The Internet Personified: Beach Hideaway Edition

Browned and--sadly--mosquito-bitten, I have just returned from a beach all the way on the other end of Goa. It's so close towards the end of Goa, in fact, that Google Maps shows you the little dotted outline of Karnataka, just spitting distance from there. Also very close is Gokarna, which is actually IN Karnataka, and where I once went, many years ago, all by myself, to have a very lovely, contemplative beach holiday. This time, we were taken by two friends, as a wedding present, to their favourite beach. They were also taking their two dogs with them, so we had to arrange separate transport, since said dogs are not the little lapdog variety, and require most of the backseat to themselves. Which meant K got to live a long held ambition of going on a long drive on the Enfield Bullet, which he has been wanting to for aaages. (Don't worry, we both wore helmets.) On the way there, we decided to be a bit more adventurous than the map had in mind for us, and took meandering country roads, rich with trees and birdsong, including this little bridge in the photo up top (enable images to see!) which was so narrow that if you stretched out your arms, you'd be able to touch the sides. (On the way back, I saw an old white lady on a cycle smiling to herself as she headed a caravan of scooters and cars, no one can honk at you on this bridge, you see, because there's no space for anyone to pass.)

Going on a Bullet is quite an experience in and of itself, and if I was a certain kind of travel blogger, and maybe ten years younger, I'd totally start a blog called "Adventures From The Back of a Bullet" but my butt hurt too much after about two hours for it to be a full time occupation, alas. Before hour two, when you're still a bit energetic and not quite so jogged about, it's quite glamourous though, especially when you stop for a drink, and take your helmet off and shake your hair about, at least I would, if my hair wasn't already standing on end with all the wind and the humidity. Oh well. Imagine me shaking my hair about in any case.

Our hotel room was shaped like a boat and I THINK was actually made out of half a boat hull? Either way, it was super cool. Bathroom/dressing room downstairs, big bed with mosquito net and small sit-out upstairs. (Photo below, featuring also two other friends who also happened to be in South Goa at the same time and who came by for a swim and a drink.)

It's been so long since we've stayed at an actual hotel though! In Europe this summer, we stuck to Airbnbs, and friends' homes. The ONE hotel we stayed at was in Amsterdam, and that was hardly luxury, with a shared bathroom and a teeny tiny room. I love, love, love hotels. I love room service. I love fluffy pillows and white sheets and going down to the same restaurant for breakfast every morning. I love breakfast buffets (which this place didn't have, but STILL.) I love "discovering" all the parts of my temporary room: opening the drawers, and looking at the bathroom and exclaiming over the toiletries. It always feels like a "real" holiday when you're staying in a hotel, where you can have a glass of rose at noon and then sleep till 3 pm and then go down to the beach and swim and eat again and drink again and sleep some more. I had some writing to do--because when do I not? Such is the freelancer's life--but only one column, so it was almost fully free time.

Frolicked in the sea like a water baby, even though over the years, my love for the sea is tempered with my Anxiety-with-a-capital-A, because what if it sucks me in and I DIE, how long would I last floating in the open sea before I just gave up and drowned? When I was a child, I swum all the time, without adult supervision for the most part, and even though I wasn't the world's best swimmer, I trusted myself enough to think that I'd stay alive. I used to even get a certain kick out of my name meaning "goddess of the waters" which is close enough to a benediction, I think. Now I stay in until my knees, and splash about, but always get uneasy when I go further in. I'm working on this, and all my other anxieties. (I watched this Boxing Day documentary once, ages ago, about the tsunami, and it freaked the FUCK out of me, and I think that's where this phobia dates from.)

Another way I have reverted to my hoyden girlhood is by amassing mosquito bites all the way up my shins and my thighs. Telling me to stop scratching them is useless, my hand drifts to my legs almost unconciously, and now I have bumps which may well turn into scars if I keep at it, but OH MY GOD IT FEELS SO GOOD TO SCRATCH AND SCRATCH AND SCRATCH. You know? It's one of the most satisfactory feelings in the world.

