Neighbour amaivadellam...

We're not the most outgoing couple on the block. Others gather around and share laughs and have beer in their backyards. But not us. We're perfectly happy vegetating on our couch watching reruns of Raymond or Seinfeld. Occasionally we go out for some reason and we run across our neighbors and then we wave and smile. That's probably the most contact we have with all of them - the ones next door who play loud music in the middle of the night, the ones on the opposite right side with the dog who poops on our lawn, and the ones immediately in front with an immaculate garage but don't wave or smile.

The one exception has been our immediate neighbors on the other side. From the very beginning they were kind of friendly, coming over and introducing themselves when we moved in, shoveling snow when we went away on trips (and as a result we shoveled their driveway when they were away...tis not all one sided) and in general being nice. The lady of the house suddenly mowed our lawn a couple of evenings ago much to our pleasant surprise. We'd been putting away mowing the lawn till the weekend and we were pretty grateful that someone else had saved us the trouble...although we were a bit perplexed. Maybe this was the neighborly thing to do and what would we FOBs know? Or maybe she was doing this because I am pregnant? At this point, I do need to clarify that our lawn is not big. Its a strip of grass thats maybe 8' wide and 16' long. Not a biggie to mow!

So this morning when I saw the guy next door as we were leaving for work, I went over and thanked him and told him to convey our thanks to his wife. To which he responds something about his son not needing to mow our lawn everytime. Huh? What? Turns out 'someone' told his son that it was his duty to mow their lawns and that if he couldn't do it, his parents should! Looking at our overgrown lawn, they assumed that we were the 'someone'! Unless we're really stupid or have signed some kind of bonded labor contract with their son, why would we do something like that? I told the man that it wasn't us but he wasn't satisfied. He called my husband over and asked him if he had spoken to his son about mowing the lawn. Talk about disbelief!

One part of me is mad that they could assume something like that about us! I wonder if the son had lied for some bizarre reason. I wonder if some other neighbor had actually spoken to their son like that. I also wonder if maybe the neighbors are a bit nutty after all...A part of me feels stupid for having accepted their favors unquestioningly... But what can you do? Stop her when mowing and say "No. thanks, I'll do it when I do it. Now get off my lawn?"

On the other hand, they have been nice to us after all and so I do want to clear up the confusion. How should I do that though? Any ideas?

Awake

Not really... Not awake at all in fact. Fell asleep during a lunch and learn presentation at work. Yikes!

Now armed with a cup of coffee, I am trying to wake up enough to start working again. The coffee is doing me some good, but apparently there is another coffee enthusiast in house. My baby kicks up a storm inside as soon as I consume caffeine. Am I going to have a baby addict on my hands?

Interesting news I read about recently: Color Kinetics being bought over by Philips lighting. I don't know why this is interesting considering I don't own shares of either company(Actually I don't own shares of any company, but thats a different issue)...Nevertheless it is interesting and a bit disappointing. I thought CK was all set to become a giant all on its own. I love their products! Actually I love their marketing and all the colorful brochures and photos they have. I do like some of their installations too - like that Lake of Dreams at the Wynn Casino in Las Vegas.

Petfood, toothpaste and now toys..

Here is a news item about toys made in China being recalled because they contain LEAD paint!!!
http://www.nytimes.com/

Among the toy recalls, the problem is most acute with low-price, no-brand-name toys that are often sold at dollar stores and other deep discounters, which are manufactured and sent to the United States often without the involvement of major American toy importers.

So when a product is recalled, it means the new stuff in stores goes back...but what about people who already have bought it before the recall? Too bad, your son or daughter gets brain damage??

Feeling better

Maybe I shouldn't blog when depressed judging by my past few posts. But feeling better now - must be the preggy harmones responsible for the mood swings...

My weekend was pretty unremarkable. Went to a couple of garage sales in search of baby gear, went to a tamil movie and then attended the birthday party of a friend's daughter. Oh, we also went to the Brick for a replacement microwave...

A word of advice for anyone in Canada who might read this - Do NOT buy anything with an extended warranty from the Brick. . Actually don't buy anything from them if you can help it. Their service sucks!!!! Our microwave stopped working a couple of months ago after emitting some foul smelling smoke from underneath. No problem, we had extended warranty, right?? Wrong! We dropped the microwave off at the service centre where we were told that we would hear from them within a couple of days. A couple of days turned to a week and we had heard nothing. So we call them to discover they've lost the service order and misplaced the microwave.

