I am going to kill somebody

Not sombody. I know exactly who I am going to kill. OK, so here I am, at 6:15am on Monday morning, on the potty, going about my business, and the phone rings.  When the phone rings that early I start panicking. I am not expecting anyone to call with any good news so it has to be bad news. And likely from India because they would have waited until we woke up to call. My mind is racing by now. I have already started imagining all kinds of scary senarios. HG picks up the phone and I strain to hear who he is talking to (remember I was still on the potty).

Turns out that the call is from the lady who supplies us with South Indian food. I had left her a message the previous evening about her morkozhambu/morkootaan (a kadhi type preparation) and how I didn’t like the addition of besan (chickpea flour) to it. And she was returning my call, at 6:15 am, to let me know that she ordinarily doesn’t add besan to morkozhambu but had created a special Iyengar version for me!! I didn’t know whether to cry with relief or to throw a very heavy object in the general direction of her house hoping it would wreck the antenna of the Dish TV that I know she and her husband watch all day long. In the end I chose the latter.

Now all I need to do is calm down and figure out how to rush through the next half hour to ensure I get to office in time for my 8AM meeting. What a wonderful start to my week….

Keeping up with technology

I haven’t been very good about keeping promises lately. I told you I would be back with a post within days or weeks and here I am, more than a month later, and still no post. Same thing with my emails; I have way too many to respond to. Don’t even talk to me about Facebook messages. I love technology but sometimes I feel it is too darn fast. I respond to one email and there is a response the next day! There are way too many friends to keep up with on Facebook and blogging regularly seems like an unreachable goal when you have a full time job with unpredictable hours. But all said and done I am addicted to technology. So here I am once again, making a lame attempt to stay in touch. I had actually thought of this hilarious thing to write about but never got around to jotting it down in my diary and now i can’t remember the punch line! The story was about my family’s obsession with bowel movements; gross as that may sound, i assure you the story was pretty funny. I hope it comes back to me soon.

Anyways, my parents left a week ago. I always mope for about a week or two after they leave and then things return to normal. The first week after they leave is usually tough. The house seems so empty without them. And then there is the struggle in the kitchen. My mom takes over the kitchen when she visits me and I happily let her. However, the problem is that once she leaves, I turn into this fumbling, clueless person who behaves as if she has never cooked before. Seriously, i actually forget simple recipes and have to look up my books to make sure I am not missing some key ingredient, like, this one time when I made sambar and forgot to add daal! This usually goes on for a week and then I regain control of my brain and stuff starts coming back to me.

Talking about regaining control – i find it strange that some men are so obsessed with making their wives change their last name after marriage. I don’t know if this is an American thing or rather a mid west America thing, but i have now witnessed several instances where the man has openly proclaimed that he expects his wife to change her last name. Take for instance this farewell party I went to this week. It was for a colleague who was changing assignments and moving to a new role. Her current role is very global in nature, so she travels A LOT which means she needs her passport all the time and hence hasn’t had the time to change her last name after marriage. Her new role will be a US based one. So, when her husband is asked to say a few words at this party, the only thing he talks about in front of the entire crowd is how happy he is that she will finally be able to change her last name. How sad is that? I haven’t changed my last name after marriage and HG has never once even asked me about it. We will probably discuss it when we have kids because we both have those super long South Indian last names and while I would like my kids to have both surnames, I think they will never forgive me for sticking them with a hyphenated last name that is 20 letters long. So, yes, we will discuss this at that point, but it will be a discussion and not a foregone conclusion. I found it extremely annoying that the man took it for granted that my colleague would change her last name now that she didn’t have the excuse of global travel to stop her.

As for my opportunities for global travel, the world has suddenly opened up to me with the acquisition of an American passport. After several false starts, my citizenship ceremony finally happened and a shiny new passport was recently delivered to my doorstep. I am still waiting for the Indian government to grant me the OCI card, but in the meantime, I am free to embark on visa-less travel to most places in the world. Just the thought of that makes me giddy! Would have been nice if we actually had some exotic travel plan lined up, but for now, the only international travel we have in the plan is thanks to the entertainment world our little city offers us. Going for Rudo Y Cursi tonight and the Marriage of Figaro tomorrow. And the rest of the weekend will be devoted catching up on those pending emails and Facebook messages – technology after all is a tough task master.

