Get Well Poem

Five years ago, my newly married cousin got really really sick. I just stumbled upon the get-well poem I wrote for him then.

The last few days, for you, must've been hell,
Even 16 km away, I can tell,
That you'd rather be sitting as was pre-decided,
In wa bar with dim lights and tolling bells,
Drinking to bhabhi's, my and your own health,
Caring a fig about health being wealth,
How does it feel, Vishal Bhaiya, to lie all day,
With an aching back and nothing to say,
Staring at different ceilings in different houses,
Dreaming of boots, shirts, or doing self analysis!
Studying the activity of spiders and their ilk,
Being force-fed pills, tablets and milk,
Periodically being resigned to four people plunging,
Your body in ice-cold water and sponging,
But all this is the darkness behind the candle,
Or to be more scientific, the penumbra mantle,
All your worries have been replaced by just one,
To get well soon, and go out in the Sun,
So how does it feel, Vishal Bhaiya, to lie all day,
And having your meals while in bed you stay,
A week-long break with nothing to do,
A nd a million people calling and asking after you,
Getting silly get-well cards like this one,
And being bombarded with good wishes, on the run,
Having somebody staying up nights for you,
If you carry on like this, you'll have a crew!
Getting so much attention, it makes me jealous,
(Don't raise your eyebrows, I've always been callous,)
Anyway, enjoy your convalescence, and take your time,
To plan out an ingenious crime,
People have done great things while they were recovering,
So why not you?? Take advantage of what's occurring!

Re-defining English

Something I wrote a few years ago -

Literally:

1. GRANARY – grandmotherhood
2. TABOO – what a magician-turned-ghost would say
3. STALEMATE – boring pal
4. KILOBYTE – how a rabid dog kills
5. KIDNAP – children’s mid-afternoon siesta
6. MUTATE – become dumb
7. BROADCAST – overweight film casting crew

Realistically:

1. WEATHER-a lifesaving topic you resort to when all other conversation is failing.
2. SWIMMING POOL- a place where you can go to console yourself that others in the world are fatter than you are
3. NEWSPAPER- an accessory that helps you spy on the people sitting around you
4. EXERCISE BIKE- a piece of furniture that doubles up as a clothes hanger
5. DICTIONARY- a gigantic paper weight that sometimes encloses one’s dry-flower collection
6. LECTURE- a respectable and formalized version of a lullaby
7. VOLUNTEER- person who goes around collecting free T-shirts
8. JEANS - weight detectors (better and more reliable than weighing machines)
9. SECRET – something that everyone knows but pretends not to know
10. CELEBRITY – a person whose death makes headlines

And finally, inventing some on my own:

1. PERUSALTRAUMA – act of repeatedly counting the number of pages left to read in a particularly boring reading assignment
2. SIDDLE – move from side to side in a vain attempt to let the person in front of you pass by, only to find that he/she is doing the same
3. STUPIDITIOUS – person who believes that the next pinball game will show him his math test score
4. QUICKLEAN – act of cleaning up the house or your room five minutes before guests arrive
5. DISALBUWEL – remove personally unflattering pictures from an album
6. BRANDANCY- loyalty to a particular brand in the market
7. MASSMANIA – weighing yourself immediately after skipping a meal to see if some weight has dissipated
8. PICKACY – art of selecting the largest piece of pastry on a platter without the host or other guests noticing
9. SLAPTREATMENT – hitting the television/music deck/video-player to make it work

Chasing Centaurs and Thunderstorms

So I'm back in Cleveland. The city that was established in 1796. The city with enough winding roads to put the Land of Oz to shame.

Work this time around is definitely cooler. Co-workers include some quirky and brilliant office-mates, who're rocket-scientists in the real-ist sense. Conversations range from martial arts to stock market misadventures, and going sailing during a forecasted thunderstorm in the middle of the work-day is considered to be perfectly normal. (I survived this particular expedition, and later learned that sailing that day was the stupidest thing to do, probably worthy of a Darwin award (which is awarded to people who do humanity a favor by removing themselves from the gene pool) , because a sailboat in a storm on lake Erie is like a lightning rod, and we could have been fried, and it was also Friday the Thirteenth).

Oh well.
I'm still here to report on this - and even though google services are far-reaching, I doubt that they extend to the afterlife.

I was also recently asked to gather some information on centaurs, celestial bodies that are similar to asteroids, and found mainly between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. Tracking and hunting down each one of the 119 known centaurs look up a large part of two days. But now I know something about Transneptunian Objects, electric propulsion, the Kuiper Belt, and other tidbits that I could save the world with.

Ice-skating yesterday was cool. And not just temperature-wise. At least three different people noticed my friend and me struggling during our attempt to skate backwards, and offered their advice. The best one we got was to sing while trying to skate like that.

And what do you know... it works.