ChAI

I used AI to make my chai this morning.  

Why? Because I wanted to see if I’d still get that dopamine hit from something I didn’t even make.  

I wanted to know if, by outsourcing an experience whose only purpose was my own consumption, it would take away from it.  

By removing the act of boiling water, steeping tea—by only keeping the intent to make it—would I still feel the satisfaction when I took the first sip?  

I read somewhere that you should aim to do hard things. That when you push yourself, when you fight resistance, and break through the boundaries of what you thought you could do, the dopamine hit is bigger.  

But what happens when everything can be done by AI?  

What happens when AI whispers, "I got you," and we stop doing anything at all?  

The dopamine hit then wouldn’t come from the effort, but from the discovery that AI can do more, so we do less.  

But here’s the catch—AI will do more, and we’ll feel less.  

Less joy.  

Less self-reliance.

Less confidence.

Less you.

I'm full of it 😅

My heart is full of grace

for what I have, and been given

As those are two different things

What I have is what I choose to keep

What I've been given is by, of, and from love

My heart is full of hunger

for what I am to learn

So much to see and do

Seeking discomfort like a junkie

Yet anxious because of fleeting, slippery time

The newness of knowledge and unasked for wisdom

like holes in a blanket of complacency and self righteousness

My heart is full of discontentment

for everything I've told myself I need

but don’t have yet

Yearning and obsession with the idea that what I need will save me from who I am

like holding onto sand so tight that it's a palmful of nothing by the time I'm ready to open up

My heart is full of grief

for all I have lost

Versions of myself I miss like I would an old dear friend

Corners and drawers in a room that no longer exists

Except in the squiggly creases of long term memory

My heart is full of hope

that is largely little; sometimes large and sometimes little

Ultimately at the core is a forever optimist hiding behind the ruse of self-deprecation and self-pity 

Hope that I will endure, I must endure 

Ready to do the work

The work that is work enough

The end of the tunnel famously brims bright

Another one about pain ✌️

What's a reasonable amount to bleed?

I bet it is too much if you pass out from it?

Is it too much if standing up feels like work?

It's a chore isn't it? Being a woman with lady parts

It is exhausting, mentally & physically

A bright Sunday morning that's supposed to feel open and euphoric and free

Made inconvenient and messy and uncomfortable

Parts that can't be dismantled, pain that can’t be shared

It's a lonely cross to bear

Tuning in 🎵

I wasn't trying to be polite

When I said that you sang without rhythm

You just don't wait for the song to flow like I do

You rewrite the rules for how music should feel

I confess it is not rare I mean to be mean but,

I like when you sing when you see I'm blue

Tuneless and a little stupid, I still sense the melody

Tuning out I could be, tired too

I rewrite the rules when it comes to tuning into you

Joy 🧲

The sway of the sycamore tree's delicate branches

The calm nap face of a dreaming stray dog

The jarringly bright reflection of the sun on a car's dash

Giggling children with half-chewed food in their mouths

A realist sees math, and feels joy

An optimist sees music, and feels joy

A romantic sees poetry, and feels joy 

Math or music or poetry,

Joy is the state most naturally met,

The means to the end matter as much as

  fish bones do to a vegan

  being tidy does to an emotionally fragile hoarder

  a WiFi router to a marine biologist in a submarine

  two dental kits in a ventriloquist's travel bag

Punchline is Inside

I bite my tongue the instant the doctor's assistant punches holes into 7 crisp report printouts

I bite now, that's my thing

If knuckle nails is to wolverine

Unbidden masochistic biting is to me, I'm wolver-rani

My teeth, it is the one good thing I got from my father

The very same set of even molars, aesthetic incisors and sharp canines

And how I choose to care for it is to not

Barring the nighttime brushing routine

There is daily jhanjhanahat they must endure

In the form of cold water and hot oatmilk chai

But enough about crowns bound to jaws

I didn't come out of my writer's block for this

What I did want to write about is the philosophical undertone of teeth clenching and what it means about control, or the lack of it

About wanting to keep your head (and jaw) above water because life is not consistently kind

About being a drama queen, with crowns plural, who seeks sympathy in oatmilk chai because dairy is apparently not my friend, and supposedly never was

I wanted to write to not wallow in glorious 'woe is me'

But to wander though a thoughtscape of words that I don’t hold back

Certainly not through clenched teeth, but lay free and untethered

And endless jabs of the keys later, feel like a return to safe place much like home

A home I left behind years ago

A home I wasn't born in

But many versions of me were

The renegotiation of fear

Try as you might, fear follows, like a shadow, in all your pursuits

Fear is an internalised response to trauma from early childhood years

The firsts of new experiences often force us to face fear head on

The first time you are left alone to attend school or made to independently perform chores

The first time you address a crowd or speak your mind during a conflict

The overcoming of fear always involves negotiation and more

Someone famously once said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"

That makes so much sense because fear is such a predictable roadblock when charting any new path

