A Little Moon Music

The moon was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door...

~~~

Above the quiet dock in midnight,
Tangled in the tall mast's corded height
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child's balloon, forgotten after play.

~~~

It's either full moon night or darn close to it. I find it incredibly difficult getting a good photograph on my little digicam but that doesn't stop me from trying. This one reminds me of an old poem I studied many years ago and later taught. The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. The ultimate drama of an ill-fated romance between a highwayman and his sweetheart, the black-eyed Bess. Reads something like one of those old cowboy and western movies too.

Full moons also invariably remind me of T.E. Hulme's masterly Above the Dock. That's the poem in its entirety up there. Short, sharp, direct and descriptive. No hemming and hawing around. Minimalism at its superb best.

When Necessity is the Mother of Reinvention

What do you do when you have a pile of debts to pay off and you still need a new look for a new season at work? Easy, you reinvent your old stuff. That's what I've been doing lately. Like today I dug out this old bag I bought at a second-hand market a couple of years ago.

It's a lovely jute-woven type shoulder bag in a beige brown shade, very summery as well but boringly plain. It had a little flower applique when I bought it but in a horribly jarring light blue colour. Tore that off as soon as I took it home too. Well, I took a long hard look at it today and bought some sequins and floral appliques in a nicely blending shade, and voila!

Who am I anyway?

Latent tendency finally tumbling out of the closet or natural by-product of years of wielding discipline? I'm not sure why but I do know that I'm getting to be a real harridan online (yeah, yeah, I can hear a chorus of Yes, you're sooo right, J !!)

In real life, I don't have as many short-tempered flashes of impatience but in the virtual world I seem to have more expectations of people and keep coming up short time after time after time. Maybe it's because most people I deal with online are young and relative greenhorns in terms of life experiences. Maybe I expect too much from them and end up feeling shortchanged by careless, flippant attitudes. I do tend to be very intense about things in life in general, something of a worry-wart even, and in situations that might otherwise be lightened by a laugh and a step back, my natural inclination is to do the opposite and tighten up with brittle nerves and explode at the slightest provocation. Or maybe after years of handling discipline in classroom situations, I've gotten so used to being instantly obeyed I've come to expect it in outside classroom situations as well.

A good online friend from the US who I first got to know, as with most online friends, in an MIRC gameroom where we'd play trivia every evening always called me stubborn. It didn't help that he's one of the most "abrasive" (his words, not mine) persons ever who gets a kick out of provoking other people. So most evenings I'd be engaged in verbal fisticuffs with him, fighting, arguing and hassling the heck out of each other. "You stubborn woman!" he'd throw at me exasperatedly, "You dominatrix!" and that always made me laugh because I honestly felt nothing could be more way off base. As a child I'd always been the most docile, passive and submissive kind. Always did as I was told, was terribly afraid of hurting other people's feelings, never stood up for myself or my beliefs. Well, now that the worm's turned online, maybe I'm learning to be more aggressive, more assertive in real time too.

Or maybe I just need to go offline and get a life.

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....

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

It Can Happen To Anyone

I had a bit of a scare recently. I'd picked up a bad little inflammation on the back of my left hand sometime around the beginning of winter which would itch crazily and no matter what ointment I tried, always reappeared after a couple of days. Something similar happened above my left eyebrow and just below the tip of my right earlobe though these weren't as visible as the one on my hand pictured here.

Then my arms began itching too, and a similar skin inflammation appeared on my right hand. I'd tell friends and neighbours about it, and one said she'd had something similar on her back, just below the right shoulder which turned out to be a spot of ringworm, and someone had made a concoction of garlic and ginger and zapped it away, although it had stung terribly. Ringworm? We did have 4 dogs so it seemed quite possible, I thought. But we'd always had lots of dogs around the house for the last 2o years so why now?

Finally, after one night when I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep in an agony of itching and irritation on my arms and feet, I consulted a dermatologist. To my complete shock, she said it was caused by sun exposure and asked what sunscreen I used. I said I never used any. And that's the truth. I've read a lot about sunburns, skin cancer caused by harmful UV rays, the importance of using sun protection etc. In fact while I'd been waiting my turn to see the doc, I'd been reading an advert for a new brand of sunscreen in a magazine. But somehow I'd never imagined it could happen to me. I hate gunk on my face in the daytime. Gunk as in wet stuff like moisturizers, creams, lotions etc. I always felt they clogged my pores and suffocated me. The doc clucked incredulously and disapprovingly and gave me a couple of tubes of sunscreen and a hardy skin ointment plus a strip of anti-allergy tablets, it being the dry season around this time with lots of allergen-laden air in circulation.

Well, they worked like magic. The inflammations on my hands have subsided dramatically and I think I've had an incredibly lucky escape.


Needless to say, I now use sunscreen scrupulously. Though I still love the sun and sunshine I'm now very conscious that it can be a silent killer.

Spring Collection

Took a while this year but it's here again at last. Spring. To take a few liberties with Eliot...

Spring is the cruellest season
Breeding flowers out of the wasteland

The Japan theite blossoms look remarkably like Japanese cherry blossoms and they don't last very long either. I took these pictures last week and already they've disappeared, presumably to morph into fruit. I snapped the azaleas (2nd and 3rd last pics) on a wet rainy morning. Also called rhododendrons, they're abundant in the Himalayan foothills and at school in Darj, we had a lovely school song called The Singalila Song which went

Along the Singalila skyline
I'll climb the rhododendron road
To find beyond the fragrant springtime
The spirit's loftiest abode
And where the mountains meet the morning
The world held in a moment's span
I'll hear the wisdom of the timeless
To love my God and serve my fellow man.

A Little Tree-some

Some folks like shooting people, especially children or the very old, some stalk animals, wild or domesticated, some camp out by sunrises and sunsets, some stick with mountains and valleys, some swear by night scenes, some feast on foods. Me I have a thing for trees. When travelling by road, trees invariably catch my eye. Their outlines and silhouettes, and the more crooked and scraggier, the more interesting they look to me.

Which explains these pictures. I love photographing trees. And flowers. But trees win by a slightly wider margin. Especially in the leafless, stripped-to-the-bone stages. No heavy leaf-laden trees with lush green glossy foliage for me. I like them bleak, stark, denuded, desolate, skeletal, clawed and taloned, reaching out to the skies with defiant dignity.

You can click on the pictures for larger images.