Weddings and (not entirely related)dreams

Two months and quite a lot has happened. But surprisingly little has changed. So far(and thats hardly a month) so good. Its weird how people keep asking you how it feels to be married. As if I'd tell, either ways!!...............
One of my closest friends got married to a once senior at college. I've known both of them for close to 6 years now and they make a charming(touchwood) couple. . Love and Godspeed, you two.
We're shifting homes this weekend(to a 3 bhk) and am trying to convince lover we can afford a packers and movers service. And lover, inspite of the splurgethrift(that deserves another post on its own..i'll put it up soon, and see if the threat of public defamation makes him wiser) that
he is, is convinced they come exorbitantly priced. Not like we/I'll be doing most of the work. With his dad and mom around, its most likely they'll end up doing most of the packing and stuff and they are(like parents come) even more staunchly against the whole idea...Broz on vacation as well(shutdown.. ah..for hp times ..sniff sniff :( )....on second thots, i hardly miss hp)..

I got inspired by the tagging fever , and decided to give a shot at the latest one thatz doing the rounds. And thankfully this doesnt require me to write 55 word stories or dig up titles of my previous(non existent) posts to form a sequence.

Things i want to do
------------------------
1)Travel a lot, yeah this is cliche but wtf there's a reason cliches are. All kinds of places too, Noth India, especially the villages. Gujarat/Rajasthan/Calcutta(yeah, ive not even got that far yet...) Europe(..but onez entitled to dreams, rite) the countryside. Closer home, I wanna go to wayanad, pondi, Bekal ..this is an unrealised childhood dream, or lets say teenage..eeks, even teenage seems like so loong ago now...are my wrinkles visible yet?..(i actually reached out for a wrinkle lift kinda cream last time in h&g and l was aghast to say the least, and he actually got all so caring and soft, as if i'd gone mental and he had to handle me right..and i got put off and put the thing right back..he bought me a fab moistouriser from dove instead, but i gave it to grandma on my last visit hu coz of a medical condition needs it mire than i do)
2)Make love on a moving train :D
3)Be an awesome cook, make truly exotic stuff..this dream is stalled until m in charge of my own kitchen, whenever that is..but m confident ill be up to it then...(and to think i havent even got my basics right!!)
4)Stay a night in a tent on a riverside
5)Be a passionate lover, a fun companion and a good wife..(nah, no catch here, just one man involved)
6)Be the best mom ever.
7)Read (more)
8)Now that I'm in my (almost - no dream can be translated to absolute reality) dream job..try and do a good job of it.
9)Retire early and live in kerala..in one of those Sathyan Anthikad kindavillages where therez still a nice mix of tradition and connectivity (its retired LIFE you see, not vacation, i dont want to be lonely and banished..get the drift?) kids, they better be able to luk after themselves by then..i think lover will accompany me, though for now i'll leave it to him..this one dream is like the most important..i guess am looking to it to be a compensation of a life not so wholly lived..isnt that what all of us want of retirements?
10)Be a good daughter, a good daughter-in-law(the latter's obviously a lil tougher, but not impossible).., the best sis(to the best sis in the whole world) and the best bhabhi(the last two ive almost achieved.. m sure the concerned parties will vouch for me :D)
11)volunteer time, regularly(this is one of my new year resolutions)
12)Own a house
13)Learn belly dancing :D..(hubby butts in, says no to belly dance, says i dnt have a nice belly and should go for bharatnatyam instead..just not my cuppa tea..mohiniyattam maybe..true mal stuff..and m likely to have grace rather than speed, though i seriously doubt either...)
14)Go to a temple more often(this is another resolution for '06)

Things I can do
---------------
I've been just sitting here staring at the screen realising how this list will hardly even match up to the first, and am feeling all low about it and have decided not to put anything here

