A life well wiled/The life sarcastic

The life sarcastic is one lived in wile,
Tis’ a vale of eye rolls and a slippery slope of bile
At every serious sentiment and earnest thought.
For the self-proclaimed (t)wit, sacred is naught.

The life sarcastic is to sneer at a simple joke.
It had better be nuanced as fuck,
Or tongue-in-cheek, that shit's dope.
But lolcat memes now, they always in luck :)

The life sarcastic is to drawl, "You don't sayyy",
To an opposing opinion, when you're down a chardonnay.
But if you hath nothing to offer after that initial rejoinder,
You curl your lip and say "It's all relative, you'll find, duhhh".

But there's perks to be had in the life sarcastic.
The world is an unending fount of both mediocre and bombastic
Events for the wit to satirize their existence against
And loftily pronounce, "humor is the best antidepressant"!

- When I tried to pay my therapist in rhyme

The Desire to Scream Increases Exponentially with the Number of Training Workshops I Attend OR Why I Now Endorse Attention-seeking

There is a generally accepted view that adults function as ego-laden objects. The ego weighs the adult down and renders the brain senseless to elevating emotions of openness and self-confidence. This mental deadweight is further piled on by a cloying diet of flattery from juniors and people who need you to drop them to the airport. Recognising this adult trait, training workshops employ techniques tailored specifically for adult learning. Adult learning is different from children’s learning because it involves adults, copious use of powerpoints, notepads used to write down more than grocery lists, and doodles drawn with the last drops of your fellow trainee’s pen. However, the outcomes of most of these workshops are dubious at best since adults can be told to do many things on this not-so-green earth which they will loudly agree are good and proper but the sneakiest part of being an adult is that they do not have to do those things unless handed an official notice by a legal authority or their neighbor.

The course of my life has been steered (by a trained hand no doubt) to cause me in the recent months to manage a series of training workshops, an experience that can accurately be described as life-changing. I have often sat at the back of these workshops and dreamt of what I would do if I changed my life, if I had enough money to open that coffee shop and dabble in many golden delights like playing the drums, talking of air and light with friendly strangers and making coffee all day; of sampling amuse bouches of life rather than a bland diet of fixed experiences, of whether I should have pursued that career in chemistry instead of thinking that “helping” people is the greatest reward and so on. These are nagging thoughts and being a person who overthinks everything, the ample time offered for overthinking in the back of a training hall while grown adults unsuccessfully try to solve a 12-piece jigsaw square in the front, surreptitiously judge each other and keep asking for a tea break causes the overthought to slowly build as bodily pressure that must be released in some mechanical way.Having never screamed like the mythical banshee or a girl who has seen the latest movie heartthrob up close, my desire to use this vocal method of stress relieving is fanned more with every passing workshop. In the next two months, I feel as if I must needs become that species of humanity I detest, the attention-seeker. Screaming is like attention-seeking basic procedure.

Attention-seekers can be found in various settings, clicking selfies in front of coffee shops, stuttering around malls in orthopedically unsound high heels, enacting facetious dialogues from old movies in training workshops and in those people who “are going to drink just a little because I’m so over everything” and can then be found sobbing into the sleeve of the bouncer before running down the street indrunken abandon followed by their sober, somewhat envious, eye-rolling designated driver friend.

However, attention-seeker may not be the right word for such people. Perhaps they too lead tortured lives and have been forced to undergo the life-equivalent of an adult training workshop. The despair that I feel is perhaps akin to their feelings before they drown their sorrows in behaviours that I previously and erroneously labeled as attention-seeking. Unknowingly and most definitely unwittingly, they are the Socratic gadflies in our lives that bang into us as they drunkenly careen down the street and remind us that being awkward is a blessing since we are never as acutely and tinglingly alive as when we are about to trip over an object or a drunk person. It is an experience that mimics childhood in its similarly uncoordinated and brazen innocence. We must recreate such experiences more often and seek out these people. They are the true trainers and have much to teach us. It’ll be free as well.

