The other day I was trying to record a video of myself talking and I wasn’t able to do it successfully. I’m unable to jump onto the talk-to-the-camera bandwagon but I try, and I fail. I wanted to talk about the new “cool-girl” phenomenon as I call it; about how we’re all expected to be cool girls (as described by Gillian Flynn in her novel Gone Girl) with the extrapolation that we are expected to disguise concern for present-day society with an apathy manufactured by the patriarchy & capitalism to keep pushing society down the proverbial drain.
Why care? This is how things work! What will you gain from outrage? You can’t change anything. So be chill, smile, accept what you don’t like and play into the system as it exists.
And on and on, it goes. This is a way of convincing people that change is not possible, and even if it is, why would you try to engender it given the mucky system you’ll have to wade through? Best be left alone.
On my phone, I have an unpolished version of a video in which I talk about this phenomenon, two photos of an Italian nonna’s Potato Gnocchi recipe handwritten in cursive that her (great?) grandchild uploaded to the Internet because they cannot read cursive, four cards I made in Canva that have prompts for my 4-week essay writing project, and a picture of Dostoevsky’s paragraph where he says that only cowards abandon themselves.
That I haven’t started this 4-week essay writing project is a separate matter, but it is something that I have been trying to work on. Meanwhile, I have been working very hard on my body by working out, eating well, doing a health check up, and using AI as a nutritionist up until the point where I realised that AI is just a sophisticated Web search, not an expert in any field. This was until last week when my trainer was fired from the gym, and, on an unrelated note, I was experiencing headaches and dizziness.
It is so hard to achieve balance in life, and I find it fascinating that we spend out whole lives trying. To use a lazy metaphor, it is like a being a juggler trying to keep all the knives in the air. A fall, snip, and you get cut. Of course, it’s not always this bloody. The one-dimensionality of social media has us convinced that we might be able to have it all in order, and perhaps, we could, but only for a brief moment. It is this social media that I am trying to shed; it exhausts me these days. One of the reasons I started, once again, writing long form because I was feeling bereft by my own shredded consciousness. I feel like so much of me is frittering away with these bite-sized snatches of time captured by bytes.
From time-to-time, my body physically rejects the screen with what its headaches and discomfort in my eyes. This makes it harder for me to be regular with writing here or writing back to my long-distance friends, some of whom are true pen pals. I want to connect with people, read interesting literature, experience music, and of course, partake in the memes, but I can’t keep up with the pace. Slowing down is the order of my life.
The past weeks have been dialled-down, if not languid; meandering if not scattered. I do miss the challenges my brain undertook and sometimes I feel jittery about not wrestling with a mental puzzle. When this happens, I try to read outside of my comfort zone, or cook something that I haven’t done before. Lately, I made a “healthy” laddoo, banana bread, beetroot chips, and a roasted red bell pepper dip. More often than not, my hands feel dry from all the dishwashing I do, and perhaps, I should use the almond oil TFB bought me to moisturise them.
It’s been easy-going, and I don’t mind it a single bit.
amarllyis 
Leave a Reply