That's just the way it is... Things'll never be the same

Isn’t it just the irony of life that when I had no wish to stop blogging, when I had so many exciting things coming up like Christmas, trip home, weddings, babies, bachelorette parties, etc. to blog about circumstances forced me to take a break…

Update: Everyone scared me slightly about how much detail I put up so I have taken down most of the bitching. Here is a gist for anyone who missed out ;)

My boss was fired. Him getting fired set off a crazy chain of events… No one did any work for two weeks… everyone just stared blankly at their monitors, most people took 2 hour lunches everyday and at least thrice a week there was alcohol involved at these sessions, people fucked off whenever they felt like it and took it in turns to call in sick, people picked up fights with people they believed had been involved in getting him fired, people threatened to quit, people did quit, and of course every Friday night was a major regroup and re-strategise campaign at the pub …

I had a little work drama of my own in all this… but now that has been sorted too and the person I was really pissed off at got exactly what he deserved!

So now we’re trying to pick up the pieces and move on from everything that happened in the last three weeks. People will be missed, like my ex-boss and a couple of other friends who also left… I think that we all had a really good time in the last two years and now the party is really over! Well, nothing lasts forever…

Also on that note, my friend from Madras who came to Australia the same time I did and who shared my first apartment with me and S and who washed and ironed his own clothes and cooked his own meals for the first time ever at the same time as me, is returning to Madras for good in a couple of days. I will miss him… his turn of phrase is really quite like no one else’s… we could publish a book on all the funny things he has said in the crudest manner possible… The three of us lived together for 1.5 years and it seems like such a hazy dream now… None of us had lived away from home before, we were all spoiled rotten with never having done chores before, we missed our friends (and family) terribly and tried to recreate our alcoholic party Madras lifestyle in Melbourne and realised it wasn’t quite the same…

But we had our fun and games and wild nights on the town and quiet, reflective nights in. We also had our share of fighting and hating each other, there were car troubles and university troubles and financial difficulties and struggling to make ends meet. Everything was so new and strange… like smoking in our apartment, whenever we wanted, wherever we wanted (I’m so glad we stopped that dirty habit)… That whole first experience of living away from home is really quite something and its impossible not to form this incredible bond with the people you shared it with. And its also impossible not to pick up some embarrassing stories about each other along the way… I’ll hold my tongue though, don’t want embarrassing stories about me to get out!! So anyway, we hung out this weekend one last time in Australia and it was good. The cool thing is he’ll be there in Madras when we visit and he’ll be as jobless as us so we have someone to hang out with during the day like we used to…

I’ll come around and visit everyone real soon, ok? Must get back to work now!

How much is that doggie in the window? I do hope that doggie’s for sale…

Yay… I have been tagged at just the right time when I wasn’t sure what I felt like writing about. So here goes…

Seven Things I Plan To Do:

1. Skydive
2. Learn how to play guitar
3. Get fit
4. Tour Europe
5. Get a dog
6. Buy a convertible
7. Design my own house

Seven Things I Can Do:

1. Sing sing sing
2. Survive quite happily on a diet of rice and curds and fried fish/chicken/mince/prawns/potato
3. Sleep for 12 hours at a stretch
4. Drink like a fish
5. Shine academically
6. Smoke like a hippie
7. Make people laugh

Seven Things I Can't Do:

1. Eat anything that has long slices of onion in it (or even any other kind of vegetable)
2. Get out of bed without snoozing
3. Drink gin
4. Play particularly well at any sport
5. Spend another Christmas without my family
6. Spend my life without a furry four-legged companion of the canine variety
7. Stop eating chocolate

Seven Things I Say Most Often:

1. Fuckin’ hell
2. Chooth (Hindi)
3. Ey Watha (Tamil! I have no idea how the second word is spelt)
4. As if
5. Whatever
6. Yeah right
7. That only

I’m not tagging anyone but everyone is free to do it if they want… it’s a lot harder than it seems!

So then I analysed my things I plan to do list to see if I was close to any of them and I believe I am to some of them.

Skydive – just waiting for the right time or a trip to New Zealand

Learn how to play guitar – I can play notes E and F now. A friend gave me his old guitar which was very kind of him and he would’ve taught me more if everyone else present didn’t prefer him playing the guitar to me learning it. But I shall persevere…

Get fit – Been at the gym for almost two months now. Rather scared to check my weight and measure my waist because what if there hasn’t been any improvement?! Still I do feel slightly better so here’s hoping…

Tour Europe – Ideally, this will happen next year or the year after. But its just so expensive and I can see my entire life savings being blown away on the one trip to Europe. But I think it will be worth it… and its time I stopped spending every holiday of mine in India.

