The Recount Continues...

We step back further back into the weekend... Certain unfamiliar terms just might have a helpful tooltip.

Getting tired of the mandatory half hourly sutta break, one complains, that not everyone present is a smoker, at which point an upstanding religious individual comes up with the genius idea to visit Bangla Sahib. Since one doesn't like to interfere with peoples' religious tendencies, and being outvoted by the rest of the group, one decides to visit the Mentor, the man who sowed the media seed in a very confused and depressed individual coming fresh out of the boards, very unsatisfactorily, and whose office happens to be on Barakhamba Road.
As two cars are filled up, one requires sustenance, particularly double mutton single egg kathis with hazelnut coffee from the aptly named 'The Kathis' in GK. As none of the occupants are rather unaware of how to get to CP, one leads the way to India Gate and begins circling it, looking for the KG Marg turning. One full circle later, it is discovered that the roads around India Gate have obviously changed their names since the last time one visited CP. Discovering the kathi on hand to be rather excellent, one decides to concentrate on it, expecting the rest of the occupants to find the turning, without being told to do so.
So begin the three slow circles of India Gate, with one concentrating far more on the kathi on hand than the road, giving it nothing but a token glance, if only to avoid hitting the car in front, and to keep moving in a circle, as opposed to turning onto the wrong street. All this while being informed by JD Fortune about how he'd like certain hot girls to ruin his life and whatnot. Halfway into the third circle, one realizes that there is a long line of cars moving equally slowly, honking and cursing, as are the occupants of the car, and the upstanding religious individual on the other side of the phone call. Going up the central road instead, and turning onto Central Secretariat, the route one assumes also leads to CP, one finishes the remnants of the hazelnut coffee on hand.
Upon reaching CP, one receives a phone call from the upstanding religious individual, as the latter's car seems to have misplaced the former's.
So begin the seven slow rounds of inner circle, pointing out the various landmarks the various occupants of the two cars can see, including, a suspicious number of times, the office of India Today. Much ranting and screaming(on the part of Sweaty, whom some of you may remember, who had to visit a toilet ASAP) and weeping(on the part of sutta break caller, who had consumed the majority of a rather potent green chilly) and cursing, including the most vile swear one is known to fling at upstanding religious individual, Indira Gandhi, which is not to say that one has anything against her, rather admires her immensely. The swear is only akin to that used by Trey Parker and Matt Stone's characters in invoking the name of Barbara Streisand. Either way, once all of the niceties were done with, arbitrary India Today office spotter came up with the commendably brilliant idea that one stop the car at the Palika Parking and wait for upstanding religious individual to catch up.

Needless to say, neither car was able to find a parking spot close to the other. Finally, one car was placed on the ground level, and the other, somewhere in the lower basement. A fact even more needlessly obvious, not one individual managed to remember where either car was parked once the three hours the cars were left there had passed.

A Recount...

Monday morning, one wakes up with a very heavy weight on one's chest, despite lying on the stomach, and a level of discomfort. As the hands seem to be inexplicably pinned down under the chest, one reaches for the pillow with the teeth, and bites down to pull the pillow closer. On a clamping shut of the jaws on the pillow, the pillow gives off a whimper. Finding that at least a bit strange, the teeth then attempt to banish the entity hiding inside the pillow case by shaking the hell out of it like a dog does to a newspaper. Finding that method to lead to more whimpers, and an eventual Fine, I'll make breakfast, just stop biting me, one decides to get up and figure out their immediate surroundings.
By locking the arms in a push up position, and lifting off, the weight is lifted, and it rolls off, grabbing the arm of its significant other, who had occupied the couch, pulling him off as well. The resulting commotion woke up the last bit of sleepy flesh, thrown across a corner, but still occupying very little space given the 5 foot flat stature natural selection had chosen to spare her with.

Here follows a converation between Little One(LO), Myself(R), Pussy whipped guy(PWG), Bloody weight across my chest first thing in the morning(BW), and Birthday girl aka pillow(BG).

