i sometimes say things that i don't mean.

i figured i should start off with a disclaimer.

i've been in a kind of off mood lately, which is admittedly odd for me because i feel like the past year has been this kind of unending mood typified by sinusoidal feelings ranging from YAY I'M SO HAPPY TO BE ALIVE IN THIS BEAUTIFUL WORLD and ...oh that could've gone better...with a period of about a day. having this range of emotions allowed me to just compartmentalize my doubts and feelings and go into any situation with the fresh attitude of "okay, let's do this!"

but alas, it's summer. the season of dwelling. and boy, do i have a lot to dwell on.

right now i'm just in a funky, cranky mood, which makes me irritable and hard to live around, like when becca gets mad and it's all your fault even though you didn't do anything wrong and just happen to be sitting next to her when she's got 3 tests next week. and it's REALLY annoying to be upset-like, because normally i chide people for letting things they can't control control their emotions, and i've been doing this a lot lately. i was sitting on the hill today, writing in my notebook about how i feel like a cat that wants a mouse but has gotten a lobotomy and thus has no will to chase after this mouse. that was literally the most eloquent thing i could summon to describe my mood.

i'm sitting in steep & brew because the person i was stealing internet from's internet is not working in my apartment and i needed to download some answers to problem sets that i've been trying to do for ochem that i'm trying to be motivated for.

but i just keep thinking about people and things and how my cell phone which is quite possibly my only mode of communication with the outside world other than the hole in my face and fleeting bouts of internet is going to give me a tumor, how nigeria has oil spills galore that america has not made a big deal about despite the fact that we get oil from nigeria all the time and how i've cultivated this introverted personality inside of my extroverted self and it doesn't make any sense when i talk about it with people... how i don't really like people that much, but it seems like i'm like, obsessed with them due to the fact that i'm vocal about the liking that i do have. also, something i've always pondered...
when you have chemistry with someone is it visible to that person as well? is chemistry just the nature of an interaction you have with someone, visible to the whole world? or is it deceptively only connected to your synapses and that person has a different idea of what chemistry you have, if you have any at all? basically, like, is it like an accelerator that connects directly to the fuel in your car, or is it a hybrid accelerator that sets of an electrical mechanism, which thus dictates to the car to send out fuel? does this make any sense? i have been wondering about this  a long time. i asked my roommate but she said she doesn't really know what chemistry is in relation between people.

steep & brew is a surprisingly loud hangout place twenty minutes before close.. the staff here makes me a bit uncomfortable because they always make lewd sexual innuendos to each other in a flirty way, but i mean, this place has free wi-fi and good coffee and it's open until 11.

dear everything.

1. i do not like boys at all period. i know that sometimes my actions conflict with this general viewpoint, but i have to admit that this is my truth. guys are too impulsive and they don't plan and they do things like "improvise" and "get hammered," and think you're "beautiful" and admire you for the qualities you have and they don't, like planning, looking nice in floral prints, and talking to people. and it's like, enough already... why can't you just be my best friend, why can't you just rag on me instead of trying to impress me... i like a challenge.

2. i went to costco with my parents, and ate a bunch of samples instead of eating the indian food at home yesterday. this makes me upset because this was my one chance to eat sambar and i didn't get it. and i effing miss my home-cooked cooking.

3. i think becca is mad at me over something stupid.

4. i really don't believe in the concept of shy-ness. why are people shy? it's not fair that i'm not shy. it puts WAY too much pressure on me.

5. i am going to go see modest mouse this weekend.


6. i haven't listened to any music in the past 4 days except for the mix CD i made my dad for father's day, which OMG he loves! he loves it, i'm so proud of myself because my dad scrutinizes all of the music that i listen to/get for him/sing for him. but he likes it and says it's great. i think i made my dad like guster. and over time, regina spektor. i'm really proud of myself.


7. i really really want to re-re-record a study in blue. it's too soft when you play it through speakers. and there's some vocal stuff that could be better. why did i write such a difficult song? it's a truly difficult song to sing and to get the dynamics right on... oh well.


8. i'm just kind of pretending ochem doesn't exist until class today.


