Mar 31, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Reading, Writing, Thinking
A Dinner-break non-Post
©By Vijaya Sundaram
March 31st, 2013
Write about your strongest memory of heart-pounding belly-twisting nervousness: what caused the adrenaline? Was it justified? How did you respond?This was the prompt I got just now when idly clicking on “inspire me” after idly clicking on the “New Post” button seconds earlier.
I had just read other people’s blogs, while chowing down my two Amy’s Pizza slices. This is my dinner break in between grading papers, so I don’t feel too guilty about blogging! (Yes, it has become my guilty pleasure, and that is terrible! It’s interfering with everything. I am truly addicted). Or perhaps, I just want to write, because the dam has broken, and every day is a day wherein I need to write something down, be it poetry, stories, reflections or commentary on something.
So, what is my strongest memory of heart-pounding belly-twisting nervousness?
Being on stage at the Museum Theatre in Madras (now Chennai) India, at age 16, singing Vincent by Don McLean (click the song-title to hear Don McLean) to a crowd of five hundred school-and-college-age kids — so, as far as heart-pounding, belly-twisting nervousness goes, that took the prize.
As did I, that night. We won the Best Vocalist AND Best Band award (with my mostly all-girl band — our drummer was a boy we imported from our “brother” school). We blew them away. I had been ready to faint at the beginning of it all, but settled into an almost surreal state of calmness after I began, and the wild crowd became still. At the end of that song, wild applause rang in the hot, stage-lit air. I couldn’t see anyone. I was alone in a ring of light, and it felt good.
(I could write more about this, but that will have to wait for another time. This is a quick post.)
My most recent feeling of heart-pounding belly-twisting nervousness?
Right now! I’ve got to go! My heart is pounding madly. I’ve got to finish grading mountains of paper! An all-nighter looms. And I broke my word to my FB friends. I wrote this blog! But what the hell, it’s my dinner break. Right? And it’s not really a blog post. I mean, it’s only four hundred and forty-four words (according to that little word-count gremlin crouching below this box), and that’s a mere sigh in the raging winds!
Justifications, justifications! I want to write! That’s all I want to do!
See you when I emerge, gasping for air and sustenance, mid-week. If you don’t hear from me, I’ve probably died from drowning in paper (it’s a veritable sea around me here, and the water-levels are rising).
Quick, someone hand me a pair of flippers and a snorkel! This tsunami will not bear me away.
Bye, folks!
Love,
Dreamer of Dreams.
Alas, I have no picture of me performing on stage in Madras (Chennai) at age 16, but here’s me at age 21 onstage (far left, in black pants, black&white shirt, and electric guitar in hand) at Fergusson College, Pune, India, at the InSynch ’85 Inter-Collegiate Festival.
Tags: Addiction to blogging, Blog-Post, dinner break, Grading Papers, heart-pounding moment in time
Feb 11, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes
My daughter is happily singing this song by They Might be Giants while making her bed in her room (she’s now used to doing it, and I’m mighty pleased about that). She’s a happy child, and I love the occasional up-shifts in key, so carefree, so unself-conscious! I know she revels in the strangeness of the lyrics (she knows about the Mesopotamians, because her mom, unable to let a teaching moment go waste, told her all about them a couple of years ago. To her credit, she wanted to know).
And as I hear this song about Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, Gilgamesh and Sargon, I remember “Ozymandias” by P.B. Shelley, and remember “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,” and imagine how, behind the “vast and trunkless legs of stone” in that poetic desert, the “lone and level sands” stretch far away. Then, I look at my calamitous clutter of corrected and uncorrected student papers, and feel a moment’s spasm of rebellion: Why work? Nothing survives.
Of course, I know why. It’s work, silly!
I have a Snow Day today. Like a child, I rejoice, but then soberly contemplate the gritty pile of student writing that I have yet to plough through. Work!!
Still, there’s play, and raccoons in our backyard in the summer, and love, and laughter, lots of good food, great music to play, a child who gets jokes and profound ideas, who laughs and spins and reads and thinks, and loves us unconditionally, and who’s kind to everyone, and a loving husband, who’s kind and hard-working and funny and creative beyond all imagining, and students who are wonderful, hard-working and thoughtful, and friends who are kindred spirits, and my mother who is the well-spring of love and devotion and the epitome of hard-work, and a sister and bother who are good and loyal and hard-working and fearless, and I have all those unwritten stories and poems, and finally, all those dreams waiting me on the far shores of sleep.
Looking back on this run-on sentence, I see one hyphenated word that jumps out at me, like a monkey from a tree (just felt like using that simile. You don’t like it? Ah, well. Better luck next time). What word? You guessed it: Hard-working!
Work! Work! Work! says the monkey on my back.
I’d better get back to working hard. I’ve not much time to waste.
So much to be happy about in the midst of so much work in the world!
Tags: Ashurbanipal, Gilgamesh, Grading Papers, Hammurabi, Ozymandias, Sargon, Snow Days, Thankfulness, They Might Be Giants, We're the Mesopotamians, Work