Portrait

death is always saddening, for those of us that get left behind.

i remember all too well what it’s like to lose someone incredibly close to you. i also remember standing at my aunt’s funeral, looking at my cousins, and thinking to myself ‘that will be me someday’ and wanting to just cease existing, just so i would never have to live to see my parents die.

losing my mother is my absoloute worst nightmare. i selfishly imagine her always being there, never having to get through life without her. never having to cope with the turmoil of my day to day existence without her irrepressible faith, courage and wisdom.

i never knew nihal de silva, not apart from his writing, but i know his nieces and nephew, and i even sort of know his sons. i’ve hung out with them a few times, we have some friends in common, and they were always really nice and very interesting.

i tried to call nihal de silva’s niece and my good, good friend R when i heard, but i hung up almost immediately because i remember how mad i was at everyone that called me during my aunt’s funeral. although i tried hard to keep in mind that everyone only had the best intentions, it was difficult to refrain from being pissed off at the tactless inquiries and insensitive questions. i went to the funeral yesterday, mostly because i wanted to be there for R and her sister, and i stratiegically avoided speaking to either of his sons, simply because i didn’t know what to say. i remember all too well how awkward and irritating it was to stand there and be kissed by hundreds of people after my aunt’s funeral, stuttering to make conversation that would seem normal, and me, trying to figure out a response to ‘i’m so sorry for your loss’ by people who had no idea how sorry to be.

indi has a great post on this. i think we are all fairly sick of having to live in troubled times, but it always hurts more when the ones we love become the ones we’re left to mourn.

indi likes to call our friend vraie ‘the truth’. he claims this is what ‘vraie’ means. i must confess, i’ve never actually asked her if he’s right, but i can tell you this. ‘the truth’ is a fairly appropriate thing to call her ; she speaks the stuff often. vraie can be found at barefoot when she’s not working her ass off or living it up with her decadent lifestyle. when you’re trying to spot her, remember this : she’s the one with the hip clothes and the great attitude…and this is what she said.

‘if there’s one truth about being human, it’s that our heart and our head don’t work in sync. love isn’t something you can rationalize. truth is, love shouldn’t be rational. it should make no sense. it should be crazy. intense. insane. but don’t be fooled, it will come to an end. and when it does, we need to remember that there’s another truth in life ; that the world isn’t going to wait for us to pick ourselves up. our lives are about to get very complicated. accept it. and you’ll start living.’

a bladdy australian, a pretentious chain-smoker, a tattooed wannabe writer and a psychologically disturbed artist at barefoot. photo by deshan, who personally hates it. i like it.

when deshan took this picture at barefoot, he asked us to look ‘disreputable’. i’d like to think we don’t look in the least disreputable (here), which is embarrassing. you’d think we wouldn’t even have to try.

youth is glorious and, i’m sure i’ve said this before, utterly insane. it’s your tailor made chance to make mistakes, discover your hidden talents, perform all/any illicit activity without a nagging conscience, make the best friends, and to have multiple shots at trying to figure out what you want from yourself and from life in the future.

nothing is meant to be clear or certain, and nothing is. everything is blurry and great and confusing and irresistably fun. you move from one interest to another, one phase to the next, one hobby to the other, everything is constantly changing and you try your best to hang on and make as much as sense of it as you possibly can. you, your opinions, your morals, your values change from year to year, month to month, day to day even, as you learn things anew and find out things about yourself and the world that you didn’t know were real.

this said, youth doesn’t come without it’s own set of responsiblities and pressures. there are exams to be gotten through, pressing questions about your ambition to be answered, an entire future to be planned, step by step. there’s a whole bunch of adults to please, a whole bunch of peers to outdo and a self esteem that is so arrogant it’s disturbing. everyone expects something from you, people you know, people you don’t know, people you love, people you hate, but all the same you struggle helplessly to live up to as many expectations as is humanly possible. there’s criticism when you go wrong (’so young, too!’) and applause when you do something right (’so young, too!).

my mother says being young is about loud music, a lot of sneaking around, a couple of secrets, constant sunday morning hangovers and unpredictable mood swings. of course, she and i both know that it is somehow much, much more, and nothing all that glamorous at the same time. it’s horribly complicated and stupidly simple all at once, making it almost impossible to prognosticate where your next fuck-up is coming from. being young is about learning to accept the sheer unpredictability of life and the impermanency of everything that’s supposedly solid. it’s about living for the moment, not necessarily because you want to, but because there really isn’t any other option. it’s about living and learning, every achievement, every loss is a lesson waiting to be embraced. it’s about living life like it’s meant to be lived ; with faith and zest and grit, qualities that age and it’s little wisdoms and sensibilities seem to dilute with adulthood.