Get a dog – This one kills me the most. Right now I don’t have the house and backyard but more than that I keep wondering what the poor thing will do when I’m out of the house 50 hours a week! The dogs in Madras always had someone for company and when we returned from a holiday they’d let us know exactly how lonely they’d been by barking up a frenzy. Hey… that’s what my next post is going to be about… the story of all my darling dogs (and there were a few)

Buy a convertible – I really want to do this next year but there are many obstacles along the way like getting an Australian drivers licence (I’m quite certain I will fail the test – everyone does at least once) and of course, the big one – money! I could just buy any old car for less money but I think that since I don’t really need a car, it’d be fun to buy a cool car now at the age when I can do cool stuff and not want these things later in life when I am bogged down by shopping bags and car seats!

Design my own house – This seems the furthest away. In fact, I don’t think it’ll happen in this country in this lifetime (I’ll be lucky to even afford an average house off the block) unless I win the lottery… but since I don’t even play… I guess I can hope that I get a super high-paying job in India that will allow me to fulfil this plan…

So there you have it! Let's hope I make them all happen...

Living life the easy way... And sippin’ on Bacardi Rum

Oh joy… summer is almost here. We’re on Daylight Savings Time and that always puts me in a holiday mood since the sun doesn’t set until 9 pm or thereabouts and as a result I always feel like I have some few more hours in a day and take things much easier. We have also had two gloriously hot 30 degree plus days this week and it was simply blissful… especially since the first one was Tuesday and a holiday for the Melbourne Cup of all things (public holiday so we can all sit back and watch the horse races is something else, but I’m not complaining… its our first public holiday since JUNE), and the second one was yesterday and I just couldn’t wake up in the morning so took a sickie… Have I ever mentioned that I love to sleep and once I’m asleep I really really hate waking up but falling asleep is a big big problem for me these days… Ah well, we can talk about my insomnia another time. Lets get back to talking about alcohol instead…

So with spirits we also have the whiskeys and the bourbons and it seems that as people get older they’re drinking more of these but this is one kind of spirit I just can’t stand… not that I haven’t drunk this also when really desperate but its not something I particularly enjoy. I remember that when I first came to Australia I drank a lot of Jim Beam because S and my housemate at the time preferred it and we were poor students so we couldn’t always choose what we drank so I just went along with it and drank it and the thing about it is that it doesn’t really get me happy high… it just gets me into that mode where I know I’ve drunk a lot but can’t really feel the fun effects of it… like when you smoke too much and reach a kind of zone… So anyway, one night in particular stands out when we the three of us drank Jim Beam the whole night and then S passed out and my housemate and I continued and suddenly it was 7:00 in the morning so I thought, “oh, what the hell, let me just go for my 9:00 am class now instead of missing it’. So I went… hahaha… what fun it all was. And it wasn’t my fault my stupid course had a class EVERY Saturday… did they not take into account that people like to get smashed on a Friday night!! But yeah, the whiskeys and the bourbons are so not my thing…

So is Tequila my thing? I think not… although I have always had shitloads of fun every time I went the Tequila route. But its not something I would be up for every weekend… its more a once every four months experience. At the last one, three of us slammed almost two bottles over a few hours and I yelled at everyone at the party and told them they better come to my birthday party the following weekend and on the way home I used up all my credit calling Rat and Sista T and apparently all I kept saying was “Yeah maaan, I’m coming next month maaan… yeah maan” and then just kept laughing hysterically of course. Good times good times… :)

So before we get to the grand finale of my favourite type of alcohol ever (and which you should’ve guessed by now if you know me even a little or if you have been following the alcohol posts closely ;)) lets talk about sweet tasting and some not so sweet tasting liquors and such. I’ve always been a Baileys on the rocks fan for just a quiet dinner and night in type thing and I’m very attached to Kahlua for sentimental you me and you reasons. So guess what… it is also possible to get extremely fucking high on this deadly combo particularly if you are slamming them both together… So one sunny AFTERNOON, four people slammed a bottle of Baileys and Kahlua and guess what me and my friend slammed next… we finished a whole disgusting bottle of Sambucha… oh my god, that stuff tastes GROSS… but we slammed it… and I was very very high, I kid you not. We also went clubbing that night after all this and I had a good time dancing for a while and then went stumbling to find a bathroom and instead I went into some employee area and literally stumbled down a few steps and twisted my ankle and just lay there in a heap for some unknown period of time. I really have no clue how anyone found me or helped me out of there… the next thing I know I’m in the lounge next to the ladies bathroom and there’s an ice pack around my ankle and all the ladies who came in kept asking me if I was alright and if I wanted anything… so I bummed a couple of cigarettes and lay back on the couch with my leg lifted and smoked away until S found me (and I don’t really know how he found me… I was rather out of it to realise that people would be wondering where I was)… That was such a fun night… even the whole ankle experience… at the end of it all on the way home, in extreme drunkenness I started crying for my Mommy and its so funny that I started crying for my Mommy because my Mommy is not the ‘oh you poor thing, how did it happen’ kind of Mommy… she’s more the ‘serves you right… this is what you get for going out at all hours and drinking and what not’ kind of Mommy.

