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.

I saw X Men 3. I'm quite confused. Still in shock really. How could they do that to Cyclops? After that happened, the movie passed in a haze of violence and confusion. God guy? Bad guy? It was sort of sad to see Wolverine grasping at straws. And they brought Jean Grey back to life for that?! And Storm looked old. What happened to NightCrawler? Why wasn't he around? And how could they do that to the Professor?

I have to see it again to decide if I like it or not.

And there didn't seem much space for an Xmen 4. Will they? Won't they?

P.s: I came to work yesterday. On a Sunday. DO I have big neon "LOSER" lights above my head? My father, very helpfully, said "welcome to the real world".

Gee thanks.

Dear Architect,

I know you don't take requests from real people but please make an exception this time. I know you are busy (with that pesky Neo and annoying Morpheus and the upstart "city" Zion)but please, 2 minutes of your time.

Could you please tell your programs to make the following changes in my reality?

a. When I am having breakfast in front of a million or so strangers so early in the morning, could they please make the sambar a little less scalding?
b. When I want to try something new, could they make sure it is NOT strawbery milkshake? That taste so early in the morning makes me want to barf.
c. When I decide that I don't want to have the taste of a bad beverage and get a cup of hot coffee, could they please move the wet spot on the floor away from my path?
d. If they don't move that wet spot away from me, could they at least let me regain my balance without having to do an undignified slide-hop squeal wiggle in front of the afore mentioned strangers? And when they laugh, could you do that cool 'no mouth to laugh with' thing that Agent Smith did with Neo during interrogation?
e. Make the coffee less hot. I just burnt my hand on the hot sambar. Do you have to burn me twice in 10 minutes.
f. The idly was good. Thank you for that.

P.S Times Of India headline : "Al Zawahiri says blah blah Kill American Infidels" or something and my first thought was, "Didn't they drop 3 bombs on this guy last week and kill him and a bunch of other people?". I read the article and THEN I realised that Al Zarqawi died last week, not Al Zawahiri. AL Zawahiri - Osama's sidekick in Afghanistan; Al Zarqawi - Al Qaeda Terrorist in Iraq. That's not too difficult.

In the world of mules
There are no rules.

Reading Ogden Nash. (Don’t yell Tara. You can take it when you come.) Saw The Bone Collector on HBO last night. During the breaks, I was reminded how much I dislike Sex and the City. I just don’t like any of them & all of them. Don’t know why. And then I saw Seinfeld. And dragged myself to bed. Many of these sentences are missing the subject. I don’t know where it is hiding. Maybe it is scared of you. I am completely mad.

I like Angelina Jolie in The Bone Collector. I don’t like Denzel Washington in it. Which is weird, because I generally like DW a lot.

The vending machine coffee here is bad. They have two vending machines (different brands) and they both suck. One sucks more than the other. One of two comes with a guy who operates it. He also makes ragi/badam milk. Which is hot and sweet and cloying. They are trying it out here to see here if there are enough takers. I guess if they decide that there are, they’ll leave the machine and the guy will go. How does it matter?

Ramble Ramble Ramble

I bought an umbrella this weekend. I brought it to work yesterday and forgot to take it back. I have lost 3 umbrellas in my life so far. I wondered if this was to be my fourth. But no. It was still there, under my desk. Just in case you were wondering.

Once upon a time, I extolled the miracle that was Coffee Day vending machine. It works that well only in the Chennai Central railway station. Here, it sucks.

Tired Sleepy Bored

Saw 15 mins of Capote last night. Boring.

Read William. Funny. I want Three Investigators. It has been ages since I read any.

Hungry.

I was going to write about the Golconda fort, MI 3, my mother, shopping for chairs, kitchen stuff and sleeping under 2 mattresses in a too-cold hotel room. All of that is inconsequential to what happened last night.

They followed me here. They are evil, wicked, and cruel. They hate me and want me to cry. They come every night and torment me. I hate them like I hate nothing else. And they leave behind bits and pieces of themselves to taunt me. I thought I was free of them. But last night they came. They came in hordes. They crept into my room, unseen, through the open windows. I was unaware of their presence, unconcerned, watching Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire for the fourth time and laughing at the screwed up subtitles. D went in to my room to get something and shrieked. They were there. Swirling around the room like a dervish, making a low angry noise. She slammed the door shut, but they had made the decision. They came into the hall. We ran, slamming doors, shutting windows, switching off lights, grabbing blankets. We ran in to D’s room, and slept. Cowering under the blankets. Waiting. Wondering. Sleeping.