Addendum: Technology question – how do I respond to comments without them getting counted as additional comments? 4 people have left me comments, and becasue I replied directly on their comment it now appears as if I have 8 comments! Any suggestions on how to avoid this?

Back but not in full form

Thanks everyone, for checking in on me. I am alive….though still not completely back on the blogging circuit. The past few months have been hectic and while I have wanted to write, I sort of couldn’t muster up the enthu and energy to do the needful. Days became weeks and before I knew it, three months had passed since I wrote the last post (if it can even be called a post.) I want to remedy this situation soon, but at this point, I feel like my brain needs a charge of electricity to restart the ideas plug. I have lost that earlier momentum and I think it is going to take me a little while to come back to a normal pace (which was slow anyways by all standards.)

I just wanted to let you all know that everything is fine at my end. I have gotten emails of concern from many of you, and I am extremely grateful to you for checking in on me. I am doing well, my health is great and best of all, my parents are here with me. My mom is on a cooking roll which is always a good thing in my books.

Work has been very busy and my boss has been freeloading the team with one crazy idea after another. I am itching to write about his latest puke-inducing venture; believe me, you WILL puke. But HG has strictly advised (ordered) me to not write write anything work-related on this blog. So for now, I will remain silent on this topic.

In the meantime, I am collecting ideas and should be back on the blog soon. Hope to reconnect in a few days/weeks/months.

Stop Gap

Thanks (from the bottom of my heart) to all those who emailed me and left comments after reading the infertility post. It meant a lot to me, to hear those words of support. I owe you all replies and I am sorry for not writing back yet. I have been very busy at work and with other personal commitments. But I promise to write soon.

In the meantime, I leave you with HG’s latest post. Hope you guys enjoy it as much as I did. That man cracks me up!

Best job in the world?

Heck, yeah!

Dealing with Infertility

It’s been a while since I talked about my fertility problems on this blog. But something happened last week that made me think about what this problem has done to me as a person. It started off with a normal phone call with my friend R, discussing lunch plans for the next day. We moved on to talking about my new job and how things were going with my boss. I was trying to tell her that I somehow have lost that ambitious streak I used to have early on in my career and don’t really care if I get promoted early or not. R works for the same company I have now joined and feels that I deserve to move up faster because of my past experience. So she was trying to counsel me into not being so demotivated about work but instead to focus all my energies into work as the first year is pretty critical (like I didn’t know that). I tried telling her that dealing with fertility treatment along with a regular work schedule is not fun and that I am happy to not be a ’superstar’ right away. But she just wasn’t getting it. She went on and on about how I should try to take my mind off the fertility issues, be positive and believe that things will work out.  This is all stuff I have heard before from others, and also from her. And I know that R only means well. I don’t know what happened to me that day though; I just let loose on R. I think I was just sick of getting advice from people who have no clue about the pressures of going through fertility treatments. I was tired of hearing from friends about being positive and not thinking about my fertility issues. Do you think I haven’t tried? In fact, I hardly talk about my fertility issues anymore because it only makes me depressed. My situation is frustrating because my body has tons of eggs, but it just won’t release them! Taking all those medications day after day to make your body ovulate and then going for an ultrasound to discover that your body has yet again, for the 15th time, produced an egg from the side that you do not have a functional fallopian tube on (I lost one during the ectopic pregnancy) is one of the worst feelings in the whole world. Imagine having to deal with a normal work day after that!

