Rant

Today at the ILO we have been asked to wear red, or pin red ribbons to our lapels. We have been given flyers to remind us that at lunch time people will be forming a human ribbon, holding hands to raise awareness about living with AIDS. 

Holding hands to make a chain and ribbon together for AIDS seems just a step away from dancing around a fire and mumbling incantations over huge pots of frothing potions. Which as we know is a remedy against AIDS that has failed in Africa. They're both based on superstition, led by quacks and equally distant from a real solution. Just in case my red pants make a difference though I have worn them today. I wonder how many people I have saved with the good points they are ratcheting up with the universe on this most special of days as decreed by the UN. 

I do think though that holding hands will achieve nothing more than spreading colds and flus faster. If holding hands had helped the 60' would have ended differently. 

This evening as I was looking for something to turn into my desktop picture I realised that in the last five years I have not one single picture of myself with my grandfather. I have pictures of us on a group, or sitting with family, but of just the two of us, capturing some part of the camaraderie we shared- not one. I did locate a picture of the two of us sitting side by side at a table in a restaurant. The picture was taken on a family trip, where three separate units piled into cars, cousins, grandparents and all to go to a wildlife sanctuary. We like this particular restaurant. My grandfather liked it too. It served chutney that did not offend him, and sambar that he could almost tolerate, despite being it being run by Kannadigas. I remember this meal. I sat by him and we decided to get one dosa, one plate of idli and one plate of vada to split between the two of us. And one filter coffee and one tea. He warned me that I would not like the tea. He was right. The picture has me reaching into his plate. Something I frequently did, if I saw something there that I wanted.

I am trying to think back but I can no longer recall the exact date on which he died. I never really knew the date of his birth. Some time in August. Or maybe it was in September. Maybe its my grandmother who is in August.

Two days ago I was at drinks with people that I do not know very well, and one man whom I think of as a kindred spirit. He instinctively understands, and this is wonderful. He mentioned that a neighbour's father had cancer of the kidneys and the lungs. While everyone commiserated, and the discussion moved on to the subject of the neighbour's dogs all I could think was- if he is lucky this neighbour's father's kidneys will fail before his lungs.

Summer reading

This has been my reading list since I received my thesis grade last week. I now feel free to read again, now that I have a second M.A.

1. The Midnight Palace by Carlos Ruis Zafon- what a small silly book.

2. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.
I love all things Sarah Waters, but Fingersmith was her best. This was alright, but not amazing like that. I did enjoy reading her version of a middle aged man though- I thought she might have gotten that part right. But what do I know, I will never be one.

3. The Winter Rose by Jennifer Donnelly
I loved this. I adore stories about female doctors at times when female doctors were a rarity. The characters here were lovely. Except for the annoying insistence only One True Love forever I enjoyed the book a great deal. Which is why I galloped into the sequel. Big mistake.

4. The Wild Rose by Jennifer Donnelly
I hate books that make me despise the women in the book, while ignoring the sins of the men. This book did that to me. The cast of characters got too unwieldy, and she didn't establish the primary woman as a sympathetic sort- not early enough, in fact not at all. I found her character to be completely unrelatable, and inconsistent with the way she appeared in the previous books. This One True Love Forever business got very tiresome as well. It would be nice if not everyone behaved like tragic lovers a la Romeo and Juliet- there is a reason they are so young- it is behaviour best suited to teenagers. Presumably when you get a bit older the world forces you to pull your head out of your ass.
I should have loved that the main character was based on Gertrude Bell, but instead of making the book about her work the book was about her pining away and doing all manner of silly things because she lost her leg and wouldn't communicate with her boyfriend or her family. Bah. As you might have gathered the book annoyed me. It took up 700 pages of my life and left me bugged.