So this of course brings us to the end… the best kind of alcohol ever… (drum roll, please)… RUM… sweet smelling, molasses fermented rum… rowdy, ass-kicking, rum… Ah rum, how I love it. I’m very glad that I got off the vodka in the early days and switched to rum… what a whole new world it was… I’m at a loss for words right now… I should probably be under the influence of some rum to write more eloquently about it … my favourites are Old Monk (I hate Old Cask for some reason) and Bacardi Lemon (affectionately called lime juice)… but I also like plain ol’ Bacardi Superior and Bacardi Oro and Reserva… I’ve had some lethal Jamaican Coruba rum and I think after Old Monk, my favourite Indian rum is good ol’ Kodais (I don’t even know how its spelt… I am referring to the Bangalore one)… But has anyone tried Bacardi 151… I think its 60% alcohol or something and I almost threw up slamming half a shot and couldn’t even drink it when it was mixed with coke.

But I’ve drunk rum at the oddest of times and the oddest of places and it has always delivered a good time… I’ve drunk rum with coke and orange juice and sprite and pineapple juice and I’ve even drunk it with fucking water whenever we’ve run out of coke at a slumber parties at my house… Old Monk & water is just fucking foul by the way… we’ve finished a whole bottle of Bacardi at 5 am as we watched the sun rise and the train glide into Londha station one hazy December morning… … we’ve drunk it in paper cups in backseats of cars with no ice and warm coke and we’ve sipped it in style sitting in beach house gazebos… we’ve mixed it in 500ml bottles of coke to quickly slam on the road on the way to a party (the ever present “ready mix”) and we’ve drunk it in Pina Coladas and Mai Tais… I’ve finished a quart of rum in my room one night by myself and sneaked down and stole some of my Dad’s to keep the buzz going one jobless night.

Under the influence, I have professed my love and undying friendship to many a rowdy rum compatriot… I have danced till the cows came home and sung till I couldn’t sing another note… I have pretended to be sober with family and how many times have I driven home in such a state… I have puked my guts out and laughed my ass off… I have cried like the world was ending and I have eaten like there was no tomorrow… I have yelled at anyone who would listen (including my boss) about my current depressing work situation (this actually happened last Friday in a marathon Bacardi session – I think I had at least 12 drinks in total) and I have karaoke-d like it was going out of style… all in all, I really do love that little drink called rum. Remember that Bacardi ad with all the people chilling and drinking in the tropical island type place and on a yacht and such and singing this song…

Be what you want to be
Taking things the way they come
Living life the easy way
And sippin’ on Bacardi Rum

I used to love that ad before I started drinking and I’d actually forgotten all about it until now. There may not have been yachts or a tropical islands but we have had some very good times sippin’ on all sorts of rum… May the good times roll on… Cheers!

Well, show me the way to the next whiskey bar... Oh, don’t ask why…

By the way, I was extremely wasted when I wrote that last entry. I’m not sure if anyone picked up on that… skilful that I am at hiding my highness. Haha, as if… you can always tell if I’m high from a mile away. But anyway, I was high on wine so I myself was not fully aware of the extent of my highness. Wine is so strange that way… two glasses pretty much get you to the “I’m so happy” stage and after that it can go either way really quickly for me… feel really sleepy, head starts hurting, bad mood, stomach contents start heading north, etc. etc. OR drink a few glasses more, everything is fine as wine as far as stomach contents go, head buzzes quite happily, and anything goes in terms of dancing, singing, eating, etc. etc. But still at the end of this nice side of wine also my head eventually starts hurting and sleep beckons and all and the next morning always feels like a professional football team spent the whole night practicing in my head. And I know what you’re thinking… ah, it must be all the cheap wine, but no, my wine hangovers do not discriminate. Once, my visiting uncle took us to an incredible fancy Italian restaurant/wine bar and we tried at least three different types of fucking expensive wine and it was the same old saga the next morning. So why do I drink wine you ask? I’m not entirely sure… sometimes there’s nothing else on offer, sometimes my stomach is too full to handle anything heavy like spirits and Coke, sometimes I think “Oh yes, two glasses of wine to get a nice buzz and no more drinking because I don’t want to get drunk”… that plan always fails of course because I can never halt at that nice buzz stage… I prefer to not drink at all or just get totally wasted… There’s nothing worse than running out of booze when you’re halfway there… its really like taking you to the top of the mountain and showing you what you can’t have.

