devoured by my own pleasures

My head is a little hazy this past week. Not enough hours of the day for music, reading, watching movies. There's a different and deeper involvement with social media. Twitter is really new to me, and it's nice to be able to drop a quick line to someone I admire. Not just, oh, say Amitabh Bachchan (it was his fans I followed there in the first place), but also an odd assortment of folks like Josh Malina, Pee Wee Herman, Susan Orlean, Merrill Markoe. I read little snippets from Colin Quinn and the Dalai Lama and Joe Hill.  Met up with Tricia there, the woman who writes the amazing Coney Island blog Amusing the Zillion (I originally registered there under the name @northofconey so the Coney Island people do follow me.) Not many of my friends are there, but Gretchen Kunz is, and of course it's where I first met Shiva.

Facebook has been a slightly busier place than usual for me of late. Of course, it's more public.  I only have 23 followers on Twitter, but I have 131 friends on Facebook. Then again, Facebook does have private corners like messaging and text. A lot of music content for me there, since my friends are a little heavy on the musician side. (Also rediscovered a little know of my college radio friends.) I haven't counted recently, but there are quite a few of my old boyfriends there, a few of whom do flirt. Old reliable Bob Steiner, wicked Michael Sheehan. And some old friends where the arm's-distance quality of Facebook is just right.

So many music clips! so many movie recommendations! so many jokes and political quips, clever notes to respond too.  But then there's also a like of YouTube to look through to find just the right bit with which to represent myself. There are emails I have to crop, which would run to a novel if I said everything I wanted to.

This is a winter of breathing slow and hard, thinking warm thoughts.

After a long online chat the other night, where I was told about how fascinated westerners seem with the Kama Sutra, I decided to finally read it. I'm not sure how many translations are around, but I downloaded Sir Richard Francis Burton's (Project Gutenberg), which I know was the first English translation. I guess like most (stupid) westerners, I believed it to be something like a sex manual, with hundreds of sex positions laid out, and so on. The beginning does deal with sex, explaining how a man and woman should properly enjoy each other, and describes and names certain attitudes and acts. But a lot of it, and the entire book, is just more about relationships and social rules -- most of which seem to be bendable or breakable. For instance, it tells how a proper wife should be chaste, but then there's a lot of space devoted to methods of seducing married women, or sneaking into a harem to enjoy the king's wives. Most of the book is about courtship, really. Some is quaint, some is sensible, and some is astonishing.

Enjoy an unwilling woman by drugging her and taking her home, then enjoying her before she comes to? Legitimate pastime then - date-rape now. Attracting a woman, when encountered at a party, festival, or friends's house, by stroking your mustache, jingling your ornaments, and (my personal favorite), sitting a child on your lap, placing paan in its mouth with your tongue and stroking its chin. O rly?

Overall, it was a pretty interesting social history, a really odd, ancient slice of life. Vastly entertaining.

And our old pal Amitabh is again in the hospital. I knew about his 1983 injury while making the movie Coolie, but did not know that he had subsequent abdominal surgery in 2005. I knew his spleen ruptured and was removed in '83, but apparently he's had lasting intestinal issues, including an incisional hernia. So he's having an operation today for something related to that, and apparently the doctor saw something else on a CAT scan. The EF, of course, are losing their minds. Those are some seriously crazy people, and I still sometimes make the mistake of trying to interact with them. There are a couple I can say that I like, but not many I enjoy reading. Anyway, I think I can also say that Amitabh is maybe too soft-hearted when it comes to those crazies.  He follows a handful of the craziest on Twitter, and blogs from his hospital bed to make all of the insane fans happy. (Though it does also serve the purpose of getting accurate information to the media.)

Some video? oh, if I must. I was lucky enough to find this one, the opening song of the show I attended last January: 

This is how to love David Johansen.

Then I started with "Smooth" again, by Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas. That song hooks me and earworms me up more often than I'd imagine. I'm afraid I may have passed it along to Shiva. There's something so sexy about that song that it's almost scary:

Kind of makes me wish for summer already.

Plans for the weekend: finish watching Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (recent movie, well received, Hrithik Roshan).  Make one more necklace and one more pair of earrings for the Village Scandal. Continue to play four or five different games of Words with Friends at once, and get creamed in most of them. (My Scrabble skills are way rusty, and my friends are way smart.) Buy a few things online. We got our hands on a little extra money and I may finally buy myself a kameez and a bottle of Mitsouko.  

I've been wearing Bal a Versailles, which I bought - reasonably - on a hunch. It's not bad but I have a feeling my aunt Mara used to wear it -- it makes me think of her. Barry likes it a lot, but it's not my favorite. 

Actually I saw a thing on Fiverr the other day where someone will blend a cologne sample to your liking, which of course intrigues me.

I think everything is intriguing me lately. He does feel like it should be spring, leaning into summer...