midlife crisis

My blog is having a midlife crisis. It began its existence with blogger's dot template. Finidng that people were lukewarm to its look and highly impressed by the looks for another blog, it decided to change colors. Let this be a lesson to you, never change yourself to fit the demands of other people.
What happened was the blog did become prettier but because of its inadeptness in the markeup arena, it also became inaccesible to some it was fond of.
hence the midlife crisis and the shift to wordpress with a banner (please look up and admire..uhh just a few inches, avoid that mirror overhead ) designed by yours truly, by sacrificing an entire sunday morning in which better things could have been done but were not.
The result of the midlife crisis is that it makes my blog prettier to look at and definately more accessible and at the same time freedom for exhibitionsim in the form of library thing is kind of limited..ohh well..pros and cons..do comment on the new look!!
ok please??
right, do it now..
click..
grrr...

and the new blog can be found at:

https://directions.wordpress.com

sigh..HERE

tenners

I may not be the most cheerful person on the planet.but I definately count myself in its happy denizens

Right now I am not happy. Definately not happy. I am not unhappy either, which shows you that maybe happiness and unhappiness are not two extremes, but rather different state of minds. What does that make my state of mind, the bored reader may asked..my answer: bored, stuck in the office with nothing, absolutely nothing to do, does not a good day make.

So here are ten things that bore me:

10. long meetings, specially after doughnuts and coffee
9. talking about my own research, buddy i suffer through it, do you have to too?
8. news..specially my dad's obsessive news watching which means watching news on every possible channel
7. shopping for more than an hour, specially when no looking for anything specific
6. anyplace where I am supposed to keep my opinions to myself
5. cricket..it should top the list but i figured there are better things. Most indians will be shocked by this lack of patriotic fervor , but sorry no cricket for me
4. long farewells, howso ever I love you, or will miss you when you are gone, please dont linger at the parting point. Dont make me stand on railway platforms or infront of buses or at the airport ans do extended goodbyes
3. Treadmills and stationary bikes. I like to run, I hate biking..more about that later, but I cannot stand treadmills, usually I zip around my morning 3 miler and come back home happy and ready for work. Yesterday I didnt get up in the morning and so decided to do three miles on the treadmill before my kickboxing class. Guess what, I have been a trainer for 8 years, I tripped 7 times, couldnt figure out what was wrong with the program I set and I couldnt change it AND each minute of the three miles was torture!! even with awesome music playing!
2. Bollywood family dramas..I cant sit through those tear jerkers, specially if I have to keep my opinions to myself, all that melodarama leaves me cold
1. in the office..no work..not even the guilt of not doing work to add an extra zing to my surfing the net....right now its all..well..BORING!!!..ohh no yahoo either :(

ok, so i am bored bored bored..work is dreary, I have nothing to do, my boss took the files and decided to work from home. Duh, how am I supposed to work?
Bieng a mere grad student/hourly employee..I cannot hot foot it home as soon as the aforementioned boss disappears
so here is a tag i maaroed from some blog hopping..
Number of books I own:
In the US: about 10 (decidedly controlling myself)
In india: me thinks about 200 or so?

number of books I lent that never came back
sigh..dont even ask, I have learnt with bitter experience not to lend books to people you know you wont see in a while. The number must be close to 20-30. Point in case: copy of zen and the art of motorcyle maintainance

number of ebooks I own
10

Last book I brought:Eliad (Homer)
Which I havent started yet because it is a joint project with a friend, who has disappeared into the woodwork. It is our only way to read something serious!

Last book I was giftedtwo on the same day, did I get lucky or what!!
Knife of dreams: Robert JOrdan, part 12 of wheel of time
The giver: Lois Lowry: i loved the book: do you hear me giver/gifter?

Last book I read:
Since I read books on a daily basis, two books deserve mention here:
hullaballoo in the gauva orchard: kiran desai: funny funny book
pretty good for a girl: leslie Heywood: A book that will soon be a book I brought, because this one I will reread.

