Wish List

Another boring day in the lab. With no deadlines looming real close and one that I slogged my ass to meet only yesterday, I think I’ve earned a day off. Sure I did the odd jobs that always pop up in the lab and of course some planning and reading. But most of this morning I just sat back and thought! It was a peaceful day for a lot of intro and retro -spection! Some cold shoulders, some very warm hugs and a lot of brickbats and bouquets have led me into wondering what it is about me that people love or hate. What is it that I like about myself and more importantly what is it that I wished for. That chain of thought led to this :

Things I wish for :

1. I wish I could just say boo to the world when I want to. I place WAY too much importance to what people think of me. I have this very bad urge to please everybody. I can’t go to sleep at night if I think someone is mad at me. Even if that someone is in the wrong or didn’t matter at all. I say and do stuff just to please people. Sometimes I wish I could be honest about what I feel and quit being the hypocrite I am!

2. I wish I could be impervious to hurt.

3. I wish my happiness didn’t depend on what others thought of me or how they treated me. Like one very wise person told me- Detachment is the key to happiness!

4. I wish I had one (atleast one) extraordinary talent! At the risk of sounding like a show off ; sure I can do a lot of things tolerably well and some very well! But 23 years into my existence and I am still looking for that one special thing I can do and that I am known for. Like musical genius , or superior talent in a sport, or artistic ability, fantastic quizzing skills or even genius level intelligence. Instead I have only reasonable potential in all of the above. I am grateful for what I have and who I am. But I am sick of being a “medium” in everything! (and for the dirty minds : tut tut! :P) Like in school when you had girls go by tags like,” the singer” or “the athlete” or the “super brainy girl”… instead I was “the overenthusiastic girl who takes part in everything!”. I am definitely happy and proud that I was that way but sometimes I think I would any day trade that for a supertalent!

5. I wish I had more patience and didn’t blow my fuse quite that often. I wish I could instead stay angry with vengeance. Actually I’m glad I don’t. But I just wish I didn’t crumble into a bundle of tears and frustration everytime I lost my temper!

6. I wish I was more motivated. My dad always termed my performance in tests or in any competitive event “satisfactory underperformance!”. I wish I didn’t accept mediocrity and pushed myself more.

7. I wish I didn’t waste so much time and push things for later. I wish I focussed more on research and worked hard at it! This includes the awful lot of time I spend reading blogs/news and other random stuff on the internet.

8. I wish I could have a daily routine of prayer, exercise and reading and stick to it!

9. I wish I didn’t have such a high opinion of myself. No. Seriously.

I have been surprisingly philosophical so far. And so on a more flippant note : I wish ..

1. I had better teeth!

2. I could lose all the unhealthy weight.

3. I could own a bookstore.

4. I could identify ragas by instinct!

5. I could tell all the people upsetting me to go to hell! (sometimes advisor included!)

6. I could magically conjure food!

7. I could speak Telugu

8. It were summer all year!

9. I always live by a beach.

And of course I wish I stay this happy all my life!

SupernovaK!

Finally! It’s about 12 hours since I saw Novak “Nole” Djokovic fall down on his knees in ecstasy after destroying the swiss robot - a feat which was formerly touted impossible in a slam outside France.And the euphoria is still there! For the record, I do hate the “Fedexpress!”. Ever since he beat Sampras in Wimbledon in 2001..ending a an era in The Wimbledon championships! I still remember watching that match at home and the heart ache felt at the end. I remember going downstairs to find R perippa equally emotional and shattered. Granted Federer is a phenomenal player with unquestionable genius. He is also reasonably level headed and free of any airs! Yet however hard I try; despite the gloominess slam after slam seeing him run away with the trophy, despite the unequivocal praise and declarations of genius, I couldn’t get myself to root for him! I would have been a much happier tennis fan if I had joined the Federer bandwagon. Seriously.

I flitted between several other possible replacements for the Sampras shaped hole in my heart - but not with too much success; for me or them! Safin was the first. I did watch him beat Sampras in a fantastic display of tennis in the 2000 US Open and also watched him on Zee English after that on the David Letterman show (I was supposed to be studying late in the night!). Somehow the fact that it was only Flushing Meadows and that Safin was a hunk helped. However he is probably the biggest waste of space on the Tennis Draw! Such talent wasted due to no motivation and a complete lack of sporting temperament. Slam after slam he remains an also ran crashing out in unnecessary 5 setters. He did come close to redemption once - 2005 Aussie but that was a flash in the pan!

I really like Andy Roddick. Great court presence, a fantastic serve, superb attitude on and off the court, a great sense of humour and great looks too! However hard he tries though, he is always found lacking playing against Roger. His performance in the 2007 US open semis was mind blowing and playing anybody else, he would have trampled them on course to the final. But even that wasn’t enough to beat Federer. In any other era, in the absence of a phenomenon like the Swiss, he would have been a multi grand slam champion. Yet he remains among the runner -ups!

