I am running away from reality, as fast as i could.
and trying not to look back, so as to prevent my eye from tearing.
Drugged sleep and feet aches...spent Sunday in a haze...
Monday, September 28, 2009
Drugged sleep sucks. Well, for one, I had vivid dreams about some story I am writing and besides that I was dreaming about batman, lame music from horror movie, demon child and haunted house. I think all this is because I was searching for the movie - "666 - Something which was released in 2007" before I conked off. After I was legally drugged, and made my journey to la-la land, I did not realize that I had slept for so many hours in afternoon stretched to late evening without getting up in the middle. I think I would have continued to sleep if our neighbors' kids' did not make noise which can wake up the dead. However the biggest advantage of this sleep was - a whole bunch of relatives came and went and I did not have to pretend to entertain them especially when my feet hurts beyond normal pain.
Eeeks! I wrote this last evening and I completely forgot to post it. This is what happens when I work on multiple browsers!!!
OK! I passed an mandated exam yesterday by some sheer dumb luck. Irrespective of my preparation or whatever I was going to study, it is not something which can be passed easily. The reason is that the questions are framed in such a way that the answers are very vague and it is not based out of common sense. To explain it better, here is an example.
Question: If you have a resource in your team who has issues with attitude and shows crappy behavior at times, what would you do?
a) Take this issue in next team meeting and drop in subtle hint. b) Escalate to senior manager. c) Speak with that resource offline and try to find out the issue that is being faced. Also ensure that suitable actions are taken. d) Allocate critical task. Of course the correct answer for this question is option c. But that is what we call an ideal scenario and a manager with lot of time, resources and tons of patience. Which everyone lacks! So actual answer will be: "Kick the person out of the team". Really, the whole paper was filled questions of these sort. My older colleage was saying - " If you get good marks, then you are mostly lying." Unfortunatly, this was not a honesty checking test.
I always thought that I am fairly open minded person but it seems like I was fooling myself in thinking so. On Sunday, my mom asked to buy some hypertension medication for her from a nearby pharmacy. I walked over to that place and I handed over the prescription to the guy at the counter. The store was fairly packed with customers, not the rush you see in evenings but both the counters had enough people. A girl stood next to me and asked for i-pill. Everyone, turned and looked at her. I rolled my eyes. It took only a moment to realize that couple of them were actually looking at me. I felt hot around my jacket collar. In next couple of minutes I moved to next counter to buy chocolates. When I was walking back home, I realized that I was no less than other patrons who give "the look". Irrespective of how preachy I am I felt ashamed at my own bias, however unconciously done.
Over this long weekend, I have caught up with three different dramas that I had been meaning to watch for sometime. I finally gave up watching entire episodes and watched only those which mattered to the storyline and that wasn't saying much. After watching it, all I could think was - My life lacks drama. I mean look at those people. They have nothing but drama in their lives. All the time they are busy in one or other complex situation and somehow manage to get out of it by going through even more complication. My aunt who is here for the festival (Dasara) season, watches a handful of them and last night I took a break from reading and joined her. My aunt has hopeless memory when it comes to following up on calls or emails or even anything domestic but she can rattle out enitre family tree of some guy in her favorite series. By listening to few of dialogues, she can deduct implications of those words on a handful of family members. My mom gave up watching it after few minutes and bullied me into handing over my laptop so that she can play a game of FreeCell. OK, coming back to drama issue here. Like I mentioned before, my life lacks drama. School was boring, college was mediocre and pretty much mundane. I slogged so much in the beginning of my career that I missed out on life completely. Now I am too busy with work to get drama back into life. My mom thinks that drama is for people who react to emotions. It was up to me to fill up the blanks . :-)
My feet hurts. There are corn on my right feet which has now made it impossible to walk few yards without hurting and my face wincing in pain. It is so ridiculous that I have been making a list of things that I am not able to do because of this pain. 1) Kick start my bike. 2) Jump around guava tree to get the best one around. 3) Yoga 4) Morning walks 5) Going for morning cup of coffee to meet a colleague turned friend to start the day by forgetting all the nonsense that we leave in our respective work stations. 6) Run to elevators. 7) Wear high heels. 8) Walk around the cubicle talking to my team. 9) Make frequent visits to rest room 10) Ignore all meetings (its not exactly a bad thing :-) ) 11) Cannot walk much even inside the house.
