aeolianblues

Whenever I go to America I get weirdly territorial of Canada, there's just something about being away from home that makes me fifteen times more obviously Canadian for some reason. I wonder what being sooo far away, in the UK might do to me, I wonder if it'll make me feel the same. I do also know so much more about the US (god don't we all). Idk we'll see.

Laughing at the state of this. This is how we get through work huh. (For anyone offended, I don’t use Firefox for work, all the ‘confidential’ stuff and internal sites are away on Chrome and you aren’t seeing them.)

We’re googling, writing bad articles for my music mag, YouTubing, radio, making gifs and listening to Apple Music (Spotify’s blocked on the work laptop). As life should be I suppose

girlies I am getting messaged by people whose names I can quote like a history textbook

count: that's now 24/24 bands I have teched for my live sessions who have asked me if I'm in a band. Maybe I should be

The duality of life is so crazy. I was back on campus today, I’ve been feeling pretty ancient all week because it’s been frosh week which means I have to deal with the fact that this year’s class graduates in 2028 (that’s not a real year) and were born in 2006 and 07, years that I can remember writing in the margins of a school notebook.

I'm walking around campus for the beginning-of-year campus clubs fair, and it's all, people love me, people think I'm cool, people are coming up to me saying they like my fit, in the meanwhile I'm internally getting jumpscared thinking wait; these incredibly well-dressed kids are approaching me whilst I'm shovelling fucking peanuts into my mouth out of a bag in my tote bag

There comes a point when you officially get Older and become invisible to cool young tiny things, and then you can do whatever you want because they sort of stop noticing you. I've been feeling a bit old this week, I'm at Big Person work, everyone around me is like half a decade younger, we're at quite different stages in our lives, I've been thinking. But I also have the sort of face that would pass me for a 19 y/o clearly, because these kids all have pulled me in like I'm some sort of counter culture bohemian trendsetting cool kid, and whatever the hell that means, it's definitely instantly made me feel a lot younger and connected with 'the youth'

Lads, I will not be putting up with 4 pm sunsets

I love the fact that I have a food blog that spawned from chaos because I can just post ‘oh man, I just made the most fucking fantastic mushrooms today, with some sautéed onions and spices and I am still thinking about it. I forgot I can just cook with onions for two weeks, fucking welcome back onions I’ve missed you’ and that is considered a perfectly on-topic post. It’s great, that’s a thought, not a post. All that said, guys I have to tell you about this fucking mushroom I cooked today

If any of the words I use sound strange to anyone, try voicing them in not-an American accent. Hope this helps 👍

I remembered suddenly that when I was 10, in the very early days of social media, when things were way more lawless and casual, and social media did not link to real life, for all intents and purposes, I did not have internet, save for to be able to do a school-assigned summer project every summer break for which I’d hand-write info from Wikipedia (and other sites) and select some pictures to print out and paste into a scrapbook. In those days, my only real exposure to America was through television. I wasn’t really into sitcoms and whatnot, which are often American, and of course we had Hollywood films. But we also had (have) a lot of indigenous cinema, and so of course I heard a lot of media in my own accent and languages, and read a lot of work written in my own English. Owing to a long and tedious history, our English was British English. Our books were either the English editions, English imports, or occasionally Indian editions. And of course, we had a rich literature of local English-language and Anglo-Indian authors (I hadn’t read The Room On The Roof aged 10! But I would have read it by 15, which honestly is the right age).

There was some exposure to American* English and voices through Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon shows, and through American dubs of kids’ anime, however. So I grew up loving Pokémon, Beyblade, a bunch of other series that my generation at least, watched in English. (*yes I’m aware the Beyblade dub is Canadian. Only Canadians know the difference between a Canadian and an American accent.)

So here we are in around 2009, 2010, all I know about America is: it's vast, very clean (my mum’s dust allergies did not flare up for the first time ever when we visited family there, and so America must be dust-free. As an adult, I maintain my own house now and laugh at the notion that *anywhere* could really be dust-free; my mum visited me and sneezed once. Yet, I do have to concede that she sneezes more in her own house, which shall always be 10x cleaner than mine, and saying this even is a compliment to my house. I try to be my mum. I fail, regularly. (<- was sweeping at 2 am last night because I’d rather have the dust IN the dustbin that I had to take out for garbage collection the next morning. Also it’s!! the hair!!). It has Disneyland, President Obama, Pokémon and Beyblade, mindful of the knowledge that two of these were actually Japanese. No obstacle.

This is my view of America. Sounds quite nice, doesn’t it? And they speak differently to us, but the only people I’ve heard speaking like this are 1. my cousins (very sweet) 2. ‘YES WE CAN!’ A+, inspiring 3. ‘Go Pikachu!’

