Yellow brick road................................................. OR A Rant

It's funny - I've had a most awful day and yet I don't really want to write about it now. I was wallowing in pity on my bed (it's a huge, lovely one btw and great for wallowing/messing/shelving/losing things in/dreaming happy dreams in/painting ceiling murals in/talking to God in... you get the picture...;O) and I thought I would write one of those depressed blogs a friend has been spieling out lately.

Something along the lines of

Cold
lost time...
cold
tired
aches
missed opportunities
cold....

LOL - you get this picture too? Well, she's been on at it for sometime and in my haze between sleep and waking I imagined writing something like this as a surrealist-ish record of my emotions. But I'm not going to.

If you're up for it, I'd be glad for us to take another delighful ramble without a map. Just follow the yellow brick road and you will get to Oz ;) It will be an easy ramble with picnic stops on the way. No stylistic endeavours, no poetry except the fluidity of mood-swings and all of those on the lighter end you may be assured. It is spring. The ramble will probably start with guys, their greatness and their foibles... uh oh, too feminine a word... fallibility?... But I want a plural noun... ummm follies. Now give me another word instead of 'greatness'.

No, not grandeur! My word, you've got bad taste... But I really want a word starting with 'f'... to niiicely match with follies, you see? Am I clever or am I clever!
Fantasticity - shall we settle for a coinage?
Ok done.

Now we will probably ruminate on the fantasticity and follies of men (well, I just had to be positive and put in both in the title... that will probably be the only time you hear it from now on, girlfriends ;O - just kidding... I do think people are fantastic anyway!) Then we will move on to this entire business of onlineness, orkut specifically, facebook and msn and gtalk generally, and tagged furiously! We may stop to taste the goodness of chocolate and all things chocolate on the way. We will then maybe discuss girls too, but WE will not be objective as we erm happen to be rather inevitably subjective on that topic... We reserve the right to be wholly subjective on any other topic as well and reserve the right to change the terms and conditions of our ramble at any point :). Note the timely smile :D. If you are still reading, you are wonderful!

Why I came in to write after having vowed to give this space a break was because I was looking into profiles on Orkut from a university community to see if there was anyone I'd missed out or forgotten. I am now curious to see personal profiles not for any vested interest but because I now know better how to choose invites even from friends of friends! And it has been interesting of late to find many of my acquaintances - and one friend - falling heavily (;O) in love in these online communities! And I do not mean shaadi.com or match.com or eharmony.com or any of those other crazy adverts on large-sized signage in India and un-closable pop-ups worldwide! Please don't throw the arranged marriage out, we have loved it too long and hard to give it up! Co-existence is possible and healthy.
Anyway I have a few simple rules - anyone 'here for/looking for' 'dating/whatever he can get(cf facebook)/games/relationships' is crossed out. 'Relationships' in some limited vocabularies means 'can i go out with you please? all you need to do is say hello back to me'.
- anyone who says 'Ideal match: You' gets lobbed in the bin too.
- anyone who says 'you are looking very nice/u r very spiritual girl i likes spiritual girls, i be liking your profile, can i make friendships with you' needs to be immediately alerted to the fact that marine engineering was never my forte.
- if my friends choose to go on this insane rampage of decorum ;) they are allowed but shall be informed of my extreme scepticism. If they are friends, they are ISA approved ;) Certain friends' friends - like BO's friends or DP's friends - are also automatically ISA approved. The judge's decision is final.
Those are my rules - I suggest you adopt them, she said imperiously.

Do not worry, I have not turned the final bend. I have just had a long day and am now in a rather silly mood :)

But what makes me rather sad is that most guys seem to have a pride problem... I suppose girls have it too but one of my guy friends says that is very often a guy thing. The sad thing about that is not simply the existence of the problem. It's the non-recognition of it. Guys reading this, if you disagree you are welcome to say so. In all probability, you don't. Right, which woman worth her salt would actually like a guy who is all about himself? Men often do not like women who don't listen, so my English lesson Unit 3 reading and listening components tell me. Lol - here's the funniest bit! This is from linguistic research - Allwood, Coates, Cameron, Thomas and me... Women make minimal responses and backchannel often as part of their supportive 'scaffolding' in a way in conversation... But men often follow the backchannelling with a turn of their own thus taking over speaker position and the place of power in a conversation. However, - and this is not backed up with research - with the feedback mechanisms and minimal responses, some women can easily possess the appearance of listening but whether they really are is anyone's guess. My prof once told me that I was a good listener. I was amused, and he laughed and said 'Well, at least you nod your head at all the right places and smile and look interested throughout the lecture. In fact, that's one of the things in language and gender'. EW is an absolute darling, btw, as anyone who's met him will agree but he doesn't teach language and gender. I didn't attend sociolinguistics either. Now if you let me go on, I shall be quoting my dissertation and everyone else's! Tsk tsk... you should really let me see that glazed-over look in your eyes. I'm usually good at that - I stop quite soon.

