Popagandhi

There are good days, days on which I’m funny and wonderfully driven. Focused and assured. Days when I know my place in life and life knows its place around me. Days where I could leave school, if it pissed me off enough, make a few phone calls and have jobs and apartments in three different cities and continents. Even without having to try, everything I did could inspire the young and make older people jealous. Men and women would trip getting to me, while I steadfastly sit Buddha-like on my lotus pad, uninterested, while making fantastic career chops and other assorted suave moves that betray my age and youth. Then you realize our cliches hold many clues ââ�¬â�� we don’t all get that much, and we don’t all get away. Why do you think there’re so many ways to say, “God is fair”, to articulate the dreadful “pride before the fall”, “calm before the storm” rubbish?

Then on other days I find myself in a class I really couldn’t care about, in an institution that makes me understand my place as a perennial underachiever who’s there because she missed the deadlines for those schools she thinks she should be in, so now suffers endlessly amongst people who drive her nuts with their small-minded myopia, so she thinks going from one party to another with no sleep in between might hold the cure.

Then there’re the GSR four point fours in which you find unsettling familiarity fighting with ex-girlfriends, except that this time there’s no going back in the first place so what’s the point fighting anyway? When making up means you’ll say hi and smile in the corridors?

Then there are the deadlines. And then there are the deadlines. And then there are the avalanches that is neverending work now that your collaborator has made it in the big league and even over here you feel the crunch from New York City agencies. And then there are the deadlines, and then there is career. And then there is the travesty that maybe, just maybe, a bloody term paper now appears as important, in your head, as a chances for a piece in the New York Times.

Then there are the parties, and the music that say what I don’t want to hear. I’m sick of love songs, so tired of tears. And then there are the calculated toppling-into-someone-else’s-arms moments I can’t say I don’t enjoy.

Then there are the solitary cab rides home after, because I still won’t stay over if I’m not in love, when all taxis play at five in the morning are songs about sadness and loss, songs about us. Songs about how we could have been good together, but I quote, you tore it apart. The songs in cabs in the mornings are all crap, and I want my life back.

Then there are days and weeks when you tire of being a sensible adult, and nights you remember how it was being reckless, young, and free. Mornings when you discover you still like every moment of it, years after you thought you left it behind. Maybe a leopard never changes its spots.