Unfiltered Thoughts on Filters

                             
Instead of using 25 filters will it not be easier to take care of yourself?! Take care of your skin, your body, your health, and above all take care of your mind. If you do that then you can actually look like the way you want to look even without a camera, even in reality. Obviously if one is set on his or her ways my words going to die at the threshold of their ears. Also one's family and friends can see the actual person constantly. Who are they trying to fool! The problem is I don't like anything that is fake. But when I'm taking photographs with people, the celebrated "groupie" they use filters, an unthinkable amount of it. Not only that, they are now clicking pics with the filters, through apps, so now you do not have to use filter after taking the pic, your photo would come out with a better version of you. In one of these groupies I saw that all of us were looking the same, same complexion, same straight hair, no blemish, no personal faults, no personal idiosyncrasies of our own skin, no individual way ours eyes wrinkle when we smile that makes us a "me". We were looking so much alike that it was on the verge of being creepy. 

Sometimes in photographs I look fat, okay most of the times, and sometimes I look very tired and aged, but I still feel like showing it to people because maybe the background is phenomenal, maybe the moment is beautiful, maybe my face looks beautiful but my belly looks like I'm 6 months pregnant. Sometimes what happens is my pic-partner is looking good or there is a never before seen love in his eyes or an eagle is flying just behind my ear with fully expanded wings but I simply look bloated. What to do in this scenario? I sometimes post the photo anyway, sometimes I don't. 

The problem with me is, when I would decide to be fake, I would be one like nobody is, it would be unbelievably new. It's a joke. But you get the idea, right! Did I tell you in that above mentioned groupie all of us were looking the same ? 

So fakism and copism or imitationism all are in the file of my file cabinet under the letter "D", titled "Disgusted".

So what does it mean? They think they did not come out of their mothers' womb beautiful, so they decide to come out of their smart phones beautiful, but definitely not smarter though. 

I do not want to think about it anymore, gave this silly subject more of my time than it deserves. I'm now going back to my Jo Nesbo thriller Redbreast where Ellen Gjelten just got killed, and of course some nice warm tea!

Shakespeare to Shakira

People love to categorize. Put everything in a box and then label it. It gives them peace of mind. Yes, we have figured it out. Hurray! Problem arises when one cannot find a category, a label for someone, something. There are some fixed idea about things that people do not like to toy with. But nature takes its own course and forms people's mind with all the possible unexpectedness.

If a person is good at studies, it is taken that he or she would be a very serious grave person. Same goes with intelligent people or intellectuals. A PhD scholar or a Maupassant-Maugham or a Rilke-Baudelaire or a Monet-Matis or a Bach-Beethoven or Camus-Kafka-Kundera or a Chopin-Puccini fanatic is not supposed to dance at the pub drunk listening to Bailando, less twerking to get your freak on. But he can. He does.

A doctor or a physics professor can be a religious person who never forgets to pray in front of his gods, and at the same time keeps an eye on the television because soon Skyfall is going to start. A Muslim could be a vegetarian. He could hate meat. And when everyone is eating supposedly forbidden meat wraps he could go for simple grill cheese sandwiches. He shyly requests his quite capable and over qualified but otherwise sickeningly lazy unambitious wife to get a job as people start to whisper that he being a Muslim is against the idea of women working. On the other hand it can also happen that a knowledgeable person with all his wisdom decides to a stay home and not do anything. 

Someone who loves to cook all the time starts to discuss for hours about Browning or Keats or Donne or Virginia Woolf people get shocked. And if then he starts to talk about the gory violent thrillers of John Sandford, Steig Larsson, Val McDermid people get shocked. If you know about Chaucer is it a rule that you cannot know how to make a fantabulous chutney! If you are a CEO of your company that means you cannot twerk like Miley Cyrus! (It seems twerking is becoming a recurrent motif of this piece of writing). A person who is talking ardently about Shakespeare, if he is seen talking about Shakira with same fervour people feel like they have been cheated. They give this look like they are saying "we are told and made to believe that you are gonna and only can talk about Shakespeare, and here you are also talking about Shakira, we have been conned to believe you are only this person, but no you are actually that person, too"!

There is no such thing as New Story. All stories are OLD!

There is no such thing as New Story. All stories are Old.

The Lipstick is better than the song

Fifth Harmony's "I'm worth it" is a fabulous awesome song, nobody can stop 'self from dancing to it. I love it. I show it to people and to people who don't even like these types frivolous light music videos, they were left open mouthed so wide that they almost drooled. Was that a sign of lust or a sign of fatigue for keeping their mouth open for a long time, who knows! There is something about the video, the colour scheme, the super confident sensuous movements, there is definitely something unique about it. 

