Happy New Year

Celebrate endings—for they precede new beginnings.” —Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Wishing you all a very Happy, Peaceful, Prosperous, and Healthy New Year 2024!

What is the opposite of …

Thanksgiving?

For some reason, this has been playing in my mind recently and it started with thoughts on being apologetic and saying sorry. We (a little bit generous here…because Thanksgiving isn’t celebrated everywhere) have a day to give our thanks to all and one and I think (correct me if I am wrong) that we do have a day of atonement in the Jewish calendar (if I remember the holidays correctly from my days working in a predominantly Jewish school and from watching Marvellous Mrs Maisel). Why isn’t there a day to say sorry to people we have hurt and maybe mean it too. I will tell you where I am coming from. It all started with a video I stumbled upon (don’t ask me the source, I haven’t a clue). In the video, this lady was asking the presenter and I am paraphrasing here.

“Why is it important for a person who has hurt you to say sorry? why do you need the validation that what they did was wrong and for them to accept it in order for you to move on? Why is your peace dependent on someone saying sorry?”

This got me thinking…I have people in my family who never say sorry and that includes the kids in the family too. Some say “What is the point of saying sorry if you don’t mean it?” and some others say “Why should I say sorry? I did what I thought was the best”, some more are like “I am older so I don’t have to really say it” and others are like “meh!”. Honestly, I am a person who expects people to say sorry if they realize their mistake (either by self-reflection or if I convince them about it) and it is only because I always say sorry, irrespective of their age, if I made a mistake. In fact, once my niece told me that there wasn’t any need for me to say sorry to her as I was an elder and I was allowed to make mistakes. I had to correct her opinion on that.

Is it really wrong to expect people to realise their mistakes? And is it wrong to expect them to say sorry because that is the only way “I” would know if they realized their mistake without any dramatic and cliched statements or discussions? For me, it isn’t about my peace of mind but definitely, a validation that they know why and how they have hurt me and hopefully they won’t do it again. Not all mistakes can be made OK by that single word, but at least it is a good start isn’t it?

All these thoughts were going through my mind when I saw that video and that in turn made me question a day for feeling and expressing how sorry we are for the hurt we cause others should it be part of our day-to-day thing instead of allocating a day for it? I know Thanksgiving Day has a little bit of a religious element to it but in general, I think it is like the harvest festival that we have here in India thanking nature for all that it yields us (again… correct me if I am wrong here. I am avoiding searching for it lest I go into a rabbit hole of web pages).

If you have come this far, thank you for giving me your time and reading my random thoughts 🙂

Late but not lost

Finally…I managed to finish my travelogue of our visit to Udaipur in March. It’s been a while really but thanks to my photographs and my memory I am able to recall all that we did and didn’t do. If I had left it for longer I might have missed a few details.

Binge watching

One of the perks of living with my sis is that my nephew and I have similar tastes when it comes to music and movies except maybe the hip-hop songs that he listens to more which I am not a big fan of. So during his break (schools had a delayed start here due to the heat waves) we binge-watched a lot of movies together. I haven’t watched most of the Star Wars movies but thanks to him rewatching them for the nth time (most of the scenes fast-forwarded because they are lame, according to him) I kind of feel like I have a hang of the Star Wars franchise now, just don’t go asking me quiz questions on that as of yet 😉 But the one series that I was absolutely happy to watch was the Top Gun series. I had watched Top Gun a long time ago but had forgotten a lot of it. So we decided to watch it first before we moved to the Maverick one. I should say it was a lot of fun. I wouldn’t understand the craziness that comes with that movie, but I get the appeal of both movies. Especially when you watch them back to back, with all the songs that they sing together as a unit, the kid coming back and singing the same song in Maverick, the emotional side of the story, the songs etc. It was fun and I enjoyed both movies. Typical Hollywood masala movie to watch on a holiday. My nephew and I are hooked on the ‘I ain’t worried’ song and we keep singing it *all the time*. He is trying to whistle the tune now too and sometimes it feels like Simba trying to roar 😀 but it is cute and he is almost there. Another year and he will be whistling like a pro 😉

He hadn’t watched any Jurassic Park movies which I thought was an abomination and promptly decided to rectify that and we ended up watching 4 of those movies (literally binge-watched them in 2 days). We had to stop after Jurassic World coz the rest were not yet available and the holidays were over too.

For a kid of 12 years (almost 13 according to him), he is into Suits, which I find very interesting and he is really into it (even though he would be happier watching Breaking Bad according to him 😀 and even attempted to bribe me to watch so he can watch along with me. The only reason he is not watching it on his own yet is that his mom will stop the subscription if he watched anything not appropriate for his age). The other sitcom he is into is Brooklyn 99, again a weird choice. I am thinking of introducing Big Bang Theory and seeing how he takes to it. Not that I have watched any of these. I don’t watch any sitcoms so when he starts any sitcom I start reading my book and just keep an eye on the time and ensure that he does his homework after an hour of break 🙂 Hopefully, he will continue to do the right thing when I am back home and not there to monitor him. I will sure miss all the binge-watching when I head back that is for sure 🙂

Music is indeed …

…the medicine of the mind. Music has always played a very important role in my life (hence its place in the name of the blog). I have always turned to music for all occasions. The moment I stop listening to music is when I know I ain’t feeling right. Because I listen to appropriate music for all occasions, like listening to angst music when I feel very revengeful, and slow ones when feeling melancholic, but mostly my music tends to be very peppy and pop-py. For the past few months, I haven’t been listening to anything really. I didn’t think about it much until today. What changed today? I started listening to my favourite songs, starting with Adele’s 21 Album and followed by some Shawn Mendes 😉 and instantly I feel like I am 100% back (emotionally at least).

That is a sign that I am getting my zing back 😀 Thanks to the hard-core meds that are doing their job too. Fingers crossed that the side effects are manageable too. After a couple of weeks, there is a visible decrease in the boils and the old ones are healing at a good pace. There are new ones but they are at an increasingly decreasing pace (does that make sense???). I will take any progress really. If only I could sleep well at night, it would be great. But I compensate for it with naps in the afternoons. The itching that accompanies drying skin is the killer for now. I have a check-up in another couple of weeks and I am hoping that there will be visibly better changes too. But for now, I am going to listen to more songs (some Ed Sheeran, some Lana Del Ray, some Imelda May…) and apply some medicine to my mind.