oh, youth. the foundation of my existence, the manifestation of my dreams and nightmares. help me get through this one.

sometimes i am deeply saddened by the world : the lies, the hypocrisy, the violence, and above it all, an insanely corrupt beaureucracy that likes to keep the people ignorant and oppressed. i continue to live my happpy life in my secure bubble as the world around me erupts in dishonesty and power-play. money is power and power is everything. i want to change the world, but i don’t know how. i’m angry at what little initiative people take to make the difference they keep talking about, but at the same time i understand why we lack this motivation : we are either indifferent or scared. on one hand, we are numb to the decadence and we don’t care so long as we’ve got secure, cushy lives. on the other, we are afraid of being ’silenced’, shot down, of being called eccentric and being ridiculed, or worse, killed for speaking out and daring to expose the flaws of those in authority and their methods of ruling. i wish we could amass our creativity, our dreams, our aspirations all together and campaign productively for a world that’s more accommodating of differences. i wish we would be more sure of ourselves and our values, so we don’t have to be scared and threatened and therefore hateful towards other people. i wish the lies would stop : lying to our people, our children, our friends, our enemies, ourselves.

asvajit told me about forkscrew, where the above image is from. the series of posters that draw their likeness from the advertisements for the international phenomenon that is the iPOD, are eye-catching immediately because of their startling familiarity and then because of their brutal honesty. the figures in silhouette are a little morbid and a little scary, while the numbers at the bottom coupled together with the little iPOD look-alike iRAQ is striking and in its entirety is extremely powerful. it makes everyone uncomfortable, and thoughtful, to see the dancing shapes in silhouette against the colourful bakcgrounds replaced by those of men wielding guns, people in suffering. this is such an intelligent way of using the image of something our generation is intimately associated with, the iPOD, to get a political message conveyed to the masses.

here’s what they had to say :

Here lies…

There lies…

Everywhere lies.

In the face of so much miserable, screeching, smirking, self-satisfied falseness, there is nothing to do but refuse to believe.

We refuse to believe a government of half the people is a government of all the people.

We refuse to believe that dividing people in the name of religious ideals is the proper fulfillment of the divine in ourselves.

We refuse to believe that a country founded to be an experiment in diversity should become an historic monument to intolerance and isolationism.

We refuse to believe in the idea of a “war” on “terror.”

We refuse to believe in this particular convulsion/perversion of America.

We refuse to believe leaving is the only answer.

And we refuse to believe staying means keeping quiet.

Find your own way to fight back without violence, to speak your mind without letting your anger twist your truth, to keep listening to what you don’t agree with for the little voice of life that even the most foul and fearful intentions can’t silence.

Find your own way to keep pushing your truth every day a little farther into the light of the unfolding world.

This is ours.

trace, beautiful and happy, as always.

once upon a time, when i threw the name ‘tracy’ into a sentence, everyone knew there was only one tracy in the world for me. no one had to ask ‘which tracy is this again?’. no one had to say ‘what’s this tracy’s last name?’. everyone knew. trace is my soul sister, my best friend. she looks like she belongs on a ramp, she acts like she’s 12, gives advice like an omniscent, and parties like a true animal. some of the best memories i have of my life over about the last 6 or 7 years are of the times trace and i have spent together : dancing, talking, eating. we’ve stuck through bad (like the time we went to watch ‘up in lights’, a musical produced by visaka vidyalaya, at which the two of us sat and held on to each other so tight, stunned into a silence even devoid of snide remarks and bitchy comments, it was that bad) and good (like that time we were going somewhere, and we were walking past wafflers and we knew we just had to go in and have a waffle drowned in chocolate fudge). we’ve stuck through tough (all the break-ups, the make-ups, the finding out shocking truths about your significant other at 3 am in the morning, and having entire conversations in whispers over the phone trying to calm each other down) and fun (like that time we all went to h20 and trace and i almost completely ignored everyone else while we danced till we couldn’t anymore). everyone around us has gotten used to ‘us’, no one ever says our names independently of the other, and if i’m somewhere without her, i am bound to get asked ‘where’s trace?’, we get invited to things together and when she’s here, we almost never do anything without the other. i’m expected to know how she is and what she’s doing and the exact date and time of her flights here and back. it’s like being married, and even better because, at the risk of sounding over sentimental, she’s perfect.

tracy, at home on a leisurely sunday afternoon.

