Back to the drawing board: Some hypnogogic gibberish from a mild narcoleptic

I avoid siestas lately. I try to be a little less of the schlump I have been these holidays. After the cibarious obligations are dispensed with in the afternoons, I try and help mother with her latest interest –she is dabbling with the famous Madhubani painting. She never ceases to amaze me for her perseverance in learning one or the other art form constantly.
Speaking of mother, she is a constant source of amusement to me. The feeling is amply reciprocated. I appear totally cabalistic to her. She is bent on ravaging my organic look, something I have worked on for donkey’s years. She wants to condition my hair with pure aloe- vera gel-the priceless hair that I have got by not combing and careful scrunching every night to make them look that sexy kind of messed up. And she is sacrificing that innocent aloe plant in the balcony at the altar of conventional notions of consummate beauty. I think long, tangled hair, worn loose have an instant unsettling effect. She thinks it makes me look like an ungroomed boor-full of piss and vinegar.
Apologies for the caesura, couldn’t help it. Coming back to my aborted attempts at refinement, I have been trying to inculcate in myself some propensity for taking to art seriously-painting/sculpting/sketching/sundry. The only major regret I have in life is of not having learnt art. To me art is the precursor to finer taste in things, the ante chamber to the sophisticated clique where the contamination with philistineness is a guaranteed rarity.
Here I think it fit to divest myself of a well kept secret. When I was not very young, I enrolled myself in classical singing and dancing classes. I soon realized much to the comfort of my teacher that I lacked passion- the de rigueur to follow any kind of art. The teacher later told someone that I was an abderian teenager given to frequent bouts of twaddle. So that was my first attempt at refinement gone over like the proverbial lead balloon.
It hardly deterred me. I kept at art, although in different manifestations. I tried to paint/sketch/design clothes /photography/miscellaneous. I was miserable at all of the aforementioned crafts, if put mildly. It didn’t surprise anyone considering I could never mind the margins of the wings when I filled colours in my butterflies. Drawing butterflies was incidentally an obsession. Minding the margins is still a brobdingnagian task but my idea of art has changed. I mean, who says you need to keep to margins to become a painter.
Everything said and done, I think I still have a lot of promise. And like a dear friend of mine who is set to juggle his newspaper job with learning pottery and toy making, art is my new rai·son d'ê·tre too.