We visited the service centre again in person and they managed to locate the microwave and we were sent back with new reassurances. Now that it was found, everything would be all right. I wish! Days went by and then weeks...and everytime we called we were put on hold, transferred to some other department which would then transfer us back to the original dept and always the answer would be the same 'I'll check on the status and call you back in a couple of hours'. Never happened - not once was a call returned. Meanwhile we adapted to life without a m/w - somewhat inconvenient but not a show stopper. It would have been bad if it was the refrigerator that had conked out.

Finally innumerable calls later, two months after we dropped the m/w off, we were able to get store credit for the m/w - and even there we had to face unwanted attitude from some customer service chick. So we have the store credit but were too nauseated to get the replacement m/w there. So we're still microwaveless at the time of my typing this. Maybe we'll find one at a garage sale somewhere...

Angst is a luxury

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6752507.stm

Makes everything else look trivial, doesn't it?

Ramblings

More to clear my mind than as an actual post to be read..

I was thinking back on the past couple of years here in Calgary and I realized I've been happier and more relaxed lately than before. I think with this pregnancy at least there is some immediate sense of purpose and direction - There will be a baby and I will need to care for it a lot in the next couple of years. Neat and defined - I like it.

This sense of purpose wasn't there before and hence all the unhappiness, doubt, guilt and endless self-questioning. Am I doing the right thing? What is the right thing? How come I don't know what it is I should be doing? Is this why I was educated? What do I really want to be doing for the rest of my life? Could a better person somehow use these circumstances better and have built a better career? Am I really sad because I feel I am in a dead end career? Or am I sad because I feel I should be sad about the non-career? Am I sad because I am scared that I might actually become complacent and enjoy the non-career and non-stress? Would I really feel happier elsewhere or am I just finding a convenient excuse? Wouldn't the added stress of an actual career make me more unhappy?

Somehow all this is tied up to my 'career' and what I feel I should be doing for the rest of my life. The problem is that I've no idea what I want to be doing and never did. Growing up, this scared me sometimes but I figured things would become clearer as I got older. I will be turning 30 later this year but am no clearer than I was when 13.

But staying at home and cooking day in and day out does not quite interest me either. I am fine with doing that for a couple of years but not beyond that if I can help it! So what then? Work in a dead end job like scanning groceries at Superstore? Sure...but where is the intellectual challenge? It would be so BORING! Okay, so I need intellectual challenge - I could sit and home and solve puzzles and do the Superstore thing part time, right?...But no, what about my education? What about my peers? Shouldn't I be trying to compete with them and make myself known in my field? Or something?And there is all the comparison with them- Here is where I SHOULD be just as they are and here is where I am and oh my god, look at the gap - I am falling short so much! Nevermind they live in a different city, have different circumstances and more importantly WANT different things. But.. but.. what do I want? If I don't know what I want, is it wrong to want what everyone else seems to want?

And so continues the endless cycle of self doubt and depression. Unless its broken temporarily by some external circumstance like a pregnancy. Another way to break it might be to figure out what I want - but how does one begin to do that?

A friend once told me a few years ago that most people start working not because they want to but because of imitating others who are working and later they're too entrenched in the system to stop. Of course we do need to work for our food, shelter, etc. but there is more to it than that. I scoffed at him then because I was still young and idealistic. Now I wonder if he had a point..

metaphorically speaking

If you lived in an alien land where they spoke a strange language - say you'd lived there for a couple of years now - and you thought you'd learnt enough of the language to manage - Then you attended an event where you couldn't figure out what was happening - Would you be upset?

Would you blame yourself for not adapting well or justify it saying that you didn't grow up with the language or learn it at school - so how on earth can you manage?

If you felt bad about it, would you take lessons? If you didn't feel bad about it, would you still do something about it anyway?

What if you knew you were leaving this land in a couple of years? Would you still be motivated to learn the language - even if you knew you'd never need it again after these 2 years?

If the sign of an intelligent and interested person is his/her ability to continually learn, by failing to adapt, haven't you failed at a larger issue?

On second thoughts

Finished reading the book "Three in a bed". The fact that I managed to read the book from cover to cover within 3-4 days should in itself be an indicator of its content.
If it were heavy with information, I wouldn't have been able to plow through it so quickly. I am onto my next book and unable to read more than a page at a time for this very reason.

