So many babies!

Another cousin of mine had a baby on Tuesday. And I was there when she had the baby. I promised her I wouldn't write about the process, so I won't. If only I could write about it...

It was a 'normal' delivery. Only, there was nothing normal about it. I was actually in the labour room with her and trust me, 'labour' is a good word for what she went through. A better word would be 'absolute horror'. Ok, 2 words.

Anyway, the baby, once it was finally out, was absolutely beautiful. Her body was all wrinkly but her face was very clear. And pink. And man, what a pair of lungs this one has. I was 'burping' her and she was constantly bawling her head off. My ears are still ringing.

This keyboard is really very dirty.

I have been spending the better part of the past 2 days in the hospital with the cuz and the baby, alternately burping her and cleaning her butt. The baby's, not the cousin's. They are coming bck home today and the cousin's first kid is up in arms already. Constant shrieks of 'This is MINE' and 'I want this' and 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh'. God help us. The next couple of days are going to be fun. Baby screaming for milk, kid screaming for attention, mother screaming for sleep, aunt screaming for help, me screaming for silence. Much fun.

Last night, we had dinner at an aunt's place. There were about 9 full sized people amd 2 kids.

Going to pick up a cousin at the airport. More later.

In Chennai. The weather is surprisingly pleasant.

I was at a punyajanam today. My thus far anonymous niece finally got named - Shriya. A 10 day old baby is tiny, wrinkly and like a little monkey. I'm sure she'll grow up to just as pretty as her mom, if she takes after her, or as pretty as her dad's sister, who, while being very pretty, is a wee bit annoying. Don't ask me why; these reactions of mine don't always have reasons.

The day after I came to Chennai, I went to see my other cousin who recently had a baby boy. Her sisters in law were there and when I was introduced to them, one of them commented that she had met me just last week. Nope, not me. 'Twas my sister. Apparently we look identical. She kept insisting that I was not me and I kept insisting that I was, in fact, me. The conversation was hilarious. And then went I went out for lunch with a couple of friends, one of them commented that I look a lot like my sister. Yeah, I get that a lot these days.

I'm going to Ranipet tomorrow to meet patti. I'm back in a day. Not much to do in Ranipet. I'm quite sure I'll stay at home all day. And I'm equally sure that patti will grumble that her grandchildren hardly ever talk to her anymore and that she never knows what we are up to. How much do you talk to your grandparents? How much do you tell them? Every time she says something to the effect of "I never know what you are up to", I feel like I'm living a wild and reckless life in the wild city of Hyd. I wish.

For this New Year, I want to lose weight, travel some and figure out what I want to do. This keyboard needs to be cleaned. It is disgustingly dirty.

What plans for the New Year? What resolutions? What wishes?

My commas are all mixed up.

Lots of work done today; I have mostly been listening to people talk. Damn tiring. Now I want to finish some stuff before I go home, so I am making a guy stay back. He's not very happy.

I generally don't gossip. And people don't gossip with me. I don't know why. There is always, always a gap of a few days between when everybody know Something and when I get to know It. Sometimes that pisses me off. Mostly, I don't care. Here's what I don't get. When I was in Engineering college, I never told anybody that I don't gossip. But nobody ever told me stuff. Inevitably, someone would take pity on me and let me know what the rest of the world was talking about. In Bhub, I made the terrible mistake of telling someone to stop bitching about someone else. I never heard anything after that. I have the same problem now, at work.

I am also, apparently, a little difficult to get to know. And people think I am either a snob or a jerk or stuck up or arrogant when they first meet me. Some people. I have heard this first hand from a few. You know who you are. And then when (if) they actually get to know me, they treat me like a damn push over. Hmph.

I have also been told that I am scary. I get it. I am very yeti-like but I'm mostly harmless (like the Earth). I'm also rude and opinionated. Sucks to be me.

Then there are those who tell me that I'm sweet. Huh?

Hey internet, I started out writing someting totally different, about work and people who talk in languages I can't understand when I'm right in front of them and about people who smile too much. I got side tracked.

I hate people who look like the Joker all the time. Too much cheer. Stop smiling. It hurts to have a conversation with them. I don't want to stereotype, but there are 3 short women I know who smile a lot. By a lot, I mean all the time. And while talking. It seems rude not to smile back but try talking to them! My face hurts. It feels pulled and stretched unnaturally. I have a frown on my face the rest of the day, to compensate for all the freaky smiling. I hate being polite. Too much work.

I read an interview of Mrs.Kennedy on LeahPeah and this quote cracked me up.

“Windows is like the computer equivalent of a straight guy who’s afraid that spending any time on his appearance will make people think he’s gay.”

I thought I was the Person of the Year. Then I read more, and it was obvious that Time was talking about The Great American (Web 2.0) Citizen. Dammit. I wanted it to be me. All is lost, because of geography. Why shouldn't I be Person of the Year? Why shouldn't "Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world." apply to me? Why, oh why? This is why everybody hates America. They are so caught up in their Super-Power, Big Bully, Big Brother, I-Am-God status that even their media does not realise that "You" could be a loner in India. Why is a loner in India any less important than a loner in the all-holy US of bloody A? Hmph. All I ever wanted, ever since I knew of the Time Magazine's Person of Year popularity contest, was to be It. My picture on the cover. If not mine, then at least me as part of the collective. And the year that they name a collective "You", I still don't make the cut. This is so unfair.

According to MSNBC,

Time has been naming its person of the year since 1927 and the tradition has become the source of speculation every year, as well as controversy over unpopular choices such as Adolf Hitler in 1938 and Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.

Am I a more unpopular choice than Hitler?! Khomeni? George W. Bush (2004)? Come on. I can understand being less popular than Bono or Bill and Melinda Gates (2005) but still, they pick 300 million people and they still don't pick me. I voted for Stephen Colbert, but that was only because they didn't have a "Me" to vote for. I blog. I waste time on other blogs. I watch youtube; hell, I even comment on youtube. I think it was because I don't have a MySpace account. News Corp got mad that I don't have a MySpace account. They spent $580 million on MySpace and I don't have an account on it. That's why. I knew it.

300 million people are Person of the Year. Keep it. I don't need a MySpace account.

I came to work at 8 this morning. That's about 30 minutes ago. My floor was empty, the lights were off. It was great.

How is The Prestige? Whenever I say Christian Bale, people go "Ewww. Remember his horribly wooden acting in Batman Begins?"; that's not fair. It wasn't horribly wooden, it was amazingly wooden. Does nobody remember his amazing non-acting in Reign of Fire? Was I the only person who liked that movie? (Other than my cousin, G, who loved the movie for the other non-acting actor.) I like dragon movies. I think it started with Dragonheart. Even with Sean Connery's voice and Dennis Quaid in tights. The movie sucked, but dragons are brilliant. Last weekend, there was a 2 part movie on Star Movies called Ring of the Nibelungs. It was horrible. But it had a dragon. So I saw the movie till the dragon died. And the Dungeons and Dragons movies - brilliant. Goblet of Fire - yummy.

Anyway, I like Christian Bale solely because of Newsies. Singing, dancing newspaper delivery boys. Yay.

So how is The Prestige? Forget Christian Bale. Hugh Jackman!!! Magic!!!!!! Exclamation marks!

I always felt that religious people were weird. This proves it. Jesus Christ has BO, and it is in the Pentagon.

Whenever he sees another fellowship member, he says, "I immediately feel like I am being held accountable, because we are the aroma of Jesus Christ."

And we won't be able walk across the North Pole, 30 years from now. Damn.

We seem to be living in Day After Tomorrow. What next? Snow storm in New Delhi? Maybe that's not too far off, considering what happened a year ago. Woohoo, .

Time Magazine has a poll out for Person of the Year and my vote is for Global Warming. Or rather, my vote would be for Global Warming if that was one of the choices. Mahmood Ahmedinejad is leading right now. Did I get his name right? I used to think Parthasarathy was a painful surname to have. Not anymore. Not after Ahmedinejad or better still, Agadahshloo. I have no idea if I spelt that right. That would be the woman who plays the Iranian wife of Ben Kingsley in House of Sand and Fog and she plays somebody in Nativity. I like her first name - Soreh, I think. Or Shoreh.

I get about 45 junk mails in my Gmail account. They are of these categories:
1. Medical - Penis elongation! Viagra! Cialis!
2. Nigerian Minister asking for my account - Please send me 20000 US Dollars and your account number, and I will give you 1 million dollars.
3. Sick people - My sister/cousin/aunt/friend/niece is suffering from cancer/AIDS/flu and if I pass this message on, Yahoo/Google/AOL will give them 10 cents for email forwarded message.
4. Christ - Accept the Lord as your saviour and you will go to heaven. Or you will roast in hell. Yada yada yada.
5. Accout Notification - Since when do I have account in Bali and the US and Sierra Leone?
6. Stock Market - Buy this today and sell it tomorrow and be a billionaire!

and other weird stuff. Apparently, I am not the only one bothered by so much spam.

I generally delete everything without even looking at it; today I was bored. Never again.

I saw Casino Royale on Saturday. Hilarious movie. I loved it. Especially the moments between Vesper and James. When Bond said I love you, blah blah blah, I was waiting for the punch line. Really. And I thought it would end up like Guns of Navarone, where he has to kill her but he can't coz he loves her and she ends up dying anyway. It was, almost. The rest of the movie was great. Many parts of the movie seemed to have pissed of the indian censors; some scenes ended abruptly and seemed jerky - not at all in synch with the rest of the movie. Still, awesome fun. Especially the chase scene that ended in the Nigerian embassy blow up. It was not at all like a Bond movie though. Except the cell phone GPS and tracker and the defibrillator and how did they know he would be poisoned with Digitalis? It was as if Jerry Brukheimer and Ridley Scott made the movie together.

