Love In The Time of a Heatwave

Dil ke badle mein dil de
Tu sauda humse karle
But I just wanna be your lover-girl..

Is that really what love is? A sauda? Merely a transaction?

"Here you go luv, all my hopes and dreams and desires, and as a special bonus - my heart and my soul - just like you ordered, all yours for the cost of a burrito lunch and some yellow tulips."

Hmm. I probably shouldn't be taking my cues from Alisha Chinai, but blame the E-volver comments section for reminding me about cheesy 90's pop music and sending me down this train of thought in the first place.

In other news, it's bloody hot. We finally made it to Kickass Cupcakes in Davis Square yesterday, and while the deep-friend cupcake was really quite amazing, it was too hot to enjoy it when I was feeling so damned deep-fried myself. There was no wind, no air, it literally felt like a sauna. And the heat wasn't helping my feet either; I have penny-sized wounds at the backs of my feet because of wearing bad shoes on Thursday when it was all humid and rainy (yes they've got band-aids on them, but I have to change them frequently because of all the oozy stuff they're oozing.. v. painful and gross.. damn summer shoes) and the heat made them ITCH.

Later in the afternoon, we checked out the Coolidge Corner Arts Festival, and while the raspberry fruittata from J.P. Licks did help, the mercury hit 90F and I went from fried to boiled. But I did enjoy the Arts Festival; it reminded me of our neighborhood Bucktown Arts Festival in Chicago. There was lots of wonderful hand-crafted jewelry, hand-painted silk scarves, beautiful photography and also, interestingly, sock monkeys (yeah, toy monkeys made of socks).

Two artists stuck out of the crowd for me: there was an Israeli lady named Tami Rodrig, who made the cutest silver jewelry and accessories out of bottle-caps. She told us how she went to India and collected so many of her bottle-caps there because the refrigerators have bottle-openers attached to the door handles and they collect caps in a tube at the bottom, so she was like a kid in a candy store.

And then there was this photographer called David Stern who had shot the most breathtaking pictures of Italy, and then printed them, in gorgeous and stunning resolution, on ceramic tile so you could hang the pieces in your kitchen or living room. Simply amazing stuff. There were sunflowers, and rivers, and crumbling Italian houses decorated in flowers and vines, and boats, and sacks of chillies and red peppers... it was so beautiful, I was literally left salivating. I need to go to Italy. NOW.

And then I finally got around to watching Atonement, which is quite possibly one of the saddest movies I've ever seen. It's about (what else?) true love, although love that is only experienced for a few, brief, stolen moments before being snatched away because of misunderstandings and confusions. The kind of love that is enough to sustain years of separation and, eventually, depressingly, death.

The eternal love story - isn't that what we're all striving for and dreaming of? The kind of love that isn't a transaction, isn't a negotiation, isn't a calculated risk.. but is mad, desperate, all-encompassing, ever-lasting, flawed, painful, insatiable..

Can it be real? Or is the dream all we will ever really have?

I am a dreamer
And when I wake
You can't break my spirit
It's my dreams you take..