Death-The Leveller

Death has occupied my mind a lot lately.

Actually, I have been ruminating about dying at some point every day for the past 2 weeks, not in a morbid way, but more in an "Am I ready? Is there any unfinished business? How would I want to be remembered?" way, which I guess is constructive. At least, to a point.

What's not is, allowing myself to be tortured by the fear of leaving some people behind. As a new believer, I must draw the line of evaluation there. I can't give in to this distressing hand-wringing. For reasons of my own, I have been reading the Bible for the last couple of weeks.

I have always believed death will be like that dreadful moment of suspension. I cant stop but think about the unique relationship of a trapeze team. When the swinger lets go of his bar and hangs in mid-air for a split second, he has no protection. He cannot see his catcher nor control the catcher's speed or method. But at just the right moment, the swinger's "savior" arrives and whisks him to the base.

In other words, we will not be left hanging for one moment because to let go here makes us present there.

There is one particular place where Paul says, "When you sow a seed, it must die in the ground before it can live and grow. And when you sow it, it does not have the same body it will have later. What you sow is only a bare seed, maybe wheat or something else. But God gives it a body that he has planned for it".

The key phrase is: "that he has planned for it." As the story of our life unfolds, we are safe in the strong hands of our savior and "catcher" who has planned for us to be with Him forever. Nothing can pry us from his loving grip.

But for the more Am I ready? Is there any unfinished business parts - there was this song by Seals & Crofts that my cousin sister gave me years ago that I have on looped play.

windflowers, my father told me not to go near them
he said he feared them always and he told me that they carried him away

windflowers, beautiful windflowers
i couldn't wait to touch them,
to smell them i held them closely
and now i cannot break away
their sweet bouquet disappears
like the vapor in the desert
so take a warning

windflowers, ancient windflowers
their beauty captures every young dreamer who lingers near them
but ancient windflowers, i love you

Etymology...confusin...

(Overheard at an undisclosed location)

Guy 1:
i want bigger shoulders , pecs , abs and big arms but dont wanna get too big , just 'toned'

my diet is great - i drink diet coke and cereal bars for breakfast and for dinner low fat yogurt and burger with no bap (i was told carbs are bad)

i dont want to go to gym so do 5000 situps three times per day - 900 pressups and bicep curls with a 10kg bar

will i look like brad pitt from fight club ??


Guy 2: (okay not a guy, Guy1's ultra-sycophantic girlfriend)
You already do, skinny soft lad!

Guy 3: (gags)
yes your body will but your face will still look like a horse's arse



I have no idea, why this conversation is relevent at all in any context.... but i cant get it out of my head... Is there actually such a phrase as "horse's arse"? I had developed a suspicipon that "horse's ass" was actually an alternate term for "mule" and not actually to do with farm animals' rear ends. Enough with the etymology already, my ma wants me to have my well deserved bath.

AAAARRRGGGHHH!!!

I just sat here for an hour typing a new update, when firefox crashed and I lost the whole damned thing. I've gotta go play some violent video games for a while or something....I guess I'll try it again later. .... Oh, and did I mention DAMMIT!

Unlike music by the Nine Inch Nails, which is better than it sounds, roast turkey is less good than it sounds. For a reason that I have not been able quite to fathom, it is supposed to be this really exotic christmas meal. Or so I, at any rate, have found.

Whether this is because christians somewhere cook it better, or if it is because it is a dish that is appropriate to the country, I am not sure. Perhaps you need to be near dense and dark pine forests, with clearings for witches and wicked stepmothers who either devour small children or send them out to find strawberries in the snow, to appreciate the comforts of roast turkey.

Yet, such is the theoretical allure of this bird that for a number of years I have seen people be reluctant to contemplate the roasting of any other for their traditional and compulsive (if not compulsory) Christmas overindulgence. After all, the connotation of the word turkey, that is to say of dismal failure, seems to me to be entirely appropriate.

Now if turkey were really so good, why is it that do we not eat it at other times of year? We are not very keen these days on self-denying ordinances, so the idea that we save up something delicious just for a single glorious treat once a year isn't very plausible. If something is good we want it all the time, in and out of season, and are prepared to import it at the greatest expense from Ivory Coast if need be.

So why does turkey so rarely appear on menus, other than in the slightly modified form of cold cuts in mildly exotic buffets? I do not think its size can explain everything. If it were really so splendid, we could cook half, a quarter or even an eighth of a turkey. The fact that we don't eat turkey all the time, or even more than once a year, tells us, or ought to tell us, something.