The book told me more about why I should co-sleep rather than how I can do it safely, what I should look out for, tips from people who've been there done that etc. Somewhat disappointing! And it gets repetitive very quickly - Yes the tribes in Malawi, Uganda, Palani etc co-sleep and have amazing results, but really can we move on to the everyday world we live in? Also the author would have you believe that murderers and rapists are created because we don't co-sleep with our children. Kinda far fetched IMO.

There are a couple of reasons why I am going to give this a shot.
1.) Breastfeeding will be easier. Consequently no sore nipples, infections and all that sort of thing.
2.) Child feels more secure. No sleeping problems initially (and later on as well, if you believe the book).
3.) Both baby and me will be well rested (I can hope!)

At home today since am feeling flu ish. Must be all the people at the food fair yesterday...
Who knew so many people in Calgary liked South Indian food? Hopefully the event is better organized next year and there is more food to go around.

risk taking

A friend of mine told me yesterday that she was changing her career - after having been in the lighting industry forever - at least 20 years if not more....and changing it to do something quite different; something she's not tried on a business scale before but something she loves doing anyway. I was shocked. I was also filled with some kind of envious admiration. Way to go!

To be able to shrug it all off and try something new, after all these years on one kind of a career path - wow! So many of us get attached to the idea of being in a particular career and we keep moving along in the career path - joining associations, aiming for professional development, making contacts and trying to stay ahead in the field. The career becomes closely tied with our ego and our very sense of self. How do you introduce yourself? I know that in my case 'I am a lighting consultant' is the sentence that follows 'Hello, I am ...". And this does not even have to be a business meeting.

Not that there is anything wrong with all of this. We presumably entered the field because we liked it. But how many of us question it after 10 years, after 20 years? Even if we did, would we have the courage to start all over again in something completely different? What if we sucked at this new thing? At least we had the previous thing in a solidly established way... and what after doing this for a while we discovered that we didn't quite like this either? I know these very questions would make me hesitate and probably not take the risk.

But then I was never much of a gambler anyway...Everytime I watch 'Deal or no deal' on TV, I am always encouraging the person to walk away with whatever money they made in the first round. But I do admire the ones who persist round after round despite losses and then come out with a million dollars in the end. I would never do that, but I admire them nevertheless. Just like I admire my friend I suppose.

Feeling groovy

Feeling stuffed after a good lunch. My friend was astonished at the sheer quantity of food I ate..
Strangely I am not sleepy as I usually am after a good meal. Maybe thats because I've nothing to work at and will be leaving soon. Funny how the prospect of an idle afternoon is so delightful!

i've got no deeds to do, no promises to keep
i'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep
let the morning time wash all these troubles from me

life, i love you, all is groovy

I love this song especially on nice summer days... like today.

Three in a bed

This is the title of the book I am reading today during lunch break. No, its not a risque book about ménage à trois. It is about the benefits of having your child sleep in your bed with you instead of in a crib in a different room.

Have read only about 50 pages into the book so far and at this point there is a lot of ranting about what is wrong with the Western Society in terms of child birth and child rearing. Interesting ranting though!

I sure am glad to be here at this point in time instead of a couple of decades ago when babies were routinely separated from their mothers and put in a nursery at hospital, when breastfeeding was recommended on schedule instead of on demand and people were encouraged to let their newborn infants cry so that they'll learn to behave. Sounds shocking but what would you or anyone else do if that's what the doctor recommended even if that wasn't quite what you wanted? A lot of prevailing theory still conforms to these beliefs...but at least the alternatives are gaining some credibility!

Cosleeping is still a controversial theory even though it has been routinely practiced in several Eastern cultures including India. That's one advantage I have - this being from India bit. It makes me more open to this and willing to experiment. With all the terror being spread about SIDS and how the baby MUST sleep in a crib, I cannot blame the people who want to play it safe though.

I think this book would still be interesting reading even if one didn't want to co-sleep. Just getting that different point of view and knowing how certain practices started can be thought provoking and can make a difference.

A quote from the book:
Helplessness is the vital condition of the human baby, because he requires the company of those who are teaching him what it is to be human. His frailty is our cue to pick him up and hold him. A baby has to sort out his own ego from the muddle he sees around him and he does that by first identifying with his mother. ......... At the beginning the mother and infant are as one - the rest is a slow struggle towards independance. ........ When you put a newborn baby down to sleep in his cradle, he thinks a part of himself has gone - the part that sustains life and gives him comfort. He does not have many resouces to cope with this separation. Whether he protests or not, he needs you. It is such an obvious explanation for infant misery that medical handbooks tend to overlook it. Experts keep telling us to put the baby down, because it is easier, and mothers should not be subject to the whims of their children. They are missing the point altogether.