Well anyway, we have established that wine and me are not best friends. Having said that though, I absolutely adore homemade wine and Christmas in Madras is always a bumper season of slamming bottles of homemade wine. Every time I’ve had a wine party at my house on Christmas night, everyone pretty much has a bottle for themselves. Much fun. Must remind Mom to start stocking bottles for this year, now only.

Wine’s close compatriot is beer of course. Mmm… Beer… Come to think of it, beer is possibly the first taste of alcohol I ever had because my Dad was in the habit of giving me tiny sips now and then when I was a kid because I used to think it looked absolutely wonderful… the golden colour and the white froth and all. How funny, I was just typing this and thinking about my Dad and he calls unexpectedly. There are forces at work a lot of the time I tell you. Anyway, I never really enjoyed beer until I came to Australia. And by the way Fosters is a really shit Australian beer and no one here drinks it… how they bloody promote it in India like it’s as synonymous with Australia as Waltzing Matilda.

But there’s a time and a place for beer and again I am limited to what conditions I can drink it in. For example, if I’m starting my drinking on a Friday evening and plan to be out until the wee hours, beer is a big No No because my stomach just feels really full and all the gas builds up and I just feel like I’m going to explode. But if I’m just hanging out on a warm Sunday afternoon in the park playing cards and Dumb Charades and have no deeds to do before I sleep, I’m quite happy to drink three beers and go to bed with a smile on my face and a lovely beer buzz in my head. Its also quite pleasing to sip a cold beer when everyone and everything is winding down after a huge night of partying and all we can afford is a Rs.100 bottle of Kingfisher compared to the relatively expensive Rs.150 for an Old Monk & Coke… I’m just randomly quoting figures by the way, I can’t really remember the prices. But I think that when it comes to taste, there is no other alcohol that is quite as exciting as beer because there is just so much freaking variety. I’ve tried many different beers from different countries and some of my personal favourites are Australia’s own Beez Neez, Belgium’s Stella Artois, Australia’s James Boags, Mexico’s Corona (without the lemon though), and quite recently I was introduced to a very delicious German beer called Hansa Pils. Mmm… Beer…

Moving on to my favourite alcohol genre… Spirits… in all shapes and sizes… well, actually not… I’m quite fussy here also. Let’s talk vodka. Most people I know first started drinking with vodka. I don’t why this was but when I think about that horrible Romanov vodka we used to drink for lack of better options I seriously wonder how it did not just kill us… that too, we used to only take shots when we first started… The only picture this presents in my head is one of acid corroding our insides. But anyway, it was all good fun to get SMASHED on two shots of vodka… so much cheaper and nicer on the waistline also because of no added Coke calories… Since those heady “get smashed on two drinks” days, quality of vodka has improved steadily. All the Absolut and Smirnoff varieties available these days make for nary a dull moment. And has anyone tried Stolichnaya vodka? I’m not sure if its very good or not but I have had a couple of fun nights on this vodka. But still, vodka is still not what really gets my juices flowing. I’ll drink it if there’s nothing else but wouldn’t really go out and buy some for myself… although, there is a very nice ad on TV these days for something called Absolut Cut and the ad is incredibly tempting, so we’ll see. And how about the rumour that vodka causes impotence in men… don’t know how true it is but I do share this tip with any boy I know who drinks vodka. And then there’s that whole “oh, but vodka doesn’t smell so its perfect to avoid letting your parents what you’ve really been up to” but that is such bull crap… all forms of alcohol smell and it doesn’t matter if you take two shots or two sips… anyone with a keen sense of smell (like me) will immediately be able to tell if you’ve been naughty or nice

It seems there is a lot more to cover than I originally thought so looks like this will have to be continued. But in the meantime, do share your views on wine, beer and vodka. White or red? Best beer ever? Drank vodka the very first time you drank? And if you’re a teetotaller, I’d like to hear from you too… and hang on, don’t call AA yet… I only drink once a week except for holidays and special occasions…

To be continued…

Well it's too late, tonight, to drag the past out into the light

It’s been so long since I’ve written that suddenly this whole weekend the words have been tumbling out in my head and sometimes I really wish I had a Dictaphone or something so I could record these things I want to say as they come up in my head. Fuck, that was one hell of a long sentence.

