Life as I know it

There’s so much going on in my life right now, it’s become a blurr.

The wedding is next month and things are escalating to an all time high. For the past 3-4 months, there hasn’t been a single weekend that I’ve spent at home. We’ve been shuttling between contractors, suppliers, vendors, designers and we go from house related work to wedding related ones like it’s nobody’s business. An average Saturday-Sunday starts at about 8.30am and goes on till about 10pm by the time we get home. The upside is that the house is now nearing completion, save for a few things that will hopefully be done by the end of next week. It took a nasty tantrum by me for the contractor to buck up and finish the work he was allocated. When the deadline is 4 months overdue, I’m entitled to that I believe.

I sat and put down my to-do list leading up to the wedding, and it is long long long 😦 Luckily, nothing that takes too long to do and I figured allocating dates to get them done will help rather than just listing out things and doing them at my own pace.

I stayed in today, well half a day at least and got some much needed rest. Woke up feeling groggy and out of sorts.  My BB organiser looks like its got a bad case of chicken pox with all the work,wedding and house commitments and deadlines slotted in. Looking at next weeks schedule is giving me a headache. Remembering how I got through the last 3 weeks still leaves me at a loss for words and I don’t know how I did it.

Things on the home front has me walking on eggshells. My father is short tempered and loses his cool over the most minute of things. I’m leaving them a broad margin coz I know underneath it all, is the fact that in a month they’ll not have both daughters living with them. After 26 years, I guess that’s tough for any parent.

The packing needs to start in earnest now. I’ve been procrastinating the transition but it’s here now staring me in the face. You can’t just pack your life of 26 years into a few cardboard boxes in a day and be over with it.  C and I have devised a strategy to move a box or 2 at a time instead of having a major ‘Moving Day’. I don’t think the latter can be avoided entirely coz somethings that will be moved like my study desk of 15 years will leave a gaping hole in my bedroom.

Hope the weekend was a good one and here’s to a great week starting tomorrow!

“Losing?” My Religion

This post is about religion. I’m a Catholic, not the overtly religious type though. I don’t feel bad if I don’t go to church every Sunday.  As a kid, growing up, Catholic values and beliefs were inculcated in us at a very early stage. Catechism followed by Sunday mass, for a good 18 odd years. I’d have to admit it was mostly due to my parents, not because we had this inbuilt need to be there or allocate a good 4 or so hours in church every Sunday. With time, changes in lifestyles – work & classes pre-dominantly, this routine was broken. I no longer could go to church as often as I did, and strangely I didn’t miss it. I believe in god and that there is a higher power above us, but at the same time I don’t agree with my parents perception that not going for Sunday mass, will send me to the fires of hell and that all  ill will befall me.

The bible iterates that a good catholic family should pray together and observe the sabbath, this includes Sunday mass, but does that mean that if you don’t attend mass regularly that you’re a bad person? This break in routine I’ve had has made it difficult to get back on track and prioritize church as a routine Sunday ritual. Even the times that I do get dressed and go, it’s out of obligation to my parents and because it’s the ‘done christian thing’, which I think is a pointless exercise. I’ve been at loggerheads with my father on this, he’s the very religious, pious type and my feisty reasonings with him don’t go down too well. The more antagonized I am, the less likely I am to go.

Prayer is something I do daily, and I’m definitely not an atheist. I have my own sense of spirituality, which obviously my parents don’t get. Probably because there’s nothing tangible for them to see.   I don’t ‘tell’ people when I go to church. I don’t have set days or times. I just go whenever I feel like it. I’m still trying to come to a conclusion as to whether my take on this is right, or not.  It’s something I’ve wondered for quite some time, and have not come any close to answering.

So…

I really want to get a dog. A brown Labrador-Retriever pup….and my mum won’t let me! Ever since Tracy died, I thought I’d never want a dog again. Clearly I was wrong. Not having that constant tailing around and not having a dog to absently pet whilst you read a book or just someone to be with when you’re at home… I really miss that. I miss Tracy to bits, but I guess it’s time to move on and give another doggy a home.

I need a miracle! (with my mum that is)

Happenings

You know how things get all awkward and weird around people you once had an amazing connection with? It’s happened to me since of late and I could barely talk to him for sometime. It didn’t really help that we hung out in the same circle of friends or that we suddenly stopped talking altogether. It also sucked that we went from 3-4 hour long conversations to barely anything. God knows what happened.

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Life’s been pretty dreary. Got the parents on my case for constantly being out on weekends and for extended periods of time on work. I stop going on these visits and I could potentially get fired. I keep going on with work, travelling far and wide and pay no heed to parental warnings, I’m up for a serious walloping at home. Devil and the Deep Blue sea, hello you!

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Got a bit of overseas travelling coming up, to which I’m looking forward to. Will get to see some interesting places and quench a much prolonged though not agonising thirst for ancient history and mythology. Swine Flu? Yeah, the folks are a bit tense over that too. Precautionary measures will be taken.