But, I have a huge I mean HUGE problem with the song. See if somebody has to say "give it to me I'm worth it", isn't it sad? It is not like the L'Oreal ad where women are pampering themselves with good expensive things and saying to the world "I'm worth it!"  in that ad they are saying, I deserve this luxurious vibrant coloured lipstick, do not dare to judge me, "I'm worth it". I know these types songs are not meant for deep thinking, they are only for grooves and moves, but just that one line bothers me and I cannot shake off a feeling of unjust and humiliation. My advice is if you need to remind somebody you are worth it, so they would give you things you deserve, no matter what is the thing, leave that place immediately, go somewhere where you don't need to remind anybody anything. They know.

INTELLECTUAL THEFT in Greek, In English COPYCAT

Why I don’t like it when someone copies me? I guess nobody likes it. But why? I did some soul searching and realized that not only that I do not like it, I feel enraged. I feel so strong about it that once I stopped wearing my favourite sweater after seeing a stranger wearing it.  I thought there has to be some deep rooted reason for this. I delved deep into my psyche. And voila! Found it. Once I saw these movies, “Single White Female” and “Talented Mr. Ripley”. Anybody who has seen these movies will understand how, creepy it is, being copied. And it becomes creepier when the person who is copying you is otherwise friendly with you, close to you. You can’t even point this out to that person out of modesty and fear of causing harm to the relationship.

I love Christie’s Poirot and Ms. Marple. I told the story of “Nemesis” to someone, just four - five sentences. So after few days, I was hanging out with few people and one of them asked me which Agatha Christie book he should read first, I was about to answer, but before I could say anything, suddenly  that person jumped and grabbed the opportunity and said, you should read “Nemesis”, its good. That is the first time I came across the occurrence of the term irritating copycat. After that I started keeping a watchful eye on things I said and them being stolen and used as thieves’ own. Maybe it is harsh to use these words in this otherwise silly simple context but that is how much strongly I feel about this.  I will give some more examples to clarify my exasperation. I swear by midnight snacks. I don’t sleep before four, so I need some sort of food even after dinner. I made a bad habit of making sandwiches at night. I used to take two slices of bread, two slices of cheese, a poached egg, few slices of cucumber, tomato and onion and made this heavenly (and heavy) sandwich at night, time is very integral to make this sandwich, the main ingredients of this sandwich are insomnia and mid night. It has to be made after 1 o’clock at night and only by psychotic bibliophile insomniacs. Once I took few photos and showed them to some people, making fun of my gluttony. After few days I came across a photo of a sandwich, exactly like mine! Actually this is what bugs me, somebody is copying from a person and then taking all the credit, sometimes that copycat may have a better plate or a better camera, (who cares!) Similarly once I took a photo of a tea cup, my shades, my purse lying casually on a table. It was a spontaneous photo, and probably that’s why it came out so good, because spontaneous over-flow of any feelings is always good. I posted that photograph on facebook. After few months saw a friend posting something similar. But more ‘likes’ cannot make an idea or a spontaneous perception of someone else’s yours, right? This is very childish to put so much thought to something so teenageish and trivial. So if we change the sandwich to a short story, or a plot of a 500 paged novel? Will it be so trivial then? What to do when after a boyfriend gives his girl a stemmed rose or few lilies or a bunch of orchids on different occasion and at the end of the month a friend post a photo of entire flower shop on her dining table - with those same lilies, roses and orchids - ruining the aesthetic subtlety altogether? Should one feel sorry for the girl! Just a memory flash - remember that scene from “Mona Lisa Smile”, where Betty (Kirsten Dunst) will go on insulting her friend Giselle (Maggie Gyllenhal) for being a philandering, promiscuous on the verge of becoming a whore? But Giselle will not mind but rather hugs Betty because she knows the true reason of Betty’s unhappiness. Hmmm. So suppose one likes to have cross body bags, but stops carrying it like that for a while, in the meantime others start, so now if that person goes back to her old habit, others think she is copying. Nobody can clear the situation, because if you put these in words, they sound silly. What to do when someone copies your way of talking, your certain choices of words, your habit that makes you, you? So many times it happened to me when I expressed my views, shared them with people, and later found out those people xeroxing my said words on those given topics to a hoard of listeners. And the painful shocking part is they pretend they come up with all those opinions on their own. They do not say, “I heard my friend saying this, and I totally agree with her”. Watching an advertisement, I told someone “see this is an intelligent ad”, few days later I heard her pointing out the ad and saying, “see, this is an intelligent ad”, and I am right there, man! Can’t you see me, you moron! Again it sounds silly when put it like this, but now imagine instead of a line, a habit, a way of your talking, it was your new scientific invention for which you have applied for a patent and someone else take your research papers and publish them and get a patent and the praise? Make a cup of tea, and think! 