I remember the times when each of my sentence used to span across more than three lines. While writing requirements, the first feedback I received was that - "Cut your sentences short." Initially I did not understand why they were saying that. They - here refers to business users. They had no issues with grammar or sentence strucutre but it was just that people lost the idea of what they were reading about when the sentences became really long. One of the business user, Jennifer, she told me that she had studied a subject in college which was only about writing professional documents. Starting then, all the documentation and my emails followed the expected etiquitte and now it has become sort of habit. The other feedback I had received from my current customers two years back was that I make my emails too complex to comprehend. My customers are mostly non English native so they want their emails as simple as possible and as straight forward as possible. It took me a while to correct myself everytime I wrote an email, which is several times a day. All these changes and regulations on writing itself from my profoession has started to influence my writing in general. I rarely write long sentences and never is my writing complex. At least thats what I assume so. In a way I see a clarity in my writing; just the sentences and nothing more.
During lunch, which is around 11:30 AM for me, is a time when I read random things on net while eating my lunch. This was when something stuck. Here is what I ended up writing.
I felt a spark leave my fingers as soon as I started writing down the words which had just started to swirl through my head. I chased that spark amidst swarming bodies, under the rocks and all around the place but never really did find it hiding anywhere. Was it because this monsoon midday breeze has already bought it for you? The spark that left my fingers found me once again but it had turned into a full blown flame and the only thing that I can do now is to get engulfed in the blazing flame and allow myself a sweet and hot surrender. Or was that your whispering in the wind that ignited the spark in the first place?
I stared at the opened notepad, sighed and gulped down lunch and got some work done for couple of hours. At around 1:30 I went for my afternoon coffee. I spilled some coffee on the counter and I wiped it with a tissue. Below is what came to my mind.
Black marble stares me back with a million eyes, grime glaring and droplets of water shimmering; I ran a damp tissue on the marble only to hear it squeak and moan in agony of being devoid of anything tangible strangely reflecting the state of my heart. The marble was my distant mirror; frustration a constant companion.
My mom generally packs some fruit for me to snack on. Today I had black grapes. It was around 3 PM when I started snacking on them and reviewing a document.
A drop of liquid squirted out of the fruit and got stuck to the lip like a clingy girlfriend. The plump of lips succinctly held the grape amidst them the drop if liquid still being as clingy as ever, had held a cigarette last night in same adoring fashion. The emitted smoke had formed a thin veil of mask hiding the plumpness and the beauty of the lips which was now moving around the fruit in a sensual manner. Can an object hold such a power as to make a stark distinction between sensually good and sinfully good?
I pinged a friend at this point checking if he wanted to pick up a coffee from coffee day. He wasn’t there and I gave up going since it was ridiculously hot outside. And then I wished I hadn’t looked out of the window.
Heat envelopes me in waves and I hear a distant cry of a wild bird. Window looks like a painting with constantly changing pictures. Heat permeated through the glass and continued to hit me in gentle blasts making tiny beads of perspiration appear and flow down in rivulets starting from base of my neck and running through my back. A whisper breaks the mute communication which I have been having with the horizon and the suddenness sends a tiny shiver through my spine which vibrates that bead of sweat. I look around to see a residue of an old dream managing to haunt me on a particularly warm monsoon afternoon, making me tremble for the lost time.
After this, I gave up distracting myself and listened to music in really loud volume and got work done. I still have five more of these “things” but its on a document saved in office computer. So more things tomorrow!