So I warm to this little novelty. I can still do Ash Ketchum’s voice, and at one point aged like 11 everyone thought I was going to be a voice actor because I could do accents. Never mind that my range was very limited, and I had never been ‘y’all’ed at. All I had was ‘GenAm.’ Southern exposure would come later in life.

I couldn’t just speak American, that would’ve had me cast out immediately. No way. We were harsh on ‘snobs’ that pretended they were from elsewhere, who had a ‘posh upbringing’, went to the international schools, or spoke with an accent we recognised as from the foreign English(-first language) world (read: British or American. Australians were our cricket sledging rivals: we’d done their accent a million times and they’d done ours. They were the reason why Indians have an odd propensity for the word 'mate' despite not being British. The Aussies didn’t count. Also we didn’t really have Australian schools in the country, international schools were usually IB or IGCSE, which usually produced one of two accents). But almost as a little nod, as a token of admiration, I could spell just a handful of words differently.

And so I could declare the color of pH indicators on my tests and then go home to watch my favorite animated series. It was seen simply as a mark of internationalism: what a well-read kid! You were clearly reading outside the curriculum if you were reading American editions. I don't particularly ever remember being taken aside for my spelling or discouraged from it, besides the occasional circling of 'bad' spelling in my work with a red pen by a teacher. The world continued to turn. I volunteered with organisations, my documents were notarised, my sentences ended with fullstops. My sums pointedly ignoring the 'hundred thousands' and 'millions'. I'd come home and sit in the bathroom, furiously scribbling away my Pokémon ideas, telling my mum I needed longer to shower, mental tyres screeching to a halt when she'd turn off the light in frustration. But true to character, at least the scripts retained their proper geographical localisation (localization?), albeit spoken through the mouth of a 13 year old who certainly did not live in the USA. But could put on a damn decent voice in a few specific situations.

I don't remember when exactly this stopped, it likely faded away like many childhood enthusiasms do, aided by a resigned fear of being marked down by external examiners on important tests, and the subsequent need to standardise language for the widest possible readership, but it was long enough ago that I had forgotten I ever wrote like that in the first place. I think it was definitely gone by 2016, for both reasons. I'm not sure 'American' was really 'cool' to anyone anymore. And we were coming up to 15, 16. That was when I first got a phone.

ooh goodness, the state of things. I woke up, in the evening right, laptop’s in my lap, mid-code, I’ve come to to a podcast still playing; I’ve fallen asleep in the middle of the workday. Now luckily towards the end of the day since I came to around 5:30, and I’ve caught up on work since (and no one was looking for me) so it’s fine, I’ve got to sleep before midnight. I’m clearly still working through the post-festival fatigue.

lowkey the reason you don’t find me hanging around Indian online communities that much is because it invariably turns into your uncle-ji’s nationalistic WhatsApp group chat 👌

like. Do you think I don’t want to talk to other cool people who share my growing up experiences. Tumblr is so American, I’m largely out of it. People on here will post ‘it’s a lake booboo thing, anyone from Ohio will know this’ and it’s all ‘yeah yeah yeah’. I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I can tell you weird shit about Chennai. I won’t, because any public internet Indian chat invariably turns into a heated need to ‘defend our culture’ and so I nope the fuck out. Guys. GUYS.

Can we PLEASE have some casual Indian representation and I mean low stakes, no stakes; absolutely ZERO stakes representation. Where every single conversation does not need to turn into an educational event where we sing about our heritage and defend our dignity, dudes, it’s fine. We’re fine. It’s fine to just. Exist. I don’t want every little post to turn into a culture expo.

“It takes as much effort to put away things neatly as it does to make a mess” wrong! You do not know how effortlessly I can create an absolute mess, Mumma

man I saw Daniel Craig’s Loewe catalogue photoshoot, this website has got me conditioned to seeing people so excited about Dan’s free and frolicking era of having fun sans Bond and starting with Knives Out, him living his best life, and I don’t even go here. Saw the shoots on IG and like half the comments are homophobic joyless idiots, sometimes I forget that world exists. The sort of idiot who’d be down the chippy whining about how Hollywood is killing the Masculine (Normal) Man™ and all that nonsense. Or some American bloke on his laptop raging about some Hollywood conspiracy theory about gay people. The sods.

How much of Toronto’s economy is propped up by the rest of us fuckers going, “I’m going to Toronto tomorrow”?

CORNERSHOP FOLLOWED ME my desi ass can sit and weep now :’)

you’ve heard of ‘floor is lava’, now introducing ‘floor is storage’. Welcome to my world