Friday, April 25, 2008

Heat, Sweat and Tears

As summer explodes this April with the sun sizzling down with a vengeance like it's trying to bore past my newly sunscreened skin, I'm not sure if it's the extremity of the weather that's been getting me a tad emotional lately.

Like when I was watching Little Women on TV earlier today. As with most everything that comes on TV, I stumbled onto it halfway through starting with where Jo goes home to find little Beth dying and as the two sisters grapple in their own ways with death, I started tearing up crazily. I'd first read Little Women at boarding school at St Agnes, Haflong, all of 11 years old, and I had loved the story of Jo March and her sisters, and later made it a point to catch hold of the sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys as well. As I write this, I suddenly remember a long-legged crush I had at college whom I'd obliquely refer to as Ted in my diaries after Jo's long-legged son Ted :)

And then the other night after watching Andrew Lloyd Webber night on American Idol and loading my phone anew with Michael Crawford's Music of the Night, and later flipping through my song list looking for another Lloyd Webber favourite Love Changes Everything by the divinely throated Michael Ball, I lay exhaustedly in bed traipsing down memory lane... Barbra Streisand, Jim Croce, Gordon Lightfoot....

I read somewhere once that music is the shortest route down yesteryears or something to that effect, and I couldn't agree more. The association of music and memories is so instant. When I listen to The Eagles' Witchy Woman, I don't just hear the song. I'm transported back to a picnic on a balmy day with a group of friends after we'd just recently come back from a college excursion around the country at the height of summer (early June, to be specific). To this day I can never listen to Witchy Woman without fond recollections of that fun day out.

Friends with who I'd shared the music suddenly become terribly missable, even those I haven't seen or even remembered for ages. The good times, the fun times.... they come crowding back into the mind. Funny but at the time I'd never thought I'd ever look back and miss those times so much one day. Just like a favourite quote from a John Lennon song, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." And Lennon couldn't have imagined himself as he was writing and recording that song that he'd be dead just a few weeks later. And when I was a young wide-eyed college kid, I never ever thought a poem we had in English class would ring so true someday -

Oft in the stilly night
ere slumber's chain has bound me,
fond memory brings the light
of other days around me....


Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Bam Bam, gotcha, friend!

I was scratching my head all a.m. trying to think up some absurd but totally credible April Fool text message to send suckers ... uh ... friends. But with rain suddenly lashing down again, I forgot all about it until my sister got this sms around 2 pm which dramatically read -

CNN BREAKING NEWS:
Obama pulls out of presidential race, says it's for the good of the Democratic party

She's not as rabidly anti-political news as I am so she screeched Turn on the TV! Watch CNN! and waited and waited and waited. Well. Brilliant, I thought. It sounded so plausible, so real, so my kinda prank. So with great glee, I forwarded the message on to tons of people.

One instantly messaged back a speechless but shocked "??!!" One smartypants informed me, "Sister....it's valid only till 12 noon." Well, wiki says the tradition differs and while in some countries, the jokes last only till noon, in others the jokes last all day.

Another friend lamented, "Darn! It's a sad sad day :'(" and getting deeper into it, sent a second more prophetic message which ran, "Expect McCain to win the presidential race now..." Not his fault he's forced to go offline for a month and stew in unable-to-check-facts territory, I decided and messaged back, "Fooled ya! hyuk hyuk hyuk" He was good enough to admit, "Damn, you got me. Good one nonetheless!"

Of the two Political Science colleagues I pranked on, one cheered, "Advantage Clnton! Hurray 4 MHIP!", while the other said, "Strange. I thought he was doing better than her."

A few responded, "April Fool?" I liked the question marked doubts enough to reply cryptically, "Watch TV" Well, it wasn't a yes or no and I wasn't lying exactly. I hope they raced home to turn on the TV or asked their folks back home to turn on the TV and tell them pronto if it was all true :))

Even my baby wasn't spared his blushes. He sneaked out of a high-fi seminar to check cnn.com and message, "Your breaking news is not on the cnn website!"

Hee hee I know I know, my bad :D