'Tis an Iron and Wine afternoon

The return of Ykas from vacation saw the resumption of animated talking between him and Sequence L.

I wouldn't say that the residents of the graduate student office are characters right out of PhDcomics. For one thing, there's only one white guy in this room. And everyone here are hardworkers that maintain regular hours and are fairly normal to talk too, . But there is a lot of cross-talk and there are certain quirks.

W, the white guy, is a baseball fan. Him and the Puerto Rican-Ramirez-die-hard-follower get together often to shoot the baseball shit. W is not exclusivelly a baseball fan - he can talk any sport with anyone who cares to listen. During the world cup, there were frequent REALLY LOUD curses coming from his end one day. I thought his research was collapsing.

"You ok W?"

"Yeah I will be once USA fucking scores".

You get the drift.

Then there are the South Koreans. The wise, aged, been-there-done-that couple of guys who are silent except when they start jabbering in korean. The newest member to this club, Sequence L, is not welcomed wholly by these two wise men, but is tolerated purely on an origin-ship context. The lady south korean, Dr. Ho, on the other hand, is the most hardworking amongst all of us - extremely focused and a general joy to have a next desk person.

Incidentally, Sequence L (you might have guessed) is an expert on gene sequencing analysis. He worked for a bit before returning to grad school and always begins his questions with the phrase "Back in the day, when I was..".

Then there's young Ykas. Him and SL are a match made in heaven. Both love to jabber - ceaselessly.

The chinese are a group on their own cherishing their native tongue. The bot who sits behind me speaks English in a very mechanical voice and goes 5 days in a row in the same clothes. the other guy constantly clears his throat once he starts thinking. A, when she was here, would get so mad at this sound that she would boost the volume of her headphones to deafening proportions. Unfortunately for me, her headphones were leaky and thus there I was stuck between the throat-clearer and bad-sounding-bhangra. Throat-clearer's wife is quiet, for the most part, until she connects with three other chinese women. Then it becomes a chinese allegro of what I assume is fashion and gossip (since our field is not terribly this exciting).

And me? I ain't much of an office talker, but I used to curse when shit didnt work. But not anymore. Since I got rather intimidated by Dr. Ho's quiet working routine.

Most days will find me behind headphones. This afternoon found me hooked on Iron and Wine after one of HG's music suggestions.

The Facebook reduction rules

I recently realized that the number of FB friends that I have is getting a little too much to handle. There is a limit to manageable social connectivity, as I understand it, called the Dunbar's number (about 150 social contacts) and the aim was to reach this.

So, it was chop down time. And here were some rules.

1. Keep people you meet almost on a constant daily basis. This list included officemates, fellow graduate students, IT support staff (very important!), cricket mates and other sports-mates.
2. Remove faculty though (I didn't really have any on my list but this seemed like a general sound scheme).
3. Remove religious nuts thanking god at every moment (even if they fall under Rule 1).
4. Remove away the dude who gets 10 comments for every status message he shares and you can't figure out why (Exceptions - those who fall under Rule 1).
5. Keep people you've truly enjoyed drinking with, and others who were OK drinking buddies (for now).
6. Keep people you think you'll truly enjoy drinking with.
7. Remove people whose friend request you've mulled on for a week to begin with.
8. Remove people from high school whom you sent a friend request. You wanted to see where they ended up and now you know. Some have become fat and ugly. Most have jobs.
9. Remove one time meets. There's only so much you can chat about that one meet.
10. Remove people who take too many Farmville, Barmville and other permutations of sillyness. There's only so much Hide **** Application you can do.
11. Keep people whose blogs you read, whose photography skills you admire and who have cute kids.

And the most important part is this - if you do get caught, make up an email-got-hacked story. You know - My email got hacked, people started getting random shit from me (Didn't you get any? Oh consider yourself lucky!) so I had to delete everything including facebook (And I'll surely add you as soon as I get on FB).

Trouble is, am still a 100 away from landmark number. So I need more rules. I suspect I might just use HGs filtering method of does-this-person-irritate-me.

A certain malluness has crept into the apartment

As I type this, there's Yesudas singing his trademark Guruvayoor songs in the background.

Soon that'll be replaced by the mallu playlist. And one head will bob up and down.

(Sometimes though, Janis Joplin gets broadcast. This incidentally is a new as well)

HG walks around sometime with a thortu on her head.

There are lamps being lit quite religiously every Monday.

And a never ending collection of Malayalam movies. Dasan and Vijayan et al.

All curses that are flung at each other are in the native.

Fish is being made. This has become quite regular. There is a talk of a fish biriyani.

And the menu for a first Onam is being planned in detail. Which includes non veg, much to my mom's consternation.

Ah..the good stuff.

Houston we have a problem

Let's face it. Cards out on the table. Ever since the qualifiers disaster, I have lost all of my gumption. Disaster is probably a harsh word for this event considering I've been given somewhat of a second chance (more on that another time). But it will be one if whatever is inside of me doesn't buck up.

