I am afraid I must close this blog quite soon. I am returning to uni tomorrow and I am closing myself back into a hidey-hole. All further thoughts will be diverted into private correspondence. It’s been a nice ride, thanks for reading.

Love,

CocoaCaliente

Yet I have recently come to the realization that they are not the only type of non-verbal communication that is special. That’s a fancy way of saying that I’ve rediscovered emails. Emails are the letters of our day – most often used for official notifications or business correspondents. It may occasionally inspire personal connections, but too often we’re tempted to hit send all and send mass updates to everyone on our address book to save the hassle, or that we let our emails lag, or we’re so fatigued from sending emails that our personal ones lack the spark that make it special.

But oh, emails can provide that passion and spark. They can send your heart racing, and I just re-read some emails from someone….and did I remember. How curious, those same words written about mundane life two years ago still hold my interest, make me want to read on, and inspire me back to Ramya still.

A good email is better than a good letter. A lack of substance in a letter can hide itself under fancy notions of style and ambiguities. A really great email relies entirely on the sentiment and writing of the author. And they have become more memorable to me…

I am going to keep up writing via post because I hope that substance takes time to mature, and I still like style enough. But here is to personal emails, for preserving the passion.

I can’t wait to see Julia and Julia. The movie has evoked so much commotion that I want to see what its about. The New Yorker has a small piece about how Child saved a woman’s dinner party. It made me think about how things always go wrong at the critical moment. I am incapable of running a dinner party smoothly. Every time I plan something big, it always turns out wrong. As wonderful as food is, bringing people together, cooking for others always makes me terribly self-conscious and flustered. Especially since things seem to go wrong, for me, so often.

I am just discovering what Child meant to the Baby Boomer generation through the criticisms of the movie, and what has touched me most is the admittance of error. In an era of where we can manipulate every image, mistakes are edited out. One of the best Child episodes, supposedly, is where she drops a potato pancake on the ground and picks it up again – these things happen. A movie is fictional, but I am looking forward to all of the humanity that comes from the movie.

Tomorrow is the Woodward Dream Cruise…a relic of this town’s Motorcity. I spoke to an acquaintance from Swarthmore who is visiting Detroit and I told him that I was leaving. It didn’t hit me that there is so much more that I’ve been wanting to explore in Detroit that I havent had the chance to. I don’t really have that much time with packing everything and preparing for my final year. Every year I try to go to the electronic, jazz and blues festival, or promise to go to the museums or explore the Mexican town or Greek Town a little bit more. While outsiders, including myself, see Detroit as a failed city, loyal citizens recognize the richness that the city still has to offer. I regret that I have not had the courage to discover it myself. Maybe I will come back.

But right now, all I want to do is sleep.

Also, the Times has a touching series on summer romances. I wonder if everyone keeps those memories, or if the other person in the stories forgot them entirely. I felt some pleasure in knowing that we can, indeed, be unforgettable. I hope will be, to the right people…

But everything else is changing. We’re moving to Los Angeles, which is slightly unbelievable.

That’s it for now. My mind is still reeling…

Rock climbing in Central Park, with a pair of flamenco shoes in hand.

The front doors where I work. I felt weird snapping photos so I did it really quickly, and thus, badly. But I worked on the 17th floor.

The view from my window.

From this mess of ingredients…

To this delectable lasagna…

Tina’s recipe and photo, I was merely her bitch.

Mere jaan, mere zindhagi

The first week I was in London, we wandered around Oxford Street at night, and the photo below is in front of the lingerie window at Primark.

May might kill me for this, but we thought it’d be a good idea to skip down parliament hill after a scrumptious lunch picnic we had, one spring Sunday afternoon. We tried to link arms and skip in unison, but of it all went downhill from the first step…

Wherever I go, I find the nearest used bookstore. This photo was taken in Stroud – the afternoon light streamed onto the dusty books – it was so serene and beautiful. I don’t think I found any book that I wanted though, but it felt so magical and precious to pick up one of those books…

One more from Stroud.

My favorite. We missed the train back to Bath from Stroud, so Tina and I were a bit bored. Besides snorting white (candy) powder and popping sugar on our tongues, I made Tina jump!

Why, hello, love.

Anthrax? Cocaine? Refined sugar? All I know is that Bath and Stroud hardened Tina…

What I did read instead of my American studies reading. No wonder my marks were so low for that module.

