Hope, Love, Despair and Verbal Diarrhea

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Verbal Diarrhea and Despair

I've often been accused of being in a constant state of verbal diarrhea. Back home, I tried taking a lot of fiber in my diet, but at a point decided that it was of no use and that there are enough people in the world around me to listen to my shit. And that worked surprisingly well. I had a gang of great friends and a really cool ex-girlfriend who would put up with everything I could give them and more. I should say I did my stint in the listening business too with the above mentioned people and it was nothing to regret about. The quid pro quo was beautiful. Add that to building some nice bridges on the family side and my (verbal) bowel movements were well under control. However, after coming to a country with a population one third the size of India and probably 1% of the people around me speaking my language, I've been constipated. And all the doesn't-taste-like-cardboard 51% Fiber One, granola bars and $7.99 a basket of clementines have been of no use. I think (hopefully) that the culmination of this 6 somewhat-difficult months in the US will be in the revival of this blog as my western closet. Shit will be written here. You have been warned.

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<Random Thought #1>

Why buses look like boxes? If they're so large, streamlining their design would help, wouldn’t it? And why did they change this design,

to this one

anyway? I think the earlier ones look a little more streamlined and way cooler (adding in of course, the heating and the air-conditioning). What do you think?

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Getting back on track, I've been thinking a lot about home lately. And I think a lot of it has got to do with the fact that work in the lab has been light and I've had more time on my hands than I should have. People always complain about lack of time. Its not funny when you have more time on your hands than you need. Your brain goes into overdrive, and hallucinates. Not good.

Love

I've also come to realise that if you are ever with people you care about around you, make the most of it. Times change, places change, people change. And its better to to make good memories you can lean back on in times to come than be constantly worried about bad things that happened or great things that will never happen. Let go. There is more to life than a few sad moments, a few bad decisions and a few opportunities missed. This is something easier said than done, and I've been struggling very hard to come to terms with it. So maybe writing this down will help me get to it sooner. And maybe get someone reading this thinking about it.

Hope

In a time when Wall Street has come to mean greed and dishonesty, something that happened today gave me a lot of faith. I saw an ad for a pair of dumbbells from this guy on craigslist and met up with him. Since I also helped a friend move a couch she bought from him, I couldn't get my dumbbells that day. However, I paid him the money and let him know I would come back for it. And thanks to my memento/ghajini-like memory, forgot all about it. About three weeks later, today, I get an email from this guy asking me for my address so he could refund my money ‘cause I hadn't picked up my dumbbells. At first I wasn't quite sure if it really meant what it said. I started at the email about 45 seconds reading it over several times. I mean, think about it, someone you buy off craigslist returning money? Would you ever try to contact someone to return money for something that was their fault in the first place? Realistic probabilities are that probably 1 in a million people would do it. It means a lot to see that people with principles are still around. And sort of helps you hold on to your principles when the world around you seems to be crumbling down! I now have a great level of respect this guy and will never forget him in my life.

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<Random Thought #2>

When the fingers of our hands develop, they are webbed at first and then the cells in between the fingers die to form what we have. In this case, since our present day fingers developed from fins, it was probably faster to evolve fingers from that rather than evolving an entirely new mechanism to design muscles, skin and the likes around the bone without any cell death. However controlled cell death is no more clearly emphasized than in the worm, C.elegans where exactly 131 cells die in every developing embryo. Destruction for creation. Ironical? Interesting food for thought, me thinks.

Image: Mouse Embryonic Foot with the digits in the process of separation. Image courtesy, Michal Maňas, Wikipedia

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Ending with something nice, one of the last pictures that my beloved D100 clicked before she was given a new home. And looking forward to the day my new baby (D40? D80? As of yet undecided) will arrive. I haven't fiddled much with the image except brightness and contrast. The flowers were ones I bought in an attempt to liven up my drawing room. Looking at this I think, Damn, evolution never ceases to amaze me. Ever. What about you? What comes to your mind?

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Edit: On reading my own blog, (yes, thats how desperate and jobless I am) I had the thought that readig left-aligned text is less boring than reading justified text. And so on the command of Alignis, the Egyptian God of text alignments (my first thought was Textis, but then it was too close to Testes which sounds more Greek than Egyptian and as of now Im more partial to Egyptian Gods.) this post has been realigned.