Tendonitis

Sometimes we forget to wonder about the little pleasures of life that while we were growing up, once made our parents so happy. For instance, it is the tendonitis (de Quervain's Disease)I'm suffering from (I'm still undergoing treatment for it) that reminded me how a basic action like being able to write or type or feed myself or wear my own clothes myself or being able to soap myself in the shower is actually a blessing. Yes, it is.

There are many unfortunate human beings who are denied this blessing, you know.

Thank you, God, whoever and wherever you are, for reminding me of this little fact.

Individual Milestones

It's nice to be appreciated once in a while for what one does everyday on a regular basis, without stopping to consider exactly what one gets in return except for the mandatory monetary benefits. Immediate case in mind : K, who turned up on Tue afternoon, with a huge white carnation in his hand and a huger smile on his face. Now although he's the sort of husband who does like to surprise me once in a while by doing the very unexpected of things (good ones, fortunately), a weekday isn't really the time it'd occur to him to do anything of the sort. The most he'd rise to would be to say, "Let's cook some really spicy stuffed baingan masala" or "Let's go over to the Shindes' place for a chat or call them over" when he's not particularly bogged down by the burden of mainframes jobs. So I naturally wondered about the source of this floral extravaganza. He must have been more than a little ecstatic about it, for without even pausing for my volley of questions (now that's a rarity, I assure you), he pulled out a small piece of paper from his fluorescent green backpack and proceeded to wave it tantalisingly before my eyes. The typical Gemini I am, I didn't need any more foreplay (oops !) : I grabbed it. It was from one of the HR personnel from his office and was a simple acknowledgement of the efforts he put into earning his daily bread selflessly (it wasn't that dramatic really). You can have a look at the two for yourself, since I strongly subscribe to the school that believes in pictures speaking louder than words (although that doesn't deter me from using lots of them on a daily basis !):




I insisted on playing the role of a proud wife that day, despite K's assuring me that everyone had received the same set of things from the HR, and some had received pink and even red flowers. I told him that I didn't care, I insisted on treating it as an individual triumph.

Talking of individualism, I wonder why Rituparno Ghosh took so long to come out of the closet. Everyone's known about his alternative sexuality for years and for heaven's sake, it's as personal a preference as one's favourite colours or beverage or restaurant. Freud, himself a doctor and therefore a man of solid common sense, opined :

"There is nothing shameful in homosexuality, it is not a vice or humiliation, it cannot be treated as a disease, we count it to be a variety of the sexual function…"

If the conservative Kolkata crowd can turn up in the most bizarre of costumes (the grotesque Ascot hats, for instance) at the Statesman vintage car show annually, then I really don't see why the former couldn't summon up courage earlier to dress the way he wanted to. It's his recent revamping that's causing the gossip and exchange of looks, not the actuality of the thing itself. For those who have absolutely no idea what on earth I'm referring to, here are a couple of illustrations (the first one's from the Star Screen Awards Red Carpet 2009 and the latter from today's TOI, featuring numerous celebrities who turned up to exercise their right to vote):

Having titled this post thus, I am a bit hesitant about introducing the topic of my recently been re-diagnosed with hypothyroidism, since I always protest against being bracketed with those hypochondriacs who treat diseases or illnesses as individual success stories, as if remaining perfectly fit were not more of a merit in the contemporary world. I've not been too traumatised by the blood test finds, since I've been battling with the separately small but cumulatively nightmarish symptoms of this medical condition since I was in class VI, approximately 15 years now. I had always been taking synthetic thyroxine (marketed as Eltroxin in India) to keep my metabolism as close to the clinically normal as possible. My grieving parents were informed by our family endocrinologist that it was a condition that usually operated in cycles, waxing and waning, but it almost never disappeared. However, although most people dismiss it as not being as critical or dangerous as say, typhoid or malaria or pneumonia, it's the slow sapping of the abilities that you take for granted on an everyday basis that makes it a more potentially draining and even daunting one. It would account for things that had recently assumed seriously intimidating proportions in my daily routine :

Depression

Memory lapses

Constant fatigue and drowsiness

Cloudy thinking

Puffy face

Intolerance to cold

Muscle aches and pains

Constipation of an extreme nature

Excessively dry skin

Weight gain and difficulty losing weight

Heavy menstrual cycles

That's quite a list, I'm sure you'd concede. Believe me, I'm glad to be back on medication. It's not easy to cope with such a variety of symptoms when you're only in your late twenties and have most of your life ahead of you. It's not a nice feeling when everyone around you dismisses you as a mere hypochondriac.

