Quality waste-of-time!

k and I are a perfect match when it comes to the matter of hanging out with folks (Y'all may notice I don't use the word perfect loosely especially when it comes to marriage stuff. Prefer to let other couples vie for the perfect couple spot; too much pressure to be one! Also, how will r~ learn the tricky art of mule-headed arguments unless we lead by practice? :p) So anyway, k and I are the kind of couple that need about 32 seconds to make up our minds when someone calls us to hang out with them.

Them: "So you wanna' hang out?"
k: (holding receiver and looking at me): "What time can we feed r~ and have her ready?"
Me: "Gimme 10"
k: "We'll be there in 15."

So that's the amount of planning we do when someone calls us. What's the word am looking for? It's not "people's person" -- that's someone people want to spend time with not someone who wants to spend time with people almost always...that's the word that describes us.

I have noticed some folks tend to keep some occasions private: anniversaries, birthdays and so on. They do cool, romantic things, fly to exotic places and come back to share awesome pictures with us. Some couples stay home and take it easy and just celebrate quietly. We, on the other hand, strongly believe in the "the more the merrier" cliche'. if k or I can squeeze in 2 additional people to the party, we would do so even if we had to spend 30 minutes convincing them that our home was a really hep hangout place and we would ensure that they would stay entertained the entire duration of their stay.

So given that, we (I should probably start speaking in the singular; k can say what he thinks in his expired blog if he wants to) or I am constantly surprised when people chose to opt out. No, am not talking about you or you in particular. This is sort of a sum total of my observations based on my 10 year stay in Lex. So anyway, why do people say no when you call them to spend time with you? Let's analyze:

• They are booked for that time.
• They do not belong to the "Oh...we are one big set of friends" camp.
• They would rather go to the dentist (or as P~ would put it, "They don't like you, don't you get it? Duh!")
• They don't like your facebook updates.

So to summarize, those people who opt out of get-togethers baffle me (maybe they really don't like my updates)! Maybe they really have important things to do with their free time than chat with me about my facebook updates. No seriously, I always wonder what the driving factor is to refuse an opportunity to share some face to face personal time in this increasingly virtual world. I guess kids are a good reason to say no. If one is throwing up on your tshirt the moment the invitation comes along, I suppose there is a valid reason to hold your breath and say no and then get your kid to sit down in the bath tub when you give her a bath (Don't get me started on that!). Another good reason is playing hard to get but wait -- we are not in College anymore. Drat! And I thought I was on to a breakthrough there deciphering the forces behind people's choices. I, on the other hand, got myself up the world's fastest, highest, all-est wooden roller coaster and my limbs shook for 30 days after the event, because while I detested and still do detest roller-coasters, I went along for the big gang (Unfortunately, the 2 other girls in the gang wanted to try out all the number 5, hardest rides. Ugh). Basically, I believe in the power of numbers; show me a big gang and I'll tag along for the ride even if it is to, God-forbid, King's Island (k, if you are reading this post, no, it does not mean we can take r~ to Kings Island. No, you may not pay random people to tag along.) And in this respect, k is just the same. When we were students and had a lot more free time, he would constantly look for excuses to call people home: we have thrown graduation parties, got-a-job parties, got-hitched parties, star-at-home parties (When Crazy Mohan and YGM were home), dal-bhati parties, golu get-togethers, New year's parties, birthday parties...you get the idea.

I suspect though that we are entering a time where we are so restless, constantly multi-tasking that the days of leisurely banter and "time pass" are behind us. We catch up online and are so caught up in our lives that we forget to leave some time out for wasting. Oh no, not to say I have mastered the art of zen living but am just throwing this out there and reaching random conclusions (because if you can't reach random conclusions on your blog, where can you?)


You know how in School, there's always this girl pleading with another girl to come...somewhere to do something, "Vaaayen! Nee vaaayen!" I suppose I am that girl now. I often wonder why I prefer to have a gathering whenever possible. Do I like the sound of conversation? Do I like the idea that I have a whole bunch of friends around me and that feels good? Am I bored too hang out with just k and to be fair to k, is he bored to hang out with just me and therefore we feel the need to invite 6 other people to dissipate it? Of course we have r~ now and she keeps us more occupied than 10 people can but even now, I prefer a gang to alone time. As one of my friends put it tongue-in-cheek, "As RS would say -- Let's get together and have some fun!"

Yes, RS would say that. And I guess that's just in my genes. Gotta remember to ask mom and dad if they were like that (Based on what I know, that is true) too.