As usual, all that remained was bits and pieces of them. Like a visiting card, to remind us that they will come again tonight. And there is nothing we can do but wait.

My landlady’s sons are complete brats.

I live with 3 girls. They are all really cool people. (One of knows about this blog) Especially D. She’s the coolest of them all. (Hi D!).

Anyway, there are 4 keys to the apartment. 3 are with the other three girls living with me and one is with the landlady. So I’m generally left hanging.

Last night, I went home (after standing in line at the cinema in vain and dinner) at 10pm. Nobody was home. D was at a party, R was at work and I have no idea where N was. So I rang the bell downstairs. And waited. I could hear the TV and I could hear non-TV speaking too. And I could hear the bell – It was loud and long and musical and annoying as hell. I rang the bell again and waited. It was, by then, 10.30pm and hot and humid. I was sweating buckets and the damn people inside are watching football. I knocked. Once twice three times. Now I was pissed. I pushed against the door and Voila! It was open. I went in. The TV was blaring from the bedroom and the door was open. I knocked on the door frame. The two bespectacled boy-men looked at me vaguely. I asked for the key. One of them rolled, yes rolled, off the bed and gave it to me. The other just pointed at where the key was. They didn’t even pretend that they didn’t hear the bell. “Yeah we heard it but we figured either you’d give up and go away or come in and get whatever you wanted. We are lazy bastards who don’t give a shit about the POOR GIRL WHO WAS STANDING OUTSIDE FOR HALF A FUCKING HOUR”.

Damn them.

There is a woman sobbing into her cell phone outside my building. At least, I think she is crying. Either that, or she is making mewling noises into her cell phone while she is sitting on the sidewalk, with her head on her knees. I passed her twice; once on my way to lunch and on the way back. Both times I looked at her, looked around and saw other people also give uncomfortable looks and walked on. Both times I felt guilty; like I should have done something – spoken to her, asked her why she was crying, console her. Both times I told myself that that she would feel better if she was left alone, that she would be uncomfortable if a complete stranger asked her what was going on, and so on and so forth. Both times I felt annoyed: why was this girl sitting in public and crying? Couldn’t she at least do in the privacy of the restroom? The dorm? The car park? Outside some other building?

I convinced myself that it was better to leave her alone and I came to the relative security of my cubicle, with the reassuring sound of keyboards being pounded and people on the phone, not crying.

I didn’t talk her not because it would have made her uncomfortable, but because it would have made me uncomfortable. And now I feel terrible; like I should have done something. What would you have done?

There is this place called Chaitra on road # 2 that makes great appam. We were the only customers last evening. I had appam and kurma and some brinjal and coconut thingy. The brinjal and coconut thingy was forgettable. The kurma was very spicy. The appam was yummy. Hot, soft. mmmmmm.

I have work. Yay?

I saw Flight 93 last night. It was sad. Inspite of knowing what was going to happen, I was wishing (expecting?) everybody or atleast a few people to live. Only when they showed the crater and the smoke did it register that they all died. It was a little too much; especially because it was "based on real events". I'm too used to almost happy endings in Hollywood disaster movies. Everybody was a little too brave, a little too accepting. It didn't seem real. I don't know. I have never been hijacked.

I still can't get over Chaiyya Chaiyya in The Inside Man. Everytime I think of it, I have that "It didn't really happen that way, did it?" feeling. Unbelievable. Why? The movie itself has blurred. I remember only the shock of the title song.

2 Day of doing nothing at home and being fed good food and playing with the neice and the neph and not having to worry about how my laundry is going to get done and not having to get out of bed and having people to wake me up and watch movies with me and sleep some more and eat some more and sleep some more and talk some more and have good coffee and have somebody cut mangoes for me and have some more coffee and... you get the point.

It was good.

My cousin took my shoes. She took them. Those nice soft flats that were so hard to find. She took them and I let her. I'm too nice.

I saw Alladin and The Inside Man. I liked Alladin better. Maybe it was all the singing and flying around.

Maybe I'll get some work today.

I whined all of this week about having to wash my clothes.
That is finally done.
Yay.

Going to Chennai this weekend.

