Empty spaces

For the past few days, I notice I am becoming increasingly restless. It's something I've felt before and felt in exactly these circumstances actually. I am studying well which is good but it's not as fulfilling right now as it was six months ago. Piyu reckons it might be a mild case of burn-out but I don't think it's that. I am not less enthusiastic or less prolific but I am just less fulfilled.

Learning something new and getting a concept in place is not giving me that sharp jolt of pleasure that it used to. I wonder if it's desensitization to over-much stimulation.

And it's not just the studying. It's a lot of things. I find I can't sit down in front of the television like I used to. TV with it's blurred-cleavage-and-overzealous-bleeping on the English channels and the shake-what-yo-mama-gave-you item girls on the Hindi channels is starting to feel like a gentler version of the pop culture torture methods some psychopath designed for use in Gitmo.

I find my attention wanders from movies I think I should be riveted to, and I feel guilty for it. I've been reading A Pair of Blue Eyes but Elfride's inconstancy does not help with my own occasional meanderings.

Music is a salve. Sometimes songs help with the uneasiness like the serendipitous Aage Bhi Jaane Na Tu followed by Traumerei last night, sometimes I suspect my iPod's shuffle has started feeding on my subconscious. I am particularly thankful for it at times like last night. But today, try as I might, I couldn't feel the yearning in Lag Jaa Gale with the same gale-force I used to.

Talking with friends feels like over-stimulation. I haven't been good with them recently, I know. I've been defensive and sarcastic and I don't like being this way. Mitzi theorizes it's the winter doing its thing. Piyu figures I'm withdrawing into my shell like the unbalanced Gemini-Cancer cuspian she insists I am. Astrology does not help soothe my frayed nerves, never has really. Then again, nor does this blackguard of a Bombay winter.

I'm taking long walks again. I crave solitude and sometimes, even silence. It's like needing a fix of tranquility.

I am never overwhelmed by crowds but lately I'm comforted by the anonymity and blending they offer. I don't understand it. It doesn't often happen that the voice in my head speaks with emotion in this much contradiction with reason.

Reason claims I should be satisfied with my life at this point. Emotion points out I am not.

I have a vague sense that there's something missing. Something that was once close that is now not within reach. A piece of the puzzle that has wandered off, refusing to yield a whole picture.

I recall those earlier days of restlessness, what Pushky called 'my blue periods' with liberal seasonings of irony. What I don't recall is what helped me get out of them. Did I wait for them to pass me by? Or did I push them away by plunging into over-activity and 'distractions' - what Rohith recently wrote about. Maybe dad is right. Maybe I just need to take a vacation after a relentless and rather eventful year.

Perhaps I need to seek out Bukowski again. "There is something wrong with me besides melancholia." he says. Does it apply to me tonight, I wonder.

Christmas is coming and that usually helps. Until then, I guess there's always homemade cake.

Sin, Sin, Sin

Hospitals are excellent places to take notes on the best and the basest of human nature.

How the human condition incorporates the contradictions inherent in a life which ends as it must but the loss causes grief all the same, though we know something that does not die is not truly alive.

How human society tolerates and stipulates that some people's egos are worth more than some other people's lives.

How it is perfectly acceptable that a fatal error is excusable becoz it is an error, and not a mistake. So that a technicality can smoothen the rigidity of thought over the splinters and shards of a conscience that must have been ripped to shreds.

How it is essential and even praiseworthy to be unemotional, and near inhuman becoz it is the exact useful way of allowing reason and learning to take a judgment call. Becoz allowing yourself to actually feel wud be unbearable.

How knowing that each day, out there in the world, terrible things happen to people and more terrible things will come to pass, that things are much worse for others than they cud possibly be for you, does absolutely nothing to lessen the burden of your own personal tragedy.

P. S. Twelve-hour shifts in an emergency room have taken over the last two months of my life. Writing these posts makes actually ruminating on all that happens easier to deal with, almost like preserving one's sense of peace (since saying sanity wud be closer to the truth but even more close to being hysterically dramatic).