Ennui

Today I went to the store, bought myself a big box of sushi and ate it by myself in the cafeteria. The fish felt weird but good. I read the bridge column while I ate. Then I thought a little about the eyebrows of the new intern, they are very Tom Selleck and so I heart him already. After this I went back to work and promised myself a cup of tea in a couple of hours.

i feel stabby

doom

Scary stuff

Today my mother called me to tell me she had heard of a boy with a PhD from the U.S whose parents were looking for a suitable girl. She wanted to know if I was interested in her initiating a conversation about me filling that position.
I wanted to know if she knew anything more about him (she didn't), and if just a PhD from the U.S was my going rate.
Impasse.

in the summertime

things to do while spending the summer in switzerland, generally understood to be among the most lovely places to spend a summer.

1. write 60 page long papers over 2 weeks. field e mails from anxious professors over missed deadlines. this only makes the situation more enjoyable.

2. decide to work part time at what must surely be the most boring job in the world, paying bills for serbian policemen who are being sponsored by the swedish national police board to learn 'strategic management'. try to figure out what strategic management might entail- not that it matters though because all your time will be spent dealing with cantankerous accountants, one of which has a single gropey hand (the right one).

3. develop a repetitive stress injury from using the computer too much, because staying in and furiously banging away at your keyboard is what summer is all about.

4. stop signing in on skype. your friends want to meet and go to one of the concerts being held in parks around town, but you cannot keep saying no because it makes you look un-fun, and forces you to acknowledge how slowly you are progressing at your writing. avoid them instead.

5. develop a bizarre obsession with daily talk show hosts and their work, craig ferguson for example. you must choose a show that has been on for at least 5 years, if you choose the late late show, which has been on for 8 years. 8 years x 40 minutes a day gives you plenty of time-wasting fodder on youtube.

6. eat vast quantities of biscuits. in the little time that you do have to spare you must concentrate on sending yourself into one sugar coma after another.

7. get yourself an earworm. here. this will do for now.

plotting and scheming

In the summer of 2013 I will be taking the trans-Siberian express from Moscow to Beijing.
It is going to be an adventure.

Tea-time

I took a nap this afternoon and dreamt that my grandfather was at the door to have tea with me. He was fumbling with his mobile phone because he wasn't quite sure how to use it, alone, and slightly unsure about if he was there at the right time. And it was so disappointing because even in the dream I knew this was wrong- it was him but it could never have been him.

1. My grandfather was always on time; at places at the time he wanted to be at. If he was at my door it was the right time for him to be there. And he would never have been tentative about if it was a good time to see me. It was always a good time to see me. He knew that.

2.  My grandfather knew how to use his mobile phone. The two things he needed to do, disconnect calls and delete text messages without reading, he had mastered. Everything else was unnecessary and there was no uncertainty about this either.

3. We lived together, so there was no reason for him to visit me for tea. Had we lived in the same city we would have been in the same house. This visiting business was for other people. We were intimate enough to sit at the same table every night and eat out of the corner of each others plates. It wasn't the cute quirky thing grandfathers who occasionally see their offspring and dote on them do. It had the slightly competitive tinge of people who live together and know that whoever gets to the chutney first gets to eat more of it. Though we were never like this at tea. Only at breakfast.

But it was nice that he came to visit me while I was napping. There aren't too many other options left to us.

I think the dream was brought on by a deep deep desire to have someone make me a really good cup of tea.

 

Movies during the week

Beastly was a waste of time. I watched it because I watched Craig Ferguson chat with Neil Patrick Harris about it and I was charmed by their camaraderie. This is not enough of a reason to watch something. The film reaffirmed my opinion that anything with Vanessa Hudgens in it is a terrible mistake.

Happythankyoumoreplease was another one that I learnt about from Craig Ferguson, this time in a chat with Josh Radnor, who directed the movie. It was marginally better than BEastly. But this is not saying much. I was bored.

Angel was delightful. It was macabre, over the top and crazily fun. I like Romola Garai. I loved her in Atonement. And Dirty Dancing 2 is a guilty pleasure. Though I have to say the charms of the lovely Cuban boy in it had eclipsed hers for me. Until now. I ow want to watch many things wit her in it. I also want to watch the other stuff by the director Francois Ozon. I liked Swimming Pool quite a bit. He looks like fun.

