How I Cooked Myself Out of It

My flat is being renovated and the place is a god awful mess with a metric ton of dust on everything. The dust has caused me to develop a mild cough and sore throat and the only passing that Pippa would be doing would be passing away. Even killing time has lost its charm and I find myself ready to bolt out of doors, screaming for my (dead) parents every now and then. I'm told that this is my body reacting to the noise, supplemented by the heat and the chaos of yells, slams on marble, the kind of cuss words that make me feel like sailors are golden tongued and of course dirt everywhere. I also want to have a chat with the sun because what the fuck is this temperature of 38 degrees which feels like 42 degrees? 

Now, let me be clear. I should have expected some of this. I am neurodivergent, I am now learning, one typo at a time, that what that means is that this is a sort of natural state from which my nervous system craves respite almost on a constant need basis and since I am now a part of the body that hosts this nervous system, of course it means I need to be the one to calm it down. So, since running out of the house screaming for my dead parents is not on the table, I needed a solution. 

My solution was to cook. Just cook.

Over the course of the past four days, there has been some action in the Mobius Kitchen and now at the end of April, I find that the provisions have proven most useful. I've cooked fish and eggs and more eggs and some chicken as well. I've combined stuff like soya sauce with honey and pizza issue oregano to make a blend for chicken which a friend called Sammit told me would go really well with a pizza as well. I've obeyed the recipe for a cooler shared by a friend over Instagram. This friend by the way is also an Earth Genasi like Mobius Worblehat! There has been the lesson of the fact that turmeric is the game changer in fish curries and the equally important lesson that eggs if left too long in hot oil tend to explode and then you have yolk everywhere.

Don't get me wrong, I still want to run away screaming for my dead parents but at least I can do it on a full stomach now. I suppose that now that I am the only one keeping score of how I'm staying and what my body is asking of me, sometimes I need to bend the rules and sometimes I need to heat oil, add masala and temper temper away the blues.

Shout out to all my friends who are a part of this journey with me and my trusty cooking pot who has seen me concoct many things.

The Bilge Master 

What Nobody Tells You About Being ND

 “And you can have it all

My empire of dirt”

 That sense of blankness when you’re about to write something important (at least to you), is a terrifying part of my writing process, or so I’ve found as I’ve paid more and more attention to how I write and what I write. So, here I go with a cup of tea and a lotus biscoff biscuit in my hand, making a typo like a pro to tell you all, I will tell you all…yeah, Eliot beat me to this one.

It is an often repeated saying that there’s a first time for everything and anyone who happens to follow me on Instagram knows that last weekend was spent at the Apeejay Kolkata Litfest, a gala event with lots of insights and thought provoking conversations; not to mention travel on buses and in cabs, selfies and group pictures and a controversial plate of fried rice which was served to us in jail.

So now that we have gone to prison for our vices and guilty pleasures about literature (for we are as much what we read as we are what we wear), let’s take a look at how I feel on the Monday after the AKLF. Put simply, I feel like a herd of elephants in the seventeen stone category (minimum) did the mamba on my spine.

I was glam itself for the past three days – good clothes, ties, blazers, excellent watches and lots and lots of smiles . Bertie Wooster would have modeled his article on “What the Well Dressed Man is Wearing” on me (assuming of course that Bertie Wooster was a real person).

But that brings me to something else, am I real? I ask this because I went from an outgoing and adrenaline crazed junkie listening to luminaries talk literature, psychology and book covers to a man in his dad’s clothes, sipping tea and doing whatever this is so quickly. My WhatsApp is full of chatter about the event, but my phone is on silent and my head hurts and I’m so twitchy that the sound of the doorbell is making me jump out of my skin.

 I sort of zoned out a second and had to read from the beginning to get back some sort of bearing of what it is that I was writing. Apparently, there’s another event coming up soon but I’m pretty sure that I won’t be able to attend it because this event has set my social batteries to a point from where its just work and books for a minimum of two weeks and no skipping workouts (especially leg day) for a straight week.

I don’t even have the energy to try and make this article a little less chaotic. I feel like I’m birthing a little trickster demon using the pixilated ink as a substitute for blood and keystrokes instead of chalk to draw Aldebrand’s Pentacle (tell me you’ve read Johnathan Stroud without telling me you’ve read Johnathan Stroud).

I suppose that now that the trickster demon has appeared, its time for my last trick.

This is what nobody tells you about being neurodivergent, not even the internet. Typically, before this aspect of my psyche took hold and assured me it was here to stay, I would be able to attend such weekend long events or have 15  hour days without balking. In college, I would be the most unhinged party animal and for the longest time in corporate, I drank the equivalent of a small plantation’s produce of coffee to function. I now realize that these were the small signs that nobody indicated that such blatant disregard for my physical and mental well being was tomfoolery.

So I guess, this is now me and my overstimulated, plump arse against the events I want to attend and the cooldown periods attending said events will have!

 

*JUMP* Doorbell!

 

The Bilge Master