You didn’t need to know that…

…I’m writing this post ’cause I’m bored

…I’m also only writing it cause my friends, Ruchi and Vikram wrote something like this before.

…I’m going to be nasty and keep the “juicy” stuff for later in the list

…I’ve never wanted to be an “engine driver” that all boys seem to want to be at some point of time in their lives.

…I’m a bigger geek than you think I am. I’m quite likely more nerdy than you think I am!

…I’ve actually asked someone to marry me and then watched as she went off and married someone else!

…I’ve kissed another guy, albeit only on a dare. (And no we weren’t drunk. Or at least, not drunk enough!)

…When I was a kid, I’d lie in bed thinking of what it would be like to be dead and buried and have maggots crawling through my body.

…I’m mostly egotistical, but sometimes egoistical.

…I cannot play chess to save my life.

…My parents didn’t get cable TV until 2004 and I don’t live with them anyway. So I grew up with the only option being Doordarshan. I’ve never watched much TV in my life and I’m still not tempted to.

…I used to spend huge amounts of time online and the only reason I don’t anymore is that I can’t afford broadband in India!

…the longest conversation I’ve had with someone lasted almost 6 hours. (Yes, I’ve seen Before Sunrise and Before Sunset too)

…If it wasn’t apparently already, I like to talk, but I’m also a good listener.

…I’ve only ever tried marijuana. Three times. It didn’t work even once. Damn!

…I never had a nickname in school or college. I made one up for myself. It didn’t catch on. Don’t ask.

…I think Terry Pratchett is one of the coolest writers alive. No wait, Neil Gaiman is… um, maybe Iain M Banks, well Douglas Adams is certainly the coolest writer dead, but that sounds morbid. Oh well.

…I love my parents to bits, but most times I get bored talking to them, so I really envy the people who can.

…I can’t balance a two-wheeler.

…I fooled you about the “juicy” bits at the end. This is all there is. Until I can think of some more.

Honest injun

Most people do something dishonest and then their conscience nags them about it. Not me, no. I’m the exact opposite.

That is, I do something honest and then I think, damn, why didn’t I just be dishonest about it! 🙂

For instance, a couple of days ago I visited a library, bought one of their withdrawn books and also had to pay a fine on another book. In total Rs 178. I handed over a 500 rupee note and waited for my change. The woman at the register handed me back Rs 431 and said she was increasing it to Rs 179 since she didn’t have change(!)

I took the money. Looked terribly puzzled at her. And when she didn’t seem to get it I finally gave in and returned the extra Rs 110 and told her what she had just done. Of all things, she apologised to me and took the money back! Feeling very surreal, I just turned around and left.

All the way back to the railway station, I was thinking, heck, Rs 110 would have bought me something yummy to eat and I was terribly hungry! 🙂

I used to be able to handle this…

There was a time I was pretty cool with whatever went on in the world of computing. I was a mad code monkey that wrote programs in assembly for fun, wrote DOS utilities, batch scripts and some simple database programs (for a library and a hospital.) The Internet came to India and I was on top of things since a geek friend and I hacked into the VSNL server in Bangalore and created accounts for ourselves. (Well, not really, it was simpler than that, but if I tell you how simple, I can’t brag then, can I?) That time has long since passed.

All my friends went on to be computer engineers and I studied biology. I finished a bachelor’s degree in biology and got a master’s too. My metamorphosis from computer geek to biology geek was complete.

Nevertheless, I still played with computers a lot, never did any coding ever though. I surfed and surfed and then surfed some more. I had a million (some would say zillion) accounts wherever they were free and some paid accounts too. I was active on newsgroups, on fledgling social networks, played online games, and chatted with friends across three networks and IRC. Phew. And all this while being a grad student at university.

Today though (and for a few months previously) I can’t be that active anymore. I barely make the time to read and reply to email. I check friends’ blogs for updates maybe once every two days as opposed to several times a day! I rarely ever login to orkut when I used to be on for most of the day earlier. Yahoo! Messenger which would have me logged in even while I was asleep, hardly gets a workout these days. And I login to MSN only to play Minesweeper Flags with friends.

So why am I boring you with all this? Well, it’s just so if I don’t comment on your latest blogpost, don’t read your new 360° page/blog, don’t reply to your email as often, you know why! 😉 (Yes, Yahoo! 360° yet another social network is out and I have a page there…)

The funny thing is, just about this time last year, I was writing this post about how cool (sort of) my online existence was! One year later…

Life as I know it

This used to be the name of a friend’s blog, she has since changed it. Twice. 🙂

Anyway, I decided I was not boring the few readers I do have enough, so I might as well write about my daily routine… hehe

So prop up those eyelids, fasten those seat belts (so you can’t run away) and away we go…

So the first interesting thing, I teach at an all girls’ college. Which means, being the cool, young prof makes me very popular (or so I like to think!) The department doesn’t have me take any lectures or assign work to students, so no one hates me yet. I spend most of my day talking students through their work, their lab experiments or any other questions they may have. The general purpose trouble-shooter, thats me.