Things I cannot do
------------------------
1)Keep my own secrets, especially nice ones..there have been countless times when I've bought stuff, made stuff, ordered stuff for lover/chakki/friends..only to be too excited bout the whole idea myself and either telling them rightaway or doing it sooner than m supposed to..In all the three years i've known l, i've never given him a gift in time!!
2)Pretend (to myself or the world) that things are ok...this is no saintly stuff..and not a virtue either..and not even bout being honest..just plain loser talk.
3)Keep my voice low..especially when m excited/angry...thanks to being born to a *lecturing* couple!!..the general decibel level in our house is a few points higher(yeah i knw thats not hw decibels work..its logarithmic..but please, poetic license sake) than any average household. And hubby is such a stickler for public manners its one sore point between us.
4)Work for more than an hour at a stretch without being distracted(this is a rather new development thanks to the month long break from wrk..looks like i have some form of coderz block)
5)Stop daydreaming
6)Blog regularly..

this is getting boring, anyways Happy New Year one and all.


Footnote : lover and hubby refer to the same person. lover is for times when hez being addressed/referred to lovingly(duh!!)..and hubby is for mundane and not-so-loving references

I'm NOT an atheist..

..and not all quizzes are purrfect.

Haymaker

You are one of life’s enjoyers, determined to get the most you can out of your brief spell on Earth. Probably what first attracted you to atheism was the prospect of liberation from the Ten Commandments, few of which are compatible with a life of pleasure. You play hard and work quite hard, have a strong sense of loyalty and a relaxed but consistent approach to your philosophy.


You can’t see the point of abstract principles and probably wouldn’t lay down your life for a concept though you might for a friend. Something of a champagne humanist, you admire George Bernard Shaw for his cheerful agnosticism and pursuit of sensual rewards and your Hollywood hero is Marlon Brando, who was beautiful, irascible and aimed for goodness in his own tortured way.


Sometimes you might be tempted to allow your own pleasures to take precedence over your ethics. But everyone is striving for that elusive balance between the good and the happy life. You’d probably open another bottle and say there’s no contest.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

ON@TCC

This is the website for Chetab Bhagatz new blog. Though the overhyped launch sure makes room for scepticism..what with a passworded site(463 ) and a month long run up at his blog.

Question

how does one manage to tear herself away from all those wonderful blogs onilne to chronicle her drab and boring life..

Waxing Lore..

i sneaked out in the afternoon to go to the parlour to get my arms and legs done. Now dont think m so jobless, just that I have really nice employers who're more worried about getting the work done and not about the hours I spend in office. Which means you can find time for your personal stuff as well if you're smart enough :)
It was bout lunchtime so the ma'm(typical smalltime parlour owner .."oh gudiya u have so many pimples ..y dont u come for a cleanup" .."ur co-sister had come here the other day..ur husbands are faeeting with each other?" ..the usual ..on second thoughts shez not really small time coz she even holds classes and all that..) deployed 4 girls to the job..yeah, imagine being pulled in 4 different directions at once..for bout an hr odd..pure bliss :D
..and with the pot of wax very precariously placed between my feet..i couldnt help wondering wht would happen if soembody spilt it..so scandalous!!..Imagine "Girl scalded while being waxed(during office hours to boot)"..yikes!!
But eod they did a good job of it..and i plan to go back there next time.

Article

This is the article.
Quite a flame war is happening out there. And m too tired to explain how the interpretation is way off what I really meant.
Anyways ull propably get it if you know Kerala.

Lost..

You've totally lost it if you have to make up with someone(no matter how bad u still feel) coz life just can't go on without him/her.

Books..

HP6 is disappointing. And Disappointing in big bold red letters. Guess I can't say it enough. 600 odd pages and nothing happens, just classes and teenage infactuations and the like. Voldemort doesn't even appear either. In fact somebody said book 5 could be summarized as 'Black dies'. On the same lines, book 6 is 'Dumbledore dies'. Then again, the next books ought to be interesting, given how many horcuxes Harry's got to collect and destroy and also coz they'll no longer be in Hogwarts. But I guess we'll miss Hogwarts as well. The Wizarding school has kind of grown on the fans, with each book.
I read FPS too. And this is one fun book. Total page-turner. I'd be lost if I had to sell it coz there is little else you can say apart from that its about three guys and how they scrape throuh IIT and their mistakes blah blah..And how it is nostalgic..and the kind that you easily identify with..Yeah all the cliche'd stuff...But well, for a change the cliche holds true.