Too much to read. Too little time.

Went to the library yesterday and got even more books on labour, delivery, child development and everything inbetween. My husband is amused at my zealousness and also a bit apprehensive that all this reading will only serve to confuse me further and make me a nervous wreck. I hope not!

I am thinking of it as targetted reading rather than directionless reading though. Lets see. One of the books was titled 'Easy Labour' and the librarian checking out the books was amused. Is labour ever easy? Turns out she had somewhat of an easy labour with the entire process lasting only a couple of hours - so it was quick even though painful. Thats very impressive for a first delivery and I could hope for nothing more...
And she assured me "once you have that baby in your arms, you'll forget all about the pain you went through.

Lets see..

Delivery

Tis lunchtime - although being self employed, I don't really have a paid lunchtime. It is whatever I want it to be. I just like to have lunch and take some time off at the same time as the people around me...

Been reading another blog for the past half hour and I am trying to do this chronologically so this all makes sense. I am still in 2004, reading about the birth of her first child and the entire process in the hospital. Its amazing! Its also horrifying! In my usual procastinator style, I've not spared much thought to labor and delivery till now considering that it is pretty far away. Suddenly 19 more weeks seem like very little time and I don't think I am prepared at all in any way...But what can you do to prepare? It is what it is, right? Well, in her case her hypnosis tapes seem to have helped her a lot among other things, although she still needed an epidural at the end of the day. Maybe I should join some breathing/relaxation classes - or buy some tapes or something..

I liked what she wrote about the delivery itself - how she always thought the process didn't matter as much as the end result and how she thinks differently now. It is one of the most significant experiences (not to mention prolonged and painful) that a woman goes through and she cannot help reflecting on it again and again later wondering if there was something she would have done differently. At least we have options at this day and age that gives us the luxury of wondering about it- epidurals and picotin and whatever else...

Well my self assigned lunchtime is over and I should head back to trying to floodlight the exterior of a high-rise building using some LED fixtures! Sounds more fascinating than it really is... like anything else I suppose.

What I am reading right now

Upamanyu Chatterjee's book "English, August". I started this book reluctantly since it seemed very dense and pretty pointless not to mention pretty depressing as well. I have since started admiring this book and I am only about halfway through it. I am not even going to try and summarize it or analyze it. Here are some favorite passages of mine from this book, from whatever I've read thus far.

' In the government, you'll realize this over the years, Sen, there is no such thing as absolute honesty, there are only degrees of dishonesty. All officers are more or less dishonest - some are like our engineers, they get away with lakhs, some are like me, who won't say no when someone gives them a video for the weekend, others are subtler, they won't pay for the daily trunk call to Hyderabad to talk to their wives and children. Only degrees of dishonesty. But, of course, honesty does not mean efficiency.'

'Bhatia made Agastya's secret life seem so ridiculous, he wanted to laugh. Its major consolation had been the possibility that it was a profound experience, something rare; now it seemed as common as a half-bottle of whisky, something he shared with Bhatia. Agastya faintly disliked him for this, for shattering one of his last consoling illusions. But he could not admit to their similarity. He realized obscurely that the sense of loneliness was too precious to be shared and finally incommunicable, that men were ultimately, islands; each had his own universe, immense only to himself, far beyond the grasp or the interest of others. For them the pettiness of the ordeal was unrecordable, worthy at best, only of a flicker of empathy. He was really not that interested in Bhatia's life; later, Dhrubo would not be interested in his, and his father would not be able to understand it.'

'The inhabitants of his world moved so much, ceaselessly and without sanity, and realized only with the last flicker of their reason that they had not lived. Endless movement, much like the uncaring sea, transfers to alien places, passages to distant shores, looking for luck, not sensing that heaven was in their minds. I was not born for this, said Agastya silently. He had said that all he wanted was to be happy. Now alone under the stars, he could finally admit this to himself without embarrassment. '

Been a while again

Its May 1 already! Time sure flies...What has happened in the while that I've not updated this blog? Not much and plenty - depending on how you look at it.