there came a time then, that this other amazing woman came to be a part of my life. and her name, you ask? lo and behold, it is tracy. i love her, and admire her and have found big respect for her and everything she does. she is just one of those people you know you can trust, the kind of person who will never make you feel intimidated or uncomfortable, no matter how little you know her. and when you really get down to it, she’s always full of life and great ideas. she has this addictive laid-back attitude towards life and all it’s idiosyncracies. she’s got passion and zest and energy, and charisma to go with all of that. whether you’ve seen her being a nail-biting wreck of a director on the opening night of ‘fefu and her friends’, behind the majestic lights board looking hot and bothered and yet so pretty last weekend at barefoot during ‘looking thru my earphones’, onstage for jehan aloysius’ ‘the ritual’ giving a jaw-dropping performance, or leading the ladies’ college students into a clean victory at the annual all island inter school shakespeare drama competition last year, she’s the kind of person you want to know. she can easily bring out the very best of any cast she’s working with, and demandingly, yet sensitively, veers any production she touches into absoloute success. she teaches with knowledge that outdoes almost every other teacher i’ve encountered, an enthusiasm that’s contagious and a sort of patience that relaxes yet drives everyone. she’s got two fantastic (and fantastically cute) children, around whom she looks simultaneously irritated and happy. she’s by far the nicest thing that my advanced level exam brought about to my life.

here’s to the tracys (or traci, as some would say) in my life. here’s to all the marvellous ways in which they have changed my life, and all the ways in which they will continue to do so.

….then so can happiness.

i refuse to be swayed.

this is what i want.

a little uncertainty. a little chaos.

a little mystery.

a little courage to take a little risk.

something that resembles a break-up, a death in the family, a post that made me cry.

yet, there are strawberries at the galadari, and friends to meet for lunch.

there is still family that sits in the next room, waiting to love me.

there is still a little hope, for a little change, a little happiness.

and there will always be misery,

great, racking misery that moves me from the inside.

yet hand in hand, there will be unstinted joy,

moments of sheer delirium or of quiet contentment,

of wholesome comfort or of ecstatic momentum.

it’s all there.

waiting to be discovered.

waiting to be felt.

let’s just go back to the start

someone (who has all the liberty in the world to judge me mind you, only because she knows me incredibly, almost unnervingly, well) once told me ‘your profundity is strangling you’. at that point in time, we laughed at this heartily, but sometimes i worry that this is true.

i love sounding profound. most of the time, i admit i’m full of shit. but i’m one of those idealists that love a nicely worded sentence that makes people go ‘gosh, that makes so much sense’. i love being moved by ideals, i loved being touched by revelations, i love believing that people can be changed by profundity. i love(d) v for vendetta and i love putting faith in my conviction that people can change the world.

i try to keep life simple, and as much as i love thinking ‘i know everything. i know who i am. i know what i want’, i am realizing more and more and that i know so little. i don’t know everything, i barely know anything. i don’t know who i am, sometimes i don’t even know if i’m straight or not. and i sure as hell don’t know what i want, i never have and perhaps i never will.

today, in another profound epiphany i realized with sudden clarity that i have two options when it comes to living my life. i can see that the reality of my behaviour is largely unacceptable to a lot of people and that they will always talk about me. i can either learn to live with this, or change everything about the way i am. i cannot however, continue to live the way i do and expect to be completely respected and admired by all. as much as i’d love to tell you that my decision to remain largely unchanged has come about from some noble notion to ’stay myself forever’, that isn’t entirely true. i can’t change the way i am, because i can’t. i really can’t. for one thing, i subconsciously like it too much, i have too much fun being confused and indecisive. for another, i am almost innately adverse to self control and therefore will never be very good at it. no matter how hard i try, and try i have.

fact is, people will always talk, my mother is older than 50 and absolutely great and people still say shit about her. but i feel it’s almost my duty to be even a little radical, just to make the people that call me a ’slut’ think different, if nothing else. i yearn to change the way people think inside this tiny box and have them see life from a broader dimension. i long to see the generation to which i belong bring back free love and be somewhat reveloutionarily determined to be accepted by a society that stunts alot of what we do and who we are.

as insecure as i sound sometimes, i love who i am, and i love change. as useless as i am with regards to bringing about certain changes in myself that i’m told will result in the positive, i do allow and even revel in change. it is great and inevitable and larger than life. i love youth. it is the only reason i can be someone different, and want something different, every day. it is my best excuse, the glorious scapegoat for every time i am caught off-guard, the truest explanation to all the things i do wrong and all the right things i don’t do.