Some guy was expelled for being an atheist.

More gross pictures today, not from the same people though. This time, the pictures showed a huge dead crocodile being cut open and people pulling hands and legs out of its stomach. Some of the stuff they pulled out was partially digested and really gross.

Yeah, I know some weird people.

It has been a while.

I get too much crap in my inbox. Yesterday, I got a really horrible mail with pictures of a guy crushed by a truck. And when I told someone that I got this horrible mail, he sent me videos - one of an elephant killing a guy, one of a croc hurting a handler and one of a lion being all liony. Why? When I told him that I got this mail, I specifically said that I found it very disturbing and then he sends me videos! Asshole.

Idly and Vadai dunked in sambar with thenga chutney on the side. Mmmm. Coffee. Double mmmm. What did you have for breakfast?

I saw a guy who looked just like Stanley Tucci near the water dispenser thingy. Serious double take stuff.

I was walking behind a couple of girls - one large and one tiny. The large one said that hyderabad water was horrible and that she was going bald. The tiny one laughed. But here's the thing, the large one had long, think hair, almost till her butt. The tiny one had very short hair and really was going bald; atleast, it looked like that from where I was standing/walking. So if the large one was being sarcastic/making fun of the tiny one, not very nice of her. If she was serious, sheesh. Take a look at who you are talking to, dumbass!

The sister was going to see Casino Royale yesterday. I wonder what she thought of it. Hey, Soph?

How great is DailyLit.com! For those of you who don't know - you can sign up to receive a chapter a day of one of the 500+ titles that they have. They have only classics but with Alexandre Dumas and Lewis Carrol and Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare and O.Henry and Oscar Wilde, I don't think I'll ever run out of things to read. I have signed up for G.B.Shaw's Major Barbara. They even have Sophocles and Von Clausewitz! I don't know how long I'll be excited about this, but for now, I am. Whoo.

And more hilarity - Only the telugu version of Casino Royale has been released in this city. The english version releases only on Dec 1. People are pissed. I really don't care. It's James Bond. How interesting could it be?

Update:
I went here from a link somewhere. A 90-something man who quotes from Alice In Wonderland and writes about cannibalism. From there, I went here, a 66 year old woman who has been blogging for more than a year. They both write so well.

Anyway, I got this poem from dontoearth.

I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I’m introduced to one,
I wish I thought "What Jolly Fun!"

Do you like your job?

I don't. What is worse is that I don't know what I would like to do.

Anyway, somebody explain Live Aid to me. Why do people think that they can get rid of poverty by having pop concerts?

A friend recently told me that she thought I was 'lost'. I am not sure what she meant. I am not sure that I am not.

Did MJ sing at some award show recently? No, I don't really care.

What exactly is Funk?

Too many questions. I'll see you all on Monday.

Ugh. I am unbelievably depressed. I use that word loosely. I am tired, for no reason; pissed off, again, for no reason; anti- social, as I have always been; and sad, and I don't know why. I could just say that 'life' has gotten to me but I haven't done much living lately. Barely existing. I just want to lie in bed all day. And get up only to go to the bathroom. And sleep. How long is forever?

I'm going nuts.

6 people I know are getting married before March.

I read somewhere that America is more religious than Asia and in 10 years, Europe will be too. Yay for Asia.

If you are mad, would you know?

Give me something interesting to read. I have bought a book on India but I am not able to make myself read it. I want something light, funny, interesting. I don't know what happened to my ability to read anything, anytime. I miss it. I bought
a couple of Lee Child's books a while ago. I want something like that. Mindless entertainment.

I am watching United 93 this weekend. I don't know why I am going to a see a movie I have seen before and didn't particularly like. Maybe it is part of my talk to actual people and not just people who live in my head thing. I don't know if it will work. I don't think it will. There aren't actual people in my head. Imaginary people? Lots. I'm going now.

Bye. Have a good weekend.

D and I were waiting for the bus. It came. We got on. I tripped, my shoe fell off the bus. The bus started moving. With my shoe on the road. I yelled. The bus stopped. I walked, one foot bare, to my shoe which had barely escaped being run over. The bus took off without me. Atlast I no longer had one bare foot. Just a dirty sole.

Everything noteworthy that happens to me, seems to happen in the vicinity of a bus. Atleast this did not involve shattered glass and run away bus drivers and angry mobs.

Over at the Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, there is a hilarious post in the Hate Mail section.

Excerpt: ‘you fucking fuck of a fucking fucker fucky fuck fuck fucker fucky fucker fucky fucker fucky fuck fuck!!!!! FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!’

I almost spewed the coffee on the screen when I read that.

So.

Coconut Chutney with Aloo Parathas? Ugh. People say such terrible things to me when I have curd rice with ketchup but this is ok? I object. I strenuously object. The 3 others sitting with this guy didn't blink when he sat down at their table. They just included him in the conversation as if all was well in their world! That freaked me out. Do people really have coconut chutney with aloo parathas? Do other people think it is ok? What sort of world am I living in?

Anyway, there is an article/video in Wired.com/YouTube about a guy who saw the Flying Spaghetti Monster in Germany.

sweeping in Kalamazoo...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmflint/292685189/

I don't know why I'm on the Micheal Moore mailing list, but I am. I followed a link and it took me to this picture..

Americans are weird.

I don't know what Logo Gazzag. com is or what it does but I have received about 50 invites for it. My guess is that it is yet another social networking site.

 

A rickshaw and a bus fought and the bus won. I was there after the fight and saw the battlefield. It was a mess. Mangled steel and shards of glass all over the place. I don't know what happened to the people. It couldn't have been pretty.

 

My first ever appraisal is coming up in some time. Bleh. 

- A chap I know sent me an email now with "anyone(s)" in it.

- People have a lot of trouble with 'its' and 'it's'

- Too many people treat "the" with no respect at all. It has a purpose. Don't diss it.

- "Myself (insert name here)" is a terrible way to introduce oneself. Too many people seem to be doing it.

- Why is Simi Garewal famous? What did she do before her god awful talk show? Aishwariya Rai is creepy. Simi Garewal is creepy. Both of them together in one frame freak me out. Kill the TV.

- Somebody on my Google Chat list has a "Tryst with Destiny".

- "Wat r u dng n ofc?" STOP IT. STOP IT. DON'T DO THIS TO ME.

 

 

 

I generally email my posts, but the last two times, it didn't work. I don't know if Gmail is screwing up or Blogger is.

My first pimple in 2 years showed itself this morning. All in all, not a happy day.

Who is finally Senator of Virginia? Porno Webb or Macaca Allen?

I posted this yesterday evening and again, blogger fucked up.

- A chap I know sent me an email now with "anyone(s)" in it.
- People have a lot of trouble with 'its' and 'it's'
- Too many people treat "the" with no respect at all. It has a purpose. Don't diss it.
- "Myself (insert name here)" is a terrible way to introduce oneself. Too many people seem to be doing it.
- Why is Simi Garewal famous? What did she do before her god awful talk show? Aishwariya Rai is creepy. Simi Garewal is creepy. Both of them together in one frame freak me out. Kill the TV.
- Somebody on my Google Chat list has a "Tryst with Destiny".
- "Wat r u dng n ofc?" STOP IT. STOP IT. DON'T DO THIS TO ME.

I posted this at 10 am but it didn't post. Don't know why. Bad Blogger.

I don't know what Logo Gazzag. com is or what it does but I have received about 50 invites for it. My guess is that it is yet another social networking site.

A rickshaw and a bus fought and the bus won. I was there after the fight and saw the battlefield. It was a mess. Mangled steel and shards of glass all over the place. I don't know what happened to the people. It couldn't have been pretty.

I'm sitting right below the airconditioning vent and it is bloody cold. In training today. The trainers are surprisingly good. Not sleepy today.

My first ever appraisal is coming up in some time. Bleh.
Update: I take back what I said about not feeling sleepy. So sleepy.

Update: Hot Hot vadai.

Somebody's status message says "Always put yourself in others' shoes. If it hurts you, it probably hurts the other person, too".

 

Wouldn't it depend on shoe size?

I am the stupidest person on this planet. We have certifications tests at work that we need to take. I have to get one of those by this December. So I took it today. And I FLUNKED! It was one of the easiest tests and I flunked. A bloody multiple choice test and I failed. Failed by 2 points. Failed by 1 question. I am so ready to kill myself. Not because I particularly care about failure, but because I have to take the damn thing again. In two weeks. A bloody waste of my time.

I was faced with a difficult choice last night. I wanted to watch TV for a while before going to sleep. I was in no mood for news and I really didn't want to see Friends reruns or JAG. So I had a choice between watching New Zealand get thrashed by Australia or some movie. I watched NZ get thrashed (36/6!!). It was terrible. I watched until they were 45/6 and got bored. So, then I watched a really bad bunch of tamil movie songs on Adithya TV. Bleh. They were all sooo bad. They were playing 80's songs. The garish clothes and hiding behing flowers became too much to handle and so I checked out what english movies were on. Oh the choices. I had to choose between Sheena, Goldfinger (There was a character in it called Pussy Galore!! How Austin Powers), Blade Trinity, and a bunch of other crap. I went to bed.

 

Bed was good. Sleep never disappoints.

