You know it's a good day when

your advisor, returning from his month long vacation, walks into the graduate student office and there's only two of his students there. You are one of them. And the other guy tells the advisor - Er, am leaving for vacation tomorrow.

My dearest HG,

Yes, it's been six months since I married you. I know that six month celebrations are not common, and I'd be like Subodh (from DCH) if I remembered our anniversary every six months and pestered you with cake. But since this is our first six months being married, I hope you'd allow me to say a few things. After all, how many times does a first six month anniversary come about? Yes, exactly....once.

In the past six months, we have seen each other a total of 25 days. That's it. These days, naturally, were the best ever I've had. The remaining, about 155 or so, were the second best I've had. I know that in the next six months, these numbers will change dramatically. One thing though - I thought I knew you before marrying you. Not completely, but enough to keep me satisfied and confident that I knew you and that you are mine. Little did I know that there were secrets about you that I discovered since then. And now I hope these secrets, these little things that tell me who you are, never stop coming. In some ways, I want you to be a mystery. So that little things surface every now and then, that only I know of.

Secondly, two weeks more and you will be here. I heard once a lady say that it's pretty easy to figure men out - pay little attention to what they say and more attention to what they do. I hope that I've shown you that I love you through the things I did. I hope that this is somewhere deep within you, to give you confidence that you need in order to do what you need to do. And when you're here with me, I hope that this gets cemented.

And lastly, I started this blog with the intention of being true. I realised that if I let the lies (starting with one or two and then becoming indecipherable) stay, I wil never reach anywhere. What I found suprising is that I am naturally true when I am with you. Discovering you has lead to discovering me.

I don't have much fancy words. Well, I do. But let's save our friends the pain. You know I love you.

Happy six month anniversary :).

Yours,

Bird.

This came to me in a dream

A dark haired girl ( I recall nothing else) and I were having a conversation.

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Girl: And oh, I know that subject too.

Me: How do you know so much in detail?

Girl: When I pick up a subject or a textbook, I think of myself as the Creator of that subject. If I were to build this or that theory, how would I do it? Most times, there is a correlation between mine and the textbook version.

Me: But won't that take forever?!!

Girl: The very fact that you're asking me that proves to me you've never tried it.

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For some reason, I just recall just this part of the dream. I'll be the first to admit - this quals thing is really getting on me, making me feel insecure about a whole lot of things.

The Nobel laureate

Just before my talk at the ASMS conference, I was chatting with this guy R, when he suddenly gets up and greets a small Asian man. "Koichi! How are you?" That's when it hit me - this was Koichi Tanaka, the 2002 Nobel Laureate famous for his MALDI work. Yup, that right, and he was here to attend this session. My colleague, Paul then asked me - So? Are you nervous? I replied, why would I be nervous? There's only a Nobel prize winner in the damn audience.

Anyway, R finishes his small talk with his "Koichi" and sits down.

Hey you know who that is?

Yeah that's Koichi Tanaka isn't it? He seems to be a very humble man.

That he is. You know, back when he won the prize, he was an instant celebrity in Japan. In a good and bad way. Good because he got to set up his own institute and bad because of all the attention he was getting. They say that there used to queues of people waiting to see him and parents would give him their children to be kissed.

What! No kiddin?

No kidding. The funny part is Koichi hated all the attention so he would hide in the bushes outside his institute to avoid the crowd.

And that picture of the small man hiding in the bushes was so funny in my head that I promptly forgot all my nervousness and gave the talk pretty OK.

Back at home, I was sifting through all the cards of people who dropped by my poster and requested a copy of it. And lo and behold, his card was there with his name, designation, email and everything else. The Laureate had stopped by my poster and I hadn't even noticed him, much less talked to him. Too late, I thought and added his email id koichi blah @ blah to the mass listing. While going through the remaining cards, I found a card of a post doc from the same institute, but the strange thing was that the email id on the card was ditto that of Tanaka's!

I checked again. There was no doubt about it. The email id was koichi blah @ blah. This guy and his post docs had one email id. How totally weird!

Songs and you

Some songs remind me of you. Knowing you, you'd want to know the list. Not that you're romantically hopeless, but lists are your thing now aren't they? But there is no such list. Am sure I could make one, but the songs wouldnt share anything amongst them. See, some songs have just one line that remind me of you, others have a catchy title which I wouldnt have noticed otherwise. Others have simply a tune which my brain latches on and before you know it, am daydreaming. Yet others, and these are rare, are completely on the whole about you. You know these ones. I want to do something with these ones. I either send them to you, lyrcize them for you or I simply pick up learning the guitar so that I can sing to you.