The past two months have been my most unproductive yet so far. All I did was write a 25 page paper which should have taken me a week (and it's still not done). Heck, I wrote a darn good 40 page review article on the whole field in under two months WITH coursework and what not. Analysis for the other project has to be now redone. Though thats not my fault, I should have caught RP's mistake right from the start and pushed at it instead of prolonging things.

So there, a wasted summer.

Maybe I burnt myself out the last two years. Maybe it, whatever it is, was catching up before the quals finally was the last straw. Or so I'd like to think. It's much more comforting to think of it like that as opposed to harsher things such as the fact that you've lost interest in your science. Honestly though I don't think it's that bad. I am, simply put, disheartened by the fact that I couldn't pass my quals because of a schmuck who was pissed that I didn't give him enough respect and who is now making it worse by dragging out the process while pretending to give a fuck.

When it happened, I kept thinking how it could turn out to be the best thing for me. I know this one CS prof in Vancouver who told his student to drop out of the program since his math skills were insufficient. The kid did drop out but within a year published a Science paper that got the prof asking him to come back. The kid said - no thanks you said my math was bad, am in Microsoft now.

Years ago, I got called a disappointment by a college principal in front of a whole crowd. That stung then, though now I laugh at it. And I came back with great stuff in my final sem. Years before that, during my 12th, I got accused of forging marks on a term paper. I got pissed and scored really high in the CBSE exam. Both times I faced my instigator afterwards, both times I said nothing. Both me and the deed left unacknowledged.

I think of these comebacks now, trying to get into that frame of mind. Easier said than done of course.

Maybe it's time to break things done, keep chopping at them and putting each in its place. Feelings and emotions and thoughts and ambitions and then..get to the work that needs to be done.

We have grand plans now dont we?

So..tick tock.

Knocking on a watermelon

Summer here means highway closures. So when I saw the highway Traffic Advisory Light flashing, while heading to Chicago airport, urging us to tune to AM 530, I perked up. Now, my mama told me when you see flashing advisory lights asking you to tune to AM 530, you tune to AM 530. So I did. And I found out my usual highway is blocked, and something about the way the lady said 'looo..oong delays' made me go uh-oh.

And so I took out the map - the good old fashioned map and traced alternative routes and bada boom later, I was cruising on the left lane when the right lanes are all backed up for 5 miles. And I reach in time to pick up this woman , with her bags and shoes (there is a dearth of footwear in cochin now).

Well, that felt good.

The highway gods did not take this work around too kindly, and blocked the hell out of us on the way back. We did make it back ok though.

There's a big watermelon that I bought, and I've been knocking on it every morning. I have no clue what to look for, but I just like doing it.

"Allright...

..... very well then"

is my advisor's favorite phrase.

One could very well claim it's his philosophy too.

It's that time of the year again

When I first saw the Tour, I was at a friend's house in Utah and he was flipping channels. "Look, there's Armstrong in yellow". This was in 2003, Armstrong's fifth year of contention. I remember looking up and saw this mass moving around a corner, vibrant colored and shaped like an arrow. Deciphering the color yellow was impossible, and it looked like all they do is ride all day.

And now, July will find me glued to the Tour. I've watched live it the last three years, watched the DVDs for the years before (the Armstrong years since '99) and know that I will be watching it next year as well.

The Tour is a three week story that moves through about 20 stages or so, with a couple of rest days. Each stage is a single-day race on its own. So you race a 100km race one day, go to sleep, get up in the morning and do it all over again for 20 days. The beginning of the race is all flat, and there's plenty of hard-core-big-motored fast riders who go at it. A week and a half later, they hit the Pyrenees mountains at which point the only thought is crossing the finish line.

There are stage winners, who win on a particular day and then there's the overall Tour leader, the maillot jaune, the guy who wears the yellow jersey. This guy is the leader of what is called the General Classification. Besides this, there's the Green Jersey for the sprinters, the Polka Dot Jersey which is for the mountain climbers, and the White jersey for the best young rider.

There are 22 teams this year, and each team has a leader that is targeting one of these jerseys. There are two or three lieutenants under this leader and then there are domestiques, whose sole job is to listen to team orders, protect the main guys from a crash and do the horse-work.

You can save up to 60% of your energy by riding behind another rider. So all the domestiques ride up front, letting the leader save his energy until the very end. Since each stage is a race, there are no shortage of guys who want the glory of being a stage winner. When the race starts, the whole group (called the peloton) start together, until a few brave fellows set off on their own. This is called the breakaway. The peloton then tries to catch up this breakaway, through a steady slow increase in pace. Teams get together, make the decision and then start leading the peloton, which explains the arrow shape. The peloton becomes this self-organizing thing moving steadily and with intent. You have to time the breakaway just right. Set off too early, you got a long-day's work riding alone. Set off too late - the peloton will catch up cuz the pace was alreader high. Then, they don't really treat you too kindly for making them work unnecessarily by sending you to the back.

Everything is a mixture of strategy, talent, endurance, road technicalities combined with luck.

And no prizes for guessing whom am supporting this year.