summertime and the living is easy

easy is not the word to use when you talk of living in a city that has temperatures of 37 degrees celsius in the middle of the day. but i'm just hoping the positive thinking may make things better. i can dream right?

so in news, daughter's back home!! for two action-packed months.
she got back home just yesterday and we've already completed one shopping trip, one argument and one 'let's raid mom's wardrobe' session. today i am at work, i expect it is 'let's try on all of mom's footwear' in session at home. now sleepovers and meeting friends are on the cards for her.

i love having her home.

iz in teh intertubes making u laff

i love lolcats. and advice animals. and hotdogs . and people getting rickrolled. never liked scumbag steve though.

i have not found a single [and i mean it] friend of mine who loves them and laughs at memes as much as i do.

:( either i have a terrible sense of humour or my friends have none.

new find

here's my latest favourite http://issuedinpublicinterest.blogspot.com/

it's a pretty cool blog, i absolutely love the wry and dry sense of humour that underlies the writing. thoroughly enjoying it.

new depths of shallowness

talking about a married couple.

me :  when did she put on so much weight? she's not looking too good these days poor kid.
him : no wonder he doesn't want to take her out or spend time with her.
me : what rubbish! he's no adonis either. and anyway looks shouldn't matter in a relationship, should they?
[no comment]
me : what? looks matter so much? so you mean, if you and i didn't look the way we did when we first fell in love, we wouldn't have gotten together at all?
him : no.
[end of conversation].

how's that for brutal honesty?

on being a teenager now

i wonder how they do it these days. being a teenager was so much simpler when i was one. we studied, we had crushes, we sighed and went mushy with romantic songs, we giggled when we caught the right boy staring for just one extra minute.
or was that just boring old me?
i exchanged books and cassettes with the object of my affection, not weirdly spelled texts.  how dated.

the girls seem to be getting spunkier and somehow more 'with it'. feet on the ground and all that. i am biased of course, being the mother of a girl.
as for the boys... i see the boys with their carefully put together nonchalant looks and gelled spiked hair. their jeans that start as low as they possibly can. their flippant and careless use of mobile phones, outdone only by their irreverence for grammar.
and i think very soon my daughter's going to want to go out with one of them. god give me courage.

kuchh panktiyaan

a menthol lozenge melting cool
the sparkly blue of a swimming pool
the warmth of an old friend’s hug
telling stories on a wine stained rug

waking up after a lovely night
a satisfied smile of remembered delight
spending hours in a timeless haze
discovery and laughter - filled days

mellow sunlight from a curtained window
the little half-moon on a pedicured toe
the sound of laughter, the clink of glass
being barefoot on tickly green grass

striped beach towels by the sea
a tanned you, a sunburnt me
the sound of waves, the feel of sand
walking with you hand in hand

 i love these memories and how they rhyme
reliving my little joys time after time.

do.not.get.on.my.nerves.

right next to my cabin is a room that the office assistants use as a dining room. they are all technically 'office boys' though the youngest of them would be in his thirties. so the thing is this room shares an air-conditioning vent or something with my office and when the a.c. is switched off, i can hear every single word spoken in that room.
which is every day during lunch hour.
which is extremely annoying when one particular secretary joins them for lunch.
which is almost every day.

she is loud [literally and figuratively]. has a bossy tone of voice. talks a lot. often i just tune it out as i surf the net over lunch or read something or do the crossword. today my back is hurting so much i can barely stay put and i am not at my tolerant best.
she is expounding on some differences between 'aadmi log and aurat log'. having started off with some graphic descriptions of a college student who fell off her train this morning.
i can't even tell them to shut up coz this is the only private place they have to gather and chat for about an hour each day.

i can't escape my desk coz my back hurts and i don't want to move around if i can help it.

so i suffer.

sigh.

titleless

can't think of what to call this one.
my back pain is back. many many years ago, when daughter was about four or five, she fell asleep in the car on an outing. when we returned home, i didn't have the heart to wake her up and i carried her up four flights of stairs. the next morning i could barely  move. my doc sorted it out for me and told me to do some strengthening exercises. which of course, being an idiot i did not do.
so now every so often, the pain comes back. it is extremely uncomfortable and lingers for a few days. i deal with it in this fashion - groan and rest and take painkillers and wait for it to go away.

i watched the south africa india match on tv on saturday. that's hours of my life wasted, never going to get them back. damn i wish we'd won and made it worthwhile.

pretty chuffed coz on the crossword today i got 'family member with one in a mess maybe (7, 7)' with just an R and an O in place. some days i am smart. 12 words done today. not great. not bad either.

'robot' showed on tv last night. thoroughly enjoyed it. what a timepass movie! aishwarya rai looks absolutely amazing. incredible eyes, great skin, superb figure, simply beautiful. i just can't figure out what makes me dislike her.

one of my old favourites

pustak!

was recently reading about murakami's works and how he ran a pub / bar and then closed it and then ran and wrote and so on. and coincidentally saw his 'what i talk about when i talk about running' on a colleague's bookshelf.
wasted no time in borrowing it and will now read it through my lunch hour.
what would my life be like if there were no books?

the only time i have not read, in spite of books being around, was in goa at chattai last month. couldn't take my eyes off the sea.
and i had 'the hungry tide' in my hands which i had been waiting to read. even so, i who usually read bleddy fast managed about a couple of pages an hour.
simply because i couldn't stop watching the amazing, calm, immense sea and spotless, flawless, cloudless sky above it.
i miss goa :(

hopping mad

other than bad grammar, the one thing that lights my fuse is a patronising attitude. especially if it is gender based.

today an article in the 'economic times' has annoyed me tremendously. the title has a little heart in it and uses the word "hubby".
does the newspaper know its women readers at all? if yes, where does it get off using that simpering patronising tone of voice to these women?

let me quote:

" <3 Ask Your Hubby For A Special Gift Today
Ask your husband for a slightly different gift this time - ask him to involve you in his finances. Well don't freeze in your tracks. We are certainly not asking you to morph into a financial geek or snoop on your husband's finances. No, you also don't have to forgo that expensive jewellery you admired on TV the other day."

excuse me? and the entire article goes on in the same tone. patronising. stereotypical. cliched. i know there are many many women who truly are not involved in managing household finances and therefore would find some eye-opening advice in this article.
my question is - are these women reading this newspaper? really?
and if they are not, why is economic times saying this to me??

yipppeee

i got 20 words on the economic times [the daily mail] crossword today. all by myself. no cheating.

and i got the book i'd ordered from flipkart within 48 hours :)

kya khaak update likhoon

three weeks into my so called 'notice period' i expected things to be different. 
pune beckons but mumbai won't let go.
had a reunion with colleagues and friends from a previous workplace. it was, simply put, tremendous fun.
i saw a bunch of movies - 'yeh saali zindagi' ,  'tees maar khan' [finally. and why??], 'raktacharitra -2' and some other forgettable stuff.
read a bunch of books - 'sputnik sweetheart' by murakami, 'black swan green' by david mitchell, 'the fall of giants' by ken follett and am plowing through 'the new leader's 100-day action plan' which is of course is practically 'abhyaas' for me.
i wore a pretty blue sapphire ring, which promptly changed colour within a couple of weeks. have had to take it off coz it's looking bad. :(
i accepted finally that i am in love with two blogs - 'doing jalsa showing jilpa' which i have been reading for some months now and 'the vigil idiot' to which i was recently introduced.
i went on a 3-day weekend to goa and saw the most amazing horizon. EVER. i also saw a shooting star. :)

i noticed that a lot of the above starts with "i". i am so full of myself.
but then if i wasn't full of myself, perhaps i'd be empty.