In february, I discovered that I was pregnant - something I didn't really think that I'd be blessed with so soon...Its funny how something becomes so much more precious when there is a possibility of it not being attained. I had always kind of wanted kids, but not in a desperate must-have way. When some medical problems made it seem like I may not have them after all, I did become a bit more attached to the idea of having em. How far would I have gone to have kids though? Luckily, that's a question I did not have to answer since this happened spontaneously without fertility treatments and expensive operations.... I suspect that if need be, I might have gone part way on this road, and then turned towards adoption. I truly believe that having a biological kid at the price of thousands of dollars is a terrible waste of money.

So I am excited about being pregnant and terribly nervous about being a parent. I find myself constantly referring to the past... What did my parents do right that I didn't turn out to be an axe murderer or cocaine junkie? I remember bits and pieces from my own childhood - stories my mother told me for instance, that I want to pass on as memories to my child as well.

I've been reading plenty of pregnancy and parenting books and magazines. In fact thats all I read. Admittedly my career has been relegated to the back seat. But I know (and hope) this won't be permanent - regardless of all the people who seem to suddenly think that having a child spells the end to my career aspirations.. I do want to focus as much time and energy on the child for the next couple of years though..

What else happened over the past couple of months? My father-in-law visited us for 3 months.
I joined Toastmasters and am having fun at their meetings every Thursday evening. I also sang a song at a local event for South Indians. We've met some new people in this city as a result...

life is good...

Idleness

There is a lot of work to do...
Instead I am laying around doing nothing. I've also managed to finally add a couple of more installments to the Barcelona trip blog, easily 5 months since the trip.
Hope to finish up the remaining two installments by the end of the week.

Happiness

"In one often-cited study, researchers at the University of Kentucky analyzed the essays novices born before 1917 wrote on entering the School Sisters of Notre Dame and correlated them to the nuns’ life spans. They found that 9 out of 10 of the most positive 25 percent of the nuns were still alive at 85, while only one-third of the least positive 25 percent were. Overall, their study showed positive emotions correlated to a 10-year increase in life span, greater even than the differential between smokers and nonsmokers. "

This is from an article in NY times about Positive Psychology. Basically a new 'science' that teaches people about what can make them happy and how its different from hedonism (Pursuit of pleasure instead of happiness). If plain psychology deals with depression and what goes wrong with the human mind, positive psychology deals with all the positive things - how and why humans feel good. Reading about it reminded me of the 'Art of Living' class I attended a couple of years ago. Similar principles and same objective and even similar methods of instruction!

No wonder this 'Science' is accused of being a cult and not really a science at all! What does it matter what it is, as long it makes people happy? Does it make people happy though? Or are they pretending to be happy? I have no way of knowing, but I hope they're happy! Everyone could use more happiness...

In the end I don't know if I need a class to teach me what Ayn Rand wrote about all those years ago:

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of happiness - to value the failure of your values- is an insolent negation of morality. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man - every man- is an end in himself and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy - a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that deos not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals and seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

Tall order, but surely gives us a reason to pursue happiness.

Today's random image

This is a street performer in Las Ramblas - a photo taken during my trip to Barcelona a few months ago!

Dosais

Titled thus since I am eating dosais while typing this...good dosais I might add since my husband has nearly perfected this art form. Mine always seem to get torn or worse get glued to the Tava unless I make them really thick, but where's the fun in that?

My holidays were great although they went by a bit too quickly and so much still left undone. Visited family and friends which is always a nice thing when you're in N.America and are dying with lonliness. Okay I am not dying with lonliness...but could do with more company. The problem though is deciding how much is enough. Having a threshold seems to make it more difficult to make friends, but then do I really want 'friends' in my face all the time? And if they were really 'friends' would I consider them as being in my face or would I be grateful for their company? What about degrees of friendship then?

I want to go home..to take off this uniform and leave the show..
The only reason I typed that line was because I am listening to 'The Wall' as I am typing this. Talk about multitasking - I am eating dosai, listening to Pink Floyd, running an AGI calc and typing this blog. Although that line does sort of fit in with the whole lonliness theme thingie I am trying to write about here.

I finally got hold of 'Forward the Foundation' by Asimov at my Aunt's place a couple of weeks ago! Good book and certainly better than its prequel, but I still like the original 3 books the best. The part of communication between minds (telepathy) is so fascinating! I also reread John Wyndham's 'Re-birth' - another great story about the very same thing - a superior variant of the human race who communicate telepathically. Great imaginative fiction! Still have 2 more Foundation books to read before I finish the series.

Enough said for today. Bye...

Happy New Year

Its a year - a day already... but Happy New Year anyway!