I find religion and God fascinating. Weird, incomprehensible, irrational, and at times unbelievably annoying but still, facinating. I don't understand it and I don't want it. Nobody has been able to give me a convincing reason for either religion or god. Religion as tradition, religion as support, religion as don't-as-questions-it-just-is, and religion as a-way-of-life - I don't get it. I also don't get why people don't recycle religions. Most religions that are around today have been around for hundreds and sometimes, thousands of years - how are they still relevant. This generally provokes the response that people are more moral (what ever that means) and socially conscious when they think that the crow is going to poke their eyes out if they lie, for instance. (Here is another thing I don't get. Why does the crow poke my eye out when I lie? I'm not lying with my eyes, am I?) Does this mean that aethists lie, steal, cheat and murder their way through life? Not making sense.

 

Richard Dawkins' latest book ' The God Delusion' sounds interesting.

 

In a conversation with a scientist who believed in God and who said, "Science can't disprove the existance of God", "There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove," Dawkins said. "You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it."

 

Do you believe in God? Why?

 

And the next question is, why do you, when you disbelieve in all Gods but your God, give respect to other Gods? Why is it not permissible to disrespect another chap's God when it is ok to make fun/disrespect just about everything else? Does that stem from a fear that maybe the other guy got it right and his is the real God after all and you don't want to piss off the chap who is going to let you in at the Pearly Gates or Paradise with 72 virgins? Or is it 76?

 

I don't have much to do today. I'm looking busy at the computer right now. So all's well in my world.

Do you have any superstitions? Lucky tie, Lucky shoes, unlucky hankies, pens, make up? I know a guy who has a lucky red shirt and has worn it on all important occasions since high school. I know a girl who has a lucky hanky. There are people who do things in only one way if something important is coming up. Apparently there are some people who won't say some things - and invite bad luck. Like emergency room doctors/nurses - I read somewhere that quiet and slow were bad words to use when there wasn't a crowd in the ER.

And then there is "Break a leg".

 

What are your weird rituals, superstitions? I don't have any. I feel like I am missing out on something.

Hilarious bloopers and typos - http://www.xcom2002.com/doh/

 

I went home yesterday and DIDN'T watch 24 because D wanted to watch it too and she came back from work only at eleven. So, I saw Ocean's Eleven (for the gazillionth time). Then I read some Jack Reacher and went to bed.

 

Today has been predictable so far. No work followed by some work followed by no work. Let's see what the rest of the working day (30 minutes) brings. Lunch - 2 paratas, buttermilk, palak panner. What did you have?

 

Vish - Don't hate me.

 

Ta.

Thank You for Smoking was hilarious. Brilliant movie.

 

I saw bits of The Departed but the mom and uncle and various aunts objected to the language, so we turned it off and watched some Sarah Jessica Parker movie. I forgot the name. It was bland. Watchable.

 

Diwali was fun. I was in Ranipet after a long time. The dog looks the same. He hasn't changed a bit since he was 2 years old. Or maybe I'm just not seeing it. Great food, great people, good movies, fire crackers, and a cute neice and a baby nephew. Good Diwali.

 

The dog freaked out at all the noise from the crackers, the neice freaked when the dog started barking, the baby started crying and we all paused, looked at each other and paused the DVD to attend to the kids. They were ok in a couple of minutes and we turned the TV back on. This happened both evenings.

 

We are a family of nerds. We (father, mother, uncle, 2 aunts, cousin, cousin's husband, grandmother, great aunt, sister and I) watched the National Spelling Bee on TV. For about 45 minutes. Until amma said it was time for lunch; then we dutifully turned the TV off and pigged out. I think we had sambar sadham, rasam sadam, veggies, parathas, banana chips, curd rice, pickles, thayir vadai and payasam for lunch that day. Yum. Have you had curd rice, mango pickle and banana chips? Mmm. I brought soan papdi back to hyd. The roomie brought Peda back from Mumbai. And the first season of 24. So I know what I'm going to be doing after work for the next couple of weeks.

 

I am so sleepy now. Have to go work. Have to.

A friend of mine is getting married in 114 days. How do I know? He has the number next to his name on Google Talk. The countdown started at 140 or some number in the vicinity. He actually has a countdown!

 

Another guy has "I believe in death, destruction, chaos, filth and greed" as his status message. Quotable quotes from American History X. Earlier his line was, "And somehow, life goes on" or something like that. He went from that to death and destruction.

 

Another guy has "are you sure??? do you really want to talk to me???" - punctuation, his.

 

Mine reads "Not Here". I am now, but I am not generally available for chat. You know, working. Or talking. Or reading. Or doing stuff that requires my full attention. Or not.

I had a very weird time last night. I went to bed at around midnight. Not tired or very sleepy but I need my sleep or I get very cranky and I needed to get up at 6 in the morning. Switched off the lights, drew the curtains, cursed the traffic, took clothes, books and other stuff off my bed and dumped them in various places around the room, changed and went to bed.

 

About 20 minutes later, I heard a weird singing. Some woman going 'aaaaaaaaa'. I opened my eyes, the singing stopped. I closed them, it started again. I wasn't freaked out. When I was a kid, I saw a movie where there was this ghost that wore clanging anklets that a guy would hear and for a very long time after that, I heard anklets at night. And I didn't sleep that night, the first time I saw Godzilla. The black and white one.

 

Anyway, the singing continued for a while and I dozed off. I got up some hours later and I heard voices. Outside my room. On the wrong side. On the side of the cemetary. I was very disoriented, and a little creeped out. I looked out of the window, there was no one there. I looked out of the other window, there were a couple of people talking loudly. Real People. Not just ectoplasm. (?)

I have a very bad cold and my ears seem to be blocked. Sounds seem muffled and I keep asking people if I am too loud. I can't tell. I am so careful about not shouting that everything I say comes out in a whisper. There has to be an easier way to do this.

 

I read Eoin (Sp?) Colfer's "The Wish List" and Soph, I liked it. I didn't expect to. It is about a 15 year old girl, a slightly older guy and a dog who die during a robbery. The guy ends up in hell but the girl has equal amounts of good and bad so she is sent back to earth as a ghost to fulfill the wishes of the old man they were in the process of robbing when they died. Throw in a silly St. Peter, a Game Boy obsessed Satan, a freaked out Beezelbub, a snarky old man, a sarcastic hologram and a boy-dog morph thingy, and it is all quite entertaining. Silly, yes, but a half hour well spent.

I just burnt my tongue with too-hot chocolate. You know why they gave it to me hotter than usually? Because I asked them to. And then I burnt my tongue. It is usually luke warm or very close to room tempareture. So I had this huge discussion with them and told them that it shouldn't be called "hot" chocolate if it isn't actually hot. It was more of a monologue. Anyway, my tongue hurts.

 

I have a sore throat. That hurts too. My lunch tasted weird. The others said their food was ok. So it was just me. Being weird.

I have been staring at the screen and trying to think of something to write for 30 minutes. I hate it when this happens. My mind went blank. 30 minutes of my life that I am not getting back. Sigh.

 

There is a singer called Nedelle. She has a nice voice. Nancy Sinatra-ish.

 

Ever wonder what makes a star a star? If you take away the cone bras and the slightly controversial songs, Madonna is not all that great a singer. So why is she famous? And why did the whole Kaballah (sp?) thing become newsworthy? Curious, I am. I saw True Blue on VH1 last night. It is such a bad song.

 

3 people I know are getting married on November 27th. Why that particular date, I wonder. Curiouser and Curiouser.

Dor was good. I was a little weirded out initially.. but it was good. Sreyas Talpade was amazing. Hilarious. Ayesha Takia didn't look old enough to be married. But Kukunoor himself.. How do I even start? I don't know what to say. I was squirming in all his scenes. It was embarrasing to watch him massacre his lines. Wasn't he a decent actor in his earlier movies? Anyway, what is with directors witing a role for themselves in their spories? IF he had to do that it should have been Clive Cussler style one scene rather than M. Night style through the movie. No speaking parts please. Couldn't he get someone who could act for the role? Someone who wasn't him? Sheesh. He was stone faced throughout the movie. Maybe the role asked for it but over kill in that case.

The Iqbal chap was really really good.

Now I have to go have coffee (mmmm) and breakfast.

Restless, bored out of my wits, listening to some band called Rubyhorse and waiting for 4 o' clock to leave. I am leaving early today. My flight to Chennai is at 6. I have one bag, not very heavy. It has 4 books and around 15 DVDs and some clothes. Why am I telling you this? Why do I tell you anything at all? Some questions have no answers. I'm rambling.

 

I saw Alien Vs. Predator 2 days ago. I liked it. What is wrong with me?

 

I like Keane.

 

Read 1984 again. Big Brother is Watching.

 

Apparently condom sales are the highest during Navratri in Surat.

I want to see School Ties. Don't ask me why. I just do.

31 out of 100; you?

