<3

to my beautiful boy with 4 guitars, 327.5 black t-shirts, and the world's sexiest voice:

thank you for making not only my minute, but also my hour, my day, my week, my month, my year.

<click here for the [ex-rated] rest>
(yeah, it's for him only. what, you think this blog is a public peep show?)

here's to many more years of spiderjay and simphonatic.

plenty of <3s
your little girl

What Is It To You?

what would you do with rs. 830 (approximately $18.54)?

leave your response(s) in the comments section.

Barbie Girl

of course, noone can ever match aishwarya rai in dhoom:2, but i feel like, for me, i'm coming pretty close. guys get to just shower, shave, throw on some clothes, spritz on some cologne, and leave, but it's unbelievable all the stuff women go put themselves through before they step out for the evening, come november-december.

- pick out clothes, jewellery, shoes and accessories well in advance (and discuss them endlessly with worried mother)
- go shopping, find nothing satisfactory
- go shopping again
- return first-round purchases in deference to secound-round purchases
- call tailor, send outfit out to get stitched (embroidery, badla-work, etc sold separately)
- haggle over outfit delivery date ("nahin, nahin, raju bhai, aise kaise kaam chalega, pehenneka hai, humko parsonh hi mangta hai!")
- briefly wonder why all tailors seem to be called raju, chhotu, or the entirely-ambiguous "master-ji"
- pedicure
- manicure (although i confess that i'm saved from that fate, because i have no nails to speak of)
- facial
- wax arms, legs, underarms, and assorted parts of face and body as necessary
- pluck/thread eyebrows
- thread upper lip
- cry from pain of threading
- bleach face, stomach, back for the purposes of photogenic-ness and small purple/blue/pink choli du jour
- call the tailor to say it's T-3 and where the hell does he think he is?
- pensive 20-minute shower
- wash, dry, and straighten hair
- try on outfit that has finally arrived, huff in dismay that "this was bound to happen", give back to tailor who sits in poor light near kitchen and makes last-minute adjustments to outfit, inevitably muttering under his breath that he should have stayed in the gaav
- use assorted gels, lotions, creams, during and after bath for smooth skin and glowing face
- struggle into clothes, stare at mirror critically, wonder where that extra weight suddenly came from
- apply makeup
- stare at mirror haplessly, tell family to wait, more prep time is needed
- hack at eyebrows which have somehow grown asymmetrical in the last 8.5 hours
- make sure earrings have backs well-attached to prevent slippage
- change outfit choices at last minute (if out of town, wish desperately for items that cannot possibly be delivered before the function begins, even by hanuman) and repeat as many of the steps above as are necessary
- stare at mirror disconsolately
- viciously jab at forehead with bindi
- totter out the door in heels
- run back up to collect forgotten item (cell phone, watch, house keys, or similar) while liftman waits, inevitably muttering under his breath that he should have stayed in the gaav
- plaster fake smile on face for camera
- repeat through february

Yes, It Matters

i love them all dearly, but i can just see the money-managing, goal-oriented, future-thinking business-school types i know squirming with dissatisfaction here and wondering what the hell difference it makes what exact colour the sky was a hundred years ago.

but this article, from the NYT, makes perfect sense to me.

Air-Index Impressionism
By JOHN GLASSIE
Published: December 10, 2006

“Without the fog, London wouldn’t be a beautiful city,” the French painter Claude Monet wrote to his wife, Alice, during one of his long visits to England from France. Few Londoners would have agreed with his statement at the time, when the city was choked by the smog of the Industrial Revolution, but no one argues with the beauty of the colorful skies he began painting there between 1899 and 1901. Pollution has never looked quite as attractive as when seen through Monet’s eyes.

Now there is evidence that Monet’s atmospheric images of London were not Impressionist concoctions but a result of highly accurate observation. According to a paper published by two environmental scientists in August, the paintings (nearly 100 of which still exist) may “provide useful information in the analysis of the London fogs and air quality during this period” — a period before pollution levels were routinely recorded.

In their study, Jacob Baker and John E. Thornes of the University of Birmingham analyzed the position of the sun in 9 of the 19 paintings in Monet’s “Houses of Parliament” series. There was “a perfect correlation,” Thornes says, between the solar positions in the images, the actual solar positions derived from astronomical records and the dates on which Monet said, in letters to Alice, that he began the works. “We can date, almost to within 15 minutes, when he first put the sun onto certain images,” Thornes says. Having found some quantitative information in the paintings, Baker and Thornes say they hope to find more. “We believe,” Thornes says, “that we can basically deconstruct the images to work out how much smoke would have to be in the air to create that visibility and those colors in, say, February 1900.”

Some art historians doubt the London paintings hold this much documentary evidence, pointing out, among other things, that Monet continued to work on many of the images after he returned to his studio in Giverny, France. “There’s no question that Monet was astonishingly allegiant to what lay in front of him,” the Monet scholar Paul Hayes Tucker says. “But at the same time, for example, he had a penchant for pinks. He always was trying to sneak pinks into pictures throughout his career.”

Thornes concedes that “it’s still just a hypothesis” but maintains that “we’re fairly optimistic that we’ll get something out of it.”

you see, in the long run, it's not going to end poverty or save darfur or cure cancer or make some dude rich through stock market shenanigans. but investigating, unlayering, rediscovering the past, at least for me, makes my present existence more understandable, more dimensional. whether it's etymology or calligraphy or tristan + isolde, it informs my world.

(and monet, to me, believe it or not, is prettier than money.)

My Brain Is About To Implode

not from the stress, for once, but from the fact that i haven't done any app work today.

then i read this in a discussion on love and academia in the applyingtograd livejournal community:

I'm glad I'm not part of a (sic) academia couple. I have a professor nearing retirement who, since grad school, has never lived with her husband during the academic year.

(at <http://community.livejournal.com/applyingtograd/2072575.html>)

now that is real commitment to your cause. but please, oh please, may it never be my fate.

Would You Light My Candle?

task of the day (although i should probably have posted this on december 1):

<https://www.lighttounite.org>

i'm not usually one for this click-to-do-good type stuff, but this is a cause i feel strongly enough about to actually post here. you can raise a dollar for AIDS research in a couple of seconds by moving the match and lighting the candle. not too shabby.

Tick Tick Tick

by december 20 i shall be done with grad school applications. after which? worry, bite nails, travel to out-of-town weddings, party like it's 2007, attend in-town weddings, wait, relax, worry, enjoy life, worry a bit less, grow nails, see a bit of india, wait, get new passport, hopefully travel abroad, wait.

update, tuesday, december 05, 2006:

have reevaluated situation; estimated date of completion now december 15. w00t.

update 2, saturday, december 16, 2006:

upon re-reevaluation (and the need to get out of the house instead of atrophying in front of the computer), have adjusted submission date back to december 20. it's less inhuman. and anyway, all i have left is one online app (an SOP, a short diversity essay, and a 15-page writing sample), plus one paper packet with an 8-page paper and a 17-page paper (the latter of which is done except for proofing) and another paper packet with a 15-page paper (which is also done except for proofing). after that: par-tay.