Love's Kitchen was ghastly. All things with Gordon Ramsay are doomed.

Soul Kitchen, another film about cooking and rescuing a sinking restaurant- this time in Germany, with Germans. The film was full of people saying "so-oul kitchen munn" (man) in the peculiar sing song Germans get/do when they're being all hard rock about things. It was ok as films about food go, but this is because so many others are so spectacularly terrible. Like Love's Kitchen. Love's Kitchen made all of 121 pounds on its opening day. Which does not surprise me.

In other news my obsession with Craig Ferguson continues. As does my addiction to Master chef Australia.  But more about Craig Ferguson in the next post.

Movies on the weekend

On Friday and Saturday I wrote a term paper. On Sunday I went on  movie bender. It seemed like I hadn't watched anything film like in a long time. Over the week I had fallen into a Craig Ferguson charm vortex- and had gone through every clip on YouTube. So I thought it might be time to watch something more substantial instead. And so I put myself through Chloe, Shame and A Dangerous Method.

Chloe was ok. I didn't know, until a friend told me after I had watched it that the lesbian bit was supposed to have been very exciting. It wasn't terribly thrilling in the movie. The whole thing seemed a little too much like Unfaithful. But this might be because all films about cheating seem kind of the same to me. If the plot was something other than unfaithful married person who feels bad and then dumb stuff happens I would take note.

As I did with A Dangerous Method. Which I liked very much- due in great part to Keira Knightley. We never get to see her being a doctor in her own right. First she is the patient, then the mistress, then the pregnant wife of someone else, while all along clearly far too intelligent and compelling to be just any one of these things at a time. I would have liked to see why she moved to child psychology. I would have liked to see that developed more than the elaborate bit about Otto Gross and his influence on Jung. Or if not more than equally.

Shame was great, except that the title made it seem a bit preachy, or gave it a bit of a judgmental context that the rest of the film doesn't really hold to. It didn't seem to be as much about shame; it seemed to be about compulsion and wretchedness, so the context provided by the title is not necessarily one I would have arrived at myself.

You could tell from about the 10th minute, from the way the music kept swelling higher and higher while all the man was doing was riding the subway, that this movie was going to be a long, torturous and self consciously so. I liked it. But I couldn't watch it again. I will be watching everything with Carey Mulligan and Michael Fassbender though. 

Mangoes

are depressing. Because I live in a country where the stores are filled with things that look like Mangoes, but are imposters inside. From the Cote d'Ivoire. And the South American ones are even worse: with thick reddish green skins and fibrous hard stuff inside.

Last year I ate just one mango. The Mango came from a Bangladeshi shop on the outskirts of Milan, and was a gift from a shop keeper who said I looked like his Tamilian girlfriend from 10 years ago. I wasn't sure where that conversation was going so I took the Mango and escaped. It was bigger than an Alphonso, but didn't taste like a Banganapalli. Whatever it was, it was very very good. And it was the only one.

This year when my mother visited me she brought me 3 Malgovas and 2 Banganapallis. Banganapalli is my favourite kind of Mango. I ate one a day at dinner for the next 5 days. And then they were gone.

This week, on my way to the library I found a Turkish woman selling Alphonso mangoes. They will little but they looked lovely. And so for the hideous sum of Rs 130 per mango I bought two. I finished eating the second of those this evening.

Yesterdays newspaper had an article about Indian mangoes and how they are packaged and sent all over the world. I worry that I will find no more mangoes worth eating this year, so all that remains for me is to cut out pictures and scour the newspapers for more stories about mangoes. The Hindu rarely disappoints in this regard. 

spring cleaning

this evening i decided to clean up my wallet as there seemed to be a lot of bits and bobs in it.
i found a prescription of my grandfather's.
i found the business card of an ex boyfriend in which he had noted that we had been together from july 2008 to august 2009, and that any time in the future i could barge into his life and demand that he return to me for a maximum of four days. 
i found a gift coupon from a bookshop that i dearly loved, and that closed shop in 2008. given to me by said ex boyfriend as he had won it in a quiz. we went to the bookshop together and took pictures on the day it shut.
i kept the gift coupon and threw out all the rest.