However, I disregarded these skeptical and dissenting thoughts this year, putting them to the back of my mind, which oddly enough feels as though it really is located at the back of my head, somewhere in my occipital lobe. I took no notice of the small, mocking voice that worms its way forward and tells me it, the turkey, will be no good. But it was still a new year party that was calling me over. So, I tell myself, as a man whistling in the dark, this time the turkey will be delicious.

The first and most serious problem with roasting a turkey is the fat. There is so much of it that normal dishes cannot contain it all, and one has to repeatedly empty the fat into various containers. And while turkey fat might have been thought by grandmothers to have medicinal and preventive properties when rubbed into the chest, and maybe is indeed excellent and perhaps even incomparable for roasting potatoes, yet there is far more of it than you can possibly want or use in a year.

Turkey fat does not keep to itself, either. Turkey fat vapour (or, I suppose it would be more scientific to say, droplets) soon spreads through the whole house, which begins to smells like a vast roast turkey, and remains roasted for a few days thereafter. Mere soap and hot water are powerless against the insidious invasion of turkey fat.

The meat tends to be dense and not easily digestible. It seems to sink directly into special receptacles in the small intestines , where it settles like a lead weight and saps the will for movement for at least two days.

My cousin was with us for the post Christmas yuletide celebration. He ate it with the undiscriminating voracity natural to adolescence, but in the middle of the night his grandmother roused us from our drinks and the scrabble table to say that he had a terrible stomach ache. We found him groaning in his bed and when we offered to examine him, he said, "I want a proper doctor, not you."

In my time in the market I had been on the receiving end of far worse insults than this, and I told him that no such doctor was available, this being Madurai, that I was better than nothing. Reluctantly, he let me examine him. In the end, my diagnosis was that he was establishing an excuse to not do the homework the following day that he had put off ever since he arrived. On the other hand, there is no denying the indigestibility of turkey.

My observations on the disadvantages of turkey as a Christmas bird have been confirmed by others. I am now cured of my illusion. I pledge hereby that in no year, will I be cooking my own goose/turkey. whatever.

Thirst For A Proper MMORPG

This is a take on an article in the Daedalus Project a few weeks ago about people who fell in love because they met in "massively multiplayer online role playing games. (MMORPG)"

A year ago I was an avid player of these games, Final Fantasy XI (FFXI) and Everquest(EQ). They were fun games, but there weren't very many female players. And people estimate that half of the female players you did see were actually male players pretending to be female. Yuck!

But based on the Daedalus's endorsement I thought that maybe I should give this another one a try. I needed to find a game with a better male to female ratio (Yes, adolescence does that to you). So I tried The Sims Online. Sims supposedly has the best male to female ratio of all massively multiplayer online games, but hardly anyone plays it. I can see why. It's pretty pointless. There's nothing to do. In Fantasy or EQ you would join a team of other players and kill monsters. Only with good teamwork was it possible to kill them efficiently. Plot lines follow every other Hollywood Fantasy movie. Young apprentice befriends older mentor(another player). Work together to kill monsters(other players). The more you kill, the stronger you get, more skills you learn. (For the initiated, along the lines of Diablo, only more complex and more fun). And so, unlike the real world where you work and work and nothing happens, in this your work is quite shockingly, rewarded.

However in Sims all you do is stuff like take the dog for a walk, call your wife good names, make lunch, watch tv, eat dinner, go to the bathroom, take a shower, sleep. That was easily the only virtual world ever invented that is more boring than real life.

But this virtual world does have a better male to female ratio than the real world. And the girls (atleast i think they were) are easier to talk to. Every time I did log on, my virtual roommate, Ktrina79 starts chatting with me. Ktrina was a schoolteacher from Montreal and the pics she sent made me wanna go back to school. Was fun for a while, but there was no way i could go on with the tedium. For all I know "she's" really some fifty year old gay guy.

Although it may not fit the stereotype, we gamers are not immune to love. There's bound to be some flirting going on when you have a few thousand people playing an MMORPG together. The games are filled with scenarios that shed light on player personalities. Those seem like pretty good odds for the ladies.

We thus stand on the cusp of a new generation where parents telling their children about the circumstances of how they met will not revolve around college parties, chance encounters at a coffee shop or business conferences. Instead, they will tell their children how they met each other while battling gnolls in subterranean caverns or slaying the undead in forgotten crypts while pretending to be warriors or clerics.

Point of the post - I'm bored. Lots of work i dont wanna do.

