25 Mistakes

(at least i *think* that's the right number -- the number of mistakes you inevitably make when you commit a murder...)

now, this guy wasn't out to kill anyone, but he's obviously such a twit he wouldn't have been able to keep the number down below, oh, say, 1978352601^2.

<http://www.journal-news.net/page/content.detail/id/525232.html>

Burglar leaves his Facebook page on victim’s computer
By Edward Marshall, Journal Staff Writer
POSTED: September 16, 2009

MARTINSBURG - The popular online social networking site Facebook helped lead to an alleged burglar's arrest after he stopped check his account on the victim's computer, but forgot to log out before leaving the home with two diamond rings.

Jonathan G. Parker, 19, of Fort Loudoun, Pa., was arraigned Tuesday one count of felony daytime burglary.

According to court records, Deputy P.D. Ware of the Berkeley County Sheriff's Department responded on Aug. 28 to the victim's home after she reported the burglary.

She told police that someone had broken into her home through a bedroom window.

There were open cabinets in her garage, and other signs of a burglar.

The victim later noticed that the intruder also used her computer to check his Facebook status, and his account was still open when she checked the computer.

The victim later noticed that she was missing two diamond rings from her dresser in the same room as her computer.

The two rings were worth more than $3,500, reports indicate.

During the investigation, a friend of the victim told her that he knew where Parker was staying, in the same area as the victim's house.

Police then went to the home and spoke with a friend of Parker's.

The man said Parker had stopped by his home occasionally, but he said the man didn't live there.

He also said that the night before the burglary, Parker asked him if he wanted to help break into the victim's home but he refused.

As of Tuesday evening, Parker remained in custody at the Eastern Regional Jail on $10,000 bail.

If convicted he faces one to 10 years in prison.

(needless to say, i found this link on fb. hah!)

One Phone Call

if i were an ordinary indian citizen, with a muslim name, travelling to the u.s., and if i got held up at newark airport for secondary screening en route to chicago, and if i used my one phone call to call the indian consulate to help get me out of the airport as soon as possible -- would i succeed?

also, would i cause international headlines?

please, someone tell srk that, no matter how gorgeous his eyebrows, he's not above the law. and please, someone also tell the indian consulate in nyc that, if he has recourse to their emergency-vip-law-bending unit, we should all get to put their phone numbers in our phones, too -- and to use them when necessary.

It's Been A Month

not my longest absence -- but certainly an unpardonable one, given that i spent so many mornings and evenings in july sitting in front of my computer, staring at it or into the middle distance (grey's anatomy or gmail on the screen, so who cares? nothing was really *changing* or anything...)

now i'm back in philadelphia for the long haul, my hair pinned back in a sensible but odd-looking (because stunted) bun, in front of a different computer, thinking all the time thinking thinking. the to-do list grows longer shorter longer shorter. i should be in bed, but i am paralyzed by the fear that, once i go to bed, i will not want to wake up early in the morning and be productive. i am in a rut, the august rut that in school would have been the june rut: there's tons to get done, but i want so badly to deny that anything is actually important that in the end i get my way, and do facebook and livejournal and blogger, at the ridiculous and avoidable expense of more stress in the days to come.

no matter, i swam today. and someone outside -- maybe a member of the band i read lives across the street from me? but no, they were punk, or something -- is playing a trumpet or trombone or some other kind of wind instrument, alone, random, soothing. no matter.

the universe colludes: i have been thinking about monster books. tim carmody suggested erving goffmann's stigma. now i'm reading mel micir's old blog and i find this, as irrelevant to my life right now as bacon (the author, not the meat) but something i know i want to tuck away -- or put on display -- for inevitable future use:

"It is rare in 'natural' conversation that the best answer is provided on the spot, rare that witty repartee occurs. . . . Indeed, when during informal talk a reply is provided that is as good as the one that could be later thought up, then a memorable event has occurred." (Goffmann)

tuesday i will entertain in this apartment for the first time since the fall. who cares if the living room ceiling is dripping plaster everywhere!? i want more out of my graduate life, especially if this is to be my last year in philadelphia.

Dude, Why's Your Bike Here?

i bought a bike yesterday -- so exciting!

imagine, then, my chagrin, when i took it downtown for the first time, thinking to run errands, locked it up on 17th and chestnut, and came back from the shops to find that some idiot had locked his bike next to mine with my brake cables in the u-loop of his lock!

omg! i'm a new biker, but even i know that that's terrible bike etiquette! i was so pissed! (and totally made sure to tell him so when he came back, ipod'ed, sunglassed, completely duh and apologetic enough to make sure to call me "honey" while he said sorry...)

what does one have to do for an uneventful ride in this town?

Thanks Are In Order

to all that is holy.

thank you google, thank you thank you thank you, for finally bringing out the picasa for mac application for which i've been waiting and waiting.

