Je Ne Sais Quoi

For the past year and more, there's been this pain that visited my tummy every so often. I thought it was from eating crap all the time, so I would cut down on one type of yum food a week to identify the culprit. I could never pin it down, but the general consensus was that it's the 4 teaspoons of bournvita in one glass of cold milk at bedtime (the erstwhile highlight of my day). So I gave that up. But the pain persisted. So I went to the doc, who through a series of tests discovered that I had a little unnecessary piece of benign being inside me. I had that removed with the hope that I had bid my pain goodbye, but oh dearie me, no! It was back. By then I'd had enough of doctors so I ignored the whole thing for a few weeks. The pain would come and go, till one day it was so bad that I had to rush to emergency, where the doctors wanted to prove their prowess by taking out the least complicated body part - the appendix. Of course, I stood up for its rights and said no way are they doing any such thing, esp when all the tests were negative. So with great reluctance, they let me out with only an injection. Then I figured it was time to see another doc, so I went to one who referred me to another, who gave me some meds, which made me better. So I was happy and I went home for a week. Then I came back and the pain came back. Every day. Lots. So I went to ayurvedic doc cos I thought at least that won't have side effects. I have to have the stinkiest meds on the face of the planet and rub an oil on my tummy. But I think that's better than popping pills all day, which I am prone to do. But the next day the pain was so bad I went to emergency again. They made me wait for two hours. So I figured it's cos I wasn't screaming in pain. That's a useful lesson for anyone who wants quick attention. Please scream. Well anyway, they checked for many things but it was all clear, so I came home. The next day I went back to the doc who made me better for some time. He gave me the same meds. I am better again. I think I will be better for 2 weeks cos that's how long this course is. After that, when the pain comes back, I will go to an astrologer and ask him what I should do. He will tell me to wear a red stone. I will not wear it cos I don't like the idea of surrendering my health to a piece of jewellery. By then there will nothing else to try. And I'm sure, being the loyal thing that it is, the pain will still be around. So I will have to start the alternative healing that I used to practise all those years ago. A valid question at this point would be why did I not do that all this while. The only time I think about doing it is when I am in pain. And then I am in so much pain that I can't focus. So I don't do it. What then? Sigh. What a pain.

The Simplest Recipe

I was channel surfing this evening and stopped at scene showing a group of 4 women curled up around a coffee table drinking vodka and eating chocolate. It was obvious that they'd had a crappy day and were trying to make themselves feel better - and succeeding from the looks of it.

Greatly inspired, I decided to google a chocolate fudge cake recipe. I found plenty, for cake as well as for chocolate, but the strangest one by far is this one for sugarfree dark chocolate:
Ingredients: 500 g - melted & tempered sugar free dark chocolate
Method: Melt and temper Sugar free Dark Chocolate and put in a mould. Cool in refrigerator for 25 to 30 minutes. Tap each chocolate out from the mould. Arrange nicely on a serving tray and serve.

How can the ingredients for a food be the food itself? This is like saying I make great biryani. I get it from Hyderabad House!

Cinema सिनेमा

I watched a movie on TV called The Transporter. It's about an ex-special forces operator, Frank, who now lives in France and works as a transporter making not quite legal deliveries of people/cargo. I'm not going to provide the whole plot here; suffice it to say that Frank gets involved with one of his packages, a young, attractive Chinese girl named Lai, and all hell breaks loose when they attempt to rescue 400 Chinese people smuggled into the country to be used as slave labour.

I must confess I kind of enjoyed it. It was fast-paced and reasonably gripping. No great acting - the characters were true to type. The strong, silent, I-work-better-alone hero; the young, vulnerable-but-gutsy heroine; the handsome villain known only as Wall Street; the I'm-tough-but-I-have-a-heart middle-aged cop. It was good watching if you had something on the stove and had to get up periodically to stir without missing much.