So anyway, lots to tell. Work is really crap and I really want to get out of here but for now I’m just going to chill here because I’m going on holiday and what not. But like seriously, work is SOOOOO crap its not funny. Its just too complicated to get into right now so I’m just going to pretend that everything is hunky dory. And you know what, in my head, everything is really hunky dory because all I can think of is India… Madras… my home… my family… my friends… my dogs… it’s so close I can almost reach out and touch it. But of course I can’t… because there’s still a month and a half or so to get through… But then I think about it again and it’s like, what the fuck is 1.5 months in the greater scheme of things… because in my head, I’ve already planned the whole holiday… and in my head, everything is as it should be, as it used to be…

Last night I went to a friend’s house for a birthday party… and it was at his house, in his backyard… I can’t even remember how long it’s been since I’ve sat around in someone’s backyard… Backyards fucking ROCK! It was just so nice to sit there in someone’s honest to goodness house… normally it’s someone’s shitty rented apartment… Backyards remind me of house parties in Madras… how many have there been… my own house and its “front yard”… what tales it could tell… my terrace too… well if it came down to it, what tales my dogs could tell also… they’ve been there throughout… and I remember people trying to get my dogs stoned… poor babies… as if I hadn’t tried that already when I used to smoke in my bathroom before going to bed… they were just not into it… smart doggies!!

Today I went to a Cuban Jazz festival at a winery in Melbourne’s famous Yarra Valley… it was much fun, I say… there was dancing and bottles and bottles of wine… there were Salsa lessons that nobody followed really, and there were more bottles of wine… and there were grey skies and blue skies and raindrops on my face and the sun shining brightly… it was surreal... you know, that wine kinda lazy high...

It’s been a weekend of U2 and James Blunt… re-listening to U2 classics like “One” and “With or Without You” and discovering new songs like “Goodbye, My Lover” and “Tears and Rain”…

Well its too late, tonight, to drag the past out into the light… Its really quite something else to be going home again… its like a warm glow you can’t get away from really… Oh shit, working 10 hour days… oh wait, going home in a month and a half… its all OK…

You say goodbye, and I say Hello...

This is to announce the early retirement of this blog. My heart is just not in it anymore and I think I'd like to stop now before I lose the urge to write completely... because that would just be not right. So anyway, I am taking a break and I have to say it was a really fun trip. When my professor introduced us to Blogger in 2003 and went on about blogging being the next big 'community-building' tool, we kinda dismissed it all as geek speak. But he was right and I think he would be terribly impressed with the online community that I felt such a part of in the last few months.

I'm sure I'll be back soon. And I'll be sure to look you all up... Don't go anywhere, you hear ;)

Anyway, don't want to get too senti or anything... For now, its so long, and thanks for all the fish :)

Last night I had the strangest dream. I sailed away to China, on a little rowboat to find ya…

Very lazy to blog about anything original so I will give you some random recycled rambling excerpts from the rubbish I wrote three years ago and that I recently rediscovered thanks to recovered hard disk. Wow… that must be a personal best record of number of words beginning with R in the same sentence! I must warn you… a lot of it is really random and makes me wonder what the hell I was thinking back then!

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Sometimes you think about life back home and you wonder what you miss the most, apart from the people and dogs of course. It would be easy to say it was the food and the car and the entertainment, but I think it goes beyond that. It’s the smells… I step out on my balcony here (when it’s warm enough) and I only smell the city – dust, fumes, noise (yes, I can smell noise)! At home I’d often wake up to smells of people cooking… rich, spicy aromas. Sometimes I’d wake up to the wonderful smell of rain. And when I enter my house, it’s the smell of food and dogs… And my room, just the right amount of perfume in the air… it was perfectly balanced. If I smoked, the balance was destroyed and I worked painstakingly to restore it. It never failed to bring a smile to my face whenever I entered my room and caught a whiff of that familiarity…. like an old friend. And my parents’ room, so comforting… And my Dad’s aftershave… every single day I’d smell it in the living room, on the phone and in the car. And strangely enough the smells change as the seasons change. Summer has such a distinctive smell… it reminds me of something musty and old. Christmas leaves the smell of wine and cake in the air. When I first got here I imagined singing “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams”. But now I will be home for Christmas and I can hardly wait.