 

Time Magazine's Top 100 movies

 

A - C

Aguirre: the Wrath of God (1972)
 
The Apu Trilogy (1955, 1956, 1959)
 
The Awful Truth (1937)
 
Baby Face (1933)
 
Bande à part (1964)
 
Barry Lyndon (1975)
 
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)
 
Blade Runner (1982) (Seen)
 
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) (Seen)
 
Brazil (1985)
 
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) (Seen)
 
Camille (1936)
 
Casablanca (1942) (Seen)
 
Charade (1963)
 
Children of Paradise (1945)
 
Chinatown (1974) (Seen)
 
Chungking Express (1994)
 
Citizen Kane (1941) (Seen)
 
City Lights (1931)
 
City of God (2002) (Seen)
 
Closely Watched Trains (1966)
 
The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)
 
The Crowd (1928)

D - F
Day for Night (1973)
 
The Decalogue (1989)
 
Detour (1945)
 
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
 
Dodsworth (1936)
 
Double Indemnity (1944)
 
Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
 
Drunken Master II (1994) (Seen)
 
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) (Seen)
 
8 1/2 (1963)
 
The 400 Blows (1959)
 
Farewell My Concubine (1993)
 
Finding Nemo (2003) (Seen)
 
The Fly (1986) (Seen)

  G - J
The Godfather, Parts I and II (1972, 1974) (Seen)
 
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) (Seen)
 
Goodfellas (1990) (Seen)
 
A Hard Day's Night (1964) (Seen)
 
His Girl Friday (1940)
 
Ikiru (1952)
 
In A Lonely Place (1950)
 
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) (Seen)
 
It's A Gift (1934)
 
It's A Wonderful Life (1946)

K - M
Kandahar (2001)
 
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
 
King Kong (1933) (Seen)
 
The Lady Eve (1941)
 
The Last Command (1928)
 
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) (Seen)
 
Léolo (1992)
 
The Lord of the Rings (2001-03) (Seen)
 
The Man With a Camera (1929)
 
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) (Seen)
 
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
 
Metropolis (1927)
 
Miller's Crossing (1990)
 
Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980)
 
Mouchette (1967)

N - P
Nayakan (1987) (Seen)
 
Ninotchka (1939)
 
Notorious (1946)
 
Olympia, Parts 1 and 2 (1938)
 
On the Waterfront (1954) (Seen)
 
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) (Seen)
 
Out of the Past (1947)
 
Persona (1966)
 
Pinocchio (1940) (Seen)
 
Psycho (1960) (Seen)
 
Pulp Fiction (1994) (Seen)
 
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
 
Pyaasa (1957)
 

  Q - S
Raging Bull (1980) (Seen)
 
Schindler's List (1993) (Seen)
 
The Searchers (1956)
 
Sherlock, Jr. (1924)
 
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
 
Singin' in the Rain (1952) (Seen)
 
The Singing Detective (1986)
 
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
 
Some Like It Hot (1959)
 
Star Wars (1977) (Seen)
 
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) (Seen)
 
Sunrise (1927)
 
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
 
Swing Time (1936)

T - Z
Talk to Her (2002)
 
Taxi Driver (1976) (Seen)
 
Tokyo Story (1953)
 
A Touch of Zen (1971)
 
Ugetsu (1953)
 
Ulysses' Gaze (1995)
 
Umberto D (1952)
 
Unforgiven (1992)
 
White Heat (1949)
 
Wings of Desire (1987)
 
Yojimbo (1961)

I have marked those that I have read. I have read only 30 out of this 100. How many have you read?

Time Magazines 100 best English Language Novel from 1923 to the present

The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow

All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral
Philip Roth

An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm (Read)
George Orwell

Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume

The Assistant
Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien

Atonement
Ian McEwan

Beloved
Toni Morrison

The Berlin Stories (Read)
Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin (Read)
Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited (Read)
Evelyn Waugh

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder

C - D
Call It Sleep
Henry Roth

Catch-22 (Read)
Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye (Read)
J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange (Read)
Anthony Burgess

The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron

The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell

The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather

A Death in the Family
James Agee

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen

Deliverance
James Dickey

Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone

F - G
Falconer
John Cheever

The French Lieutenant's Woman (Read)
John Fowles

The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing

Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind (Read)
Margaret Mitchell

The Grapes of Wrath (Read)
John Steinbeck

Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby (Read)
F. Scott Fitzgerald

H - I
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene

Herzog
Saul Bellow

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson

A House for Mr. Biswas (Read)
V.S. Naipaul

I, Claudius (Read)
Robert Graves

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

   L - N
Light in August
William Faulkner

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (Read)
C.S. Lewis

Lolita (Read)
Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies (Read)
William Golding

The Lord of the Rings (Read)
J.R.R. Tolkien

Loving
Henry Green

Lucky Jim (Read)
Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead

Midnight's Children (Read)
Salman Rushdie

Money
Martin Amis

The Moviegoer
Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway (Read)
Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch
William Burroughs

Native Son
Richard Wright

Neuromancer (Read)
William Gibson

Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro

1984 (Read)
George Orwell

O - R
On the Road (Read)
Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Read)
Ken Kesey

The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India (Read)
E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion

Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth

Possession
A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run
John Updike

Ragtime (Read)
E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitions
William Gaddis

Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates

S - T
The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles

Slaughterhouse-Five (Read)
Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth

The Sound and the Fury (Read)
William Faulkner

The Sportswriter
Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (Read)
John le Carre

The Sun Also Rises (Read)
Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html

I don't like people who laugh for nothing. There is this guy I met a few days ago who did "Hi, How are you? How do you like Hyderabad? Ha ha ha ha". Why? Why force yourself to laugh when nothing funny happens? Ugh. And then I have to politely smile.

 

Then there are these people who are always smiling. Oh god I hate them. Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Batman.. that kind of smiling all the damn time.. I don't know if I am expected to be my normal self or if I am also expected to be smiling all the time? My face hurts, people! 

 

So, is Bin Laden dead or not? He has become like Elvis.  

 

I want coffee.

 

3 days to home.

Brilliant weekend. As usual, I didn't do much of what I had to do - like grocery shopping and throwing out the milk and taking out the garbage and calling people and stuff. And I did a lot of TV and books - I finished Winds of War - 3 hours on Friday and all of my waking hours of Saturday and 6 DVDs of amazing stuff. I saw this almost 10 years ago and I remember so much of it differently - or maybe I am mixing up two different 2nd world war movies/series. Didn't Natalie go to concentration camp? Didn't Warren die? Wasn't Byron part of the French resistance? How many movies am I mixing up?

 

And then on Sunday, I finished Young Hornblower and Admiral Hornblower omnibuses (Is the plural of Omnibus, Omnibi?). Again, brilliant stuff; though I didn't get why he married Maria. That brought me to Sunday evening and I finished up the day with Enemy of the State and I, Robot. I saw the end of I, Robot for the first time. I sort of liked it better this time, than when I saw it earlier. Maybe the print makes a difference - and the end wasn't cut off, so that is a huge plus. I got confused between Jack Nicholson and John Voigt in Enemy of the State. that ever happen to anybody? If J.N hadn't been wearing glasses with yellow lenses through the movie, it would have gotten very weird.

 

My eyes hurt.

 

How was your weekend?

I was in an accident last week. My bus hit an auto and it toppled over. The bus driver ran out of the back door and didn't come back. The people in the auto were ok and we, in the bus, were just annoyed that it had to happen when it was raining so hard.

 

And today, another accident.

 

Is there a patron saint of accidents?? Anyway, this time I was on my way to work and we were about 10 mins to destination. A truck tries to overtake us, my driver swerves for some reason and the truck hit/scraped a window. I was fast asleep and woke to the sound of shattering glass. Glass showered over 4 girls sitting on those seats and Squeal! Shriek! The bus stopped, the truck stopped and both the drivers proceeded to yell at each other for the next 15 minutes. Then we finally went to work. Why do people smile so much after an accident in which nobody was hurt? Adrenalin rush? Oh we live again, so let us be happy? Anyway, in the 10 minutes that it took to go back home, everybody was big grins and loudly talking of all the other accidents they/their family/their hairdresser's third cousin's great aunt had been in. Much fun.

 

This would be the third bus accident I have been in without getting hurt. I am going to run out of luck one of these days.

 

What plans for the weekend?

Don't you just hate people whose feet/shoes/socks stink? I was that person today. I really really need to buy foot wear that don't collapse with the first rains. Horrible. Nobody is coming within 10 feet of me. Rooms empty when I go in and the queue at the bathroom mysteriously vanished.

Have you ever wanted to fart very badly but couldn't because there were other people in the small, closed, air conditioned room with you? If you can't run out of the room, and don't think that you would be able to fart silently and blame the guy next to you, what do you do? Let it rip and say "Better out than in"? or "Who me?" or "What smell? What noise?" or "Is the toilet leaking again?"...

 

Not that this has ever happened to me.

Notice anything different here?

I just love listening to Staind, reading comics, checking out Go Fug Yourself, planning my next trip to Chennai and the one after that, and making appointments at 10.30am on a Friday.

 

What should I do next?

Chronicles of Riddick - I didn't remember most of the movie though I had seen it twice before. I totally did not remember that Judie Dench was in the movie. And was that Eomir?

 

My bus was in an accident yesterday evening. He was going way to fast and took a corner on slope at around 80kmph on a busy road. An auto was crossing the road and BAM! The auto fell on it's side. Tires squealing, brakes screeching, yelling, cursing, honking - the works. The bus driver got out of his seat, walked down the bus to door at the back, got out and was never seen again. He vanished. In a few seconds, a crowd gathered, bleating for the blood of the vanished driver. They righted the auto and fortunately the two guys inside were ok. Rattled but otherwise fine. I hung around for a few more minutes, got bored and took an auto home. How jaded am I?

Do you find people of a certain "type" unbearable? Do you find it difficult to look beyond some first impressions?

 

There was this girl in college; short, high pitched voice, and she had a weird walk. Disliked her on first sight. A guy in college - tall, dark, deep voice and the first impression I had when I spoke to him the first time was "Smarmy Bastard". Cut to now - woman, weird, high pitched voice, round, and smiles all the time. My first thought - fake. I can generally get over first impressions. Some people I thought were stuck up and rude and obnoxious are now very good friends of mine. So I can change my minds about some people, but others, nope. Not a chance. They draw the same reaction from me that a cockroach does and we all know how much I just love the roaches. I don't know why. In the case of the first girl, nobody else liked her either. So I figured, good gut reaction. In the case of the guy, everybody liked him and I couldn't stand to be in the same room with him. And I haven't quite figured out the latest yet.