(i don't have boot camp, so i couldn't have run the PC version on my mac.)

<http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2009/01/announcing-picasa-for-mac.html>

i was just thinking yesterday, as i uploaded my pictures from my winter break travels to picasa web albums, that iphoto is really not an intuitive or user-friendly piece of software. although the slider thing where you can choose how many pictures you want to see in each row in your albums is pretty neat, and although some of the edit features (especially the special effects like sepia and vignette) are cool, too, those are about the only front-end features in iphoto that are actually exciting to me.

(i just recently discovered "smart albums", and even that is strictly OK, because i can totally see how the conditional logic it requires would fail quite easily given how i work with my photos).

so yeah, other than silly cosmetic things -- ugh. i mean, what on earth is an "event"? and why can't you see all of them in the left-hand bar if you want to? why is "last import" the only pre-set viewing option, instead of a nice calendar-like thing like picasa has? why can you not trash photos from within your albums, making you go back to events view all the time? why can you not view photos larger and click between them using simple arrow keys?

this is not even to mention the features i was missing out on by not having picasa installed on my mac (although these, admittedly, are failings on google's end). like, why does the picasa web uploader for iphoto only allow uploading and not downloading (the entire album download feature is the best thing ever!!!)? and why does the uploader not integrate more intuitively into iphoto, such as by being housed in the "share" menu and not the "export" menu?

on and on i could go. but i'll stop now, cuz i wanna go download the thing asap, already. i bet it'll be sleek, and pretty, and exciting. yessss!

What's Wrong With This Picture?

this ad (click for larger pic @ flickr) --


was on the front page of the delhi edition of the hindustan times on friday, november 28, 2008. see?


the bombay edition for the same day --


did not feature this ad.

HT, you should be ashamed of yourself.

below, part of an email/facebook note i sent out/posted last night. i've heard back from several people saying that they've written to HT. maybe something will come of this; maybe not. but at least we're doing something, and having our voices heard.

No matter what your personal politics are, I hope will you recognize that my aim here is simply to raise awareness -- to highlight how the world of politics has already begun leeching off the events of this past week, and how, too, certain sections of the Indian media seem to be more about money/TRPs/ad sales than the objective, sensitive, non-partisan dissemination of information. Yes, emotions and stakes are high during elections, but higher when national security and citizens' lives and liberties are at risk. Now is hardly the time or
the occasion for rabble- (and vote-) rousing -- especially by a party which has been unable (or unwilling?), during its various stints in power, to circumvent several acts of "brutal terror".

I have already written to the Hindustan Times to put on record my disgust that they would choose to run this ad at all (the political clout of the ad's sponsor notwithstanding). If you would like to contact them, too, you can do so at:

Email: feedback@hindustantimes.com

**UPDATE**: The feedback@ email address seems to be bouncing messages. You can email letters@hindustantimes.com, instead -- and be aware that this is the "Letters to the Editor" column, and your content may (if they believe in representing all angles of feedback to their publication) appear in print.

HT Media Limited
Hindustan Times House
18-20, K.G. Marg
New Delhi - 110 001, India

Phone : +91-11-6656-1234
Fax : +91-11-2370-4600

if you have a few minutes to spare, join the movement, small though it be. make a difference in (y)our world.

PS: Facebook, I See What You're Doing.

in the midst of the most unsettling evening of news-watching and numbly-calling and helpless-feeling, i got this laughable missive from facebook (i can blog about this because it's petty, self-contained, and far from home -- unlike what's going on in bombay as i type):

From: Facebook
Date: Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 19:32
Subject: Please reset your email notification settings.
To: [me]

Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We're sorry for the inconvenience.

To reset your email notification settings, go to:

http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

listen up, zuckerberg et al. don't boast about having 120 million active users when you can't even save their preferences for not being harassed by your gratuitous email notifications. (i've unsubscribed from most of them, and my inbox is the healthier for it.)

also, just btw, it might have been nice to address me by name, or even as "Dear Facebook user", or something. didn't they teach you manners at harvard?

Charting The Cost Of Living

erin was just blogging the other day (see <http://squishsquasher.blogspot.com/2008/10/living-beyond-your-means.html>) about one of the causes of the latest financial meltdown -- over-reliance on credit cards.

this old new york times article (admittedly, from 2002!) points out a bizarre cost correlation which it would make me smile to think of as a cause-effect relationship:

NYC; Beware The Price Of a Slice

By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: January 12, 2002

It was too early to pop open the Champagne, but ordering a celebratory slice at the local pizza parlor did not seem out of line. Giddiness over imminent good times faded, however, when a colleague pointed out that the price of pizza suggested that the subway and bus fare would be raised before too long.

Huh?

Beware the Pizza Connection, he said, and he wasn't talking about a drug ring. He had revived a forgotten variation on the interplay of markets, New York style.

