St Louis :)

Apple Pie.

I used to have this theory that if I called a Travelog something innocuous and comforting like apple pie, I would have a harmless and gustatory sort of motivation to write it. This is obviously false since the last one was about Chennai, 3 years ago. Not only am I aging, but I'm also great at self delusion.

Any excuse to get out of Gainesville is a worthy cause. Throw a giant arch, a mad family, a ho-down, frozen custard, anteaters, museums and cats into the picture, and by God, there will be an Aggie there.

St Louis is the kind of place that I like by default. It's a big city with enough buildings that I had to crane my neck to look up to, bad traffic and good food in the middle of a tearing downpour of rain. What makes St Louis such a great place, personally, is the arch, which almost makes me miss skulking around Bombay. Picture a rainy day in Colaba, looking around and grounding yourself with the Gateway somewhere in your peripheral vision. The Arch is somewhat like that, a structure that let's you orient yourself in the middle of a big city.

Over the last four days, I've absorbed a whole new place. With Thai food, Ted Drewes, the St Louis Zoo, Body Worlds, Waterloo, and a gazillion other things :)

They do fireworks on a whole other dimension here. With barges shooting off lights in the sky framed by the arch, as thousands of people watched on. I think it's a hell of a way to celebrate freedom. Imagine having Jana Gana Mana and peda's on steroids.

Other bit's of this trip included the best party I've ever been to, with the formidable party planning skills behind it. Never has a ho down been this awesome, stray fireworks and the heat notwithstanding :) What struck me about Waterloo and the little towns around it was it's quaintness and scattered bits of history around churches, houses and tiny coffee shops. Any Starkey's reading this, I love you :)

There wasn't a free second to whip out a camera so no pictorial evidence exists. Another reason to go back, eh?

I'm a believer :)

I'm going to go ahead and be a sap. Excuse my digression from extreme cynicism and borderline nihilism.

Happy Birthday Derek :) Go fight some supervillians who think their's is bigger than yours. Ego's I mean.

Lots of love,

Me.

In your face

I like my big nose.

It gives me the liberty to say a lot of things to my morning coffee. Chief amongst them being: All the better to smell you, my dear.

I had the best weekend ever at St Pete's beach. I think the awesomeness of a trip is decided by the number of pictures you have of it. I have 3 of the beach, which means I was too busy being grossly salty and happy to bother with capturing anything significant.

This post was supposed to happen on Sunday night, but like, ha.

Apart from OD'ing on icecream and chlorine, we went to a comedy club which I think was a great blend of intensely funny and offensive. I think we need more of this in India, where the remarkable levels of repression might just give rise to genuinely funny standups.

Over and out,

Weasel.

And another thing.

Sharan makes me feel as if I'm in the wrong life. She is among other things the reason I believe in alternate universes. There has to be another me that doesn't care deeply about kinetic isotope effects and their repercussions.

I feel so terribly bad for all those alter-we's that we shed somewhere along the way. And that I hadn't devoured Philip Pullman during those years when my three brain cells were growing.

Things are madly out of control on the work front. Somewhere, Murphy is smirking quietly. Kill me if I write about the weather.

Eeks, where's my mojo?

Rubber Duckie

Today, we performed the Fourier transform of a rubber duck in class.

I think this is one of my favorite equations, now that I see in every class, and in every wave.

Wtf man, the body snatchers are at work.

Even though I love this blog to bits, I've given up coffee which has sapped me of the will to live, let alone write.

Shwetu might be coming here, which makes me furiously happy. Fist in the air, whee sounds etc :)

I'm a little stuck here. Also, I've learnt to cook, crochet and clean cupboards. I'm somebody's grandmother :|

It's fun dating a superhero; one has to keep up.

Over and out,

Duck

Rat Kinesin

Is an interesting thing to study. 12 in the night on a weird Sunday with three functional brain cells is not the time to do it though.

The weird thing about blogging is that you could be have entire days free, a bunch of awesome things happening around you and unlimited access to wifi, yet you find this time, someone else's computer and nothing vital to write about. Stupid Aggie.

Life is a loopy circle.

Things happening right now:

1. I'm reading the Blind Assassin by Atwood and I think it's making me dreamy.

2. I saw No Strings Attached. It was a lot to take in especially if you went in thinking yay, ashton, breezy rom-com. If that was you, the first 30 minutes would have you squirming. There's just no other word for it. There are funny bits but some unmistakably squirmy ones too.

3. Cellular mechanics is on. And I'm semi dead.

4. Somewhere over the rainbow.

5. I miss writing. Savagely much :| Oh wait that could go on for a while.

Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue,
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true.

Hair there and everywhere..

And to think in a previous life I used to hate bunnies.

They have the softest hair though :)

I think Boston is a mixed bag.

Snow v/s Suchi.

Vodka v/s Veera

Bad movies v/s bowling

See, it's tough to be on vacation.

Mostly, it's dealing with a difficult Christmas and too many things happening at once :)

But Muchi and Veeri I owe you one man. Too much love :)

Looking forward to more sunrises,

Weasel.

Muchi

Dude,

Happy Birthday!

Crap, i forgot the birthday post this year.

I foist the blame on Marston Science Library.

Love,

In whichever sense :)

Maggie

7

What did you do today?

Today, I was a little in love.

La Douleur Exquise

You know what it feels like.

Eeeeeks, I'm just about suppressing the urge to write down Skyrocket Love's semi-emo'ish lyrics out here. Thank god the inner cynic has affected some quality control by killing the whiny child in me.

It's winter here :) Is it just me or does winter smell a certain way, because that's what's making my prodigious nose very happy.

