The Bollywood Drinking Game

Not that I'm allowed to have a drink in front of my parents.....


1. Whenever a chorus of off-screen woman harmonize to accentuate a point that's already been beaten to death, take a drink.
2. Whenever you spot a continuity error, take a drink.
3. If the continuity error has disappeared by the end of the song, take another drink.
4. If the continuity error is unintentional, take a shot.
5. Whenever you hear someone called crazy, take a drink. Note that Hindi has four or five different words for crazy. Learn them before you start the game.
6. Whenever someone makes the worst possible choice, for no other reason than the plot needs to get worse (for instance, asking the least reasonable or calm person to talk to the irrate police officer, confessing to your worst enemy that you've fallen for his sister, etc).
7. If you ever start trying to calculate the traveling times involved in the cut scenes of the songs, then just finish off the bottle right now.
8. If the subtitles are clearly taking liberties with the script, take a drink.
9. If the subtitles explain why a joke was supposed to be funny, take a drink.
10. If you're watching the movie with an Indian who has already seen the movie, and they keeping giving away chunks of the plot, with a smile on his/her face, just finish off the whole bottle.
11. If they focus in really, really close on a face, that is completely hamming up the emotional content of the scene, take a drink.

decent bollywood flicks

http://www.bollywoodblitz.com/movies/munnabhai-mbbs/index.shtml

This one was so popular they're actually making a sequel. (mostly for sakuramayoke

....?

My mom just said the weirdest thing. "I stopped buying you presents because Christine would always steal them from you."

For those of you just tuning in, one of the reasons I'm cataloguing all this strangeness, because this is really the first time in my life that I've tried to enjoy spending time with my family, tried to really sit back and examine what frustrates me about talking to them, and whether these reasons are petty or valid. So....I'd appreciate if people talked to me about commonalities they see.

She just told my brother, "Dad and I have decided that I'm not going to buy any more presents for myself until you get married."

o.O

Uh, okay, then.

I really don't understand.

salt box stories

I usually hate writing this style (the poetry at the bottom, not this strange gushing prose up top here), and it's completely a first draft, anyway. No idea why I even bothered writing it out.

Still, salt box stories. I had quite forgotten those. Summer camp, my junior year, one of the most horrifically demanding seasons of my student life. "Yet, somehow, at three AM, long after my Alaskan Dream had fallen asleep, I had found Annie, whom I didn't even remember until I read her notes.

We sat on these wooden boxes that littered one section of the campus, and I'd amaze her with tales and adventures and the most meaningless diatribes. Even then, I was a talker, and she adored me for it. One night, driven by my own words to fresh heights of curiosity, I finally gave in to the temptation to rip open one of those boxes and find out what was inside: rock salt. You know, for winter.

But winter was a dream-song of another era, when you're seventeen in the summer, when you're just beginning to have some idea of what women are good for besides reaching out for their trust. Rock salt in summer is a kind of foresight that was utterly foreign to this young, cocky, expectantly romantic boy who never knew the length of his shirt. That summer was when I first realized that you could do more with a pretty young lass, then puzzle out her defenses and earn her trust. Earning trust had become a game to me, by then, a thing I practiced at with other girls for the Real Show, for Angel.

Poor Annie, she was no match for me. I unlaced the corset of her defenses as quickly as Angel can undo a man's belt.

Poor Annie, for the first time, I had some idea what I might do with that trust. And with the kind of unthinking simplicity which comes to unthinking boys, I tested those ideas out on her. Yes, quite nice. I shall have to try this with my love.

Sweet Annie, I had quite forgotten you. You tried to pry a few more moments out of me, with your words, but I had long ago learned to shield myself from the kinds of petty attacks you had made. You wrote me a letter every day, after that night, when I finally showed you what might still my tongue.

Ha! That's poetic license. I don't even remember what happened between us, but she writes of a single kiss.

Poor, sweet Annie. I had quite forgotten you, but all your words are still locked up in my desk drawer at my parents' house. The picture you gave me is still here, too, though no matter how long I look at it, I do not recognize you.

Is it a comfort, to know that your words, all that vast array of special stationary, they made it back across the states to my home? Is it a comfort to know that I carefully ordered and numbered them, kept even the envelopes they came in? I labeled and organized all your desperate pleas for me to love you back.

And then I put you in a drawer.

Thirteen years later, you snuck out past the giant pile of letters from Alaskan Dream, and slid out of order and out of your envelope, just far enough for me to read these words:

Sing Me a Salt Box Story.

Oh, sweet Annie. I had quite forgotten you.


( Read more... )

Aah, yes, that is how I want to wake up

Okay, first off, to the half dozen of you that text-messaged me to let me know it was Xmas this morning: thanks, but next time could you wait until noon?

My mom started off my morning with a rather strange question, considering the source.

"Amul, what kind of women are you attracted to?" Not only did she not wait until my first cup of coffee before trying to make me think, but they don't HAVE coffee at my house, and it's Christmas, so there aren't any coffeehouses open anywhere.

I dunno. I like strong women, emotionally, I mean. Women who refuse to let me take care of them. Pretty, too, although strong is more important than pretty to me, at this point. Active and athletic.

"Really? Because [your Ex] never struck me as any of those things. In fact, she always seemed...." and the rest of this conversation is not fit for print.

After about ten minutes, followed by another four or five minutes of sullen silence on my part, my mom suddenly broke out with this non-sequitor: "I think you and Amit should move back in with us."

And you wonder why I don't visit more often. Of course, then I had to explain WHY I had just said that.

Yeah, merry Xmas everyone. I really want some coffee.

And a cigarette.