Cross Your Fingers for Me

Rejection letters are not fun.  At all.

To cheer me up, or to stop me from whining, people say stuff like “don’t worry, you’ll go someplace you deserve to be.” They even give me examples from their lives, or from that of other friends. Atulya’s been very nice about it, and something Priyanka said made sense “you’re meant to go to a certain place and meet certain people; don’t worry you’ll get there”. Ajju even withdrew her application from two places I had applied to after she got her college. I’ so lucky to have her as a friend.

Despite all that, and the fact that things end up fine, it’s still unfair. People who have the same GPA got into college already, and I have better work experience and SAT scores. I didn’t force myself to work so that I’d get into college; my restlessness was enough of a motivation. But I’d expect it to pay off. With only 7 colleges remaining, it’s hard to stay optimistic. On a better note, I’m more excited at the prospects of India (as a backup) than I previously was.

Please cross your fingers for me.

All I want to say

All I want to say is spread over my head like little clouds in the bright blue sky, or like little islands in the vastest of oceans.

1. This, the first one, is my musings over the events of the past few days. There are some people who get some of the things they want, and some people who get ALL the things they EVER wanted. And there are lots and lots of people in between. There are also those people who think they NEVER get ANYTHING they want, but they’re mistaken. We’re all lucky, although the extent may differ for each one of us. When we think of ways in which someone is luckier than us, we might as well also think of how we’re luckier than them. Like Robert Frost said, life goes on.
2. Picture this: you’ve hung out with a group of people for around five years, sometimes having such big differences that the only reason you stuck to them was because you didn’t have the courage to “ditch” them and hurt them. One person from that group was almost a best friend (only “almost”, even then.) Then one fine day, you find out that that certain someone never liked you. She’s always hated sharing her “best friend” with you. It’s shocking, a tad bit painful, and even amusing. I absolutely DETEST people who establish, or want to establish ownership on another human being- I mean what do words like “sharing” imply anyways?
3. Now for a concept that I’ve written a million times on my diary, but never on the blog. (Imagine how much I can rant when I actually write a diary AND blog.) Anyways, do you know of the times when, for no apparent reason, or for a chaotic jumble of reasons, you wish that you wouldn’t have to wake up the next morning? It’s not the same as wanting to die, not the very least like it. It’s like wanting to hibernate, or to not have to think about anything. Personally, I feel like this desire can be satisfied be sleeping with just a little bit of sun on you, sun sieved perhaps by thin curtains, or the net window (jaali ko jhyal).It’s just that I’ve been feeling a that for the past week, although it’s been quite a normal week.
4. Okay, I can’t downplay the good things that have happened this week. The first was a meet with a friend after (WHAT?!?) two months. We had coffee (and cake), motorcycled through Sanepa, out into the Ring Road, and in again from the __-Bagmati route. Then we had some pizza that tasted like jaad (while I giggled uncontrollably over it for almost half an hour.) The second was a friend’s Bartaman party, where (too) I giggled at how someone (an ex-classmate) kept making jokes that weren’t funny. Going to the jotisi, how scared we were, and how he disappointed we were with his accuracy when we stepped out. A pastry from a friend (guy) who used to be so rude to me at school. Tasty momos full of fat, pizzas so hot they blistered the roof of my mouth, and yummy sundaes.
5. Now for the bad things that happened. (It amazes me how the weekends were the least eventful days of my week.) I had a fight with another ex-classmate when I (apparently) insulted her cousin who had dumped a friend of mine. It didn’t bug me, apart from the fact that one of my closest friends is also really close to that girl. Something else that pissed me off was the lack of any credit whatsoever for the success of a project I had contributed to (with payment, of course). Working a whole day underfed. And the juice that I spilt on one corner of my laptop’s keyboard. At first, a few keys were just a little hard. Now they’re sticky (blame all the sugar in the juice). Just what I thought could never happen to me.
6. Perhaps for the reason mentioned in point number 3, I’ve been reading a lot. An amusing fact: my two mechanisms of defense (not the ones you study about in Psychology) are just the opposites of each other. One’s reading, because it takes me into another world. The other’s writing, because when I write, I become clearer about what I feel. It’s funny that one keeps me from thinking too much, and the other cleanses me by making me think to a point of saturation. Which one I use, depends on the mood of the time. I love the way a human mind (and body too, but not the topic of discussion here) works.

Well, now that I’ve written about why I haven’t been writing, I go. Cross your fingers until the colleges I’ve applied to send me their decisions.

I’ll leave you with a song I love (it just played on my computer). It’s called “Zindagi” from the Hindi film “Yuvraaj”. This one’s especially for Ajju and JJ. Don’t senti nakhau too much when you listen to it, la?

Till I see you again,
Maichyang

Good-ness, etc

I’ve always wanted to believe that there are good people in the world. My friends used to come up with incidents that showed how people are becoming more and more selfish with time, that every progressive generation becomes lesser and lesser helpful. I still tried (sometimes very hard) to believe that people are good at the core, or that even though EVERYONE may not be good, most people are.

Update

It’s 1:47am, and I’ve updated my post on bodhgaya. Please have a look. The pictures are the same, but I found, at the dead of the night- I woke up to catch some electricity- some text that I’d written for that post.

http://maichyang.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/294/

Lazy Lumbini days

I was in Lumbini for a month, working. Besides doing awesomely fun- and sometimes frustrating- work (teaching), I saw beautiful temples and monasteries, met awesome people, and experienced a lot. I came back on the 14th of February (what a day to come back home) so in a sense (in EVERY sense, actually), I’m late to update my blog.