My 2008 Wish-list

A new life, a new 2bd house, bookshelves, keyboard stand, a shiny new car, clothes and more clothes, travel to a loads of new places, long(er) hair!, over-stuffed plush recliner, fluffy boots, knock-out dresses, miracle face, to be continued..

Bleary afternoons

I'm so blah I can hardly open my mouth to say blah.

And to write that one line above (and the current one), I had to literally slap my fingers to move on the keyboard. Now that I have them moving, I should complain some more :)

I hate the smell that stuck to my dress at lunch today from JJs. Their sandwich bread smells so strong? Sick. My intern actually asked me if I'd been to some Indian restaurant for lunch since I smelled of food. Bah.

I have also been recently cursed with the 'Secondus Keyum'. To elaborate, the times when I want to get into my house quick enough, the first key I try in the lock will always be the wrong one. Why, O why do I not get one of those color-coded key-fitters that'll help my numb-with-cold fingers clutch the right one?

Other interesting things that have happened since my last post:

- I could feature on an Ekta Kapoor list?
- I have forgotten that I have art supplies at home. They were covered with a nice thick layer of dust when I brought them out yesterday (only to put them back!) while I was cleaning up.
- Did I mention I have become a nut-case?
- I have become a walking disaster target. Yesterday's cleaning ended with one paper cut, one miscellaneous cut, one gouged cuticle, one sprained foot-arch. This morning ushered in one screw-scratch and one stapler pin cut in the same cuticle area from yesterday.
- I haven't gone to Target in a while. MUST go today and waste some of the not-so-hard-earned dollars.
- I've become enamored with INSEAD. It is such a shiny new toy. I have to break out the books soon. I'm itching to do so already. Yeay!
- I'm gearing up for another mega-round-of-cooking soon. Maybe this weekend. Lovely.
- I'm also drowning in paperwork. Makes my bleary afternoons bleary-er (if something like that is possible!)
- Vin is leaving?!!
- I made that resolution to not screen calls anymore. I am actually getting good at it. Except the temporary glitch now and then. But come on, I can be pardoned. Atleast I'm trying!

Follow your dream?

Yesterday, I watched the movie American Chai. I simply LOVED it.

The film was full of subtle nuances that made me relate to it on a whole other level. Sureel's passion for music, how he inspires Maya to follow her heart, his dad's dialogue when he meets him in the Green room after the competition, and so many other scenes. I loved the scene where Maya is performing and he stands side-stage, transfixed by the music and the elegant but crisp movements she makes as she fuses different styles of dance..

Oh well, I wonder what transpired between the actors and THEIR real-life parents before they were actually allowed to go act in this movie :)

But what does 'following your dream' entail, in reality? Shattering the dreams that others have/had for you? Carrying the baggage of your roots? Being bound to all the emotional ties in life? I wonder if it is an isolated phenomenon pertaining to desis.. do people in other countries feel bound to the dreams that their parents have for them? I do understand that parents have our best interests at heart. But these best interests stem from life experiences that they have had all along. Granted, they are wise, but how do those same rules apply to our lives, 10 years down the line? Are we trying to fuse two different subsets, that barely intersect within a wider universal set? I am all for 'freedom of choice/thought', or so I claim now. Will my mind also get polluted by the experiences I have along the way, and will I expend my 'wisdom' in an 'I know it all, you're not mature' attitude to my offspring? People tend to forget that they were also in the same stages of life, but in a different context, at some other point of time. Inertia affects people, they refuse to move on. They use the term 'generation gap' in a very broad sense. Whatever happened to the 'dreams' that our parents had for themselves when they were young? Don't they then work toward helping their kids achieve the same in their life? Isn't that why my mom enrolled me in all those extra-curricular activities, and helped me be the person I am today! But somewhere, the link snaps. At some point, the mind closes up and does not think about it from a different viewpoint altogether.

There is no use, however, in berating the older generation. They talk about experiences in a whole other angle, since the subtext of them all was set in a different time and era. Some things may never change, like the dread of the unknown future, the thirst for stability, and the age old rituals of maintaining your image in society. But, trying to force people to understand things out of context is like trying to tout the great taste of peanut-butter and jelly on idlis. Granted the PBJ is the best tasting thing you can slather on your breakfast. But you're talking about bread for breakfast, while your folks are looking at the idlis on their plate. And there-in, lies the jarring truth. Someone has to adapt. Which continues the vicious cycle of 'broken dreams' to avoid conflicts and confrontation, or the extreme opposite - the 'misguided rebel'.