It is only once fear is renegotiated, harshly dissuaded, forcefully rebuked, overpowered with grit and sheer strength does it go away

But it doesn't go away for good. It is also a self defense mechanism and therefore protects you from the foolishness of your impulses

Truly it is foolishness that drives greatness

The optimism of naivete propels you to attempt the seemingly impossible

My friend Al

Lady Danbury's handmaiden goes by Coral

Everything in this room is covered in prints that are floral

Including my pyjamas, and they are pink, just another detail you may find banal

Tonight after many a night I've got a private listening session going with my favorite song playing plural

That means multiple favourite songs not the same one on repeat, and it's the ones most jovial

Including some that feel like hugs, comforting and sweet, although aural

The poem where every line ends with a rhyme is a good one? It's merely conventional 

Usual, ideal and bland, like oatmeal

Prime Time for Preening

Abundantly beguiled with adverbs

Little sense prevails in fistful blurbs

While insomnia disturbs me in these suburbs

"Yet your faith remains in sleep tea herbs"

Obnoxiously inane wordplay is my vice

"It would be tolerable if it were nice"

While a tsunami of ideas arrive undisguised

Elusively my friend sleep skates over thin ice

If not self pity, atleast I can self deprecate

Although I can say this stuff's hard to replicate

"Write for the sake of it, don't you complicate"

Without an inner voice, nobody could placate

Not subconsciously profound is my belief

"This writing serves up only comedic relief"

The seriousness if any, is unsuspectingly brief

Comes and goes swiftly & cunningly as a thief

I waited mere minutes, maybe three

"To make the next line rhyme with 'free'?"

Am I at Mount Everest, have I peaked?

Or is it the intramural fibroid, BRB I must pee

Aaand I'm back, you're reading never ceased

An hour has passed, but to you no increase

I dare attempt to control what time has seized

"How about a joke to set the mind at ease?"

Gurgling babies keep the Gram's relevance

Joyful fragility of smallness & incoherence

Only after the climb can you begin descent

"NOT a joke! Plus a random turn, I dissent"

"When will it end, sunrise will be here in a few" 

Rather feels like an arduously long queue

Blink twice and find yourself rescued

Smile as the hue of dawn dawns on cue

Plain to see

The singularity of pain

Dynamic

Isolating

Debilitating

Compounding

Hyperbolic

Frightening

Intensifying

Seemingly without respite

The pain of a stubbed toe

Of contracting uterine muscles

Of a dash of the shin into the edge of the table

Of tiny joints in the knee collectively ganging up on you

Exactly the same yet exactly different

Pain is unifying

Though solid yet fleeting

A thoughtful "I know"

A thought "this is the last of it now"

Small kindnesses we give each other

Making it just a little bit more bearable

Pain lives in the brain

Pain you can exorcise methodically 

If you just calm your frayed nerves

Control your breath, gradually unflexing

The tightly held fists

The strained thigh and glute muscles

Pain is thus, purely physical, if only you separate the you from the you feeling it

Pain shared is pain saved

Pain spoken about is pain dissipated

Pain written about is pain cathartically removed

Going to be gone

I made that arduous journey today

I thought that thought

I went there where the full spectrum of what I could imagine was realized

Mind, very unkindly, stretched to its maximum

Manifesting my deepest fear just through the power of thinking it, and without any transit

A red eye to what feels like self destruction 

At 3.33 am, am I to find my way back to sleepy oblivion?

Or am I too doomed, try as I might:

A mere prisoner locked in my own brain cells for the night?

I won't make any bones about it anymore

Had I faced the morning without this forced revelation, I would have been weak

Lasted about a miserable week

Before the thought, unthought and elusive

Would sprung up unwanted and unbidden

And then I'd be a body of just namesake bones

Not in the least ready to face the onslaught

The attack of the most unpleasant of all ideas

That one day all that will be left is bones

Soulless

Of the ones I hold on to so tightly

That I harbour attachment to beings who are but a phenomenon called existence

Of being human as a human being

That I am myself a phenomena 

Transient yet complete as a washing machine cycle

Going through the same preset of motions as those who have departed before us

What is waiting for us is hidden in plain view

Like a naughty child behind opaque curtains

We are but freed when its time to go is what is said

We are fed that our physicality is happilly abandoned for the freedom of flying

But it is truly the most unknowable thing

What happens when you die

All you can do is hope you leave for grazing greener grass

Theorize that it is a relieving, and revealing experience

Like the ultimate putting down of papers

The hanging of your towel after the last shower

Rinsing flesh that won't feel the gush of life

The towel, dried freshly by the sun brings warmth to the next user

That is all one can hope for

That is all you can do

That all that is knowable is neither why we came here

Nor where we go when we leave

But we can fulfill but a simple duty

We can leave behind comfort for those who outlive us

And with that resolution, I assume the responsibility to live so

To allow bodily functions like sleep to hijack me

To permit the day and all that it brings to take place

To live like a being attached to other beings

With hopefully just a little more awareness