Men, Marriage & Malarkey

I’ve just returned from my long over-due vacation and dived head-first into work. The post on my impressions and adventures will have to wait for the weekend when I hopefully get a moment to breathe in peace and just ‘be’.

This post came to mind while I was travelling. I had just finished Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy” and the book had left a profound impression on me, so much so, that I picked up a copy for my own during my travels. The one point I kept returning to was that the boy she deemed most suitable was not the one who aroused great emotion in her but rather the one who made her laugh. I think that in most romantic relationships we over-estimate the fiery flames of amorous feelings and underestimate the warmth and steady glow of a good companion. The ideal you may think would be to have a balance of the two, and I think thats possible in a long-term commitment that sees the ups and downs of life, but not necessarily a possibility in the form of a perfectly packaged individual.

I pondered over this some and some personal interactions of my own have validated this for me. I’ve met people who have elicited great emotion from me and vice versa. Thats fine and dandy because noone on earth can possibly object to those wondrous highs of being in love and being loved in return and as such noone reads the fine print about the dastardly lows and highly irrational behavior. I’m guilty of some irrational behavior of my own and been subjected to some as well. All I can say is if the 2 people involved are not mature enough to communicate through the chaos to the real issues underneath and commit to resolving them it can get really ugly. I personally don’t like myself when I’m so choked up with emotion that I can barely string a coherent sentence and am just lashing out…so I figure I need to find my very own funny man. If he can fan the flames as well that will be the icing on the cake

With all this squared away I was resting easy until I picked up an issue of Marie Claire. The editor wrote a piece on the many single and seemingly eligible women in their late 20s who just can’t seem to find Mr Right. She raised some interesting points of how we may be so fixated on finding the ideal man, intelligent, successful, and handsome, that we pass up on people who don’t obviously fit the bill. What we may not realise, she said, was that the intelligent, successful and handsome Mr Right may not be looking for us. Most of us stabilise our personalities and our careers in our mid-to-late 20s and in the process may become quite boring! She also raised the point that the man we meet and reject at 28 will probably be the man we meet and accept at 38. Now I don’t know about you but that gives me major heebie-jeebies!! By that standard the guy i crushed on at 16 is probably the closest to the ideal man i’ve ever met and even he wasn’t the same ideal as his 16yr old self when i met him again years later!!

From the highs of funny man to the lows of 38yr old i’ve settled on a nice medium as aided by Shobha De. With all this men & marriage thoughts going on in my head I picked up her book “Spouse” in which she analyzes her own marriage and that of those around her. She doesn’t profess any magic cures but rather a few pointers from the rough roads she’s travelled. What I’ve liked most about her book is her approach…only marry if you really believe in marriage and in making that commitment to stick it out with your partner. That gives me hope because I truly believe in the institution of marriage and for keeps. Now I just need to find someone who thinks that and is tall, dark, handsome, highly successful, witty, intelligent, likes to be a little adventurous with food…………..and on and on. LOL!

Have a good week!

Contemplations

Its the season for me to sit and think about life…my life. Another year is coming to an end and i’ve finally discovered Mitch Albom on my road to ‘Conversations with God’.

There’s a few things i already knew and was doing, a few things i thought i should work on and realised i needed to work on for sure after reading the books, and a few things i hadn’t even thought about.

The combined effect is making me feel very contemplative and a little down. A visit with my crazy cousins yesterday managed to lift my mood some and so did some insights from “Tuesdays with Morrie”. This is my moment to be sad…i’m sharing it with the world but i’m optimistic that something along my travels today will give me pause and make me smile and that will be my moment to be happy.

A good weekend to all and i hope you all spend it doing something you love which gives meaning to your lives with the people whom you love.

“Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own” – Mitch Albom, ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’.

Norwegian Wood, Melancholy Whores and Brothers…

For those of you who may have been looking for some titillation please stop reading now. This is a book review post and not the intro to a weird porno. For those of you who actually like books…please continue reading

Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

I read this bestseller right after finishing Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss”. The stark differences in style captivated me from the first page. Where Desai forced me to form my own attachment to the characters Murakami’s prose drew me into the lives of Toru, Naoko, and Midori. Toru Watanabe for me kept drawing the parallel of Sisyphus in his daily struggle and his continued efforts where those around him gave in to the depths of despair and sought to end their existence. The flawed characters provide a wonderful literary balance of enabling you to identify with them either through their flaws or redeeming qualities and leave you feeling quite bereft with their exits from the narrative.

