Oh, The Places You'll Go...

Cincinnati... Schenectady... Albany... Philadelphia... Washington DC... Cincinnati... Pittsfield... Anaheim... Atlanta... New Jersey...

Long drives. Tedious lay-overs in sterile airports. Staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night, in alien hotel rooms. Flights at every unreasonable hour. Trying to navigate to strange airports down unknown roads in the wee hours, without a GPS, and watching the sky grow light on the way.

The days have begun to blur. The one shining light at the end of this haze is, at the end of this year...

HOME!!!!!! (This is where the soundtrack kicks in, softly at first, and then rising gradually as the scene fades out. Paul Simon, singing "Homeward Bound." How cliched can one get?)

Meanwhile, quick updates, for those interested:
1. No, Paul Simon didn't happen. (JAP, looks like your curse worked, you evil person.)
2. But (HA!) Roger Waters did - the Dark Side tour, in Virginia. He is THE man. I had goosebumps through most of the concert. (I wish I'd also had some of the stuff causing the blue haze above our heads, but unfortunately, that wasn't an option.)
3. The Bartimaeus Trilogy, written by Jonathan Stroud, is absolutely brilliant. Entertaining and witty, makes mincemeat out of some other popular wizardry-related series. Please pick it up.

I try to have all updates or learnings in nice round numbers, like 5 or 10, but my day's beginning to blur again, so hasta mañana.

Paul Simon, anyone?

This is a cry of despair.

Paul Simon is playing at the Radio City Music Hall in NYC on Saturday, 21st October. I'm desparate to go. But none of my friends here (at least, the ones I know in person!) are interested - not quite their genre.

Anyone out there wanna go?

Cultural Confessions

For the longest time, I thought Jessica Simpson was a character on "The Simpsons".

I haven't read "7 Habits" nor "Siddhartha", nor watched "Citizen Kane."

I have, on the other hand, read "Congo", "The Andromeda Strain", plenty of Alistair Macleans, Louis L'Amours and Sudden time without number.

And watched Sleepless in Seattle, The Man With One Red Shoe, See No Evil Hear No Evil and You've Got Mail several times.

And (the kicker) I still, just occasionally, listen to Cliff Richard, The Carpenters and Abba.



(Head hanging low) I'm a cultural pleb, hoi polloi.

La Dolce Vita

The end of a journey of little sleep, delayed flights, late arrivals and early meetings, malfunctioning credit cards, miserable weather, incorrect GPS information and other such. A final delay, sitting in a tiny aircraft on the runway for an hour and a half, cell-phone and laptop so out of juice that I could neither talk to anyone nor work, nothing to read or write on. Finally, clearance to take off. A rocky take-off, the small plane buffeted and tossed around by a powerful storm, the world invisible as we rose through clouds banked miles high.

And suddenly, as we emerged from the cloud, a perfect, perfect circular rainbow against the clouds, and our plane sillhouetted within it.

Wonder lies in the little things. As long as there's something to make one go "wow!", most other things fade into insignificance.

And now, even the song is over

Why don't we stop fooling ourselves?
The game is over,
Over,
Over.

No good times, no bad times,
There's no times at all,
Just The New York Times,
Sitting on the windowsill
Near the flowers.

We might as well be apart.
It hardly matters,
We sleep separately.

And drop a smile passing in the hall
But there's no laughs left
'Cause we laughed them all.

And we laughed them all
In a very short time.

Time
Is tapping on my forehead,
Hanging from my mirror,
Rattling the teacups,
And I wonder,
How long can I delay?

We're just a habit
Like saccharin.
And I'm habitually feelin' kinda blue.
But each time I try on
The thought of leaving you,

I stop...
Stop and think it over.

~ Overs: Simon & Garfunkel

Rethinking Frontiers

My Very Elegant Mother Just Sat Upon Nine Pins will have to be rethought.

Alien-ated

So there was a blood donation camp in my office building a few days ago. Posters were up for ages, asking, begging people to please donate. And as a good donor from years ago, I decided I would.

Off I went, on the appointed day, to the van in which the donations were to take place. Only to come back, because they needed ID. Back with the ID. Return again, to figure out my social security number - without which they wouldn't accept a donation, and which I never remember. Some time to hunt through documentation to find the number, then back again to the van. Fill out forms, extensive, long-winded forms about exposure to disease, sexual promiscuity, etc. Get finger pricked for blood-type testing. Wait for the nurse to be free to see me.

Only to discover that if you've been in the US for less than 3 years at a stretch, and especially if you come from sub-Saharan Africa, or India, or "places like those", they don't want your blood. Rationale: you've been exposed to malaria (I know malaria stays in the system for a while after you fall ill, but does it have that long a gestation period?!!) and "other such diseases".

I feel like I'm in a bad movie, where someone with a guttural Germainic accent is telling me, "So you fink you kan gif blood, eh? Vell, you're wrong. Go back to vere you kame from, filthy Indian."

Alright, so this is an exaggeration. Still, I'm feeling intensely alienated right now. Ironically, that's probably just how the INS wants aliens to feel.