3:00 p.m.

There's this giant magnifying glass up there, you see. Up in the sky, someone, mad beyond imagination, has held up this giant magnifying glass, collapsing-compacting-concentrating the sun's rays onto a single blinding point on the earth. This is the little town of Chembur. It is hot today.

Though the afternoon is cruel to everyone and everything, the worst sufferers, by far, are the dogs. The sun has pushed them underneath edges and behind walls where the sharp shadows offer a condition marginally less oppressive than the searing open ground. They breathe in harsh rhythm, saliva dripping and in an entirely dog-like way, they ponder suicide. They wait for the sun to go down.

I sit in the shade of the long verandah of my house, observing the afternoon explode in slow-motion around me. I could have sat in the considerable comfort of my room in the inner folds of the red-tiled, high-ceilinged, creaking-wood, double-gloomy mansion, the air-conditioner cranked up to Deep Arctic, but I choose instead the glare and heat of this verandah. Despite the semi-diabolical sun, I feel as cool and as light as a breeze from the sweetest winds. The elements have no power over me and I am the envy of dogs.

A breeze from the sweetest winds - my mind grabs on to this notion and lo, I am pulled free and up, up, up; I am a breeze, a silent caress, a hushed chill, laden with double-edged scents and moods; I am zeppelin-esque-like-ic-ious, slipping silent and beautiful against the giant blueness, a cloud, a contraption, an airborne clown; I look down on the distant earth with its miniature ways and cares and fucky-mucky cock-talk. I am above it all that and swirling further away, to rarer things, on finer wings. I, who am the wind, fly with all other winds and we fly strong and we fly high. They are me and I am many, I realise.

The smell of ganja lies thick around me. A bittersweet, warm, green-woody smell, a smell of organic lust, of plants in heat, of Eros by flora, suffusing the air with microbial sex-cells. The smell is fertile.

It's been three years since the last time I came under the spell of marijuana. It's going to be a lovely evening. I smile.

Day 6525 | Day 6528 | Day 6531

I haven't had much time to node in the last few days which disappoints me.  I can't believe it took me so long to finally get into this place; it's like electronic crack with a sympathetic ear.  I'm seeing quite a few new noders posting their first writeup and, to put it frankly, most of them suck.  To be fair, my first writeup makes me cringe when I read it as I'm sure my current wrietups will do the same a few months down the road.  But I digress; I've had a major paper to write and I've been through 4 or 5 drafts since Monday trying to get it right.  I'm not quite done but it's due today so I think I should be able to come to some sort of equilibrium between my expectations and the time expectations.  How to write an "A" paper with minimal effort was incredibly useful; Jesus imagery can carry you a long way in whichever direction you want to go.

I skipped micro today.  I consider myself a rational individual and decided that the marginal cost of waking up at 8 in the morning to go to class was greater than the marginal benefit of sleeping in until my next class at noon.  The main reason why I did this was that I got to sleep at the ungodly (for me) hour of 3 am because I went to midnight ultimate on the quad.  Midnight ultimate is always fun even though I'm one of the worse people there.  At least it's a group of people I know which, for a guy like me who doesn't make friends easily, is more than welcome at college.  Campus can be one of the loneliest places on Earth.

Arthur C. Clarke is a bastard.  Any sufficiently nice person is indistinguishable from someone who likes you my ass.  Sure there are a lot of tips all over the place, "how to know if she's interested", "find out of she likes you", "get into a girls pants in 3 easy steps", but the truth is that no one knows anything about how the enigmatic mind of a girl works or, for that matter, a guy's mind either.  Everyone is unique and responds to things in different ways.  What might be one girl's body language for attraction may be another's for friendship.  I have never been on a date before, never even asked a girl out on a date before.  I gave it a shot last night though and surprisingly being turned down never felt so good.  True to form, I spent hours thinking, scripting the whole interaction in my head.  Making sure I wouldn't put her on the spot, double checking that I wouldn't set myself up to fall too far, picking the perfect time and place.  All's fair in love and war I suppose and plans don't last too long in war either.  At the moment the first word—the first syllable that I uttered passed my lips, I wasn't following any of my plans.  Even though it was the first time I'd actually managed to convince myself to cordially request the company of the opposite sex at a weekend activity I didn't feel the stereotypical heart-beating-like-a-jackhammer-sweaty-palms-stuttering-nervousness.  I actually felt calm; really calm.  Probably because I see this girl not as an object but as a friend and it was just a conversation between friends to me.  And then she told me, in not so few words, that she was busy.  There was no dropping of my stomach or anything like that, I just kept on with the conversation fairly nonchalantly, calmly in fact.  I suppose it isn't the outright rejection you get from a 'no' but I even surprised myself at my demeanor.  Now I just have to stop myself from over analyzing everything she says and take her at face value.  I'll find another evening.