Respite

Ah.... at last, it seems, it rained. After much patient suffering and powercuts related sensationalism.



Well, but it seems the grass is always greener on the other side. Here it's been dripping incessantly right from Friday onwards and the miserable weather seems likely to persist till we're ready to scream with frustration. Which I already am.



And to add to it, I've not been well for some time. Abdominal cramps which began last Tue after I returned from a round of jogging and caused me to sit on the edge of the sofa with clenched mouth and contorted features, continued to haunt me with threats of a return for the next few days. Till I had to consult a local gastroenterologist on Fri noon. After noting all the related gynaecological complications, I was packed off to Somerset Medical Center for urine, blood and ultrasonography (involving some quite embarrassing invasion of anatomical privacy) procedures. Although each and every human being related to the medical technicalities was unexpectedly kind and reassuring, the very nature of the day, sullen and overcast, tortured me with vague premonitions of some unpleasant tale in the making. I'm not superstitious by nature, but as I remarked earlier, weather related changes influence me to a ridiculous extreme. The reports are due soon. I wonder.



We were watching X-Men 2 (X2) and 3 (X-Men : The Last Stand) back-to-back on FX Channel yesterday evening. It struck me as ominous that people like Bobby's parents and the President/Jean's parents should judge any aberration from the normal human condition as a disease needing some sort of cure, however drastic or painful the latter might be to the person in consideration. Or that Jean's id-like unconscious and violent passions, in the avatar of Phoenix, seek to be harnessed by Magneto for all the wrong reasons. It's most curious indeed how we all seem to have this predisposition to form cults/clans/groups/gangs against anything/anyone else that might threaten our individualism. As if ganging up itself was not a theoretic oxymoron with respect to the virtue of individualism and uniqueness. But I did find the use of the Freudian conscious = ego = Jean/unconscious = id = Phoenix symbolism intriguing. The portrayal of Jean as the life-giver towards the end of X-Men 2 in stark juxtaposition to Phoenix as the death-wreaker right at the beginning of X-Men 3 is compelling. Although it does remain a problem that all these moral implications somehow tend to get overwhelmed in the light of the visual kaleidoscope that is the film.



Amistad, watched on Friday night on DVD, however, stunned all our perceived notions of humaneness and nobility. The fact that Cinque actually has to fight for the basic human right of independence in a world where Declarations of Independence form such a mouthful in history, jars and jeers at our jaundiced desensitisation to the trauma that underlies the history of 'civilizations'. It was sobering, this rude realisation how we humans have knowingly and willingly contributed to the ghastly and shameful apparition of the subaltern. It is a testimony of incessant narcissistic human enterprises (instanced in the oft-dismissed diatribe of the 'Communist Manifesto') that we are too mired in academic technicalities to analyse with all the respect due to our collective conscience. We are too busy hoarding for our respective (a)moral futures in a world of globalisation to trace our tortuous way back to the lives we trample and tyrannise over in our effort to surface as the surviving elite. In short, we remain uncivilized primates, be it in our conspiracy to preserve class divides to serve our vested self-interests or in our blasphemous exploitation of God-given genes of complexion to further motivated neurotic (non)needs.



And all this for the ego ?! Which, as Lacan shows, is itself a human construct, the ultimate exercise in self-deception.



Mercy me.

Stomach and Parking Woes

I've had a bad scare yesterday. For the last two days, my stomach has been feeling hot and spicy after each meal, until things came to a bad pass yesterday afternoon when the condition began to cause me such discomfort that I interpreted it as gastric ulcer for sure and was forced to frantically call up my school-friend, Sharmistha, now in Flanders, ,and ask her advice. Medicines with the composition Ranitidine or Famotidine were what she suggested, besides the compulsory biscuits every hour. I was utterly perplexed (and highly annoyed by my lack of foresight) to find that we had no Omeprazole or Zinetac among the huge heap of medicines we had carried over from India. K was taken aback by a very evidently-scared-out-of-my-wits me bursting into tears over the phone and asking him to come home as soon as possible. Despite a steady shower, we left for the closest pharmacy (RiteAid, of course) immediately after he had had tea and an evening snack and hunted down the aforementioned medicine. Luckily it's an over-the-counter drug, so all we had for concern was the price tag. We chose the in-house RiteAid product with the exactly similar composition but a lower price tag. All the same, it came to about $6...if you convert that to rupees, you'll probably empathise with my mental state after that. The more I try to save money, the more I somehow end up wasting it in some way or the other.

