Mosquitoes, ceiling fans and sweating

Some of you, okay at least one of you (yes, you know who it is) has wondered what a delight it would be to be my boyfriend. In the various adulatory comments that I have received over a few years, I have found qualities in me which even I haven’t realized I had. My self-esteem has been on the rise because of these and sometimes even I am quite sure that I would be able to give my partners a good time being just myself.

No, I’m not getting carried away slapping my own bass guitar. If you are wondering what that silly phrase means, don’t worry. I just coined it. It’s a neo-phrase adapted from ‘blowing your own trumpet’ – just in my case that I don’t play trumpet. I play the bass guitar. One more thing, ‘slap’ is not the same thing that you see in S&M movies. It’s a form of bass playing which is very cool. I must also add that I’m pretty average in slapping. Back to me – but my negative side. Here’s why you wouldn’t like living with me anymore.

Like every living person on Earth, who trudge on their feet miserably towards whatever sorry thing that they are doing, I too have my own ‘peculiarities’. Some call them ‘the extra spice’. Some call them ‘OCDs’. Some might even call them ‘things that make one person different from others’. Actually, I would like to rephrase this term to ‘annoyances found in a person that you would like to see eliminated; so much so that you wouldn’t mind killing that person itself’.

I have a ‘thang’ for avoiding unnatural noises while sleeping and listening to music; especially, when you do both together. Yes, I sleep while listening to some kind of music or the other because I believe that you are able to find time for listening that you can’t otherwise, courtesy your busy schedule. Besides, it’s a cool thing to wake up to a song which you really like.

Because the ceiling fans create a whole lot of noise (almost all of them do, and the one in m apartment is the worst of them), I hate to put it on. What happens in that case is that, those unimaginably resilient mosquitoes swarm and buzz around me and prick me to agony. Seriously, these are one of the very few ‘pricks’ that I don’t like. I do my best to cover me with a bed-sheet. Sometimes that works. Most of the times, it doesn’t. I was getting tired of this predicament and I decided to do something about it. If you are wondering if I weren’t using any repellents, I was actually using ‘All Out pluggy’ which doesn’t work at all.

Yesterday, when I went to the supermarket, I bought Mortein mosquito coils. I was happy hoping that Mortein would provide me with the same clinical efficiency that it did with its rat poison. Talking about rats, you must have an idea as to how irritating it was for me when that stupid rat was running amok in my apartment. That was the worst kind of noise. I had to turn up the ceiling fan and music just to eliminate that!

So, in the evening, I light this mosquito coil and was happy that the fumes even smelled okay. Since, I had closed my windows of my amazingly cute (read claustrophobic) studio apartment, the fumes were getting to my eyes. By the time I was ready to sleep, I my eyes were as red as a baboon’s sass and I was lacrymating profusely. But I still felt happy. I could listen to music without the stupid ceiling fan and doze off, which I managed to at about 2 am. 

At 5 am, I was awakened by the soothingly warm buzzing of our dear friends, mosquitoes! Fuck, I was so pissed that I thought ‘Dammit, I’ll turn on the ceiling fan!’ I did just that and went back to sleep. I woke up to the knocks on the door by the ‘garbage wallah’ at 8 am. I picked up my garbage bag and gave it to him and returned back to bed. My radio was playing ‘Machinehead’ by Bush (the band, not the chimp) and I felt like smashing that ceiling fan into pieces because it was drowning clarity of the music.

I switched it off, and thought of dozing for a few more minutes. The only problem, I dozed for a few more minutes than I hoped. I woke up at 11 am all sweaty and muggy. I felt like cursing myself to death. I had just wasted an entire morning by just sleeping.

Incidentally, earlier in the night, Vinokur and I were discussing about finding an apartment or hotel room in Mumbai for him to stay when he would visit me next. For a long time, I kept on wondering why he wouldn’t stay in my cozy (read miniscule) apartment. That way, I thought, we could save a lot of money. I even felt angry at him when he suggested that Jews needed certain ‘luxuries’ and ‘comforts’ to live in – like air-conditioning etc.

Thankfully, the night just cleared up the smoke in my head. The only problem is to find a place for the Jew god to stay.