Celebrating Women Everywhere | International Women's Day

I’d wanted to do this post for a long time now. Each year, March 8 would come and go, escaping my notice. FYI, I don’t live my life knowing what day today is. I deign to burden myself with such trivial information only when I’ve got no way around it. Illustrious examples include exam schedules and birthdays of best friends who are capable of burying me alive.

But I digress. (I really should make that my tagline.)

Here is a prized list of books (off the top of my head, thank you college-life) that celebrates women and shows us exactly what they are capable of.

The Help – Kathryn Stockett

Oh hell yes. I will not oblige you by giving you a description of this book. If you haven’t even heard of this book by now - ye who hath been living under a rock, rectify that mistake pronto. And for those of you who have heard of it but couldn’t be bothered to read it:

The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd

A girl whose mother died when she was little runs away with their Black maid (who’s the only mother figure she’s ever known in her life) to escape her father (and the pissed-off racists), right into the arms of a sisterhood. There she is introduced to the secret world of bees, the Black Madonna and her mother. I love this book to shreds, btw. This had so much potential to turn into yet another civil-rights drama, but it is just a backdrop to flaunt the strength of women.

The Invention of Wings – Sue Monk Kidd

It really is about the inventions of wings in America before the abolition of slavery. It’s about two sisters as abolitionists and feminists and how they plunged ahead, despite the criticism they faced, even from fellow abolitionists. Bear in mind this is a loose account of the Grimke sisters, so no sceptics, these women aren’t fictional.

Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire – Elizabeth Wein

These books are a bust for traditional tropes of delicate, fragile women. This book celebrates the power of friendship and sisterhood even under the direst of circumstances. How the love for your best friends and the love for your homeland can equip you with powers you didn’t know you could have. Fair warning – it’s a roller-coaster ride, and not for the faint-hearted.

A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini

Two women. Two different generations. Married to the same man in a war-torn Afghanistan. The bonds between them morph between rivalry, mother-daughter, and sister-sister. The beautiful yet incredible thing about this book it shows just how much a woman is willing to sacrifice because of the love for her family. Again, I’m warning you to keep a huge box of tissues at the ready.

Sold – Patricia McCormick

A thirteen-year-old Nepali girl gets sold for 800 rupees by her stepfather into a prostitution ring in India. Lakshmi happily goes along with “Auntie” thinking about the tin roof she can buy her mother with the money she gets by working as a maid in “The City”. This novel traces her loss of innocence with a narration that doesn’t give a lot of morbid details but is still harrowing. McCormick’s accounts of the shady underworld of prostitution will leave you livid at the injustice of it, and in wonder of the women who do more than just survive through it. How they stay even when there’s a chance of escape because staying means their families get to eat.

You have to fool yourself into believing that the things described in this book don't really happen to finish reading it.

The Color Purple – Alice Walker

A book that has survived the wrath of many narrow-minded people; a book that celebrates femininity in all its glory. A book that doesn’t shy away from saying the things that have to be said.

Out of the Easy – Ruta Sepetys

Screw it. I just tried to write a three-line-pitch without making it sound synoptic. What do I love about this book? A whole brothel full of prostitutes showering love on a seventeen-year-old girl in search for some answers. I have never seen so many women of so many different shapes and personalities. But they all equal in their capacity to love.

Saving Francesca – Melina Marchetta

At first glance, this book may not seem like a prime candidate for a seating on this list. It’s about a gang of badass girls in a boys’ school and how gradually they run the place.

God, I love this book.

The Seven Realms – Cinda Williams Chima 

A fantasy world run by a matriarchal government. Plotsy, shippity, and all things addictively nice. Need I say more?

one Girl – Gillian Flynn

I am including this book in the list because the list lacked some good female psychopaths. Who ever said girls were sugar and spice and all things nice? Heads up, female psychopaths are just as bad as their male counterparts. You get on their bitch-side, heaven help you.

A Song of Ice and Fire – George R R Martin

Daenerys. Arya. Cat. Sansa. Cersei. Don’t tell me your knees won’t give in front of these women who are capable of kicking your ass.

HAIL MOTHER OF DRAGONS

Life Updates: The One Where Everything But Life Is Happening

Since my blog shows signs of life even more sporadically than I'd originally imagined, I thought I'll give a poke in the blogosphere and tell all you beautiful people what I'm up to these days. Believe it or not, I don't just spend time staring at the ceiling.