LO: Renovatio, what the hell's wrong with you?!?
R: Screw you, none of you even drank anything, can't you sleep still? Look at him, he slept on the couch and kept to himself.
PWG: Dude, when you live with a woman, you'll learn to do that too.
BW: Shut up and go back to sleep.
PWG: Yes darling.
R: No, get up, it's seven, and we all have work and stuff to get to. It's gonna take us two hours to get to frigging Delhi from here. God damn middle of nowhere place you live(to pillow).
BG: Well I'm sorry about that my lord, and what would you like for breakfast.
R: No, shut up, happy birthday, I'll make something. Where's your bloody fridge.
Chorus: Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear pillow...
BG: Shutupshutupshutup! he's right, I didn't have any alcohol in the house, but you're all making me feel like I'm having a hangover.
PWG: What the hell have you been drinking, you feel like that after shrooms.
LO: Why is it always about shrooms with you?!?
PWG: Dude, shrooms ro-...
BW: Pussy whipped...
PWG: Sorry darling.
R: You know what, I found some cold bacon here, this is mine, you guys find your own damn breakfast.
BG: Just make some of your omelettes Ren, or pancakes or something. Pleeeeeeease.
R: Oh bloody hell, fine. Someone make some coffee, I refuse to make it sugary and shitty like you retards drink it.

Some time later, I'd managed to finish putting together a modest breakfast for the five of us involving pancakes, the bacon(cooked by this point), fried eggs, coffee and juice, and once having finished eating it, we left, with much complaining about the choice of music in my car.

I will relate more of the last weekend soon.


In unrelated news, I know those online IQ tests are bullshit, but I took one for the hell of it anyway.

Your General IQ Score of 149 shows how able your mind is in general. Anyone with a General IQ Score this high is considered to be a genius. This score is better than 99.95% of all persons taking this test. All known occupations can be comprehended with a General IQ this high. You should be able to handle any academic challenges.

Holy shit.

On owning one's first car...

Saturday:
Welcome to Maruti Service Masters, Okhla. We hope you had a pleasant time finding the damn place, which should have taken you no less than an hour, while remaining in a five hundred meter radius the entire time. Please remove everything not nailed down, and figure out a way to remove your brand new speakers as well, or we will screw them up. Your car is in excellent condition, and we appreciate that you decided to come in for a servicing to start the service cycle, so that we can mess up your car and give you reason to come and get it serviced hereon. Oh, and we forgot, speakers can't be removed. Very well, we'll just have to screw them up. Enjoy the auto-rickshaw ride home considering we shall neglect to inform you of our value-added service of providing you a car for the day we keep your car with us for servicing, and remember, that not only will we call you over the day to tell you your brakes are close to failing, something you didn't notice because of your habitual double clutching and double braking as a result of spending time with drag-racing types, but that we must replace nevertheless with our exorbitantly expensive genuine Maruti parts lest the result be a mild case of, well, death for you. Remember, bring a credit card or lots of cash, and keep in mind that you will be back to see us in a matter of days, since your car shall begin to wobble when you cross speeds that we don't touch on, completely neglecting the fact that a fellow your age will never drive his car at 60 on an empty road. Especially not at fifth gear, as we prescribe for most efficient fuel management. Thank you, and have a great day.