The search for the 21st century tennis hero continued.Somehow Nadal doesnt appeal to me. The grunts and the sliding and all that top-spin puts me off. The 2007 Montreal masters came as a brilliant ray of hope to me. I had seen Djokovic in the French. However I don’t enjoy the play at Roland Garros enough for him to leave an impression. But it was a completely different story in Canada. The scrawny Serb impressed me with his wonderful playing. The glint in his eye and the confidence gave me more hope. By the time I watched him do his famous impersonations I was a complete convert! Inexperience and nerves were his undoing in last year’s US open. But in Melbourne this year, he has played like a champ! When he hopefully beats Tsonga tomorrow to lift the championship trophy, he will have a die-hard fan cheering for him! Thanks to him, today I was the one with the smug look, watching a Federer match with S. I say, Let’s go Novak, let’s go!

Bedside book pile!

I like to think of myself as an avid reader. I have a compulsive need to read, especially while eating or sitting on the potty! On several occasions I have stooped down to reading the backs of shampoo bottles to satisfy the craving when caught without a book. There is always a book in my bathroom. Same with eating. That relation is symbiotic - I like reading while eating but unfortunately this has led to the “have to eat something while reading” syndrome. Enid Blyton always made me hungry. And the cups of plain delicious bournvita eaten then, have now enlarged (pun intended) into this unhealthy urge. Also, I used to have to read at least a page before closing the shutters every night. Grad school work load (it exists! even if not working always looming in head to make one guilty), living and eating with friends and several other distractions (damn wireless internet and Youtube) has led to a steady decrease in my book devouring speed. I did finish the last Harry Potter and a Thousand Splendid Suns in one sitting but in general I take several weeks to finish my books. This is disheartening to me as I was always a quick reader and took pride in being one! This however doesn’t affect my book purchasing speed. Now I read multiple books at the same time; something I never could before. I want to put a list down somewhere for the fear of losing track!

Currently reading :

1. My Name is Red - Orhan Pamuk (third attempt at finishing-Love the writing but have to reread every time cos the details become hazy!)

2. Blink - Heard so much about it..yet to make significant progress into it!

3. Blind willow sleeping woman - My first Murakami! Have to read at steady pace giving me enough time to reflect on it. Finished two stories so far!

4. Shopaholic and Baby - Hey everyone needs their chick lit!I looove the series. Sadly this will be the first book in the list I finish!

5. Karma and other stories - Rishi Reddy.  Read a review in Jabberwock’s blog and bought the book!

Hopefully will write some book reviews once I get done with them. There should be a way to sneak them as pdfs onto my laptop. Can pull off some reading time at school pretending to read scientific papers!

Yawn!

Howdy dear blog! My inspiration for posts seem to be sprouting from google talk status messages. The one about caucuses did and now this..Maybe thats why I started writing a blog. Because a single line in the gtalk window is not enough vent for creativity or to just tell someone (who doesn’t care in the first place ?) what is up! When I was in school in Madras I used to go back home and recount my entire day to my mom. Frankly nobody is that tolerant these days

Coming back to “yawn”…My accomplishments for the day are as follows :

1. TEM lab from 9:30-12:45 in the morning. It didn’t help that I woke up at 8:30 or that the bloody instrument was so off alignment. So that is essentially 3 hours in a dark room and a funny guy, a reticent TA and a bright green light for company!

2. Heavy chinese food for lunch at Moys = first nutritional intake of the day (altoids don’t count right?)

3. Conveniently convinced post doc and postponed an experiment to tomorrow - which meant afternoon off!

So after organizing my to do lists according to category, project and priority all of which will remain unnoticed or ignored till I am bored enough to do it again, here I am waiting for it to be decently late to get out of school (I am weird that way!I care too much about people’s impressions!) and staring at my computer screen with my reader and news pages open and…………..YAWNING!

Delurking and Dandilsa

First things first - This is my third attempt at something close to a blog. The previous 2 suffered horrible deaths. While one was gobbled at the hit of a delete button, the other barely saw daylight post registering! However my obsessive compulsive blog reading is getting closer to kilpauk (for non chennai residents -tats were the hospital treating mental disorders is located) with my google reader bursting at its seams. Yet there is the need to talk about somethings to someone - without coming off as arrogant, stupid, insipid, bloated or plain obnoxious..what better way..start a blog! (again!) That’s why I am delurking in the blogworld!

Dandilsa is a word in my family, synonymous with a hog. The story goes that on being nagged by an aunt for more food my grandmother exclaimed asking if there was a dandilsa in her stomach - it being a monster that gobbles up the food leaving you perpetually hungry! To me, the word means family jokes, rib tickling-nicknaming humour that runs in my dad’s side of the family, familiar smells and family gatherings and every other beautiful thing that nostalgia is about. And funnily enough the nom de plume fits perfectly with my OCDesque blog devouring habits. So there - Dandilsa Delurking!