Random Blogging

oniomania (O-nee-uh-MAY-nee-uh, -MAYN-yuh) noun

Compulsive shopping; excessive, uncontrollable desire to buy things.

[From Latin, from Greek xnios (for sale), from onos (price) + -mania.]
Oniomania is another word for the urge to shop till you drop, habit of the debit, thrill of the bill. According to a pearl of ancient wisdom, we don't acquire things, things acquire us. In the case of oniomaniacs, it is perhaps the fun of acquiring things that acquires them.

Imelda Marcos of the Philippines could be one prime example of this category, also known as shopaholics.

-Updates on my other blogs - Something I got tagged for by my dear friend Aristera & Keya on Literary Mosaic and a little something in French on FranceSay

The Week Gone By...

Two blissful rendezvous with two of my oldest and closest friends - alot of heart-to-heart with atleast one of them. We've been friends since school days - disliked each other for most of school, but now closest of friends. It's been over a decade - shit that makes me feel old! One of them is going away - flying away to greener pastures, so to speak, to pursue a Ph.D in cancer immunology. Fancy na? My friends seem to have this knack of picking up high flying, erudite courses! Intelligent lot they are. Eccentric too. Lovable as well. Adorable. Irreplacable.

Two birthdays. One day. The first was nice - cozy, warm, just as birthdays should be with close ones there to bring in your birthday and wish you the best for every single day of your life. Good food. Good conversation. The yummiest home-made chocolate cake. The second was confusing. Too much noise over nothing. Two many flaring tempers. Terrible food....but the yummiest chocolate cake in town! :-)

Two new batches at AFPune this session. Summer courses - still stuck with the kids course, but am enjoying it this time. A bright, enthusiastic bunch of students makes it worth commuting in the infernal Pune heat, not to mention teaching in those stuffy classrooms with non-existent ventilation making them more like furnaces than 'salles de classe'! Planning and preparing for class is also far more enjoyable, knowing that what I do will be received well and appreciated...

Two days alone. Everyone's in tinsel town - taking care of annoying paper-work and even more annoying bank work, while I stay back to baby-sit the house. Well, not exactly - I saw no reason to cancel class just to visit banks, even if they are in the city that breathes life into me! Going to spend my time reading, pampering myself, sleeping, watching a film or two perhaps...and yes, entertaining a friend and visiting cousins!

Current Music - Please don't go - No Mercy (Does anyone remember this one-hit band of three? I used to love this song way back in school!)

Current Mood - Strangely enough, not great despite the good week. Lonely. Terribly so. Not 'coz I'm alone - lonely from inside. The void just keeps growing. :-(

Maunvrat?

It's almost a maunvrat these days, save the few people without whom I wouldn't stay sane and to whom I pour my heart out regularly. Every now and then, I get tired of talking. Yes, me "the-talk-a-dozen-words-a-minute" Geetanjali finds the effort that goes into talking extremely cumbersome and tiring. For a long time I wondered if this is a direct consequence of that dreaded PMS, but then I realised that it doesn't always co-incide with "that time of the month" and so I've come to the grand conclusion that it's not so much due to the hormones as it as due to my incredible personality. So anyways, I don't talk, apart from what is necessary. Friends who come knocking in cyber space and/or telecommunication space for the most part end up being ignored. At times like this, I wonder even more than at other times, how people maintain such large and busy social lives - how they can keep jabbering on-and-on endlessly, meaninglessly without ever feeling the words they utter. I'm glad, then, that my circle of friends is restricted to a select few, with whom words are not really necessary in order for me to communicate what I'm feeling. The silence rejuvenates for I bounce back as talkative as before and genial once again. Not an extrovert - never that! - but genial, yes, definitely.

Seperating the Chaff from the Grain

I’ve lost friends who I included amongst my closest friends and been disillusioned and betrayed – and I’ve met a lot of new people, not all whom I could call friends. I seem like an open person and oft do I say that my life is one bloody open book, but the real me is hidden deep inside and there are very few who get to see it on a regular basis. What irks the most is when people who’ve known me for barely a few months insist that they know me inside out, based on what is almost always a wrong perception of me from the clues they have picked up from a very public part of my personality. I’ve learnt how to separate the chaff from the grain so to speak. The ‘grain’ has never before been as dear as it is now.

Current Mood - Tired. Very tired. Sad. Lonely.
Current Music - Lotus Feet by Shakti.

Changes...

Aristera Baba said he’s changed so much in the past couple of years – I agree, but then I think he’s changed so much since the time I first him! :-) His statement made me think about me and how much I’ve changed in the last few years. They say change is the only thing constant in life – and looking back over the last five years I couldn’t agree more. If someone were to ask me to recapitulate the last five years in a sentence (something very difficult for a person like me – you can ask Aris Baba and he’ll confirm how it’s almost impossible for me to stick to short-n-sweet in my descriptions of anything and anyone)…I’d say it’s been the most rocking phase in my life. Rocking, not in the happy, hep-n-happening sense of the term, but in the sense that my life has taken so many unexpected twists and turns and been rocked from it’s roots so many times, that no other word but ‘rocking’ could best describe it.

Taking the example of my internet habits, I’ve gone from being –

• Someone who’s life depended on her internet connection, having so many loved ones abroad, to someone who knows that the internet is but a medium to keep the illusion of the relationship alive.
• Someone who checked her emails twice, sometimes thrice a day to someone who checks her emails twice a week, if lucky, thrice!
• Someone who blogged daily, to someone who blogs once a week and thinks that’s regular!

Superficial yes, but there are so many small changes that have gone into making me who I am today – and the changes just continue to happen each day, whether in small or big ways. I wonder where I will be five years from today – and though I pray that I don’t have to see any more radical changes I know inside that so much more still lies around the corner.

Sigh – guess I should take those vitamins regularly if I must emerge the survivor eh?

Current song : Je survivrai (otherwise popular as ‘I will survive’)
Current read : Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood
Current Colour: Blue, a deep, thick, dark blue.
Current Mood : Pensive

Boo - encore!

I'm petrified of vehicles with just two wheels - right from bicycles to motobikes. I never learnt to ride a bicycle; falling off one when I tried, and making my friends fall when I sat behind them...the first time a friend gave me a lift on his bike, I nearly screeched him into breaking in the middle of a busy street. He was going at the dangerous speed of 30! ;-) Now, several years later when I sit behind my Puneri friends who are mobile thanks to their scooters/Scootys/Activas/etc kindly offer to drop me off, I straddle their vehicle much like I would a horse - pressing the flanks of the vehicle/horse when I want it to slow down! Even otherwise I'm rarely relaxed, scared that the maniacs let loose on the streets of Pune will drive too close and take away with them my precious limbs! Plus there is that mess that I have to deal with post-bike ride...the tangled mess I would refer to as my hair pre-bike ride! ;-)

Boo!

I'm scared of Pressure Cookers. There it's out! I'm bloody scared of them - I think they are wierd temperamental things that erupt and let out a hot, frothing, scalding emission at who-so-ever dares to go against them. They are scary. Period...

And no, you're not allowed to consult Freud's manul and psycho-analyse me on this declaration of mine!

Current Mood : Strange.