Procrastination 2.0

I have a paper due tomorrow- on Maoist movements in India and Nepal. This is why I am now going to tell you about what I ate for dinner.

On my way back home I stopped at a farmer's market the other day and bought lots of fresh vegetables. Having bought them I found I had no will to cook them. So on day one of the vegetable explosion I made guacamole pasta. I diced one avocado, a quarter of an onion, one tomato and squeezed the juice of one lemon in before adding  a tiny amount of pasta. Because the avocado was really ripe it made a sort of sauce for the pasta, but the whole thing was more like a salad. I dislike chopping onions though.

Dinner on day two had fewer ingredients.

I cut half a pod of garlic and sauteed it in a teeny bit of oil before adding one medium sized aubergine, one tomato and half a teaspoon of chilli powder. I kept the heat high and let some bits of the sliced aubergine char before pouring in a bit of water and cooking the whole thing down. Right at the end I added some chopped basil and salt.

Tomorrow I shall make myself beans with just a little bit of butter and lemon. There by bringing down the number of things i put into the vegetables down even further. This is a game I will play until my paper deadline has passed. Or until the vegetables finish.

I wish I loved Cat Stevens as much as I did when I was 13

At some point I used to listen to Cat Stevens. And his songs filled me up with happy feelings. I associated them with afternoons in middle school when I would sit with my best friend (we would make an unsuccessful foray into boyfriend-girlfriend hood a couple of years after this) and sing Beatles and Cat Stevens songs. He made me a mixed tape with Tea for the Tillerman and a couple of songs of Sheryl Crow. She hadn't hit her beach bum stage yet. One of our long standing discussions was why we didn't know of more famous female rock stars, feminist before we had learnt the vocabulary.

Soon after I turned 18 my friend died. I don't listen to Cat Stevens very much any more. At first it hurt too much because of memories of a best friend and high school boyfriend. And later he stopped making sense. The sweetness of his music no longer related very well to the somewhat more chaotic and bewildering turn that my life was taking. I discovered the Postal Service, where every song was deep and meaningful. Death Cab for Cutie, who have written an accompaniment to every kind of heartbreak.

And now I wish I could go back to having the kind of relationship I used to have with the music I listened to.  I wish I wasn't listening to Adele and singing along in her anger and rage, but just listening to her because her songs are fun. This isn't because my life is all longing, tears, heartbreak or rage. Far from it. But for some reason the music I listen to is. I am going to set about fixing this. I don't see myself going back to my Simon and Garfunkel days, but perhaps there is hope beyond this current swamp of moody indie dominated stuff.

Belgrade Continues

To breathe in Belgrade is to smoke. Most restaurants and cafes have no separate non smoking area. This is the thing that bothers me most about the city. I am now on day 4 however, and I am getting used to hiding my coat in a cupboard, or under someone else's coat, on entering a room, so that the smoke does not get into it. I have given up worrying about the smell of smoke in my hair. 

I must be one of the 3 people in the city who does not drink tea. On breaks from the workshop my policemen (I think of them as mine, because my project works for them) sniff at me, when they offer me coffee and I ask for tea. Each time this look of mild disgust and disbelief passes across their face on hearing that anyone could turn down coffee. The one thing they are most unhappy about at the workshop is that we have had to remove our coffee-filter machine thing and have replaced it with instant coffee and a kettle.

Three times now I have walked into what I think are department stores, because I like looking at shiny wrappers, and I want to know what Serbian groceries look like. Every time it has been a different chain selling cosmetics and hygiene stuff only. There are more kinds of hair dye than I have ever seen before. I studied a shampoo made with cow placenta for a while, but bought a body lotion made from goat's milk instead. I am not ready to wash my hair with the placenta of anything. I still don't know how stores are organised here. I need to investigate this further before I leave.

