Saturday, September 23, 2006

Smileys and me

Hi there subscribers!! How are ya??

I know, by now most of you must have noticed that I have this bad habit of using a lot of emoticons in my blogs. Almost all my sentences have to end in a :) or a :( or a :P.

Let me explain...

I belong to a generation which grew up watching TV shows like Seinfield, Friends, That 70s show etc. And we have been conditioned to laugh only when we listen to canned laughter in the background. I have been so conditioned to laugh, that if they give a canned laughter soundtrack to a documentary on the deforestation of Amazon (I am talking bout the jungles you technophile!) I might laugh my heart out, not realizing that it aint a comedy :( !

All said and done, I have to put a smiley in my blog everywhere I think I should be laughing (like here :) !!). Considering that my jokes aren't really witty, it becomes all the more important that I indicate to my reader that it was supposed to be a joke :) !!

Now for all of you who are reading this blog between your washing and drying cycle, go count the number of times I have used emoticons in my last blogs :P !!!

Washing..

Since my last post was titled "Clothes", poetic justice decides that this post should be aptly titled "Washing". (Yupp this is the second article in a series of articles titled clothes, washing, drying, ironing ... dont ya worry, am just kidding :P)

To get into the mood of writing about washing, I tried to get into the skin of the character by actually putting my brown, grey and black shades of clothes for washing :) !! After all, great actors try to get a true feel of the character they are enacting by being one. Acting is one realm, that I have no intentions of exploring. Sessions of dumb charades have proven to me that I am absolutely dumb when it comes to acting :) !!!

Coming back to the title.. for all of you who use the traditional "washing machine", there is this half an hour time between when you put your clothes to wash and switch them over to the dryer. According to me, this is the most unproductive time of my life!! Imagine, I waste 1/2 an hour every week doing nothing! That translates to 2 hours a month, 24 hours a year!! Which means, 1 day of this year, I will be doing nothing but waiting for my clothes to get washed! Owww, what a waste!!

After doing causal analysis of this, I decided I should find ways to do effective utilization of this time. That is the exact reason why I am writing this blog :), so what you just read where the thoughts of a man as he waits for his clothes ...

Beep ... 1/2 an hour over, time to put my clothes to dry.... :) !!

Monday, September 18, 2006

Clothes..

There goes my weekend... 2 days of fun.

I am blessed with a friend circle so big that we could put the entire Indian Parliament to shame. My stay in Uncle Sam's land would have been really boring, if not for them.

Before I get starry eyed and break down into a song about them, let me change the topic!!

Most of my friends thought that I had a very Victorian dressing style, and they forced me to buy some shirts for myself over the weekend. Making me buy clothes is like making a dog have a bath. I am a big spender when it comes to electronic gadgets. But the moment you take me to a cloth store, I try to run as far away from it, as I can.

Let me justify. I have a size which keeps on growing exponentially every year. So at the start of the year, I take into consideration the inflation (of my tummy that is!) and then buy tents, that will fit me through out the year. Now, I restrict my choice of tents to just 3 basic colors Brown, Black and Grey. That makes me look dull and boring.

Now, I have always believed that what you wear should reflect what you are! Considering that the only animated conversation that I can carry out with some one is about the capacity of my car engine and the gas mileage that it gives me, I find it appropriate to dress in dull colors as a warning for people approaching me!

Anyways, I succumbed to their pressure tactics, and bought a few bright tents this time around. Thanks to Deepak for helping me out! Now you are gonna see me in Deepak's choice for one more year ;) !!

By the way, let me remind you, I still will talk about my car engine with you... Dont expect me to talk (interesting) like him. Thats a tall order for me now.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Simian Crease

I have recently embarked on a path to self discovery and there are a few weird and interesting things that I have found out about myself. Let me have the pleasure to share it with you.

1) I can wag my ears. (97.86% of the human species can't do that. Well, that reminds me, do you know that 47.5% of the statistics are made up on the spot?? :P)

2) I can raise one eyebrow at a time. (WWE fans .. can you smell what the Rock is cooking?? For starters .. I would love Chicken tikka masala :P !!)

3) I have a simian crease on both my hands! (That's a very very rare condition in human species! Trust me, I haven't made this statistics up, there are very few left-handed persons in this world who have simian crease on both their hands!! .. And I am amongst them. Bow down you average guy!

So, I would like to dedicate this entire blog, to my simian crease! For you lesser mortals who do not want to read ahead, there is food on my desk, come pick some up and eat :) !!!

This simian crease (SC) self discovery happened not so long ago, when a friend of mine well- versed in palmistry, pointed out that I had "different" hands. Now, I know that I have soft girlish hands (yikes! people actually thought that I was a girl when I was a kid, now I have stopped shaking hands with people altogether :P !!!), but she gave me a shock when she told me that I have a rare medical condition in which my head line and hand line are fused together. (That means, I neither have a head nor a heart .. ) She further told me that this condition is called a simian crease!

Off I went googling about my "condition". After all, nowadays, if you don't understand something about yourself, you go ask Google .. "Google, google on the net, who is the fairest of them all?", said the evil step-mother of snow white and Google replied "Results 1 - 10 of about 2,200,000 for ..." And the first entry was a sponsored advt, which said "Snow White", and that is how the fairy tale started!! For the sake of not getting sued, the author changed Google to Mirror. Only idiots would believe that Mirrors talk!

