The gold and the glimmer

Sitting in bed, sated after a nice dinner of rotis and what was supposed to be gobi manchurion but didn’t quite manage the trip to the heaven of deep fried gobi goodness (but which still tasted so mmmmmmm), warm mocha coffee inside me making me feel all fuzzy, sitting in bed and listening to Dashboard Confessionals sing about stolen hearts , smiling to myself at having successfully survived 2 deadlines, several emotional upheavals and 1 crying jag of the past week, I feel at peace. I feel like I have reached the middle of the storm. I can hear the rumbles behind and I can hear the rumbles from the yet to come and they sound their deepness around me, darkening the space they touch. And I know that when I close my eyes and open them again, I will have to deal with the life I shut out for a few minutes’ peace. But in the midst of all this whirling, I rest for a while, snatching at a fleeting contentment. Tomorrow, I will deal with life. Tomorrow. For tomorrow is another day.

Another sleepless LA night

Helicopters over my head. One after the other. Over and over. Or maybe it is just one helicopter going around in circles. I don’t know which. And I don’t know why. Cant be good. I checked yahoo for breaking news but there is no sign of any new disaster. Governments shutting down, hunger strikes, aftershocks, gunmen..... tsk tsk. Too much drama in the world. I wish I can do a Calvin and refuse to inherit the world.

Anyway I wish i can write a really whiny post about how all this drama is affecting my extremely sensitive hairdo but a friend just read my blog and declared that it has way too much emotion for her. Some people’s hairdos are even more sensitive to emotional charges than mine are. So for the best interest of good hair days, I am not going to blow my nose all over my blog. Atleast for a while.

I just spent half an evening reading old orkut testimonials. (Remember orkut? Remember?) Anyway I am convinced now that orkut was a better social network than Facebook. Especially now that facebook has made it harder for my fans to find my statuses and like them. I have got only single digit likes in my last few statuses. How atrocious! And the security settings make it harder for me to stalk people. I am reduced to staring at people’s display pics for hours coz that it is the only thing on their profile that FB would let me see. That, I believe, is the beginning of the end. When a social networking site loses sight of its prime purpose of existence- to enable people to stalk ex-girlfriends, ex-girlfriends boyfriends, potential boyfriends, celebrities, teenaged children, brother’s flings and other random people- and actually starts investing time and effort on other secondary goals such as user privacy, then there is nothing more to be done except to pack your virtual eyeball and move on to the next totally-unnecessary-network-to-belong-to.

I have managed to decide on what courses I want to take this quarter without giving my hairdo too much stress. And my cold seems to have almost died away. And I went grocery shopping and managed not to die on the way back. Grocery shopping is the one household chore I absolutely hate. And if I did it twice in one week and am still standing, I must be given a fricking medal and a statue on Marina Beach at the least. And India won the worldcup. And my friends and I went for a celebratory brunch buffet at a local Indian restaurant nearby. I haven’t fought with any new people. In fact, I finally closed a 4 year chasm with an old friend. That was good. Gave me a warm tingly feeling all over.  One of my best friends wrote her GRE and scored quite well. Hopefully I’ll see her here soon, since the possibility of me visiting India in the near future grows remoter and remoter. Overall I must say the last week’s atmosphere has been quite conducive to my hair health.

I'm absolutely addicted to black eyed peas' 'Just cant get enough'. Its been looping through my head for the last several days. Its replacing 'Tonight I'm Loving You' as my song of the week. Whats yours?

Helicopters gone. Hair care demands rest. Good night people of the world!

To a people starved of home, to ones clinging to fast fading memories and half remembered dreams to remind themselves of the country they left behind, to a small group who stayed up all night loading themselves with coffee and diet coke and tortilla chips in a little room with a HD tv in the corner of Boelter Hall of Engineering and Sciences and many more spread across different time zones, it was a night to remember. Thank you for an amazing World Cup, Team India. Thank you for giving us something to cherish, something to carry around like a charm, something that made us forget our deadlines and lists for a while to cry with joy and hug random strangers and run around the streets, yelling, in the middle of the afternoon while people stared. I am still speechless. I am no crazed cricket fan. I am dispassionate towards the game under normal circumstances and laugh at those who bunk work days to catch a match on tv. But this was not normal circumstances. What a night! I wish I could be home now to catch the fireworks. But I cant. And I am forced to celebrate voyeuristically on Facebook through  other people's pictures and status updates. Sigh! But we shall crib another day shall we? Tonight's gonna be a good night!

On the last few weeks. Dated Match 30th in this 11th year of the 21st century..

After the umpteenth time of starting to write a post and then deleting all of it, I make a solemn promise to myself to publish this post regardless of how crappy it is. Reader expectations be damned!

At first I thought I had run out of topics to write about. So I’d have this vague itch to write, but I wouldn’t know what or where to scratch. Then I realized it wasn’t that I had no topics to write about. I did. I do. I have lots of topics to write about. It’s just that I couldn’t sustain the interest to write about them long enough to write about them.

