Edgy Trams and Ugly Doctors

Graz, Austria, 2018.

  

  I am so fucked off today. Not only did I wake up grumpier than a grandpa and groggier than a hobo who'd just shot up heroin, I also woke up late. To make matters worse, I had to wear a microphone in class for an agonising one-and-half hour, further perpetuating the Indian-working-in-a-call-centre stereotype.

  I have been doing more of what I love this week and not overwhelming myself with social obligations. So, naturally, the first thing I did was getting my procrastinating ass to Graz on Tuesday. Now, I might have been too penurious to buy avocados for the rest of the week, but the important thing is I made it there. I saw a new place. 

  Graz reminded me of Salzburg; I loved how accessible the woods are from the city and how I only needed a debilitating twenty minutes to receive a stunning view of the city. For free! No need for metros and buses. I realised just how acutely I missed walking. In Innsbruck, I would walk everywhere. Never mind how far, I would walk. The Inn would wail, the mountains would weep, as the pollen swept the air, the trees would shed their leaves in respect. 

  Anyway, now that we have taken care of my oh-my-god-I-am-enjoying-life bullshit, can we, finally, take a minute and discuss the fact that the medicine uni shuttle/tram in Graz is edgy as fuck?
Matt black. 
  
  Matt black!
  
  The fuck is this magnificence is wasted on med-students? 

 Matt black. Matt-mother-fucking-black. 
  
  The fuck do they need it for? Aren't y'all too busy saving lives and stealing drugs to stay awake on your shifts? I, for one, always am suspicious about attractive doctors. You mean to tell me that you are that attractive and you do not depend on your looks to get you through life? For me, the uglier my doctor, the more likely it is that the honour of treating me is going to befall him/her.  

  This is precisely why I refuse to grant my grandma's wish of getting with a well-to-do Indian boy (a doctor) - because all the good ones are ugly. What's the point of marrying a good-looking doctor if you are going to be neck-deep in lawsuits because your significant other sucks? 

Eight A.M. Lectures Are Unnecessary

  

  Could someone do me the favour of shooting me?

  Would it be considered rude to pull out my spanking-new Sedaris and read? Probably not—I am sitting at the back of the lecture hall—, but I'd be judged by my neighbours, and I am just not ready for that kind of social pressure. Not now when I am going through my people-free phase. To be fair, though, how people-free could I really be whilst sharing the same kitchen and lavatory as a friend and being too well-mannered to turn around and not answer when someone asks me something at university in their adorable Austrian accent. Did my parents have to give me a good upbringing? Why couldn’t I have had two heroin addicts as my parents, who had slightly more pressing issues than their child growing up without the respectable amount of comity?

At least, I am writing this blog post, so not everything is in vain, even though I still consider eight a.m. lectures quite unnecessary. It’s not like anyone is actually listening. 

  I read this interesting observation in Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones: women, more than men, frame their sentences as questions. We seek constant validation by doing so—an affirmation what we believe is true. This made me analyse how I use language and ta-fucking-da! My sentences often embody the interrogative form. So do most of my female friends. For the past week, every time I catch myself doing that, I stop and remove the question-bit of the sentence. 

  
  Another thing women employ more than men are words like appear, seem, might, I feel, etc.—another sign of unassertiveness. Passiveness, even. 

It is fascinating how a simple sentence changes if you take out a few words. 

This conversation is quite redundant, isn’t it? 

  Now, take out the last two words. 

This conversation is quite redundant. 

  Different, right? Now, take out one last word: quite. 

This conversation is redundant. 

  Read that last sentence again. 

  And again. 

  Be honest. Whom did it sound like? 

  It sounds like a certain type of person—a certain type of man. 

Doesn’t it?

Disapproving FedoraMan and Watery Iced-Lattes

Oxford, England.

As I sit in one of Oxford’s average cafes, praying that I remember not to place any weight on the left-hand side of the table, since it would result in it jerking up, which would then result in my iced-latte—which is way more water than is acceptable, even at Starbucks, and much too warm for it to be marketed as an iced-anything—to become airborne for an immutable second, before it gracefully lands on my laptop, people around me are actually working. Imagine the horror. I can hear the barista with the perfect hair, clamouring in the kitchen, cleaning up before the next round of loud tourists and caffeine-deprived students inundate this quaint, black-and-white-interiored cafe. The electric roar of the coffee machine as it cleans itself commingles with the clings and clangs of the glasses he is putting away. Originating somewhere above my drenched head, George Ezra’s voice augments this…melody. 

