Papoosh etc - Marriage, Motherhood, Mayhem and Musings!

Life has come a long long way since my last post. The single biggest event being getting married: "YAY" :-D That being said, nothing could have prepared me for the rollercoaster that marriage has been. The realisation that being with someone for almost a decade will still not really prepare one for marriage came as a massive eye opener. The fact that my husband can still amaze me with sides of him that I haven't seen in all my years of knowing him is refreshing. That we still have new things to fight about...not so much. And then there's making up..which is oh so amazing post marriage...something everyday about it that calms me down every single time. None of the rushed passion of making up when we were seeing each other...more a smile across the room after not having spoken to each other for hours...or the shared joy of finding a tripod that we couldn't for the life of us remember where it might be....its a life that I am grateful to have found with my own person...

A bad day, A week, a month, A year The downs in my life, The most that I fear In my darkest hours when I've had to cower, You've cocooned me in you, Brought me back my cheer. A life where I lost you, devoid of hope. A life, now I've found you, I no longer mope My joy, my strength, My reason to smile I cannot wait, My love To walk with you down the aisle

For the first time in the history of this blog, my absence has been not due to lack of material..but lack of internet access :-D. As fate would have it however, the moment I did finally manage to have the internet god smile on me, my material went right out my head..which ofcourse is not really bad news for you!!! On general life though, the move back to Bangalore has been amazing. I love the new job, the new office, the new team, the new house....a LOT to be thankful for :-). Having the man close by helps ofcourse. The last two months have been spent firmly establishing my reputation as Ms. Motormouth at work. The tragic stories shall be detailed to your general amusement soon. For now, I'm just happy to be home :-)

The last time I set off to explore the world, I had the cloak of naivete, the comfort of ignorance and the excitement of spreading my wings to carry me through. No grey clouds cast their shadow. No inkling of the crippling bouts of missing family that would come. Bouts that would leave me aching physically, that would result in waking up gasping for breath and a desperate desire to reach out, to hear the sound of my mom's loud, free, laughter; to hear my sister whine, to listen to my dad's not so musical snores. I was young, dying to prove to my family that I was ALL GROWN UP, able to take care of myself, more than ready to take on the BIG BAD WORLD! 6 years I lived alone. 6 years that brought me closer to my family than I could have ever imagined. In these 6 years, I loved and lost. I found myself, I learnt that it is ok to not fill every silence with unnecessary yapping. I learnt to not let the walls of a house close around me, I learnt to live with myself. 6 years and I was ...

Oh how you beckon to me Slyly, Aren’t you wily, In your pretty pink And powdery blue Pick me you say Choose me I hear, I almost sway. And you, Yes you, Not pink Not blue, Sit quietly, watch me Knowingly In the end I pick up Yet another strappy Yet another Black Yet another Shiny Yet another standard Su Shoe!

And you sit there And have the gall To accuse me Playing ball You say With your emotions A story that is as tall As you, or worse As deep As me. My supreme sacrifice In this, my silence Not one of my virtues you see, Grips me in a vise While you dribble Around, and fumble Reach out and snatch At words that refuse to latch Onto exactly what you would like To say. And still… I wait, Not always patient, Sometimes I sigh Sometimes gasp when the price you extract From me, my love For yours, Though rightful Seems just a little too high. And still… I stay, While you muse And rave And rant And then subside Turn in for the night For tomorrow, Is another day, Another chance For us to smile, to laugh To dance.

So to use an oft abused phrase, I've been itching to write for a few days now. Now people who know me well enough would also know that my mother brought me up to believe good girls do not scratch. Alas, they would also know that this here..this me? Neither a good girl, nor am I averse to scratching :-D! I have admittedly not been in the best of spirits..not the least owing to the fact that my dear, my loving, my smother me with love family has no idea where the keys to the bar are!!! Agreed that the last time the bar was opened, it was the hands of yours truly that lovingly brought out the bottle of Blender's Pride. The hand that put the bottle back (and not that lovingly) were definitely not mine though. Anyway, even if we were to put all the finger pointing aside (though why we would do that when it isn't really even half as fun is beyond me), the fact remains the keys to the bar are missing. And when my spirits go missing, my weekends do not really have that nice, hazy, ...

Life seemed good, not ecstatic, but content And you walked in, dazzlingly brilliant, What more could I have asked for, What more could I have wished? Nothing better that God could have sent. My own private paradise, Within your arms, In the depth of your eyes. I’ve seen them laugh, I’ve seen them cry, I’ve seen our love ignite them, At times with desire, At times shy. A dream that we have lived, Seen it torn, Thrust into misery, A dream thus shorn. A chance to renew, A chance to set right. When all has seemed of despair, A way to walk into the light.