The bridging of the so-called 'generation-gap' is a long time coming...

Playing catch-up

- I saw a cab getting a speeding ticket. There's hope for the world yet!

- I have been blah at work for quite a while, but am all caught up now. Almost.

- We had an awesome MeatFestXI. More on that sometime later, or never. Who cares.

- I got into the whole 'Skinny Pants' thing. And now, I'm addicted. But that darn grey one - so tight!? Sick.

- I'm sick of clothes-shopping. No more until Thanksgiving Sales.

- I haven't seen RubyLu in months now. Sob.

- I bought the Brita Water Filter thingie. Hmm, and now I'm supposedly drinking good, clean water.

- The Apartment is actually a pretty good place, since they have good music, but otherwise, the smoke! I'm so glad all smokers get diseased lungs and die painfully. What a wretched thing it is to have smoke up your nose, and in your hair and clothes?!

- Al&Pp should be back this week. We simply must upload some better songs to chill out to, the next time.

- I saw 'Jab we met', hmm.

- I wish I were an amoeba. Do amoebae have such trivial worries in their lives? I'm sure they're all happy and just go around floating with their pseudopods. Life would mean just me, my cytoplasm and my nucleus. Wow.

- I'm going to read Stephen Hawking's 'The Theory of Everything'. The closet geek in me is very happy. Maybe I should just become a nerd again, and life would be happier?

- Why isn't Brad Kelln writing the third book? I am losing MY sanity.. after all the time I spent reading 'Lost Sanity' and 'Method of Madness'.. Damn.

- Can I really truly have a career change? Turn around and start doing something which will wake me up in the mornings in a happy state, rather than the disgruntled person I am now? Does it snow in Australia? I know they have sunny Christmases..

- Who am I? Can you tell me?

Lunch Drama

Friday lunches are festive. The hours leading up to the lunches, even more so. To illustrate:

a. My department goes to lunch every Friday to a G's. And we've been doing so since the beginning of time, so we just fax in our orders at 11.45 and our lunch is at our table the minute we walk into the restaurant. The fax part of it is usually a task assigned to the co-op/intern bakras. Rumor has it that at one point of time, since we did not have a co-op around, Rb picked up the job. Now that he isn't around anymore, the boss runs around for the same chore. Hence, at this morning's all important scrap meeting, we finish up with a solution. The Excel fax file is now on the company's shared R: drive, thereby enabling all the folks from different departments that join us to access it. They will get an Outlook reminder at a specified time in the morning that will in fact remind them to go to that file and add their order to it! Bingo, no one needs to run around asking people for their orders anymore. Aah, the marvels of modern technology.

b. One upping the whole arrangement above, is my little coterie of friends that does lunch so many times together that we do not go to the same place every week. We'd be brain dead by now if we did! So, our debates are usually about where to go. Case in point - today. Everyone is OK for everything. Our choices: Panini Panini, Ras Dashen, Indian. So, after a thread of about 10 emails, we decide to leave the decision to the point once we all get into the car. But, here comes the magic e-mail from JohnH. Read on:

Okay, we’re all engineers, and we’re all smart people. What we need is a quick, easy, and uncomplicated solution that is guaranteed to produce a fair outcome for all those involved. What I’m proposing is that I’ll write up a little FORTRAN code in my Argonne Mesa phase II PSCAD case study to simulate high frequency noise on a DC voltage line. Each of you will then pick a number between 0 and 1 and a multiple of .003 (the solution time step) and then I will randomly sample the AC component of the bus at that time to determine the AC voltage. I’ll average each of your respective voltages and if the final summation is positive, we’ll go to Panini-Panini, if it’s negative we’ll get Ethiopian. Clearly this is the best, easiest solution, and I should have something compiled and working for us to use by Monday afternoon. See you all at noon :-D

Blink, blink. And JohnG starts the number thread, and we all follow. We add two numbers each.. one between 0 and 1, and one that is a multiple of .003! Sabina sent a single number - Pi, as best as she could remember it. BUT, we were all wrong, WHY? JohnH wanted ONE number that satisfied both criteria!!! Oh well, another spate of emails unleashed..