Currently reading:
Calvin and Hobbes: the eternal time pass for me, how i adore taht kid
The shadow Lines: Amitav Ghosh

5 books that mean a lot to me:

1.Pretty good for a girl: I have started training for a marathon and this book insprires me to keep running and running and running
2.Surrender the Pink: Carrie Fisher: A book that is remiscent of my relationships, down to the last dotted i and crossed t.
3 Ordinary People: Judith Guest: somehow a bok that touched my core, it still does every single time
4. PG wodehouse: anything he has written
5. Collection of Saki,aka, HH Munro
6. The little Prince

there are probably billions more, these are the ones i care to mention

3 books I started reading but never completedA suitable boy, vikram seth: could never get through it
all my textbooks
cant think of anything I didnt finish, I usually make it through

Books that made zero sense to me:

A god of small things, arundhati roy: beautifully written book, with amazingly alive descriptions and yet the entire story never made sense to the class 10th 14 year old me..maybe I will understand it better at 23?

The Magus, John Fowles: never made sense (ask maa, it never made sense to her too..even when read the right side up :p)

My most treasured books:
hmm thats a tough one, I might even cry

1.A rare collection of asimov stories (out of print now) that disappeared from my bookshelf

2.Reader's Digest how to read, write and speak better: It was practically my bible for every time I needed inspriation or motivation to write, teach or just study (it has a great section on how to make notes for an essay/thesis)

3.A collection of Grimms Brother FAiry Tales, hand illustrated, hard bound, collecters edition..me thinks, and has colored my fantasies since I was really small and uptil now, when I rereead them again all the time

4.my entire collection of robert jordan's wheel of time

5. my dad's collection of phantom comics from his boyhood.. I have them all, nicely bound into 14 volumes!!

and lastly my tag:
chandni ..for the bountiful gift of her last tag that almost svaed me from a catatonic death in the office

ahem..just a little gem

usually dont do poetry, but this came to me in my sleep. Considering am niether a babe and nor would I ever have the unkindness to dump anyone that badly, maybe this poem is a reflection of who I want to be:
Go away from my dreams
go, shoo
You dont belong in them
just a warm body to warm cold me
Your purpose fullifilled
I have no need for you anymore
go, shoo
Leave my dreams to the adonis I know of
albiet dreams of him
will never make me laugh
or touch me with an appreciation of a goodess beyond reach
But you there,
stop standing like a deer in the headlights,
frozen with shock
didnt you see it coming?
go, shoo
I have need no more.


tell me what you think of it..

weird weirder weirdest

Chandni knowing my relcutance to do actual work when supposedly at work, has given me much more interesting work by tagging me to write 6 weird things about me. Here they are, and also listed are six victims of this weirdness..

This is a hard tag to fulfill. I have to actually decide what are the bestest weird thing about me. There are so many that limitiing to six seems like a pity, this could have been a very long post otherwise

1. I adore reading manuals, when I buy a gadget, half the thrill comes from reading the manual. I horde them too (for troubleshooting)

2. I cannot not read in the loo, if I dont read I cannot shit.

3. I cannot speak in Hindi with someone unless I know them well. If I go "completely angrez" on someone means I'm uncomfortable

4. I start crying everytime I get hurt. It is a reflex tears thing, and I have no control over it but it sure is weird to see a girl cry because she fell off a step in a step class and sprained her ankle.

5. I never learnt small talk. The weather is my limit. Networking is probably my worst nightmare because I have no clue what to say to anybody about anything at a social function. Recent tip from a friend: compliment women on their saari, me: frantically taking notes.

6. I never leave for someplace without coming back into the house atleast 2 times, if forced to leave, I find I have forgotten essential things like maps, glasses, jackets, wallet (which ofcourse has my licence, so have to slink around after that hiding from cops)

Now the best part:
the victims are..drumrolll...