Sunset over the Thames.

Party pics – Kokos for Button Down Disco, in Morning Crescent? Somewhere on the northern line near Camden. After taking fashion advice in an attempt to look hipster and cool, I looked like a cow girl. But the venue was super cool donned in disco fashion.

Going off tangent – but ff I had to describe myself in one photo, it’d be this – silly and laughing. Sorry it’s sideways.

One last photo. The only day of snow. Unfortunately, I missed it in preparing for my American studies class, but Anna was there to add to the beauty.

This blog post is one of the most popular pieces on the New York Times today. There has been a lot more discussion of “happiness” lately from different blogs attached to big name media outlets.

I think if happiness is something we can only recognize in the past, then it’s little more than nostalgia. I think it’s true that the stories we tell ourselves changes with time, and sometimes retrospect helps us create a story about ourselves where we can shape happiness. But I find that stories I tell about myself create a distance where I place myself as a character removed from my present life. I don’t want to live in memories. I don’t want to live in a semi-fictional world I create from the stories that I tell about my past.

The “soft-focus terms” of happiness that this author refers to is not an intangible, unreachable form of happiness. I think it’s very real, but lacks the drama of “hard-edge intensity of experience”. It’s a tranquility formed more of it’s ability to feel full from the absence of intensity.

For Thoreau, happiness was stretching time, gliding in a boat. Taking control of the moment and drawing it out until you fill yourself in the present moment. I’ve had many of those moments this year – particularly, walking down Broadway, so engrossed in the people whom I’m with, that I’ve forgotten that I’m half-way to Midtown. Or walking along the edge of the river, whether it’s the Hudson, the Thames, or whatever cuts across Philadelphia, completely absorbed. (Why do I crave the same type of experience whatever city I’m in? What is it about rivers?)

I’ve also felt that intensity of experience, where you feel so full with emotion from something terrible that’s happened. But I think I can experience that same intensity of experience just being completely still and feeling utterly calm. It doesn’t require torturing yourself over unrequited…– that’s just masochistic.

Kreider’s post delves into much more than moments of happiness with other people, but it’s the part that’s struck me the most. But are there actually several gradations between the tranquil and tortured happiness that I interpreted from the post? Can you reconcile the essence of a tortured artist/lover, the archetype hero of these intense experiences, with…a monk/enlightened one? Or am I completely misinterpreting Kreider’s point?

I’ve always been an early adopter of high-technology communication. My first e-mail account, I opened when I was 9, I used blogs to connect with writers around the world when I was 15, and I was one of the first high school students to use Facebook in 2005. I’ve used everything from iChat to facebook chat, MSN to Skype. (Except twitter – I haven’t used it successfully and I don’t think its worth the effort right now.)

And then I started writing letters. I’ve written letters to only two people before. A girl who went to band camp in middle school and a pen-pal in India. Neither correspondence lasted a very long time. So this is really the first time I’m depending on my correspondence through letters to maintain my fledgling relationships.

And the curious thing is…its my best work. I am rather timely with letters and I spent time with them. And I’m not afraid to write what I feel, to pour myself into my words. I’m always afraid of what I write to other people because its all public record. Nothing digital is private anymore, and letters are one of the few places its safe to store yourself. Every letter is a gift – it feels likes Christmas every time I find one in my mailbox.
And I reread letters like it’s a book. But a collection of letters is a narrative between people, so I guess it’s a piece of literature in itself.

Does it sound like I’m romanticizing about letters? If I am, it’s not with an ounce of nostalgia because I had never had the chance to discover letters before. Since I’ve just started on what seems like a wonderful journey, I’m not sure what the downfalls are.

Well, there is one. Time moves much more quickly and the “I” that I am now is much more different than the “I” that I present myself in subsequent letters. So far, I haven’t been satisfied using letters as my sole means of communication because so much substance is lost in between.

But I am rediscovering a new way of writing. Its not a carefully edited (read: censored) image that I present, as is possible via web, but a rediscovery of myself as my words often surprise me. I’m not very true, because I have re-written almost all my letters, and have gone back and erased, edited etc. I wonder, did letter-writers share that anxiety? (before there was the option of email?.)

I’ll just end, with three cheers for the inked word.