9. i sometimes wish you could like, find out statistics about how much people think of you. and that could be the way you decide who your friends are instead of blindly having to you know, assess their personality, and make possibly-accurate assumptions about people

10. i wrote a song last night but it sounded too much like death cab for cutie. 

11. i feel like i really don't believe in love the same way anyone else does... it's just another thing i'm "too cool" for.

i have to take an ochem test soon

very soon. here's caution, you wind!

i don't understand why people shorten organic chem to "orgo." what the heck? there's no O sound in the second part of the word. you don't shorten physics to fizz-o, do you? you can say bio. that makes perfect sense.
but i digress.

i haven't been posting that often because i have yet to establish feelings of normalcy. i still feel odd, like the main characters of my life have left to go be on a different show that pays them better, and the tv show of my life is now adding new characters or making more minor characters that you've seen around develop larger roles and get more lines.

just a thought.

you're a dream to me, dream to me

I just woke up from a dream that seemed like it was trying to tell me something important... been kind of combining aspects of the universe and aspects of my dreams to piece together and answer. And no, I'm not crazy, but to be honest, my dreams have been pretty successful in revealing what I want. Sometimes they're just spooky.

For example, there was this time when I was excited about my first day of middle school and I had gotten a kind of shitty touch screen calendar fake palm pilot thing. I had wanted to get up super early so I could look nice and maybe fall in love. Yes, this was a ridiculous thought, but I was a crazy child who believed in love and peacemaking and unity and all that bullshit. I was pretty insane about it. I used to draw pictures of earths with smiley faces over all the land masses. I was not prepared for the reality of many things until I actually did fall in love and got smacked in the face by it. Anyway, none of this was relevant.

The only thing that is was the fact that I kept having this dream that I was waking up, picking up my palm pilot to check the time and that I couldn't read the time. I kept picking it up, waking up and not being able to see it-- it replayed over and over until I got bored of the repetition and I woke up. The time was 20 minutes before my alarm was set to ring at 4:30. My dream essentially woke me up and told me something. Yes, it was stress-related and could've happened anyway... but I'll tell you another story.

It was a random day just after school ended a few weeks ago. I was having this dream that was kind of convoluted (as dreams often are). In this dream, I decided to check my grades... (In real life, I hadn't been supremely worried about grades since I was tired from the semester and busy with other things, I hadn't thought about it too hard.) I kept checking my grades. All the grades that I already knew appeared, but then my Geography 339 class seemed to have a B in the slot, but I couldn't see. There was some stress that I might end up with an AB because I had to write this really intense research paper that I hadn't known much about to begin with, and it was basically the first hard writing-related thing that I'd ever done in my life. The dream consisted of me constantly trying to recheck my grades and being unsuccessful. When I checked my grades when I woke up, the grade was an A. It was weird that my dream would envision that whole scenario (how do YOU pronounce the word scenario. Is it scenArio or is it scenARio?) when I hadn't been thinking of grades at all. I had literally forgotten that I had grades yet missing.

This happens a lot. Dreams sometimes save my life (or tell me exactly how I'm feeling based on the way I act in a dream.) I could share other dreams (I have a recurring one that I have to go onstage because I'm in a play and it's my cue and I have to do a costume change but I can't find the clothes and the clothes don't fit when I do find them and then I go onto stage and like, my mom's there) but I think I've made my point. I've always thought that I'm like, a little psychic about some things. It's not that I think I'm anointed with some mythical psychic power. It's just that often I just KNOW something's going to happen, because of my running, annoying analysis that goes on in my head. But I might be insane, because often, I do things over and over expecting a different result (which is the definition of insanity according to Albert Einstein). In my mind, things are different in different situations, so I'm more of a scientist.  At this point, I've probably lost you. So, I'm sorry. Suffice to say that I think about everything too much and therefore, sometimes with that, I end up figuring people out fast and being able to read their behavior really well and not-all-the-time-but-sometimes I can tell what's going to happen next. And it's really more of a curse than anything.

But anyway, I'll tell you what the end message of my dream is... I need to be more self-reliant, self-motivated and selfish...in other words, independent, brazen and less neurotic. I'm gonna do it.