The girl who sits in my cubicle is just a little weird. She "diets" on puris and sprouts cooked in butter (not together). What is the point, one may ask. She has a logic behind it. Apparently food needs to taste good even if she is dieting; and hence the butter. And since she wants to have healthy food - the sprouts. The puris were just a phase. She got over that after we made fun of her. We are mean like that.

 

My favorite non-healthy food (groups) are cheese, ice-cream, chocolate, chakkarai pongal, adirsam, all payasams, and I am so hungry now.

 

What did you have for lunch today?

 

 

Whenever Amma went on one of her cleaning sprees, I used to make excuses to get out of it. And even if I couldn't get out of it, I never had to do any real work.. Krishna, Murthy or Devaki had all the tough work; I just had to supervise in my area and most of the time, this just involved yelling "No No No, Don't thow away that Tinkle Digest. I know I have'nt read it in a decade but I might want to read it sometime", and Amma would anyway override me in everything. So, no big deal. I could just vegetate in front of the TV when other people did all the hard work and got the house shiney and looking good as new.

 

Unfortunately, things have taken a 360 degree shift in my life. I worked all saturday, got home, and crashed. On sunday, I wake up to my roommate telling me that it is 10.30 and I have slept for more than 12 hours. So what. That is what sundays are for. So I said 10 minutes and turned over. She sat down next to my bed and proceeded to prattle on about what she had done on saturday. I cracked an eye open and asked her if she had decided that I had had enough sleep. She said, "yes and you can lie down for 10 minutes". How kind. I got out of bed, did the dailies and had coffee.

 

By then, I had a vague recollection of the two of us deciding to "clean the house this weekend", sometime during the week. It sounds so easy when it is "later". Later was now and there was no getting out of it. So we started. First job, washing machine balcony. So much garbage!! 2 bags of garbage later, we moved to the kitchen. Much more garbage!! We had bags of all kinds - laundry bags, food world bags, paper bags from fabindia, cloth bags from god knows where and more. So we took all these bags and put them all in a large bag. Then we started on old plastic bottles - pepsi, coke, mineral water, medicines and one bottle of some weird semi-solid brownish sticky substance. We didn't have a bag big enough to take all of this, so we dragged out a large cardboard box and put all of this in that. This was followed by old pressure cooker, and newspapers. We had about a hundred newspapers, still rolled up. We broke some stuff we were planning on keeping and with heavy hearts, we threw those away too. Now, we had no junk in the house but how were we going to take this unbelievably huge and heavy cardboard box out of the house? We tried picking it up but it was torn on one side everything started falling out. Not good. So we used the pai. We put the box on the pai and manouvered it out of the house and to the place street where the garbage guy collects the stuff from every midday.

 

Now that all the crap was out of the house, we swept and mopped. The house is divided into two between us. D cleans her room, the dining area and the kitchen; I clean the entrance, the living room and my room. My area is bigger but hers is more cluttered. So more or less even split, I thought. Then I started sweeping the entrance and SO MANY SHOES! Mine, hers, the earlier roommates. About a hundred. Pick then up, sweep under, put them back. The rest of the house was easy. Then D mopped. Just as I was about to breathe a sigh of relief and go bathe, D said, "Now that we have done so much, why don't we clean the windows too?"... Why don't we indeed. So 6 windows and one cut finger later, I finally bathed. Phew.

 

Bathed, ate and slept. Got up, ate and went right back to sleep.

 

How was your weekend?

 

Oh yeah, I totally forgot, we cleaned the fridge out too.. There was a really bad smell coming so we threw everything out and cleaned it from top to bottom with Pril. now it smells nice and lemony. And clean.

Working this saturday too. How about you?

 

Damn, I'm a poet.

I make fun of other people's fears. But I have my own little secret fear. Not secret anymore, but still...

 

I have always had a very irrational fear of cockroaches. Always. There was a time when I was so scared of them that I wouldn't go into a room that had a cockroach until my mom had gone in and scared it out of the door/window or killed it or told me that she talked to it and it promised to behave nicely. What can I say? I never said it was a rational fear. I am not so scared by them now. And by that I mean that I can approch one from behind a can of Hit.

Anyway. A couple of days ago, I got home at a decent hour and D wasn't back yet, so I had no one to whine about my day to. I turned on the TV. It was stuffy and the fan was stirring up the hot air, so I opened a window and went to get a bottle of water. When I turned around from the fridge, I saw a HUGE cockroach fly in through the window I just opened. It was HUGE. I don't mind small cockroaches. The big ones freak me out.

 

I froze. It went under a pile of cushions. I didn't know what to do. There was no Hit. (D had bought a can of something called Cockroach Stop a couple of weeks ago. But it said Non-Toxic. What is the point? I want it to KILL the damn cockroaches, not make them sneeze! Then I read on and it said "Non-Toxic to humans". Unlike Hit and Baygone which give you death I guess. Then it said, "dehydrates cockroaches and insects from the inside out." Ugh. Does it kill them or make them thirsty??) So I took the Cockroach Stop and a broom and went toward the pile of cushions, gingerly. And nudged it. The roach scampered out and ran toward my room!! No No No. Wrong direction!! So I sprayed a little CS ahead of it and it turned - toward me!!! I ran out of the way and it went to the balcony where we hang clothes to dry. No No not there either. There was no way out of there. So I sprayed some CS again and this time it turned toward the door. Right direction finally, but the door was closed! So I ran ahead of it and opened it. By now it was moving under the influence of CS and seemed a little woozy. It was still not dead. If I had used do much Hit, the damn thing would have died by now. Anyway, it went out of the door without much further ado. Phew. I discarded the weaponry, washed my hands, shut the windows and sat back down in front of the TV.

 

I looked under the bed before I went to sleep. And switched on the light and checked the bathroom before going in.

I was in a call right now for about an hour and a half with two other people. I set up the call, said hi to both of them and then proceeded to not say a word for the rest of the call. And since the speakerphone was being a pain, I had to hold the phone up all the time and now my ear is hot. All for nothing. And at the end of the call I said my good byes and put the phone down. For this I missed lunch.

 

Sigh. Have to go eat now and come back to work.

 

Government holiday today in Andhra Pradesh. For visarjan. Why do they need a whole day to put the Ganesh idol in water? ANd why can't they do it after working hours? Dammit. Why am I in the oofice when an entire state's (and several others') population is enjoying a day off in the middle of the week.

 

I complain too much. Way to much. Chronic Complainer - that's me. 

Sad me.

 

Vish - I have become one of those sad people who are dependant on their phone for everything - remainders, time, phone numbers, and moral support. I am one of those people I used to make fun of.

 

The weekend was weird. I squirmed out of coming to work. A bunch of people turned up in hyd from bangalore and mumbai. We saw Cars. It was not very good. They had taken a generic racing movie and made it colourful, changed the dialogues a bit to fit in a "cars are people" world. Not fun. Entertaining in bits and pieces but overall, bleh.

 

I didn't get my phone back. I have a new one now. Nokia 6030. It does not have a camera or bluetooth or internet and it can't make breakfast for me. I can use it to make and receive calls, send and receive messages, store numbers, as a timepiece and alarm. Now all I need is a connection. I hate that I am so needy.

 

I went back home on friday and looked at the laundry basket. It was full and there was a pile of clothes as tall as the laundry basket next to the laundry basket. (I have written laundry basket 4 times now).

 

So my roommate and I went out and bought a washing machine. That is 9000 rupees gone, bam, between the two of us. Last week, we went to buy bean bags and ended up buying a dining table. Bam. 5000 rupees. One phone. 4000 rupees. And I haven't even paid the rent yet. And cable and electricity and TV rent and refridgerator rent and phone bill and so on and so forth. Money just flows out of my account.

 

I told a cousin about this place. 1st member of the family to know about this other than the sister. Hi S.

 

Go work.

I lost my cell-phone. I think the other two people who sit in my cubicle are playing with me. But if they are, they are damn good actors. Damn it.

 

And I just found out that I have to come to work tomorrow. Ugh.

 

I want my phone.

So.

Why does speaking/writing about food make people, who hear/read it, hungry.

 

Is it like hearing running water and needing to pee oh so badly. It really, no pun intended, pisses me off. There are fountains and rock gardens with waterfalls in my place of work (cool, huh?). And there is one right outside where I go to have lunch and breakfast. And everytime I pass the waterfall, I need to go. Go now. It is awful. Hate it. So. Much.

 

Do other people also have this problem? Why couldn't my parents toilet train me differently? When I see my cousins try to get their kids use the toilet and they do the whole running water thing, I feel really bad. Damn. Another generation of people whose bladder is getting conditioned to react to running water.

 

I was going to write about someting totally different and got side tracked. Again.

 

More later.

I just had Karachi Biscuits. For those who don't know what they are, they are vanilla flavoured cookies with nuts and other stuff and are sorta hard. Apparently a speciality of Hyderabad. Good stuff. Now I'm feeling hungry.

Work. Gah.

 

What have you all been up to?

 

I have found that while my work ethic is great, the gland that makes me like/want work is severely underdeveloped. As are my glands that like/respect/want to breathe the same air as certain folks/collegues who I meet/talk with/send emails to very regularly. Should I be worried? And I find other people's worries/problems amusing. Not to their face though. I am a good person, really, I just have trouble focussing and all that shit. Give me something that matters. Talking to me for hours about how your nails need shaping/cutting/polishing very often is not going to give you points in that register I keep in my head for most people I meet. It is an automatic negative. And don't ask me why I don't like wearing a dupatta. I get annoyed very easily and you annoy me. Don't tell me that you appreciate all the hard work I do and then give me work that would take a normal person a week to do and tell me you want it yesterday. I am not amused. Don't ask me why I'm listening to music and not talking to you. I don't like you. I don't want to talk to you. You are not interesting. And you are definitely not funny.

