Saturday, October 27, 2007

We're all Going On A...

We're going to Goa! We're going to Goa! We're going to Goa! *Runs around in circles screaming and waving hands like a mad person*


*Stops*

The three of us for five days.
It is going to be like, so awesome.
*screams excitedly*
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In other news, the English-killing gormless lady's paper is over! Torturous it was, really. Especially because I wasnt well the last night, planned to get up at five and study, ended up waking at 8.45 and having to rush there without having studied a thing, and entered the exam hall 20 minutes late, with a headache. The paper was a mess. Urgh. Came back home and flung my unread notes aside. My mum picked them up in amusement. Couple of minutes later she was in hysterics. She has newfound pity for me when talk to her of my language class woes.
The English notes were incomprehensible. Made absolutely no sense.
But anyway, its over! I wish I could say it was my last, but at least I can say its my last but one. How I will celebrate at the end of fourth semester when I can give the whole darn thing up.
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Also, I just thought I'd mention how unnerving it is when your parents talk about you as if you arent around. Mine do that a lot. In the car especially when we're driving to the occasional function or family get-together. This morning as we're driving to one, they're sitting there and talking.
I mean, just because I'm in the back seat, doesnt mean I've gone completely stone deaf.

"Youngsters these days. Mrs so and so at the lab was telling me how she cant afford to depend on any of the younger crowd for anything. They're married to their phones. The phone is always a priority for them. Always."
"And they're never on time. What's the difficulty in getting there at the time specified?"
"My friend was telling me how her daughter leaves her clothes all about the place. Its the same thing with MM. She just leaves her things where ever she wants to and I have to pick up after her."
"If they'd only look at their watches from time to time, thats all I'm asking."
"If you tell them, they get angry with you. Hypersensitive."

And I just sat there listening in amusement. Maybe they're trying to tell me something.

Nah, that couldnt be it.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Catch Vs. the forest

Infancy and Childhood were two units we had this semester in our Developmental Psychology portions.
Sadly, our teachers didnt have the time, poor things to teach these chapters in class.
So, of course, we ended up having to leaf desperately through our fat text books the night before the exam- in the hope of mugging up the first eleven years of life.
It was quite entertaining.

Did you know that only 20% of 4 year olds can throw well, and only 30% of them can catch?
I laughed out loud when I read that because I remembered the time when I was around that age, maybe a little younger.

Sidetracking:
I can sort out when memories are from, by the length of my hair at the time they happened.
If I remember having almost waist length hair at the time, then it was before I was four, before we moved out of Bellsize Park to the house on Foxlees.
Short, shoulder length hair, and it was just after we'd moved. (I still cant believe how my mum and the Chinese hairdresser tricked me into that.)
Shorter hair still, and an irritating fringe that got into my eyes, was my fifth birthday and beyond.
And two inches below the shoulder again was when I was late seven-ish.
End of sidetrack.

So anyway my dad over the weekend would suddenly say, "Come on MM, lets play some Catch!"

I didnt want to hurt his feelings or anything, but quite frankly, I preferred my stuffed toys. And my dolls, Laura and Minnie (on account of the embroidered mouse on her dress).

According to my books, children begin pretend play in Middle Childhood (6 to 11 yrs), but I seemed to have gotten a headstart.
Since my mum had been regaling me with stories from the Ramayana (it was a big fat yellow book she read from), I was quite transfixed with the idea of living in a forest.
So I'd decided Minnie and I were going to be exiled, and we'd picked up our imaginary bows and stridden off into the forest.
Laura was Sita, I thought her too incapable to be saddled with a weapon. And the stuffed monkey I had (well actually it was a Monchichi, darling things, anyone heard of them?) was Hanuman, but he didnt come ino the picture until the end when we all said "Jai Bolo Hanuman ki!", my favourite part of the whole charade. Chicka was his name actually. Chickaboo, to be precise (no stress on any of the syllables). Adventures that monkey's had, ask Snum to tell you about them sometime.