Write a 250 word essay starting with "Why......"

Why is educating equivalent to watering down so many times? If we looked like we wanted to learn halfway, we actually preferred playing outside, but guess what? We get up at 6 am for twelve plus years, brush our teeth, grimace at our pimply faces and march off to school, so don't, DON'T belledddy patronize us, please!

History textbooks for example. Each era/period/century is made to snugly fit into 10 pages of badly typed up text. It's like watching a horrible trailer for a movie that will never be released. So you have kids walking around under the impression that most of the Indian Independence struggle started with salt on a beach and ended with salt-holding person's dietary changes. Not cool.

Science is another gassy explosion altogether. To draw from personal experience, I spent a large part of my youth thinking we get Vitamin D from the sun and milk i.e. that both are separate sources of the thing. But as I learnt and only because I took specific chemistry classes, energy from the sun converts pro-Vitamin D which we get from foods like said milk into Vitamin D. And here I thought that there were invisible Vitamin D packets floating around in the sky between the times of 12pm-4pm. It would have been a simple enough thing to explain to a child but nooo, hide this scarring truth from us.

Geography makes me seasick (my oversmart quips are a result of this poor education, I don't know enough so I think I know a lot, geddit, geddit). The world somehow manages to be completely boring in a geography textbook and learning from television has its perils. Most channels, through Hollywood movies make the Ptolemaic mistake of showing the States to be the center of the universe.

This non-critical, biased, way of learning infects higher education too and we sit around in graduate level classes and ponder completely uninteresting, inherently flawed, meaningless questions like, "If someone on LSD thinks he is flying, do we say he isn't?" Word.

2 year old limerick

The secret to poetry is rice
Each grain a sticky thought
You chew on it, don't forget to share
If it's too hard, then make curry!

...

Words, how did we come to make them? Who thought of putting an e after an a to give us such a pretty looking word as "faery" or make the daily ritual sound like a rare and special thing by calling it "quotidian"? And then we have QWERTY which really shouldn't be a thing.

Casa Bonita

I feel a think coming on as some favourite but forgotten character once said. I have moved into a new place a mere catapult shot away from my old apartment, and yet, so very different. It is the place I have always wanted but did not know I wanted, and now that I have it, I cannot but want to have it longer! So goes my fierce nostalgia for the present projected into the future. The perfect little apartment on the second floor of an open set of homes, with a central shared space where children play, an old railing to which I lock my bike, paint peeling in just the right places all give the facade character. Imagine that, after living in a chunky, dingy apartment building with blinding white walls and little else that stood out. And the inside of our new abode is an even more cutesy tale. A cosy living room lit by a lamp, a thirty year old couch, a recliner in the corner and a view of the park. Two bedrooms with our lives in them, a kitchen full of brand new dishes waiting to be filled with our food experiemnts, beer in the fridge, a makeshift bathroom curtain to block out the streaky windows and a very chic shower curtain. Domestic bliss is quite real, I have to admit. But if it seems like I attribute it all to simply these objects, it certainly is not the case. We have fun neighbours, and I have a brand new roommate who is easygoing and a friend which is pretty stellar as roommates go so really I saved the best for last. We also have a theme of leaves to bond us :)

Mind Farts and Psychic Vampires

This is a post dedicated to expanding the English lexicon. I introduce two words, the first of which I had coined awhile back and the second was introduced to me by Victor and Caitlin.

Mind farts came to me in a brilliant flash of mindfartiness during a long, intellectual discussion filled with obscure references and random philosophy. It means to let off fumes of nothingness which if done in large amounts may contribute to global warming, but which relieves you (like this post).

Psychic vampires, as was explained to me by V and C, are people who tire you by their mere presence. Interaction with them leaves you needing a Gatorade and so in the interests of your sanity, you should identify those people early and not let them get to you. Sounds good.