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Getting hitched has been a hot topic at the residence the past few days. Being a woman, independent and as carefree as I am does not serve well, especially if you conveniently forget to pay as much attention to politically correct innuendos. In my case getting married before I hit the late twenties. Told the folks that I will not be settling down for the sake of things falling into place conveniently and just because it is the ‘done thing’. My strategy of buying time on the pretext of reading for Masters fell flat on my face when I told my mum of plans to start on it next year. “Masters or no masters, that’s not an excuse to not settle down young lady” she said. Kaboosh.

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Ran sobbing (ok maybe not sobbing) to daddy, my hero, seeking solace from the mother’s chat ( I happen to be daddy’s little girl) and with grim realization find out that he’s been behind it all to begin with! Ran off feeling betrayed. Vented.Vented.Vented. My friends have been punching bags the past few days and I love them for their patience!

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“A woman can never be too thin or too rich” – Duchess of Windsor. I agree. We’re all vain to some degree.

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I’ve always run to my dad to get things fixed or when something went wrong when I was a little girl. It was a natural assumption that he could make things right. Twenty something years down the line I still run to him. The latest being with a bottle of red wine that needed to be de-corked (??) at a dinner we hosted. He obliged with his usual salt and peppery grace.

“Ay Ammi? – Yes Mum?”

Today whilst at work I heard someone say something that made me look up and smile 🙂

You tend to think that once you get yourself all educated and out into the corporate world, land that big break that you just automatically grow up and things become all…well… old? You have people calling you Uncle, Aunty, Mrs So n So or Mr X Y & Z. or Ma’am and well you get my drift! Anyhow, today, one of our very senior managers suddenly go “Ay Ammi? -Yes Mother?” The only thing I’ve heard come out of this man’s mouth would be anything related to work and figures and this strategy and that. Add to the fact that he’s built like a quarterback and about 6ft tall! So yeah it was a bit out of place to hear this big hulk of a man sound like a scared lil’ school boy when his mum called. Makes me think back and re-iterate the relevance of one of my previous posts – When are we really adults.

Somethings are probably not meant to change… and for good reason.

When are we really ‘Adults’?

This is a question that has perturbed me for quite sometime. When we were kids, it was a norm that an adult was someone who was grown up enough to drive a car or go out of the house alone, unsupervised, cross the road without holding mummy’s hand. A couple of years down the line an adult was someone who made his/her own decisions and had a stable job and more than a few hundred rupees in his or her wallet. This is when we start focusing on technicalities like being 18+ or turning 21, the “I’m legally an adult! Wooohooo!!!!” stage. Time when everyone else has to back off because you’re legally a person accepted by the law, have that all important Club Id (No more fake ones bouncer-siree!) and basically are held accountable for your actions.

So this is all in the real world out there right? The carbon and paper world. What about that little unit called home? Where the President, PM, Judge and Juror are none other than your parents? The laws in this little world are TOTALLY different. You are NOT,NEVER,WILL EVER be treated as an adult (Forget the fact that you’re employed, educated, sustain yourself in everyway, don’t bug them for anything and even have a say in how the country runs!) Yeah so I vote! 😀 When it comes to the parental unit, their law is law. Be it 18,21,26 or 36 they will always want to know the following;

1 – Where are you going?

2 – How long will you be gone?

3 – When/What time will you be back?

4 – “You’re driving??!!! ALONE??!!!!” Followed by a gasp of shock and a tirade of Why????!!!!!

5- You get a minute later than 12midnight at a company function (I won’t even bother with meet ups with friends) and you see *Home* or *Ammi* or *Thaththi* or even the likes of *Terminator* and *Trouble* flashing on your mobile phone screen, very appropriately followed by the MI theme song!

So after much consternation, heated discussions on liberty and asking my folks not to put me on the spot with questions like ‘Where are you?’ ‘What time are you coming home’ and ‘Give the phone to your boss, I’ll tell him a thing or two!’ ….I have resigned myself to the fact that things will always be like this, simply because we’re in Sri Lanka, have parents who actually do care about us and are part of a culture that appreciate family ties, too close for comfort ones at times but heck, if you can’t beat em’.. Join em’ yeah?! Hehe.

So really speaking we’ll always be stuck in limbo. In the legal world once you’re 21+ you’re and adult. At home, as long as you’re single and living with your parents even at 30 years of age you can forget about telling your folks ‘Listen here mum, I’m an adult! Treat me like one!’ They’ll just have an armful of responses to that statement that you’ll want to crawl under a rock and never come out! In a good sense that is 🙂

Foot Note – I will probably eat my words the next time I get one of those phone flashing *Home Calling* moments, will inevitably grimace, inwardly curse my luck and loose my cool exterior, possibly even sulk.. but like all kids in SL I’ll answer the phone with a meek “Yes ammi, it just finished, I’m on my way home,bye!” and scoot off into the night- homeward bound of course!

Foot note 2 – I don’t get the logic behind how they suddenly become lenient when they know you’re with your bf/fiancé? I mean COME ON!!!! What gives? I’ll save this train of thought for another post.

The parental unit – Gotta love em’!