Rain

Another incomprehensible post absolutely unrelated to the title. For further confirmation read on.

Time: 21:37, (GMT+0800hrs)
Place: Room Number 812, The Sheraton Subang, Kuala Lumpur (Subang Jaya rather)
Setting: I'm sitting at the desk in my room enjoying these precious few moments I get to spend in it by staring at myself in the mirror while waiting for an analysis to finish running and thinking how the dark circles under my eyes are my defining beauty. Yeah that's right, I said beauty.
Weather Forecast for the evening: 28C, 74% humidity and cloudy but no rain (I do not like using the Fahrenheit scale irrespective of however American whoever's becoming. I refuse to use miles too. For that matter I have always measured distance in minutes, true Mumbai style. But more importantly, please note the absolute absence of rain in the present and near future.)

After dinner at a Thai restaurant where most of what you can do is, of course after a good deal of cursing the Higher Power for not working his magic on your colleagues and bending them to his will of wanting his little helper by the name of Freespirit having reasonably palatable Italian food, serve yourself right at the end (so that you get the least) and keep poking and playing with your first serving so that you don't have to repeat this process, you can't stop yourself from the teeny jar of Pringles in the mini bar. They can afford that, for the amount of time I'm spending figuring out why exactly I am so fascinated with the Airline Planning business (after a week with MH data, you'd wonder too - believe you me!), they can definitely afford the extravagance of 6 Malaysian Ringgits to the bespectacled, young-looking consultant who doesn't talk too much. Maybe the bespectacled, young-looking consultant can't, not the way her not-so-young-looking tummy is growing. Despite the efforts at the gym which make her feel far-from-young and like she's on botox for her face. I cross check with the mirror. Nah! With the number of pimples on my face, botox? Yeah right!

It's weird being away from home. It's weird being at home. I assume this is what most people call growing up. And this doubled up with "where the hell is my life going and my career taking me" is the Quarter Life Crisis. I'm two years away from it, technically. (I've always wanted to live to be a hundred and until proven otherwise will continue to believe that I will) But the recent random changes from the complete lack of privacy to having too much of it for days on an end, gives you enough time to put down useless thoughts like these as a sacramental offering of writing, more hallowedly and out of mass change in religious beliefs, commonly known as the blog.

That was a long sentence, wasn't it? I have this alarm bell like thing in my head. More like a reminder service which goes off every time I blog to remind me to a. Write painfully long, inconsequential posts and b. To include at least one really long sentence with half a dozen adjectives thrown in for good measure. Oh yeah, it went off again. It was upset that I forgot that its most important duty by far is to ensure that I come up with an ambiguous title for most posts and then double check that I completely or with a very small room for error stray off the topic. Ain't it cool? (Well..you're supposed to say that whenever you talk highly of any gadget- like hey dude, check out my new cellphone, it's so awesome it practically thinks for me too! Don't you just wish it did? Oh yes another function - include loads of snide remarks and opinions of the world in parentheses, which no one other than yourself cares about - man, this bell rocks!)

The joy of blogging at work does not compare to the thrill of blogging from a client site. Not because I'm jobless that I indulge in this heinous act of wasting valuable client money and company time but due to the more noble and hence self-reassuring reason of keeping myself awake. There are only so many days that you can go on with the bare minimum hours of sleep. The same sleep which has come to be so integral a part of my life since graduation, more so because I can't have it any time I feel like.

By the by, time and place change. Current time: 12:55, (GMT+0800 hrs). Current location: Slouched in a seat in front of good ol' lappy such that I can barely see the heads of my Project Manager and colleague from above the screen. Not that I'm exceptionally tall. This Project Manager, as dear a fellow as he is, works me like a dog but believe me he is the best. He's Chinese and gives me the immense pleasure of being taller than him when I wear heels. Now, wouldn't you agree he is the best?