The only thing I can write about any number of times for any length of a period is my Cold. But that is against my new blog resolution to 'stop cribbing in blog'. Up there along with ‘stop treating blog like an emotional discharge stick’. And ‘stop changing blog template every time you have a mood swing’. So now you are stuck with my current template. And stuck with me. Trying to be sweet and cheerful. And we’ll see how that goes shall we?

I forgot what I wanted to say next.

Hmm…..

Usual updates about my life:

I have a cold. A bad one. It leaves me with a consistently irritated disposition. And constantly searching for and catching at my breath. Which I seem to have left somewhere in my bed along with my tangled up sheets.

My last quarter was nice. So was spring break. Which makes it all the more harder to face this quarter. 

Course selection returns to haunt me again. Every quarter, this is the part that gives me nightmares. I am convinced every course I take will change forever the future of my (seemingly nonexistent) career. I swear if this cold doesn’t kill me first, all the blood pressure from selecting courses will. I hope my mom doesn’t read this and get saddened by the fact that she has managed to raise a daughter who is singularly incapable of making even the simplest of decisions.

Coming to decisions, I have decided I suck at my choices of guys. And therefore I am going to leave the responsibility of choosing a life partner for me to the stylishly groomed hands of my mom. I am sure I will end up with a psychopath or a sadomasochist if I was left to make my own choices. *Shudder*

I realized just yesterday I have been spelling weird wrong for the past several years of my life. No wonder MS Office kept showing wiggly red lines under my wierd all this while. To a girl who prides herself on her English, that was a nice reality check.

Master Chef is starting to heat up. I am absolutely in love with Callum.

I have no idea why the fat tree architecture is able to save costs in data center topologies. I have been trying to make sense of it for the last 4 hours. But atleast it led on to this blog post. So it hasn’t been a complete failure in all.

On a positive note, I sat in an undergraduate introduction to communications class today. In all my years of engineering, I have never had communications taught to me the way it was today. Its times like these that make me fall in love with UCLA. When everything seems screwed up about Grad school, its moments like these that remind me why I’d still choose this over all else I could be doing right now.

I wonder why everyone is fighting with me. Oh well, their loss I suppose!

I need to call a lot of people. I need to tick off a lot of lists. I need to keep a lot of promises. Soon….. It shall be soon.

I was reading Arundhati Roy’s ‘God of small things’. It got me wondering about choices and consequences. 

About how you make one choice. And the cost of living climbs to unattainable heights. About the past and its ghosts and the albatrosses we love to drape around us.

I am relapsing to emotional discharging. Time to sleep.

Falling in friendship... all over again...

Have you ever had a friend you thought you'd lost to the past? Have you ever been to that point where  you could see the relationship beginning to stagnate and the only reason that you still held on was a respect for what you once shared and all the while wondered if it is time to let go and give in to the distance growing between you? And have you ever had one phone call erase all that, one evening wipe away the sourness, so you go back to being the girls you were 4 years ago, the girls who shared everything, the girls who'd talk so long that the shadows grow around them? Have you ever ended a conversation in frustration and doubted if you could ever relate to the person again, if you can talk and still read between the lines, if you can understand what is not being said as much as what is, like you used to, like before? And then a few days later, have another conversation make you forget that you even doubted?

Have you ever hesitated before revealing a truth, wondered how the other person would take it, a million potential wrongs feeding in your head, procreating doubts? Have you ever typed the same sentence a hundred different ways finally clicking 'send' before you could change your mind again? Have you ever feared the reply only to be surprised by simple acceptance, plain understanding?

Have you ever woken up to a mail continuing a chatter you'd thought had ended? Have you ever stayed up at nights rediscovering people you'd thought you'd known, in a good way, like finding hidden candy in lunchboxes?

Have you ever had a person you'd all but forgotten about, a person you'd relegated to facebook contact, a person whose name only comes up when your phone reminds you of an upcoming birthday? And have one chance meeting reopen a door, so you start where you'd left off, like all the years in between had never happened, and all those reasons you'd told yourself for the friendship ending never mattered? Have you ever walked into a house of your memory, walked smiling as you saw what had changed and what hadnt and pleased with yourself to still remember those little things noone else  knew, walked in and to be greeted like you'd never left?

Have you ever seen change happen, seen it, felt it and hated it, and not understanding it, walked away from it? Have you ever convinced yourself you've moved on from it, except for those few times when there was no one and nothing to distract you and protect you from yourself, when those questions you thought you'd answered would rise again and make you wonder if you could have done anything differently, and wonder if you were to blame or he or time? Have you ever packed away people like dolls, in boxes to be placed in attics? And move to a new future, to a new country, only to find them old friends and those old relationships for which distance was never a problem, nor time? And stumble upon the paradox of space and how it can bind as well as separate?  Have you ever written away a relationship, only for it to come bursting back in to your life, or creeping in slowly until a day when you look up and find the space that was, occupied again?

