#the nostalgia one can feel in their own life the cumulative nature of living

[adjectives-nouns]

Getting into Frieren sucks because the story is great but the fans are reprehensibly horny about it

[baliyanblog]

PLASTICS, a boon or a curse?

Since their creation in 1907 by Baekeland , plastics have managed to be the most controversial creation of humans! It is astonishing to know that with no value of its own , plastics have given skyrocket acceleration to growth of industries. Leaving few exceptions there is no industry that can do without plastics. Once I was attending a workshop on fast food industry and packaging, where I learnt that in the last 30 years Fast Food sector has grown manifolds due to packaging. Packaging gives a sense of security , it is hygienic and moreover handling products becomes convenient. In Fact it is now in human psychology that better the packing better is the quality of the product. Plastics are tough, durable, non corrosive , they are chemically non- reactive to maximum compounds, protect from rotting due to resistance from water, all this makes plastics the most desirable material for packaging. 

By now you might be relating every product we consume has a certain way of appealing us and mostly that is the way it is packed. In simple words you might have never bought your expensive perfume if it was packed in a clay pot with exactly the same smell ! 

  Do you remember all those posters you made in school to save earth and how there was no summer vacation without you protecting the environment! Nostalgia, right? Well looking at the present conditions I don’t think we succeeded rather we have added to the plethora of junk by consuming so much paper and plastic. This statement might be subject to debate as awareness is important, but only if ignorance is absent.

So why even bother if we are so trapped in plastics? According to me we must  not just bother ‘bother’ rather actively ‘bother’ and refuel our awareness senses if we want earth to remain the planet with life in future!

Humans have managed to disrupt  every level of life and in all ways possible. From street animals to mighty ocean’s inhabitants we have managed to destroy every form of life in our full capacity. What happens once a product is consumed, we throw away the packet but in reality it has nowhere to go but remain on earth for like forever! You remember the properties of plastic that made it desirable , well for the same reasons it has become a huge headache, since we are not able to manage its disposal. Today our oceans are full of garbage , plastic has entered into our food chain. No animal has any part in invention , distribution or consumption of plastics , yet they are most vulnerable to our deeds and they bear the cost of our greed and mismanagement.

If actually there is some almighty who has created mother earth she/he might be very disappointed looking down at the most advanced species created, at us! And more than that the superbrains of our planet might have some really hard time knowing we are still getting an F in  God’s assessment  after so much hard work put by them. Some good day I was watching a documentary on BBC on oceans narrated by the super David Attenborough and at one point I felt so overwhelmed that tears started rolling down my eyes, that was the clip where a blue whale was carrying her still born calf for days as she could not accept her loss! And most probably the calf died as the blue whale had consumed microplastics.

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Is it fair ? If there is real hell and heaven , no one amongst us can ever make to heaven for the cumulative sufferings we have given to other living beings. Whoever has made this planet either god or geographical phenomenons it was made for all of us! We did not create this world nor can we run it by ourselves. Rather the world can function very effectively without humans in it. So it's high time for us to realise our limits and act accordingly.

We consider ourselves very intelligent , we have created computers , electricity , internet (which helps us “connect” ) and so much more! We have a juggernaut of intelligent people making policies and unions, collecting funds to protect what we have destroyed (that means everything)!

But yet again through the Coronavirus outbreak , mother earth has told us what we should do to protect her, and that is STOP. Yes just Stop! Nature still has the power to heal itself, if only we give it a chance. All our science , all our research are limited because all we have been doing is discovering! The feeling of supremacy is wrong. We need to limit our curiosities and stick to the balance or else homosapiens will be the only species flourishing in the red data book. 

After earth we have plans to spread our wings of curse to other planets of universe, then let us recall class 1 science book chapter number one - LIFE, it read life is possible only with 3 components air, water and sunlight. And that is the long and short of it , let us respect LIFE let us be more responsible.

