Fury

Zero-Sun

And all we are worth is just zeroes and ones.

Midnight In A Perfect World

If you stare at a moonlit sea long enough, the water stops being water. White on black on white on black. Blinding shards of light over thick, murky blackness. If you allow yourself to forget what you're looking at, everything just... melts. Dissolves, sinks, drowns, dies... a sparkly, hypnotic, spectacularly glorious death.

"Stop the guns, stop the guns!!"

... is what I heard this afternoon, exactly 10 seconds before I was to leave the ship's bridge, done with my marine-mammal-lookout watch for the day. I lifted a pen to sign the roster, and at that exact instant, the bridge radio bursts into frantic yelling from the engine room, which, we were to find out at that instant, was filling up with seawater.

What ensued immediately was one whole minute of wild chaos, with more incoherent, panic-stricken engine-room hollers coming through the radio, and the captain running up to the bridge, banishing all us lowly seismic crew to the instrument room (where we spend over 12 hours a day), while he set about, with unnerving calmness, to decipher what exactly was underway. We tore back to the instrument room, on standby to shut all systems down in case a blackout was issued. Senior crew members on night-shift, frantically summoned, poured into the instrument room, bleary-eyed and puzzled at first, then quickly progressing to urgent alertness. Guns stopped, ship to a grinding halt, the chase-boat racing towards us to tow the ship if needed, and frazzle, frazzle, all around. Morbid excitement. Every person in the know making mental checklists of precious personal belongings to abandon ship with, if needed. It's embarrassing, the enlightenment that comes with making that checklist. Of priorities, imagined. Versus those, real.

In the end, in a nutshell, valve shut, leak stemmed, water pumped, and back to business, an hour later. Like nothing ever happened at all. I don't know what's more horrifying -- The possibility that things could have gone very wrong, or the fact that an hour later, it was all back to business. Frantic business. Single-minded business, unwavering priorities. Tick, tock, tick, tock, must catch up with the clock. Must make that money, must not stop, no matter what.

Bulletproof...

I wish I was.

Happiness is shamelessly relative. And so is misery. On a nice, broad, long time scale, I wouldn't exactly call now the epitome of perfection, joy-wise, what with ridiculously long hours at work that I don't exactly bubble over with enthusiasm for, the considerable lack of food for herbivores, the sameness of every day on a ship, the fact that work encroaches upon my dream-time as well, the drastic reduction in free-time, sunset-gawking time, shutterbugging-time, the lack of contact with the outside world, my outside world. Still, compress that time scale to little short of a year, and I'd call this heaven. Especially those nights when all I have to do is look up and melt, drowning within the rivers of shooting stars that dance for me.

What if?

Do we all have a few defining moments in our lives that irrevocably change its course? Do those crazily radiating roads emerging from every crossroad ever meet? Is there ever a possibility of finding two straight, diametrically opposite paths that, defying all conceivable logic and reason, meet, hundreds, maybe millions of miles down the line? Maybe there are a few, but I'm starting to think that those I've already crossed don't belong to that category.

I often wonder if life is passing me by, a life I think, in some undefined, intangible, immeasurable way, I should be living, that I was meant to live. But maybe it's just me who's stepped away, living this other, alternate, parallel version. I've always so vehemently, nearly forcefully tried to believe that I don't live in regret. It's always easier to lie to yourself than to acknowledge the substantial chasm that exists between what you want to be like, and what you really are.

Demon Days

That's about the closest thing to 'sunset' I've managed to watch in days. Well, alright, five days, but that really is downright shocking and reprehensible and terrible and head-shakingly sorrowful by my standards. Offshore-ing standards, that be. A far, far cry from March when I shamelessly flooded this blog with enough pictures similar enough to be made into animation! Which, I absolutely swear I never did. But then again, the alternative to less sunset pictures here means more spouting of words and things, in trite, bloggy "trains of thought" and "fragments" and "ponderings" and thoroughly pretentious rhetoric.

Er... I think I'll stop now.