 

If you are wondering, not all those "you"'s were referring to any one person. A lot of people annoy me. So much so that I wonder if there is a club of people who get together every friday evening and practice stuff they are going to tell me or ask me just to annoy me. I wonder if there is a secret handshake and a code word. Like in Secret Seven. And yes, I know that the Secret Seven didn't have a secret handshake.

 

/rant

 

And I have to do laundry today. I don't want to wear used underwear. I know you didn't want to know that. Oh shut up. I have never worn used underwear. I was just saying... Work. Now.

Got the roommate hooked on to The West Wing. Much fun.

Icecream for dinner. Yummy.

High Crimes. Predictable.

Oprah. Still boring.

Been at work since 10am. Waited.

 

2 calls at 12... now 15 minutes of work later, I'm going home...

 

What a waste of time.

 

Bye.

I like the Becker-Posner blog. I feel intelligent when I intelligent stuff. Not making sense?

 

I went from Dad Gone Mad to Amalah to more and more mommy blogs and suddenly realised that I was reading about post-partum depressions and maternity bras and sippy cups. *shudder*

 

So I went to Zug and read about credit card pranks and pretending to be micheal jackson and eating coins and trying viagra in the church and ordering penis enlargement pills online. Hilarious. A good morning wasted. What can I say? I was waiting for an email and it still hasn't come.

 

So now, after a brief period of estrogen overdose and a lot of deep belly laughs (and forwards), I am reading stuff that a nobel laureate (economics) and judge have to say. And it is really very interesting; if you want to know about immigration reform and health care and social security and plagiarism and China and many many more things that I didn't know could be interesting.

 

So back to more reading. Bye.

I have had a busy morning. Woke up late, missed the bus, got drenched, Came to work, changed my password, had breakfast, got drenched in the rain, dried off, checked my mail, replied to mails, checked various blogs, met with co-workers and came to consensus on several "issues", got work, sent emails to manager, wished several people happy birthday, had coffee, gossiped, decided to do work, added few columns to already voluminous xl sheet, got more work, have to start now. Somebody save me.

 

Life should be more than just existing.

 

Saw bits of the Pelican Brief & Erin Brockovichlast night. Julia Roberts has big hair.

Why do you think Holmes kept Watson around?

So, Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man's Chest...

 

First, all of the Flying Dutchman's crew look like they were born out of the puke of the designers of Jason/Freddy and the Orks/Uruk-hai. Some originality would have been nice. Why did this movie have to be 3 hours long when it would have been a perfectly good 1 and a half hours movie? Why, oh why? The dialogues were better in the first, though I admit, Captain Jack Sparrow's makeup was more intersting this time around.

 

Kiera Knightley (sp?) was pouting throughout the movie. And Bloom was boring. And that oracle woman? What were they thinking?

 

I was disappointed. It was funny in a lot of places but there were long stretches of yawn. Not good enough. Will I see the next one? Of course. I still think Depp is awesome. Maybe, since they are bringing Geoffrey Rush back in the 3rd, it'll be better.

I had so much fun last night. I felt all warm and tingly when I got home. Major smiles. K's studying, R (you don't know her, Girish) is getting married, Y is almost done with her residency, S has just chnaged jobs (and still hasn't quite figured out what a conversation means) and D is still nuts. Good fun. So the deal with Ramya is that she met this guy on Orkut (of all places!!) and checked him out on tamilmatrimony.com (again, Hloy shit!!) and then from there things got a little blurred till he popped the question (I am still not sure if it was just a week after "meeting" on Orkut) and she said ok and they called their respective parents and his came to her home and they met and now all is well and dandy. People do this? People I know?! Anyway, she seems very happy and I guess that's all that really matters. All in a week's work apparently.

So that was saturday.

I went to my grandmother's place this morning with my dad and my aunt and uncle were just shaking the cobwebs off and the cousin was still asleep. The conversation, during the course of several coffees, ranged from just plain weird to really scary. Somehow my aunt and I started talking politics and obviously you can't talk Indian politics without talking about religion and caste. My uncle piped in about how the Karunanidhi is trying to get a bill passed basing reservations based on religions. Now reservation based on caste itself is a contentious issue.. The conversation veered off there with my father and uncle talking about how if the TN assembly passed it the supreme court would strike it down as it is unconstitutional and all that. My aunt and I went off on a tangent. I was my naive self and said something along the lines of maybe politics shouldn't be based on religion. Oh man! She took me down, tied me up and beat the shit out of me. (The sister gave me Earl Grey. Black. It tastes weird. Making weird faces now.) Her arguments made absolute sense. Politics stinks. Religion mixed in copius amounts with politic stinks even more. In India, politics IS religion and caste. The hindus are mostly stupid and fractional and that is why the minorities get away with murder. What really really pisses me off is how American and European missionaries dole out money for conversions. A while ago, apparently a woman's kids had fallen ill. The people she was working with were not in town. The local priest gave her a bag of rice. She took it gratefully. Then a few days later he told her to come to church and take the rice. She did. By then her husband had also got whatever the kids had. She was desparate and this priest was looking like a lifesaver. He then told her to give her children "christian names" or no more rice. She did that. Her children now became "Mary Vimala" and "John Prakash". She was being ostracized by the rest of her family and the community she was living in. Her employer came back and this woman went to her and got money for hospitals bills and all that. Her kids got better, her husband went back to work. They were poor earlier; but they had a basic support system. Neighbours would watch the kids when she was at work, the old women in the slum would give her advise on how to take care of them when they were ill - not big stuff, but important. Now they were still poor, had "christian" names and no friends except for the priest. They converted. Moved to the christian locality within the slum. KNow what she did was probably wrong for them in the long run - with the extended family refusing to see them anymore and having to live with strangers and not really knowing what she had gotten into, but at the same time, know that if it happened again she would probably do the same thing if she was desperate.

The priests apparently get paid "per soul" saved. I have nothing against any religion. I just don't get what people get out of converting others. It is not as if her or her family's life has changed for the better. It is not as if any of them even know what the religion means or what it stands for. It seems like the religions and the people in the know prey on the poor, the needy and the desparate.

I still don't like the BJP or the VHP or the Bajrang Dal or the Shiv Sena. I still think they are a bunch of goons in saffron. I still wouldn't vote for them. But the alternative? Congress?? They pander to any imam or priest who comes calling. They know that if they give them what they want they are assured of most of the 17% muslim vote (or is it 22 now??). And so nothing really gets resolved. The 60 year old woman who got "talak talak talak"'d for no reason almost 10 years ago still gets no alimoney, is not allowed to keep in touch with her children and gets no help from the government because of "Muslim Law". Why are we not equal under the law?

I don't really mind the reservations. But I think the way they are now will only hate the country in the long run. It would make more sense if they first fixed the primary education system. Make more kids go to school. Build more village schools. College education is still for the priviledged. I know people who have had fake "Most Backward Caste" certificates made up because it is easier and cheaper. Well to do people. Sad it is.

Have to go sleep now. Good night.

I moved to another cubicle and my computer is facing the corridor. So anybody who walks by can see me reading zug.com, fark.com, updating my blog, listening to music... Not good at all. Speaking of music, my headphones vanished. I don't know whether I left them at work or misplaced them at home on a bus or rickshaw or shop or restaurant or...

 

Moving on. I am really looking forward to going to Chennai this weekend. Did I already say that? Well, I do. I don't know why, but I need a break from this place and my laundry and bad food and too much work and swiping in and swiping out. Appa brought lots of thattai and murukku and jelebi and laddu and other stuff. Want some? I haven't had any. I generally pig out on those; this time I haven't touched anything. I think it will stay unopened till I give it away or go on a binge. Probably the latter.

 

A classmate of mine is getting married. Wierd.

I was reading this blog called Daily Hater or something and it really freaked me out when I saw that I hated many of the same things that he did. It was scary to know that I hated so much. Though, in my case it was less actually 'Kill, Kill, Kill" type of hate and more of nails on chalk board. I don't know how it was for him. I was also many of the things/type of people he hated - sitcom watching, junk food eating, whining, IT employed, fat person. Mmm.

 

I have come to hate looking at xl sheets. Hate hate hate. It looks like my job will be just that. Staring at xl sheets and trying to make sense of it.

 

Those super-weird, super-hardworking people who are on the same project as I am? Remember them? They have been here for three days straight. If they weren't so damn nice, I'd hate them too.

 

That new project I got "allocated" to - I know nothing about it and I have to make a presentation today. What fun. My life just went from boring to painful.

So, I found out this morning that I am going to be in two projects starting tomorrow.
Me! Multi-tasking! Much fun.

The newpaper guy came to collect money this morning. We get The Hindu on weekdays and both The Hindu and The TImes Of India on weekends - we don't read either. Much.
We used to get only the Times earlier but I wanted The Hindu and D wanted Times Real Estate on weekends, so the arrangement. Wouldn't you expect the paper that is delivered 7 days a week to cost more than the one we get just twice a week? Apparently not. The Hindu was Rs.35 and The Times, Rs.50. Maybe it was a typo. Or maybe they are priced weirdly.
Oh well.

Did I tell you? The kodai trip got cancelled because people had work, family and stuff that came up last week and one by one, the buggers all dropped out. So, I'm going home.

I am, hopefully, meeting some classmates from school. (I would link to my very long post about my school here (which I wrote after a previous Kodai trip last year), but I am too lazy to find it.) I haven't seen some of them since I left school. Just emails and stuff. I am really looking forward to it. Fingers crossed.

8.38am, Monday, at work.

