Friday, January 27, 2006

I can't feel a thing

Ahem....all you Linkin' Park fans out there...gimme a holler......( now that all zero of you have responded , I can safely continue)....

First of all: sorry for ripping off one the lines from Numb.

I can't help it, it seems...I feel dead inside. I wake up somedays and do not feel like getting out of bed....The variation in my life from the pleasurable days of my undergrad ( SVCE guys know what I am talking abt) is so drastic.....the culture 'shock' ( the word -shock- is in quotes primarily because the word is more of a bugbear than anything, I guess), all the living-up-to-expectations crap, and the whole tonne of work ( I like S.I. metrics still...) have sort of had an effect similar to what a nova has on stars...I feel denuded...As if my entire life were a sham....All the hooplah...balderdash..gibberish...( as my limited literature knowledge allows me to spew out alternate words for talk that's trash)

Any guesses now why I named this god-forsaken-excuse-for-a-blog 'an attempt at normality' ( I know all you chemists out there can't but control a smirk...) ?

As the dude who at least bothered to comment on my previous post said, I should be perhaps be happy to be where I am.... but


"Jayesh Seshadri,
Graduate Research Assistant,
Laboratory for Advanced Systems Research,
The University of Texas at Austin"

Sounds cool, huh?? Think its remarkable??
.
.
.
I dont think so....And its quite easy to get here. Ask anybody I know.

Jayesh

p.s.1. If I were a woman, I could blame this sudden spurt of sadness on PMS....Alas.
p.s.2. don't hate me for p.s.1.

Friday, January 13, 2006

Chinese??? Yechchch......

(Back after a long long vacation, this part-time blogger returns to his pseudonative Austin, Texas. )

Singaara Austin....I feel as if I have lived here forever....its soooo peaceful, calm and quiet... a portion of me already feels so comfy here that it does'nt want me to return to Chennai... After my travails, such as getting drunk with gingerale in Orlando, getting chased by mad dogs in Chantilly, hunting down metro stations in downtown Washington D.C. and hatching eggs sitting at home in Melbourne, I am getting back to the grind, of yet another long semester. And I am still searching for the light at the other end of the tunnel... My return day began with me running around to pay internet and electricity bills, followed by dropping off a check at the bank, and crisscrossing UT to meet an acquiantence who had flown over from Boulder... Living independently sucks eh?

I think most things here are stigmatized....people generally follow the trodden path...despite this being the land of opportunities as some old dude once said...I find most of my brethren from India speaketh still as Indians, we call the people of this country , foreigners! A guy once approached me about joining a sales enterprise, with commission bonuses and increased commission for adding other people into the network and so on....with claims of making a lot ( I am talking thousands a year)...I would have probably given it a shot, were I here long enough...but as my 'Indian' sensibilities prevailed, I decided to 'let it pass'... Thats one thing I feel we don't do enough....we don't experiment...no entrepreneurship here at all! We like our own petty lives, no grandoise dreams...day in day out...Aren't we all stuck, then? Sans inspiration??

And here I am, supposed to be RA-ing for a professor, with all the comforts a graduate life ( work, work and more work!)....The drastic escalation from zero work to the oft-to-be-eschewed totally busy workday has left me in a dizzy...the sudden return to 6am naps and the waking up at 12 noon to go to work has left my brain in a weird dull semi-comatose state, from which I desperately want it to awaken. But do I really want to jump out of this perhaps self-induced moratoriam from anything social, anything involving people?? Why do I feel this feeling of emptiness, as if I were just a shell? I have never tried anything 'weird'(American?!)...People say I have what everyone at my age desires here , but is that what I desire ? How do I know ?

/*
Perhaps this is the alcohol talking from the new-year's bash I went... considering that it was a meagre 12 days ago, and I have never tasted champagne before....Or it could be all the C++ and TclTk/OTcl coding thats talking.... Thats quite a possibility!
*/

Have a blast in 2006...
Jay

p.s.

Whoever invented chinese food ? Oh right, the Chinese I guess!
Thaangala ( as the tamil word goes)! I can't stand it...ever...

Soy& vinegar shld be banned. Not that I like thai or any other indo-chinese food any better...Pukes me up all the time.