So anyway, the golden deer had just arrived and it was all very exciting and adventurous, and it was about to be the time where we'd all bow down and shout in praise of Chicka.
And suddenly, here was my dad, wanting to play Catch.

These adults must be humoured, god bless them, I'd thought and tottered off in his direction.

Thing is, I was never able to catch the ball. It makes me laugh now when I remember it. Everytime he threw it at me, I'd wildly clamp my arms together like a crocodile, head turned away, eyes screwed shut.
And whenever I threw it, it landed 2 feet away from me, no matter how hard I tried or how angry I was.

My dad kept encouraging me, hoping for the best. But I couldnt do it.
Naturally, being three and all.
I was telling him about it yesterday and we'd a good laugh about those futile attempts we'd made to fine tune my motor skills.

Sooner or later though, he'd let me get back to my imaginary weapons and the gazelle, and I'd gladly scamper off to greener forests.

Friday, October 19, 2007

I was right

I did brillantly.

I keep forgetting, but this sort of thing always happens to me during exams. Always.
I've talked about this before, here and it happened last end semester psych exam as well.

Thankfully I didnt do anything as daft this time. Man, was I glad when it was over though. Just sort of scribbled something for the last answer and hoped for the best.

Now that we've written so many exams in our lifetimes, they dont seem to matter as much as they did before. Sad really, we dont tend to work as hard as we did in our earlier days.

On another note, sometimes it depresses me how useless our course is. Not as much as it does Osh and Jay perhaps, but still sometimes.

And other times it doesnt. Like during the exam, when we were made to sit next to the PCM students. Ha-ha. Good it felt, to smirk at them as they desperately tried to remember formulas and derivations that I dont ever have to attempt to mug up again ever. Tra la la! *joyful jig around the computer table*

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Exams and what they do to you

Somehow, somehow, the fact that my exams are less than 24 hours away and I havent opened my books yet isnt scaring the bleeding daylights out of me.
Its very strange.
I'm screwed. I know it. And yet it appears as though I dont care.
Thing is, I think I do, which is why I am trying so desperately to distract myself from the whole situation.

So anyway, very cleverly, I havent been studying. What I have been doing over the last couple days instead is:

1. Seeing the Black Eyed Peas live in concert. Yeah baby. It was awesome. Rained a bit while they were playing Lets Get it Started (which they played at the end... "Les miks it up abid" Will.i.am must've thought) but that just made things funner. He made up an impromptu rap about Bangalore, quite entertaining. He's funny too, really funny. We were pretty close to the stage, so we could see them up close, and Fergie thoroughly impressed me. I never really liked her much before, but she was terrific. She did like, six headstands across the stage as she was singing. And she's 32! What a bod, what a voice. Apl.de.ap had some awesome dance moves as well.
They did do some research on Bangalore and India. Every cheesy lead-in to a song was linked to something Indian. Dont Lie was apparently inspired by Lord Ganesha so he would help them in their relationships (What? I laughed out loud at that). Fergie in a bad Brit accent said that "Britishers' 'av stolen your consept of curry and made i' popular back there" before breaking into London Bridge. She also said that she thought naan bread was Ferigilicious. :|
Taboo kept going on about how Bangalore shuts down at 11.30, but we were going to party the whole ****ing night.
They ended the concert at 10.15pm. Bit disappointing.

2. Watching TV. Several straight hours of it. Having not watched so much TV prior to the current panic period, it came as quite a disappointment. Bored the pants off me. I've got absolutely no decent channels, it seems like. I'm definitely getting Tata Sky.

3. Going to MG for, as it turned out later, no particular reason. Nicehair, Osh and Snum (in the avataar of b-munch) were there, and they kept me nicely entertained. It was quite pleasant actually. Except, of course for it being a collosal waste of time.

4. Going through the usual excitements and disappointments that I have wisely come to expect as part of life.

5. Reading books. I'm reading five different ones now, if you'll include this month's Readers' Digest, and the one I finished this morning- a particularly entertaining PG Wodehouse called Damsel in Distress- do try it if you happen to come across it sometime.