And you say engineers are boring people? Not as exciting as investment bankers, lawyers and doctors?

Pooh-pah!

Hello Panda

 

Another 'moment' in Devon at Fresh Farms. Pure delight. I found the 'Hello Panda's. Woohoo. Nan, this one is for you!

Surprise!

I could do a cart-wheel (if I could!) right now. I managed to lay my hands on 2 Kinder Surprise Eggs in Devon!!! Of all the places :)

I remember the number of boxes Nan & I managed to go through in Gizan, not for the chocolate itself, but for that magic yellow capsule. Oh, what fun days. I mean, I was almost completing high school, yet here I was, sitting and collecting those surprises.

Though they say 'Kinder' they aren't only for kids!! Obviously. The little 'surprises' inside the capsule can range from a little plush figure to figurines in porcelain and the best ones I like are the ready-to-assemble gadgets. These tiny little pieces fit together so well, and voila, you have yourself a little whirring toy that may be as big as your thumb (disclaimer: my thumb is a tad bigger than an average dainty lass!).

So, today over lunch, B got initiated into the whole school of Kinder Surprise eggs. I threw a couple at him when he was standing at the checkout, and he says in a bewildered voice: 'D, this one is making some noise on the inside! You sure it is a good one?'.. and like a maniac, I take the 'non-noisy' one from his hands and substitute it with one that makes quite a bit of noise. Quite delusional I must've looked to him.

And then, he got to see what the fuss was all about. We ended up getting two little thingies, none mechanically-whirry though. *Pout*. One was an alien-race-vehicle (?) I named MuckB. The other was a pink little shy doll thing - not my happiest moment, but Oh well. It supposedly belongs to some cartoon series called PaintAll or something. Then different colored creatures which paint a magic land or something along those lines. Very confusing, but given a choice I'd have picked the red angry one with arms folded. It got named Figly - a non-harsh version of Fugly?!

My list.

I know I'm pretty much the vetti-est person around when I make my fourth blog entry for the day! I decided to go on a self-indulging list of current favorites. In no particular order, of no particular category:

23 Prithvi Ave, Chicago, Baby Bee, Summers with Jan, her mom's awesome cooking, school picnics, 6$ sunglasses, witty posters & wall-signs, ARRahman, Pam's salsa (and Unilever, thereof), Chipotle, Dasa Dosa's Baked beans, CPK, BITS : R10D & Dance Club, my own paychecks, loud colorful skirts, yellow, Showcard Gothic font, yellow call-out stars, a game of doubles tennis on the PS2, GIFTS!, BR's vanilla chocolate chip ice cream, pineapple & jalapeno pizzas, Roti Canai & Kari Seyur, Fanaa drive, my Mazda626 (R.I.P), IITCCvsPeoria, my first job @ GiftShop, pretty earrings, SHOPPING!, living without roommates, Fall TV season, SYTYCD, comfort food, Blick, red shoes, weekends, rasam, Whole Foods, IKEA, cold water, music of most kinds, CSI, bright colors, my 5$ Tees, clearance sales, tres-leches, my cheap 27" TV, Vladstudio desktops, Photoshop tools, my stick figure Flash animations, gult blockbuster movies, Bharatnatyam, creative bursts of energy, eye-makeup, cute babies, a smart joke, slapstick comedies, animation movies, smart glasses, waterparks, Hugh Jackman!, dark mahogany wooden dressers, books to read, norukku-theeni, fridge magnets, emoticons, my comforter, microfiber recliners, the wave, FOOD!, RubyLu, impromptu parties, evenings with friends...

... and so much more! I should really update this often :)

For laughs

I couldn't resist putting this one up here, found it online somewhere:

"You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named Bush, Dick, and Colon. Need I say more?"

Hmm...

It all comes down to this!

Quite a different mood from what I was around the same time last year.. knock on wood!

Go IIT! And I think of all those crappy slogans we'd use when we were at inter-school cultural fests or campaigning for school-post elections.

"Jeethega bhai, jeethega, ------- hi jeethega"
"Pana marathula vavvala, --------ke savaala"
"Twinkle twinkle little star, -------- is a superstar"
"---------, ----------, clap clap clap"

OhmyGod, I'm mortified. Not about the slogans, about the fact that I can't remember others :) Ah, glory days!