Paranoia and other good things

'Hello, hello, hello, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye,
That's all there is. And the leaves that are green turned to brown'

(Paul Simon, in case you wondered). Nothing really got unblocked. This post is as difficult as the first.

Too many sweets at work today. Liquor filled chocolates, cake with cherry filling, a donut from Krispy Kreme (who refuses that!)..Well at least I refused the cookies. Christmas is good for my soul and bad for my everything else.

I don't know why this is difficult. This isn't my first blog ever after all. My previous stint at blogging was a couple of years in another blog site where apparently only kids with serious suicidal tendencies wrote. My rants about today's music and raves about Illayaraja went unheard amongst the 'I cut myself today and watched the blood slowly dripping down.' and 'I hate you. I hate me even more'. Jeez, are kids today really so depressed? Or is it just an effect thing? But if so many people are writing it, who do they intend to shock? Or maybe they feed off one another. And of course they all hate their parents, especially their mothers.

I guess I hated mine too about 15 years ago (wow, has it been so long?) for no reason really except that I could. She nagged me about my marks, about my appearance, about my friends, my TV watching and almost everything else under the sun. I had to finish school and move to college and to a hostel before I realized how much I loved her and her carrot poriyal. So maybe it is a fashionable thing to hate one's parents. People do grow out of it, don't they? I did (except during the couple of years they nagged for me to get married). I miss them. I even contemplate moving back to be closer to them. And that's the thing - All these years I've taken them for granted, ignoring them, running away from them to a different continent, doing pretty much exactly as I pleased. Now suddenly on the verge of having a family of my own and trying to plan for an uncertain future, I find myself thinking increasingly of their mortality; of their frailty. Everytime I go to India, it is always a shock to see how much more my parents have aged.

Don't get me wrong; my parents aren't old geezers in their 80s or something. They're in their late 50s..which is still pretty young. But their transition from being superparents who were always there to bail me out of financial or any other kind of trouble, to being human and having ever-increasing aches and pains and difficulties is hard to accept. I know.. I know...They were always human and that it is my perception that has changed. But, there is a reason for a shift in my perception - the physical evidence of their aging.

Enough morbidness for today. Someone said that to love is to be afraid. If no one said that, someone ought to have. I find myself always just a little fearful about the ones I love - the most recent addition to this list being my husband. I worry about them: Not in a huge overwhelming way, but in a constant everyday way that exists somewhere in the background of my mind. Is this normal or is this being paranoid? Who knows!

Sweet dreams.