Dear Freud, the Interweb has me in its deep, deep clutches. We blame my mother, yes?

It is not the diet. Not the getting-a-wee-bit-too-snug tee after a vacation. It definitely is not the what to buy on sale, the item with the bigger mark-down or the one with the lower price tag. Nor is it the 'Bag or Shoes?' predicament.  It is not the you-just-found-out-your-hot-yoga-instructer-bats-for-the-other-team. What it is, is the little yellow-orange flickering light on your modem. Nothing haunts, gives you anxiety or brings your world to a crashing halt like the three ominous words- Connection is down.

Crickets.

Were there Internet Gods and there are of that am sure, my mother-in-law would ask me to fast on a wednesday,  wear yellow on sunday, check the vaastu of where my modem is and maybe feed fifty poor unclaimed domain names to appease the WWW. But deeply engrossed in her game of Temple Run, my pain is dismissed with a "Wait one second!". So much for divine intervention.

By the way, has rahu-kalam passed?

Frantic to be connected, on to the next then. The ubiquitous coffee shop.  Who like the Witch with her shiny red apple, has me bite. For a simple reason- Free WiFi. And instead of falling asleep for a hundred years, I suffer through loud generic pop, a populous of age-group I long left behind and terrible Lattes.  Headphones on, I proceed to stare at the blinking cursor on my blank screen. In my best pensive, angst-y writer look. Wait, no one saw me checking my Facebook page, right?

On these coffee-shops, I have a lot to say. But that's a rant best saved for another caffeinated day.

For a blogger who has often bragged "If there's WiFi, will blog", the curse of only one or no bar seems to haunt me every time I travel. The forced two day e-detox did however chalk up to two abandoned games of scrabble, beginning Franny and Zooey (again), one squabble, two fun lunches, a bottle of wine and a brief moment spent considering self-medicating. 

Hashtag YOLO. Right? RIGHT? Sigh.

Back on, and my world didn't come crashing down, that I will admit. But best not to make this a habit, yes? 

This post really was going to be about the severely dependent relationship we have with Internet. How it validates, gratifies, proves and cements our social existence with an intensity that just can't be duplicated. It really was. But now that am connected, I must go Instagram my Latte and make that ever important pick- XPro or LoFi?

(Cross-posted on High Heel Confidential)

You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.**

I'll admit, not entirely familiar with Anne Rolphe, I bought the book first coz' I was completely taken with it's retro cover. Book covers just don't get enough chops! Now that, that's out of the way, I'll also add, I liked what I read. See, sometimes it all works out.

Yeah, yeah. Kumbaya.

"I have always wondered why mountain climbers do it. What is the necessity to make yourself cold and weary, oxygen deprived and footsore, just to get to the top of some fossils, minerals, wormy soil, all piled up in jagged shapes, rock sheers and deep drops that care nothing for human endeavors, passions, reproductive urges? But my first love was like that, dangerous, reason abandoned, sense tossed away, and compulsion driving thought. I was going to climb that mountain, plant a flag on the top, and tumble down the other side."


-Art and Madness. A Memoir of Lust Without Reason.


** Spectacular lines, also from 'Art and Madness'.

Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes. There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy. **

Cocktail. A movie. Not the Tom Cruise one, the OTHER. Also a beverage. One that I need copious amounts of. A less sugary, non-fruity one if you will. Oh hell, just pour me a Martini.

If art imitates life imitates art, then Cocktail sure is a movie of times. (No it really is and you'll soon see why.) Good girls get the boy. Girls who drink, date, earn a living and live an independent life are good to bed, not to take to Ma. (Charlatans! Harlots!) That in gist, is the movie. Oh sorry, forgot the spoiler alert. But are you really surprised? Was that really a spoiler? 

And that's why to me the umbrage, the indignant offense almost all have taken to the Guwahati incident surprises me. Did we really not see it coming? (Not that it makes the incident any less offensive and outrageous. Or scary.) Here is a movie (Cocktail) an elite production team churns out which in it's most basic form will make every social anthropologist reach for the nearest pen to paper a theory. Exhibit A: Innocent girl from homeland that doesn't drink or engage in promiscuous sex or even dating. Cooks, cleans, prays. Exhibit B: A successful career woman (one assumes). Drinks. Dates. Heaven forbid, even occasionally gets laid. Exhibit C: The man. Beds Exhibit B but longs to marry Exhibit A. Did the movie really have to be set in London even? 

Did someone say regressive?

And this is a movie set in 2012. Also the year where one eleventh grader, a girl, was publicly attacked by a mob of men when exiting a pub.

These are the times. We seem to be a society that's largely been socially conditioned by murky margins. The outraged are real, but is their voice loud enough? Is their dissent weighty enough?

The movie is a mere dot on the board. The bigger problem lies elsewhere. The place where declarations like "She must've asked for it!" are flippantly thrown around. Where every rape, abuse, molestation is watered down to "Did she provoke it?" or "She must've asked for it!" but, that's a whole other post now, isn't t?

Am a woman. And am worried.

** A Henry Kissinger quote.

An Excerpt Sometimes IS The Whole Story

The blues, man, the blues… the blooz! That aching' ol' heart disease and joker in the heartbreak pack, demon engine of rock, matrix of uber-amped Aerosmith, and the sould-sound of me, Steven Tyler, peripheral visionary of the tribe of Oh Yeah!

Now the blues is, was, and always has been the bitch's brew of the tormented soul. The fifth gospel of grits and groan, it starts with the first moan when Adam and Eve did the nasty thing and got eighty-sixed from the Garden of Eden.

"Once upon a time…" "In the beginning was…" That's the way it starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives' tale blues riff begins with "Woke up this morning'…" The blues is soiled with muddy water, funky with Storyville whorehouse sweat and jizz, smoky from juke-joint canned heat, stained with hundred-proof rotgut and cheap cologne. It's so potent 'cause it's been in every low-down, get-down joint the world has ever seen.

Everybody sucks on someone's tit, and ours was the bitch's brew of the blues.

- Steven Tyler, Does The Noise In My Head Bother You? A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir

Parched

In the quiet of the night, she lies in wait. For words to come to her, or her lover. It's all the same sometimes.