DIY

I am a big do-it-yourself person. If some household stuff is broken I try to repair it myself before calling the experts. A blocked drain, a broken fan, a fridge light that went out, those kind of things. Which is a part of my evolution as a human, I guess. Where does fixing things come in the evolutionary process, you may ask. I don’t know, I was just rambling.

Anyway, the DIY I'm really talking about is the kind of things, you know, like painting your old pair of jeans with REALLY big flowers, making your own calendar and writing love poems on it, sticking matchsticks on a chart paper you’ve put up on your wall, making your own envelopes with silly underwater designs, cutting up your old clothes to make bags out of them, buying buttons of all shapes and sizes and sewing them on on a purse you made yourself, and many more useless things.

I think every girl goes through a beadsy phase in her life. You know, collecting beads, making necklaces, bracelets, sticking them on clothes and bags. Why, I even made a beads bookmark. A string of beads hanging from a rather thick handmade paper. I bought a denim bag from the secondhand market in Aizawl, and that bag went through various stages in the evolutionary process before it exhausted its usefulness and was laid to rest in the garbage. Beaded, rebeaded, re-rebeaded, dyed, re-re-rebeaded, and then redyed. I'm sure that bag must have felt like a guinea pig, poor thing.

A friend and I got “inspiration” from a magazine, took out our old jeans and painted a big red rose on the right leg. People stared whenever we wore them, which for me was about two times. I still have that pair of jeans.

Remember when Mariah Carey cut off the waist band off her jeans? At around the same time I did the same thing (but I was unaware that the diva had done it) because I was getting less space inside the jeans, which was further mutilated (cut it off at the knees) and decorated with mediocre art (a design I copied from a bedsheet).

And fabric paint, oh fabric paint! I've lost count of the number of shirts I’d ruined because of this medium. Not only shirts, bags and shoes were also its victim. Wait, I still have a sample, let me take a picture for you.

                                                          (T-shirt art, circa 2007)
                                                     

And altering clothes! This is not exactly craft-y, but very much DIY. Add/remove a sleeve here, raise the hemline there, cut off the leg, use ribbons and beads and other stuff for decoration, turn a frock into a skirt, a skirt into a bag, and so on.

I don’t know if cutting up magazines and pasting the pictures on a chart paper counts as DIY, but I did it myself heheh. Or doing the same thing with friends’ photos, garnish with a dialogue box and make them say things which we thought were really funny. Ha ha ha.

Long before we immersed ourselves in Facebook, we created our own “Walls”. A chart paper stuck on a wall, and our friends who came visiting would write whatever messages they wanted. A kind of Guest Book. And sometimes we write down the things we did (Eg: It’s 2 AM and XYZ is talking in her sleep).

What else…? Nothing came to mind. So here is the Mariah Carey video where we first saw the waist-band-less pair of jeans.

Tutorial: How to make a balloon drum

I haven’t done this thing in years. Many of you might have done it in your childhood, and for many it may be a new thing, a new learning. Allow me to demonstrate how to create a simple musical tool, The Balloon Drum.

Materials required: A torn piece of balloon, an empty cup, and a rubber band.

Stretch the balloon piece flat over the mouth of the cup:

Tie down with the rubber band, so it is airtight.

Your balloon drum is ready. Pinch it to make a “Twangggg” sound.

Escape Velocity

The best thing about a new year, according to me, is the renewal of faith and hope. Well, you can renew your faith and hope anytime, but with the onset of a new year you have this mindset of “New beginning, good start, etc etc”. As if the previous years all faded away and you have begun on a clean slate, all your past mistakes and sins erased and washed away. You have been given another chance and you should be thankful that you are still alive.

You must be wondering about the title. Did you think I was going to write something Physics related? Escape velocity, as we learned, is the minimum velocity an object must acquire to free itself from the earth’s gravitational pull. 11.2 kilometers/second.