I decided to lose a little weight and found a place that said swimming center close to my house. All excited, I finally managed to move my ass and go investigating like 2 months after I saw the swimming center. Turns out it's a Slimming center!!! So much for my lovely eyes! All beauty and not of much use! So...no weight loss happening for me! To actually do something expressly for the purpose of losing weight? Which is really all that I want? Totally beneath me :-P So then I went and joined dance classes. Life was all good, swinging and all that. And then my ankle gives up on me!! Something about prolonged abuse. What is this world coming to? With inanimate parts of one's body throwing legal jargon at oneself???!!! *Sob* Anyway..point being..weight loss? Not happening again!!! And then I thought I'll like smoke a coupla extra cigarettes. Control the hunger pangs so to speak, and there's only one kind of hunger am referring to here. All you people with dirty dirty minds,...

So...am back! A year or more(?) of not writing. Not not wanting to write, but just..not writing. I'd been trying to figure out what it was that kept me from penning my thoughts down; and inspiration!! It was the theme! Daft I am I know..don't tell me..but it took me a year to figure out that the way the blog looked, all sad and droopy eyed was completely in contrast to the way I've been feeling. Everytime I looked at it, I couldn't get myself to write morose stuff, and I couldn't see myself writing sad, weepy, self involved (Ok, I take that back), but self pitying stories any more. So Voila...in step with the way my life has been..I present coffee(ey) Papoosh :-). I know that's not a word, but it is my blog you know. I can make my own words here :-D And as a peace offering? No? Or something to make you feel better about the fact that my absence is not permanent after all? I knew that would work now..I present to you: Crunchy Trippy Strawberries Seriously? Since...

So I guess this is what they call drunken blogging!!! ;-) Midnight here and I'm still recovering from the after effects of a job well done. The new job has given me way more avenues to prove how I am god's goft to the corporate world (??? ;-)) than I could have asked for. I've always thought corporate training was the way to go for me..and today, post my first ever formal training session, I am convinced that this is the way to go for me. I guess I knew deep down that nothing would give me as great a high as being able to connect with an audience, being able to impart knowledge from my post high up above, to be able to drop those pearls of wisdom to people eager to lap them up..but I never knew how good it would feel, how much I would feel at home standing in front of people expecting me to be taking them through the intricacies of a world that was new to them, to be able to guide them through those concepts that they had only heard of!!! I conducted my first ever formal t...

At the risk of sounding oh so boringly repetitive..I know I've been away for sometime..and yes there has been a lot that's been taking up my time..no excuse for not penning a few lines here though :( I guess it's about time I changed the city on my profile as well. The move to Hyd. was pretty uneventful..so was the move into the new house. After years of making one bedroom pigeonholes serve as well as they could as homes, I finally have managed to move into the 2 bedroom category..and thankfully a nice two bedroom house at that. A new house always means lots more work, a whole round of setting up home, a whole new system to keeping things, finding place for random stuff and there's been quite a bit of that. Fortunately, this house has enough cupboards to hide my hideous mess in...on the outside it all looks spic and span. This house mirrors my story ;-) That apart, the city has been refreshing in the quality of roads and infrastructure, but oh such a pain when it comes ...

Helloooo ppl!!! Oh you sneaky ones...here I thought I had no readers apart from family..and you go and give me li'l surprises like these :). So I've discovered I have readers!!! And more than 2!!! Aaah well..about time might I add! The last weekend has brought back into focus why I feel this need to share so much. There's just so much that's been happening lately, this is the only way to make sense of it. Yes, I do realise its effect on the sanity of general public, but what's a few lives coping with information overload when it'sa question of my sanity I say :) A new job again, but this time in a new city. A new laptop, of my own :D No cheap office systems for me anymore. Ha! More Money. Higher up the corporate ladder. General drunkenness after ages :)) With so much going on, am sure you'll forgive me for not being as good with the words right now no? Not really do I hear? Well..Ha! to you too. Uhm...you readers? Please stay? I'll speak to Suha and make...

I've just started reading "My sister's keeper" By Jodi Picoult. It's a book I'd been meaning to get my hands on for ages. In my search for this one, I managed to find another one, "Perfect Match", which was a book that I must write about, another time..different take aways there. Anyway, "My sister's keeper"; I knew this was going to be a difficult book to read. With no sides that could be taken, a story with questions that might be too difficult to even confront, let alone answer. I hadn't bargained on it being this hard hitting though. I am barely 50 pages through, and already, I need a break. This hasn't happened to me with any book. EVER. There's no gore, no blood, no traumatic scenes written in heartbreaking detail. But the characters, their emotions, they're so raw, so real. It's like watching the story of someone's life unravel, completely unmasked, open to everyone's scrutiny. Already, my mind is spin...

