We all have been hit by this universal shopper-uplifting phenomena and don’t we just love getting one free. Usually though it is a juice box free with a juice box,  hardly a big-ticket item like a pair of shoes free when you buy another. So here comes the absolutism of marketing activism:  BOGO 50%.  You buy a sweater and get one half off.  Your sale oriented mind gives the signal to your eye which is sufficiently trained to read the tantalizing four letter word and you pick up that sweater whether you need it or not and then one more for your sister who will give it one look and will gladly pass it on to her mother-in-law.   You basically paid full price for something to get the other thing at a discounted rate. We are getting everything BOGO these days.  Get your top teeth whitened, get bottom bogo 50% or get the left side of your hair blow dried and pay half for the right side. Just kidding.  Commercialism  hasn’t gone that far yet. But encourage another friend to read this article and your next article will be BOGO 50%.(Shhh!! don’t tell, it is always free).

In 2011, the whole nation saluted the chivalry of the airline pilot,  ”Sully”, who safely landed all his passengers and crew  to an emergency  water landing in NYC’s frigid Hudson River. The world came together to help Japan which was badly hit by an earthquake and a tsunami. The world also became bereft of a visionary and a creative genius this past year whose products grace millions of palms and laps everywhere. A legendary entertainer also died suddenly at his house under his doctor’s supervision.

Last year saw the rise and subsequent decline of Occupy Wall Street Movement making the parks available once more for tourists. Oxford Dictionary also knows how to follow movements. It added the popular words, OMG and LOL to its list.   It also added the word ‘cougar’ (possibly inspired by Demi Moore) which means a middle-aged woman seeking a romantic relationship with a younger man.

New movements, a few disasters, some triumphs, 2011 was a year just like many others but for some, it was a year that was etched in their memory for ever.

Yes they are, I thought. Especially the ones that lets you match your rash or your cough with assessments and potential treatments or the Remind You app that of course remind you to do things.(Only if you remember to download it in the first place). Do we appchieve  anything without apps?
Do any of you remember the time when we had no smart phones and thus no apps to download.  You don’t? Then it must be long ago.

What do  Applications do for us? Apps  are designed to help the user perform specific tasks.  The variety of tasks it seems has multiplied in the last few months or years.  You like tweeting, download a Twitter app; want to post vacation pictures before you vacation is over, download a Facebook App.  Applications  run our lives now.  Music apps, graphic apps, 211me’s, the digital business cards app etc. The word ‘App’ is being used more frequently in a day by an average person than the number of times the Kim Kardashian is photographed in a day or  the Dow Jones go up and down or down and down.

Go ahead then, download, download. Everybody, everywhere. . .  do your share.  Just  don’t sign into Loopt personal mapping app if you are doing some Vegas style hanky-panky.

I wish there were applications for the quintessential question, ”are we there yet?’  Every time you hear that question the app should automatically launch itself and zap those back seat monsters into being quiet or somehow divert their attention maybe to a look outside the window app.

I am also looking for somebody to develop an app. to control tantrums and I need both the kids and the adult version. One of the features of that app. should be an intra-language translator. There are folks at home who need English to English translations.

To the list of I want apps is the application for customizing my looks. One day, I can look like myself and the other day maybe like Angelina Jolie or whoever I prefer to be that day. I guess the app for making people look at you would be then built into it anyways.

There should also be an app for parallel parking in one shot, an app for controlling frizzy hair, an app for making your guy or gal gravitate toward you. There is no end to what apps can do for us. This is just the beginning. Wait till you start using apps to . . . .

Here I will let my readers use their imagination and finish the sentence with whatever personalized app that they would want.

There are articles about abortion rights, Medicare, social security, lack of funding etc. All non-fictional articles but poems or prose dedicated to any one of these topics, I haven’t read them. If anybody has, please forward them to me.

The other day I was reading Ebenezer Elliott’s  Corn Law Rhymes to oppose the English government taxing bread and making it more expensive for the poor people. I read  poems written on the ill effects of industrialization and capitalism and that set me thinking. Has anybody written poems about the computerization of today’s generation? A poem celebrating the success or not of the Republican Tea Party or a tragedy on a politician’s failing policies?

Is it because we don’t need a poem to reach the hearts of masses any more? Information in our age is at our disposal moments after anything occurs. We have all media at our disposal that helps us make our decisions.  Media provided information shapes our affinities. Then why write  something fictional about it!

Could it also be that our lives are so hurried that we don’t have the time to sit and ponder over poems written on the current events because media has already given us so much information about it? What ever maybe the cause, I would love to read a quartet written on  any of the issues plaguing our country today.