Yesterday a colleague of mine took me shopping with her. We ate Serbian Chinese food at a tiny restaurant in a corner of a very shiny mall. I had the spicy chicken with vegetables and wheat noodles. She had the hoisin chicken with rice. Both looked exactly the same, until the waitress covered my portion with toasted peanuts and hers with toasted cashew nuts. I got some 'chilli' sauce and mixed it with everything on my plate. It still looked and tasted exactly like her plate- which was alright. Whatever that one dish was that the restaurant made that day, and called five different things, it was good.

This afternoon's lunch at the police academy was bread, thin clear vegetable soup with an anaemic kind of noodles, cabbage salad, white beans in tomato cheese sauce, pasta with braised beef in a brown sauce, and chocolate cream cake- which I strongly suspect is the same cake that has been served for the last 3 days but covered with an extra batch of chocolate icing. There was also a choice between strawberry or sour cherry nectar. I had two glasses of sour cherry nectar and one apple. I am looking forward to dinner.

And here is a picture of the Assembly that I took myself. It is not as good as the one I posted yesterday. But at least I took this one myself.

Belgrade

I have been in Belgrade for 3 days now. I love the city. From about ten minutes into it I felt like I could live here and be happy (except for all the smoke, but we shall get to that later).

It has been cold and rainy since my arrival, and it fits every notion I had in my head of a the beautiful grey bleakness of Eastern Europe. I arrived at the Hotel Excelsior, which is where my ex-diplomat boss likes to stay, and found that it stands bang opposite the National Assembly which is in an ex-Palace and looks like this (but without the snow).

This part of town is full of hangovers from a greater Yugoslavic past, lots of imposing buildings with fountains in front and wide roads. I love the rain. It fees delightful to be sploshing across puddles, while not freezing away. It is May, so everyone from Belgrade that I have spoken to is peeved about it, but since I just escaped an unusually unpleasant summer in Bangalore, I'm not too unhappy.

Prices in Belgrade are a relief from the unrelenting ridiculousness of Switzerland. Everything seems reasonable, and I had the most wonderful dinner, with drinks and dessert, at a very lovely restaurant for the amount I spend on a general- bought on the go from a supermarket- lunch in Geneva. And the food- day 1: bacon wrapped chicken breast with a spicy cheese salad and chips. On my second day I returned to the same restaurant and asked the waitress for something light with vegetables. Looking thrilled she said, leave it to me and marched away, only to return with 5 bits of fried aubergine and an enormous piece of chicken schitzel covered with a mushroom and cream sauce. She scowled when I wasn't able to clean my plate, and went off in a huff when I told her I wasn't able to deal with Serbian portions. She was mollified later, when I ordered a glass of rakia (a sort of fruit brandy- that is usually 40-50 % alcohol), and stayed to chat with me about things I should do while in town. After three sips of the stuff I stopped, and this time she laughed at me, because i was beginning to drop thing. Even on a full stomach quince rakia is too much for me.

The workshop I am here to attend is held at the Police Academy. Like so many other college messes the food here is not so bad that it is inedible, nor good enough to inspire you to really want to eat it. There are 25 other people who go to lunch with me, and this is what most of then eat: 2 or 3 hunks of bread, a bowl of soup, a plate of leafy salad, a plate with sides- usually mashed potatoes or chips and boiled veg, two medium sized pieces of meat or one large piece stuffed with cheese, and a slice of cream filled cake for dessert. And this is just the average. Most of the men eat more. A few of the women eat less. There is also no way to tell the women at the counter to give me a small serving of anything. Even when I say this in Serbian they look at me blankly and then move on. So when I waste half or more of the food on my plate my worried hosts keep asking if they should get me something different, but the problem is not a lack of things to eat, it is the excess.

This evening I shall go to a restaurant inside a converted opera house. Will report on this tomorrow.

It has been exactly two months since the last time my grandfather picked up the phone and said "hello darling" to me. The last time he said it he had a coughing fit; he was taken to hospital later that night.

On most days I am ok. 84 year olds are more likely to die than others, I tell myself. Specially those with cancer. At least we had a good time when he was alive.