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Post title courtesy a Gorillaz album. Which I have, but can't quite remember if I've heard entirely. It's always usually (hmm... isn't that some kind of oxymoron?) El Mañana. I would've preferred it being called 'Today', but 'Hoy' doesn't quite have the same ring to it, now, does it?

Title also in tribute to Samit Basu. Read the last bits of The Simoqin Prophecies this morning and grinned wildly for absolute hours. And since nearly everyone here positively despises bobbing about for five weeks straight, of course they think I'm thoroughly weird and smile and nod benignly at me, probably muttering "Poor thing. Losing her mind, she is," to themselves. Um, actually, more likely they're fantasising about that first beer as soon as they land on solid ground.
-----

Mmmmmm. Am finally taking the time to sit down, do mostly nothing, and drown in music that I've had to reluctantly set aside for days now. Such immensely pure bliss!

Ok, I've absolutely stopped now. Really.

Thicker than water

Les Nuits

I spent an hour last night curled up in a corner in the pitch darkness of the helideck, head upturned, facing the sky, utterly bewitched. The countless stars, poles apart from the anonymous celestial pinpricks that they're reduced to in a city, here, so bold, so proud, so assertive, so... there! Right there! In the sky, in your eyes, your ears, creeping into your skin. Spangles in your mind, and tears in your eyes.

Sea Changes

You learn something new everyday. My favourite lessons, regardless of how distressing, no -- torturous, they may be at first, are those bring me crashing down a million pegs, deliver a desperately needed talking to, and force me to strip down to bare, cruel nothingness, to really look at myself, under the harshest arc lights, surrounded by pristine mirrors from every conceivable angle, magnifying ponderous flaws conveniently tucked into blind spots. To admit, to acknowledge, to confess, to walk over burning coals of self-reproach and self-abasement with painful determination. And to what end? One that only serves to mark the beginning of yet another phase of slow recuperation, hesitant acceptance, stealthily creeping indulgence, wanton, unapologetic mental decay, followed by fresh jolt of gut-wrenching horror and devastation.

Rather pointless? Decidedly. My favourite? Yes, unquestionably. Why? A multitude of reasons, not in the least because they enable me to nurture the notion that maybe, just maybe, some good will come out of it all in the end. Whatever end. Whenever it ends. I do think it’s time I stopped pretending I’ve given up on myself completely. Dead already? Not yet, at all.

Makeovers

Life at 5 knots

I think I could get used to this...

This too shall pass

The good thing about working offshore on a seismic vessel is that you never have the time of day to indulge in the shameless luxury that is wallowing in general, unfocussed, directionless misery. Which makes that ability to brood once you're back on land so much more precious! Yum! Absence. Fondness. Etc. That sort of thing.

Post title sound familiar? :)

"But I have promises to keep"

And miles to go before I sleep.

Knocked sideways

I’ve conveniently decided to use Pompous Fact #2726 (“Anticipation-is-everything!”) to placate my unsettled nerves and to explain to myself why it is that I’m not exactly bubbling over with manic joy at finally being adrift again. I’m certainly not unhappy. I think I’m mostly content. The thing (that which I’m trying so hard to pin down with my crooked finger, in vain, it would appear) is that, among other things, before I got here I didn’t really expect to bubble over with joy or euphoria and suchlike, given that the novelty of ‘shipping’ would’ve naturally worn out with the first trip. I pretty much predicted a mild, unobtrusive contentment. Beige-like. I expected to be beige. And beige I am. What’s getting my goat now, then, is why I’m still disoriented and unsettled, when everything has so gone according to ‘plan’. And that’s how Pompous Fact #2726 comes to the rescue -- Even ‘beige’ expectations will always exceed the actual… um… state of ‘being beige’.

Erm.

I think I should stick exclusively to photo-posts for these ship stints. The novelty of offshore sunsets is considerably more resilient.

*jumping overboard*

PS. Yikes! I can't get over how much these pics look like ones I took from the Trident. So much for resilience. But do forgive... as with macros, it'd take a great deal for these sunsets to get old. At least for me.