Last night I had a strange dream… it was me arriving for the first time in a foreign country. However the trams were strangely elevated and you had to take an escalator to get to the tracks. Something or someone informed me it was San Francisco… There were strange people in the dream… people I once knew but didn’t seem to know anymore. There were strange happenings in the dream… things I can’t remember in the harsh daylight of reality, but I do know that everything happened on that strange elevated tram. I wonder if I even bought a ticket!

Saturday, 7 December 2002

Editorial Note: I remember now that I was very very drunk when I wrote this!

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My goodness, I can’t wait to see Holly’s adorable face and Chocolate’s adoring face!! I try so hard to be cosmopolitan and everything but it never really works… when you think about it! Let us be lovers – we’ll marry our fortunes together. It’s so strange sometimes, actually living with people! I am homeward bound and I can’t hardly believe it… everyone looks at being homeward bound as a bad thing. Sometimes it might as well have been the 70’s or 60’s in San Francisco… people are still the same. People are strange but they’re still a part of the 60’s and the 70’s and you don’t get much stranger than that!!

I mean, tonight I was watching Dawson’s Creek and I certainly didn’t have any part to play in any freaking creek – why is high school such an issue? It’s supposed to be the best years of your life but somehow or the other reality gets a grip and you have no choice but to follow the signs… Man, the days I live in are completely awesome.

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My life is flashing before my eyes… I didn’t have the high school years of Dawson’s Creek or the Wonder Year’s for that matter, but I still feel a part of something… strangely enough!!! I love you life… honestly!!

Tuesday, 8 April 2003

Sometimes I wonder about the things I write… Is it really normal for a 21 year old to have such a pessimistic outlook on life? And the constant reminiscing… isn’t that more in keeping with a 65 year old? Or have I already passed through the best years of my life? Life was a lazy race in the sun… How on earth did I get so jaded? There is one thing that’s improved over the years, and that’s my newly straightened hair… Well, not so new anymore but it still gives me such pleasure to look at it in the mirror that I’m convinced it’s going to be taken away from me.

My dreams haunt me terribly… Lately they’re very real and based on people in my life and sometimes I don’t like to wake up. And sometimes I wake up with a smile only to realise it was just a dream. Isn’t life cruel enough without giving us the option of fantasising other versions of it? Some days the lines between fantasy and reality are so blurred, I worry about myself!

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Its understandable why half the population in the world has experimented with drugs at some point in their lives… it’s the easiest form of escapism. Even now, just remembering it all has done enough for me. I am fine… I will be fine!

Friday, 25 April 2003

I think this is the first time I’ve woken up with the urge to write. It’s the dreams I tell you… I can’t escape them no matter how hard I try. I used to think myself lucky that I could actually remember my dreams every time I woke up, but now I wonder about that… The other urge I had this morning was to listen to ‘Wish You Were Here’… We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl… Have we found the same old fears? Wish you were here… Wish they were here. Maybe I should stop dwelling on all that is gone and focus more on what is to come! But, it just seems so bleak. Hmmmm, I wonder if I was so melancholy before I met Pink Floyd… I think I was… I think I was born this way. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe its Maybelline.

Editorial Note: That last line was an ad for Maybelline. I can’t remember if India had the same ad.

We are the girls of a noble school, whose glorious past has made our rule... To its traditions we'll be true

To some tagging business from Rat first...

The instructions for this meme (am I the only one who has no idea what a meme is??) are as follows:

1. Delve into your blog archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five people to do the same.

My 23rd post was written on June 29, 2005 and it was all about the time I spent in sunny California in May this year. I actually had a song at the beginning so the fifth line of that was

Nothing's gonna stop us now

The 5th line in the actual post itself was

So time to write about California and Los Angeles and my dear friend J...

I just read it again now and boy, did we have a blast for those couple of days. I wanna go on holiday again :( Ok, I'll stop complaining... my next holiday is coming up in 2.5 months. Yippee...

Right, so what else? I had a rather alcoholic weekend... Remember all that leftover booze from my party? Let's just say, it's been taken care of... And the thing was that I had planned to save myself for Saturday night because I had a birthday party to go to and being as old as I am now, drinking really does take its toll on me... gone are the days of drinking for 4 days non-stop and sleeping for 4 hours in between... now I limit myself to one night of bingeing and at least 10 hours of sleep to escape a hangover. But anyway, it seems once we started we couldn't stop on Friday night.

