The Idle-llic Life

With the last grad school application over, and parents away, I have had too much free time, and too much free energy to boot. While singing to annoy my sister, throwing sheep, cows, and elephants at friends on facebook, and catching up with movies were fun initially, I soon made a remarkable discovery.

The idle life's not really for me.

Something stronger than superego starts eating away at my innards when I'm sitting and doing nothing. The energy I'm not using acts like a super-excited state of matter, pulsing and throwing itself at all my organs and limbs, willing them to move.

Reading helps. A little. The 3 books I'm reading right now are 'Ignited Minds' by A.P.J. Kalam, '1001 Arabian Nights' translated by Richard Burton, and 'The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time' by Mark Haddon. All excellent. Even though my neurons are sweating and panting their dendrons off, there was a slight problem with this activity: the sitting still part.

I decided to try something new. Something so unique that most people my age wouldn't even begin to think of it. Something that would allow me unleash my creativity and burned calories as a side effect. Finally, I hit upon the best kind of indoor exercise - cleaning.

The switch boards and switches and ceiling fans came first. Then the doors. Followed by the 50 odd bunches of artificial flowers around the house (I counted). My sister and I attacked the storeroom together. We sorted through suitcases full of clothes and papers and single, divorced socks, and bags full of bags, and random objects prized by parents for no apparent reason. We categorized items and reorganized them: Mum's clothes went in one bag, craft supplies in another, old broken electronics in yet another, and so on. I made another bag for myself - and put all the orphaned items in it. These included - a pirate patch, a set of fake nails, an old used order-form-less 3-D camera with Pepsi's baby pictures trapped in it - and my favorite... a live-mosquito trap "For the Novice Trapper. Catch them live and make your own mosquito-fur coat!".

I think we need to donate half our house to Goodwill.

Home

Wow - it's 2009.

It's amazing how much happened since the toenail incident. Jumping off a bridge. The Great Waltz. The GRE. The FE. JPL. Raytheon. Lockheed. The drivers license test. Twice. Berkeley. And 5 other graduate schools. Las Vegas. Packing. Moving. A million times.

65 hours to reach home. And almost not making it. The luggage not making it at all.

I'm home now. And none of that matters anymore.