Isn’t is funny how our best ideas come at the most inappropriate times? When we are least likely to implement them? I would go for days without updating my blog because I simply do not have anything to write about. No inspiration, nothing. The other day I was at work and suddenly escape velocity just popped into my head. Maybe I read something online that reminded me of it.

All distractions are welcome when you're working, so immediately I googled ‘Escape Velocity”, for want of something better to do. I came across Chris Brogan’s website, where he wrote : My definition of “escape velocity” is “the ability to leave a situation that isn’t helpful or desired”. I was like, wow! So neatly put!

I'm sure that everyone must have been stuck in an undesirable situation at least once in our lives. It may be personal, work related, or community related. And sometimes what happens is that we know the way out, but we are too scared to go in that direction. We are too afraid of what others may think, what our families and friends may think, how we will be able to hold our heads up if we leave that situation. And we tie ourselves down, miserable, but unwilling to change.

An unhappy marriage. A job we hate. Friendship with people who make us live in their shadows. But we have kids. We need to pay bills. We cannot imagine making new friends.

This is when our personal escape velocities come to the test. Are we able to generate that minimum velocity to free ourselves? Are we ready to face an unknown future, take risks and jump blindfolded into the dark? Stop listening to people and do what we want to do? Most of the time we never achieve this escape velocity. We don’t even know it exists. We just accept things the way they are and wallow in our misery.

Sometimes, we know there is an escape velocity. But to reach that takes time, patience, and though it may not apply to all cases, luck. We work our way towards it, slowly, steadily, and prepare ourselves for it. And when we free ourselves from whatever had chained us, that freedom tastes so sweet!

I’d had a good start to the new year, and I hope that things will get better. Nothing mindblowing or anything, but I have this feeling that it’s going to be a good year for me. Just a sixth sense kind of thing. I may even get close to escape velocity by the close of the third quarter, and my life may take a different direction. And no, I'm not getting married.

I guess this qualifies as the obligatory I-will-do-better-in-the-new-year post. Wishing you a good and successful year ahead, and may you acquire your escape velocity and fly off to a better future.

Timepass post

I'm thinking of switching to Wordpress, but haven’t really worked on it (procrastinating, as usual). But I've been on Blogger for so long (officially it’s been four years) that it’s hard to let go just like that. I think it must be kind of like having a new phone number and texting the people in your contacts list “Hey this is me and this is my new number”. Of course if you don’t say your name your friends may think you are some psycho stalker and hit the Delete button immediately.

The thing I like about Wordpress is, the Freshly Pressed posts you see when you open it. You discover amazing blogs / blogposts every other day. Like the one that asked you to “Please describe yourself in the most annoying way possible”, the one that made me laugh out loud, even when I thought about it afterwards –“Christmas Gift Guide: Revenge Edition”, or the “Top Ten Movies I'm Embarrassed I Haven’t Seen”.

Today I discovered a new blogpost, The 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list, and the blogger had listed around 1200 books (Yeah I know the title says 1001 books). It is not the definitive list or anything, just one person's opinion, but a pretty good list there I must say. From the list I’d read a few,  some I left mid-book, bought but didn’t open, read the translated version, watched the movie, and read the comic book and abridged versions.

I went through the entire list, and here are the books which I've read. Excluding the abridged, translated, comics and movie versions. Maybe I should make my own list from this - Top 100 books I'm embarrassed I haven't read. (Oh, and try the Wordpress thing. It's much better than wasting your time on Facebook.)

(Only 37? Now I AM embarrassed. Now how many have you read from that list? Not mine you idiot.) 

1. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
2. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
3. On Beauty – Zadie Smith
4. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
5. Atonement – Ian McEwan
6. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
7. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
8. The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
9. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
10. Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
11. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
12. Beloved – Toni Morrison
13. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
14. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
15. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
16. The Godfather – Mario Puzo
17. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
18. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
19. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
20. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
21. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
22. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
23. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
24. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
25. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
26. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
27. Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
28. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
29. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
30. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
31. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
32. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
33. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
34. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
35. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
36. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
37. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe