It's really late (1:42am) here, and I should go to bed soon, but I just wanted to say that it's hard to be someplace where I can't be as crazy as I have gotten used to being. Perhaps I'll reach that comfort level at some point in the near future...or perhaps I'll just snap and reach it regardless of my coworkers' ability to handle it...but let's just say that at this moment in time, I don't see myself developing such a strong relationship with anyone here that I can be brought to tears (of laughter) over the thought of the loch ness monster being able to animate a body of water so that he can use it as a vehicle to transport himself to the US and kill Tammy. If that didn't make any sense to you, don't worry, it apparently didn't make sense to anyone I was talking to the first time I brought it up either. Ah well, perhaps that's just as well.
But still, it's not like I'm having to bite my tongue to keep this stuff in; it just doesn't even start to grow, because there isn't fertile soil for such imaginings, and so they're all being stunted for lack of coconspirators. Sometimes I do think of random things and smile, but I'm kind of more shy than people think I am, and so it will be awhile before I feel really comfortable with my coworkers. And it will be way, way beyond comfortable before I'll tell them about Pyro and Gyro, or Thai prostitutes and blowguns, or any of the other myriad things that have formed the fabric of my life.
I will share one thing with all y'all, however. Today, I was looking out the window of the car (having a driver is weird, I'll write about it more at another time), and I saw a billboard with the Greek letter mu on it. Now, if we were to write out the pronunciation of 'mu' in English, it would be 'myu'...but on the billboard, it was written 'mju'. I thought that this was hysterical, because Vidya often says 'jou' and 'jes' instead of 'you' and 'yes' in IM conversations (although she actually pronounces them w/a j when the fancy strikes her in speaking as well). However, even writing it now for a bunch of people who don't know the in-reference behind it, it sounds lame--and I figured that the driver (Fazil...still no Habib) would appreciate it even less. But I thought it was funny, dammit! And I will go to my grave thinking it, and a million other things, were funny, even if no one else gets or wants to get the joke.
But if being a grownup means that you end up spending all your time with people who don't encourage ridiculousness, I want to stay young forever. Alternatively, I'll make friends with people who are increasingly younger than me, so that by the time I'm in my forties I can be some weirdo taking community college classes w/the sole goal of meeting students in their early twenties. Too bad it's not the 1920s and I can't form a brilliant literary salon in Paris, attracting scores of bright young things to discuss any manner of scandalous, artistically dubious subjects.
Growing old and the end of all fun for me will apparently be marked by Hitler, in the form of all my friends' marriages, invading my salon and getting an endless series of wedding pictures taken in front of the Eiffel Tower. Now there's an entertaining image...the tyranny of adulthood and sobriety clamping down on my fun salon, isolating the individual and destroying the community in the method of all great totalitarian states, with the guise of 'improving' life through discipline, rigor, and the gilded safety net cage of marriage...and at the end I can take all the wedding pictures, recolor them, and turn them into one of those composite pictures where all the small pictures form one large picture...and the large picture can be Hitler in Paris. Ha!
Okay, I feel slightly better--I may be boring for the next six months, but my imagination will still be there. Maybe it will even flower more prolifically when I get back, like grapevines after a severe pruning.
Oh, and I've been writing like crazy in the Hyderabad blog, so all promises about letting you know here are out the window; if you're too lazy to check it, that's your loss.
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