My head feels like a million angry reservation protestors are beating up Arjun Singh and the riot police are lathi charging them. It hurts.

A girl said this today to some guy – You are the bad guy. As it is you are wearing yellow. Yellow yellow dirty fellow.

She did. I swear. She was 24 yrs old. And then she came and told me that she said it. I wonder, sometimes.

I never realized how big my forehead was until I saw the photo on my ID card. It’s huge. It covers 1/4th of the picture, most of the rest of the space is taken up by my caterpillar eyebrows. I need help. Epilatory help.

I used to be able to disguise my rambling as coherent speech till now. I find myself unable to bother. I am a proud rambler.

I am also very sleepy.

I have a lot of work to do once I get home. I have to wash clothes – 1 week’s clothes. I need to figure out where to get a washing machine from and buy or rent? I need to unpack. I moved in last week and I still haven’t unpacked. My excuse then was that I had no wardrobe space. That is no longer true. I’m just plain lazy. But you already knew that.

I spilt chikoo milkshake on myself today. I wiped it off and it didn’t stain and dried very quickly, but there is still a faint smell of chikoo. I don’t know if I’m imagining it. What is chikoo in English? Sapota is not English, right?

I left my phone at home yesterday. I felt fidgety and weird all day. I went back home at around 7 and I had missed just one call. I feel so unloved.

I fell asleep for 10 minutes in front of the comp just now.

I am so sleepy.

I spent the weekend in Bangalore and it very helpfully rained just as I needed to go out. And by rained, I mean poured. Sheets of water, from all directions. And even more helpfully, just as I was getting out of the car, it stopped raining, as if a switch was turned off, somewhere in the skies.

Anyway, Bangalore is horribly crowded. You would expect people to take a siesta on a Sunday afternoon, post lunch. But noooo. They were all out in droves, in their weekend finery.

I stayed at Ravi’s house and hogged tomato rice (which he said was puliyodharai, and got a knock on the head from his mother). It had been such a long time since I had good rice. One month is a long time.

I saw Da Vinci Code. It wasn’t as bad as people have made it seem. It wasn’t great, but wasn’t terrible. Tom Hanks was not a very convincing Langdon and Tatou seemed a little lost. Jean Reno and Magneto were, as usual, brilliant. Paul Bettany’s whipping scenes were really gross. I also saw bits of Arunachalam and Sinbad and Sleepy Hollow and Bourne Identity on TV. All very entertaining.

The Alumni get together thingy was a bit of a bore, though it was nice to see all those people again. I left after dinner, just as the party started livening up. Loud music and dancing and smoke and dark rooms and crowds are really not my scene. I got a few phone numbers. Only time will tell if I ever use them. History says I won’t but let’s see.

The bus ride there was terribly uncomfortable. They were playing a Hrithik Roshan movie which added to the discomfort. I didn’t sleep much and kept fidgeting. The guy sitting next to me must have been cursing me. The journey back was much better. I got a window seat and slept throughout. They started playing Matrix but the sound wasn’t very good so they played a Bobby Deol – Amisha Patel movie. I was asleep before the starting credits ended.

Now I have to go. Miles to go before I sleep.

ps. god bless the "Edit" button.

Footwear should not feel like coffin for the feet.

I got off the bus yesterday and "Florsheim" stared me at the face. I have been wearing the same old chappals for the past 4 months and I felt like getting something new. I didn't think that I would buy something from someplace that looked so expemsive, but I had time to kill, so what the hell.

Half an hour and almost 10 pairs of shoes later, I was convinced. I am a freak. I have big feet. Shoe factories don't make shoes my size. Shoe designers, like clothes designers, have no idea that people like me exist in the income range that they are targetting.

So I went to Bata, sure that I would get lots of choice there. Did I? Did I? Noooooooooooooooo. They had my size, but in those pointy heeled, one foot off the ground, shoes. I can't wear those. I wouldn't know what to do with those. I'd a) fall off b) trip c)twist my ankle d)hurt my back e)hurt my heels and in all probablility, within 10 mins of walking in those, I'd take them off and walk bare foot. I know me. I'd do that, even on the road. I'm lazy, spoilt and need my comfort. I can always wash my feet later.

I wish I could go to sleep and wake up with small feet. Not just small feet, I want a lot more, but right now, I'd settle for that. Make it happen.