OK well. Sometimes. When I really don't know what else to do after finishing a series.

For starters, let me say, the last semester of college is SHIT. I  had a bunch of responsibilities to tend to, and nowI have a parade of exams coming up. Now, when I say parade, I mean a DAMN PARADE. And if by a miracle, I do survive through them, I have to tackle the momentous question:

I have no clue.

I did land myself with a job that pays well (so yes, that should have shut me up and made me giddy with happiness and gratitude according to busybodies) but I DON'T LIKE IT so I'm not going to.

My conversations with my parents for the next decade or so.

What else is happening you ask? Well, here you go.

The signboard of my life

I am on the hit list my class drew up. Everytime I open my laptop, people clear a circle away from me - it's like just like clockwork. And any misfortunate soul who happens to be near me, gets to watch a couple of videos under duress.

To hell? With you? OF COURSE JUST CONSUME MY SOUL ALREADY.

But the one productive thing that has happened is I've rediscovered my talent (or not) for sketching.

I WAS A LITTLE RUSTY OKAY SO SUE ME

And then my soul got consumed again. On purpose.

Now my energy is laser-focused on aggressively shipping Bellarke. Tumblr encourages me too.

That's it for now. Remember the parade of exams I mentioned earlier? Allow me to volunatrily go die.

Yours insanely,

A Birthday Treat From Yours Truly - No There's No Cake or Giveaways Sorry

So it’s been almost FOUR years since I’ve started this blog although it remains to be seen how well I’ve made my presence felt in the bloggerverse. A quick perusal through my blogroll will advertise the embarrassing fact that I’ve not exactly tried very hard to be an actual blogger.

In these four years, not once did I celebrate any blog-related milestones (probably because there aren’t many to speak of) so I thought I’d celebrate my birthday with you guys. And I wasn't lying, there really is no cake. No there aren’t any giveaways either. You know I'm too poor for either of those.

But there is something.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been vapid enough to google whether there have been anyone you admire/adore/adulate – I mean ANYONE –  who shares the same birthday as you. I have, and the results were dismal.

But then, inevitably, upon my baptism to the EXO fandom, I happily learn I share my birthday with this dork.

Is it just me or does he seem a little put off by that fact?

Anyways, this was my reaction when I found out

And I decided I’ll post a Kai GIF-rabilia post (I have to be the first to coin such a term) to celebrate my birthday. Pardon me for being way too excited to just let this momentous stroke of absolute luck pass by. Imagine if I hadn’t discovered EXO.

OH THE HORROR

Now everyone knows the dancing machine EXO Kai.

SOMEONE CALL THE DOCTOR INDEED

So, I thought I’ll throw up some (meaning, a lot of) gifs celebrating the man (kid? honestly I’ve no idea) off the stage. There is a difference between the two, actually.

If this is Kai –

Smoulder #1

Smoulder #2

The Smirk (that will be the end of me)

Then this is Jongin.

Aegyo #1 fail FAIL DAMMIT On Point

Aegyo #2

A Jongin Tutorial on How To Break Make Hearts

I thought I'd also share some other interesting facts about him that I've gleaned over the past three months.

(Does it show? That I'm a newbie to the KPOP fandom?)

(Really. Who am I kidding?)

1. EVERYONE loves Kai. 

BEHOLD Kai's fangirl army base

And then there's the biggest Kai fan of all time.

Featuring Kai's Death Stare and a Blushing Chanyeol

2. He hits people when he laughs. 

Mostly it's poor Sehunnie who gets the most of it, but really - no one sitting next to him is spared.

Chanyeol later gave as good as he got in the same "interview'

3. Acting sexy comes naturally to him. 

This can be seen by how frequently he combs his fingers through his hair or how he repeatedly sticks his tongue out. I already mentioned The Smirk, didn't I?

His tongue doesn't sit in his mouth, for some reason

4. Despite the I'm-A-Bad-Boy attitude you get from the music videos - 

He gets easily embarrassed for no reason

.... and easily hurt, the big baby

5. Does it surprise you that he's great with kids?

Look at the proud papa

6. He probably got all that daddy training by raising three poodles. 

He loves dogs, you know.

