Frustrated Inc.

It is so easy to let frustration build up. You never really know where and how it started. In fact, I don’t even realize that it has started until it sets in.

I get frustrated when I hear sounds that I don’t want to hear or when I heard things that I don’t expect to hear. These can range from mobile phone buzzes and notifications to Blu meowing to attract attention. It can be the next-door neighbor’s kid screaming or it could be the fight between two women from the slum behind my building. It could be the sound of the air-conditioner malfunctioning or the drip from a faucet that is not closed properly.

One of my wishes is to be in an environment where sounds are absolutely under my control. Almost like have a mute or a kill-switch button for everything that could possibly create sound. Something like a sound-proofed studio for a living environment. I guess I am still okay with ambient sounds, even those that are characteristic of a city like Mumbai. But they have to be nondescript. Something that can be figuratively swept under the carpet of my fucked up mind so that I don’t feel accountable righting the things that are wrong.

As a musician, feeling frustrated with technology seems like a given. I am also starting to feel like I’m getting old enough to feel like an older man who finds any new things in the environment frustrating. When I’m working on a song on my digital audio workstation, I get frustrated when I’m unable to achieve what I want quickly. Because I haven’t had formal training in audio engineering, it is easy to get lost in the maze of parameters and controls and lose sight of the art that I’m trying to create.

I get frustrated when I make typos. I’m increasingly making typos in whatever I do. I fee like my dexterity on the keyboard (for typing) and my ability to pick errors that I have made are waning. It is such an embarrassing situation when someone who has had over 20 years of touch-typing experience and over a decade of experience in academic proofreading and copyediting make mistakes after mistakes after mistakes.

These are some of the sources of frustrations that I have. Right at this very moment, at least the noise and typo frustrations have set in. Blu is begging for food after being fed and J is on the phone in the same room, getting some work done. He has moved out into the other rooms a couple of times, but he still starts conversations in my auditory range.

Maybe I should work on this pervasive frustration issue with my therapist more than anything else.

An update about Neverlast

Blogging seems so late 2000s these days, at least for me.

Until about 6 years ago, around the time I met J, this blog used to be where I opened my heart out, and let loose all the shit that my brain came up with. I'm not suggesting that the outlet that I had on this blog has somehow been replaced by a man. No, not at all. Yet, I admit that we do have strange conversations. But that's not why I stopped writing here.

Life became packed. Dating someone within the same geographical boundaries means that your social life kinda doubles. Plus music. Gigs, rehearsals, gigs, and more. Plus, ever heard of social media and podcasts?

Yet, a few years ago, when I was visiting my parents in Thiruvananthapuram, I scratched that itch to write again. Write blogs, that is. I had just started exploring Tumblr and I thought, Why not? Tumblr had a nice app which you could easily draft posts in. It was more intuitive for sharing images/gifs. Why not, indeed? That's how Neverlast was born.

Strangely enough [with three heaped scoops of irony], Tumblr became my desirable source of erotica. Anyway, Tumblr, for some fucking reason, does not let you have multiple user accounts on the app. That was a huge dampner to my blogging efforts. Since then, I have linked  my Instagram to Tumblr, and Neverlast gets all my instas, yo.

Coming to the point -- I'm back with my parents. Some slight changes, though. They are in Chennai. My father is in his deathbed. My mother has become even more complaining and talkative than she was before. I'm here helping my sister out to manage my parents. I'm somehow able to meaningfully communicate and spend time with a child (my niece)! But I have become even more averse to talking on the phone to other people (like J) and share what craziness I'm going through.

This means that all day I go through an exquisitely frustrating ordeal of managing chaos, noise, interruptions, while attempting to work from home. This is indeed no fun. I get my shit together once my Mom goes to bed around 10 pm. And today, I have work to finish. So I took a shower to rinse myself off all the frustration. And in the shower, I thought - Why not, indeed?

So I am going to try and microblog on Neverlast once more. You are welcome to check it out.