Wednesday:
Welcome to Maruti Service Masters, please sit in our sub-standard lounge and eat stale patties while we screw you some more out of your hard earned money. Today we shall take over forty five minutes to send someone to attend to you, and then take another hour to re-balance and re-align your wheels. Once that is done, we shall take you for a road test, only to find out that your car still wobbles at 80. Very well, you shall return to the lounge for another thirty minutes during which time we shall discover that your wheel's bearing and hub have worn out and need replacing, something we couldn't possibly have figure out last time you were here for a full car service, considering we're only certified Maruti car technicians. This process shall only take us another forty five minutes to complete, during which you can try and scrape together something over thirty five rupees so that your friends who accompanied you for the 'half hour' this was supposed to take can get to Nehru Place and an ATM. Once you have sent them off, we shall take you for another road test, to discover that once again, your car continues to wobble. After sending you back up to the lounge for another obligatory thirty minutes, we shall discover that one of your wheels, which we allegedly removed and balanced and aligned and played musical chairs with no less than three times, has, on the back side of it, well, A BIG BLOODY GASH. This wheel will have to be changed, and we can't put your spare tire there instead, as it is also completely worn out. We will now treat you like a retard for no less than fifteen minutes, all the while dropping hints, but not acknowledging that you are already aware of the fact that you will have to replace at least four of your wheels or else you'll find the ones you replace wearing out far too early. Oh and while we're at it, we'll arbitrarily point at something on the underside of your axle that you, being a lifetime car owner and all-cum-car technician ought to recognize as the suspension arm, which we also must replace. And before we forget, we have to change the entire steering frame of your car. Did we mention we're going to charge you through the ass for all these spare parts? And we'll continue to commend you on the amazingly well maintained five year old second hand car you bought with only 30k clocked on.
If you would like a car to take home while we keep your car overnight, follow Prashant, the incredibly inept car technician overseeing all the work on your car to our loan-car fellow and waste yet another forty minutes waiting for him to tell you that he just gave their last car to someone, and that if you wish, you can come any time this week with the car, all the way to Okhla again, and sit for another five hours waiting for us to discover other problems in your supposedly well maintained and smooth driving car.

In Flames

I sit here on a system I purloined from my colleague, waiting, wondering, hoping that the one I was working on is alright. I suppose I overloaded it with the last render, but whatever I did, I caused the UPS to catch fire. Burned my thumb a bit too. Again, hopefully, it's alright.
It's being narrated in my voice entirely, they seem to like it, and I've been able to do a decent job with the editing, considering the footage they gave me. I've spent way too many hours in the last week and a half sitting in my 19 degree office working on this damn movie to see it go up in flames.

In flames.

My life changed with those flames, four years ago. Having just got back from Pakistan, one of the toughest and scariest but most memorable times of my life, a time I was forced to grow up a little too soon, with everything happening around. I was attending Woodstock school, for the rest of the year, away from my folks for the first time in my life. The customary six week period where we weren't allowed to meet any family starting on my 14th birthday behind me, I spent a weekend with them, where Dad treated me more like a man than the kid he'd always treated me as. I knew he had something he wanted to say, to tell me, but kept himself from saying it, until perhaps the next time I met him. Little did any of us know.
The following thursday, I was fumbling with a problem in Star Math, they all thought I was some stellar student, when I got called out of class. Wondering what the hell I'd done this time, I followed the peon out and was rather surprised to see my aunt as well as my sister at the office. I was a bit apprehensive, even more so when she said Dad had an elevator accident, but wouldn't say anything more. I went over to my locker, and grabbed a book for the ride home, thinking I'd need something to do while we sat around in the hospital waiting for him to recover. A few hours later, my uncle took us aside in the train and told us he was gone. It had been instant.

It took until the next morning for it to sink in. The next few days passed like a blur until I found myself at rishikesh wading knee deep in the river, pouring his ashes into it. I remembered carrying his body, lighting the fire below it, taking a stick and cracking his charred skull through the pile of logs. I remembered going back the next morning, to look at charred bones, all that was left of my Dad. I opened my eyes and found myself at the river again. I swore at that moment not to shed a tear, to be strong for my mom and sister, that Dad's strength would flow through me.
I found out over the rest of the week from newspapers that he was with RAW. That was what he had wanted to tell me in Mussoorie, the last weekend I met him, what he couldn't tell me in Pakistan because I was too young. The accident had happened in CGO complex, his own office. The lift had stopped, and he had tried to climb out, along with all the other senior officers, and gotten crushed when it started moving.
I numbed myself to everything around me, I strove to be the man Dad wanted me to be. I put my faith in love and love alone, just like Dad always taught me. Time and time again love kicked me in the balls, left me gasping on the ground, but I got up just the same, ready for it to find me again. Keeping myself strong, Dad's strength flowing through me.

