Month: January 2005

During this recent break, you know the one we had for winter, I saw a ton of movies. As usual, I enjoyed making fun of most of them. A lot of people relate pictures I take with movies. For instance, when people see this one, their first reaction is “Oooh, just like in Signs“.

I hadn’t seen Signs before, so my only response would be, “I guess”. But that recently changed.

Amongst the many movies I caught up on this holiday season, Signs was one of them. Now there are one class of people who go “Oh, it’s so cool. Everything in the movie had meaning. The girl and her issue with water. The boy and his asthma. The baseball batter and his quitting/being kicked from the team. …”

I am not one of those people. All I have to say is this.

“Why would an alien race whose bodies disintegrate on contact with water want (or try) to take over a planet WHICH IS OVER SEVENTY PERCENT COVERED IN WATER? WHAT IF IT, oh, I don’t know, RAINED?”

Because they’re retarded, that’s why.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere. And rationale behind stuff I wrote elsewhere. Semi-interesting reads for people interested in my extremely slowly growing photography skills. Speaking of photography, a couple of new people are looking into using delineate’s code/style for their site.

The more the merrier.

I have exhausted my quota of writing for the day I am afraid.

Not to be ignorantly insensitive about the N. Korean scheme of doing things, but hey, that’s what I am going to be.

Guess where yours truly would probably put to death in some horrible fashion?

It recently dawned on me that I am not a kid anymore. Bluntly put, I’m rather old, and have been around a while. With minimal deductive logic, I realised this meant my parents have been together for an even longer time. November 11^th? 21^st? (something like that — a date I should know, but don’t) last year was special for my parents, considering they’d officially put up with each other for 25 years and all.

I figured they needed some sort of upto-now lifetime achievement award. In my small way, I mean.

So, a while earlier (last January to be exact), I started writing them this letter. It was just me articulating how much they meant to me, and my plans relating to a small token of appreciation I’d prepared marking the occasion. Yes, I wrote — as in using a pencil and paper. As I’d planned, I finished it before I travelled home-home for the summer and gave it to them in person when I was in Madras (June-July, or something).

The plan outlined, as a 25^th anniversary gift, shipping them off to any part of the world of their choice, for as long as they wanted to be there and me footing all expenses.

Needless to say, when I first gave the letter to them proposing the idea, they were all “No way!”, and then that became “We’re so proud (tear, tear), but we can’t take this from you”, which later morphed to “OK, we have these tiny plans” (to do what I don’t remember, except they were tiny), and so on … . Of course, I reject all minor plans holding out for them to crack and come up with something better, after battling all the initial guilt.

By now it’s almost November, the anniversary is looming sometime thereabout and nothing’s happened, so I get a bit impatient. I mean, they’ve seen different places and lived in different places, and it was hard for me to get a handle on what new experience it is they were really interested in having. After some pushing, it’s made clear to me that they’d always wanted to take a cruise down the Nile.

Cool, OK, so Egypt it is. Tataaa. (I can be impatient, yes.)

But then there were a ton of life things… like working people can’t just arbitrarily pack up and leave because their son thinks it’s a good idea, so things were delayed for another couple of months.

So, finally, in a couple of days, my parents are being shipped off to some region of Egypt, and have a ton of plans as to what it is they plan to see and do (snorkeling?) there, for a week and a half or so. They then continue on to other places to meet old friends (something I wouldn’t do, but amn’t complaining that they are) for a while. Oh, and the thing at some point includes 4-5 days on a cruise down the Nile. What they wanted.

Now they’re all in tears all proudlike and I guess, love me.

This, ladies and gents, is how one buys love.

Bookmark, read, learn, and refrain from frequent abuse.

I’ve been extremely … I don’t know the word. It’s like, my mind can’t keep its focus on a given topic or task for more than a minute or so at a time. (Which is obviously why there aren’t any real posts. I take my time to come up with something coherent. For instance, halfway through typing that sentence, I broke, and typed part of a later paragraph.) It is a weird sort of a combination of disturbed and distracted. Even when I’m “sleeping”. I don’t really dream usually, and sleep extremely soundly. But for a few weeks now, I’ve been sleeping a lot (as in timewise) but not really feeling too refreshed. Meaning, arbitrary tossing and turning. And the dreams, for the love of god, I’ve been having this extreme multi-level recursive dreams. You know, the weird ones in which you think you’ve woken up, but really just waking up from a dream within a dream? God they get old real fast.

So, to cut a long story short, since I am incapable of being funny or remotely interesting, I will plagiarise.

There is a good chance you’ve probably seen this before somewhere else. But here is a hilarious clip [~ 34 MB] from one of the September Late night with Conan O’ Brien shows. I insist you should watch if if your bandwidth allows you to.

There haven’t been updates recently because I’ve been doing stuff. My new years eve was spent at this marathon comedy session at a neighbouring comedy club. It was very good, but not awesome. I can’t laugh-laugh at non-relationship humour anymore. Coupling and Sex and the City have spoiled me silly.

I’ve been reading a lot. I can’t believe how much fun that’s been. My current reading list includes books on photography, classics like “Great Expectations”, and ridiculously advanced mechanics books that regard General Relativity style non-linear field theories in physics as “fairly elementary”. Believe it or not, I now actually feel like I’m getting close to entering the “Gates of Coolness”, where I am actually comfortable with my comprehension of things around me and my ability to express them succinctly.

I’ve also begun to see why I’m working on a “Doctor of Philosphy” and not “Uber master of this sub-subset of science”. A lot of things are beginning to make sense, and reading’s helping. Needless to say, I’ve thought of a cheeky title for the dissertation, as well as a humourous disclaimer, but I seriously doubt I’d get away with having them in there.

I am uninspired, but happy. Actually, I am inspired, just not in a way that I thought I wanted to be. Speaking of which, I’ve almost homed in on the primary trait that’d determine whether I’d love to spend the rest of my life with someone, or not. I can’t word it yet, but it’s now a crystalline concept.

And that feels good.