A sad year and a smelly dog

There is a certain symmetry to begin the blog with a photo of Bruce Chatwin and to end it with one by him. I am happy with how the blog looks now, none of the hard, definite colours there were earlier. But the vagueness, like how I want to be, and the greyness, which is what the weather makes of the environs and what the state of my mind is.
The smelly dog is F, she hasn't had a bath in a month and smells very dog-like. Kukur kukur gondho, as we say around here.
The year is indubitably sad, but is made happier and bearable by the presence of my mother and dog.
We got the AC installed today, took less time than I thought, more money than I'd hoped and messy as I expected.
Sitting at home, I am wondering whether the year MUST be so sad, whether working elsewhere was such a big thing. After all, this is Delhi, that is why one comes here: because there are options, if nothing else, in numbers that can never match your home town.
God, I do hate this city so.

But then, searching for Chatwin and Edmund White for the blog made me remember stuff I liked, of happier times, of knowing Chatwin for the first time at the BCL library, such a refuge in summers, so many hot, hot afternoons whiled away reading nothings, always things not meant for coursework. Of Oli passing on Chatwin's notebook, or was it that book of photographs off-handedly and I think I did teach myself to like a new thing, and now the picture of that door and that abandoned trailor somewhere in Latin America, or was it the Midwest, from What Am I Doing Here, brings back such warm memories, of myself. And the title, it has always echoed my state of being at so many different points in my life.
The only difference is, this torture is self-inflicted.

Apparently, celebrities are passing off manic depression as bi-polar disorder. Am I manic depressive?
And to think, I was supposed to check out all the birdwatching sites in Delhi. So many things I had meant to do here, and none is happening.