Rambling on..

Pramode Sir has, once again, put up a very thought provoking post on the pathetic state of our higher education system. I have little to add to it, though I remember how hard it was to adapt. Given, I'd come a schooling system where credit was given for conciseness(?) in expression, not for length. Even for english for that matter. Anybody who wrote the AISSE/AISSCE exams would know how hard it is to fit all you want to say into that measly question-cum-answer paper. And once you've mastered that, how it is even tougher to go back to writing tonnes of rubbish bout anything and everything in the world.
The release is done. Now sit tight, fingers crossed and pray. Or rather, blog.
A list of movies I wanna c:
1)The HHGTG movie. I dont even know what its called, and I've been warned its hardly worth the effort, but it would be a shame to have missed it.
2)Raincoat.
3)Akale, this onez supposedly won a lot of awards. But the reason I wanna c it is coz
a)It has Prithviraj. And he still makes me swoon.
b)The only other Shyamaprasad movie I've seen touched me a lot. And hez way better than certain other young generation mal directors who think art is shooting things in dim light.
4)MounaRagam. No explanation required.

Ikka Special

Somebody visited my blog :D
Yipee..clap clap clap..bring out the glasses..Let the champagne flow..:D
Herez to you anonymous visitor, choose you may to remain in the shadows, but you've made my day, night more like. Many thanks :)
Tomoz Zerinkkaz bday. Its been more than a year since dude went over to Lucknow. Ever since, its been the one phone call in a month kind of a thing. Not that I feel any less close to him. It would even be wrong even to say I miss him, not on a day to day basis. But lets just say it would have been nice if he were in the same city. Forget keeping in touch, B School seems to have ridden his life of all sense of normalsy. We go back a long way, Zerin and I. Class 9 to be precise. I still remember the day he walked in, oh if looks could kill it should have been him, back then. He had the whole female population ogling at him in like seconds, but idiot that he was he ogled right back. Now ..m sure his B school education has made him wiser on the subject of the market value of brands that woo the market a mite too hard.(OMG m gonne b killed for all this, but m banking on 1) Hardly anybody knows the blog exists..so..2) Time has this great value as a lightner of sorts..i mean it was soo long back..how much would he care now)
Anyways by the end of the term, he had like impressed the staff(centums in math, science and ss? or some such feat) and sutdents alike, he was like the star striker in the football team, and all that it takes to be the highschool hearthrob. Some of that wore off after a while(the acads mostly, I guess high school was the last place he consistently did well in acads..though he did manage to get into NIT and IIM) but I'm sure he was easily the target of the max crushes and the reason for quite a few heartbreaks back then.
Oh yeah, whats that I hear? Yes, me too:D geeee. We started as friends, but then somewhere on..you know, the usual..And again, more of the usual..common friends who try to help and mess it up..and then not talking to each other ..and then 'resolving to be friends again'..(Except that the cliche totally worked in our case..look at us 10 years later..and in spite of the distance the reducing frequency of phone calls, as thick as it gets.)
And somewhere along the line, he found his girl too. Though I can't really talk bout it out here, lets just say shez one terrific person. And that they make a lovely pair.
I've gotto run now, so lets leave Zerinkka bio incomplete. And wish him a Totally cool Bday.

Rambings..

I bought vanilla lipbalm, from gargy(never heard of them before)
And its oh sooo yummy.
Its monday morn, and we have an *important* release due on friday.
And the last thing I ought to be doing is blogging bout lipbalms.
Had an uneventful weekend. Counting days to september, when I'm going home. Need to write about onam, not the 10 liner composition type gyan, just how it feels, used to feel more like. Sometime..