On the whole this is a book I would wholly recommend but with the warning that it may leave you feeling quite depressed with how it turns out especially if you are an emotional reader like me.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Now having prepared myself for angst and melancholy with Murakami I was all prepared to ride out the despair with this book. I was brought up short. Marquez’s charm lies in his subtlety, in as much what he doesn’t say as what he does and as such I did this book injustice as i continued to hunt out greater emotions and did not give it the fair reading that was its due.

The book begins and ends on a whisper as a man contemplating death on his 90th birthday instead finds a renewed vigour and zest when he finds and falls in love for the first time.

A book i will definitely revisit.

Brothers – Da Chen

This book i picked up on a whim from the library and found it a very engaging read. The story revolves around 2 brothers – one legitimate and born to a life of privilege and the other a bastard whose struggles at various points shapes his life to come. The story is set against the backdrop of China’s cultural revolution. The lives of the brothers overlap at many different points but each remains ignorant of the other as they grow up. The many interesting and historic changes that marked the annals of Chinese history are seamed into the story effortlessly and bring this dynamic saga to life.

A must read if you like epic movies and have an appreciation for dramatics.

Nemesis slain and loss inherited!

I’ve vanquished an old nemesis…the lap blanket from all the silk yarn I purchased in Hanoi. This blanket has been months in the knitting (because its been so darned hot out here and knitting heavy silk on humid Saturday afternoons is no picnic!) and I’ve finally completed the main pieces and joined them all up.

Normally the “Martha Stewart” in me would be happy and call it a day but I reckon I’ve now progressed from novice to intermediate knitter and my artistic vanities call for some fancy embellishments in the form of the bright yellow lace I’m making to go along with it.

The only problem I can foresee is that each flower takes me about an hour and I haven’t had a lot of free time to knit and there’s a lot of trim that needs to get done.

Must….knit….faster!

On other news I have finally made my way through Kiran Desai’s prize winning novel “The Inheritance of Loss”. AB had lent me this months ago (back in June) and the start was an uphill battle that I lost frequently in the early days. I left it aside for some time until I felt sufficiently able to take it on again.

Where do I begin with this book….my reaction upon closing it was very similar to the one I had when I finished “100 years of solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. There is so much and so little to react to all at the same time. You are overwhelmed by all the different characters, their facets and flaws and yet on a whole the minutiae of each character is so easily defined it hardly seems worth the effort to think about them in depth. Therein lies the charm of an author able to bring you in and have you make the effort to foster an emotional connection to the characters who themselves are depicted often without emotion, a very much “take me as I am” feel, and all without the reader being aware until the last page just how much of yourself you’ve given to the story. A must-read in retrospect.

Enjoy your week ahead.

Addictions!

I did mention being addicted to quizzes right so no surprises here that i took another one this morning. I was minding my own and going through my Google Reader when i spotted that AB had taken this quiz on his blog: Soulsoup

You can take the quiz here.

I am 77% addicted to blogging

How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

I picked up the last Harry Potter but haven’t been able to bring myself to read it yet. I was a reluctant convert…if i remember correctly the 3rd book was already out before my resistance was mowed down by a highly persistent and extremely determined 14 year old whom i happened to be tutoring at the time. I’m an avid reader by any means and nary a day goes by without my reading something both online and within the comforting confines of a book so i naturally responded to a wonderful story and storyteller who grew with each book and drew you further into a complex and most importantly magical world.AB and i were pondering the success of the J.K. Rowling series and undeniably part of it is fad-driven but equally undeniable is the fact that its a good story thats grown with its character.

I am waiting for just the right time to settle down with this book. In the past i would read through a whole day and night to be able to finish the story in one sitting and know what happens next. Since this is the last one and with the ‘removal’ of characters from the last book….well i’m just not sure i want to find out and end the magic just yet.