I am also tired of people suggesting to me that I should look into adoption or getting a pet. People, it’s not that I don’t know about these options. But HG andI will take that decision when we feel comfortable with it. We don’t need additional pressure from everyone on what they think we should do with our life. I am for adoption and would love to adopt a child. But the thought of having to wait two years to get a child through an adoption agency is something we are not ready for right now. Also, despite how selfish this sounds, I will admit that I want to be pregnant and experience pregnancy. After having gone through two failed pregnancies, I know what it is like to get that rush from knowing that you are carrying a living thing inside of you. I don’t want to miss out on that. So, when I heard from R for the 100th time about how she and her husband had tried for nearly two years, had almost given up, got a pet instead and were soon pregnant was just annoying. First of all, they started trying when she was 27 and were pregnant by 29. What is so traumatic about that? Telling a 34 year old woman (34.5 actually) that she should get a pet instead and wait for the magic to happen is plain insensitive. We are in a situation where the dreaded three letter word in the fertility arena (IVF, for the uninitiated) almost seems like a good idea. All because my stupid body won’t perform a basic function. Anyways, all of this frustration sort of boiled over and I yelled at R non-stop for almost 5 whole minutes (enough for HG to come running down to see what the commotion was) and worst of all,  I started bawling on the phone. Of course, I felt like a total idiot after that because I know R only has my best interest at heart and she genuinely did not mean to hurt me. I have known her for a long time and I know that she cares for me very much. We did make up right away. In fact, R came running over to my place and apologized profusely and the two of us cried it out together. And we did meet for lunch the next day as planned. But I regret yelling at her. I wish I didn’t have to resort to yelling to make a friend understand what I was going through.

I wonder now if perhaps it is better to talk about it openly rather than bottling everything inside. But the truth of the matter is that infertility is an ugly word and to talk about it openly takes a lot of courage. So while I build up the courage to be more open about it, all I request of my friends is to be patient with me and with others who might be going through something similar. All you good friends out there, if any of your friends are dealing with fertility problems, and you really want to help, then remember that sometimes the best way to show concern is to not ask questions.

Jamaica, ya mon! no problem, mon!

Everyone back home wants to know what we did in Jamaica. What tourist sites did we see, what cultural stuff did we do, did we explore the island, did we try the local cuisine…..all very valid questions. In vacations past we would have had no problem answering these questions. But this time, our answers are met with a disappointing ‘really?’ from our parents and sundry relatives.  Who goes on vacation to just lay on the beach? Apparently not anyone in my family.

We try to tell them that we tried different locations on the beach each day, and made sure not to sit on the same beach chair every day, but all we get from them is ‘what else’? Well, we tried all the restaurants in the resort and also raided the drinks menu – boring. What about listening to reggae each night and dancing with the hotel staff? That’s cultural, right? More yawns. We did take a tour of Ocho Rios downtown one day and also went to the beautiful Dunn’s Falls. Okay, that’s something, they concede. Looks like HG and I sort of redeemed ourselves by incorporating this one touristy activity into our schedule. Phew! Need to note that for future holidays!

*****

It sucks to be back in 20F weather after absorbing all that sunshine in the past week. My tan wore off on the way back from the airport. Well, until the next sunny vacation, I will keep myself warm by looking at the pictures of our fabulous Jamaican holiday. And ponder over what I need to do to be born in Jamaica in my next birth.

Wish you all a wonderful 2009! See you in the new year!

Quotable Quotes

HG to me, as I am parading in my new swimsuit – you look like a Victoria’s Secret model…..in non-HD TV version.

Bombay Meri Jaan

A few weeks ago, HG came home carrying a surprise gift for me. It was a book of photographs of Bombay/Mumbai by Betsy Karel, aptly titled ‘Bombay Jadoo‘. I remember eagerly flipping through the photos, excited to relive memories of the city I grew up in and still care very deeply about.

One of the photographs in the book is taken outside the Gateway of India. It’s the picture of a street kid and two dogs lounging in front of the Taj hotel. You can see the magnificent edifice looming in the background, a reassuring structure in the craziness that is Bombay. And you see the bindaas spirit of the city reflected in the carefree pose of that young boy.

To wake up yesterday to the image of a burning Taj and to hear about the general chaos in the city…..it was just heart breaking. How much more hurt can this city take? The people of Mumbai are known to be a resilient bunch. But this time, I sense fear in them. The mechanical precision with which the whole operation was carried out has left people in shock and in dread of what might be coming next. There is a lot of anger too. I just hope that the people of Mumbai don’t resort to violence to respond to this threat. Because that would be totally pointless and not keeping with the Mumbai spirit. I pray that the jadoo of Mumbai will prevail and bring this city back on its feet soon.

Hee hee

How does one keep a straight face when being introduced to a guy named DeMuth?! hehehehe…