Oh, and coffee just does not taste the same here. I recommend that you'd be better off carrying your body weight in Nescafe before you land here so that when painful withdrawal symptoms hit you at 3 am before midsems/assignments, it's not your body that lies withering in spasms on the carpet.

Spams of writing are better than nothing at all, right?

It's weird to move to a whole new country with no foreseeable options to return home. Grad school sucks you into it's complex, frustrating and incredibly challenging maw, till lack of sleep, thought and hey-let's-chill-this-weekend are bygone conclusions. Before you know it, you'd have spent 5 years here, hopping countries and continents. The only constant you could hope for is Friday night's

Shwetu, I repeat, I'll never ever mock you about your science library days.

Yeah, so a new country, a new list of things to fall in love with. new cities to sink roots into,especially when you are a distinctly rootless thing to begin with. From being a confused Goan-Mallu-Dig-Bombay blend to here is a puzzling journey.

Oops, over my head :)

Oh, and it is humanly possible to miss pani-puri more than your parents. Testified by Aggie.

I'm going to Universal Studio's this weekend :D And New York in December! :D

yay!

"An increase in population leads to fluctuations and social competitiveness for resources and then stuff dies"

- Johns Lewis

in some random class.

PS. I'm sick of missing you. Sick.

Hair and there.

So, why weren't you blogging all this while?

My ass wasn't comfortable enough. To sit down, stare suspiciously at space, balance a cup of coffee and a lap top, potter about online and type. See all that multitasking? The least one can ask is for a warm, soft place to park your rear end.

Which I found in a purple bean bag. The pride and joy of my life right now.

Extremities taken care off, I'll bugger off to the significant aspects of life here. The flora, the fauna and all that they get tipsy on. What's life like here. I wish some of you were and then we could collectively ignore that question.

But like, America, OOH. For an unashamedly consumerist capitalist pig like me, there are big, shiny, vastly pointless and amazing things to possess. Colored, flavored bubbles for your bath, sleek i phones everywhere, purple velvet bean bags, you get the bright glitzy picture.

Ah, sensory overload. I must stop hyper ventilating like this. There is so much to say here. Convey the whole concept of Big. Which is everything here. Classes, people, portions, cars, bikes, the sky.

I feel like I'm on a new planet where a whole new vista called the sky has opened up. I swear, the scales are completely off. The sky stretches endlessly here. In perfect blue. Swept with puffy white/soft golden/neon pink clouds all the time. Like outrageous bits of beauty wantonly strewn on an endless canvas. You learn a whole new landscape that never heard of heat and dust.

In between missing regular food and the mindless calories I eat here. In between calculating the in's and out's of thermodynamics. In the vast aisles of 2 gianormus libraries surrounded by what feels like the combined output of all the world's printing presses(where Sandman lies next to Chaucer and the New Yorker). With slow cups of coffee on sheltered windows. On park benches, worrying three sets of complicated equations. This is when life creeps up on me.

Univ is different. The relentless pursuit of knowledge for starters. I was awed at how much they want us to study here, and how undergrad at VNIT stamped the last bits of that out of me. I'm wondering if all this cross referencing and endless comparison between two lives is right, but try stopping :)

Waiting for a train.

Oh man Inception.

When we keep moaning about how movies suck these days and how you'd rather rip them off from a torrent with free homemade popcorn, there comes along that one movie that makes you a Believer.

And how.

Inception takes movies to a whole new level where you spend every second caught up in its relentless pace and edgy brilliance. Wiki tells me a lot of things about the plot which I'm still having problems assimilating and marveling at. The acting is flawless, there isn't one scene I'd like to see done differently.

Christopher Nolan is the Man. Awe!!

That apart, this was the first time in my life that I've ever seen a quiet hush in a crowded multiplex during the interval. Also the first time I've heard applause for a scene that dint involve demi-godly sporting antics or Aamir Khan. Watching people sit on the edge of their seats, mouths agape, another first.

That apart the movie hit me so hard, I stumbled out. Literally.

Muchi, best thing we've done in ages mon. Like ever.

And if you still dint get this post, go watch the movie. Scram!

Why bother?

Ok, a month left.

Jittery :|

There is no Plan B

There are some movies that make it worth crawling out of bed at 7 am and driving in pissing rain for. Movies that help you forgive the mouldy seats, crappy popcorn and the hormonal couple going at it two rows ahead.

The A Team was pretty Awesome, the sort that makes me move my bum and blog about. This used to be a series on TV that I missed on account of not being born back then. I can't really decide how it compares to the original but as a movie by itself it was one hell of a watch.

If you're the kind you enjoys meaningless wacky action, brash, loud macho stuff then A team is totally worth it. The Alpha team consists of Hannibal Smith, Face, BA and Murdock who specialize in the "ridiculous". 8 years and 80 missions down the line, everything's good for our guys till the conventional shit hits a very large fan and becomes effervescent.

In any brash American type of movie, throwing the words Saddam, counterfeit notes and CIA in any permutation and combination constitutes a well though out plot. Hence, expect nothing from A Team in those respects. What scores here is the dialog and the way the team comes together.

Most of the action leaves you awed and laughing hysterically at the overtly macho and supremely awesome way they pull off successively crazy stunts.

The best thing ever was the flying tank sequence and the window cleaner free fall one. Considering we are all very jaded movie veterans, it still is fun to see a larger than life tank falling from the sky and firing ammo mid air.

Murdock spinning on rotor blades and singing "You spin my head right round" is one of the funnier scenes and the car in a 3D movie one is KILLER.

Man, I dont want to spoil this. Get over your instinctive disdain for all things big and American, leave a chunk of your hippocampus at home and A team is a fun deal :)