That reminds me, I have a very bad habit of straying miles away from the topic that I am discussing. So I come back to my SC. Simian according to the dictionary means a monkey. I looked it up on dictionary.com, and finally ... after 25 years of my mysterious existence, a lot of things became pretty clear to me! I could finally put two and two together!

For starters, I realized why gals don't really find me attractive. Monkeys don't really go well with chicks .. that reminds me, had I had a canine line or something, I could sit pretty on a rich lady's lap wag my tail and go around in a limousine :) !!

Also, I need to confess, I have always had this thing about female monkeys. My mom tells me that every time that we went to a zoo, as a kid I would always insist on being near the cage where the monkeys played!! I remember this one time when we had been to a hill station and I happened to look at a female monkey and from somewhere a male monkey attacked me. Only a guy knows how difficult it is to protect his love interest :) (Btw, if anyone of you believed what I wrote in this paragraph .. its time you see a psychiatrist :) !!)

That also explains why I love to pick lice out of my roomies hair (yikes, that was gross!) and eat bananas :) !!! Finally, I guess the quality of my jokes are degrading so I stop writing more about my SC...

Its 10:30 PM on Friday evening and the only thing that I am doing is writing a blog :(!! Girish go get a life ...

Friday, September 15, 2006

Bliss 2

Appraisal over.

Vanilla latte spilled on my lap. Air supply CD got stuck. Car tyre punctured. Battery down. Alone on a deserted road, no one to help and there is a thunderstorm :) !!!

There go my happy thoughts down the drain. There is a statement in my letter which says "The matters related to compensation are strictly confidential between you and the company". So, I haven't told you anything ...

And I thought that money is not a motivator! After all, I was enjoying my work :) !!!

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Bliss

With a little bit of publicity stunts and shamelessly sending my blog URL to a few unsuspecting souls, I have finally got the number of people reading this space to a half a dozen helpless souls :) !!! (Psst .. ever wondered why Soul and Sole sounds the same in English??)

The general feedback that I got from you people is that I am frustrated with my life :) !!! Hehe, I never realized that until I myself went through all my blogs. Ya ya, I think I am wee-bit
frustrated .. So here I am bringing some happy thoughts to my mind....

Me in my car, light rain outside, its twilight and I can here the birds chirping (after a hard day's work they are going home to their families). My moon roof is open, I am listening to a love song (how about .. "All out of love" by Air Supply?). I am alone in my car (ya, I cant think of having anyone next to me :) !!) and I have a tall Vanilla Latte as made by Starbucks in my hand :)!! The road is on the country side, and its green on both sides, and straight ahead at a distance I can see an ocean with its waves breaking on rocks as they reach the shore. The road is winding as it takes me down a lush green mountain towards that ocean :) !!! There is no car on the road, and I am the king of the road. Wow, absolute bliss...

Buzzzzz ... reality checks in ....

I am gonna get my appraisal letter today. A report of what my company thinks about me. That no longer brings any good thoughts to my mind :) !!! So let me publish this blog as it is, and go get my letter...

If my next blog is all the more sadistic, then you know the outcome :) !!

Expiry date

Ever wondered about the fact that the biggest uncertainty in your life is actually your life span??!! You plan, save, invest and do a million other things just because you don't know when your last day on this planet is!

Life would have been really easy if God had put an expiry date on every baby's forehead as it left His production line.. (The Production line analogy is really easy ... God has a billion vendors each specializing in producing one thing in the human body. So the tooth vendor makes all kinds of teeth, the eye vendor makes all kinds of eyes etc. God has a ISO:9000 certified production line and Just-In-Time procurement cycles. So using neural networks, all vendors can predict when God is gonna assemble the next baby, and they send the parts just-in-time for God to set it up. He must definitely have an instruction manual for all His production-line employees to know where to put what .. Ever once a while a new employee comes and messes up. Finally the finished product gets shipped via a stork with a tracking number. This tracking number is exactly what the doctor sees and calls it the "due date!", and delivery takes approximately 9 months! And all this while we have been praising Ford for coming up with that concept!)

Well, coming back to my original argument that everyone must have an expiry data, ever wondered how simple it would have been to lead your life?? Every parent before giving birth to a baby would be taught Microsoft Projects (yeah!!). The moment the stork comes and delivers your baby, you see the expiry date on its forehead. That's the end-date of your baby project. Then using the Wizard tool in MS Projects, you start planning backward till today!! Assign milestones like .. Baby walks, Baby talks, Baby meets first girlfriend, Baby becomes an Engineer, Baby marries, Baby has first baby etc. etc. Depending on the lifespan, the baby could do more things. Lesser life span = lesser milestones, lesser budget, lesser stress, and more enjoyment!!

If I know I gonna last for just 2 more years, I know I don't need to earn that much and I can retire and enjoy the rest of my life! However, if I am gonna last till "Baby's baby gives birth to another baby" milestone, then I need to work till I am 58 years old (unless my baby doesn't decide to wait to give birth to a baby till it is 18 and the baby's baby phase happens before!) and save money all the while, invest, buy property, and generally be a miser!

You will have assigned targets in your life. You would know that you have to work towards a milestone, and wouldn't be confused with what you have to do! You wouldn't make earning money as a goal in your life. Its crazy to work just to earn money! Job satisfaction is in fool's paradise. Everyone works for money! And everyone saves money just cause they don't know when they are gonna kiss goodbye to everyone and buzz off...

I know, most of you ( I mean the two of you who read this!) wont agree with me. But its a thought to ponder. After all, no one likes bad surprises, its always easy to lead a planned life!!