Its surprising, actually...

... How fast time passes by.

How you block out things you thought were most important. 

How much things change.

How many emotions one person can make you feel and not in a good way. 

How there are certain days when the sun shines so bright outside that it hurts your eyes but it refuses to dispel the darkness that tiptoes around your aura threatening to engulf you. (wow, that's dramatic)

How some feelings never change. 

How some feelings change so much that you wonder why you felt them in the first place. 

How long you can go without the things that you loved the most.

How much you can change, as a person, over the short period of one year. 

How different a person you actually are from who you thought you were.

How much effort it takes to put a smile on your own face just to ensure that people don't wonder why you always have a hangdog expression.

How little it takes to fall apart.

How difficult it is to just believe the words that come out of a person's mouth instead of questioning every intention, every thought behind it.

How much you have missed out on in a world that was your world.

How many people, relationships you have had to lose because you do not have the strength to explain. 

How cynical you have become of pretty much everything.

How long it has been since you actually had a bar of good, solid, comforting chocolate.

How small things that you left in the past come back to make you smile.

How much courage you get in knowing that you are strong enough to still want to say bring it on. 

How much happiness it infuses in you to know that someone still needs your shoulder. 

How awesome it is when you can cross the road during peaktime traffic all by yourself.

How brilliant it is to have a group of people who just let you be and make you laugh.

How much hope it gives you that those people might let you call them your friends. 

How much it means to know that someone is trying to make you laugh despite everything.

How high you get on being noticed for having potential.

How much it means when someone believes in you with a steadfastness you have yet to see in others' eyes.

How the person you thought you hated is the only one who really believed in you, fought for you.

How funny Will & Grace is.

How some people have the knack of saying exactly what you want to hear and despite your cynicsm, you believe in them.

How mindnumbingly, awesome sukhapuri really is.

A long way, I have come.

A long way, I have to go.

 

I leave you to drool over this monstrosity from Indijoe's, Bangalore. A cake that almost got me a promotion, one that made me sick of food itself for well over a week.

 P.S: I HAD to write a depressing post before I could move past, so COME ON and cut me some slack, won't you? If anybody still visits this place, that is :D

P.P.S: I lost months of work that I did on my blog and a couple of pages that I loved as well, all because of a tiny mistake I made. Ah well, let's start from scratch, shall we?

Blogging 101

I try not to preach. I try really hard.
A little because I don't sound nice when I'm preachy,
But mostly because I know how I react to preachy people and posts.

But since I started blogging I have had certain Great Realizations, some on my own and some from Spiff (which I found to be 200 'parsant' true) and I thought I should share; might be of use to those who are just starting out. Maybe they can steer clear of those mistakes that I thoroughly plodded through like a big, fat buffalo on rampage.

Anyway, coming to the point, there are two three parts to it -

The Writing Part:
1) Be honest in your posts. Readers can detect fakers a mile away. You don't have to over-dramatize everything just to make up a good post. And don't attempt abstract nonsense just to sound intellectual unless abstractness is your forte and you make perfect sense.


2) Write about something of common interest to readers. Even though blogs are a place to express yourself, nobody wants to read about how you brush your teeth in the morning and how many times you yawned in advanced history class. Unless you have a blog and followers which/who are exclusively dedicated to your life and times in which case, it's o.k.


3) Please do a grammar check before you post, you don't want to sound illiterate to the world, do you? And running a spell-check  is pretty simple too, so DO it. N 4 gawd's sak plz don typ lik dis n da blg - annoys the shit out of everyone. It's called text language for a reason.
Also, don't type whole sentences in capitals. It hurts the eye and the page. Use bold html tags.


4) Include pictures in the posts. RELEVANT ones. It helps break up boring text into digestible bits - says almost every blog-advice site. Heed if you want to be read. But this does not give you the license to go crazy and include like ten pictures for every three lines you write (unless you have a photo blog).


5) Reply to comments. DO reply. Readers don't comment because they are entirely jobless and have no lives. They comment because they like your work and want you to know they appreciate it. Acknowledge that. Even if you are the most popular blogger on the planet, reply. For without readers, you'd just be another person talking to himself.
Also, don't comment and leave a link JUST to increase your traffic without even reading the post, you'll only repel the blogger.


6) And for HEAVEN'S SAKE remove word verification on comments. This is a personal request as well. I comment on a lot of blogs and it makes it really painful. I don't see the point either. If you don't want direct comments, enable moderation. But please, NO word verification.

The Technical Part (even if you are a tech-geek, don't ignore this part)

1) Take pains to learn how your blog works. What comes from where, goes where et al. Blogger and WordPress both are very, very customize-able platforms. Learn a wee bit of HTML code, exercise common sense and you can work wonders for your blog. Customize, customize and more customize.