Anyway perhaps he is attracted to a woman because she gives much! But he sure looks proper loser-material when he says 'I want, I want, she must love me, she must feed me, she must love my family, she must understand my needs, she must respect my community'. Well, erm, WHAT about HER? And it's not women's rights I'm campaigning for at all - it's just bad CV style I'm lamenting, LOL. If you don't let her know (I assume you hope this she is looking!) what you like about her, let alone what you can give... you just don't get the job. ESPECIALLY if you're from the Indian sub-continent, and that desperately seeking, surely you are used to writing 'bio-datas' instead of proposals?? Lol, and a CV or cover letter that does not say what interests you in the company you're seeking and why they should choose you and what you can give, just does not make it - or so my careers advisor always said. It is also very intriguing and laughable that most men like flirting and do too! :( Sad too :(. But why am I telling you this? My blog has only a few readers as I know it, and you are probably very discerning. But hear me rant, will you? It may amuse you and it does amuse me :D

But yes, that does annoy me about some men - DP once said about another guy we know that he was so full of himself! Maybe it's the Indians in this place... but they are so confident that they have a corner on you just because you are Indian. I mean I'm sorry, I was never in love with every one of my fellow-people even when I was there! Why would moving make it imperative to be friends with every countryman or -woman? And why would moving change my parameters of making friends? One called at 3 am two weeks into my moving into a new place and all I could think was zzzz who gave him my number zzzzz! LOL Another sat in my room till all hours talking! And the same one once told AP and JR and me that if the story wasn't about him he was not interested. I do plead guilty to minimal responses from the depths of sleep to this one!

And girls... why be so naive?? Please SP - although you may never read this - do NOT try to change one of those seekers, especially the non-romantic, hard-core ones, by showing him that you care for the greater good of his soul... Honestly, he will only assume it's a different pick-up line and delight himself in it! Yes, you know exactly what I'm on about, lol. People, it was just plain stupid. However, I'm a nice one to be talking! BO will bear testimony to one sunny London morning! (Different blog, different place).

Ah the delightful lightness of my ramble has lost its flavour ever so slightly in this impassioned plea... has it not? And I did mean to mention the fantasticity of men too...

There are some lovely ones who will always tell you when you need to be told that you look great. The kind of guys that will pay you a compliment in the nicest way and you are sure they are not flattering you, or flirting necessarily, or even saying it because they look for positive things to say (like dutch comfort ;O). There are very few of these guys around but they are lovelly ;) My old pastor back home was one of them. Actually my pastor back home in Bangor was too. Awww, how I miss them! My dad, of course, knows how to pay me compliments... But he makes my mum grin and go 'Yeah, right!' so I guess he might have that effect on her ;OO LOL. And then there are the kind of men who can make you talk and make jokes. And they will listen and not be bored. There are very few who will actually get it too! And then there's the wonderful kind - they are usually random unknowns - who will laugh and call you an endearment on the bus or at church and pay you a lovely compliment just because you've smiled at them and they're older people. Bless them!

Compliments are dicey - they need to be just right for the person you're talking to. I, personally, don't take them very well, I'm afraid. I remember agreeing with a classmate when I was in middle-school on this subject and I'm taking a LONG time to grow up on that one - as on many others, lol. I am quite convinced it's flattery or flirtatiousness usually. I'm getting better however. But I've always remembered this bit in 'The Von Trapp Family Singers' where Maria describes their manager as a man who always knew just the right thing to say. He met this nun for the first time and they really needed to make contacts and get themselves into a niche - and he picked her diction! Telling her she had perfect diction secured her favour for life, apparently:)

I don't know if I pay compliments right - I am quite particular about them. They have to be true. They have to be very positive. They have to be needed. They may circumvent some parts of the truth depending on the enormity of the need! I do keep positively reinforcing my students, like a good teacher! I keep going 'brilliant', 'fantastic', and on the rare occasion, 'oh, you've made me so happy, thank you!'

But I definitely have the gift of the gab... I may not really gas all that much in person. Look at the size of this blog? I am online far too much these days. I am restricting my orkutting and was restricting my facebooking - but now with the new pub church venture, we are going to have to use facebook. And I must get on my mother's nerves and she must get on my father's nerves while I keep her at the computer for hours! And MAY I please rant about this Tagged.com? The website just had me give it my name and picture because a couple of friends kept asking, and immediately it sent an email to every flippin person on my list! MY grinning mug and a cheesy line or two to my profs even - have spent the better portion of the week apologising! Ah well... Some of them were so adorable they actually signed up! EW didn't but EW got my apology almost immediately.

As for chocolate, which doesn't really enter in here but must be on the yellow brick road... God bless all chocolate makers:)! What's your favourite kind?