Strange though it may seem, the cost of a subway ride has traditionally paralleled the price of a pizza slice. (We're talking here about a regular slice -- mozzarella and tomato sauce, with none of those fancy-shmancy toppings that muck around with one of civilization's great achievements.) Call it, if you will, the Fasel Corollary, named for George Fasel, a vice president at Bankers Trust who made the link in a 1985 article on this newspaper's Op-Ed page.

He got it right. In 1960, for example, the fare was 15 cents. So was a slice of pizza. ''I do believe there is some kind of historical correlation,'' said Gene Russianoff, a leader of the Straphangers Campaign, the subway-riders advocacy group. It wasn't difficult to get him waxing lyrical about his boyhood in the early 60's, when he could venture forth with a dollar in his pocket, take two subway rides, buy two pizza slices and a 10-cent soda, and still have 30 cents left.

In the early 1970's, the fare rose to 35 cents. So did pizza. Through the years, the increases went more or less in tandem. Just before the price of a subway token last went up, in 1995, it stood at $1.25, lagging behind the $1.35 typically charged for a slice. Obviously, it was time for a fare increase. Thus did the $1.50 token come to be.

It remains at $1.50. But pizza prices have not stayed put. In fact, the pizza-token gap is so large these days that it is hard to see how the subwaymeisters can hold out for long. The grease-ateria around the corner from home on the Upper West Side charges $1.75. In Midtown, pizza parlors routinely charge $1.90 and even $2.

With that kind of market pressure being brought to bear, how can the $1.50 fare survive much longer?

The problem is especially acute when you consider that New York City Transit expects an operating deficit this year of $255 million, in large measure because few New Yorkers actually pay $1.50. Far from it, said Albert O'Leary, spokesman for New York City Transit. With all the discounts created in recent years, he said, ''we realize $1.06 on the average fare.''

The Pizza Connection is not New Yorkers' only worry.

What if the Jets, who play today in the first round of football's post-season, go all the way to win the Super Bowl? That isn't very likely to happen. This is a team that has not even made it to the Super Bowl in 33 years.

But should Jet lightning strike, the stock market could be headed for trouble in 2002, despite its splendid run in those first five days. Historically, stocks have fallen in the year of a Super Bowl victory by a team from the old American Football League. Like the Jets. The advice here is to choose your rooting interests wisely.

Bear this in mind, too. After every World Series appearance by the Mets -- in 1969, 1973, 1986 and 2000 -- Wall Street fared poorly the next year. You think this is silly? Fine. But do you have another explanation for the Crash of '87?

The far more frequent presence of the Yankees in the World Series usually leads to rises in the Dow Jones industrial average. But the Dow has also tended to do even better when the Yankees lose the Series. So their defeat in November, however painful, may be another sign that Wall Street will sparkle this year.

With the subway fare, Gov. George E. Pataki has ruled out an increase in 2002. This is, remember, an election year.

Ah, but what about 2003? That's a bit far down the road for predictions. But the way things are going, the next governor, whether Mr. Pataki or his Democratic opponent, may see no choice but to raise the fare.

There is an obvious way out, though. The state could restore traditional parity by giving pizza makers subsidies to lower their prices. Anyway, it's something to chew on.

(see more of the same at other times in recent history: july 2002: <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B00E2DD1730F93AA35754C0A9649C8B63>, june 2005 <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/21/nyregion/21nyc.html> and july 2007 <http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/nyregion/27nyc.html>.)

except that nothing in this market is smile-worthy, really. i mean, my grad student stipend will still keep coming, but what about the rest of the world economy, which is on the down and down?

still -- facetiously speaking, and given that if pizza and the subway can be linked then everything financial is somehow linked -- if that this, too, is an election year, and if the base subway fare is now at $2 and not $1.50 as it was when this old article was published...

what might this mean for (a) pizza prices, which have been rising at searing rates the last few months (see <http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/mmm-pizza-a-slice-but-at-what-price/> for evidence of the meteoric increase!) and are now at close to $3? (b) -- in turn -- future subway fare increases (put off in the recent past due to much straphanger angst)? (c) -- in turn -- all those unemployed bankers who won't be taking cabs anymore?

Subliminality

what does it mean when you log on to amazon.com and, five times out of ten, the "recommended for you" display is the "#1 in engagement rings" category?

eep!

You're Kidding Me, Right?

i'm not much of a drinker; in fact, for a large part of the past two years, i've been better known to abstain than to drink. and although i now enjoy a glass of wine every so often, i'd say i'd still be quite happy to have a cranberry/lime/soda replace a glass of wine -- sweet, no surprises, and i'm clear-headed when the night is done.

this summer, apparently, mocktails are in. good for me! (wait, who am i kidding? i haven't been following trends in the bar world, i've been busy studying/working/being lame on the phone!)

but mocktails it is, says this NYT article: <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/dining/20appe.html>, so it must be true.

and yet... even "all the news that's fit to print" sometimes can't disguise pure idiocy:

... no amount of passion fruit purée will hit the spot for cocktail purists of the dry martini ilk. For them, Sheridan Square in the Village offers what might be the most restrained mocktail in town, the Mineral Cocktail. Made with Badoit sparkling water, mineral drops and mineral water ice, it’s the brainchild of the chef Franklin Becker and the bar manager Rainlove Lampariello, designed to be healthful, light, and easy to knock back.