Read this article.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/journalismcompetition/sanitation-schoolgirls-in-the-developing-world

That is all.

So...about that quest

I don't know if all of those goals will be accomplished. My family is in town, including my aunt and uncle Monu and Sonali from England and their relatively new son, who I've now met for the first time, two-year-old Anant, my Reenu Bhua, and my sister. I'm having tons of fun because the family makes me realize where I get all of my spunk from. Some interesting liaisons of influence worked together under just the right temperature and pressure to make me. (I sound like my dad describing how cooking works.) There is not a dull moment when you get the nine of us all together. I wish I could give you a more vivid image of this fun phenomenon; it's a good time-- that's all I can really say, without getting anecdotal, which I could, but I'm not in much of an anecdotal mood.

Suffice to say that my family is incredibly cute and funny. I am constantly thinking that I wish I had the video camera so I could remember these moments forever, or better, have some kind of paid camera crew to follow us all around so that we wouldn't have to carry the camera everywhere. We are so temperamental- all of us. One moment we are getting into a fight, next, we are laughing together. We're also all very different from one another, which makes our similarities even more interesting.

I've recently been getting nostalgic. I started reading my xanga from high school. I basically started my xanga in 8th grade, circa my musical renaissance because I wanted to be able to express my opinions without someone finding it from Google or something. I'd say that was about the most creative time in my life as far as thinking about things pretty deeply. Back then, I was kind of caught between being a high-schooler and a middle-schooler, meaning that I had all the desires of a seventeen-year-old girl, but all the freedom of a toddler. My computer, my magazines and books, the library and my friend Cassie, were the sole portals I had to some cooler form of life. That's when I started to get into some really great music, and thank god I did that before high school. I started remembering when Becca and I first became friends, and what we talked about. I remember thinking she was so cool because she did stuff for herself and went on adventures that I couldn't dream of going on like secretly taking buses to Chicago to meet up with her boyfriend.

I look back on myself now and think I was such an idiot back then with the way I looked at people and the way I acted, not considering the reactions of other people. But I guess you have to be an idiot sometime so you can learn from it or else you'll be an idiot forever and no one will want to remember you.

Today I begin on a quest

A quest, you ask?
Yes, a quest.
What for?
To make my life interesting.
And I know what you're thinking. Oh, Aarushi, you are sooo melodramatic! You are interesting. You're so interesting that you're downright weird.

Yes, well. I'm in an interesting rut.
The most interesting thing I did today was to go to the doctor with my mother and realize a condition I've had since puberty may never go away. I have to come to terms with the fact that I need to treat myself for conditions although girl, I have no faith in medicine. Well, not really. I just hate going to the doctor much like everyone else. Also, it's rainy and my flip-flops have slid off of my feet literally five times today.
It's unfortunate that I only have 3 pairs of shoes because they all were accidentally donated.

The second most interesting thing was rushing to the Humanities building to attend choir only to realize that I was an hour early for the she-bang. Yes, an hour early. How did I make this mistake?
I blame This American Life, analog clocks, the rain and a general malaise.

So I've been standing at this kiosk next to strangers trying to go on the internet to web sites that make me look interesting to bystanders and eavesdropping on phone conversations. Having phone conversations and wondering if the bystanders are listening. Wondering if that one guy in a huff has had a restraining order against him. Which, yeah, is interesting. But I want to do fun projects. I want to accomplish a variety of solitary things in my time each week. I want to not rely on others for fun.

By this time next week my goals:
-play a board/card game with someone
-learn a new name
-read the wikipedia article for each of TIME's influential people
-plan next week's radioshow

Stay with us.

place matters

it seems that the more i get older, the more everything becomes wireless
phones that used to have curly cords that i would use to tie myself up in my room when i was six years old
were replaced with cordless ones, then mobile ones
and you know that the desktops so quickly were switched to lap-warming boxes

humans have been wireless since birth
but we don't notice it until we're alone, until we realize it's me, myself & i,
moreso when we're alone in the world
connected to nothing and no one
and this is what i want to be

the problem with wireless things is that you have to back them up
you want to have a hard copy of what you have on the computer
you have to have something to live by, someone to notice you once in a while
something in your world to be connected to
pictures that are framed are  more beautiful than those that are flicked through quickly on a screen
things are so much more significant when they take up physical space
you remember more when you feel something with your hands, when you write something down

but... wireless things can go more places, see more beauty, try things out and throw them away
they don't take as much energy or effort or money to sustain
they take up less space and are less cumbersome on the whole.