Kai's the one doing the Lion King thing at the back

7. Let's talk about ships 

Having a dozen members in the band guarantees a lot of permutations as ships. However the most famously shipped Kai-starring ship is - 

KAISOOOOOOOOOO

 A popular KaiSoo meme

Kaisoo is real, people.

Seriously. Thank you Tumblr for this gif.

Poor D.O. Can't move a muscle. I'd probably puke though if Kai was standing that close.

This post took a lot more time to put together than it should have because the wifi was having mood swings and because Photoshop ate my RAM. Also, my sincere apologies to all those with slow internet because BOY you're missing out on a lot of awesome gifs.

ANNYEONG!!!

The Difference Between A Trip And A Journey

Let it never be said that you weren’t forewarned. This post is an abrupt departure from my usual volley of posts (or the lack thereof) and for the longest time I hid from my laptop because I was itching to write this and writing this would mean my admission to it. Something I’ve been successfully avoiding for so long.

Here I am, in the penultimate semester of college, with still no clue whatsoever about what I want to do with my life. Or rather, how I am going to do what I want with my life. Even as I changed my ambitions daily – from wanting to be a teacher to a nun to an archaeologist to a criminal psychologist to a physicist to an engineer – the only constant that remained was my love for books. And even though the decision was made unconsciously, the reason why I didn’t pursue a degree in literature, but rather in engineering, was phrased more eloquently than I could have ever done, in a Korean drama I just finished watching recently.

I’ll state it bluntly. I’m fucking scared. I am now standing at the figurative, much-clichéd, crossroads of my life – with no road maps of any sort. I have a destination. A five-year plan. A twenty-year plan. But ask me what the hell I’m planning on doing next year and I’ll just shrug desolately.

I thought the reason why I read so much was only because I loved it. I recently had an epiphany and realized that was just not it.

I was running away.

In some remote corner of my mind, I knew what I was doing. Escaping reality. Postponing the moment I had to make a choice. Pretending as though I had already started on the trip that would take me to my destination.

People tend to think a journey is the line connecting two points: the start and the end. But in actuality, it’s a broken, jagged line consisting of several lines connecting several points in between. Whilst we’re on the journey, the end point changes several times.

“How long until the next rest stop?”

“Are we there at that bridge yet?”

“Tell me if you see the sign for a U-turn.”

I know what I have to do. Fill the tank. Get the tyres checked. Get in the car. Start the ignition. Get the map I’ve drawn for myself out and start driving. As simple as that. And it terrifies me.

But I’m going to do it. I’ll start by drawing the map first.

Cheers,

A Promise Made To Ghosts

Fingers traced the words of,

The blood song etched on the walls.

The grandfather clock’s face was a thousand splinters,

Yet it hushed out a lullaby of “tick-tock”.

A memory –

Strong hands winding the gears.

A man whose back was,

Straighter than the pendulum,

Always bending, never breaking.

The night sand laboriously,

Of broken bones, broken hearts, broken dreams.

Weary eyes leaked out stories,

Into brine-stained pillows, always soaking.

A memory –

“Shut your eyes, child.”

A tender caress, softer than kisses.

Stories of the past, stories of the future,

Never of the present.

Four faces smiled out at me,

Jailed behind a broken glass.

Their ghosts rose up, as if to mock me,

“We’re full of life, how can we die?”

A memory –

One. Two. Three.

The bed rocked gently to the rhythm of the guns.

Pinkie curled around pinkie,

As two little hearts beat as one.

Death left behind souvenirs,

Token of a past life littered,

A doll here, a ball there.

Dust-caked and abandoned.

A memory –

A little boy sat on his father’s lap,

Proud and unafraid.

The woman weaved jasmine into,

Her little girl’s thick hair.

The sky groaned under the weight of,

Prayers it had received,

The rain scribbled consolation on my window,

Too little, too late?

A promise –

The guilt of the survivor,

Shall not wreck me,

Only the hope lives,

Of dreams about to take flight.

Of Unhealthy Fictional Relationships

This post has taken its own sweet time in writing itself. The time around when I realized the urgency of writing this was also when I had an epiphany – there were plenty other things I shied away from remarking about. That’s when I decided I’ll label such and such posts differently under how no sitting on the fence is allowed anymore on this blog – whether the bloggees or the blogger.