I haven’t sampled one, but Mr. Lampariello swears it tastes “like putting a pebble from a river in your mouth.”

a cocktail made of... three different kinds of expensive water!? that tastes like a pebble?!? give me a break. next you know they'll be charging for the privilege of air on tap. oh, wait, oxygen bars... i'd forgotten the world is full of rich nutjobs who'll even pay to breathe.

Ignominy

gautam tambay, you are a shady bugger.

that is all :P

Just Call Me "Stupid"

i haven't backed up my data since august '07. (this alone should tell you what's coming.)

said backup may or may not exist on another computer -- i can't remember whether or not i kept the master copy of all the stuff i took off my parents' computer at home. i also can't remember whether what i put on my brother's computer in september '07 is still there -- i think he deleted everything i'd put on there, with my approval, because i'd only put it there as a temporary measure until i got my new imac.

today, the hard drive on said imac failed. the thing is less than a year old.

many minutes of "the spinning wheel" and many conversations with mac support people later, i'm not yet sure what the future of my information is -- i know only that there is a "possibility" that i've lost my data, and that data recovery (if successful) will cost me $300.

i must admit, i am not attached beyond repair to all of the (a) mp3s (b) photos (c) 4 years of work from college (d) 1 year of work from grad school i had on my hard drive. so much of it is useless/outdated/sentimental electronic relics that i haven't looked at in years. so much of it is just music, which can be re-downloaded if need be, but which i also have on my ipod, and would only have to re-sync, not even rename (since itunes takes care of the back end). and so much of the most important stuff (like blog content, or email) is online nowadays, and never sees "soft copy" status on personal hard drives.

but even so: i have to say, suffering the remorse and self-reprimanding that i'm suffering now, that given a chance, i would rather rescue it all as a way to prevent having to learn the lesson than let it be lost just so i could learn the lesson.

i am sad.

and, like i said: stupid.

Good Thing I Like Apartment-Hunting

(and craigslist)

funny how life is.

moral of the story from this past 48 hours: no-one's really ever your friend for life. roommates? even less so. i suppose in a strange way it's my own fault.

Someone Make Me Stop Eating

i know, i know, working out makes you burn calories, and then you should eat more... but here's what i've consumed today, and it's a bit ridiculous:

8:20 am: 1 bowl rice krispies (with "real" strawberries) with whole milk
8:45 am: 1 banana
10:30 am: 1/2 a cheddar and spinach scone from starbucks (i blame rafael...)
1:20 pm: the other 1/2 of the cheddar and spinach scone
1:25 pm: most of a bowl of kim's tofu noodle soup
1:40 pm: 1 kashi go-lean chocolate-and-peanut flavoured energy bar
5:30 pm: 2 all-butter lemon shortbread cookies
6:30 pm: 3 grape leaf wraps with tzatziki sauce, several pita quarters with hummus, and 1/2 a veggie gyro with french fries wrapped into it (plus some steamed spinach and roasted peppers on the side)
7:45 pm: 1 glass of honeydew bubble tea (latte)

i feel like a walking trash can today. someone make it stop.

I Hate Taxes

i'm good at addition and subtraction, but sadly, 'rithmetic isn't really all that useful (beyond figuring out potential permutations and combinations of the various deductions i could take) when it comes to getting through the tension of the season of april 15.

you see, being an international non-immigrant resident alien is complicated... not to mention that my tax status has changed in some way every year for the last 3 years, so i feel like a moving target!... and i never seem to be able to find my old returns when i need them... and this year i live in a different state from the one i've always lived in... and apparently philadelphia requires people to file city taxes (in addition to state and federal)... and i didn't file my own taxes last year, so i don't know what was going on in that mess of papers!... and i didn't even get a W-2 this year...

upon thinking about all this, actually, i've come to the conclusion that perhaps the most useful tax skill i could acquire would be the ability to get off my ass about these sorts of things before april 10.

¿Qué He Hecho Yo Para Merecer Esto?

it's not even 9 a.m., and already i'm having the most horrible day i've had in weeks.

i got just 4 hours of sleep last night, i dropped my toothbrush down the toilet (what is up with me and doing that with important objects?), summer latin is looking like a vanishing possibility, and a friend just called me crying to tell me that his partner of 3+ years has been cheating on him and wants to break up to be with someone else.

in addition, my hair needs shampooing, my eyebrows need tweezing, i haven't been swimming in 5 days, my throat itches, and it's cold.

whine whine whine.