But I put in a good effort for Saturday night as well... I started at about 8 pm at a friend's dinner to meet his parents who were visiting and who I hadn't met in many years. Then we went to this really cool bar called The Long Room... apparently it literally has the longest bar in Melbourne and it stretches from one end of the "long" room to the other. It also has this really cool tapas area that looks like its been set up for an old-fashioned seven course meal type banquet and there were little alcoves that could be curtained for privacy and there were animal heads all over the place and polished wood tables and it was all rather trippy and Hotel California-ish. From here we went to the birthday party at Bambu bar and I proceeded to get very drunk and my two old school friends and I sat and laughed about all the strange girls we had ever studied with. It was so funny to remember some of them... some of them I'd even forgotten existed. All girl Catholic convent schools have to get the award for putting the most bizarre mix of girls together ever! It's amazing we all just didn't claw each other to death along the way!

My night did not end with the party. We met up with a couple of other people and had a drink at Cookie and there was this Aboriginal AFL player (or so he claimed, I must go investigate if it was really him) who was feeling very partial towards Indian looking people because of the number of racial slurs he's had to put up with with people calling him Indian/Paki... not that his own poor race isn't equally discriminated against! Anyway, then everyone came over to our place and we smoked many joints and I passed out at 5 am from excessive levels of alcohol and weed in my system! But hey, I did manage to make it to work today.

Finally I will leave you with a poem S wrote for me. Suddenly he has discovered some latent talent to rhyme and has been sending me poems left, right and centre. His next plan is to add some bad language and turn it into Hip Hop...

This morning I had to switch off the alarm
And for that, I had to stretch my arm

Then I saw the face I would miss
Couldn’t help but give it a kiss

Looking forward to seeing you tonight
Only then will I feel alright

Seven years has gone so fast, wake me up when September ends

One final entry and then the birthday chapter can be closed for a year. September is really quite a crazy month with all the birthdays of people I know and it seems everywhere I go in blogworld, I am greeted with more birthday tales. And another friend from school is also turning 24 on the 30th so still one more September birthday party left for me!

So, the party was mad. I wish I could give you some highlights but I really don’t remember anything. Not in the ‘I was so wasted and can’t remember a thing’ way but it was all just a blur and there were so many people and conversations happening at the same time that by the end of the night I had no clue what had happened. I was just very drunk as was everyone else and I can chalk it up as another wild night to my ever-so-long list of wild nights. I did some quick mental math also (ok I lied, I had to use my fingers and also some pen and paper) and there were 26 people in total including my household and only 2 people didn’t drink (one was driving and the other is a teetotaller) and everyone brought shitloads of alcohol… and I mean, shitloads… and this was hard alcohol… whisky, bourbon, vodka, rum… no baby stuff for us… it was about 15 bottles in total… the next morning I looked and there was 1 bottle of Smirnoff left, half a bottle of Bacardi, half a bottle of Malibu and some dreadful UDL (disgusting vodka pre-mixes) cans, some of which have been there since last New Years. So basically 24 people polished off about 12 bottles of alcohol… that is so wrong and so right at the same time.

And speaking of alcohol, a couple of friends from work bought a whopping 1125ml bottle of Bacardi to bring to my party (because they are all aware of my rum obsession) and they hid it in the office and forgot to bring it along that night and now it is sitting here on my desk taunting me in its full alcoholic glory. I think I am going to put it back into hiding because it is frightening me a little.

One of my friends also did a quick drug run in between and brought us some stuff to smoke from his house. And we smoked it in the cutest little pipe… it was so small and shiny and cute.

All of the pictures are of drunk faces… I was too busy getting drunk to worry about blog-worthy photos. Anyway, I have blurred a couple for your viewing pleasure.

Here are some people taking vodka shots… I did not participate for the sake of my health and well-being



Here are the beautiful helium balloons that my friends from work got me. They are so bright and colourful and happy and I got immense pleasure from looking at them



Say Hello to Scooby Dooby Doo… the most popular guest at the party. One of my friends from work brought him along and I was rather concerned Scooby was going to poop all over the carpet and add to the general alcohol and food stains. But Scooby was very well-behaved and everyone lavished much attention on him and didn’t want him to leave. Poor little Scooby was originally a farm dog (he belonged to my friend’s husband, the farmer who gave me those shot glasses and liquor bottles) but he was never cut out to be a farm dog and I think the cows terrified him no end and he was basically very traumatised and they gave him to this guy G at work and he’s like this single, middle-aged guy and they basically love each other to death now and it was the start of a very beautiful relationship. So that’s the story of Scooby.



