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.)