2) I recommend strongly that you pick one address that you are completely happy with, one name for the blog that makes you pat yourself on the back for your exemplary creativity every time you think of it and forget about changing it. EVER. You'll lose readers otherwise. Trust me I speak from experience.

3) I know templates are aplenty and us, writers, are a dissatisfied and easily bored lot but try and stick to one template for at least six months at a time.

4) Don't crowd your homepage with widgets. They might be cool but they take away the attention from the post itself. Keep it simple. Or atleast pick put those which are complimentary.

5) Make sure everything in your blog fits a certain theme, your theme. By everything I mean, color combinations, lettering and such. And please don't ignore alignment issues.

6) If you don't want to experiment on your blog as such, create a tester blog and use it as a lab rat.
Also, try opening your blog in different browsers. They tend to have technical glitches where everything seems fine to you while your readers can't see shizz (remember a very recent time when my blog was black and entirely too difficult to read?)

7) For God's sake, make sure your page loads fast. As an owner of a blog that loads like a snail (and doesn't know what to do about it), I strongly recommend that you do WHATever it takes to load the fastest. There is no bigger put off than a slow webpage.

The General Part:

1) Don't copy. I can't stress that enough. Respect yourself enough not to copy.

2) Don't be egoistical to admit someone else's blog is wayyy more awesome then your's will ever be. But take pride in your own niche as well. The key is to find the balance.

3) Don't be rude. If it's meant to be funny and a lot of people find it funny, it's ok. But telling your readers that you are better than a the whole lot of them put together, might not go down well with them.

4) Don't blog about current issues unless you know what exactly is going on and you are some kind of authority on it. Opinions are o.k but updates and newsy posts are not. Readers get those from far more authoritative sources then you.

And most importantly, be genuine. When you compliment, mean it.
Popularity comes second. Integrity, first. 

Happy blogging, y'all:)
Veteran bloggers, anymore? Let me know.

P.S: I don't claim to be an expert. This is from one learner to another.

KA-BLOOEY! goes my mind

Warning: The following can only be classified as incoherent rambling. Do not go further if you even mildly suspect that you might not be interested. Do not look for sense, do not look for order and most certainly do not try to understand.


What do you do when that you have a jealousy attack? 


When that bloody green monster puts it's hand through your mouth, reaches for your intestines and twists them all up in a bundle so tight that you feel you might die from the pain. 
When you feel stupid knowing that, rationally speaking, there is no need for that particular emotion but the feeling is so irrational, so primal, that you have no control; you just fall, spiraling headlong into despair. You feel helpless and lost in addition to stupidity.
When you feel what is yours has another side which was, is and never will be yours?
When your insides feel cold and your choking up.


And to voice it out to even the one you consider the most understanding will be pushing them away and driving the cleaver further into the wood.
So basically, this is what is called a mind-fuck.
Thank you, Universe, for conspiring to make me feel EVERY emotion possible, you didn't have to be so kind.
And no, I'm not insecure.


Anyway, Harry Potter is over. As in over over. That makes me depressed to say the least. Not that the movies ever made me happy; I have issues with the makers cutting out my most favorite parts of the books in the movies (or having screwed it up so bad that I despise the scene now). 

But it's the end of an era.
The end of, what I feel, is my childhood.
And that makes me even more depressed.






J.K.Rowling, I know everybody has said everything there is to say, but I will still say one last time that - You. Are. Legend. And you'll have my eternal love and gratefulness for creating Harry.
I have always been jealous of everyone who makes money fast. Except her. She deserves every bit of everything that she gets and much, much more.


And thank you, Radcliffe, for making Harry come to life. For looking like a dork when you needed to and never being too perfect.
And I know that Pottermore is going to suck. 
So bye Harry Potter, you will always be a precious, much-cherished memory.




Have you seen cherry blossoms, they are beautiful. 














They are more than beautiful, they are exquisite.


College is about to start. I'm actually happy going back; hostel IS fun, notwithstanding the wardens. Hopefully, this time around, things will be less complicated, with less bitchiness (my class is full of bitches, myself included), less holier-than-thou's (full of them too), less ego-clashes (the egos are PUNY but they still insist on clashing and making life difficult for the rest of us), less jealousy (and related problems) and more pure, clean fun.
Why?
Because this is the last year I'm going to be sitting in a classroom for a long time to come.


P.S: This is me venting. So ignore. And I told you not to try and make sense.
P.P.S: What DO you do when jealousy strikes, help me out here.
P.P.S.S: I promise to come up with a post that doesn't scream *the author is frikkin' looney* as soon as I shake off this murderous mood. 
P.P.P.S.S: Red Handed has agreed to guest post for me. YAY. 
*dramatically* COMING SOON!