Well practically speaking we cannot STOP neither can we omit plastics but still there are few habits through which we can bring effective change let us switch to jute ,cotton , glass and ceramic products , let us reduce plastic demand , let us walk , let us switch to bicycles and create demand for electric cars, Support biodegradable alternatives.You know the solutions, just follow them.

 Let us be kind and in true sense realise humanity.

 Or else meet you in hell !

Adios

[retracing-my-steps]

The story, as I would now tell it

So when I reflect on being married twice, saying I’ve been married twice is highly misleading because it doesn’t translate well to the experience.

If I were to encapsulate it in words that would capture it more accurately, it would be this:

I was married once, it was an 8 year relationship with my high school boyfriend (which also started long-distance lol, lord help me). After that, I found myself in an abusive casual relationship with a sociopath who I was roommates with for a year because I couldn’t afford to live alone. He acted very courteous and reasonable and it wasn’t a serious relationship so I didn’t worry about the impact. I didn’t realize until moving into my new place with him that he treated me like a ghost since he didn’t have to ‘earn’ his keep anymore, and he trashed my home without hesitation, has no respect, asked permission for nothing, fucked people in our shared bed, and acted like I was unreasonable and bizarre to be angry when my apartment was full of dirty laundry and dishes and he brought home people to fuck without even giving me a heads up (or washing the sheets). Which further made the whole him treating me like a ghost thing more horrifying, seeing him being cutesy with new people when he was supposedly in at least a sort of casual romance with me, which became instead literally, me, a body, in a shared space, who he never talked to but would ask for sex daily (until I half-lied and said I couldn’t have sex anymore because I was dealing with a bout of depression and didn’t have a drive anymore— Because who can confront a person who calls themselves your boyfriend head-on about them being a sociopath and so disgusting and that you don’t want them anywhere near you ever again?) Suffice to say I started changing clothes in the bathroom and hiding at my recent ex husband’s place because I was so disturbed by the shift in personality. And I was trapped because I couldn’t afford to live alone and I was uncertain of how the fuck to kick him out.

All that right after my first divorce, I was pretty shaken as a person and highly vulnerable. So it was the worst thing that could have happened to me.

During the abusive relationship or near that time, I reconnected with an older sort of online penpal from back in the day, someone who always seemed very warm and kind and also responsible.

I dated her for a while and I was trapped living with the abusive person for 6 months more-- and at the point of dating her, I unofficially broke it off with the abusive guy (I mean it was a casual relationship from the start and he was a liar and a void of a person and he didn’t even speak to me, I didn’t feel like I needed to officially tell him I wasn’t with him anymore)– and I started a relationship with the person who was called my boyfriend but eventually I discovered was my girlfriend and that was quite fine by me and I wanted to encourage her all I could for her to be herself.

So she was my second serious relationship and she was a person I was in a relationship with, with the intention to see if she was ‘the one’, so it was very serious– I was willing to dare to have a serious relationship again after the destruction of my first marriage, because she was so many things that my husband wasn’t, and therefore I was willing to take the chance of getting hurt again. It was an open-relationship because I was scared of being trapped and neglected like I had been in my marriage. I dated a little on the side while I was with her, a couple first dates and random things but not much more. All with her thoroughly informed and with boundaries considered of course because I’m not an asshole. She knew when she started dating me that I didn’t want to settle down fully with someone at that point in my life, not until I had the safety of having dated more to know for sure. We were together until late 2015. The dates get messy in my mind because so so much was happening at once during that time period, and so much stress with the abusive person I was trapped with, and my own anxiety problems. So we were together for almost two years I believe.