Please be bothered with a P.S. - I do not stop wearing my favorite sweater anymore. No point in depriving yourself of a good thing. Hold your ground, always.

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"Practical Magic" to make Practical Life Magical

I love magic. No, stage magic or magic shows dose not interest me. I love real magic, actual miraculous magic. There is always a visual side to magic. One must watch it in front of her happening and only then she could fathom the unreality of magical incident actually happening before her eyes. One can always read about magical happenings, but magic is in actuality goes with the phrase “to see is to believe”. And I believe in magic.

First magic in everyday banal life I saw happening was in “Matilda”. It just fascinated me, that ability to move stuff from a distance.  Here I should mention it beforehand that “Poltergeist” will not make it here today. The magic I am talking about here is in the sense it only brings pure joy, love and hope that anything is possible and the world is a beautiful place and you will be happy. So after “Matilda” and my pre-teen years, I saw “Practical Magic”. I was dumbfounded by hope and happiness. The movie has everything that can go right with a magic movie. It is about a witch family in a small town. Two little girls are raised by their aunts who are all witches. The two sisters are very close. They have magical powers. They will grow up to be Sally played by Sandra Bullock and Gillian played by Nicole Kidman. Gillian was always a bit of a rebel and she would go away but Sally will stay and fall in love with a guy and get married, hence one of my favorite song by Faith Hill, “This kiss, this kiss, this impossible kiss”. But there is a twist; there was a curse on this witch family cast by one of their ancestors. The curse was if a woman from this family ever loves a man, he would die. So after few years of happy marital bliss, Sally’s husband would die, being true to the curse. Here just when her husband was about to die, Sally would hear a deathwatch beetle making an ominous sound suggesting the death approaching. Sally would move back to her aunts with her two daughters. She decides her daughters would never practice magic. What happens then? Will Sally find love again? What will happen to rebel Gillian? Will the curse be broken? One can watch the movie to find these out. But I will watch it for its dreamy soft poetic magic. There are two particulars scenes that I like the most, when those white rose petals will fly into the moon from Sally’s diary, and how Sally’s spoon goes on stirring itself in the cup. I used to spin my spoon in the cup rapidly and suddenly leave it to see it stirring on its own. Oh, how desperately I needed and still need some magical powers. And that is why I like superhero movies, Avengers, Craft (this movie belongs to the same time period, I think. So now when I see Robin Tunny in The Mentalist, I feel nostalgic. It is the same with Aidan Quinn when I see him in Elementary, because I know him from Practical Magic), X-Men, my Wolverine (I love him), Harry Potter, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, seriously I am asking where to find them? Tell me, because if they exist, then magic has to exist, right?

The Girl with Subtle Revenges and No Tattoos

Why I like revenge thrillers! Why does anybody like revenge stories? It is very simple actually. It gives readers a sense of achievement, a contentment. There is also that justice being done angle. When a person decides to avenge the wrong doing that has been done to him, it automatically creates a goal for him, right? So when the goal is achieved everybody is happy. And that is why we watch movies, read books. We become one with the characters and start to live his or her life, his or her happiness becomes ours, his or her sorrows make us cry as our own. A fictional character’s revenge becomes my revenge. If anyone asks me what part of taking revenge I like the best, I would say the very process of taking revenge.  The careful planning. And that is why I like Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander. This girl with all her tattoos and piercings is like an inspiration. Lisbeth was deprived from any normalcy since her childhood, and she had this gift, this talent that nobody understood, so nobody helped her when she could have done some good with it. Then after such ordeal that was her teen life, finally in her early twenties she managed to have some sort of respite, a system, something nearing to a normal life but again it was shattered by an incident. She got raped and brutally tortured. After the incident what does she do? She could not go to the police, she hated authority probably more than she hated her rapist, so you would expect her to at least cry her hearts out, and blame her fate maybe? Nope, after leaving her rapist’s house she bought painkillers, antibiotics. She went back to her place, took a hot shower, had few pain killers, antibiotics, and sleeping pills and slept. After sleeping for hours, she woke up and had some food. She knew that to take revenge she would need her strength back, the strength that had been taken away. But thankfully it was her physical strength that was harmed; her mind had the strength of an iron column. So she then plotted her revenge with an ice cool head. She considers pros and cons and hatched her plan to set the score right.