Although sometimes, I think I go out of my way to spend time with people leading to situations such as:

"Hey, am going to get my eyebrows waxed, do you want to come along and share the joy of beauty?"

"Hey, taking r~ to the doc, wanna call it a play date and also grab a coffee with a screaming kid at Starbucks?"

I have always fantasized about living in the same town with the perfect set of people to hang out with. The kind of people who jump at the opportunity to make pots and paint them with you for example. Or eat at that tacky Indian restaurant that served GulabJamoons along with the plastic wrappers, warmed to perfection that other day. Or watch that Hindi movie that has the horrendous reviews just for the heck of it. Or waste a quality 60 minutes in your company.

Now, wouldn't that be something?

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2009.

Carry over resolutions from previous year:

1. Write a book

2. Bury an old hurt

3. Participate in a movie marathon

4. Pretend to be relaxed mom - get a massage (This one is really a new resolution)

5. Say "I am sorry" without a "but" at least once this year

6. Catch up on dancing

7. Call an old friend (This one is especially hard, much easier to email)

8. Get teeth checked (Well, I need at least one resolution that I can actually fulfill)

9. Catch up with a close relative (Yeah, I know, such is our times)

10. Do nothing

Now that I have completed spending 5 minutes in the new year making resolutions that I will not remember even a day from now, let me get on with other things that I will actually do this year :p

Wish you a cheerful and fun-filled new year!

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Spring's in the air!

Spring is finally here and lex is a beautiful princess in white again! For once, we (k, ~p and I) captured the white flowers on lens, while they bloomed for less than a week before turning a bright green! But fabulous weather has had a strange effect on dear husband. Normally, he is a bit weird. The good weather added a good dose to that normal bit. He manifested that in many ways.

Yesterday, we drove to work; it seemed like a normal day which means we were in the middle of waking up from zombie state as we parked at our office parking lot. That's when k realized that he had forgotten his shoes again (he did that, if am not mistaken, spring last year too). Sounds bizarre but it won't sound quite so bizarre if you a part of our chaotic morning routine.


I swear I will never be one of those people who wake up with a spring in their step, brush their teeth with a manic enthusiasm and sit down to a leisurely coffee and breakfast at 6.30 in the morning and then still in the same zen-like state proceed to drive to work while listening to calming melodies on FM. Anyway, to save those precious few seconds in the morning, k drives bare-feet (or on better days, sock-feet) to work and then wears his shoes at our office parking lot after finishing his coffee (i,e whatever remains of it, the rest would have poured all around our nice coffee holder in the car, but no problem they dry and form a neat bed for the next day's caffeine fix!).

Anyway, yesterday he had forgotten his good socks and his shoes. So at the parking lot, he looks at his bare feet with a confused look and asks me where his shoes are. I did what every responsible wife does in these situations. I laughed and waved a cheerful goodbye to him. So anyway, that's how he spent an otherwise uneventful day at work without his shoes and socks.

Today was another story. The weather was nice and balmy today and k decided to be really brave. He had a dentist appointment today morning at 9. "Just drop me there and I can walk back home!" So, I dropped him at the dental clinic and drove to work and around an hour later, I get a call from a number I don't recognize.

"Hi, it's me. I am locked out of the house and I don't have my cell phone. So, thought I'd...call you."

So, I did the responsible wife thing again. I laughed.

Anyway, eventually I did drive back home, gave my husband his morning cup of coffee, which he had forgotten inside the house before we left to the dentist.


I suspect good weather tomorrow too. It's going to be one entertaining spring season.

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Information, Time and Us.

I used to wonder why old(er) people, the general category of uncles, aunts, parents, in-laws and others, began conversations with "In those days...". I used to think that that was such a non-starter. Because "those days" were relevant to the people who talked about them, not the teenager who is listening to them half-heartedly, stifling a yawn. I wonder if I am making the transition from the latter to the former. At least in the sense that I want to begin my conversations with "In those days..."

Anyway, the thing with those days is, to put it simply, "time". It seems the sepia-tinted photographs of yesterday represented people who had time at their disposal. And to seek information, they went to institutions like the public library, relied on word-of-mouth and mostly advice from elders and wise men. Those days when people would have laughed if you told them "books" might become obsolete (books, not ebooks, just plain good old books). The days when time-management was not a science learnt from books or blogs but an art that women and men learned and passed on from one generation to another. I guess the difference I am trying to point out is for instance, waiting for your patti to finish her chores so she settle down to your favorite story-telling time versus downloading AmarChitrakatha from the internet and reading it to your kid right now because he wants to hear it now - the anticipation that fills the wait-time makes all the difference, doesn't it? Perhaps that is not feasible because we live here and patti in India , to me it is again a question of time and how much of it we are willing to spend on ourselves and on others...something that this generation of self-help (American?) books keep quoting - "Spend time pampering yourself", "Relax and spend time just the way you want it"...And in this indulgence is lost a much greater time that you think...

