Uhuru!!!

A couple more days and then I will be done (somewhat) and will get back to writing more shit here! Ah! Can't wait! 

Poor, unwell, and mind-fucked

Okay, I am actually writing something. After so long, god, this is disgusting. 

Anyway, so I am poor. Have been for a while, well since my summer class did not make and I went to Europe and then to Chicago and then my phone got fucked and then best of them all, my paycheck dipped to a dismal low. Why, because this blood-sucking university decided to increase the "special institutional fee." I make enough to cover rent, bills and a little food. Well, that means that I eat at home, drink coffee and other adult beverages mostly at home and that is good for the health. But, this is fucking annoying. I feel claustrophobic about finances all the fucking time and that is so fucking annoying. They pay me peanuts and then take 20 percent of my pay away. I don't understand why science graduate students get paid more and have to pay the same fees. The university spends way more money on those useless mother-fuckers than on a humanities graduate student like me. Well, those guys have external funding and that covers a lot, but even a fucker like this shithead I knew who is not affiliated to a lab and is basically fucking around got paid twice my salary and PAID THE SAME FEES. If you are paying them more, charge them more and reduce some of my burden. I work as hard as they do. To hell with it, I work harder than most of those turds. 

Wow, I am angry. Well, I guess I have reason to be angry. If the university is in a financial crunch then shouldn't the top brass, that is the mother-fucking executives who make shit loads of money anyway bear the burden and take some paycuts. Oh no, why would they, that would mean one less Armani suit, one less bottle of $5000 wine, one less day at the golf course and other such luxuries and these Southern gentlemen cannot be seen or thought of without those, of course not. Tch, boy, haven't you learnt anything. Well, fuck them and their wealth. Arrrggghhh. Well I am also not really well. My back has been bothering me. I am in pain and on pain meds. And I have been recommended physical therapy. But, guess what? I cannot afford it. Yeah! And then of course it is end of semester. I have shit load of work to do. Grading, writing, etc and etc. I can't wait for the break. I want to be productive. I want to read and write and make it a worthwhile time. I will obviously not be traveling and I am beginning to think that might be a good plan. I have seen a bit of the country. The rest can wait a little. 

Anyway, I got my first Christmas present. My AWESOME flatmate bought me a ticket to a Beirut concert happening in town. I am happy about that. Well, I guess that is the trick for the time being. Finding that elusive happy place amidst the dark, dreary clouds that have been hanging low in my horizon. I have survived worse and I will survive. And I will write again, soon! Till then...

Time o Time, where art thou?

Alright, seriously really I want to write. Like every evening I tell myself that I am going to post something on the blog. But, well the time's they are a changing for sure and I do not seem to have a lot of time in hand. I hate it, I hate it, I-Hate_It. But, alas! Okay, going out now. Hopefully will write some during the break!!! 

Plans and no plans

I have planned write-ups but I have not planned my schedule well it seems. Hence, the delay in a new post. I will be back and soon and with a lot of vengeance. Bear with me. It has been pretty crazy and it seems things are only going to get crazier. Papers and presentations, quizzes and readings. It is all getting piled high and deep. This business of graduate study is pretty fucking mind-numbing. And I shall leave on that note and will be back soon. 

And here I am...

Blogging is a fucking serious commitment. I mean writing in general is. And boy I am a serious commitment phobe! So, well I took a break. I admit it was a rather long one (well, what am I saying, before I started two articles earlier I had taken a fucking two year break). Alright, I am making no sense whatsoever. So, what I did since I reported our crazy Atlanta trip from two weeks ago. I wrote a bunch of abstracts, saw my bank balance dip to scary lows, cooked some food, attended some classes and presented a paper at a conference. 
I also just finished proposing a full panel to a national conference. Boy, that was a fucking awesome power trip. Graduate students and professors responding to my email were actually sending me their abstracts and I had complete authority to retain or knock them off the boat. I felt like fucking Noah man! Going through and selecting the species of academics that I was most interested in. Anyway, like Noah, I found a place for everyone on my boat. I am essentially a good person, you see (gawd, this is a narcissist on steroids!). 

