Of Birthday Bashing and Growing Up

It's an universally acknowledged fact that, after you turn 21, your increasing age is inversely proportional to the excitement with which you look forward to your birthday.

Imagine you are five. You look forward to turning six. Because it means all the adults will make a big deal out of it and get you presents and cake and let you do whatever you want, for the whole effing day!! Doing whatever you want kind of loses its charm when you are grown up and an adult and know that you can do whatever you want if you wanted to or weren't that lazy.

Imagine you are twelve. You look forward to turning thirteen. Because that means you become a teenager and have license to throw tantrums, behave badly and blame it on hormones, puberty and what-not. You will also be pleased to find yourself going higher in the school hierarchy, thinking too much about your appearance and on the brink of a long journey looking for the perfect and effective acne removal cream.

There you are, in your teens.You got voting rights when you turned eighteen, but who really gets excited about getting voting rights?? The elections didn't even happen that year, not the big ones anyway. You sailed through your teens doing everything you wanted to and didn't want to but did anyway because your parents didn't want you to, doing everything others seemed to be doing or avoided doing anything that any one else did because, yes, peer pressure works that way, finally landing on twenty, swearing to yourself to get over the teenage phase and become a real adult. But who counts twenty as a non-teen age group? Hell, you're still young, still in college, still under 21 and it is the only one year you've got to drink while not being of legal age. Nothing kicks a high like that, does it?

Now imagine you are twenty. And you are turning twenty-one. What are the perks? You get to drink legally. And surely, the day you turn twenty-one, you go get drunk and find it no different from all the other times before. So that perk stays for a day and then wears off. Then what? You are twenty-one, probably graduate or about to graduate. You now have to leave the comfort of college and go get yourself a job. In this universe, low attendance doesn't mean a talk with the Principal, here it's seeing your peanuts of a salary get reduced to shriveled skins of nuts. And failing in a test more often than not leads to a loss of means to livelihood and other comforts it brings, not to mention the fact that these ruddy tests happen too frequently and barely ever run on schedule.

Now imagine you are twenty-one and are turning twenty two. Or already have turned twenty two ten minutes back. What do you look forward to? To a day of calls, messages and wall posts wishing you fun, happiness and other nice things? To a day of more niceties and maybe an increased consumption of alcoholic beverages than what a normal day brings? To another year of sameness and minute differences? To another year of new resolutions that will be forgotten and discarded in a week? To catch up with other grown-up friends and whine together about growing older and leading a lackluster life? To put the sad moment of realization into words that will be the contents of a long whiny tirade against growing up? (check)

You know why kids look forward to their birthdays and adults dread theirs? It's not age. Well, not age alone anyway. It's school, college, a learning institution. With every passing year, you are glad to get the old year done with and begin a new one. Because you look forward to the next year to put you in a higher grade, to learn new stuff, to leave an old class behind, to forget old diagrams and definitions. With every coming year, you know you'll get a certificate, a parchment, a denouement in the written word that you have sailed through past year's storm of follies and failures and reached the shore of new undiscovered land, where there are yet unexplored territories and ample opportunities to make new mistakes.

It's not that we stop learning after getting out of schools. It's just that we stop getting as many frequent assurances and reassurances. Kindergarten teachers have time for their subjects, not normal adults leading busy lives. Your boss won't have the time to appreciate the efforts you took to color-code your complicated excel-sheet so that it's easy to understand. That's your job, you are not going to get a star on your dossier for every task you tick off your to-do list. Your friends won't have time to listen to you bitch about everyday activities the way they did when you pretended to be studying in the library. What used to capture attention before, will no longer dazzle your old, mature grown up audience. We're not kids anymore. We have lists to complete and files to organize. Who cares if you can't grow up and stop looking for a good word for every good thing you do, who has the time to care to what's happening to you when their own lives is, as the term nowadays goes- FUBAR?

So there you are, twenty-two and still not much of an anybody. In some era, people used to start their lives at this age. Nowadays, people your age are getting into rehab for the fourth time or are being compared to legends. People much younger are becoming superstars by having a voice that only puts their gender in doubt, and here you are, sure of your gender, unsure of what you are doing with your life. The only thing you've got to celebrate is that your generation can now blame the phenomenon of quarter-life crisis when the going gets tough. Well, that's good for reassurances.

Growing up can be such a pain. How can one not like Peter Pan?



