Eye Love

(I look cockeyed!)
My eyes are different and I mean different. My left eye has a fold and my right eye has no fold - it’s like a little slit on my full face. Yes, I am fully aware of cosmetic procedures and sticking thin strips of cello-tape over the eyelids to create the fold, but I choose not to make my face more symmetrical. Other than having a bit of a problem while putting eyeliner, my eyes are wonderful.

During college days, my eyes were a dead giveaway when I was sleep-deprived while studying for exams. That’s because my folded eye would become wider and the other eye would become narrower. It made me look funny and this would crack up my friends and I – a great stress buster.

They are also a conversation starter. If there is ever a situation where there is an uncomfortable silence hanging over us, all I need to day is, “Did you know that I have two different eyes? One has a fold and one doesn’t. Look”. And voila, people are suddenly scrutinizing them, talking about them and talking to each other.

Plus, they make people less conscious about their problem areas. They feel a bit more relieved knowing that their features are not so weird. It makes them more grateful that one of their legs are not shorter than the other or that at least they can lose weight whereas I have to live with this oddity. It’s amazing for self-esteem.

But what I love most about my eyes is that they are from my parents. My mom’s eyes have folds and my dad’s eyes are like my right eye – no folds. I wouldn’t change anything about my wonderful, odd eyes!

p.s. It’s totally ok to use my eyes as a conversation starter the next time you find yourself in a huge group in need of some talk.

Beyond J-pop and K-pop

After listening to the obvious and commercially marketed music of Korea and Japan (and getting tired of them), I kept youtubing and googling. And, boy, did I find some really good bands - Sleepy.ab (Japanese) , Peterpan Complex (Korean) and Nell (Korean). The former two totally have a Radiohead influence in their music and they do it well. My favourite is Nell, a South Korean indie band. I can't stop listening to 'Good Night'. Do listen to them and if you have any new music, please share them with me.

Haha Haha

Last month I was totally in love with U-Know of DBSK (a Korean boy band) after I saw him dance in Mirotic (it's one of their music videos). That's when my obsession with K-pop and J-pop started. So, I would google and youtube anything K-J-pop. I personally don't find bishounen hot other than in mangas (Natsume and Zero - I will save them for another day). They are too effeminate for me but U-known dances so F-I-N-E. So, that is when I came across this video. It has U-know (duh) and Mickey (DBSK) and I find it really kwi-yeo-un/kawaii!

p.s. U-know is the guy on the left.

It's Japanese

Heart Beirut

This is one of my favourite songs at the moment. Beirut is awesome.

Thank You

There are very few people, especially men, who have no ulterior motives but are honest, honourable incredible beings. And I have been very fortunate to have known such a person.

At first I didn’t understand him. His ways were strange. I don’t mean in a creepy way. In fact, he was one of the most charismatic people you would ever know. Everyone loved him. He was funny, thoughtful, confident, caring, intelligent, honest…He was the kind of guy who everyone thought was his or her best friend. He still is all of that.

But what I did not get was the way he treated women. And I will tell you why I found it strange. That’s because he did things that are so hard to find in men now days. The kind of things that men all over the world should be doing. He did things that we don’t ever think about. The kind of things that would humanize our differences rather estrange us.

The things he did for me unnerved me in the beginning. What I did not understand irritated me a lot. I could not accept his magnanimous gestures. I wasn’t used to a guy who was actually concerned about me. Don’t get me wrong. I have a great life filled with people who love and respect me but as a woman, having to fight for so many things in life, it wasn’t easy to let someone take control of certain things. He did the kind of things that even the most hard-core feminists would love to have a man do for her but would never admit to it.

(Just because we fight for equal rights and so on doesn’t mean we hate men. We just have a lot of fights to fight and along the way we have somehow become defensive. We don’t want to be vulnerable but we are. And that’s the hard part to accept. So, when a guy really respects you and cares for you, you can’t help but be suspicious to a certain degree.)

As time went by, what I thought were old-fashioned notions became truths. I saw them in his actions. But the sad part is that I did not really appreciate all this until much later. So, I want to thank him for everything he did for me. Thank you.

Danger Smiles

On This Week's Reject List

My week in a picture (notice the shitty, yellow dot of hope)

The one who is on top of this list would have to be...me. Nothing seems to be going right for me. At work, all my ideas are getting bombed. It's like the bombing of Nagasaki, except this time it's Naga-sucky (I can't believe that I just made that very lame joke but I am absolutely mindfucked at the moment so I can away with it). Then I never seem to get an auto. For some reason, the first fifteen autos that I manage to halt down never want to go where I need to go. The sixteenth auto-wala reeks of alcohol and the seventeenth auto-wala will overcharge me by 52% but by then I am too tired to argue. By now I am totally exhausted and you think that sleep would come to me easily but that too evades me. And plus there are some other things that are kinda too personal to put it out there. But then life is not always unfair because it gives everyone an unequal amount of shitty deals. That's the only thing that is democratic about life being unfair. So, this is for the person who will topple me from the top of this list: Don't lose hope because someone else is unknowingly waiting in line to go through this. It's NOT you. It's just life.