Yes, I like the “planning” part of taking revenge. All those minute details of a revenge plan attract me. The very process is enticing. I like planning, but do not worry I do not need to plan to avenge anything so big. Just the very idea of planning something makes me happy; in my case sadly it is almost always a get-together or a movie plan. Is it because nothing brutal ever happened to me like Lisbeth? Maybe. But things have happened to me too, silly little things. I think everybody has something no matter how small, that itch them to tread on the path of revenge. I also plan to take revenge, but luckily I think I can do that just by going on writing. I don’t need a sword, I have my pen, oh no, wait a minute( oh my god, what do I do, how do I turn this around!!) I meant to say my keyboard. I will not shed any blood, I will write my revenge in ink, (oh god, not again) I meant to say on Microsoft word! (What is happening? Is technology actually literary killing poetry of words?) Yes, after writing these few lines I am set on my goals to take revenge more than ever. I tell everybody “I am not a forgetting forgiving kind of girl”, I tell people “when I am good I am good, when I am bad I am better” (remember Demi Moore from Charlie’s Angel?). Obviously those statements are made for empty vacuous dramatic effect and let’s admit we all love creating melodrama around our life, after all we all love the idea of being the main protagonist of a novel. The women in my family especially my maternal side thrives on melodrama. So I am also no exception. But I need to start taking my revenges that are overdue for a long long time.  But first I need a good cup of tea.

Post Scriptum: I wrote the above lines few weeks ago, and just today I heard somebody saying “an unforgiving person gets wrinkles early”. Just now I forgave everybody!

There Are Two Types of Men Regarding PMS

There are two types of men regarding PMS, yes, yes, “men”! There is so much awareness about PMS now. Everybody knows what it is. It is a phase women go through before their menstruation. Hormones go gaga, create havoc in women’s body and mind. Symptoms of PMS are bloating or puffiness, severe mood swings, sudden breakout of acne on a very specific area of one’s face like chin, or forehead. In simple words women feel shit. They become excessively sentimental, teensy weensy things make them cry, they become very sensitive, I mean more than usual. Things that they usually overlook suddenly becomes absolutely unavoidable, mistakes they normally forgive become an offence only to be squared with capital punishment like hanging somebody at town square on the scaffold, and obviously this time a man would be wearing the “scarlet letter”. The anger, the irritability, the wrath, the scorn of a woman during PMS is most of the times aimed at men (not always, please note!), and caused by imbalance of hormones such as Estrogen, Progesterone, FSH (Follicle stimulating Hormone), LH (Luteinizing Hormone) and men. It is not like men become extra insensitive, non-thoughtful, unrefined when women are PMSing, they remain the same, it is just that women become more sensitive, more irritable and less patient than usual.

Now coming to the heading, yes there are two types of men regarding PMS - one, those who acknowledge a woman is PMSing, and that is why she is acting or rather behaving and reacting in a certain way, two, those who thinks the woman is being angry and nasty just for the sake of it and trying to cover up the certain behaviour as PMSing. I have nothing to say to the former ones, they are certainly fine examples of evolved human species (a rare, rare species), they understand science and women and to be more elaborate, women’s body and mind. They have accepted the fact that they make mistakes, and though throughout the month their mistakes are going to be pardoned or overlooked, during PMS, there will be severe reckoning. And they are okay with that, they prepare the hot water bags, microwave bean bags, keep the painkillers, juice, water on her bedside table, keep their hands ready on call for back massages, take her to long drives at 2 a.m. if her majesty whims so! Now the latter ones, I do not want to talk about them. Hey! my ears are hot, my hands and feet are cold and moist, my lower back and legs feel heavy and numb, I feel this blunt pain in my tummy (not heart, at least this time), I can actually feel blood rising to my brain, am I PMSing or just angry?

