Insert a cool clickbaity heading here
and other random musings
Dearest gentle reader,
I am back in your inbox to chit chat. I survived summer (YAY!) the credit goes mostly to mangoes, ate my weight in them and survived all the acne and upset stomach too. 10/10 worth it and will repeat next summer.
I took a small mini blink and you miss break too. Drove all the way to Wayanad and had the bestumbest time. We stayed at the Jungle Bay resorts, 12/10 recommend this space. Not sponsored, not an ad. It was rainy and misty and we swam in their freezing pool (my insides turned into ice slush but it was still fun) and played a whole bunch of indoor games- this was also where I marked my debut at Ludo. Yes, I am also surprised that I had never played this game before. And I lost!
Quick question- what indoor games did you play growing up?
I remember playing snakes and ladder, carroms, Antakshiri, UNO, and monopoly (it was called business?). Ludo for some strange reason escaped my radar.
I also lost royally at table tennis- no surprises here though, I have terrible hand- eye coordination. The whole of Bengaluru should thank me for giving up on driving!
I also worked on a quick fun project for a chef. I made a small accordion style menu for her. Here’s a poorly drawn flow chart (there’s a flow hence I called it a flow chart but it’s not actually one. Don’t come at me!) to tell you how sometimes freelancers like myself with zero networking skills land gigs.
Is this what they call karma or serendipity or just freelancing? I also taught two workshops; one in May and one in June. And maybe I will do one soon on just basics of drawing characters and faces- this might actually be a lot of fun.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about a lot of things, in no particular order-
About content creation, creating when content, and being content with what we create. They’re all connected but mean very different things. Thanks to social media platforms, we all create and we all perform now. I do it because it’s also part of my job. So naturally, now I am not particularly drawn to documenting my offline breaks and life. Then I realise, I’ve gone on too long a break and my social media needs proof of life so I share. Not always though, sometimes I am genuinely happy to do so. Regardless of our roles and jobs though, everyone creates, documents, and performs. That’s just how we remember, celebrate, and grieve now. In some ways that’s cool because the internet always remembers even if our brains forget. I can always access stories of Ollie losing her milk teeth or pictures of my ammama from when she was alive or the voice note of a stranger who was once a friend- all this available at a tap, a few scrolls.
I’ve also been thinking of giraffes lately. When I was a kid (pre teen not a kid-kid and old enough to know what embarrassment feels like) I mispronounced giraffe while we were playing name-place-animal-thing (another indoor game that I played plenty). I confidently yelled out, G-rough-fee. And then repeated it a bunch of times to a shocked audience (my friends) before they all burst out laughing and I realised I mispronounced it and for the life of me, my 12 year old brain couldn’t remember how Giraffe is pronounced. So I doubled down and told them my family calls it G-Rough-Fee. No one bought it but I didn’t back down either but inside-inside I was fully dying. I am not sure why my brain decided to play me this painful memory suddenly but I did realise that I’ve never actually attempted drawing a giraffe. So here we are :
I am going to try making some more and keep at it till it feels like my G-Rough-Fee :)
How do you draw something totally new? By observing them. Since no giraffes are running wild and free in my colony, I watched a whole bunch of nat geo and bbc documentaries on giraffes and paused to sketch multiple frames.
Now onto some TV reccos -
Bear (season 3)- This is probably one of those rare shows where I hate the main character the most but love everyone else. Carmy has shown zero growth, put in zero effort but that changes in season 3. There’s some glimmer of hope and the writing is still great but the soundtrack like always is even better! There is going to be another season and that’ll probably be the last. This entire series will be remembered and re-visited. It’s powerful writing but yet such a quiet show. That’s the best I can describe this. It holds tension beautifully; some of the scenes are the best I’ve watched on television. Visceral and yet tender. Very human!
Hacks - 4 seasons and Deborah is still kicking! In the last season I felt like every episode was written as the season finale episode because all the endings felt so fitting and final but then there’d be another episode. This tired me slightly and yes, looks like there’s going to be another season. But gotta give it to the writers, The writing does not drop as is usually the case of sequels and follow up seasons. Hacks remains crisp, stays tight and slaps!
Books -
I have had one 5 star book in the last month - Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis. This is her debut novel and it puts the ‘fun’ and ‘mental’ in fundamentally. The premise is deradicalizing ISIS brides and that’s all I will say. It is not at all what you’d expect it to be and yet it’s so much more. This story is a riot. Please read. Please!
Another book that gave me the goosebumps was Hum by Helen Phillips. It’s very black mirror-esque. And the less you know about this book, the better. It’s dystopian but feels super real. Read!
That’s all the confetti I can think of and had to share. The rest is a soggy cake.
Write back to me, share a piece of your brain with me. And we can then walk around with chipped brains. FUN!
Stay strange,
Love.
Mounica