Negatory

for as long as i can remember i've hated the words "weak", "struggle", "try", "incapable" -- for their overall negative valences, really, but especially when used in relation to myself.

here's another "no" word that actually means something good: never. like, "never never never never never" (cf. king lear, who's currently chewing my brains). but also like, "never again [will i get myself into such a ridiculous pickle over final papers]."

n-e-v-e-r.

someone remind me of this week when it's late april 2008 and i'm frolicking like a fairy instead of writing like a fiend?

No Freaking Fair

i leave boston and they get not one but two wagamama's??

ridiculous!

Facebook Is An Asshole

dear obnoxious, invasive and out-of-control facebook feed,

please stop feeding me information about people i'm no longer friends with.

that is all.

kthxbye
sim

Help, I Have No Future!

i know that one of the best things about email (as opposed to, say, the public nature of your facebook wall) is that it's supposed to be private, so that no-one [well, except google's ad servers, or anyone who can find out your password, or anyone who sits down at a machine from which you haven't logged off properly] knows who you're corresponding with, or what unsuitable things you're saying in the shroud of perceived privacy, or what sorts of risible mailing lists you're on.

but sometimes the contents of your mailbox need to be openly advertised to the world. this is one such occasion, because it made me super-sad. my tarot.com weekly romance horoscope says:

Love Horoscope for the Week of:
Monday, August 20, 2007

Sim,




that's it. funny, because i spent all last week juggling the dastardly thought of potential arranged liaisons and the enjoyable security of past connections and the exciting actuality of being in bombay. [code for: there were boys in my life last week, so wtf?!]

now, it's quite possible tarot.com just did the HTML badly on this email, and my romantic future is actually all set, and profitably so at that. but whatever the cause of this glitch, here's an APB to all my boys, real or imagined -- you need to fix this problem, stat.

CityLurve: Philadelphia

if i hear one more person tell me that philadelphia is a shithole/the ghetto/crime-ridden and depressed/not as good as new york, i will give them the look of death. or bust out my talons and rip right into them, depending on how annoying i found them before they went and opened their pie-hole.

i haven't spent much time in the city, admittedly, and the statistics do give reason for worry, and septa is about as inspiring in the field of public transportation as king kong is in the field of microsurgery, but the unmitigated hating? that just needs to stop already! because you know what? i like the skyline, i like the grid-like layout (boston, you have a lot to learn, buddy), i like 30th street station, i like the little squares with archaic names (fitler? rittenhouse?), i like the ubiquitous homage to ben franklin, i like the south st. creperie i was taken to on my first "real" day in the city (and the atmosphere of south st. in general), i like the view from penns landing, i like the street signs with rainbows on them, i like the architecture and the robert indiana sculpture in/near jfk plaza, and i like the painted little victorian houses in university city. so shush.

in this vein, the aarp magazine (which i was reading over lunch at work today because it had an ancient-looking kevin costner on the cover and i just had to find out what would inspire them to put his wrinkled fake-tanned goatee-wielding shaved-chested self in such a position of glory) is just beyond impolite.

you see, the magazine's july/august 2007 issue boasts an article on "50 things to know at 50" or some such (i guess you could call this advance reading... or something to make the tasteless food go down easier); #42 is "how to stay married". the advice for the more poetic among us is to "pretend your relationship (marriage) is a road trip. your wedding was the holland tunnel. your life is the new jersey turnpike. death is philadelpia. pretend there are no exits, only rest stops."

umm, hello? not only is that the most depressing vision of marriage i've ever heard (and i do consider myself at this stage an anti-marriage cynic), but also, how about we make death, like, idaho or somewhere else instead of the city in which i'm going to spend the next semi-decade? hmph!

Behold The Great Indian Male Double Standard

(GIMDS for short. i would try for a more attractive short form, an acronym, even, but this is the best way to put it.)

warning: contains spoilers. do not read this post if you want to watch the movie it's about.

anurag basu's life in a... metro (which btw should win an award for the most poorly-named film of the year) is another indian director's attempt at a love actually-esque ensemble romance. this time, though, it's set in bombay rather than london or new york, and is supposed to be dark rather than k-jo-variety-cheesy. (oooh.)

ok, so you have to give the man credit for the requisite couple of genius moments -- the phone chain that erupts from rahul's trying to organize evenings at his (literally) pimpin' pad, the overhead of neha's slow but clearly disgusted retraction of her foot while ranjit is on the phone with his wife getting out of attending his own anniversary party, monty telling shruti ("shoottee") to let it all out on the roof, then her realization that she should "take the car out of the garage"...