My first publication ;)

For more than a month hez been after me, coaxing me to write a piece for NF. And predictably, we've had endless arguments, me stating how I'm not upto such 'writing' anymore and how his confidence is a bit over-the-top. And finally, just so I could shut him up I managed to put together a rough drafts of sorts, kind of closing an issue, afai was concerned. And today, I get a mail from some Lee at NF saying my submission has been accepted and I could send in an invoice for 100$..Now isnt that cool I say? But vin, knowing how I cant stop spilling to save my life, has forbidden me to tell ppl until it actulally appears online..Well, nobody knows the blog exists so its still safe..But hats off to Vin ..really, sometimes(most..for that matter) hez so damn patient and loving and nice I cant stop thanking my stars..For one I wouldnt have put my pen to paper if not for his pushing me, and given how lax I was any sane person would have given up after a weekz effort..And m sure dude Lee wouldnt have found it so appealing had it not been for his magic touches on my thoughtless bragging..Alrite, m sure I've already said too much..enough to embarass both of us :)..

Joblessness

is fun the first day, tolerable the next, and miserable then on. Especially for the non-self motivated types like me. I wont dwell on that too much, my legendary quaities deserve a post in its entireity..
I've finally found a credible_to_self excuse for not being an interesting blogger. Pretty basic, I dont have an intersting life. Not half as happening of all those I love to read, no roomies(anymore) and hence none of the highs of living with friends, no heart-wrenching breakups to mop about in public, no ex's to abuse(yeah redundant, just adding for effect), cant even recall when last I went to a movie. Now tell me how much you wanna read bout the average joe(or joanne ..teehee bad joke). But happened to stumble upon my old blog and thought that one was decent. And that, together with said joblessness made fertile grounds for a blogging urge.
Life has changed quite a lot in the past few months. And as goes with all change, this has been both good and bad, and promises to get better. But most of all, its seen me grow, atleast within. Not sure I wanna follow that thread. Lets just let it hang.
Among other stuff, we went on a trip from office last weekend. Most of the junta turned up, and with family too. And quite a lot of kids. In fact the majority of our colleagues(pronounced as if itz got just one 'l', koleeges..this should make vin happy) are at that stage of life they're married and have really small kids, like 2-3 years old. I'm sure that says something significant bout the company, but dunno what. Maybe the sociologists would know. Anyways, we went to Shivasamudra and Ranganthittu, stayed at a nice comfy resort by the banks of cauvery. Hardly the rafting-trekking adventure it once aspired to be, but end of the day, a decent fun trip. Alistair has more on it.
Vin has been spending a fair amount of his lifetime making and remaking his site. He just keeps making super-subtle changes ( hey I changed the comment text background to a lighter shade of light grey... Ya, so I notice ..Now howz this one..m staring blankly at the screen..Idiot cant you see I reduced the gap between the links by half a micron..) Perfectionism is one thing, but getting stuck coz of it is quite something else. Its ended up looking nice, in fact I've been asking him if he would lease it out to me. Coz he isnt doing anything with it either ways.
You know what people do when they have zilch to write bout. They just sneak in links, to other people's blogs, to interesting stuff on the web and the like. Well, just saying..
Just back from watching a play at Rangashankara. Nice experience. And thankfully, not quite the overurhead kind of theatre. Its called eclipse. And is about a bunch of kids going to a beach to watch a solar eclipse. And yet another, called Lucy, who emerges and disappears off and on as they wait for the eclipse to happen. Through games and conversations Lucy takes each of them through a soulsearching trip. The girl who played Lucy was very pretty, and m sure Vin just couldn't take his eyes off her. And to make it worse(for yours truly) he could do it *legally*.
Chakki descends on Bangalore tomo. And how I miss her.

4 days to go

before we say 'i do' to a lifetime worth of each other.

whats with the cars in blore and dogs sticking their head out of bumpers?..not like we dont have enough on the streets.

Just one more attempt..