Then came the book. Apparently some Major General had published a book on RAW once he retired that's been banned around the country, but we found a copy at Midlands. A chapter of the book was his own account of it, he was in the elevator with my Dad, and for the first time I got to hear exactly what happened to my Dad.

It's sapped the last of my strength, I've been absolutely empty, but the misery only came two sundays ago, when I found I couldn't talk about it, and I sit in my nineteen degree office from nine in the morning to nine, ten, eleven at night. Days my boss makes me leave early, I pack up the computer and get my buddy JD, who's staying over with us right now, to come pick me up, and I take the computer home and keep working from there. I don't know what I'll do once I finish these movies, I don't know how I'll keep myself busy then, but I need to do a great job of it.

Wasted mornings and a lost happy trail

So I sit here, waiting for tech support on my computer at work, as outlined on the other blog I write on even more rarely than this one, the whiney one. It's one of the blogs on the right side what has the word 'whine' in it.
Flipping through messages I had read out to me from my best buddy staying over at home containing death threats from my sister's boyfriend for not waiting for her to take an additional two hours to get ready to drop me to work, and then pushing off with the car as I didn't want to get late, I remember exactly why I so pointedly left my phone at home, but more than that, I think of happier things, like the source of all that is happy, my happy trail.
Now not everyone is familiar with the happy trail, it's basically the line of hair that goes from just above the belly button to a bit below the waist. It spans the region that is also known as the 'paunch' for people that have one. Personally, I have accidental pseudo abs as a result of the physio I'd had to do post my back injury. Now pseudo abs aren't real abs, just a bit of the ab-by outline that shows up to mark the beginning of abs. As I'll be joining a gym soon, I'll fill them out soon enough. But I don't have a paunch, so my happy trail area gives me plenty of happiness.
This morning, while shaving, I wound up clogging my razor. It's a nice green Gillette thing that vibrates. After clearing it out, I thought that perhaps it had dulled enough to warrant a change. To confirm, I gave it an experimental swish down my bellybutton. Needless to say, my happy trail is now bald.
This leaves me with one thing to say. Of course there are other factors, other reasons, but the one I've chosen to speak about, is the lack of a happy trail.

I am not happy.

Acknowledging the Tag

Couldn't sleep, got too much on my mind, so I thought I'd (finally) answer the tag-bagging that Anki, Blow, and Dude decided to throw at me.


1. Pick out a scar you have, and explain how you got it.
I have a tiny stab wound at the base of my left pinky. My sister stabbed me with a packing knife when I tried to save a few balloons she was letting loose on with said knife.


2. What is on the walls in your room?
Uh, speakers in two corners, a random charcoal drawing of a man and a horse, my class photo, the last picture I have with my dad...Cupboards, bookshelves, a mirror, a little dressing table below the mirror between bookshelves, you know.


3. What does your phone look like?
It's the butt-ugliest phone ever made by Nokia, the 6255. It's cdma and it looks like this.


4. What music do you listen to?
A lot of mixed bag, mostly alt rock, accoustics and unpluggeds, but I'll give almost anything at least one listen, if it doesn't mention bling, bitches, butts, and (b)hoes (aww).


5. What is your current desktop picture?
Something off Digital Blasphemy called Idyll.


6. What do you want more than anything right now?
The same thing I've wanted for months now. She knows, no one else needs to.


7. Do you believe in gay marriage?
Absolutely, I'm very tolerant, until they decide to hit on me(gay men that is). I'm no one to stop them from doing whatever homosexual ladies and gentlemen like to do amongst themselves, and I believe everyone has a right to have what they want.


8. What time were you born?
No clue. Sometime in the wee hours of the day/night.


9. Are your parents still together?
In heart yes, but well, dad's not with us anymore.


10. What are you listening to?
How to Save a Life by The Fray, and Nightswimming by REM's next.


11. Do you get scared of the dark?
Naa, plus I can't sleep unless I have pitch black. A bit of a problem regarding my mouse, as it has a bright little blue light in the scroll wheel, which I have to find a way to muffle. Paper does the trick most of the time.