am i more likely to fly? 
no strings attached
look ma, no hands

but i guess at the end of the day, everything that is wireless has to be plugged back in, recharged, revitalized for a new journey to somewhere...
maybe it's no way to live.
when you don't have a homebase to recharge at...
you flit from place to place, trying to pick up energy from something or another. you have to find little pieces of solace... use toilets you're not used to and eat food you don't like, find rooms that you really like in the library.
i never thought about it, but place is so important. movement is all fine and good but you have to have something to come home to. you have to have self-infrastructure to rely on.

does it make you crazy to think that many of the people who will change your life unalterably you have not even met yet?
does it make you feel weird that you'll have to impress them with some innovation you come up with the future... that you'll have to make brand new first impressions and brand new efforts and that what you've already done can't be the best you can do?
does it make you nervous that maybe one day, every song that could possibly be written, will have already been written?

good thing we're all plugged into the matrix and nothing is real.

the wizened field before me where i saw you, we were frolicsome and hapless

of course i miss you.

even if i didn't, i'm constantly reminded of everything about you.

i hear the noise from my window that we used to hear when i stayed up late in your arms... i see the dancing couples and remember being one of them. i dress up pretty and wonder how much you'd like it if you could see.

but then i have to remind myself that although it's scary to be alone and it's easier to be with someone i've already won over, i need to win myself over.

i just gotta stop thinking so damn much.

dear loving friends

where the hell are you?

i'm leaving today

to move into my new apartment/chapter/abode.

songs that i know that i love (that don't make a big deal about themselves)

-new slang by the shins : turn me back into the pet that i was when we met/i was happier then, with no mindset/ but if you'da took to me like a gull takes to the wind/well, i'd'a danced like the king of the eyesores and the rest of our lives would'a fared well.

-no surprises by radiohead: no alarms and no surprises, silence

-missed the boat by modest mouse: of course everyone goes crazy over such and such and such/ we made ourselves a pillar/ but we just used it as a crutch/we were certainly uncertain/at least i'm pretty sure i am/well we didn't need the water/ but we just built that good, goddamn

-kiss off by the violent femmes: behind my back, i can see them stare/ they treat me bad, but i don't mind/ they treat me bad/ they do it all the time

-nowhere man by the beatles: he's a real nowhere man/sitting in a nowhere land/ making all his nowhere plans for nobody/ doesn't have a point of view/knows not where he's going to/isn't he a bit like you and me?

-i'll make a man out of you from the mulan soundtrack : mister, i'll make a man out of you/ tranquil as a forest, but a fire within/ once you find your center, you are sure to win/you're a spineless, pale, pathetic lot and you haven't got a clue/somehow i'll make a man of you.../you must be swift as a coursing river (be a man)/ with all the force of a great typhoon (be a man)/with all the strength of a raging fire/mysterious as the dark side of the MOON!
....you gotta love that song! it has an a cappella breakdown!

-between love & hate by the strokes: never needed anybody/i never needed anybody/i never needed anybody/i never needed nobodyyyy.

-defending the paint by the soft drugs: well, i heard it was you/ those guys don't know/just how thorough/ a plan can be/ but now they're working for me


-she's fantastic by sondre lerche: all the girls that i know/suddenly seem so-so/suddenly no one quite can compare to her/why? she's fantastic/ i don't know what to do/what is a guy to contribute?/ all the girls my own age/ have me turning the page/ there so eager to try/ she don't do nothing/ why? she's fantastic!

-i know there's an answer by sonic youth: i know so many people who think they can do it alone/ they isolate their heads and stay in their safety zone/ but what can you tell them?/ and what can you say that won't make them defensive?/ i know there's an answer/ i know now but i have to find it by myself.

