Dress the part

(Look who is back! Angsty Aunty – say hi and tell her you  missed her, wont you?)

If you must crap all over my life, I don’t know why you must but I’m sure you have your reasons, can you please not be so nice while doing it? It makes everything much simpler if the bad guys come with an eye patch and an evil laugh and sinister background score. I simply do not know what to do with people who stand squarely in my way, don’t let me go ahead and then with genuine concern feed me so I don’t feel hungry. Until I can get super powers enough to reform the bad guys or beat them to pulp, can they please dress the part? Thank you.

Car, tissues etc

(Random writing again, but how many posts can you call random and what would be the point?)

Car driving goes well (people actually asked me, and here i thought no one cared. sniff). I had gotten pretty comfortable with the whole thing, stopped being a hazard as well as a nuisance, when i realized i was still driving barefoot! Time to cross that bridge, one tiny step at a time. Day 1 with socks - no big deal. Day 2 with chappals. And i went back to being a nuisance - all late starts and jerky driving. Why am i on the bridge at all, i wondered, whats so wrong with driving barefoot? I tried and failed to think of emergencies where i would have to drive with footwear on, or the world would go to pieces. But i guess we are programmed to see things to completion, so i soldiered on. Day 3 was with shoes. Much better, contrary to expectations. Monday i should try military boots?

I have a big problem with the casual use of tissues. Especially to wipe wet hands, i mean can you imagine the waste? Every time someone washes their hands, they waste paper. I see myself becoming some kind of Hermione, starting a Society for Prevention of Overuse of Tissues that no one cares about. Until one day, right in the middle of a world threatening emergency, a certain someone washes his hands and doesnt use a tissue. And we forget the world and live happily ever after. Oh wait, i'm married now. So its going to have to be the dude who does the deed.

My inner voice (by which i just mean the voice in my head, not my conscience) has now occasionally started talking in Telugu. Which is bizarre since hello, i dont understand what it is saying! Its been almost a year since i've been surrounded by Telugu speaking people speaking Telugu, and yet i think i understand about 30%. I never imagined i'd be so slow in picking up a language. Although, i have almost the entire cipher text in my head, the day i find the decryption key will be the day i know it all!

A nice round number

Today I turn 6 bits old.

WTF.

What a good book can do

My reading has gone down considerably since you know what happened and i moved to Bangalore. I might have mentioned somewhere that the dude found a stack of Science fiction/Fantasy books that i drooled all over. Turns out i might have spent more time drooling than actually reading. It started off well, i finished The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and it was good. Then i moved on to Stranger in a Strange Land, a book i had heard so much about, an author i had heard so much about. I was prepared to love it, even if that meant changing the meaning of love! It was... boring. Not that it didnt have its moments, but the signal to noise ratio was too low, and all the signal got over pretty fast. I trawled through it and then moved on to The Windup Girl. What with the Hugo and all, i'd wanted to read it for ever. But, it was taking too much of effort, and instead of reading becoming relaxing and invigorating (yes, it can be both at the same time), it became something to check off a list - did i read something this week? Tick.
Some neurons in my head decided to go all dramatic, and proposed the theory that maybe the problem is not with the book, that maybe reading doesnt mean that much anymore, that maybe you know what has changed that too. (i know, no one proposes theories with so many maybes, but these are my neurons, for me sometimes, even my name is Vinaya, maybe).
One fine Wednesday afternoon at work, i found a book lying on my neighbours desk. I cant pass a book by without investigating, so i picked it up. Saw the name Papadimitriou, remembered a professor from long ago mentioning him, and maybe even a textbook, and opened it to find a comic book! It was Logicomix - a comic book about the search for a solid foundation for Mathematics! I took it to my desk, and that is all i did for the rest of the day at work - read it*. Somewhere in between, i looked up, smiled at the world in general and felt really glad to be alive. That is what a good book can do.



* Do not ask me at what stage i got so comfortable with the new surroundings to be able to do something like that in full public eye. I have a hundred justifications as to why i did it, but even after 5 years at the last workplace, i couldnt have done it there. Maybe you know what also gives you a thick skin!