So, the conference I went to. It was a tiny thing. A day after Fall Break. So, there were more presenters than attendees. I had wanted my pack to be there. But one was out of town, two forgot and three was just lazy (well he claims to have been productive, but the fucker did not come to listen to my paper). I presented on Colbert and Stewart, threw in a little Hazare there as well, but the Americans obviously ignored it. 
The audience got talking and I felt I had kinda done my job. The evening ended with a rather wonderful Hilsa festival, some alcohol and a trip downtown to watch Halloween madness. We missed the real crazy but the troop came back home with me and that was fun. 

It is going to be crazy through the next few weeks. I can already foresee that. Papers to be written, applications to be filled out, brain to be wrapped around things that are best left unwrapped. I have promised myself a good semester and now I need to make sure that it all ends well because as they say (heck, we all say it) All's well that Ends Well. Endings have bothered me always. And I want that to change. For once, I really do. I am getting along well with this new apartment. It has worked wonders for my work ethic, my productivity etc. It is nice and close enough to the building that I can walk to most places that I need to. I still use the occasional ride, but as far as classes and other university commitments (i.e which requires being on campus) go, I am fairly independent. And that is awesome. The walk twice a day is also doing me a world of good. I fit better into some of my clothes and not so well into others. Losing weight, like everything else, has both good and bad sides to it. I also like my new flatmate a lot. I adored my former flatmates as well. But, they were poles apart from me in outlook and also in their academic disciplines and endeavors. Although that never created any serious confrontations, now that I think about it, it frustrated me. Not being able to discuss the vast quantity of shit that you are trying to process in your pea sized brain can be a tad frustrating, I guess. Also being disconnected and in the middle of the woods was well kinda nice but kinda isolating. Someone always needed to fetch and drop me. I was a bother for friends with cars and now that situation is largely avoided. A pleasant consequence, I would say. 
Well, I guess so much for now. I need to run a few errands before I start wrapping my brain around myriad things again. I do plan to start on all the endings that are due at the end of the semester and that most certainly far easily said than done. But, before I go. I would like to share some crazy work that I came up with while in a class, I was naturally a little bored and not involved with the direction. The original being in Bengali a translation will be offered. 



হি-জি-বি-জি 
G-I-B-B-E-R-I-S-H


মানুষ জন্তু আকাশ বাতাস জল হাতি ঘোড়া গাড়ল ছাগল গরু ভেড়া ন্যাড়া মোড়া আলমারি জানলা সাইকেল জামা জুতো মোজা খাট আলো টেবিল কেদারা লম্ফ সিগারেট দেশলাই গেলাস মদ 


Man Animal Sky Air Water Elephant Horse Imbecile Goat Cow Bald Stool Almira Window Cycle Shirt Shoe Sock Bed Light Table Chair Lamp Cigarette Match Glass Alcohol 


A quick look into my insanity, enjoy while you are allowed! Chao!!! 

Of achievements, debaucheries and myriad randomness

Thursday was a red letter day. No, it seriously was. I, for the first time in my entire freaking adult life, flipped an omelette correctly without breaking it into weird shaped pieces. I know for a lot of you this might not be something. But, this was a major culinary breakthrough for me. I have experimented with a myriad different things now. Have cooked a diverse range of food items which look good and taste even better. But, when it came to reproducing that fluffy, eggy wonderfulness that my mother made for me I have been a failure. I have tried several different things. More butter, less butter, greased pan, un-greased pan, more stuffing, less stuffing, you name it and I have tried it. But, the results have always been the same. Failure, utter total failure. It was depressing and distressing. Looking at that eggy mess on the edge of my plate instead of the neatly folded omelette made me consider going for therapy. But, not anymore, I have flipped two of them now, on consecutive days. And although I am no expert yet, I am getting there. Thought I should share the thoughts and feelings with you'll. Now for some statistics, about a million omelettes are flipped everyday. a couple of million others are unsuccessful at the same venture. I seriously feel like the member of a freaking elite club now. So, that was Thursday. 