And now, we are back and I'm writing to you. There aren't that many "updates" from a beach holiday, I realise. We ate--hey, here's a fun anecdote, I'm not entirely useless: the two shacks down the road from our hotel both had celebrity endorsements, one said "Recommended by Gordon Ramsay!" and the other said, "Recommended by Jamie Oliver!" That's a lot of celebrities to come to a remote little beach, and even the one we patronised (Gordon's) didn't have THAT great a menu. Average, or even a little less than average, considering we are spoiled for choice up here in North Goa. So I asked the guy, "Hey, how come Gordon Ramsay is on your board?" and he said, "Oh, he [Gordon] was staying at this five star hotel, and I used to work there and someone told him to come and check out my shack so he did, and he loved it." (My interpretation: Ramsay wanted a quiet beach, and was sent to this one. "Where should I eat?" he probably asked the dude, and since there was only one place at the time, he was sent to this guy.] "What did he order?" I asked, thinking maybe he whipped up something amazing, but nope, all he ate were steamed mussels with lemon. "Did he like it?" I asked again, hoping for more from this celebrity endorsement, but EVEN THOUGH he's clearly endorsing it on the sign, the owner just shrugged and smiled, clearly wanting me to change the subject. Which I did, asking then, "And when did Jamie Oliver visit?" to which he sneered and said, "That shack is owned by a cousin, and HE never had Jamie Oliver, he was just COPYING me." We stuck to our own hotel after that, preferring to take our chances in a non-celebrity approved restaurant.

Link list!

As more time passed, Laura felt convinced that she had made a life-altering mistake. "I hated, hated, hated the situation I found myself in," she says. "I think the word for what I felt is 'trapped.' After I had a kid, I realized I hated being the mother to an infant, but by then it was too late. I couldn't walk away and still live with myself, but I also couldn't stand it. I felt like my life was basically a middle-class prison."

- Great article on women who regret having children. I often wonder if this is the last taboo, the one thing no one can talk about.

It was cool, and still is, for white boys to slum in the shoes of the imaginative other; like famous actors taking on roles with physical or mental disabilities, it almost guaranteed the literary equivalent of an Oscar nomination. They were rewarded for stretching their imaginations, while for someone with a name like mine, such stretching was considered whatever was the polite literary word for uppity. I was expected to stick to the reservation badlands of “write what you know” and spin my tireless rims along the dusty backroads of my own self-ghettoised culture.

- Why are brown people only supposed to write about brown people?

To me it has always been clear that a dinner party is about what is said, not what is eaten. There would always be wine and salad and bread and stew; chocolate and fruit and nuts and sparkling cold duck. But those were just the props — the conduits for funny and real and meaningful conversation; the set pieces of a lively, engaged, lingering old-school dinner party. The one that I have been chasing ever since.

- Kinda really want to have a dinner party after reading this set of pieces in the New York Times.

To expose children to this content is abuse. We’re not talking about the debatable but undoubtedly real effects of film or videogame violence on teenagers, or the effects of pornography or extreme images on young minds, which were alluded to in my opening description of my own teenage internet use. Those are important debates, but they’re not what is being discussed here. What we’re talking about is very young children, effectively from birth, being deliberately targeted with content which will traumatise and disturb them, via networks which are extremely vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It’s not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. It’s down to that level of the metal.

- Spooky story on the algorithms taking over kids content & turning them dark and creepy.

It didn’t take long for Georgia to recognize that Jasmine was unusual. At six months she started speaking; at around nine she was reading. As a full-time student and single parent, Georgia didn’t have time to homeschool Jasmine, so she checked out piles of books, including illustrated novels and science texts, from the MSU library. By the time Jasmine was two, she could write. Even the way she carried herself—head up and back arched, like an adult with good posture—was uncanny.

- I'm a sucker for stories about child prodigies. (Please watch Little Man Tate if you haven't already.)

"I never order mussels at restaurants," Mary Dumont, chef and owner of Cultivar in Boston, told INSIDER. "I know people love them and I'm meticulous about their storage and care if I serve them, but all it takes is one bad mussel and you're down for the count."

- Maybe Ramsay should have read this story on food NOT to order in restaurants before he went there, eh?

I looked at the tiny monochrome display on the bitcoin wallet and noticed that a countdown timer had appeared. It was making me wait a few seconds before I could try another PIN. My heart fluttered. I went to the hardware wallet manufacturer’s website to learn about the PIN delay and read the bad news: The delay doubled every time a wrong PIN was entered. The site said, “The number of PIN entry failures is stored in the Trezor’s memory. This means that power cycling the Trezor won’t magically make the wait time go to zero again.

- I've forgotten my PIN before, but this story is INSANE.

(Sorry for the crappy formatting, guys! Can't figure out how to insert pull quotes into this thing without also messing up font size. Sigh. Here have a photo of our feet and a starfish to make up for it)

Have a great week!
xx
m




Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of six books (suppport me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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Forward to your friends if you liked this and to the person who still says "Wingardium LevioSAR" even though Hermione made it perfectly clear how it was to be pronounced.