most of the rest was, well, shallow and/or unreal. traffic jams galore i can understand. but not so much the obvious brokeback mountain reference to hidden homosexuality. a high-speed horse-taxi-auto chase ("rahooooooooooooooooooool!"). a large number of songs featuring middle-aged rockers standing on street corners/at elevations with guitars as pedestrians pass by, un-curious. tearful mulakaats at crowded train stations. motorbike rides around powai (that's not the real city, kthxbye.) dharmendra coyly biting his lip. cheesy dialogue about "pyaar ki khushboo" and glass-elevation-aided "mere baap ne yeh ghar banane ka sapna dekha tha lekin uska dum ghut gaya". slutbag red lights at some guy niruddh's house.

and why is everyone so close-knit? the sister-in-law lives with phenyl-glugging girlfriend who's having the affair with the dude who's married to the sister. dude who's in love with girlfriend who's having an affair with other dude happens to work for said other dude, and as a drum-it-in consequence misplaced cell phones cannot possibly be returned discreetly. uhhm, yeah, bombay is a village, but these were pretty blatantly elaborately-arranged coincidences.

what i really couldn't stand, though (and here we get to the point of this post, parenthetical basu-bashing done) was the feeble state of post-millennial women's lib. when flowy-skirt-wearing shikha brandishes the emasculatory facts at her husband in no uncertain terms -- that she gave up her career for her marriage, and that if she were to start working again, she would make more money than he currently did, and that he dare not ever talk to her like that again -- i thought: "yowzah. go, you." when she starts seeing this aakash guy, i raised an eyebrow at her waffling and hesitation. after all, as he says, she is a person -- and a person with an exquisite dress sense and perfectly-coiffed hair, plus no pit stains despite frequent train travel (also, no apparent childcare duties) plus a cheating, lying husband, to boot! she deserves happiness, too! of course she should... but no, there's the whole bharatiya nari guilt-trip "i have a family, main unke naam ka sindoor pehenti hoon" complex to deal with, so rather than collect her purse on her way out, she jumps out the window and hops in a cab to versova, skimpy sari blouse and all, never to see him again.

then comes the beyond-tragic climax: ranjit's paranoia about being tattled on by shruti (and a well-timed whine about "mummy kabse ro rahi hai" from their apparently-entirely-dispensable child) leads him to confess to shikha that he has been having an affair with neha for the last two years. he says it was a mistake, that it's in the past. he asks her if she will forgive him. she walks to the kitchen, her back to him. no response. then she tells him that shruti hadn't said anything. (i almost expected the asshole to say, "well, in that case, i was kidding! i didn't really have an affair with a girl with a lopsided smile and a giant pock mark on her face! hahahaha!" but that would have been too fantastic, even for a far-fetched hindi movie.)

then she confesses, for her part, in tears already, that she wasn't at the movies with shruti the other day. that she has been seeing this guy for 4-5 weeks now. that nothing happened. she collapses into his arms.

he says, "it's ok."

(i was surprised.)

and then, a 180: "tum uske saath soyi ho?"
"did he use my bedroom?"
"bacchi to meri hai?"
dishes are smashed to the floor. (ahh, there's the asshole that we knew lay underneath this calm front!)

more tears. guess which of the two is supposed to feel guilty for having committed adultery.

(she did, after all, say that she feels like a slut...)

[is this art imitating life, or life imitating art?]

next thing we know, ranjit has moved out and is ready to take up with neha. shikha keeps the apartment and the child. aakash writes to her to tell her that he is leaving the country and wants her to go with him (he therefore wants her to meet him at their usual spot at the railway station). shikha tells her ever-obedient daughter to do her homework, and is just headed out the door, purse in hand (ostensibly to make a happier life for herself, offspring be damned, the catholic maid's there, na?), when... there stands ranjit, who has been ditched at the last minute by his young assistant/nymphet, and has decided to crawl back home injured and pathetic.

too-young-to-get-that-her-father-is-pond-scum daughter shrieks, "papa!" or "day-deee!" or some such.

at that moment, it was game over. i already knew the contents of shikha's tearful "farewell forever, i have a dead marriage to continue" speech to aakash.

be it known to all the men in my future love life: i may be from bombay, but if you cheat on me, i am not so going to do a shilpa shetty.

Ummmmmmmmmmmmm

i don't know if any other unfortunate souls fall into the same unsuspecting demographic as i, but our airtel landline regularly subjects us to spam -- automated phone calls that cause you to say hello at least twice before the stupid canned music kicks in with some sort of unnecessary marketing message right after.

usually it's something to do with buy something and win something else. i never stick around long enough to find out. but at least the message will start with a fairly normal greeting, like, "hum aapko ek naye offer ke baare mein bataana chahte hain..." (i'm discounting the long-drawn-out, mis-emphasized and highly enthusiastic "hell-looo!" that is usually the first warning sign of do-not-call-ignoring misery to come.)

but, wait for it,

this time the message was, "hello! kya aap in garmiyon main feel kar rahe hain hot, hot?"