  I glance outside. The beautifully banal brick houses with the beautifully banal flowers would have been a pretty sight, were I not tholing the regal process of hydrosis. In normal people talk: I am sweating my ass off. A man donning a tatty black t-shirt, distressed jeans, and a burgundy fedora—I didn’t even know they did Burgundy fedoras—catches my eye. This is not the sort of attire your average person in Oxford tends to find appropriate to wear outside the safe confines of his/her home.  And it is certainly not the attire your average seventy-year-old in Oxford tends to find appropriate to wear anywhere. Seeing the youthful lovebirds on the other side of the road, FedoraMan shakes his head. A quick rightward glance tells him that an Indian girl, in her early twenties, who prefers her coffee overpriced and watery,  had witnessed the whole thing; he, then, goes on to purse his weathered lips, shaking his head in a conspiratorial manner and I, having all the time in the world to procrastinate doing my assignment, indulge him by shaking my head right back in disapproval of the blatant show of sopping flesh on the historical streets of this slightly lovely, slightly drab, and extremely conservative town.      

 

  The boy sitting on the rectangular table outside, running interference between me and my co-conspirator, along with the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, which look like they hadn’t been cleaned since the first university had been founded here, remains oblivious to everything—from the seventy-year old with a fedora in this heat to the meaningful moment I had just shared with a stranger who might, or might not, be a pervert feigning reactionaryism—as he pours over a copy of “You Do You”, which matches the colour of his T-shirt. 

  As I contemplate all this, there is a flutter in my peripheral. I turn around in the most inconspicuous way I could manage. My best friend doesn’t think that turning around and gawking is low-key. Doesn’t she know that in the age of self-absorption, nobody pays attentions to anything that cannot be instagramed or tweeted about? And doesn’t he know I am a little too everyday (I refuse to use the word basic) to grace those social media sites with my attention? I see a girl, who, by the way, has nothing to do with the movement which had first caught my attention, enter the establishment. I see the exact moment the heat in the I-do-not-understand-what-ventilation-is coffeeshop slaps her blushing cheeks, for it renders her eyes into sewer-green globs and her nose becomes a crooked, but still picturesque, lane; as though she had opened a refrigerator with an open pickled-sandwich, which had been there for a little too long. As she uses the very same khaki foot, which she had used to step inside, to all but run out of this respectable establishment, I drink the last of my very last iced-latte in Oxford, hoping she does not bang into the FedoraMan and cripple him on her way out. 

New Day, New Rant: Relationships & Food?

Society Cafe, Oxford. 

I feel as though every time I write here, I need to preface it by saying "I know it's been a while." This, surely, shouldn't be the case every fucking time. It's not that the blog isn't on my mind, it is - I'd thought about posting something in Italy as I had waited for a train. Two months back. It's just tedious, you know, especially, now, since I no longer know what kind of content I want to post. So, for today's post, I am going to take Natalie Goldberg's sage advice, given to me by a sager Susannah Rickards, and just write. Without editing myself. (I mean I will still have to edit this blog post, for qualitative measure, but you get my point.)

  Currently, I am in the throes of the very last of my long summer holidays. I would say I am making the most of them, but that would be an outright lie. I am interning at a stock-brokering firm. Yes, I am, perhaps, the first literature student ever to have voluntarily stepped into such an institution. And yes, going there everyday reminds me just how glad I am that I read a cheesy book and mustered the courage to drop Business. And yes, I know I'll never earn anything close to what the people that work there earn. That is if I ever find employment. Let's not go there; I have enough anxiety already, what with being a twenty-one-year old having to live with her family for more than three weeks.

  Now, I shall preface the following by saying I love my family. I do. BUT they are such an absolute pain to be around (and by that I mean this has nothing to do with them and everything to do with me).   Call me crazy, but I really don't think I should have to tip-toe around my house if I decide I want to masticate cheese popcorn around 12 p.m. I am an adult, goddammit! I can do things like that. One of my friends sent me a picture of him eating ice-cream for breakfast. Because that is what adults do. And I don't need passive-aggressive looks telling me I have absolutely wasted my day lying in bed, watching The Mindy Project. I know I have. Actually, I chose to waste my day lying in bed, watching The Mindy Project. And you know what--I loved every sordid minute of it. I loved it so much that I contemplated never getting out of bed. This was also when I thought about dating someone. That way, I wouldn't need to get out of bed ever--they would just do all my work for me. My friend Kevin tells me that is not necessarily how relationships work. Why bother putting up with someone else's baggage then? I have enough of my own, which I am doing a fantastic job of circumventing. Ughh, imaging how much energy you would require to pretend that a second person's life is not falling apart and no, their mother leaving them when they were a child did not impact their adult relationships. It has been brought to my attention that this might be why parents aren't exactly concerned when I tell them about my dates. Do they think I cannot date people? Because I can. I promise you that much. They just need to get me pizza and coffee on a regular basis. Perhaps, ice-cream too. (Don't you dare bring me anything but Ben & Jerry's. I will throw anything else out the door, along with you. ) And tacos. A cheesecake here and there wouldn't hurt either. Oooh, I almost forgot chips. Which reminds me there is a bag of chips in my closet (I had to hide it from my resourceful brother) which needs eating.