On some days the thought that I can never again pick up the phone and call my grandfather, or Skype with him on Sundays, or sit next to him at the dinner table and nick the food from his plate fills me up with so much grief and blankness that I am paralysed.

Hitting stuff

So today I went to a self-defense class. I learnt lots of useful things, like how to extract your wrist when someone is grabbing it really tight, and how to deal with someone who is trying to choke you. It was unnerving. Hitting people is harder than it seems. I found it difficult to muster up the aggression to deal with a pretend attacker. Then I came home and ate dinner. Which looked like this.

As you can see this is going to turn into an exercise and food blog. Because I really seem to think about very little else.

Fish

So on my last visit home my orthopaedist uncovered a pretty glaring vitamin D3 deficiency, and made me pledge to drink milk every day and eat fish at least twice a week. Yesterday I decided to conquer my fear of dealing with raw fish, and marched off to the supermarket with a friend in tow- she once fed me the most delicious baked salmon, I would count on her to guide me through this confusing shopping experience. We picked out some salmon, and this afternoon when I cooked it. Margo was at the library, so after some frantic texting I left her to her books, and got on to the fish prep on my own. With some olive oil, garlic, onion, fresh herbs, salt and a squeeze of lemon it turned out like this.

It turned out pretty well I think. Next time I shall be adding some ginger and a tiny bit of soy sauce.

everything hurts because of yesterday's yoga class. two hours of dance today will finish me off. tomorrow i must find a bicycle so that i can continue to torture my body.

13.3.2012

i'm at the airport trying to go through security check but my enormous hooded cape of a coat is not cooperating. my eyes hurt. i'm going home in a rush, trying to see my grandfather one last time before his lungs lose the battle they have been waging for the last 6 months. instead of being incapacitated by grief i have, instead made a list of everything i need to do in geneva before taking off for a month, and worked through them methodically. last night three of my friends gathered in my room to sit with me while i packed. it was no more grim than usual, just with more frequent morbid jokes. i found myself describing how we no longer cremate people on wooden pyres, using an electric facility instead. its not something i want to think about while my grandfather is still alive but i cannot stop myself from skipping ahead. as if by doing so i can avoid dealing with how painful the situation is right now.

i also feel silly. in an excess of nervous energy i have bought my sister a bright green watch from the swatch store at the airport. i have also been unable to stop myself from buying a boz of chocolate passion-fruit macaroons. my grandfather loved these the last time i took them. this time he is unconscious and unlikely to revive enough to recognise me; worrying us with his disregard for his diabetes by making enormous inroads into the stuff i bring back each time, so that he might eat little bits of the nicest things is no longer on his agenda. i have also bought an over priced cup of coffee from the kind of boutique bio faux-vegan restaurant that i despise. i don't drink coffee. i haven't done so for years. it is the price for not bursting into tears every 10 minutes. i cannot afford to do so, i have been dehydrated for the last 3 days as crying and mopping up do not leave enough time to rehydrate.

at security check the man says to me- do you have a laptop inside. yes i say. take it out please. boarding card please. smile please, you cannot go through my security check with a face like that.
it surprises me and makes me laugh. i tell him that i did not know smiles were required to go through security. next time i will take the train.
he laughs and lets me go through.

my flight is not boarding yet and i am losing patience. i want to get in and eat my sandwich.

My google-fu is not strong today

future tense

it is quite possible that in the next 2 weeks i will relocate to mumbai and start working there.
if so i close up my life in geneva a year and a half sooner than i planned.
oh no. but also. what fun mumbai might be.

turning this blog into a shrine

since i havent had a thought except for 'hugh laurie' i my head for the last week, i have decided to stop fighting the obsession and just go with the flow.

so i am going to inform all of you esteemed readers that this blog will now function as a shrine to the man. if i must suffer alternating pangs of lust and lovelorn-ness then i must document this return to fangirldom.

today i downloaded a bbc miniseries just because he was in it. i don't even like criminal-thriller type things from the 90's. euw.

i have also watched every single interview with hugh laurie on youtube.