We had a hard time parking the car. It was raining non-stop and there seemed to be more cars than usual along the kerb, so that there was hardly any space big enough for a newly trained driver to easily manoeuvre the car into a straight (and legal) position. We wasted a lot of time in one smaller spot before K had the good sense to surrender and move on to a much more larger slot. I had volunteered to get out and give directions to help park but I don't think I proved to be of much help after all. I made a sorry sight in a white hooded jacket, clutching two umbrellas (both open, for some strange reason), a crumpled white polythene carry-bag (in which to deposit the wet umbrellas and thereby protect the car) and a white paper packet containing the treasure of the moment (my medicines, silly). But it felt good to feel that I had a loving husband, who, even after a hard day's work, gave precedence to my miseries over his own. It is something most women dream of but few realise. I'm glad to be one of the blessed ones.

K was decent enough to cook dinner yesterday, one of his specials, the chilli mushroom-and-vegetables that he does occasionally. For the first time in my life, I made narkel laddoos and they turned out quite well. So good, in fact, that after a trial in the evening, K looked crestfallen at the sight of just one as dessert for dinner and demanded another. I can't describe the sense of achievement that I woke up to after that. It was a great feeling.

That reminds me, we noticed something strange at RiteAid. They've happily put Halloween miles behind them and have promptly and unceremoniously replaced all Halloween decorations and puppets with the same having Christmas as the new theme. People here must really be short of enough festivals to go around.

Mitu (my sibling) has a fashion show around the corner and has, as usual, assumed with impenetrable (outrageous) composure, that I am naturally going to edit her accompanying write-up for her. She called me up on GTalk to brief me on the theme and what she wants from me. Sigh, younger sisters !

P.S. I just discovered that the writing behind the Ranitidine tablet runs thus, "Dr Reddy's Laboratories Ltd, Bachepalli -502 325 INDIA".

Of all the */#%@* !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I feel wretched...

Ok, I'm back.And much better. But I did have an awful time while the influenza was making its slow and surreptitious invasion over my innermost anatomy. Sneezing,running nose,blocked nose, coughing, headache, eye pain....man, was there an end to it,you'll wonder... Oddly enough, I was at my lucid best in terms of writing power. A couple of observant friends did report that to me. But then, I always knew that I stood out in crowds because of all the wrong things.

The worst part of fever for me is that it leaves me alone with myself and those fears, guilt feelings and psychic debts I do otherwise manage to repress. Psychoanalytically, that's easy to explain. Your conscious self recedes to the background and the unconscious returns with a vengeance. Anyway,I'm not going to go into all those intricacies. For sooner or later, some purist will turn up and accuse me of having the audacity to dilute Lacan and prostituting him. I wouldn't like that to happen.

Let's come back to the point.I realised in these couple of days, that I've been too caught up with K to give the other people in my life the attention they do merit. Especially those who have always been there for me, without being assertive in any way whatsoever. Rashi, for instance. She deserves to see much more of me than I do spare time for her. And Tua, Shobhana, Sohini.....they don't complain....but that's because they're probably generous enough to forgive me repeatedly. Can't say for certain whether I would have done the same in their places. But all I know is that I feel wretched at the thought of this narcissistic streak I hadn't known to exist in me before. Just proves that you're as bad as other people, if not worse. All preaching, no practice.

What can I say, everyone? 'Forgive me' sounds too cliched. Just 'let me try again ' perhaps?

Spoken in delirium

Am down with fever. Hate it when I am sick and bed-ridden. My very instincts rebel. And to think it all started with a sore throat. Aggravated by an AC in office that is intended to condition the air for computers and not we poor human beings. We are actually instructed to bring shawls if we feel that cold. Man, what is the world coming to? I'm sure that we shall soon end up with a world a la I, Robot. Just replace 'robot' by 'computer'. How worse can things get?
Much worse, it seems. Himesh Reshammiya stars in a film where Mallika Sherawat is paired opposite him (not exactly, she appears to be the vamp). She dances to his songs. He is wanted by the police. The biggest tragedy of all - he actually emerges unscathed. I knew the police were no good.
Even worse things are happening.I want to go watch a new film this weekend, but there's nothing on offer that really appeals. I don't want to watch 'Jara Brishtite Bhijechhilo' or the tiring starcast of JBJ. Un logon ko dekhte hi mere sare jhumne ka shaukh gayeb ho jati hei. K suggests 'Shootout at Lokhandwala'. I cheer up. Lots of dhishum dhishum gives me a chance to behave suitably scared in a multiplex and cling on to whatever part of him is closest to me. I actually start feeling much better after gauging my future prospects.