as for profundity, it’s great. it exists because people need something to believe and something to believe in, something to hope about, something that makes them feel like they know all about life, when actually they don’t. something that makes them feel like they’ll make it through unscathed because they are that much wiser, when deep down inside everyone knows that none of us will ever go through life not having made one slip-up, not having had our hearts broken and our heads fucked with, not having felt like a fish out of water, despite the fact that we’re supposed to learn from our mistakes and become the sum of our experiences.

trace and i, before we were scarred for life by king kong so very happy, as we almost always are when together.

i love photographs. this was taken right before we went in to watch king kong, which was a terrible film in my opinion, but i remember being really happy.

i love photographs because they remind me of what we like to call the good ole times. they remind me of solidarity, of all the people that have been there from the very beginning and the ones that have become inevitably and equally intertwined more recently. it reminds me of the stages, the faces that have changed and the faces that have remained the same, the stories that have been lived and relived.

photographs draw this great picture of my life as it is : both vague and vibrant. it is collage of dancing and laughing, learning and drinking, of margaritas and clubs and boys and trouble, of loves and hates and friends and foes, of victories and losses and achievements and truimphs, of memories worth remembering and a history worth having.

photographs tell me : ‘life is good. life has always been good, and there will continue to be moments in life worth photographing and remembering forever. there are people who love you, and know you. people who have been there, and will continue to be there, in the photographs in the future, years from now, standing by you, and even then, for some reason, you will all look happy’.

thank goodness for photographs, for without them, who would ever be such a constant reminder of how much fun i have had, living in my own skin? how will i ever piece together such vivid fractions of my memory as i do with photographs, so vivid that i can relive and relish it whenever i please?

i look at photographs now, from ten years ago, from 2 months ago, from a week ago, and think to myself ‘why are we smiling here?’. and when i remember why, i am overcome with this unshakable certainty that our reason was a good one indeed. we were happy and we had each other. it was good enough, and it is still good enough.

hence, i’m linking my 3 favourite photo bloggers here, as a tribute to their efforts to help us all remember…in the nicest way possible.
manekha
anush
yanik

ps - i hate blogsome.

photo by yanik (that i cropped a little).

this is this guy i know.

we met over beer and wine and some reasonably profound conversation that turned into drunken banter.

he has a drinking problem and he murdered this entire (entirely innocent, too) palestinian family awhile ago. he also has multiple personalities and a strange addiction to all things beach boy-ish, from the surfer shorts to the illegal substances. he has a long scruffy hair, and sports a generally scruffy look. he invented the washing machine, or so he tells me. after all, he’s fairly…um…imaginative.

if you spot a street urchin (on the street), it’s sure to be him, so go up to him and say ‘hi, i know of you because electra blogged about you once’.

he will eventually wind up in the 6th hell (says dante). word on the street is that i’m bad enough to make it to the 7th, so i won’t be too far away. i’m looking forward to seeing you around, fellow sinner.

he also has good taste in music. oh, and he draws ok, don’t you think?

he’s quite pretty damn great really, despite the occasional elitist freakishness that seems to creep up on him out of nowhere, which, i must admit, he valiantly tries to defy. he’s funny, never fails to fascinate, and coming from good old pretentious me, is well rounded and intelligent.

i don’t even know why i’m blogging about him, but certain personality traits just merit a few sentences if not a whole blog post. besides, this is just a really nice photograph and i wanted a reason to blog it. go, yanik! (A, don’t flatter yourself)

life is so fickle. it takes almost nothing, just a second, just a moment, for it to be changed forever.

i woke up on the 26th of december of 2004, to find my life changed forever.

i went to hikkaduwa with my friends last month, and my life was changed forever.

i watched baz luhrmann’s romeo and juliet when i was 12, and it changed my life forever.

i was at smriti’s and suda’s wedding 2 years ago, and my life was changed by it forever.

cousin N met R, cousin D met D, 4 years ago, and it changed my life forever.

my aunt went cycling last sunday and my life was changed forever.

sometimes i’m terrified by the unpredictability, wishing i had more time to prepare for these profoundly good and bad ways in which my life is about to change for good, wishing i had time to strengthen my resolve or let down my guard.

sometimes i’m excited beyond comprehension by the sudden-ness of it all, the rush of not knowing what to expect, the element of ambiguity and surprise.

sometimes i am sick of all the change, tired of the constant liquidity, exhausted by the need to adjust.

sometimes i am bored of life as it is, buying time till something happens that will change the way things are infinitely, for eternity, waiting till something explodes or implodes to tip the balance and make things new. again.

sometimes i want to breathe a new life in, i want to live in new skin, i want a new world.

sometimes, just sometimes, i wish things didn’t change so drastically. i wish i could hold life the way it is, just the way it is, for a little while longer than fate has planned.