 

I was rummaging though some of my stuff last night and I found a notebook of stuff I wrote in college. Very depressing stuff. I seem to have been obsessed with god and religion and death. I don't remember. Is that weird? I remember going through dark and angry phases, but I don't specifically remember writing these stuff. I wrote a lot in the bus and at night in my room. Oh well.

 

Appa gava me West Wing, 6th season. I had not seen any of the earlier episodes and I was not expecting to like it. I started with the 1st DVD on saturday evening, and by midday, sunday, I had finished the entire season. I loved it. I am going to Chennai and getting the other seasons. Amma was amused that I liked it too. Appa watches it all the time and she dosen't. Just on principle, so that she'll have something to bug him about. I don't think she is very enamored by politics. Anyway, what do you think of West Wing?

 

D was in Chennai this weekend so I was all alone. And it has been raining so much.

 

On friday, we both got up late. By around 8.30am, it was pouring. We ventured out, armed with only our umbrellas. Auto after auto stopped and when they heard where we had to go, they shuddered and refused to go. Finally one guy said ok. Relieved, we got on. On our way to work,  we got splashed, head to foot by cars going on both sides. I was sopping wet when I got off. Ugh. It took me all day to dry off. Gross.

 

It didn't rain yesterday, when I was at home most of the time or the day before, when I went out for just an hour. Fate.

My father gave me Lynn Truss' Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today last night.
Was it a hint?

I didn't go to the reception last night; or the wedding this morning. I met appa and patti for about an hour last night. Patti regaled us with stories of her father-in-law. He sounded interesting. Would have been nice to meet him. Anyway, apparently the bride's dad is a Telugu actor and consequently the South Indian acting/directing community was very well represented. My father had no clue who any one was, my grandmother knew a few and her younger sister knew all. Some 3000-4000 people turned up, apparently. Phew. I am glad I didn't go. Thank the merciful gods.

No mood to work. Lots to do. I'll let you know how it goes.

Apparently it is Friendship Week. What does that mean anyway? Make friends this week? The only thing it really accomplishes is spam. So much spam. Spam and more spam. Spam Spam and Spam. Spam with attachments and spam without. People who barely know me send me ppts and pictures, of love and bleah and bleah. People who know me hardly write to me. Some friendship week. I forgot a friend's birthday last month (inspite of having a remainder on Outlook). Some friend I am.

Feeling very sleepy. I got home at 12 last night and D had bought a sub for me. I unwrapped it and flopped down on the mattress. I had been reading William the Outlaw a couple of days ago and it was lying on the floor. I picked it up and before I knew it, it was 1.30. Slept and woke up at 7.30. I missed the bus again. This happens way too often. 6 hours of sleep is not enough. I need atleast 8 to function normally. Sleeeep.

A few days ago, D and I went to look at an apartment she was thinking of buying. On our way back, it started pouring. Sheets of water bore down on us. We were in an auto. It had flaps on the side that could be let down. So we let it down. It didn't help much. And the wind changed directions every minute. We were being subjected to the rain, water was splashed on us by cars, and water dripping though the leather/hood/top of the auto. A lot of water. We were wet from the sides and from the front. My back was dry. It felt weird. And it was cold. Quite cold. I don't know why I thought about it now.

One wonders about fate. And then, gives up wondering because one's head aches.

What would the input be if your output needed to be 100 units after a constant waste of 5 units and 10% of the total input?

Simple right? Yeah, I thought so too. But Microsoft thinks otherwise. And gives a wrong answer and vehemently claims that it is the right one and does not allow me to change it. Not in MSOffice - don't go checking. Just take my word for it.

I think it is very unfair to put me in training all day and then ask me to stay over and do some more work. I left at 11 last night. The other 2 working on the same thing stayed till 1. They are making me look so bad. Fools.

On a positive note, the training has become so much better. They changed the trainer and this guy knows so much more. It is not so boring and pointless anymore.

The father and grandmother are coming tomorrow - to a wedding in the city. I have to go with them to either the wedding or the reception. Why would someone keep a wedding at 3 in the am? I might go for the reception. Might.

The father is bringing some thattai and laddoos and jangri and DVDs. DVDs courtesy him and the rest courtesy my aunt.

Have you noticed that women in Grisham's books have weird names? Darby, Reggie et all. Maybe just in these two books. Metlin wouldn't know...

Have you read Life According to Garp by John Irving? I read it some 3 years ago. It was brilliant. Crazy but brilliant. I remembered the book when I read an article that quoted Stephen King and John Irving asking Rowling to not kill Potter in the last book.

I wouldn't care if Potter died, as long as he died well, and the book was good. He is not real. Sheesh. I was pissed when Dumbledore died in the end of Half Blood Prince but Order of The Phoenix spoilt Harry Potter for me. It will never be the same again.

But I did feel really bad when Gandalf fell in the Mines of Moria. Really really bad. I had to keep the book down for a couple of minutes. Unsurprisingly, I didn't feel really bad when Boromir died. Though in the movie, I felt bad for Sean Bean. He never gets good, living through the movie, roles. I have cribbed about this before.

I just realised that I have nothing to wear tomorrow to the reception and I told appa not to bring any clothes for me. Oh well.

The weekend was like the rest of my life. Nothing happened. I bought a couple of old John Grisham's. Client and Pelican Brief. Stuff he wrote before road kills like The Painted House and The Bretheren. Gah.

National Geographic had a thing about the construction of the Hoover Dam. It was awesome. They used circus acrobats!!! And interlocking blocks of concrete so that the water pressure doesn't break the dam down like it apparently did to some other dam. Brilliant.

I have noticed that my roommate falls asleep when the TV is on. Especially if it was something she wanted to see. Like Madagascar last week. Or this Dams thing last night. Or LOTR 3 a few weeks ago. Hmm. Weird.

I finally applied for a credit card yesterday. They 'lost' my previous application. Bloody ICICI.

Any other news?

Drone Drone Drone.

I feel like I am standing outside myself looking in. Annoyed that this show is boring; nothing is happening; why is this girl the main actor when nothing happens in her life? Yelling: Fool! No No don't do that! Last time you did, you got screwed. I am not listening to me. Stupid me.

What happens in this story? Am I sure that I want to know?

What are you doing this weekend?

blogger looks weird.

Training is a waste of money and time.
The company's money and my time. Lots and lots of my time. 2 weeks of my time.

1 done, 1 more to go. Pain.

3 movies tonight.

Timeline (haven't seen before) and Runaway Jury and Crimson Tide (have seen only a few million times).

Hope I get out of here soon.

Damn I just heard that I'm stuck here till 7. Damn it. Damn it.

The power in my building gets cut if it drizzles.

Yesterday it poured. Ugh. Today too, it looks like it is going to pour. Damn Damn Damn. The roads fill up with water, the traffic is worse than normal and I GET DRENCHED. Not fun.

No fun at all.

Hey nobody commented on the Sri Sai Deluxe Mess. I really want to know.

I'm in training for the next 2 weeks. Yesterday I made the mistake of sitting in front; every 10 minutes, the guy would look at me and go, "Ok?", "Yes?", "Do you have any doubt?", "Do you understand?", "Am I too fast?". Ugh. I'm going to sit as far away from him as possible today. Which won't be very far, because there are only 8 of us getting trained and the room we are in is barely big enough. But still, at least a little farther away.

Should I be worried that the company I work for has bomb detection gear and uses them? On every vehicle and person to go through their hallowed gates?

I keep taking the same thing everyday for breakfast and lunch, inspite of the fact that I don't like it very much purely because the lines for the other counters are too long. I decided today that enough was enough and had toast & omlette for breakfast. Lets see what I have for lunch.

And continuing on my laundry saga, the landlady's maid washed about 5 days laundry (mine and D's) last night. The smell of freshly washed clothes filled the air. Umm Detergent. We are getting a washing machine this week. Why don't they have laundromats in Hyderabad? (Do they exist in India? Anywhere in India? I'm moving there.)There are a huge number of dry cleaners; wouldn't this be a natural extension?

I dreamt that I left my ID/Swipe card at home and I was holding up a long queue at the gate. And I was getting more and more frantic when the security guy at the gate told me to go back home and not come to work without it. In reality, they just give us a temporary ID and we have to sign in a register or something. But dream world is not the real world. I was so relieved when I woke up.

I get up everyday at 5.57 am. I don't know why but I have been getting up at 5.57am for almost 3 weeks now. Or more. And then I promptly go back to sleep. I get up again anywhere between 6.18 and 6.22. Wake up the roomie. Do the morning rituals and stuff. Leave at around 7.15. Sometimes with D, sometimes without. Today without. She still hadn't woken up when I left. I was so jealous. She sleeps in and I don't. Damn it.

On my way to work today I saw this on a board by the road: Sri Sai Deluxe Mess

Why is a place where food is made and served and eaten called a mess? I wonder what the story behind that is.

I'm re-reading Hitchhiker's Guide and there are so many bits that seem new. I have read the entire volume, cover to cover, atleast 5 times. And everytime, something seems new. I love reading books I have read before. If they are good books.

I tried to read A Hundred Years of Solitude last week. I read one page and gave up. Why are these award winning books so painful?

Does anybody have links to Enid Blyton's Jack, Peggy, Nora, Mike and Prince Paul stories. They were called the Mystery Series, I think. No, maybe the Mystery Series was the one with Miranda the Monkey and Barney and those two (three?) kids. I don't remember.

I dreamt that my roommate told me she made 21 lakh rupees a year. She was very amused when I told her this morn.

I didn't get that massage I wrote about earlier, if any of you (Vish) was wondering.

I'm listening to BonJovi at work. Keep the Faith. I like his voice.

I have a confession to make - I like watching Rockstar Supernova. There I've said it. I don't have any favorites but I definitely didn't like Dilana(?)'s version of Zombie last night.

