in a particularly messy wingie’s cupboard – they’ve been there for a week, she merely mistook them for her jacket with the fur collar (the professional geek wing upstairs would probably consider it sacrilege if they found out we named one of them MuP – err… because it mews – they consider all microprocessor rights to remain within their combined electric field). Stories of flying lessons being held in the MT lab do the rounds – you realize connecting a DC Shunt motor with the voltage supply on is the key to the aeronautic adventures. Wing politics get ugly, messy … and then, just plain hilarious when concerns like nightwear (or the lack of it) and numerology enter into consideration (no offence to believers – I can’t help laughing a bit hysterically in the presence of active discussions over whether the digit 8 in a particular room number will make a difference if it ultimately does not add up to the offending number after all.) Who are those people standing in the middle of the road trying to console a girl clutching a soft toy? The girl’s currently hyperventilating because she screwed up a test she actually spent 10 whole minutes studying for, and the soft toy belongs to the Prince.
And then there are those times when you act up and make an utter ass of yourself by shrieking and shouting over minor things (like a first-yearite getting to know some club information before you) and later realize, with a sinking feeling, that the PMS excuse did the rounds a week ago. It’s pretty funny, the look on your face then.
In the end everything’s a gag, and the route there ain’t that bad either. :)