It has been a long week and we decided to unwind on Friday. Started at the Globe and did a pub crawl stopping at Little Kings, Manhattan and Max Canada en route. It was a fun evening. Too much drinking, crazy conversations and a little too much nicotine. Well, I guess once in a while such nights are needed. Manhattan makes a rather decent sangria and Max Canada has air hockey. I love air hockey. Although I lost both the games to our new faculty member who helped me stay afloat and drunk in spite of my depleted finances. Well, he is from a country that swears by hockey, so there is that. The night ended at the greasy grill. And it ended at five in the morning. 

And so we woke up hungover on Saturday (why is that a surprise?) and decided we needed to go to Atlanta. And so we did. Walked around Piedmont Park, watched a wedding, headed to midtown, walked up and down Peachtree and down 5th and through parts of GA tech and then drove back. GA Tech has cooler buildings and a much bigger and better bookstore. One of my fellow country-men had made crepes and that was the next stop and then there was the long drive. And all this ended at 4. Thank god I am not hungover this morning because I need to put facts and figures into my system and pump out the same. Going to be one of these adventurous academic days. 

So, that was yet another crazy weekend. It was kinda fun actually. Rejuvenating in many ways. It was mostly random. There was no serious planning and that is fun. Plans kill inventiveness and make life uninteresting. Glad, we did not take that route. Alright, I will shut up now and get on with life. More will follow and soon. 

Piled High and Deep and other general thoughts!

Writing is serious commitment. And the events of March 2009 killed any little trace of that commitment that I might have had. I re-located but for a while I remained moored to the shores that my body had left. It all sounds very strange. But truth is often cheesy, shitty and nausea inducing. However, I believe I have moved on. Not that there isn't that occasional incising pain, but I treat as a remnant of an operation that was not performed properly. So, here I am, in the US of A, a doctoral student. A couple of years (hopefully) from having alphabets before and after my name. I remember that afternoon at the British Council Library, Kolkata when promises were exchanged, this is what I had wanted. It was all uncertain, but this was it. And here I am living it now and boy isn't it god-awful at times. I curse myself, but at the next moment as I get engrossed in understanding what some theorist, researcher, someone has said in some part of the world and how that is shaping the way I feel about my world and surroundings, I feel a strange calm. I don't know if it is natural. But, I feel mighty good. 
I have traveled a bit in these last two years. Have seen a few more things in this planet of ours, which still remains (contrary to technical claims and thanks to border control) rather large for me. Traveling is good, I enjoy it and my only hope and wish is that I can keep earning enough so that I can keep traveling all my life. Work (if I land up with a job that is) will no doubt get in the way. And that is precisely why I want to continue in academia. The pay is shit and you will not drive a fancy car (well unless of course you are saving the world's future by depleting its present resources as scientists often do) or have a palatial home, but you will get summers off. And thanks to conferences and the need to go to them to get and give slaps on the backs (both the sexual and the "bravo, well done" kind), you will see new places and hopefully the university will foot the bill. So, when I get a job, hoping that I will, I can say that I have chosen wisely. Till then, I will drink seven cups of coffee everyday, go to bed at 3 in the morning, drink cheap alcohol and forget the meaning of the word breakfast. And yeah read 200 pages every 3 days and write about 100 once every six months and wank my dick off while hoping to get laid (being a single graduate student is particularly miserable). Ah well, the usual bitterness has crept into this note. I was seriously hoping to take it toward a positive direction but that seems to be difficult given the circumstances. 
Will think of something along those lines the next time I write, which will be (one can only hope) soon.