Time now: 16:39(GMT+0800hrs), sitting straight up in my chair instead of slouching. The prospect of another dinner smelling of fish and cod liver oil can wake a vegetarian up better than any alarm clock. Nah, not disturbed by it, love my job and if left to myself would have Italian or Mexican day in and day out and you have Italian restaurants practically everywhere but thanks to the job get to experiment and wrinkle my nose at all new kinds of stuff. It's actually a very rewarding process of understanding myself better. Like now I know I absolutely cannot eat mushrooms if they are not button mushrooms, that tofu and anything remotely Thai makes me want to throw up and even the yucky subji my mom forces me to eat because it improves blood circulation according to her, is awesome. Actually, that's not a fair comparison. A fair comparison would be to say that the food in the good ol' mess with the bad ol' caterer is better than any South East Asian cuisine which is mostly semi-cooked or un-cooked stuff or stuff which looks and tastes partly chewed.

Nothing, however fancy, beats the dessert section of a five-star buffet meal though. And even if one is forced against one's will to sample a sea-food dinner buffet, one can survive a long night of hard work post dinner on a plate of spaghetti with lots of ketchup, a bread roll and a helping of each item in the dessert section. Source: NYT Travel, NYT: Naturally, Yours Truly :)

Back to the hotel room. It's the evening after the one on which I started writing the post. I have in me 2 cans of Sprite, a few slices of locally grown Mango and Watermelon, white rice which tasted more like rock-solid rice and two green veggies which resembled nothing I have ever eaten. But the restaurant was lovely, an open air setting with Chinese lanterns and huge round tables where you can eat as a party and not order your own and eat it by yourself. I think the Sprite helped wash down whatever was on my plate. Having the strategic distinction (or was it disadvantage?) of being the only vegetarian at the table, I couldn't get away with what I have recommended a few paragraphs earlier. Instead, I had to have seconds. And if that wasn't enough, I ate with the stink of mackerel infuriating my nostrils and the eyes of a dead fish staring at me from the table with it's mouth open. Everything here reminds me of Goa. Not the yucky fish but the place in general. NO more explanations shall be offered. If thou willst doubt, ich kann nicht Ihnen helfen.

And that is how you just so brilliantly mutilate two languages you claim to be good at. Which reminds me of a beautiful status message of mine of not so long ago. "Möchtest nicht du, ein lang, schön Weg? Ich will und ich brauche keine Karte und keine Kompasse." It was accompanied by the picture of a long road which had nothing but really tall gulmohar trees dotting the sides. And it was perfectly empty. But the picture is just a snapshot of the long road at one particular spot, you can only make out that it is the long and winding road we're looking at.You can't, for instance, make out there is a fork at the next turn. Here, take a look.



Now, could you, by looking at the picture of the perfect winding road, have guessed that there was a fork at the next turn? Think all you want but I can tell you even you wouldn't have guessed that. But as Frost rightly advised, I chose the road less traveled. I hope it leads to the mountains and I can see snow. I've never seen snow, you know except this one fleeting glimpse of it at Chicago airport. Plus, I've always wanted to live in the mountains, at least ever since I read Rusty, boy from the hills. Imagine doing nothing but tending to your garden and writing all day long. And breathing in the healthy mountain air (no idea why it's called that but ever since I read Heidi, the mountain air has always been healthy)

Or do you think the road leads back home? And I can sit by my window all cuddled up in my blanket with a nice book and hear the rain outside. Do you think as I sit there the wind will blow and my hair will fall on my face or that it'll become so cold that I'll have to wrap the blanket tighter around myself? I'd give anything to just sit and watch the rain right now. Not because I'm tired or because the project is getting frustrating. Just so that maybe after some time I will notice that my window is open and that it's letting in the rain along with the wind and that I'm getting wet. And that the fork I was trying to see through the open window is not really visible anymore. Neither is the road. I've come so far, I should probably close the window and keep the rain out. Even the pretty gulmohar.

(You're just so happy I mentioned the rain that you don't care I am drenched. Or do you? What was that? I didn't get that over the rain.)