If someone asked me to describe the year gone by in one word, I would probably die trying. Describing anything in one word, as you would have guessed by now, isn't really my forte :)..but even then, this one would have left me completely stumped. 2007...it was a year of new beginnings, it brought with it a completely different world, promises of a tomorrow that I had been dreaming of for a long long time. It came, arms laden with extended family for me, it came laden with lessons to be learnt, it came disguised in sweetness I thought would be enough to carry me through another year. It is a year I wish I could go back and freeze in March, it is a year I wish I could erase July,August and September from. It is a year where the first half went by in a rush, where the second seems to drag on and on and on. It has been the year of breaking old moulds. It has been a year of reaching out, a year of being overwhelmed by the love I am surrounded by..the love of friends, the love of family....

As I'm sitting here contemplating on the state of affairs (literally) in my life, soft, pleasing to the ear music in the background, I find myself typing..letting thoughts flow freely. There's just been way too much that has happened over the past week for me to ingest, for my recently uneventful life to handle. How does one know that they've moved on? Does it mean to be able to look a once loved deeply person in the eye and not feel even a momentary pang of longing? Does it mean to be able to spend time with them and not think of how intimately one has known every part of them, every gesture of theirs, every tone of their voice? Or does it mean assimilating all of this and more, making all this , all of them a part of who we become, carrying remnants of them with us for the rest of our lives? How often does a Ross and Rachel kind of situation happen? Is it possible to just know...just because..that you're never going to be over...that whatever comes along in life is on...

Hi...you're still here? Wow....and here I thought you must have been sighing in relief, thanking the one above for finally answering your prayers, rejoicing in my "hopefully for good" disappearance. No? You really missed me? No wonder there was this weird feeling in and around my heart..it could have been an overdose of beans as well..but..why ruin it? I think it was all your fervent wishes for me to come back and enlighten your lives with the latest in mine..no? I thought as much :) Anyway, life has been quite the rollercoaster. So close to the end of the year, my system was becoming a little restless..what with no annual vacation on the horizon. Annual vacation here means my annual quota of hospitalisation. For some reason, when the story of my life was written, it was decided that I would never ever fall seriously ill, never suffer from any major life threatening kind of sickness. But, at the same time, it was an absolute necessity that I fall sick regularly, with stup...

Just a friend: You: "My counselor told me I'm any counselor's dream come true. I really handled that situation well. Which is good for me right?" JAF: "Hmmn..true. Good ya..am so happy for you" ******************************** True Friend: You: "My counselor told me I'm any counselor's dream come true....." TF: "Har de har har har...snigger snigger" You: "hmmph" Like I firmly believe, with friends like I have, I really need enemies. Someone needs to love me right? right ?.. hello ?

My life has been the kind of stuff movies are made of..the adrenaline boosting, leaving you with a "WOW" feeling kind of ride this weekend. The good, the bad, the weepy, the funny; all packed into two days. It's quite exhausting may I add. As you can tell from my previous post, Saturday didn't exactly start with tides of cheer and goodwill..but it picked up post that nevertheless. So, there I was feeling sorry for myself, unloved and ridiculously weepy when an old friend (SK) from school called to find out what decadent activity I had planned for the weekend. The surprise..no, shock..no..downright disbelief..yes, thats it..the downright disbelief in his voice was quite palpable. Anyway, once I had convinced him that seriously..really..honest to godly..I had a chaste weekend ahead of me, he decided to go right ahead and tempt me with visions of a land where the liquor flows freely, the cigarettes never stop lighting up and the music is always loud. And I am weak...I ha...

One would think writing on this...ridding myself of all my sad, feeling sorry for myself thoughts should have made me stronger, should have made it easier to handle unsettling news right? Apparently life has decided that "THE BREAKUP" wasn't bad enough. That kind of lesson doesn't cut it when it comes to the delicate relationship that life and I have. So here I am, feeling sorry for myself again. I knew the good times had to end sometime..butI didn'texpect it to hit me so suddenly, so powerfully. News of someone you've loved with all your heart moving on is always painful. Problem is I had never felt that pain acutely till date. Granted I still don't know he's moved on..I still don't know he walking towards his happily ever after; but the suggestion is still there..and it tears my heart apart..it sears me to the bone. I try to shut those thoughts out...park them in a corner of my mind, to be examined later, to turn them over till they're worn....