I'm going to Kodai with some friends during the Aug 15th weekend.

What's up with you people?

Did I ever tell you this?

One morning, a couple of weeks ago, I was walking to the bus. Still groggy. Wishing the world was flat, no uphills. (The path from my house to the road is a little inclined. A little. And in the mornings, it matters.) A middle aged lady, bare foot on a Kinetic Honda, stops me. "Madam Madam. I give massage on this road. You want massage now?"

I bought The Manticore's Secret (Part 2 of the GameWorld Trilogy) and The Avenger (Forsyth) and Fury (Robert K. Tanenbaum) on saturday.

I finished the avenger and fury by saturday night. Avenger was quite boring; Fury was standard fare. I seem to have missed a couple of Butch Karp books in the last few years.

I've read about 200 pages of Manticore's Secret. I'm very confused. He is taking the "there is no good or evil" thing a little too far but I like the way he made the Ravians seem like the good guys in the first book and now they are looking scruples deficient. But the Narak-Danh Gem was a little too obvious and smacked of Chamber of Secrets. Talking book and all.

I don't have much work to do and I have read all the Terry Prachett's on the net; or so it seems.

You are all intelligent, fairly well read and much traveled people. Mostly. So I can safely assume that you know things. You know, things? I have a question about one of those things that I hope you know. Atleast one of you.

What is the purpose of a toilet seat? Not the base, that is required. That flappy thing on top of the base. What is it really there for? Some people like it up, and some like it down. But when we are putting it up or down and cursing people who go before us and put it the way we don’t like it, do we ever think why? Why do we need it? Do we need it? What does it do? Not much really. From what I have seen, it is just there. And even without it, if the base was a little broader, we could use the porcelain god without any trouble. So why don’t the Parrys of the world make a commode without that plastic toilet seat. Won’t it be cheaper? Or would the plastic vendor strikes and angry moronic mobs call for a bandh? And burn buses and break windows?

I understand why the seat cover is required. When the water has run out just after you finished washing your ass or the flush dosen’t work and you don’t want to see the floaters, you NEED the cover. And for other hygiene requirements. But the toilet seat? That is still a mystery.

The world has officially gone to hell.

I went home early yesterday and crashed. I got up at around 9.30pm and my roomie asked me if I had heard about the Mumbai blasts. I was too groggy still to understand what she said and I mumbled something.

Now - Wtf is happening? It is like the Chinese curse - may you live in interesting times. Times are definitely interesting. Damn them. There should be a common sense pill that people can take or a brain pill. Morons. How do argue with people who want you dead, irrespective of what you did (or did not do) or how old you are?

I want to say, Line them up and shoot them all, but more psychopath morons with plastique or semtex or dynamite would only rise up to fill the vacuum.

This is scary.

There are days when I hate people. Today is one of those. I am feeling murderous. Angry. Pissed off. Not Amused.

And today, people want to get cute. Fools. Cross me again and die.

When someone asks me to be somewhere at A hours and B minutes, I expect them to be there at A hours and B - 1 minutes. It that too much to ask? Morons.

Yesterday, bhindi was awesome. And the rotis were small - like puris pretending to be rotis. But they were good.

I had curd and avakai oorugai. Yummy.

I have a stomach ache. The kind that comes every month. I hate it. I feel like sticking a knife in to my gut and tearing out whatever is causing the pain. Damn my ovaries. The pain dosen't stay in my tummy. It grows and spreads to my back and my legs. And then I die.

So farewell folks. If I die today, miss me lots. If I don't, call me.

I have 37 fans on Orkut! WTF?

Awesome weekend people.

Family, food, sleep, hilarious discussions, fights, neices and nephews, cousins (& their respective others), aunts and uncles - action packed weekend.

Indian Airlines called me up at 3am to tell me that my 6am flight was delayed. They wake me up in the middle of the night and give me bad news! Horrible people.

Bought book 1 of Gameworld Trilogy. Brilliant. Will buy 2 and 3 soon.

I made the mistake of saying that I wasn't particualrly religious and people jumped on me. I had an uncle and a cousin trying to 'convert' me. Fun. I love them, but why oh why do they want me to believe everything that they do?

All done. For now,

I hope to be at home today by 5.30. Hope being the operative word. I met this really funny guy today. Nice, but funny. He had a very mobile face and waved his hands all over the place during the conversation. He winked, bulged his eyes, and generally made faces during lunch (which was very good). Clients should visit more often; we get such great food - a little bland, but definitely better than standard fare. All the stress of the past three weeks was worth it. The Gulab Jamun was so yummy. Hot and ummmm.

These people have no idea what spicy is. They found the food, which I found bland (but didn't mind because I am used to my father's unbelievably weak stomach), very spicy. Sad people. I bet they have never had oorugai sadam. Imagine going through life with out kaaram food. tcha.

I have to go pee.

And then make small talk after everybody else finishes making their presentations. Or watch and nod. Or smile till my face breaks. Or all of the above. What a tough life I lead.

The damn wind was blowing hard and fast yesterday. It had the audacity to try to blow me off my path. I'm embarrassed to say that it almost succeeded. Me! I'm stunned.

And in other news, I have a sore throat and I want to sleep. For a long long time.

Last night we were supposed to have dinner with some people. Work people. Anyway, work kept piling up and they ate without me. So, I went out for dinner with another girl who also ended up not going. We were so hungry. We had this funny "Crispy Veggies" thing. It was like bajji, but less oily. Interesting. We ate and we ate. And when we could have no more, we had ice cream. Good stuff.

And I went home. Saw bits and pieces of VH1 CLassic. They kept playing Duran Duran. Interestingly, somebody asked me at work yesterday if there was a group called Duran Duran. I was stunned at his ignorance. And I slept. It was cold. The wind was still blowing. It has been raining for the past week. Clothes never dry. It is starting to get annoying. The Chinese water torture ( or was it Japanese?).

By the way, I finally have someone who comes home and washes clothes and sweeps and mops and here's the best part: she also cooks!! Yay. No very well, but let's not be greedy. She started yesterday.

I need cough syrup. Benedryl, where are you?

Superman is a sad sad movie with many mind-numbing qualities. The first and foremost is Superman himself – who is, throughout the movie, very very pretty. With his skin tight outfit (pure eye-candy) and blank face, he will definitely remind you (those of you who have seen the previous superman movies) of Christopher Reeve. Not as broad as Reeve but of the same brain dead category. (No offense to the paraplegic community, but Reeve’s face seemed frozen even before he got paralysed.) Anyway, Kate Bosworth was definitely not a better Lois Lane than Teri Hatcher. And James Marsden was so unused. Damn it. They killed him off in X3 and made him “the other guy” in this one. Kevin Spacey was the saving grace of this movie. He was brilliant. He had all the great dialogues and looked perfectly evil.

And yeah, Superman has a son.

In other news, the dad was here and friday. And the sis saturday and sunday. She saw superman and was appropriately disdainful. Only, she was not as bothered by the lack of James Marsden as I was. Ate out a lot, enjoyed a light drizzle, drank some obscenely priced "Yemeni" Mocha (coffee @Rs.105!! Decadent), came back home and saw Kundun. Awesome Martin Scorcese. Real story of the current Dalai Lama's childhood. Good stuff. The kid was great.

Hey, I finally have a bed. I bought it on saturday and it really makes a difference! No more mattress on the floor for me!!! Yippee.

Time flies when you are having fun. Right now it is dragging its weary feet across a path full of obstacles, wondering if it would be easier to just turn back. Unfortunately, there is no turning back for time. There is only one direction, and that is onward. So it slowly plods on, unwilling, hopeless, tired and aching, hoping for respite, waiting for this journey to get over. I wonder if anybody ever told time that its journey would go on for ever. That there was no breaks, no end. That th eroad just winds on and on. If they had told time, would it have taken the job? Could it have refused? What would have happened then?

Not for the easily grossed out.

The kitchen sink has been clogged for the past couple of days. No amount of jabbing the drain with pointy objects has helped. When I went back home yesterday evening, it was really gross. Water was slowly dripping from the pipe joint and that whole area looked like someone had puked and hadn’t cleaned up properly. So I decided to take matters into my own hands – literally. I unscrewed the pipe and took it, gingerly, to the place where we keep our brooms and mops and dead dustbins. There was a tap there. I filled this pipe with water, the water just poured out of the top. There was a broken broom next to the tap. My room mate’s mom handed me a long piece of wood from it and told me to unblock it. That’s when things got really shitty. I stuck it through the pipe, it hit a blockage. I pushed it through and then I almost puked. The stuff that came out was vegetable waste. Congealed and old. Have you ever been downwind from a garbage van? That’s how bad it smelled. Worse, I had to clean this crap up, wash and clean the pipe and put it back under the sink. That took another half hour. Just thinking of it makes me want to barf.

P.S. On a better smelling note, my room mate’s mom is here for a week. That is a week of good food people! Yesterday, she made sambar and brinjal. Normally, I wouldn’t go near brinjal with a 10 foot pole, but yesterday, I loved it. AND she had taken out the coffee filter & the coffee that I had brought from Chennai and made decoction! I had filter coffee yesterday and this morning! Coffee! Good Coffee! Like my mom went on a rampage and bought a zillion stuff for the kitchen, D's mom also went on a rampage and bought everything that my mom had missed. SO we have a fully functional, stocked kitchen now. Let’s see what gets used after she leaves. She bought homeopathy meds for a Chikugunya disease that’s all over Hyderabad. I had some last night and this morning. It looks like tiny naphthalene balls and smells like it too. I think it has made me constipated. Like I needed more help. Oh well, I can suffer a little constipation if it means I won’t get some weird mosquito spread disease.