Jay and Steve's trip to DC (DC, huh?)

Snow, snow everywhere!

Thats how Washington, District of Columbia seemed from air! As a warm-blooded temporarily-texan (Me!!) found out, snow's less fun if you are stuck inside all the time thanks to the sub-zero temperatures outside! Woe's me, Woe's meeeee! Luckily, my class buddy from SVCE ( http://www.svce.ac.in, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cse_svce ( an age-restriced group, btw ?! ) ) Shrivatsan "Steve" V. , was similarly stuck at his sis' place in Reston, just outside D.C. ( I was/am put up in South Riding, VA , around 10 miles from Dulles International Airport). So what do two bored-to-death 'chamathu pasanga' think up to do in their 'vetti' time? Read on...

Since I had to reach Steve's point-de-existence by 9am to leave for D.C., I got up at a positively ghastly 7:30am, and got dropped over at his place by 9am...All to see that Steve was just up brushing his teeth(the lazy dog), and we ended up leaving only around 11am from his place.. We bought a AAA map of DC downtown and metro routes ( pronounced as "r'auts")... His brother-in-law was kind enough to drop us off at West Falls Church/VT/UVa station to hop over to DC. The whole metrorail system, incidentally, reminded me of Singapore's fantastic metro system...(D.C.'s system was probably smaller in scale and speed...Singapore 1, D.C. 0!)

There we were, me and Steve, decided to spend the day walking through the "The Greatest Museums on Earth" (wtvr) i.e., the Smithsonian Buildings, in Washington D.C. The museum of American History was perhaps the most interesting one, with its description of the American Revolution, the musings on migration and so on. The Hope Diamond ( flicked from India, as is with most valuable diamonds( as steve remarked so eloquently, "t******** pasanga")) was another /*pardon the pun*/ bright spot, in the Museum of Natural History . But rest of it was mundane, almost boring, and I could not really figure out why the whole biz had this big hooplah around it... Well, we walked and walked ( poor little college students that we were, cars were still beyond our reach), all the way to the capitol, only to realize we can't get in, and then another couple of miles or so to the White House, zig-zagging pathetically and dragging our feet across most of downtown DC....Yeah, we saw the Monument en route, and as huge as it was, kept reminding me of Sushanth's comments on a age-old cse_svce group mail about sivalingams, (I hope he does read this, though I suspect he won't)...yet another 'copy' from ancient Egypt ( for those in the dark, the Washington Monument is a brick by brick copy of a similar oblisk in Eqypt).

One thing that was truly good to look at from a tourist's perspective was the presence of a huge christmas tree, right between the Monument and the WH....Also, there were all these colorful pines from each of the other 50 states, and one from Loiusiana with ornaments from evey other state , since the school asked to put ornaments on that tree had been obliterated by Katrina earlier this year...touching, indeed! Not something you know from watching TV !

We heard of these great Indian restaurants serving awesome food in Midtown D.C., such as Aroma, Beyond the Naan, Bombay Express and so on.. All usually close after 9pm wonly, as people told us...Alas! it was a Saturday...so wadduyuno....all of these 'exotic' places were closed by 5pm....(slightly dumb if you ask me, closing earlier on saturdays when people are free to roam about!)..we roamed about the grid-like parallel roads of midtown dc , for perhaps 3 hours, groping around sans direction for some eating place palatable to our vegetarian south-indian tastes... We finally wound up at a Subway, and ended up having a veggie delight as always...so much for our south-indian food hunt!

Finally, all we needed to do was to catch the return metrorail back to Virginia, and waddyuno some trains were to be shut down early that day, by 7pm, and we literally ran (rather stumbled along after beig literally maimed after walking for god knows how long) to Connecticut Ave. and Ith street ( D.C., is one of those places which has streets named by letter along north-south and numbered streets on east-west directions). Guess what we found? That station entrance was closed on saturdays! A board simply directed us to 18th and Ith to get to the next entrance...
Finally we found a fair-faced man who directed us to the right entrance, and we alighted aboard a train to Vienna, Va., after much deliberation on how to inform some folks to pick us up....

Home and dry, after about 15 hours of walking and travel and what not... One day down the drain, but hey, we can claim we saw the capital of the world ( or so they say!)!

Steve was sadly off to NC as his sis was shifting her house there, and I was back to being bored alone...Sober note to end this post, I know, but life's ups and downs are too common to note, let alone to be judged closely...

t.c.

Stench and Sensibility

As interesting as this might sound, I finally got down to chucking my clothes into the automatic washing machine ....the old clothes strewn frivolously about my room are gone finally, and as one of roomies quips, we finally found out why our room had an affiliated stench to it ;-)

On to rosier things, the typical day in the life of Mr J.S., I shall go on to detail for you (with utmost sadistic pleasure )...topographical information is not really necessary, but take a look at maps.google.com for I.H. 35 at 32nd street in Austin ,if you feel up to it...

I cross the inter-state ( I live damned right next to the Interstate Highway 35 that runs through most of Texas), and notice the usual down-trodden folk asking for god-knows-what with sign boards making political and economic statements. (Remarkably enough, I once saw a 60 something man offering a woman a 10-dollar bill to take off with him...the sheer audacity of it all shocked me...I mean, I have heard of all this taking place in Kodambakkam in Chennai and all, but in broad daylight in Austin? Wasn't it too weird or is it just that I had'nt seen the world enough, I wondered...). Reading the signs they show while I wait for the crossing indicator to turn on is one of the more colourful portions of the sojourn to the university.