(i kid you not, this is verbatim, including the comma which indicates a pregnant pause of just the right length.)

now i wish i had waited to hear more. only the prospect of permanent brain damage scared me enough to click the "end" button on the phone.

airtel clearly needs a life.

Beware The Ides Of March

(and the vernal equinox, while we're at it)

due warning to the wellesley college alumnae association and wee eff ess:

do not piss me off. it does not bode well for you. you will receive the death stare, and quite possibly a long e-mail to boot.

one such e-mail is in the works. another might be, if i can muster up the time to figure out how to reach the CEO of cafe coffee day.

i'm stylin'.

Who Wants Columbia, Anyway?

the onion says it all!

(from: <http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28701>

Giant Cockroach In Bathroom 'A Harrowing,Kafkaesque Experience,' Grad Student Says

February 2, 2000 | Issue 36•03

NEW YORK–A routine toothbrushing turned into a profound exercise in nightmarish, existential horror Monday, when poverty-stricken Columbia University graduate student Marc Edelstein, 24, came across "the most gigantic cockroach this side of Gregor Samsa" in the bathroom of his one-room, walk-up efficiency.

"It was terrifying," Edelstein told colleagues at the Ivy League university's English department shortly after the encounter with the giant cockroach. "Every day, I can't believe I am living in that apartment. The humiliations society forces me to undergo, just to get my stupid Ph.D, defy all rational, intellectual thought. Sometimes, when I wake up in the morning and see the squalor in which I live, it feels as if I've somehow found myself on trial before a group of faceless, bureaucratic agents for some horrible crime I didn't commit, and no one will even explain to me what my crime was."

Edelstein, whose combined rent and tuition far exceed his meager earnings from work-study grants and a part-time job as a teaching assistant, has struggled with an insect problem ever since moving into the 108th Street and Broadway apartment in the fall of 1997.

Edelstein called the cockroach "a deeply disturbing symbol of the alienation and pain seemingly inherent in every aspect of modern grad-student life." What's worse, he said, the enormous insect so paralyzed him with "intense, soul-searing fear" that he was unable to kill it before it escaped down the drain.

"This wretched, prehistoric creature," Edelstein said, "has survived to torment me anew another day–a day of reckoning that, although I know in my heart is soon to come, I am nonetheless powerless to prevent."

The doctoral candidate is no stranger to hardship. In March 1999, Edelstein called his part-time job at the hot-dog eatery Gray's Papaya "a vision of underpaid, overworked, meat-flinging degradation and brutality that I dare say would not be out of place within the pages of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle." Despite mounting student-loan debts, Edelstein quit the food-service job in August 1999 in "a vitriolic burst of invective and abuse rivaling the most impassioned deliverances of Alexander Pope."

Edelstein has also suffered "innumerable indignities" at the hands of his landlord, Randy Bosio, whom the tortured scholar described to his dissertation advisor as "a fetid, shambling, coin-rattling wraith of a man who brings to mind one of the more unsavory, shadow-dwelling denizens of Dickensian London." On other occasions, Edelstein has likened his landlord to one of the nightmarish "Mugwump" creatures from William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, claiming that Bosio's sole directive is "to attach himself to the flesh of the innocent and suck them dry."

Said Bosio: "Something about that kid just ain't right. Once, I let myself into his apartment when he wasn't home, just to fix the sink, and when he got back and found me there, he accused me of 'an Orwellian invasion of individual privacy,' whatever that meant."

Edelstein's woes were compounded last October, when his eight-month relationship with Meredith Astor, the 26-year-old daughter of prominent New York arts patrons James and Patricia Astor, ended in a devastating breakup, prompted by Meredith's shame over Edelstein's low social standing.

"It was your basic F. Scott Fitzgerald situation," said Edelstein officemate Howard Underwood, who started dating Astor shortly after the split. "After Meredith left him, he plunged into a turbulent maelstrom of drink and despair. Every night was a nonstop party, a denial-fueled attempt to escape the inevitable collapse of the artificial world he had created for himself, masking his inner desperation and decay under a superficial veneer of false, empty revelry."

"I had to start picking up some of his T.A. hours because he wasn't showing up for discussion section," said Underwood, who will marry Astor in June. "Pathetic, really, much like the eventual fall of the gilded, faux opulence of the Jazz Age."

"Meredith's WASP-y, socialite, upper-crust parents never approved of me," Edelstein said. "Tight-lipped, goyish, Edith Wharton archetypes. I know she never would have left me if it weren't for the mannered, insufferable manipulations of her high-society family. Hello? The novel of manners has long since been supplanted as a reflection of prevailing social mores, people!"

After enduring such "infernal, Dantean torments of the soul," Edelstein said the cockroach incident was "the last straw," prompting him to decide to leave Columbia.

