Another sun soaked season

An ECG graph. That’s what my life looks like now. Flat lines with sudden spurts of activity. Or maybe that’s not what an ECG graph looks like. Anyway, days are the same. I wake up, get ready, walk 17 minutes to my work with my ipod pugged into my ears, and huge oversized glasses hiding half my face.  Don’t meet people I know on the way, in fact I don’t meet anyone at all. So I float along in my self sufficient little universe with my ipod and my sunglasses, lost in thought and music. Life at work is a blur of semi-activity. I bug my manager for something to do. Sometimes I get something, sometimes I don’t. After 1/3^rd of my day in my cubicle, I walk back home along the same tree lined suburban streets, the same self sufficient little bubble. I then proceed to watch a couple of House episodes on tv or my laptop, read a little, gossip a little with my roommate and go back to sleep. Sometimes I try to force myself to call someone, like I would have in LA. But life just doesn’t seem interesting enough to convey details about to someone on the other end of the line, or on a blog for that matter. Which explains the slow post weeks this month.  The Divya I knew who loved having people around her, talking to her all the time seems to have imploded. Now there is just one bored person grudgingly happy with her self sufficient shell.

The long weekend was different though. For once, I didn’t have to be the planner and just had to show up looking pretty. That was fun. A friend of a friend initiated the plan and it snowballed with everyone invited inviting everyone else. So armed with a GPS and debit cards, we travelled to the far, tourist-free (relatively) corners of the world (or atleast the Californian world) and basked in the sun on beaches and got pushed around by the cold wind on cliffs. And when that got boring, we decided to let ourselves get thrown out of perfectly good airplanes at 13000 ft AGL in the name of adventure sport. The skydiving got decided so randomly that I didn’t even have time to work myself into a fear. I think reality first really truly punched me when I boarded the plane and it started climbing. But then I got caught up in all the harnessing and the strapping to my instructor that I got distracted. And then I was so tightly strapped on to him (a rather hunky him, I would like to note) that I couldn’t have backed off even if I had wanted to. And then I was out the door. And boy, was it surreal. I expected to drop like a stone the way the coyote does in all the roadrunner shows. Instead I felt like I was floating along. Apparently that’s because you are falling with such a high acceleration that the air starts behaving like a liquid (Fluid Dynamics 101 by an instructor who had a Masters in Electrical Engineering and decided to quit her engineering job to sky dive professionally, atleast for a while). So anyway I jumped off a plane and in a single day achieved super stardom on Facebook and the Real World. Even my manager wanted to know what it felt like and noted down the address of the sky diving place.  

The friend I wrote about here is getting married tomorrow.  Two more are getting married in Sptember. I am getting my paycheck in a couple of hours, so I am all excited and making plans with the money I don’t yet have. Contrary to popular culture, I want to get myself something with my first salary, and then maybe something for Anjana and Maya if I have any money left. And then probably my family with my next paycheck. I have starved myself of the lifestyle I was accustomed to in India for so long, that I just want to pamper myself first without feeling obligated to get stuff for other people. The long weekend trip was a good start. And hopefully the clothes and the shoes and the bags and the hot-shoe clip on flash for my camera that I am planning to get will be a nice continuation. I also wanted to get my mom a Blackberry Playbook for her 50^th bday that I missed but my aunt beat me to it and got her a different tablet PC. So now I have to think of alternative gifts. Any suggestions, anybody? And while you are at it, it would also be great if you could suggest suitable wedding gifts to get the friends who are getting married.

I am all excited about going to India. I just want to relax at home and get taken care off for 20 days. I don’t want to ever step out of the house, except for my friends’ weddings and one night out at 10d with my school girl friends. Everybody else who wants to can come visit me at home. For some reason, I don’t even seem to want to go visit people. Another sign that I am becoming anti-social apart from the dwindling phonecalls. Maybe it is just latent irritation from the last 1 year bubbling up, all the unreturned phonecalls and the unwished birthday. Or maybe it is just normal growing up and moving on. Whatever it is, I don’t seem to be interested except to be disinterestedly intrigued by it. Which considering its me, is weird.

Overall, the summer is warm and slow and languid. And sparkling, like the champagne I tasted at the Wine tasting I went to. The kind of summer that makes you sing ‘Stolen’ by Dashboard Confessionals at the top of your voice. The kind of summer that is ideal for romance and dreams. Makes me of last summer with its brimming emotions and something always happening. It also makes me think of how lucky I am, to be where I am, doing what I wanted to. How many people can lay claim to that? Sure, life will change soon and my blog may take a dip towards the other end of the spectrum soon, but I want to drink deep and savor this while it lasts. And worry about feeling tipsy later.

That’s it for now. I will hopefully have more to write about soon. Meanwhile, the song I am currently addicted to is Lamha by Bilal Khan from Coke Studio Pak. I am absolutely in love with it and thanks to my playing it everyday, my roommate is addicted to it too. I hope you love it as much as I do.

That's one of the beaches we went to

And the lighthouse on the cliff we trekked to

And a view from the cliff itself

And a picture of me sky diving

Those are just to show why I am so in love with awesome golden California. Somehow the pics never look as good on the blog as they do on my camera. Its a beautiful place, people. Trust me.