My walk past the interstate takes me to the neighbourhodd hospital, where I waited patiently for the Route 22 bus, which ought to ferry me onwards to the university campus ( I live kind of 15 mins by walk from my department; but am often in too much of a hurry or too bugged to foot it...). (A middle-aged nurse who works in the hospital looked at me one day and gave me a winning go-get-em smile...little did I realize then that I had not shaved for a week or so, and she probably took me for one of the recent dischargees from the hospital, I guess...)the never-on-time Capitalmetro bus comes in 20 mins late, effectively losing me $12.50 for being late from my wage-paying job at the university...aaarghh...

Reaching the department, I "manage" to bump into this huge desi junta perenially decking out at the graduate lounge( Seriously! they are always there...little india, perhaps one can call the place...) and the phully phaltoo discussions we tend to have wake me up fully to a state wherein on reaching my work desk, I can respond soberly to my employer's queries about what I plan to do to earn my pay for the day( I am too sleepy before 12 noon, all conversations and statements I make before are things I claim to be not accountable for...). The day rolls on with me "slacking off" at work till abt 2pm, when I head off to yet another lecture on distributed systems, to be followed by an even more interesting discussion on wireless networks .

5 O clock finally, and I am back at the graduate lounge not knowing what to do...I hang around for another hour or so, browsing the internet , and checking for elusive useful email, and finaly give up, and head home...I have too much work left, weighing on mind is just too many issues in life, thanks to the tons of things I agree/have to do academically... Juggling responsibilities is one thing; taking on too many responsibilities in a fashion that you know you will never be able to do justice to any of them is another thing altogether...As a consequence, life has started sucking badly; My graded test marks , which adequately reflect my apathy towards the subjects I am supposed to be interested in finally came in to round of an awesome day. I return home, and sleep off as soon as possible, dreaming of a good day some day...

Sigh...Life was so much easier in Chennai ( Back in India...as a famous personality states so eloquently)... I am fast losing focus, losing sight of that elusive dream of being independent, and being capable of enjoying the subtler aspects of life...Of having "arrived", rather than tending to do so...

Why am I here? At a place far far from home, where I need to actually fend for myself ?
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I know not...

Please stop for the love of god!

If the periodicity of my blogs is something to go by, you must know how much time I have on my hands...

As I have just discovered, not doing anything is a blissful state one should aspire to reach....for one, I don't have to bother about achieving anything, nor do I have to deal with this constant swell of information that pulls me in....Drowning in large workloads is nothing new pour moi, but hey! this is as a near-death-experience as any that I have ever seen! Somebody should banish the scourge of studying computer algorithms, and as much as I hate saying this, I would not miss it one bit once this semester's toast! (Ah well, all's well that end's well I guess... I managed to eek out an RA from my prof for next semester, so that I don't have to be so parsimonious next semester!)

Algorithmic nightmares apart, life's going as it was when I got here, the big bad US of A, has not been too bad seriously...its nice to see water not stagnating around after a heavy downpour, people are pretty nice to each other, and I have not seen people being particularly heterophobic at all...I guess I have'nt been to the no-go areas in Austin yet( I hear the eastern portion of the town is quite rough). I have'nt seen too many policemen around, and believe it or not, that actually gives me a sense of security. Living right next to campus is one big advantage I guess, the decision I made to live so close, regardless of it not being on any of the main campus shuttle bus routes ( pronounced here as r'auts, not like the way we pronounce roots!), has not been a bad one, in retrospect, and dabbling in study now-and-then by traversing the roads to the university is easy enough on weekends. Campus Police ( they have a UTPD here!) are always on the beat, and the university as such rocks, and give rides back home if it gets dark!

Austin's a pretty scenic place ( Round Rock's supposed to be awesome, but have'nt been there yet), I've been to many places around the town, mostly during the first few weeks of the semester (I confess that I have'nt taken the time to look the place up more; as a consequence have not been to 6th street for a non-official purpose...a'int I mad??) One thing one notices about Austin is the copius presence of 'lover's spots'...in the summer, you can take a stroll through any park and notice arbit giggling and leaves crunching around behind bushes (remind's me a long forgotten incident in Ooty sometime back; alas promised someone that I can't utter it again... may be in one of my future blogs...). But I miss the warmth of Chennai...for someone who was almost forever in Chennai, the instant change in weather that one gets when the weather hits 'Winter'...it went to 1 degree C yesterday...Srivatsan made an entrance right at 5:30 am, pretty much a snowman ( Srivatsan's my roomie, for those in the dark).


My thoughts wander, and its tough to focus these days...Confused , I am, and since Home's where the heart is, I am currently homeless...(sigh!)

Keep warm, makkal!

Message to self: Will blog more, will blog for less sensible things.

Eureka!

As Archimedes before me once said, Eureka!! I have done it...Have n't I ? I have created the zillionth blog on the face of the 3rd rock.... Are blogs really a waste of space and time ? Let us see...