Bird watching, adrak chai drinking

thinking about the things i don't know

Today the sky is orange - right now, in this moment at 7:09pm. It is fast becoming less orange. A little earlier, it was yellow, and it coloured everything on land yellow, almost like life had been colour graded. I sat on the steps outside and watched the birds. I saw the eagles, as high as the top of the abandoned icon tower, circling in their individual orbits and yet moving in the same rhythmic, uniform pace of the wind. I saw a crow sitting silhouetted on a wire, ruffling its feathers. I saw a small flock of birds fly up above me that I noticed had red tails. I watched their route, keeping an eye out for the moments the light hit their bellies and I could see the redness of their tails.

We had the tree chopped yesterday, the tree we’ve had for years, the tree that grew ever so fast, the tree that in full Conocarpus fashion did not leave room for anyone else to be planted in the same ground. For reasons mostly practical, the tree is now gone, and it’s sad that it will never grow back. The good thing is that the sky is more visible from the ground, lending itself to the cloud- and bird-gazing I was able to do this evening, but also that the cats can no longer climb the tree and get into trouble. This means that we can let them out more without fear of the fight that will lead to the abscess that will lead to three subsequent vet visits, so that they can go be outdoor cats for part of the day, and not be so anxious and nature-deprived for the other parts.

I finished a book today about a boy with autism. Although the author never mentions that he has any kind of autism, he does say that he goes to a special school and it’s quite obvious from the way that he is. Because I work at an inclusive school, I felt it was interesting because of some of the kids I come across. Sometimes, it’s hard to get into the mind of a child who will not let you touch their toy car or who doesn’t want to do the art activity no matter how much you reason with them. It’s made me think about emotional bandwidth and perhaps ways of being socially that I take for granted. Also, because the character is presented in a real-ish way, there are parts of his personality that I can relate to, like a need to sometimes make timetables to feel organized, or the sense of body/mind dissociation that comes from being in crowded or overstimulating places. One might wonder, am I on the spectrum? And increasingly, I think a lot of us think we are. Surely, some of us may be, but also could it be that we just want to have a category to belong to? I say this because I’ve gone down the rabbit hole. I’m sure a lot of us have.

I’ve been under the weather since yesterday, which feels ridiculous to me at this point because I used to be the kind of person that got sick once a year. It has now been about 6 or 7 times since December, one of the times which was rather COVID-like, after Muharram. I do know that the world is getting sicker and sicker and our food isn’t good and the air isn’t good and the city is bad to live in but, this bad? So soon? Someone made me wonder today, controversially, whether it might be that the vaccine is responsible for this, especially as more and more stories come out about the long lasting and rather terrible vaccine side effects, particularly the non-Chinese ones.

Speaking of vaccines, Billoo has been given a hormone injection to hopefully stave off any more heat cycles for the next 6 months, as we wait until her vaccine rounds are finished and we can get her spayed. Another decision that has caused much emotional fatigue, because of the invasiveness and nonconsensual nature of it all, but we have to keep her because she is now ours, and we couldn’t take the howling anymore. And the vaccine is necessary because otherwise she can get infected after her surgery when she is most vulnerable. But some people say that some vaccines change the personalities of their pets. And yet we close our eyes and do it.

We close our eyes and do many things, like stepping into a cold shower maybe. Or marrying somebody. Or moving countries. I don’t know. So much is unknown. Knowing is a responsibility; it means you can’t unknow and now you have to live life as a knower. And mostly, that’s a more difficult life, because it means you can’t eat processed meats or eggs that aren’t desi or use toothpaste or get vaccinated against a deadly disease or, or, or. I don’t know - there’s lots I don’t know. I’m just going to drink my ginger tea for now, because ginger has always been around.