Carpe diem

Things that amazed me in the recent past - a non-exhaustive sample: 1. The radial symmetry in a persimmon   2. The most underrated thing to fix your mood instantly - a walk. 3. The stronghold this song has on my mindset since childhood!  4. New level of 'sarsarle enno anukuntaam...' unlocked. 5. HOW IS THIS CUTE LITTLE PUP NOT FREEZING?! The art of noticing and cherishing little things is one of the best gifts you can give yourself.  And that's Day 10 for you!  

 Just came back from ICA after picking up some clementines and broccoli. I could not avoid the cookies section and damn, nostalgia hit me like a brick, ufff! No matter how fancy your chocolate chip cookie is, it can never beat Hide & Seek. I know it is a lot of sugar and fat and blah blah blah but I would defend Jim Jam all my life. Do not even get me started on Bourbon! And all the packages in the instant noodles aisle do not even come close to Maggi.  Usually I am not fussy about food (recently, I have been craving upma too) and love to try all the things that I can but today I was instantly transported back to a time when I was standing in Trinethra as a child and staring wide-eyed at the entire confectionery section. Can someone write to Cadbury asking them to revive the production of Bytes? If possible, Asha chocolates too. This is definitely a rabbit hole but I am glad I took this path. I still remember my mother packing a 'special' bag for all the years I went ...

That's a wrap. And that's Day 8 for you!

Day 7? Already? It might not seem like much to you, my reader, but this is a tiny milestone worth mentioning for me. Why? Because I am a monkey. Cannot sit still, cannot focus on one thing for long, my brain needs constant stimulation, get easily bored with things, have a hundred thoughts racing in my mind, I am no less than a little langoor jumping from one branch to another. As a certified non-stop yapper, when I am actually silent, my family immediately assumes that something went wrong. To me, consistency seems like rocket science and sticking to one thing feels like a punishment, honestly. Let us just say, I crave novelty every waking moment. (Could be ADHD too, we never got diagnosed) I never thought I would sit down and type this on Day 7 because, for starters, I had no plan for what to write, why to write and for whom do I write this? Slowly, I remembered my own words as an answer when someone asked me why I write - I am a selfish writer and I bleed only on paper. (Victim of hu...

Tired brain. Drooping eyes. Would you be interested in reading a poem I wrote sometime ago? Distance  Maybe it's not entirely about the distance between us. It's about me thinking of what you would be doing right at this moment. It's about me wishing that you could taste this sandwich I made. It's about me wanting to show you how beautiful the moon is tonight. It's about me waiting the whole day just for you to pick up the phone and call. It's about me planning to take you out to this café because I heard the coffee there is good. It's about me hoping someday soon we'll watch these beautiful sunsets together. It's about me praying that nothing erases that sweet smile on your face. It's about me longing to melt into your arms when I can no longer carry my burdens. It's about me wondering if you too feel all of this for me when I'm not there next you. Maybe it's not entirely about the distance between us, but a lot more about how closer...

For someone who has grown up avidly reading the food section in Eenadu Aadivaaram book, I just realised that I cannot write down recipes. I have reached a stage where I am eyeballing the spices to be added to the dish and guessing the stages of cooking through smell. Am I turning into my mother now? Maybe. I was planning writing down the recipe of baked sweet potatoes here tonight but I do not remember what I did while cooking them. It was just a random concoction of sweet potatoes, avocado oil, chilli flakes, salt, garlic powder, onion powder and amchur. Mix mix mix and baked for about 50 minutes at 200° C. Et voila! Even when my friends ask me for recipes this is exactly how I tell them. Explaining the process is a lot more easier than specifying than the measured portions of every ingredient. Is that normal or is it just me? Anyway the potatoes turned out nice and yum, and I am slowly getting closer to learning how to bake things. One dish at a time, baby! Maybe I will learn how to ...

Some days are about the skewness tilting towards the left and some others are about it tilting towards the right. Some days get predictable with a low kurtosis and some days are like riding the Valkyria at Liseberg, pure high kurtosis. C'est la vie, baby! C'est la vie. In a battle with the mind and heart where both compete for control over everything under the sun, there will be times when nothing makes sense. That, my friend, is the beauty of chaos - driving force behind the universe. What you initially thought were random doodles become aesthetic fractals, a simple choice of comfort meals becomes the base of microeconomics, a nerdy statistician builds a model to study the outer space or to mitigate the risk during pandemics. Do we understand it completely? No, there are always these unexplained factors jutting their way out. Can our limits of comprehension outwit the Pandora's box of unknowns? We do not know. But why even think about all of this and break my head over the...

And that's Day 3 for you!  

I planned an amazing surprise last night for my husband's birthday only to reveal it myself accidently before he got the chance to discover it. A quintessential 'thaalam vesithini, gollem marachithini' scenario. Sigh. But he didn't complain at all because hey, he got to joke about it all day long!  Today I took inspiration from Monika Gellar and cleaned up (half of) our apartment. Thank you husband (he made me type this, ugh!) We also got to know that going through IKEA website is an interesting activity for a couple and decided that a mandolin slicer is an absolute necessity. It is all fun and games until the man drops the word air fryer in every second sentence he speaks. Do we have space? No. Will he use it regularly? No. Then why the obsession? I do not know.  And also this happened. Cute no? An advice for today before I close this long, fun and eventful day - do no trust Elsamma. IYKYK. And that's Day 2 for you!

It is 7 am here and I can see the sky slowly brightening and the snow glistening. It has been almost 4 months since I moved out of India and unlocked a new level of adventure - figuring things out from the scratch in your 30s. S krämmande men intressant!  Today marks the first day of the Telugu month - Maargasiram, according to our lunar calendar, and it is one of my favourite times of the year. Back at home my mother would cook the kattu pongali with a proportion of ghee, cashews and black pepper that warms up the soul instantly. She would also croon, probably itti mudduladi baaludedavaadu, randomly throughout the day and that song eventually becomes an earworm with me catching myself humming it along with her. She would also play the Bapu and Ramana's version of Thiruppavai on YouTube. My father would go to the Mahalakshmi temple in West Marredpally early in the morning and return with another delicious version of the pongali. Maybe it is not much but these are the things I remem...