Manjesh
Amelia
Vimal
Mr. X
Sham
Manu

nostalgia

my friend says..ahh school..those were the days..yaad hai..
and I say, I hate school, I dont even want to think about school. come what may, It was the worst time of my life
and then people who dont know me well wonder why i hated it so much. It has truly left me scarred. I was never the butt of all jokes, (if i was i never realised it), i was never a part of the ingroup either...niether am I now. WHat probably rankles most is the way teachers behaved. After getting into psychology I realized even more so the importnat role of teachers in our lives. I owe my permanent sense of bieng dumb and not good enough to all the amazing teachers. To be fair, I also owe my belief in my creativity to some extent to the one teacher who believed in me.
Did it help me to be told that I am not good at anything? Why was it so easy for them to keep putting me down? Just because I wasnt the pretty child whos head they could pat and say ahh what a good giel, look at that neat homework (mine was always messy and full of doodles).
The result, in a class of 30 I had the highest IQ, the lowest grades possible to just scrape through and the confidence of a wilted vegetable and the social life of a newt. which is nowt.
the long term impact? I dont do hardcore science, I did psychology and have an innate grasp of logic and maths, which was proved to me later...but that came later. A feeling of anger when these same teachers tell my mom now in all their hypocrisy, we always knew she would do well..and also a feeling that one can never expect anything in terms of praise, because it also goes to the favorite.
What is the point? I spent 14 years of my life, bieng told I cant dance (i am and was a good kathak dancer) , i was told I cant write, which you can see i still cannot, I was told I can't act, well it was proved later that I can, i was also told I cant draw which I think is the only thing that has come true..I was also told to open a roadside shop because i'd robably never be able to do anything better, umm i dont see that hand cart happening yet, but hang around maybe it will, the speed of my phd is omniously hinting at it
So, today when my professor tells me a simple thing like, why dont you trust your judgement, you are bright and you know you are right, it fills me with a sense of gratitude and awe..really? It shows? That I know what I am talking about? Slowly finally the fear of bieng laughed at, of bieng thrown out of class for asking too much is easing away and I can ask questions and make guesses at answers and find that I am right more often than wrong..(humility was never a strong point either)
the point of the post? woe to women/men who think they can become teachers just because they have the education and nothing better to do than that, woe to teachers who think their words dont echo in somebody's mind and heart after so many years, woe to them who believe inspite of studying education that they dont change lives and gratitude to those who believe in their work, sadly they are a rare species, and to let them know they are thought of more often than they would rhink.

mills boons and chick lit

read somehwere, about someone ranting about the sadness of chicklit. What exactly is chik lit?
bieng a chica myself i take umbrage at the fact that I didnt know the exact meaning..
so here goes "The books are fun accounts of witty, overworked and under loved women looking for better jobs and a better love life. A majority of them come from Britain. But this is just the surface story. Every Chick Lit story I've read also has a deeper motive driving the character, some secret from her past she still hasn't overcome (of course there are some that do not)".

WHat does that tell you? It means its today's mills and boons. There are many parallels. Mills and boons (or romance novels, the ones read hidden from mom in school)and with decreasing delight when no longer banned and chick lit both are best in moderation. Their front pages though very different in style from each other are identifiable as ohh its a romance novel, ohh its a chick lit.
For those uninitiated or the "men" on this blog page, romance novels usually have a gorgeous hunk of a man, bieng looked upon lovingly by a ravishing slighlty unclothed woman, oh both may be slightly on the lack of clothes side..but that is a bit unusual.
In chick lit..there is a plethora of bright colors combined with a chirpy looking drawing, which ususally contains atleast one girl in a skirt and also one martini glass either in conjunction or seperately.
other than these superficial similarities, they are both recommended in moderation, too much will make you love sick or friend sick or party sick.
They are both great time wasters and are written in a particular style (poles apart, but there is a theme) and usually have atleast one successful/beautiful woman who the heroine does not like and fears will steal her man/job/friend.
Before this post gets out of hand (afetr all I am at work and should have better things to do) I would like to comment why am I fascinated by the topic. It is because, both are directed towards women of different generations, romances towards an earlier one who all unifromely wanted a hunk of a man with a gorgeous castle surrounded by a moat to keep away the bad people. And chick lit is directed towards todays woman, have the priorities changed? I think so...if we can assume(for the moment) that literature represents desires of the people it is directed towards, then todays woman hankers not afetr the hunk in the moated castle but after a core group of friends they can run to, a job that pays them well and yet lets them be free birds at the stroke of 5 pm, a man who understands them and yet is liked by thier friends and wait wait wait for the perfect man wjo is preferably the owner of the compny you work for (dang i work in a office full of women :( and while you wait, date, party and console friends who have lost their latest loves.
so is prince charming out and prince hot boss in?
seems to describe my life, how about yours?