Venial Sin

I realised something a few nights ago when talking to a friend who bounces between continents the way most people commute to work. I don’t much like blogging any more. It’s not the comments (a lot of the hate-filled ones I delete anyway, because I’m just tired of getting into flame-wars with random prats), or that I’m looking for some sort of affirmation (“Oh do keep blogging, don’t ever stop!”). It’s that I’m not doing it for the same reasons [...]

That was when all the fun began. I realised about halfway through my dirty (dirty, dirty!) martini that I hadn’t arranged for a ride to the airport, and wound up calling the hotel to sort me out with a limo for the next afternoon. “I’ll take you to the airport,” whispered Hopkins wistfully, eyes tearing up. “You don’t have to do that,” I muttered into my drink, trying to avoid eye-contact for fear of outright sobbing taking place. “The company [...]

So, while I work on finishing up the Bangkok story, from all of…good grief, two months ago now, there have been a number of other little things going on that I’ve been meaning to write about and never actually got around to. There were a couple of trips to Lahore, including a very strange one in which an acquaintance was convinced I was someone else on IRC, and another one in which a complete stranger asked me if I’d like [...]

By the time we made it to my room, past the members of the Super Junior Stalker Club and a couple of wary security people who alternated between glaring at me and just avoiding eye contact, Heartbreak definitely seemed to be fading fast. Either that or he just enjoyed stumbling and ricochetting off the corridor walls. Opening the door to my room was a little tricky, since he’d overcome his shyness of making physical contact in a public space (a [...]

Dear Madeleine L’Engle, You will be missed. For many reasons, but I think the best one is that you used to say things like this: “Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer. “It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.” I still get [...]

It was at two in the morning, while Hopkins was asleep (and snoring lightly), that my cell phone started shuddering across the bed-side table. Trying to slide my arm out from under him so that I could reach across to the phone, I tunnelled and twisted my way through the bedsheets (the hotel bed was enormous, I could have had an orgy with sumo wrestlers on that thing and had enough room for a barbecue to be held on one [...]