this whole blog thing

Taking another sip of tea and listening to She Keeps Bees, I can say the following as a recap.

It's been about 6 or 7 years since I started this blog. I was pretty religious about it when I started and while I was at Harvard but since then I have had a few lapses in the regularity.

Really there are a few reasons: This started off as a kind of outlet for poetry and also a place to air my response papers and get some intellectual feedback as well as having a gripe about what's happening in the world and my world, mainly my love life.

Now my love life has been up and down like a fucking roller coaster since the time I finished Harvard, but other things changed: working took up a lot of my brain, though I still managed to write a little poetry in here, especially trying out the Ghazal form, which I highly recommend for poets who want to stretch themselves a bit.

Obviously the intellectual stuff went for a bit of a nose-dive: I didn't get stupid or anything, but I wasn't reading nearly so much theory...

I became a Sikh about 2 1/2 years ago, which has been hugely helpful and a really good process.

Now, however, in case anybody's listening, I'm starting my PhD at Oxford University after an absence from academia of about 5 years. AND if that weren't daunting enough, I'm facing my 30th birthday in just a few days. Actually that doesn't bother me much at all frankly. At least not consciously.

And I also got married this year to a lovely man. Which is causing me both joy and pain, I must admit. Mostly joy.

So that's where things stand. I'm going to be checking in more, and like before it will be a combination of intellectual spewings, poetry and some intimate details that you didn't really want to know. I still have my food blog, Les Madeleines du Memoir. I also have a new blog about Contemporary Sikh Identity which is basically a platform for a project I'm doing with a few friends.

There's the trouble though, I guess, about getting a little older, working and constructing your identity...You have to be careful what you say.

I feel like Allen Ginsberg when I say: I want to be frank with you but, America, I don't know how. (that goes for the UK and any other country too). We'll see what I can come up with.

Love,

SR65