I think it has been said time and again, under no uncertain terms, that I intentionally refrain from reading contemporary romance. Yes, as always and therefore unsurprisingly, I have broken that self-issued rule a number of times; and not all those times have I felt like pulling my hair out in frustration. The times I did though, served as a good reminder to why I stayed away from them in the first place.

To the clueless, it’s because of this – a lot of them become increasingly soppy as the page number increases. Many of them build a story out of the romance itself while other people run around in the background. And some others just plain freak me out while the rest of the world inexplicably keep shipping them. This post deals with the last category.

The necessity to write this post was borne from how a lot of girls around me kept shipping this ridiculous couple in the Korean drama The Heirs. (Of course, while watching it, my hormones were raging because of my inherent talent to need to ship anything, so it was a herculean effort to keep my head straight and view the couple with the facts straight.) Poor Girl meets Rich Boy in America who is already engaged to another heiress. Rich Boy becomes obsessed with Distressed Damsel In Foreign Land (“Obsessed” is quite the apt word here) and he keeps following her around like a lost but demanding puppy, despite how his family is dead set against her. Finally, she admits she loves him too and a lot of issues get resolved and they get a happily-ever-after ending.

When watching the series, though, none of this hits you at first. It was only somewhere around the middle when I guessed the direction towards which this ship was headed did I realize my idiocy in getting carried away. The Forbidden Love angle plays out beautifully over the backdrop of heart-wrenching music and insert admirable directing and camera skills and BAM – you have an award-winner that has swept a mass of feminine hearts and dunked them in a sea of feels.

This is just an example among a whole host of them, whether portrayed in books or on TV. The ships that creeped me out generally starts thus – Drop-Dead-Gorgeous-Boy develops inexplicable sudden attraction (read obsession) with Small-Town-Girl and Girl suddenly starts seeing him everywhere. Then a book-specific plot treads upon the much-trodden roads named Knight-In-Shining-Armour-Just-Fucking-Dropped-Out-Of-Nowhere-And-I-Loved-The-Fact-That-He-Was-Stalking-Me and If-He-So-Much-As-Looks-At-You-He’s-Dead and Be-With-Me-Even-If-The-Earth-Cracks-Into-Two and so on.

We’re not all that stupid, we do keep a clear distance from relationships with WE ARE UNHEALTHY DO NOT IMITATE US labels like -

Ugh Cersei and Jaime and some twincest

The husband's cheating on the wife. Wife happens to be a closet psychopath.

She's his high school teacher who's married with kids. Yup.

And that's not all that make these fictional relationships unhealthy. They share other characteristic traits found in the less obvious unshippity ships.

Some say the pop culture has romanticised unhealthy relationships and I am pretty sure they’re right. Those of us who ship Draco Malfoy and Hermione, Edward-Bella or Jacob-Bella ships, Grey-Steele ships, and other ships that I shall leave unnamed thanks to my sucky memory, have been hypnotised by the writer’s or director’s spellcasting prowess. But unhealthy relationships in literature go way back and they have achieved cult status. Remember Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights, the couple that tormented each other, who had you moaning around heartbroken? Or how in The Fountainhead we shipped Howard Roark and Dominique even after he “raped” her? Or how about Beauty and the Beast and how they planted the seed of Stockholm Syndrome in literature?

This post also begs the question – how do we classify a ship healthy or not? For me, this simple test works.
If you’re a straight girl reading this post, simply replace the heroine with yourself, subtract the hotness factor from the hero and replay the storyline, minus the feels, in your head. If you can still ship this new ship –

Else, you need to jump ship. Pronto.

P.S. – By the example given from The Heirs I do not mean to imply that it is not worth watching. PLEASE DO WATCH IT AND LIVE WITH ME IN LA-LA LAND WHERE CUTE BOYFRIENDS WHO LOVE YOU TOO MUCH ARE A-PLENTY. Plus, do watch out for parallel storylines and the tragic Second Male Lead Syndrome that will leave you afflicted with it like it did for yours truly.

P.P.S – The owner of this blog cannot believe how almost every single thing she writes these days invariably turn to Korean dramas and yet lives in denial of the fact that she is currently obsessed with them.

P.P.P.S – THAT IS SO NOT TRUE AND YOU KNOW IT. I AM SO NOT OBSESSED.

