Monday, March 30, 2009

standard typos

typos. there are some words that i, for the life of me can't type correctly on the first attempt. and what's more, the typo is the same every single time! here are a few of my words and their erroneous counterparts:

date - data

fremont - fremong

belmont - belmong

sunnyvale - sunnyvalue

poor - no points for guessing this one!


what are your typos?

Saturday, March 21, 2009

stanford with a new pair of eyes!

today, i’m in stanford after 6 months. what an unnatural thing to do - to not visit stanford for 6 months. afterall, this was my first home here! and it is, in some measure, an experience equivalent to my first trip back home, to bangalore after having lived in the u.s. for a year and a half. a very, very surreal experience. i’m pretty crazy about such experiences, actually. they fascinate me. in fact (although i haven’t done it so far), i could probably even go so far as to deliberately avoid an oft-visited place and then visit it again one fine day just to see how i feel about it ;)

it is SO interesting to compare what you thought of the things you saw - people, trees, buildings, roads, and other inanimate objects and how you perceived them then, with how you perceive them now. what the heck, one should at least be able to view objects objectively. but no! :D one thing for sure is that stanford looks more beautiful to me today than it ever did… possibly cuz i'm here sans the stress bug that was always with me while i was there (wish i hadn't been such an idiot).

i feel like a zombie, walking around slowly, looking around the place and visiting the familiar areas and paths that i had haunted during my previous life (or something like that). and i suddenly find myself calling a, my first ever trusted friend, or family, actually, in stanford. afterall, it's the earliest memories that one's usually flooded with. i think i must've disturbed her during an important meeting, cuz she cut my call :p

i’m sitting in meyer library right now, looking at students hard at work. apparently, the exams are going on. typical, random students doing random things :) one guy completely bent over his books and looking into them, lest he lose concentration – i really wonder whether he can see one image, or two, of the words in his book. another in a stanford sweatshirt, obviously sleep-deprived, so he’s completely horizontal and fast asleep on one of the couches and is probably dreaming about his (brief) post-exam days right now. another girl’s sitting cross-legged on one of the couches, and is surrounded by books, papers, pens, pencils, a laptop, an ipod, wires, food and drinks – she looks like she was born and raised on that couch :D. familiar scene. i must have looked like one of these at some point in time. i’m sitting on a couch right now and looking at the other couches – i recognize the designs and patterns on the tapestries. some faces look familiar too. it’s raining outside, and i just got up to see if i could get a hot cup of tea/coffee… but alas! moon beans cafe is closed (no, no don’t worry, not for good - today's a saturday). and i can hear the clock tower ringing every fifteen minutes announcing some fast-approaching impending doom ;)

everything looks very familiar, and yet very different. i think i now totally understand what it means to have lived in a bubble. i lived in the stanford bubble, and it looks totally different from the outside.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

What's my blog address?

I've been so terrible about updating my blog, that nowadays, every time I decide to check my blog, I need to really rack my brains to remember my blog address!!

But if it's s's or n's or one of the other blogs I follow, I just need to think of them and my fingers just know what to do with the keyboard.

I probably need to bookmark my blog! :p

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

sigh...

the last two days at work have been plain crazy... worked all day in the office, got back home, worked all evening and went to bed. late. today the craziness ended. well, in a way. the crazy project ended. another one landed on my table today before i had wound the crazy one up. but i thought it can sort of wait. and that i'm not going to drive myself crazy over it and push myself to work like a maniac like i've been, the last two days.

the last two days, d had been hanging around a working me... and even stayed up late reading a book while i was working. so today i decided that i've worked enough, and left office at 4 pm (like never before), got back home excited to hang out with d, spent a couple of 'alone' hours before i called d to find out when he was getting back. and when i did, i got to know that today was his crazy day. it's 9 pm now and i'm home alone :)

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Why is it so difficult...

... to respect another's commitment to himself or herself?

Okay, these words are coming out of a number of experiences I've had in the recent past.

Has it ever happened to you that you sincerely let people know that after meeting them for dinner, you'd like to leave at such and such a time because you want to wake up early next morning cuz you want to go to the gym/ for a hike/ because you want to work/ because you want to do WHATEVER (!!) just because YOU want to do it and that it means a lot to you... and they say:

"Oh come on! It's a Sunday morning that you're talking about! You should wake up late and not early, really...(haha, are you kidding me? :D) and you're NOT going to wherever-you-wanted-to-go or you're not doing whatever-you-wanted-to-do. Just an hour more..." And after an hour has passed "Oh come on, just 30 min more.." and then "just 20 min more..."!! And then before you know it, it's 12 AM, and you're not even back home. So obviously you've lost your chance to do whatever you had hoped to do.

All this, not because they're in distress and need you or anything (in which case, needless to say, all of the above is fine) but because they want your company, while you're evidently sitting there cringing, just because you have been asked to sit??!

But instead, try telling them something like "I need to leave early because I need to pick someone up from the airport" and maybe whine a bit about it... or say something like "oh I need to take this friend somehwere early tomorrow morning", then they let you go! :D

So basically, if it's a promise that you made to someone else, then it's respected and you're allowed to keep it, but if it's a promise that you made to yourself - Forget It! It's laughed off, and it's trashed right in front of you at that very instant. And then they are happy and proud owners of you, your time, as well as your agenda for the next morning and the rest of the day!

I understand, that sometimes it is done in good humor. Sometimes because they enjoy your company. They really like you, they really want to have fun with you. BUT then... after you express yourself to them repeatedly, how much it means to you and how earnest you are about your plan, your cries completely go unheard!

WHY is it so difficult to understand someone else's commitments to themselves, to respect it and to encourage them to go for it?!