Damn bad karma

It happened again .... Blogger ate my post.I've tried and I've tried to get into the habit of copy/pasting my posts as I go, or doing it in Word...but I basically suck at it. And I've been sitting here being mad about it almost long enough to just do it all again...but now I'm too...mad. Maybe the universe is just trying to tell me to shut the hell up & stop whining...

Anyway, I'll try again later. Darn...

Where is the nearest bridge???

I officially hate myself.



Don't you hate it when it feels like you've had a string of disappointments and you foolishly decide to rely on someone who is well known for being unreliable to be the one who will bring you out of the dumps? And then that person - lovely and wonderful and amazing as they are - is, as people tend to be, a human being, who has their own ups and downs to contend with (at an amplified dosage, no less).

Well, i don't know about you, but i hate it.

I'm trying hard to focus on the positive, which isn't easy, because for bunches of other reasons i've had a predominantly tough few days of late. The resources seem low.

Melancholic Thoughts Before The Lights Go Out

It’s a melancholic Thursday. Hell, it’s been a melancholic week. I’m reminded daily of how blessed I am, but it doesn’t make it any easier to get past some of the emotional junk that creeps up on me when I’m not looking. I’ve slowly pulled away from the commitment to live simply and the conviction to turn back towards that casual lifestyle is growing stronger by the day. I have lived a lifestyle of plenty and can easily afford to give up many of the objects and wants I have so easily elevated to a status of need and possibly even worship.

My heart is pretty torn right now with thoughts of my second cousin. A good kid. Loved his mom. Went to college. Kept at the studies. Had grand plans. Kept the world turning.

He's now in a coma after a road accident. Been 5 days now. And I know that his parents have struggled for the past few days with his health, but being confronted with the reality of death is always a sobering thought. The most recent news is not positive, and I know that at any point I might receive that call from my dad with news.

I only got to know of the entire incident when I got back from school on Monday. When I found out that his mom was at the hospital fighting back tears, I headed straight for Trivandrum from school. Strong, resolute woman. I keep wondering if I should head to Trivandrum now to be with her, but part of me has hope that her son is going to pull through just like she has in the past. However, listening to news that his health is steadily deteriorating over sporadic phone calls has been heartbreaking, and watching their will to fight the inevitable has just compounded to make my heart heavy every time I close my eyes.

Yeah.... Good night to you too.

As Clueless As Me

That little thing my sis is propping up is my lil niece and the following what she had to tell me.


What's those? My feet? That’s nice. And that? My bottoms? That’s nice. Look, there’s my middle. That’s nice. I’ll call it a “no-mack”. No, no, that’s not nice. I know, I’ll call it a “stomach”. Yes, that’s nice. Oh, my finger is in my mouth. Yo, yum. Very nice. Does the next finger taste as good as the first finger? Why, yes, yes indeed. Very pleasant. Now let me try the whole hand... Yumm.. Even better.. okay this hurts... And there’s Uncle. He’s nice. Behind him is a light, small and round, looking over him, over his, his..... “shoulder.” Shoulders are nice. They protect and they support. Also I can pivot myself on it. I’ll call the ball a “bulb.” Yes, that’s very nice. Very nice. I want the bulb. Let me reach for it and maybe I can refract the light from my nails… wait, is there a nail on each finger? And why did I call them “nails?”. Oh well, that works. Wow, there’s one on each finger. But on each hand? Wow. Brilliant. How nice. And on my big finger, too? Yes, there it is. I’ll call it a “thumb”. Is there a big finger on the other hand, too? Aha, there is. And they move too! Wow. How nice. Look, a dust speck. And another. It’s floating over the many intricate tapestries of the space time continuum. Lets stare at them. Pretty specks.. Lots of specks. And there’s my stomach again. Hmmm…. There’s my feet. Hey, Uncle’s feet. I’ll eat them. Ummmm, very nice. I’m tired of eating. I think I’ll “votit”…. No, “bomit”…. No, er…. I got it! I’ll “belch” on his feet. Ah! Very nice. No, where was I? Oh yes, the bulb. Wait, there’s the floor! And its tiled. What a nice color. Are there any more? Hmm, yes there are. And there’s mommy. Maybe I can eat her feet. Wow, look at that paper….. it has a nice design. Does my butt have nice designs? Mommy must think so, she spends so much time putting the paper on it. That’s nice. Oh, my rattle toy. Sounds are nice. Colors are nice. And uncle's reaching for me! Breathe hard, Anya! Wave your arms and pump your legs. Give him that half-tooth goofy grin! He’s taking me, I’m rising. Oh, look there’s a dust mote on his nose. Wow. He’s squeezing me. Ah…….. how nice!