The Perils Of Being A Fangirl

Here. This post is the raison d’être of my blog. This post is the one in which many of you will share a sense of camaraderie with me. This post will show you that YOU. ARE. NOT. ALONE.

And that it’s okay to be obsessed. You know, as long as it’s not drugs, or sex, or underground cults. 

(Note: Does anyone know the gender neutral term for FANGIRL? And please don’t tell me it’s FAN – as far as I am concerned, that word is an umbrella term, not a synonym. And I beg your pardon while I treat this post from the view point of fangirls specifically – it’s a shame I don’t know more fanboys personally.)

1. Risk of Degradation of 20/20 Vision

Due to –

(a) All that late-night reading under your blanket with a torch, because you don’t want your parents to catch you up past your bedtime and risk unleashing their wrath in the corporeal form of THAT’S IT NO MORE BOOKS

(b) TV show marathons as a reward for academic excellence (which is code for surviving through exams avoiding all your guilty pleasures)

(c) Excessive social networking – especially when the other fangirl you’re with over the miracle called the Internet, is in another time-zone, depriving you of sleep

2. Catching Up On Deprived Sleep During The Daytime Especially During Class HoursAnd Zombie-Walking Through The Rest

Due to the above mentioned.

3. Lack of Non-Fictional Romantic Life

Reading too many books starring heroes of the fantastically perfect variety, or watching too many TV shows with the same category of protagonists can affect the average reader to such a degree of romantic sterilization of the mundane sort by raising par of male excellence. (Or if you swing the other way, then female excellence.)

4. Managing All Your Social Network Accounts

I swear. This is a talent that is gifted to a fangirl, upon her baptism into this community. How else do you explain the superhuman memory and multitasking capabilities involved in remembering all your ten thousand usernames and passwords, who you last chatted or tweeted with, and maintaining an unbroken comment thread to avoid any non-civil interactions?

5. Empty Wallets

For those of you out there, whose financial aspects are still governed by a superior authority of the parental sort, then you have limitations (like me) on how much merchandise you can own. You resort to pinning wishlists and loaded virtual carts on your Pinterest boards and bookmarks bar, and just staring at what could have been on your laptop screen. When that happens, you turn to –

6. Your DIY Skills and Photoshop Expertise

However deplorable they may be, we have that shoddy wad of bookmarks made by hands smelling of Fevicol, t-shirts we spent that last batch of fabric paint on, and folders (both digitally and otherwise) filled with our own edits and sketches.

7. The Need to Celebrate Holidays Unknown to Mere Mortals/Mundanes/Muggles

We have reminders on our mobile phones and of course, in case they fail, we also have the ever-reliable power of the online fangirl-hood to remind us when to eat only blue food or randomly scream DEATH TO DEATHEATERS or whatever.

8. Research and Intellectual Debates

We are never happy knowing what we already know. We thirst to read up on all the different versions of backstories of the various characters, the author’s perspective on how (s)he chose all the proper nouns in the book, and then unwittingly become party to raging wars on whether or not a particular character is a hero or a villain or other civil debates. If you’re talking about a TV show, then it goes without saying that unless and until we’ve dug up bloopers and the actors’ Wikipedia pages, we’re never going to attain closure.

9. Shipping Through Choppy Seas

This is mostly self-explanatory. The FEELS fuelling our primal fangirl instincts to keep calm and continue shipping canon and headcanon ships in the face of tempests exacts a heavy toll on our head in the form of acute headaches that only tear-stained pillows can cure. Speaking of which – 

10. Tears Both Shed And Unshed

I have always maintained that a significant percentage of the average global tear-level has been contributed by the tear ducts of fangirls. To cry, clutching the damned book in your arms or after watching that tragic final episode of a Korean drama series, is an occupational hazard.

11. HANGOVERS, MAN. Hangovers.

It’s not enough that we’ve been cursed to harbouring eternal feels for a series (book or TV), but we’ve also been damned with being left to our own devices to deal with that inexplicable limbo stage of our life that follows after the final episode or chapter. We then face the big question – WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

We feel as if we’re trapped in a tunnel, the vision of closure mocking at us in the far-off distance. Comfort Food, Comfort Reading selected passages, and Comfort Replaying selected scenes becomes the norm for some days.

And I will thank Ron Weasley to define what being a fangirl truly means (courtesy of Tumblr) –