Fast forward a few decades and you reach "my school days" when I did not check email, did not know what SMS meant, orkut/myspace/facebook did not exist and instant-messaging was definitely not a buzz-word and greeting cards were not synonymous with hallmark. And then in Bits-Pilani, we were told we could use "Pine" and whoa! We could actually write electronic letters to each other. And that's what we did. Our emails were long and had a beginning, middle and end, somewhat like a letter.

Fast-forward a few more years and now I see kids that are always "logged in". Every morning, they check their cellphone for SMSs, missed-calls, voice-mails, next their preferred social community scraps or whatever the fad-word is that kids these days use to indicate incoming messages :p and then they log on to msn/yahoo/aol - actually I think they stay logged on through out the night - they just check for IMs they might have perhaps missed and then emails, RSS feeds, reddit/digg and so on. If the parents are lucky, the kids might have sneaked in a good-morning and actually made eye-to-eye contact...

And really, I am no better. Perhaps I don't scrap (see how this is also a verb now?) on social communities 25 times a day but I am definitely a product of this generation of people overloaded with bits and bytes of information wherever they go (But a slightly older product and hence capable of standing at a vantage point and looking behind at a day when people were not so information-obsessed). While we are considered fortunate to have so much information so easily accessible (Imagine how much easier it is to locate a pizza hut and order a pizza - google even makes the call for you...well, come to think of it, it was probably more fun to stop and ask someone for directions and maybe discover parts of your city you had never seen before, but those are indulgences for people of a different time. Not us. We need information. Yesterday.), we also see situations where people have to actually make a resolution to stay off the internet. I remember an article talking about email becoming obsolete and then I remember reading about this guy who wanted to see how long he could exist without hitting google. Now, we have made the switch to "existing" without information, not just information as a way to make our existence more comfortable.

After making you read through five fat paragraphs about information overload, I am going to claim that I didn't really intend to write about IO.

I wanted to write about patience and time. Patience in a world that is constantly filling your thoughts and being - patience to actually open a scented letter wrapped in silk, filled with words written painstakingly, slowly by a human hand. Patience to write such a letter to a loved one. To take the time to think and write. Not type and then think about it. I wonder how different it would be to live in that sepia world of our old photos, to rise with the sun and have the time to serve hot coffee to your husband, just the way he likes it, and to savor the smell and moments of significant nothings, precious moments spent together before he buried his nose in the morning newspaper and I guess, at that moment, I would have sighed and walked back to the kitchen waiting for the other women in the house to rise and share "information" with me - limited but first-class information, like my first-class coffee...

First-class because I hear it from a human being. It might be prejudiced, incorrect, incomplete...but it is personal.

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Are we there yet?

No. Not now, not ever. We are never where people assume we are or even where we assume we should be. So, what exactly am I talking about?! Time and age, to give you a short (cryptic?) answer.

I’ve seen it happen too often for me to ignore it. When I reached my 20s, I couldn’t believe that I was no longer a teenager. When I graduated with a Master’s degree, I couldn’t believe that I was a working professional and not a PIGS (Poor Indian Graduate student) anymore. Two batches of students had successfully started or perhaps even finished their Graduate study by the time I graduated! I was actually advising them about courses and I just finished being on the receiving end of the same advice!

My office colleague once told me, “You know, I was here in this play pen with my 1 year old daughter and someone there called me a mommy and I didn’t respond. It took me sometime to realize that I was the mommy now!”

Me? I am going to be 30 in a few years, the big three-O. Liquor Barn has a whole aisle dedicated to birthday jokes, caps, greetings that convey pretty much the same messageyou are no longer climbing the hill; you have begun descending the other side of the hill. Yes, I have heard the adage - You are as young/old as you think you are. And then again, are you? It would be quite silly of me to act like a teenager now but that's how I feel (want to be?)...

I remember when I received my first mail addressed cheerily to Mrs.Shah and I just did not make the connection. “Mrs? That mail is not for me. I am just a girl.” A girl trying to adapt to being a woman, still…8 years have passed since I was a teenager and I am still adapting. And before I can adapt to being a woman, an adult, I will soon be a mom and then an aunt and so on.

We are never there. Are we?

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