Maybe for a start I can attempt to write one. Poets out there, ignore the meter.

The school  said, no extra workbooks, the state reduced our funding

But we can ask our PTO to pay for Nooks, that way we can keep on functioning.

I think, the state of the State is the same as me, both have no money just time (thanks to all the job cuts)

So stop expecting from the PTO who will expect it of mine.

She is not a wedding critic or a connoisseur of parties but she is one of those outspoken persons in her big circle of family and friends that can’t be left out. You have to invite people like them and you just have to take their criticism. She has been part of 6 weddings in our extended family in the past 3 years and have always released her acidity of the mind on someone or something. Because no matter how minutely planned a wedding is, she can still find faults.

However the last wedding that she attended was perfect. Beginning with the locale, which was the sunny Bahamas, the food, in keeping with the island mood; Bahamian stew fish, conch fritters and crab and rice served with Macaroni and cheese. Wild flowers decorated each table and every pillar on the beach. Hugh cushions were set out for the guests and baby pink and white curtained tents with white pearl beads hanging from it transported the guest into heaven. Everything was perfect, even the bride and groom with their pleasing looks and slim figures. A very happy occasion indeed! Until….! Our dear aunt D  happened   standing behind the bride who was  taking the vows and what she saw made her swoon.
A horde of mosquitoes stuck to her beaded chiffon white cape! An alarming number were stationed patiently on the suede pink chair that she was supposed to sit down after the vows.
The critic in her awakened and she opened her mouth to announce that besides the 60 humans gathered there, about 200 or so non-humans decided to grace the occasion. Her eyebrows arched up and her lips curled down following the fashion of the ladies in the soaps that she watches. She did what she usually did in such a situation. She turned her neck and tried to catch the attention of the first person so she can divert that person’s gaze to  the cape of the bride. But the wedding party was more interested in soaking the island sun. So she stretched her hand to hold the bride’s cape high and shoo the flies in the air with a flourish. That way she could everyone’s attention. But aunt D stopped that day. She didn’t do such a thing. She surveyed the guests with a smile, and turning around, picked up a glass of Pina Colada. She poured the sweet liquid into a bunch of flowers and brought it closer to the bride’s cape. Finding juicy  flora, the mosquitoes glided from the cape and landed on the vase which she carried away from the party tables. Aunt Delia, ever the vocal critic, silently helped save the bride some embarrassment. After all, they are just mosquitoes/flaws. Aren’t they everywhere.

Then one day dad needed a surgery
to help his ailing liver,
dad went away to the hospital,
while he shunted from relatives’ houses who would roll their  eyes as soon as his mother would drop him to neighbors who would take him in reluctantly

Now his friends shun him,
as they think he is a pile-on
He has nothing to give
except the sound of his basketball hitting the ground and a resolution
that this is just the dark of dawn
and very soon light will brighten his world  too.

For all of us Facebook is : a  social media network popular with all age groups, a semi personal diary meant for the public eye,  addictive, time-consuming, avenue for venting out, acceptable medium of showing off a lot of things – your vacation; your gifts; a new dress or a new hair cut; a new physique, a new solution to something. Anything. Great way to keep up with old flames. Oops! I mean friends.

Facebook is really, “ I can  read your face like a book”. Facebook  profile  of people tell us who they are, whether they work or they spend most of their time  posting on Facebook,  what they believe in – religion or politics or both or neither. The languages they can speak: I mean ‘publicly’, whether they are single or there is no chance of them being with somebody ever.

Facebook informs us of which restaurant your friend Suzie dined in on Friday night and what did John wear while mule riding at the Grand Canyon. When Trevor is tired of a long day or Tia is frustrated with the spouse not traveling this week. It tells us for whom  spring is in the air even in November and for whom July bring gloom. You get used to reading between the lines like in this case a visit from mom and mother-in-law respectively.

It also gives ideas as to how you can match an old top with a new skirt and have a new outfit for the day or promote a restaurant or debunk the myth that Molly Maids are the best cleaning service.
It tells us whose email id should be  casanova/7@lovemail.com and who has the gumption to acknowledge publicly that the last time somebody turned around to look at them was when they  wore their shirt inside out.

Once you create a Facebook account it is your solemn duty to visit the site frequently and comment on your friend’s change of profile picture or their accomplishments. After all, you don’t want to be an oddity. At best you have to hit the ‘LIKE’ button. This I feel, promotes  positivity. You can only say good things unlike in a completely personal diary.