The main mandate of my job though is to take care of the department’s intstrumentation needs. Currently, this means I have to co-ordinate the negotiations and purchases of a million different things since we have just received a sizable grant. This part is not fun, except when I get to ask the college to issue huge sums of money! 😉 But once all the instruments are ordered and delivered and installed, it means I have so many toys to play with! Yay!

The worst bit of my day is the commute. I spend anything from 45 to 90 minutes travelling one way to work. But this can’t be helped, Bombay is that kind of a city. I’m still working out a good routine which will help me minimise this travel time. Of course, I can’t really fix that since I haven’t yet found a place of my own to stay and am still living with relatives.

/me pokes everyone reading… Hey! Wake up!

Gifts!

As a goodbye gift, Heidi sent me two magazines of puzzles to occupy me on the airplane, a bag of Jelly Beans (I love them!) and some sleazy postcards… Well, cheesy at least! 😉 There’s also a mystery book wrapped up which I’m not supposed to open until my birthday!

Rebecca sent me the DVDs of the Lord of the Rings movies!! Simply awesome… I’ve watched them all again in my last week here. 🙂

Shivanee & Chhavi put up with me being cranky for almost a week, that’s also a cool gift. hehe! (They also fed me well :p)

Gauri drove me all the way to Chicago.. (I had to put up with her being cranky then 😉 )

*sniff* Thanks, you guys!

Going home…

I leave for India on a flight this afternoon out of Chicago.

After months of agonising (and not posting anything here either) I finally made the decision to leave grad school and go home to India. This was something I considered as far back as last summer, but a bunch of meetings over three days with the Director of Grad Studies at my dept. convinced me otherwise and he also told me to explore options with other depts. I did and found a dept. and a lab willing to take me in and that I was interested in.

A year of mostly no work but lots of interesting new things followed. Which also included me teaching in a classroom regularly and having a great deal of fun doing it too! But alas it was not to be. For sundry reasons I find myself deciding I’m better off out of grad school for a bit and looking for a job. I can’t stay in America unless I am in school, so I have to go home.

The 20th of this month was the last day I spent in East Lansing. I spent the day finishing up sundry chores and doing a little shopping. In the evening I met up with some friends at the Peanut Barrel. It was a happy-sad occassion. In fact I feel a bit sad writing about it now.

I got home later that night and had a ton of laundry to do. And of course pack my myriad books and comics for shipping the next day! I ended up not doing the packing and catching a few hours of sleep.

The 21st morning was spent in a frenzy of packing and sealing and clearing out my closets. My friend arrived to pick me up later and helped quite a bit. We spent ages at the post office trying to ship the books back to India and I think it was past 1pm when it was all done.

We drove to Chicago right after that. My friends in Chicago were annoyed since I promised them I would be in town by afternoon and they had great plans for the afternoon and evening. Taking me to the beach, out to a club, etc.

I have spent the past week, mostly just faffing around here, meeting people, taking walks in the evenings (Oak Park is a beautiful neighbourhood.) I also found a book sale and quickly snaffled up a copy of Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” for just about $4.

Yesterday, I walked over to a local cinema and watched a sub-titled version of “Hero.” This is absolutely the best Chinese martial arts film I have ever seen.

Earlier this morning, I went to the post office and mailed off a box of my Groo comics and also my phone to A in Maryland… sigh, I’m going to miss that phone too! 🙁

Happy Birthday!!

This blog is 1 year old today! Yayy!!

/me throws streamers in the air

Much has happened in one year both to me and to this blog. The changes in the blog are quite evident. From the dowdy hard to navigate page it was last year, and rare updates, it has changed to the snazzy, still hard to navigate and still rare updates. 😉 Well the updating part I hope to change with a flurry of posts over the next few days and weeks. And those posts will explore a little of what has been happening in my life! To use a violent metaphor, I’ll be killing two birds with one stone. So there.

And kicking!

Just to keep people updated… To that non-existent group of people that actually are subscribed to my feed, the link has now changed to http://oook.freeshell.org/atom.xml.

Looking at my blog page, there’s just so much to do! And it’s really hard when you don’t even have the luxury of using your own computer. I’m actually typing this out on a clunky Celeron 266MHz powered machine. Yep. You read that right. 266MHz. Dinosaur. And more about dinosaurs in later posts. (wait for them!)

My sidebar is badly formatted and terribly out of date. At least with the currently reading list. I probably have to update my blogroll links too. Hopefully the Flickr Zeitgeist is working for everyone. Ain’t it cool? 🙂

I’m gonna post this with the date of August 5th too, just to keep things consistent. Well, consistent to me, at least. You can go get confused. (For those who like these random factoids, today is actually the 1st of September!)

Right-ho… time to click that post button!

It’s alive!!

And just like that, it’s updated again. I’m going to start posting a bunch of back-dated entries. Starting with this one dated August 5th, for no other reason than that it’s my mom’s birthday and I love her very much! (awww! Isn’t that sweet? ;))

A lot has happened since then, and as I write more entries, those of you not in the know, will soon be!

I need to seriously overhaul this blog. I was busy trying to redesign it when I stopped writing. At the same time I was planning a move to some free webspace that I was graciously given by Hanni which has since gone.

So, lets just call this a little hiccup in the life of this blog and move on, ok?

I’m baaaaackkk!!