6. Going to Osho's in a panic, to study. Of course, we didnt. Typical. We did eat a lot though. Snum caught a good episode of House. And we panicked together, later on in the day, which was fun.

7. Eating and sleeping. Scary amounts. Snum has told me to stop.


Genius plan if you ask me. I'm going to do brilliantly well in the exams now. Brilliantly well. Oooo I cant wait. :|

Friday, October 12, 2007

The last half of September

A delightful bit of randomness scribbled over the the last two weeks of September.
:| Not.
I dont particularly like these randomness posts with all the lines in the middle. Easy to write of course, but too much like diary entries and horribly boring.
Still, we must keep this blog alive, and I'll do what I must to ensure its survival.
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I noticed when Osh and I went to the slum area on a photography assignment how terribly difficult it can be living somewhere if you dont know the local language.
Very tough to get yourself out of sticky situations if you dont speak the same language everyone else does. And if you do: immediate cameraderie.
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Beauty and the Geek. Or perhaps, as it should have been called, Dolts meet the Socially Dim-witted.
Surprisingly interesting. And educative. I didnt know it was possible for people to be that dumb.
A fan of trashy television, I am.
Hooked.
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Start of angry unwarranted rant, previously shared with Y and Snum
Okay okay. So Hutch is now Vodafone. We get it. For crying out loud. You dont have to play the ad again and again and again. How much did you have to pay Star to have them play ONLY your ad, continuously, the whole day?

It was an effective ad. Played once, I noticed it. Smiled even, at the cute little pug bemused by the changes his doghouse had suddenly undergone. Hummed along with the tune. Noted the change, and carefully stored the piece of information in my head. Hutch now Vodafone. Done.

But then it came on again.
And again.
Once more.
And again after that.
It was like a nightmare I couldnt wake up from.

Once would have been enough every half hour. You didnt have to make flashy signs that played during the course of every programme on Star World, cruelly distracting the viewer from the programme she was so interested in.
And then play the ad with that ghastly tune over and over again between programmes.

Waste of money that. Not to mention bloody irritating. Was that your aim? To infuriate present and potential customers? To insult their intelligence? "Duh, like, guys, I dont think they'll understand unless we play it over and over again, like, 27 million times," is that what you thought? Gah!
End angry rant
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That superlatives application is really cool ya.
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They're out. Our lab journals and anthologies. We didnt do anything until the 13th hour, of course. Lounged about making vague statements about what we were going to do. Yawned and postponed and told people to chill man, there's so much time.
Got into petty but entertaining little fights over who was being bossy and who was just not getting off their asses goddammit! (Not our group, smirk, we just watched eagerly from afar)

So it ended up that a whole lotta of work in three short days was what brought the little things into this world. Sigh. What a feeling when they came out.
They arent perfect though. Not nearly.

If anyone had said that to me at the time I was lugging them back from the printers I'd have socked them squarely on the jaw. But now that ample time has passed and I have had the chance to mellow out slightly, and glance over the fruits of our labours with a less biased eye, I notice there are several terrific blunders. Ah well, I accept them, flaws and all.
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Nobody knows how to use Quark Express. Nobody. Not even the gits over at Print Xpress. If you do, you could open a small shop and earn millions. Go on, I dare you.
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She who said the stuff in the last random thought from here, really takes the biscuit.
She kills the English language. And I dont mean she hands it a glass of juice with sleeping pills in it. I mean she takes a sledge hammer and literally hacks at it till it's screaming with pain and agony, and is begging her to get the hell away and leave it alone.

Some of her worst crimes would be
- always using a kind of tense thats a cross between present continuous and I-dont-know-what-the-hell-else, that I as far as I know, doesnt exist. Eg: "He is going to be having a name, which is going to be Virahamihira."
- writing a whole goddamn text book in despicable English.
Among her latest and less henious crimes are, saying
"ReJUNIate" for "Rejuvinate" and
"Atanomy" for "Anatomy"

It made me want to laugh out loud in class. You should have seen me struggling. Would have been disasterous if I had. Fatal, even, considering how much she adores people from our creamy combo.
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