Halle-bloody-lujah!

Now that this news has arrived, I can breathe again.

We have been undergoing a monumental technological clusterfuck at work (e-mail and phones out for most of a week, and it's not completely right yet---can anyone imagine this happening in the private sector and people not lose jobs left, right, and center?) which means that they had to quarantine the work-owned laptops. I don't have a TV (mostly by choice but influenced by an amount of twisted pride, I'm discovering), so I watch movies only on my (borrowed) laptop. So imagine me, visibly tense, perhaps flush with anxiety, grinding my teeth, trying not to whine, trying to fool them into thinking I'm a grownup, when they take my computer for two days and overnight. During a Bollywood strike.

Hai Ram, shouldn't that be illegal? In addition to the fact that this is a time when having a computer is vital to where we are in our work-year, and that it is one of the three or four highest-stress parts of our calendar, there's not a new Bollywood movie to be found. My local Bollywood palace did come to the rescue: they ran Jodhaa Akbar for $2 one week, and Swades the next. I went to both, even though I saw the first one twice in the theaters and I own Swades on DVD and have watched it three? four? times, perhaps. (Enough to absolutely dread SRK's a capella rendition of Foreigner's "Waiting for a Girl Like You" even though he sings it while bathing, bare-chested, outside. Sigh. Maybe he never heard the original. Maybe he learned it by listening to someone else's off-key version. Maybe he just can't sing. Just before I saw the movie again at the theater, it suddenly struck me that the song was by Foreigner, which doesn't seem accidental anymore.)

But seeing those movies again only slowed down the twitchings of withdrawal, preventing convulsions. I'm still down a couple quarts. Let it be known that I am not happy, Mumbai movie mavens. Mai khush nahi hoon. And my already bad Hindi's getting worse.

Working on this, in Lamb's Pride bulky in a gorgeous turquoise, is helping to keep nausea at bay. I fear it will be mammoth even after being felted, but I can't stop knitting. There are no new Bollywood movies out this week, and if I were to frog four skeins of bulky yarn, I would cry as badly as SRK was directed to overact when leaning against the gazebo at the wedding in Kal Ho Naa Ho, one of my least favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies. The heat of my tears might felt the half-knit yarn, and then where would I be?

I don't know how much more vicious and rambling the parenthetical interjections are likely to get; so next week's new releases had better be good, Mumbai, because I'll learn how to say "shit list" in Hindi, and then you'll be sorry.