PS: I don't know if it's a good idea to be listening to this one now- http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/s/1973+Album+Version+/DjkDf

Image: My 23rd Birthday by nyu   (It's not my 23rd, but, same/similar sentiments)

Anger Management

Ok, high time I came here and ranted. Well, it's not ranting. It's just some anger management right now.

I'm being really patient these days. With everything. Yes, I don't really want everyone to understand it. In fact I don't expect anyone to understand or whatever. It's just that I feel if I kept repeating it to myself, I'd be good at it. Gosh, I can never get that thing out of my head. I have, for some reason, always told myself that I will become what I tell myself. If I told myself I'm being patient, I will be so. I need more convincing for myself than for others. Or maybe I can't convince others about how convinced I am because I can't convince myself. This doesn't help but prove only one thing- I CANNOT SELL.

So, back to anger management. It is particularly difficult when you aren't burning your lungs out. It's even more difficult when you can't call up your best friend(s) because your head's so swollen with fake ego. And listening to all your favorite sweet songs doesn't help in writing or as they say, channelizing your energy to create something profound, meaningful and deep.

So yes, I am angry. Pissed. Angry. Irritated. All of those things that I could otherwise blame on PMS, and which I could get away with if it was for less than 6 hours. But, never mind. Things are definitely not looking good, despite me listening to all the sweet/happy songs. Only I can lie to myself well enough and delude myself into anger or happy highs. And with all that anger channelization, all I've doing is setting a record for saving drafts (thank you google for autosave). So far the count is : 4 blog posts, 3 mails. All resting safely somewhere where they wouldn't hurt/harm/maim/injure/kill anyone. Or lead to the same aforementioned happening to me afterward.

With all of this, I've made a list of things one should not do when angry. Some are based on real experiences and some are things I assume would hold good in a hypothetical situation:

1) Do not email. Type it out. Don't hit "Send". Let gmail do the "draft autosaved" thingy for you.
2) Do not talk on the phone if you're home and are not sure if your parents are asleep. Your parents don't need to know you've improved your swearocabulary over the years.
3)Do not kick your CPU when you know your PC is recuperating from the crash it went through 3 weeks back. It wouldn't help to have no music, no e-books, no sitcoms, no movies, no xkcd, when you're fuming.
4) Do not go for a haircut. Just in case.
5) Do not watch movies where the protagonists look real cool stabbing themselves with needles in the first half and real sad-ass losers by the other half, and by which time you'd have probably given up on watching it.
6) Do not go down memory lane if you're angry in a combination- like angry and sad or angry and lonely or angry and whatever else. Remember- thinking about good old days when life sucked and you couldn't do anything about it would not help the days when life still sucks and you can do something about it but refuse to do so.
7) Do not drink too much coffee/alcohol/cola or eat too much of chips/spicy food/chocolate.
8) Do not keep precious objects within your reach. Do not keep them in the company of sharp/heavy/both objects.
9) Do not try those counting from 20 to 1 or saying the alphabet backwards kind of tricks. You'd only lose momentum in your angry tirade and miss an epiphany, if any.
10) Do not look for therapy from music-Listening to some chick singing about her boyfriend not understanding her or a crazed guy with laryngitis screaming about his skin bleeding and intestines boiling in bile won't help you. If anything, it will only make it worse. Go classical. Only instrumental. Listen to Beethoven, if anything. That is, if you have any of it or can be patient enough to download it.
11) Do not try that whole 'breathe deeply and break your ribs exercise". All you manage to do is create an atmospheric imbalance of some sorts around you. Not to mention, you feel more tired than before.
12) Do not get into the whole sweating it out drama. You decide to go loosen some fat and push all that anger through kick boxing or aerobics or whatever it is that you do in the name of exercise, and then you pull a hamstring, sprain an ankle or break your hip and get confined to bed rest thus earning yourself some more time to brood and work yourself into a frenzy.
13) Do not get angry at the beginning or middle of your weekend. Get into those furies just a day before getting back to work on a weekday. You can let it all out and only blame work. Or you'd get so mad with work, you'd sort of forget about the original anger situation.
14) And don't waste time blogging. And if you've done that already, don't let it go to waste by shoving it into "Drafts". And no, there are no funny scribbles, comics kinda things going with this one. Take it or leave it.
15) And lastly, if you are mildly sleepy, forget all the crap about not taking anger to bed. Just take it and go flat on it. Don't waste time thinking, blogging, reading, listening to music, watching stuff, talking etc. Just sleep. That's probably the best thing to do. Apart from burning your lungs and killing the germs inside with some well turned out ethanol. But, never mind.