i am now listening to his protest song. which i am enjoying so much i shall leave you another song instead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYhsbQ6VxqA

despite the fact that he's singing with an american accent, despite the fact that he is not from the deep south and singing the blues, i like the album. but this might be because my brain has been evacuated and hugh laurie shaped bubbles of love are occupying it instead.

hugh laurie love

over the last 3 days i have watched every single episode of house. always appreciative of the talents and physical perfection of hugh laurie, i find i am now verging on obsession.

this is how i felt at 15 when patrick rafter was my tennis god. slightly loopy. and full of deep sighs and an almost physical longing.

it does not help that house is a horribly addictive character, with issues that he is unable to resolve. i don't need to see him in every boy i have ever dated- too much fun, horribly unreliable, and addicted to something.

following on the hugh laurie bender i've been on i downloaded and attempted to watch the girl from rio. disaster. there are some things even i cannot do for love. like sit through that movie.

they should make an app that has people's voices in them, an app where you can convert a pdf file into a sound one- and have hugh laurie or alan rickman read your essays out to you. i know i would get a lot more work on food security done if it was hugh laurie's voice telling me about pds take-off. wouldn't that be wonderful in your i pod.

how to train your dragon

managed to be the most boring, but also most satisfying film to have happened to me this week.

9-5 jobs.

9-5 jobs often stretch to 9-6 and 9-7.
they can make furtively checking your facebook at work the thrill by which you mark your days.
they can turn you into the kind of person that 'does' lunches on weekdays with friends because you might not have life outside of office to fit all of them into, while also managing some sleep and laundry time.
they can make you focus on things like cornering the last heater in the office, or being taken out for lunch by your boss that you forget that you started out trying to save the world. now all your are trying to do is submit your leave applications on time so that you can spend the weekend in italy.
this blog post about 9-5 jobs is so depressing. i shall leave. besides if i don't go to bed by 1.am i will not be able to get to work by 9.

26 January 2011

Today I ate sushi for the first time. At a proper restaurant in Geneva. We st at a large oval shaped counter. And along the top of the counter the restaurant had a sushi train. With little saucers of sushi, which we picked off. After a couple of drinks the train became hypnotic. We spent a lot of time watching the train, and talking about what might next appear on it. it was fun, as often things we wanted would go off, and then we had to wait, other times new and exciting stuff would appear, and we could be the first to get them off- racing people to the saucers of their choice.

This evening was another milestone because it was the first time ever (in Geneva) that I went to a restaurant and didn't look for the cheapest thing on the menu. I sat down, and took the fun option, didn't stress about the discounts, and didn't think twice about how much dinner would add up to. It was nice. Really really nice.

The weather cooperated as well. Geneva is very lovely on evenings when you can discuss interesting work, buy a skirt, eat out with good company, walk home without it raining and giggle about boys. Life should have more evenings like this.

(Today's alternate post- which I did not write, included a rant about Montek Singh Alhuwalia's Padma Vibhushan, the PDS, the drudgery of a steady 9-5 job, and worries about weight. All that was wiped out by the lovely evening that followed. I shall think about the PDS tomorrow. And I'm sure there will be many a future occasion to fume at Montek Singh.)

emo behaviour

when your last few months can be described by a series of garbage songs life hasn't been very kind as you need to take a chill pill.

stop listening to garbage and renew your acquaintance with the dandy warhols.

or find someone new like beirut: you can stop relating your life to every song because none of them seem to hang together, nothing is more tragic than it is beautiful, and since the words are hard to catch you can't miserably wail along (drunken or otherwise).

this is the path to happiness on your ipod.

baby steps. soon we can extend this to other parts of life.

Priest at large

My mother asked her physiotherapist if he had a priest in the family (because she imagines that any Malayali named Austin must have at least one relation in the church, and because he said he liked to have Sundays off).

He looked at her aghast and said: Ma'am I never allow priests to enter my house.


This blog is an exercise to get me to start writing again. I shall aim for 5 lines of sense three times a week. Though two times a week is also ok. And sense is optional. So on days like today, this is all you can expect.