-myla goldberg by the decemberists: this song reminds me of becca for some reason. must be the jewish-ness.


-everything i want to be by save ferris: i find myself, i'm just a-wasting my time away/ no matter what i do, it always ends up the same/ one minute moves into the next/ my life was simple but now it's complex/ and it doesn't seem to mean anything at all/ and everything i wanna be/is just another silly dream, you see/ but i keep dreaming just the same!

-the way you look tonight by frank sinatra: someday, when i'm awfully low, when the world is cold, i will feel aglow just thinking of you-- and the way you look tonight.

-all of the time by locksley: because everywhere she is i want to be/when i'm holding her, it makes me weak/we've got a kind of love that's hard to see/but your lies are tearing her away from me

-all my life by the foo fighters: this song was one of the first songs i listened to when i started listening to real music.

-intervention by arcade fire: you say it's money that we need, as if we're only mouths to feed


-walk away by franz ferdinand: why don't you walk away?/no buildings will fall down/ no quake will split the ground/won't you walk away?/ the sun won't swallow the sky/ why don't you walk away?/statues will not cry.

-everywhere by fleetwood mac: my parents loved this song when i was a wee child. naturally, it was one of the first songs i ever knew.

-dreams by the cranberries 

-kiss me by sixpence none the richer

-time is all around by regina spektor : but leaves become most beautiful when they're about to die, when they're about to fall from trees, when they're about to dry up! why am i supposed to love if i don't want to love? why am i supposed to, i'm so tired. why am i supposed to love if i don't want- i don't want- i don't want to.

not inclusive, duh.



albums i'm gonna listen to in my new room:

windsurfing nation - broken social scene
it's never been like that - phoenix
this is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about - modest mouse
clandestino - manu chao
peaceful - prasanna

i swear i'm going to like not listen to a mix for a week. really. hopefully.

not inclusive either.

favorite albums (could listen to all the way through and enjoy the whole thing  without skipping songs or albums that i have developed a relationship with):
comfort eagle -cake
in between dreams - jack johnson
chutes too narrow - the shins (also: wincing the night away; oh, inverted world-basically everything mercer has ever written)
is this it- the strokes (also: everything else by the strokes- i literally like all of their songs)
you could have it so much better - franz ferdinand
franz ferdinand- franz ferdinand
funeral, neon bible- arcade fire
begin to hope, soviet kitsch- regina spektor
the doors- the doors
ok go - ok go
vampire weekend - vampire weekend
picaresque- the decemberists
her majesty- the decemberists
give up - postal service
parachutes - coldplay
i'm wide awake, it's morning - bright eyes
the stranger- billy joel
rubber soul, abbey road, revolver - the beatles
yours to keep- albert hammond jr.
ok computer - radiohead
good news for people who love bad news - modest mouse
white blood cells, elephant - the white stripes
who's next - the who
hairspray OST (i think this one is cheating, but whatever)
twentysomething- jamie cullum
dark side of the moon -pink floyd (i know i'm super original)
every breath you take: the classics- police (this is also cheating because this is a greatest hits album)
[i want to say something by death cab for cutie but i can't think of one album by them that i totally loved to death, except that i didn't really like narrow stairs. but that's the opposite. i guess i could say plans or transatlanticism, but i know that i still skip stuff on those CDs.
but on the relationship criterion, i'll say: ]
plans, transatlanticism (um, this one has a lack of color by far making it have to be on this list)
nirvana unplugged in new york
louise attaque - louise attaque
how it ends- devotchka
the velvet underground & nico - the velvet underground & nico
dear catastrophe waitress- belle & sebastian
frank sinatra reprise collection disc 1
keep it together - guster
antics - interpol
curbside prophet- jason mraz (nobody better give me shit for this)
pale young gentleman (self-titled)
don't make me wait - locksley (except, all of the time and into the sun were better on the EP version, which is weird, but i lost the full EP in transferring music files between computers)
more adventurous - rilo kiley
the sound of the smiths  (another best of)


nothing else that i can think of right now makes the cut.  wow, i just wasted a ton of time.