I received some nice presents from friends who came to the party also. Firstly my four work friends who sit around me at work wrote the most random, rambling convoluted tale about me and my dog Holly based on all the nonsense I’ve ever said to them over 1.5 years. I would share it with you, only you’d think they or me (or both) were on crack! It was very sweet, all the same. They also got me Lazy Shit from the Turd family. We got another friend Dumb Shit a while back and slowly we must build the whole family.

I also received:



a Beatles Abbey Road LP

a Beatles ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ DVD

a beautiful chain

a beautiful bracelet

a funky MNG top

a really cool lantern type thing with candle

some yummy Ferrero Rochers (which have been attacked already)

some flowers and a bottle of wine

Birthdays I tell you… how I love them!

And what a lovely surprise I received in the mail yesterday… this year, I only received ONE greeting card by post from my grandparents and am very surprised I didn’t get a few from my parents and sister. So anyway, yesterday, I received this beautiful handwritten letter from my favourite girls in the whole world, Rat and Sista T.



It is as beautiful as some of the stuff we made when we were 11 and discovered glitter pens and things for the first time – even the handwriting is the same. Isn’t it funny how their handwriting hasn’t changed all that much since we were 11 and yet here we are at 24 (and 23 for baby Sista T) and one is a successful blogger operating out of Madras and another is an expectant mother waiting for baby in Delhi and the third is a smoker looking to escape corporate life in Melbourne. How the world turns and pulls us along.

Ok, that was my philosophy for my 24th year. I will leave you now. Wake me up when November ends because that’s when the next love-attention-party-drugs-alcohol-presents fest of Christmas begins!!

Once there was this girl who wouldn't go and change with the girls in the change room

The infamous Rat has also hit the big 24 today. Most of you already read her blog and let me just confirm that she is as sweet and genuine and funny and sincere in real life as she is on her blog. Sometimes it’s difficult to say the things we really feel about the people we really love because then you run the risk of becoming all corny and sugary but hey, it’s not like I haven’t done any of this already so here goes…

Once there was a girl called Rat and a girl called Penny Lane and they attended kindergarten and junior school together but weren’t really friends or anything. For one thing, we had our respective best friends already and for another thing, Rat’s Mom and her best friend’s Mom were teachers in our junior school and so all the other teachers used to be very nice to these two little Rats (we’ll call them both that for convenience) and they were always left in charge of the class when the teachers had a meeting and so quite naturally they used to be very smug about all this and the rest of us used to bitch about them nicely. Anyway, I started inviting them to my birthday party from the fourth standard onwards and so we sort of started getting along and then in the fifth standard, Rat, Sista T and me were school captains and we ditched class to take care of some younger class in the sports field (I don’t know why we thought we’d get away with that) and boy, was our teacher mad. But it was like our first escapade together and the start of a beautiful (and highly mad) relationship.

In high school, Rat lost all her position of power as a teacher’s daughter :p and was integrated into our larger school gang that had been together since junior school… there were like about 12 of us I think and we had many good times together but we also fought and bitched a lot and by age 13, everyone broke up into smaller groups and it was Rat, Sista T and another girl and me and that was really the beginning of you me and you. I’m not going to get into the story of you me and you again… there are just too many stories and too many memories.

Let it just be known that you couldn’t find a sweeter, more fun individual anywhere… she’s thoughtful and kind and is loved by everyone who knows her. In fact, she’s probably the only one who’s still in touch with every single friend of hers from any point in her life including most of her ex-lovers. And as for me and her, its just one big laugh fest when we’re together and a huge part of that laughing is because of the crazy questions she keeps asking. At one point, we called her Rat Question Mark because she didn’t talk and only asked seemingly irrelevant questions. Anyway, I could go on and on about the madness of Rat but if you’re not lucky enough to know it for yourself, well then, all the more bad luck to you!

Thank you dear Rat for being the best friend a girl could ask for and thank you for keeping me entertained all these years… I know you wanted a poem but it seems I must save something for Christmas and I hope this was satisfactory for now. Have a Happy Happy Birthday and I hope your party rocked. And let's keep working on getting you to Melbourne so we can live happily ever after together ;)

P.S. The title song lyrics have nothing to do with Rat... it was just one of the songs we used to laugh our asses off at when we were younger!