Facebook is a big unifier. It makes you look at the posts and pictures of family, friends, foes, flirts and fibers with a keen interest. Whether you see eye to eye with these  people everyday or not, they are there in cyber space for you to COMMENT and LIKE them.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s (later Sorceror’s) Stone was rejected by almost a dozen publishers

William Golding’s   Lord of the Flies was rejected by 20 publishers.  Dr. Seuss’s first book was turned down about 27 times and none of us now can get his catchy rhymes  out of our heads.

Rejection only should make us try harder. Whether our work is really good or awful, either way the only outcome of rejection should be revision and re-submission.

Braking the sentences sometimes can lead to an idea getting lost. But shorter sentences have more impact.

There are ways to cut short a sentence. The most talked about is where you use less or no adjectives without taking away from the text. Rather making the text more effective.

Mark Twain – “Substitute “damn” every time you want to use the word “very.” Twain’s thought was that your editor would delete the “damn,” and leave the writing as it should be. The short version: eliminate using the word “very.”

For example: He moved the big boulder with the sheer force of his two muscular hands all the while grunting, screaming, sighing and panting heavily like a warrior in a battlefield.

When you use scissors for this sentence, you will get: He moved the boulder(a boulder is big anyways) with his hands (he could move the boulder. Proof of his strength. Two hands – redundant) while grunting and panting heavily like a warrior in a battlefield.

From 29 words this sentence is now 18 words and some of you might be able to shorten it even more.

When Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write something in six words, he wrote: For Sale: baby shoes, never used.

In his autobiographical work,’The story of my experiments with Truth’,Mohandas K. Gandhi writes short sentences and that was his writing style.

“There are some things known only to oneself and one’s maker. These are clearly incommunicable. The experiments I am about to relate are not such. But they are spiritual or rather moral; for the essence of religion is morality.” – Mahatma Gandhi in ‘The story of my experiments with Truth’

All these sentences are succinct. But they contain a world of meaning.

Informally, in blogs or even in novels, sometimes verb-less sentences are used. The browser might put a squiggly red line which says that it is fragment but these type of short sentences also convey a lot-effectively.

In case you haven’t noticed. I have tried my best to use short sentences in this post.

We dream on two levels. All of us have those lofty desires that have chances of getting fulfilled only if we are ready to sweat to fill up a whole river or our stars are aligned properly.You know, things like becoming so famous so as to spend a weekend in Bora Bora with George Clooney or walking the red carpet with Penelope Cruz…….And the Oscar goes to…..Or honeymooning like Kate and Will on a private island while being the topic of discussion at tea parties the world over. If we tried, we could at least land a date with Mila Kunis if we also made a you tube video like that Marine. But most of us are just happy dreaming about these difficult-to-attain-dreams.

Then we come down to level two in our dream/desire hierarchy. We divert our energies more to the everyday life and its challenges and the more ‘attainable’ desires which we term as ‘goals’.

We all have aspirations. We work toward them. We climb, we slip, we fall, we try again to fulfill our desires. Desires of success, of power, of a person, of a thing. Everyday desires that get fulfilled and new ones crop up in their place. Again we strive to achieve them or think about how to.

Do we have it in us to do something different from what we have ever done? Something that might not make us more successful in our careers but give us personal satisfaction. Something that we have always wanted to achieve like scaling Mt. Everest or going deep down the Pacific. Like sauntering around the pool showing off our newly achieved size 2 figure in an itsy-bitsy bikini or our the men their six packs.
For me, it has always been these doable goals that I set for myself. Like I really want to understand a game of lacrosse or figure out how to solve a calculus problem. I want to, but I still have to make that extra effort that would enrich my knowledge.

There are so many of us who would want to run a marathon, but soon spiral down in our want-ladder to aim for half-marathon and then simply blame it on our weak knees after a few years have passed between the time the idea crossed our mind and the time that our palm graces our knees every conscious minute.
Then there are some of us who spend hours brooding over how to aim an apt rebuttal at our mother-in-laws. A befitting reply wrapped in oodles of honey at the exact moment when it has the best effect and when her son is not around just like she does.

The thing is, we all have it in us. We should just do or work toward what we want to from the moment something inspires us.(not really the mother-in-law part) You want to understand your teenage daughter’s cool lingo, learn it; you want to write like Steig Larsson, start by lifting a pen. Have a list of goals…….. then set out. Have good hair, enter politics, bungee jump, do it all.Time is passing you by.

Hmm!Bungee jump! I could do it under anesthesia. I can later see myself in the video.

For now I am aspiring to lounge by Lake Placid, read a book and ring the buzzer for a Sangria ………..let me top every desire………sangria bought by hubby dear who would actually look at me lovingly for doing nothing. Ahhhh …………..did I ask for too much?