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Zara or Zara Men's That Is the Question

We have a shopaholic friend whose sole interest in life are coitus (all hail Dr. Sheldon Cooper for making it a household jargon), opposite homo erectus, her lingerie omnibus, makeup & brush, being slutty with a correct amount of virgin blush and having her name among the fashionistas. Yeah she lives and breaths cloths. So few days ago our herd was grazing about in our favourite pastureland, a shopping mall, obviously, and one of us announced to the rest of the fashionistas that that aforementioned friend is pregnant, no she was not there. And look at the fate, that time we were just crossing Zara. I had this brainwave and uttered something the way someone in the Genesis did, "Let there be light" or maybe like a high priestess from the Delphi, "She should name her child ZARA", everybody nodded, then one asked anxiously, "If its a boy, then?" I said like a calm cool Himalayan saint who was just happened to be in h&m cloths with chocolate sauce of her dunkin donuts dripping from her mouth corner, "Then she should name him ZARA MEN'S"!

A Tribute to OCD and Not 59

Hercule Poirot likes things in a certain way, he prefers square things, even his toasts, I mean each and every piece of bread and also his eggs have to be of same size, eggs!! Can you believe it! He is a firm believer of formal attire, and he sticks to that even when he is going to a rough country walk or to the desert. He even once told Hastings to part his hair in the middle. His love for symmetry is unthinkably praiseworthy; to be precise like that needs real passion for nuances. Now if we start talking about his moustache and its very particular up keeping then may I well need to start an epic. So let’s drop that matter now.

Another detective like Poirot is off course Adrian Monk. He likes thing square, he counts his steps, likes things to be arranged from 1 to 10, not 5 after 8. When there is three flowers in three separate vases, and one of them is shorter than the other two, he cannot decide whether to put the shorter one in the middle or to put it after bigger ones in a descending order. He is a sever germophobe, he puts his used napkins when he has flue in a zip-lock bag, and then put it in another zip-lock bag, and then put all those zip-lock bags in a big zip-lock bag.

Now comes Jack Nicholson in “As Good As It Gets”. Here in this movie his character again counts steps, brings his own forks to his regular restaurant where he likes to be served only by this particular waitress, Helen Hunt. He uses soaps just one time, and then for second wash at that same time uses another new soap and then throw them away.

Monica from f.r.i.e.n.d.s. this maternal friend of Joey, Chandler, Rachel, Ross, Phoebe is an OCDian on the verge of being irritating but even then you cannot stop loving her. Every furniture in her room has their specific place. The border of the carpet should be aligned with the couch; the phone pen should be in its correct allotted place. Hundreds of freeze magnets are there and if one is moved, she will know, yes, she will know as she herself allotted their places. Today let’s not go into the details of her being a control freak, I am not writing a novel here. Someday, someday!

Everybody has their own set of problems. But the problem is now every problem has a name, not only that, a scientific name. A person likes things in a certain way, if it is not in that particular way, it bothers her. Now this way of a person is called OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, in plain colloquial language “creature of habit”, one can also call it loyalty, let’s call it loyalty, who’s stopping me! In this way you will know that if an OCDian commits to something, there is a chance he or she will not waver. Now how much one loses her sanity, temper, and calmness when her habits are disrupted, to what intensity, that is the question. Sometimes they become irritating and sometimes scary. Most of the OCDians are clean freak. I am not so clean freak, but I like things in a certain way (obviously!) that would probably seem very trivial or silly to others. And when they are not in that certain way, irritation, anger and weirdness hit me. Okay, so here it goes, I do not like any number that ends with 9, for example, 19, 29, 39, 49, 59 and so on. I know the reason for this, see, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 give a sense of completeness, there is no undone thing, it so proper, neat. But when I face the number 19, I feel like why not go a little bit more and close with 20! Why leave something on 19, when 20, a good round neat proper number is right there! I specifically have some serious issues with 59. The logic is just few numbers ago I came across 50, so neat, an exact half of 100, everything is so proper, clean, clear-cut. And then we go 9 more and stops at 59! WHY?? Then the whole beautiful journey from 1 to 50 just goes astray. I like the number 69, it has its own symmetry, the yin yang and its fun. I do not have that much problem with 9, I do not know why, maybe because in itself it stands for something, like holy trinity, maybe because it is a set of 3! But if something being counted from 1 and abruptly stops at 9, yeah, then it will bug me.

If somebody is giving me a foot massage, and tugging my toes, I would like my left foot, toes to be tugged in the same order as my right foot toes, preferably starting with the big toe.

So bed sheets, if it has flowers on it, I would like those printed flowers toward the head of the bed, stems or leaves toward the foot. Why are you frowning? It is the only normal thing to do. Oh, you don’t think it’s normal? Okay, but I have Harold Pinter on my side, who asked the most apt question, “Normal? What’s normal?” Now let's brew a cup of tea and ponder over the absurdity of existence!