But all through the movie I kept thinking that this was actually a Hindi movie made in English by mistake. I could almost see the writer explaining "Is mein sub kuch hai. Action, romance, comedy, family drama. Fight sequence mein hero ka body dikhaenge, highway mein car aur truck ka chase dikhaenge. Superhit fillum banega!" And seriously that's what it was - an out and out Dhoom 2. I am happy to say that Hrithik and Aishwarya are way better looking and had better chemistry than the lead pair in this movie, but the fact that Lai didn't have that silly giggle was a huge factor in her favour.

So my rating, 2/5. For Dhoom 2, not The Transporter.

The Fine Art of Letter Writing

When I was in primary school, we were taught how to write our first letter to a friend. Here's how they said it should be...

My dearest friend {name of friend},

How are you? I am fine. I am so happy to hear that you are coming to visit this summer. It has been a long time since we last met. Let me know the details of your arrival so I can receive you.

Looking forward to seeing you.

Yours affectionately,

{your name}

I don't know why I thought of this after so many years. I think I miss the definiteness of relationships. Earlier there were best friends, schoolfriends, tuition friends, neighbour friends, friends of relatives friends, ex-friends (friendship broken cos someone shared lunch with the sworn enemy). I could immediately tell you how I knew someone, and how close or not I was to them.

But now, I can converse freely with anyone I meet, and make you think I've known them for ages. I can have a party for a dozen people where everyone meets everyone for the first time, and I would introduce them all as "my friends". But in all this soical frenzy, I keep myself essentially isolated. There's no real sharing. Noone who's met me for the first time in the past two years would know that I write poetry, or sketch in charcoal. They wouldn't know I've run an alternative healing center. They'd never believe I pick up the cell phone a second before it rings. Ok the last one, practically no one believes. But it's true. 90% of the time.

Anyway, coming back to the point. I think I've become commerically savvy but emotionally impoverished. Except when my REAL friends are around or in touch. I know myself through my relationships. So I'm happy that the lasting ones are so great.

By the way, if I had to write that letter now, here's how it would go:

Duuuude! you're finally coming to {name of city}. The last time we met I wore plastic jewellery and you had big hair. When you getting here? I'll take a couple of hours off from work and come home to let you in. Let me know. Yayyyyy!!

{no signature}

You got the job.

The usual demand at interviews - Tell me something about yourself. Hopefully I won't have to hear this in the near future, but if I do, my response will be "Deep down I'm very shallow."

What the..! (or Part 1 in the series of 'I Just Don't Have a Clue'

Just how tech-unsavvy am? Internet Explorer 7 blinks when I launch it on my new laptop, and I'm staring at the screen wondering why. It asks me to choose personal settings, etc; but doesn't allow me to cos it's blinking, and I have no clue why. So I stare at it for a while, then close it. Then after a minute of waiting, I think perhaps it's fixed itself so I can launch it again. Oho, but no. It still blinks. Ok then. I'll just wait till someone who is marginally better at it than I am happens to be home when I'm trying this out (read husband). But I so know what'll happen. He'll say do this, I'll say why, he'll say just do it, I'll say but it has to make sense.....and so on.
Alas!

Toilet P&L

The recession has the corporate world implementing cost-cutting plans with a vengeance, and sometimes I'm inconvenienced, but mostly I understand, and try to do my bit to help save whatever resources I can. But here's a weird side effect of cost cutting...
They've recently introduced movement-sensor-driven light fixtures in the office loos, which are all very fine, but do the new high-tech systems have to be anti-women? Consider the following example.
I sit when I use the loo cos I'm a woman and proud of it. But when I'm in the middle of my little task, the light goes off. And why? Cos there's nothing below it. The sensors in the stalls have been placed exactly above the place I would stand in front of the commode if I were a man. As this spot remains unoccupied once I'm seated, the @#$% object assumes that there's no one in the loo and switches off!
My workaround for the problem is to do leg lifts. Might as well get some exercise while I'm at it. At the current rate, I can book a reduction of 1 mm off my tummy by the end of the 1st quarter.