At that point I knew we weren’t right for each other, which was a painful discovery. I was fighting hard and trying to be patient and trying to see if she was going to get better or if it was another case like my marriage had been. After all she was going through a lot. It was hard to have clarity. Also near the end of our relationship, I outed my abuser online and it created a shitstorm that had me on constant edge of breakdown for a number of weeks. Because the asshole had only moved two doors down when I finally got him to move out, and the poly community he belonged to tried to basically psycho-analyze me to decide if they wanted to believe me. Which was mostly because the community is a cesspool of abusers, since the people who run the community are also toxic and most of the good people didn’t have the stomach to stay- because apparently other people had been abused by other members and were suddenly banned or blocked because the admins didn’t want to deal with the drama. So I was really in for it, in for a lot of victim blaming, and worse yet, my Tumblr and personal entries started getting spread around by him. So there was a huge mess in the background of everything, things like that and the gradual act of my girlfriend disowning her family and starting to be brave enough to wear feminine clothes, her choosing a name… and just a lot of residual stress she carried from her experiences, and a fruitless job hunt. So things weren’t going well or feeling happy between us, I felt always on edge and like I couldn’t safely talk to her about problems, and there were a lot of toxic behaviors. Generally things didn’t feel right but I was scared to drop it because I didn’t know if it was really a compatibility problem or if it was simply circumstance.

But then I got in touch with someone I have been in love with since before I met my first boyfriend. Someone who had disappeared off of the face of the earth.

When I found him I warned my girlfriend I had a lot of unresolved feelings about him and I had no idea what would happen if I contacted him. ‘He probably will be embarrassed by the memory of me, frankly’ I said ‘I was utterly obsessed with him and not so subtle about the fact, and I don’t know if it was actually all that requited.. I basically threw myself at him.’ ‘But in the end, I do still feel a lot of strong feelings for him, so well if we do talk I don’t know what would happen, or if it will rekindle something in me’ We already had an open-relationship from the beginning because of my baggage with my first marriage and fear of getting trapped and neglected (and my cynicism at that point wondering if -anyone- could be fully right for me), so she was supportive of me because in the end of course my happiness was important to her.

And then I knew she wasn’t right for me. Because of how natural and easy and right things felt, talking to him. And that feeling I had- the feeling of being afraid to risk being with one person, those feelings were gone.

I was still in love with him, and him with me (to my utmost shock), and as we found a way to meet it became clear that my feeling about him was not unjustified. He felt more right than anything ever has.

As months passed and my contact with him continued and I started dating him within the complexity of my position with my girlfriend (which I was very honest with him about- I even said to him I could never 'fully’ be his, and to my amazement he didn’t care and still wanted to love me and be a part of my life)– I was still processing and figuring out if my girlfriend and I had a chance, if that was something that was going to settle down and become more stable and happy, and I was trying to figure out if the romance with my 'childhood sweetheart’ (we were 15 when we first fell in love) was just some sort of intense dream that was too good to be true, or exaggerated by my deep nostalgia, and adoration I had for him when we were young.

I contacted him in the fall, we met face to face in October 2015, just a couple weeks later.. And as the winter approached, we made plans for me to come to him in December. As December passed and I was given the joy of leaping into his arms with renewed confidence, I realized that I didn’t want to be with anyone else. That he was the most right I had ever felt. My girlfriend and I didn’t thrive together, and in his company that truth became more clear to me. And beyond that fact, I also knew that the love I felt for him was not trivial nor sugar-coated, and nor was his love for me. So it was in December, after three weeks cumulatively in his company, that I knew that what I had with him was real, and the happiness I felt and the person I was finally letting myself fall for all the way, the personality I adored was not simply him putting his best self forward. He was him, imperfect, not without his own deep scars, not without our conflict- yet, utter bliss, and contentment, and a joy in knowing him further. A joy even in conflict, which felt bizarre. Because I just felt utterly relieved and happy to know him better. I felt closer to him, instead of alienated by conflict. Troubles weren’t so troubling. I could laugh at pain for the first time. He made it feel easy. So I knew. And so the chapter with my girlfriend closed, sadly but not bitterly, because she knew too that we did not bring the best out in each other. It was not only me who was absorbing negative energy and having their anxieties amplified.

And so I moved on to a relationship that felt was right for me in every way, and I no longer felt a need to keep the doors of my heart open to anyone else.