12. The last person to make you cry?
Nits. Long story, must blog about it.


13. What is your favorite perfume/cologne?
Lanvin. I'm also fond of fcuk. I have a number of moods associated with my various colognes. Lanvin for when I'm satisfied, fcuk for when I'm missing a certain someone, Nina Ricci Club for when I've got a long day ahead and I'm feeling a bit off (it's a strong one), and Chrome by Azzaro for when I'm going out with a bunch. Also got your standard Polos, Perrys, and Davidoffs. Used fcuk a lot lately, and not much of the Lanvin.


14. What kind of hair/eye type (yes, I changed it) do you like on the opposite sex?
I like long straight hair and deep iridescent pools for eyes.


15. Do you like pain killers?
I don't really bother, the pain will go away. Unless they've been prescribed and I've had a stern "you better take em" from dear ol' Doctor Nagpal, I won't bother. I also won't drink Red Bull right after having one... closest I've been to being stoned in my life, and I've got the pictures of the ceiling of Hookah to prove it.


16. Are you too shy to ask someone out?
Naw. If it's someone new, what am I losing out on, even if she does, she's not rejecting me, she doesn't even know me. If it's someone I've known for a while, I'll allow the relationship to happen, won't force it. Talk about it, yes, but no need to make it "official".


17. Favorite pizza topping?
Doesn't really matter. Pizza's nothing great here. Take me to some good pizza and I'll call out toppings.


18. If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?
I'd like some nice lobster right about now.


19. Who was the last person you made mad?
Other than my own self, there's someone I wish I could make un-mad with me. I'll do it yet I tell you, I'll do it yet.


20. Is anyone in love with you?
Not that I'm aware of. No point, I'll let them down.

That's pretty much all. If you want to, then by all means, consider yourself tagged. Pretty much everyone who's likely to do this tag already has.

A good song...

"In the sun... now that's a good song"
"Who's it by"
"Joseph Arthur... it reminds me of Taru"
"No Renovatio, you're a good song" she called out with her doting smile as she got out of the car.

Now there's the sister I wish I had over this lifetime... unfortunately the circumstances at which she adopted me as her big little brother I'd prefer not to have had. Her sister, Tara, my ex, got hit by a truck in Sidney, and she died on the spot. I've been taken up as a sort of replacement sibling, younger, but still treated by this naive bundling joyful soon-to-be 26 year old as a big brother she's always looked up to. It's been a bit over a month, but I'm already chalked out to meet her boyfriend of 6 years to approve or disapprove of this guy she plans to get engaged to soon. She's already spent an evening with me at Fortis while I waited to hear about my uncle whose appendix burst. She's already kept my mind empty through some of the most frustrating, lonely days, put me to sleep by singing to me.

She calls me her Hairy Butt Bear, and that's because my face is hairy and my butt is cute... so she says

And she does all that because she loves her sister and loves me because her sister loved me.

This one goes out to Tara... Neets and I miss you Taru, and we wish you were around to hang out with us... I drive now... so you won't have to :)

I picture you in the sun wondering what went wrong
And falling down on your knees asking for sympathy
And being caught in between all you wish for and all you seen
And trying to find anything you can feel that you can believe in

May gods love be with you
Always
May gods love be with you

I know I would apologize if I could see your eyes
cause when you showed me myself I became someone else
But I was caught in between all you wish for and all you need
I picture you fast asleep
A nightmare comes
You cant keep awake

May gods love be with you
Always
May gods love be with you

cause if I find
If I find my own way
How much will I find
If I find
If I find my own way
How much will I find
You

I dont know anymore
What its for
Im not even sure
If there is anyone who is in the sun
Will you help me to understand
cause I been caught in between all I wish for and all I need
Maybe youre not even sure what its for
Any more than me

May gods love be with you
Always
May gods love be with you