Twit or Tweet.

There’s this thing doing the rounds on the Internet that is taunting me. Pussyfooting behind my derrière, pointing its inky fingers and cocking a snook at my fictional writing skills. It calls itself NovelRace and it tweets and superpokes writers into doing something monumental – authoring a 60,000-word novel! And here I am struggling to get a blog going from anywhere mundane to anything but.

How do you even start writing a novel? Or a short story? And why does every blogger and twitterer want, through some Satanic intervention, to morph into the love child of Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakhsmi? The only thing I have in common with said parents is - @mom: I am TamBram; @dad: my folks live in his short story. Almost. Surely, I have a long way to go from there.

Like the foxy wolf (or was he sheepish after all?) in the sour grapes story, I am going to indisputably ignore the race. Unfortunately, that makes me sound like someone who denounces change or admonishes adventure. (He might think he’s taking a stand by saying he doesn’t do stufflikethat. But, I think he’s just not capable of doing it in the first place.) Sheesh, what a dismally misleading place to be in.

So does that mean I’m going to write a book? Dunno yet. I’m not the one to go about spinning a yarn. I’ll get on to it when I know how to begin and when to finish. Or what to do during the interval. Right now, I’m happy Twittering.

Older. But none the wiser.

I’m racing into the last year of my 20s in my reborn scarlet scooter. And I plan to live it big. Big for me is not a big house, a big car, a big designation, a big bank balance and a big family. Them bigs are what oldies long for.

I, on the other hand, am doing the Benjamin Button thing. Regressing. I would know, ‘cos the first thing door-to-door salesmen ask is if my mom or dad is at home. And the first thing strangers ask is if I am studying. My life has become a Santoor Ad sans kid. I sure hope these questions are a reaction to my appearance and not my mental make-up.

Before I degenerate any further, and particularly before I turn 30, here are some of the things I want to do/get/achieve.

First: I want to be able to write. More often. More fluidly. More intelligently. More humourously. More better.

* I want a Yamaha RX-100. To own. To ride. To never have an accident on.

* I want one of those see-through abdomens. You know, where you can see the ripped muscles through your skin.

* I want to read more. Corollary: I want to make just enough money to buy more books.

* I want to grow my hair as long as it can grow before I shave it all off at 35.

* I want a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators. And I share this ambition with my husband and my brother. So, if either of you guys get it first, I steal!

* I DO NOT ever want to have children. At 30, at 40, at 50, at 60, or until I can’t anymore. Whichever comes first. I would do anything for the people I love. But I love my life too much to waste it on them little beings.

Last: I want to not be lazy anymore. But I doubt I can change that. It’s in my jeans, which incidentally, I’m too lazy to get out of. And although it’s two sizes too big and way too dirty, I still wear them. Or they wear me. My poor parents have had the misfortune of giving birth to two sloth bears. Sigh, and to think all we ever ask for is to sleep. For two more minutes.

So, there you have it. A wish list for the year. I am going to work very hard on the first and the last. The inbetweens will come and go.

Who knows, next year, I might want to start playing with toys or some such Freudian-childish thing.