Weekly Good Reads — Week 6

After long, I’m back, because I’ve deleted my facebook and instagram accounts for good. Phew! Also because today was probably the most emotionally challenging day ever. More on that later. Here’s the weekly list of some good things to read / listen to / watch.

1. Sex when you are asexual — Close Encounters Podcast (Guardian), given the fact that I might be asexual (I’m still not sure, but I’m pretty sure), this was very interesting. It was as if I was talking. If you have completely no idea what being asexual means, this is a podcast to listen to. Experiences about having sex “despite” being asexual are more common and normal than people think. But they are mostly experimental. For example whenever I have been with a women, I’ve find it absolutely and excruciatingly difficult to have sex, not because I can’t do it, but because I have never wanted to. So instead I’ve always helped them feel better. Some things are just the way they are — sexuality is fluid, in a way that, it can change for a person over their lifetime, or it can’t — people can have all sorts of orientations, or none at all. Sexuality is fascinating. This podcast is definite proof of it.
2. This is not a good read, but a good dancing / swaying song with nice lyrics — Dance Around The Room With Me by Ana Egge (this is a Spotify link. If you are not on spotify search for the song on soundcloud.com)

List of Good Movies I Saw in 2018

Mainly for documenting purposes, because who am I kidding, no one reads this blog. In case a future you stumbles here and are interested, this is a list I’ll keep updated for all of 2018. Here you go.

1. Murder on the Orient Express
2. Dreamcatcher (based on a Stephen King Novel by the same name)
3. Professor Marston and The Wonder Woman.
4. Lady Bird
5. On Body and Mind (Hungarian Movie)
6. The Firm
7. Allied (2016)
8. The Rainmaker
9. Identity (2003)
10. The Bright Day (2015) — directed by Mohit Takalkar
11. The Cloverfield Paradox — even though the plot has super loopholes, and things were just happening on the pretext of the unknown boundaries and rules of physics we do not know, like swapping with a parallel universe and other things that might count as spoiler alert. Despite all of these, I liked the movie for the possibilities it opened at the end of the movie. But given that all other movies under cloverfield franchise are independent movies, most probably there isn’t going to be a follow up movies.
12. 10 Cloverfield Lane – the second movie of the cloverfield franchise, certainly better than the third one (the cloverfield paradox) in terms of the plot — no unexplained grounds of assumptions. Sometime happens, at least it happens without being weird — even though there things happening without knowing why they are happening, they seem plausible.
13. Cloverfield — the first movie of the cloverfield franchise, directed on a handy cam with stunning (whatever is visible) animation effects — the movie is totally on the battlefield grounds — people confused what is happening and they are rushing. I really hated the guy behind the camera character though. I can’t think of any person who’d talk so much in the middle of a city level life crises.
14. Manchester By The Sea (Highly Recommended)
15. Annihilation – Starring Natalie Portman. I think this movie should win awards for creative stuff.
16. Detachment (2011) — 10/10.
17. The Florida Project
18. I Kill Giants
19. Ready Player One (10/10)
20. Avengers Infinity Wars — Although this was a setup for the future Marvel Movies, and it came out of nowhere, everybody just keep meeting each other out of nowhere (which was very weird), I still liked it.
21. Titli
22. Looper
23. Ex Machina
24. Babadook
25. Zodiac
26. The Invitation
27. Stuck in Love (2012)
28. Europa Report
29. East Side Sushi
30. Hichki
31. October
32. They Call Me Jeeg
33. The Only Living Boy In New York
34. The Discovery
35. Before We Go
36. The 9th Life Of Louis Drax
37. Lion (2016) (Recommended 10/10)
38. What Will People Say ( 2017, Netflix )
39. The Kindergarten Teacher

Northern Indian Winds During Feb-April

This period of a couple of months, Northern Indians enjoy this beautiful, pleasant wind. The mood is like:

Listen to the shuffling of the songs
as each pass their baton forward
and fall carelessly
from carrying too much sweat in their body

Source: [Nandini Varma’s Blog]

In Indian Calendar, this season is called Magha-Phalguna. 

The air is breathtakingly pleasant, and it’s still a little cold, which is a perfect fit. I feel like writing a poem, but the words aren’t coming right now. This wind is the culprit for the days’ long wars with my mother when I was a teenager. I’d want to grow my hair long, just so that I could let them loose in this wind. This is a kind of wind, you feel when you’re watching A Walk To Remember, especially the last scene:

But her love, it’s like the wind, I can’t see it, but I can feel it.

I’ll always remember, those late afternoons…

That’s the closest of the words I could find for the feeling when I walk these winds. I’m not kidding when I tell you, that in these winds, did I first start writing. It was like rush on the skin, but slow, smooth, and it blossoms you like the first words you use to greet someone you don’t know, with a smile of endless possibilities. And you know what the best part is? If you are in the mountains, this feeling manifolds transfigures through the shutting down of your eyes before you know it. At the edge of a precipice. Ah!

Now when the eyes are closed, and the wind wants to host you, you can’t help but think of nothing, the mind doesn’t chatter, the world doesn’t care, you don’t care about anything. You are nothing, then. You are right there, with yourself, with your most updated self, in the present, like when the hum of a mosquito shakes you up into the right now, action.

I wish the poem about this comes. Yes, my poems come. I don’t write them, I don’t know who does, I don’t even know if there is someone or something that does, or if it comes out of nothing like the flashes of light in the vacuum.

To the winds, outside the window! (It’s starting!)