Have you ever fallen in friendship, lost it, found it and fallen in it all over again?

The storm rumbles closer

This ain't no place for the weary kind....

Time goes so fast, so unforgivingly fast. Its like you’re whirling round and round and you know you have to stop soon but you also know your head will spin when you do stop and so you’re trying to put off the moment but eternity will not wait. Every moment when the phone rings, I anticipate pain and breathe a sigh of relief when it doesn’t come and then hate myself for it later. Everybody I love wants to help me live my life. It humbles me and gives me happiness for a while, happiness that they would want to and would try. But they cant, can they?

Your lovers wont kiss....

It's too damn far from your fingertips.

The only promise is that someday I would read this and laugh and laugh that this was where i was when i started and feel happy that i have come thus far. For that promise, we all live.

This ain't no place for the weary kind...

Me. My Laptop. My Coffee.

When I was a kid, my mom used to enrol me in summer schools just so I’d be out of her and my grandmother’s collective hair for a couple of hours. On one year, me and my younger cousin went to the same summer school in Good Shepherd. And after summer school, my aunt would pick us up and take us to her place until the evening when my mom would collect me on the way back from work (a lot of picking and collecting I’ve been through I know). So in my aunt’s parents’ place I spent half a summer. It was the kind of house that a kid would love, an old house with a porch swing and a garden and little secrets that only the very young and the very old know. My cousin was lucky in that all of his cousins lived together or atleast close by. I never had that gift/luxury. In summer, they would all play together and sometimes put up little skits or dances for the elders. So this half summer, I got to watch them as they practised. I don’t remember this ‘playing the audience’ being a frequent phenomena but I just remember this one time, sitting on the bed after a nice fattening lunch, watching sleepily with my younger cousin and his other cousin- a girl my age- as the slightly older cousins practised dancing for a Rajnikanth song “Style from Basha” if i remember right. That weekend they would put up their performance for the family, so they needed it to be just right. You might wonder whats with all the cousins and the cousins of cousins in this post. This story is about the other cousin, the girl my age who sat and watched the dance with me.

She was just another extended relative I never thought about, someone on the borders of the well-defined part of your family. I just knew she was around my age. I never realized she was the same age, studying the same grade until both of us joined the same school in 11^th and got put into the same class. It was nice for a while and then fights happened and a lot of bitching until we just stopped being so close. Once a year or so I would visit the old house for Navratri for her grandmom kept an awesome kolu and we would catch up with each others lives. And after that one day, we would go back to our separate ways and not think of each other for another year. I met her just before I was coming to the US and that was the last I saw her.

This May she gets married and all I could remember when I heard of it was the little girl watching the dance sitting next to me. A lot of my not-quite-so-close friends are already married. I wasn’t invited so i would just hear of them after they had happened from some friend or friend of a friend in our girl gossip sessions. But this other cousin is the first from my DAV set to get married and I think the first sorta close friend to do so, so it feels like the end of an era to me, like the day you throw away your first pair of jeans. Marriage has always been something in the distant future, something on the other side, other side of what i cant tell you coz now I am 22 and it is not even the other side of the decade like I would have said 2 years back. But it is still something behind the glass in the fogs of the crystal ball for me, something that comes up only in beaches when some old palmist would pester me and my friends into giving in for a palm reading session and then would voo us with handsome husbands who would bend to our every will and let us rule their hearts and homes. And yet I see it slowly creeping in, my friends suprising me every now and then in conversation with stories of alliances and engagements. It scares me, this change. This is unfamiliar territory now. Where and what would we be if one of us got married? What would be the boundaries? Would we still meet up once in a while to gossip about the people we know, collapsing into giggles every few seconds, snapping supposedly candid pics of ourselves? Would i still be able to walk into my friends’ homes with the same ease, call at all times of the night to crib about my latest heartbreak? I don’t know if guys go through this same feeling of boding when their friends get married. The one guy pal I’ve brought up the topic with is eager to get married as soon as he finds a job, so I assume not as much.

So i sit here on my slept in bed, the sheets still tangled, with my laptop and my coffee and the crumbs next to me of the brownie I ate last night that my friends got for me (awesome friends I have, no?) wondering how our lives would be in a couple of years. It would be odd at first I know, but soon we would ease into our lives with our busy schedules, no time to wonder, except on lazy Friday mornings when we have no work, and all we have for company is a laptop and coffee.

P.S. Whenever I am confused or frustrated about life, there is one person’s blog i turn to. And somehow the latest post on it would reflect the same feelings I am going through. It is nice, in a non-creepy coincidential way, to know I am not the only one going through this process of growing up. This time, it wasn’t one of the latest posts but one of the older ones on the same blog that echoed my state of mind now. The blog is this  and the post is that. I am eternally grateful to Praveen for introducing me to eM's blog. It is one that has seen me through several a tough time. To girl power!