Until next time. Hopefully, that's soon.

Love,
I am going to eat chips now.

Goddammit! I Deserve Better Coffee.

  

  Good morning, there. 

  I hope the week is treating y’all well. It has been a minute since I last posted anything on the blog. It’s not as though I didn’t have any material for it - I did - I just didn’t have the time or motivation, to be honest. For some reason, with the progression of spring, my hands have once again begun itching to keep up the blog. Perhaps because it is the one place I can vent and rant to my heart’s content. 

  
  Anywho, today, I was awoken with a few sharps raps on my door, which I wasn’t sure if I had actually heard or if they were figments of my dream. (I had not been sleeping well.) I checked my iPhone’s display for the time.

 08:05 am

  
  I thought, It can’t be the cleaning ladies; they come at 9. So, naturally, I closed my eyes, having accepted I had probably imagined the entire thing, ready to resume my incomplete dream. Then, came the second round of knocking. Okay, this time I had definitely not dreamt it. I shout, panicking, ‘Could you please come back after cleaning the other rooms?’ Yeah, I got that rapport with my cleaning ladies; it might or might not have been the first time they caught me oversleeping on cleaning day. 

  My groggy, sleep deprived, and still-half-asleep self got out of bed just as I heard the metallic clink of the cleaners’ keys and then of the door knob turning. I stumbled towards the door just in time to see a strange cleaning lady open the door. I repeated myself, this time without several feet and a door standing interference. ‘Could you please give me ten minutes,’ I say as politely as I can in my state. When she keeps looking at me, confounded, I realise I had been speaking in English; so, I repeated myself, this time in German, which turned out to be too much for my addled brain because I ended up saying something along the lines of “können Sie mir noch 10 Minuten geben - please - thank you.” You should have seen the look of utter disgust she threw me; like, she could no longer be bothered by students and their unsavoury lifestyles. 

  
  So, I got my ass out of my room as soon as I could and marched on over to my usual coffeeshop, ready to really wake up with the help of some coffee. I sat at my usual table with my cup of black coffee, my journal already out. I took my first sip, expecting to feel the lovely warmth of the lukewarm liquid traverse my throat, waking my conscious. 

  
  ‘WHAT THE-’ I almost spat out my coffee. Almost. 

  
  Coffee in Austria is, generally, never great, but today it was especially shit. I felt just as dead having drunk that cup of coffee as I did before drinking it. WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK? For the small fortune I pay for coffee on a regular basis, there is no reason why I should not be able to get better coffee. It is not even about the taste anymore. I just want to be awake after spending three euros on a cup of coffee. Is that asking too much? 

  
  Do you, honestly, think I would have payed three euros if I had wanted to go about my day dazed, half-asleep, and now annoyed? For fuck’s sake, Austria, it is not that hard. Coffee? Awake! No coffee? No awake.  Three euros poorer? AWAKE!! Three euros richer? No awake. For fuck’s sake!

  
  What is more bothersome than the atrocity cafes here try to pass off as coffee is that others aren’t bothered by this “coffee.” Perhaps because no one is ever awake enough to fully comprehend the shit they are pouring down our throats. Because everyone is drinking the same fucking shit-ass coffee. 

  
  Loath as I am, I must admit these zombies are not the lowest on the human chain. Hard to believe, isn’t it? No, they are one-upped, or rather one-downed, by the group of supposed humans: the non-coffee drinkers. 

  

  Like, bitch, why the fuck are you even called a drinker at that point? 

  Every now and then, to practice the feeble empathy my parents managed to instill in me in my childhood years, I try to understand their blasphemous disposition. No, seriously. There are times when I just sit, looking profound as fuck, staring tenderly at my coffee, wondering “what the fuck went wrong in your childhood that robbed you of the ability to appreciate such unadulterated love?” When I cannot come up with a trauma which would excuse such blasphemous behaviour, I simply shrug and say, ‘These bitches be trippin’.’ Then, I sip on my coffee.