"That's it. After staring down at the writhing legs of that foul, accursed insect, I felt the horror of the void permeating my being to its deepest core, and I realized I cannot go on here at Columbia," Edelstein told his mother during a long-distance collect call shortly after his run-in with the cockroach. "I'm transferring to the University of Mississippi. Flannery O'Connor says a good man is hard to find? Well, a good graduate program is hard to find! I know I said I'd never do it, and that if I had to live in a horrible redneck cesspool of a state like Mississippi, I'd become so estranged from my surroundings that I'd end up like that Eudora Welty character who lives at the post office, but I've had it with New York. I can't go on."

"I'm giving up. Do you hear me, O cold, unfeeling universe?" shouted Edelstein, standing atop his building's roof. "You've won, you impenetrable void of utter meaninglessness! You have destroyed me at last!"

"The horror... the horror..." he added.

Wall Of Shame

if i had a wall of shame post on my blog for every time a guy i've been interested in has been an idiot (every time, not every guy) -- i'd have run out of disk space, even on blogger.com.

***

you have intense eyes, and you look right into me. (they're what wins me over. i'm ignoring the fact that you might have a girlfriend. which i later find out you don't. but anyway.)
you drive a lancer, have ambition, and obviously love and respect your mother. (good signs, these. i'm even ignoring the fact that you have most indiscreetly badmouthed your ex-girlfriend in front of me.)
you come highly recommended by someone's mother. (not like i'm actively waiting for testimonials from malabar hill types, but still. i'm ignoring the fact that i can never actually marry you, for political reasons, even in the hypothetical.)
we sit by the sea and talk for hours. (now i'm ignoring the fact that you won't ever just listen -- or even respect the fact that there are certain topics i don't want to talk about. it's good enough to listen, i figure. so i sit and listen.)
you say you'll wait until i'm back from out of town to go out on a saturday night. (i'm ignoring the fact that you've been doing the disappearing act every so often for the last month, so i might be setting myself up for disappointment.)

but we actually do go out again.

and then you're patronizing, and silent, and you look most disdainfully at my friend who's bored and wants to leave.
you make a helluva noise about dropping us both home, even though you've said you're going to be the one to do it since you're the guy with us.
you consistently ask me to go to a club that i've said i don't want to go to, and you ask me why i've chosen this particular "lame" lounge to hang out in.
i ask you to get me a non-alcoholic drink from the bar, but you tell me that there's nothing non-alcoholic to be had except club soda.

and then, and then: you say i'm being old and boring.

you promise to call the next morning, since there are adventures being planned, but (unless that strange number was you) you don't.

you disappear again.

and then, almost two weeks later, i get a text message from you asking for my email address so that you can send me a statement of purpose to edit.

fat chance, loser.

Say What?

from an NYT article on the increasing ubiquity of advertising:
Last month, after some “Got Milk?” billboards started emitting the odor of chocolate chip cookies at San Francisco bus stops, many people complained, and the city told the California Milk Processing Board to turn off the smell.

from the first day of french class:
teacher: "when you think of french, or france, what comes to your mind?"
totally ghaat but very enthusiastic student: "the eiffel tower, and leonardo da vinci."

and from the talented hand of one ms. spacecoyote (<http://spacecoyote.com>): the simpsonzu! <http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/46036660/>
(mirror pick@flick[r], in case she gets so popular the link dies: <http://flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/358155313/>)

My, Do People Talk!

i don't even know how it got out there.

(that i'm engaged, that is.)

the "mashi net" works in mysterious ways.

Ugh

i just got a facebook message from this random guy from IIT roorkee.

the message said "hello simi how are you?"
(which made me grimace)

then i looked at the guy's profile picture.

entirely undesirable pick@flick[r]: <http://flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/255519190/>

pretty grim, huh?

that's just half the ridiculousness.. there is also the following proud statement:
The Favourite Music goes as per the mood i can never stick to some or the other type of music regularly most of the time you can find Enigma being played in my room...!!! Early in the morning ofcourse very few times i could get to see the sunrise....then it would be definitely Vocal or Carnatic.....after some time it would be Devotional Songs for few minutes...at all other times it could be any thing like, MLTR, Bryan Adams, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd, Avril Lavigne, Linkin Park etc......else it can be some telugu and hindi music like A.R.R, Jagjeet, Special titles by Mukesh, Rafi.....etc....

this is not to mention that dexter's laboratory comes first on the list of favourite TV shows of an adult with a phd in physics... and that the chap is single and looking for relationships (big surprise, there).

tsk, tsk. if this is the kind of man i'm going to be subjected to through the india network....

(i am currently so repulsed that i am contemplating the possibility of a little craigslist-experiment-esque exercise, with one simple rule: if you harass me online, i'm going to expose you on this blog. but for my own sake i'm hoping the crazies and fuglies just stay in their own corners of the internetosphere, so that my blog will be saved the trauma and my hope of finding men worth my attentions does not get permanently extinguished.)