This cringe-worthy life

You know, I used to look at other kids in my school or college and think of them as total weirdos, while thanking God about how I so was not like that. I used to think of the shitty phase the kids had and being glad that I never did. I had even claimed to my mom that how classy AF I was and not like others. All the while, I was in the top league of weirdos. Hello, cringey life. I have been in splits since I started remembering how awful I was(or I am :-/) and how phase-y I can be. I am sitting here with tears pouring down my face from embarrassment and utter laughter.

 

If we start talking about fashion, I have realized that I flow with trends, but after they have been around for atleast 2 years and are almost passing by, I will join the bandwagon. I am not the totally trendy person you see and neither the ‘shun trend and make my own style’ girl. I am somewhere weirdly in between, very unmemorable. Why am I saying all this? I have so many pictures of wearing stuff after the trend has passed and looking ridiculous in the said clothes. Imagine Henna color checked parallel pants with a matching short jacket. My brain hurts thinking about it. When I was 6-7, we went on a Shimla trip and there is a picture of me wearing a black n white pinstriped blazer style fitted pencil dress with a big black belt and a matching hat. I felt that I was looking mad cool. I want to tear that picture. Imagine a specy, spindly 7 year old with front teeth knocked out posing like she is convinced she is Princess Diana. I am usually on top of fashion theoretically through magazines, articles and blogs but I do not end up buying stuff for a long time. I have a tendency to go ‘Ewww no’ for a lot of things that I see for the first time before it turns into ‘Awesome Unicorn Gorgeousness’. The other day I was out in the mall and realized how everyone was suddenly in bomber jackets in military green color, just like puffer jackets last year. I know that I will not like them now but will crave for them in a couple of months. By the time I own something, it’s on its way out. Thank God for cyclical fashion though. Who is looking cool in those palazzos, aka the old parallels from those days? Haah! Clarification : I don’t have the same parallels now, its physically impossible to fit in those, even if I had those. They were ugly as hell too. But I do fit into a super cute plaid, kilt style skirt that I got for my 10^th birthday.

I remember the fun junior college days that people call high school in other parts of the world. I thought I was the coolest cat around and wore red t-shirts pretty much every day with embroidered flared jeans. I had a thing for silver rings and 8 of my fingers had rings on them sourced from Hong Kong lane in Pune. Yep that’s the street of choice for all silver jewelry based needs. I recall having purple flared pants also that had slits going up on my shins. Fergusson college road had the coolest stuff and Kareena Kapoor’s 2000’s colorful fashion was inspirational. Those were also the days when I would trip 800 times a day in my sky high platform shoes. I stopped wearing those once I had a boyfriend who was just a few inches taller at that age(16-ish) and had the realization dawn upon me that walking like a newborn giraffe on stilts was not cool. It’s been flats since that day. I had gone to Goa on a trip with my friends in the last year of undergrad and there is this weird thing that stands out for me. I had gotten a thick, black, beaded bracelet for N, Ani and me and for some reason, I started wearing it on my upper arm. Only after I saw a picture of me with that thing, I realized, a week later, how dumb that looked.

When I got into college, I had a crush on two guys during the first couple of months. Those guys were and will always be way out of my league. But I had a close friend though who was in that group and was absolutely the kind of girl they would hang out with. You get my drift? Like if it was high school(which life always is), she would be on the cool table with those guys and rest of the gang planning a next party, and I would sit with the Harry Potter obsessed kids who sometimes forget to brush their hair and discuss Govinda movies. She is an amazing person and would just somehow fit everywhere actually! So, to sound yo, I started learning about rock music from her. Seriously, this happened and we always laugh about that whenever talk now. This was followed by a phase trying to like Eminem’s rap, thanks to that idiot I was with. I was even writing gothic poetry because loneliness and sadness and depression was just soooooo romantic. It was cool to be sad?! This calmed down only to re-surface a couple of years back when a friend told me that chart topper music is yuck and how Beatles and Pink Floyd are the best. Thankfully, I got over that really quickly and now unabashedly listen to the radio top 40, Taylor Swift, and all Hindi music. The weird pretentious music loving phase did yield to me some sappy loving for some artists including Bryan Adams, whose concert I am going to in July. To be honest, most loving is fueled by nostalgia because I am not majorly into music. I like Pop, and I can’t help it. Actually, I don’t want to help it. Hmmmpphh.

The cringey things I say, will take up reams of paper if I start writing them down. I have a tendency to say ‘Wish you the same’ after someone wishes me ‘Happy Birthday!’ How? Why? I don’t know. Even if I have fought off a Cassowary, swam with sharks and then had a dinner party with gnomes in the garden, if someone asks me how my weekend was, I will blank out and say ‘Eh, alright, relaxed.’ It would be still fine if I left it at that. But the long pause and that look of trying to remember, takes me down. Once a guy was flirting with me and told me that my shoes were cute. I proceeded to say ‘I have flat feet.’ That was the most appropriate response I could come up with?! There was this one month that I was saying ‘Honestly’ all the time as punctuation or response. There was also a phase of ’50 shades of embarrassment/crazy or whatever the heck the feeling was’.

So even if I thought of myself as someone who sailed through without a phase, I know I had more than my fair share to laugh about. I spell out P-H-O-N-Y, and don’t miss the capital letters.I will not even deny that I am going to laugh about what I am right now, a few years down the line.

I can imagine a 40 year old me cringing :

Uggh PB? Seriously you wrote these kind of posts? I can’t believe you were being so sappy! THIS felt funny?? You wore that?!  You sang Taylor Swift all the time?? Well, homegirl is cool, so that’s okay.