a conversation, an interesting one.

I have been unemployed since I finished my Masters five months ago. Somehow I am not a big enough person to find solace in other's misery. I have been advised on several occasions to look at people who are worse off than me, people who have real responsibilities they are accountable for, and feel happy about not being in that situation. I do not comprehend this argument, and I don't think it is very humane in any case. Each one of us has our very own, customized-to-fit-personal-grievances hell, don't we?

Anyway, this is to remember a delightful conversation from just a few days ago. Conversations with strangers are usually so pleasant, perhaps because they are seldom tainted with our expectations from them, or from ourselves with respect to them.

I volunteer my time at the Habitat for Humanity, they are building houses in Oakland. I go there for several reasons, from the practical 'to-keep-my-VISA-intact' to 'I'm afraid-I-will-lose-my-sanity-if-I-don't-do-anything-with-the-time-I-have-at-hand' to 'I-like-to-work-with-my-hands'. I rely on public transportation system to take me there and bring me home, its a twenty five minute BART ride followed by a fifteen minute bus ride and ending with a quarter mile walk to the site of work.

This particular day, I was doing carpentry, not making furniture, rather straightening walls for the next level of work, putting the floor above in place. The residential construction industry in America is mostly wood based, as far as I have seen, and with a very few exceptions to this rule. I think it has to do with the seismic zones, the climate and overall simplicity of building with wood. The systems are strong and durable and I have a *lot* to learn about them, still.

Its very intensive labor, and by the time I am heading home, I am famished and ready to rest my limbs. And happy about my day being well spent. I was waiting for bus no. 45 heading to Coliseum. I boarded it and said a cheerful hello to the driver. This is how the conversation went,

Me: "Hello!" (paying fare, $2, into the machine)

Driver: "No I don't go to Fruitvale"

Me: "I want to get to the Bart Station"

Driver (handing me a transfer ticket)

Me (nodding a 'no' with my head saying I don't want it.)

Driver : "NOW you don't want a transfer, why did you ask for it in the first place"

Me: "I am sorry, I think you are mistaken. I most certainly did not."

Driver: "Of course you did, you first asked me if I was going to Fruitvale and then asked me for a transfer."

Me (very very confused): "Do you mean today? For this bus ride?"

Driver (exasperated): "Are you telling me you didn't say these things?"

Me (still very confused): "Yeah I didn't, all I said was a hello when I entered the bus"

Driver (still exasperated) : "I don't believe this, you think I am messing with you?"

Me (having taken a seat, confused, and also slightly alarmed, not sure of the sanity of this person) : "Yes I think you are joking with me"

Driver (laughing): "You bet I am!!!"

Me (grinning) : "And so I wondered!"

This dialogue doesn't sound a fraction of how interesting it was. There was more, but I am unable to translate its goofiness. I was genuinely confused and also felt slightly hallucinated in the head.

The driver later told me that he had noticed me boarding the bus on several occasions, and struck a conversation with me ( a perfectly sane one this time around). It was a delightful 15 minute journey and another seven minutes of talking after having reached the final stop (which was my destination). When I bought a BART ticket for the train ride and was waiting at the platform, he waved a good bye at me from his window. I was strangely elated.

The world is so full of good people! =) I am one of them!

endorphines

A friend told me that most of my posts freak him out about how mentally imbalanced I can sound with my thoughts coming from depths deeper than the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench of the Pacific Ocean. (This is not verbatim really, but I guess you get the idea). I must be crazy to be thrilled at such an observation. =) So the yellow me is writing today!

Everytime I chance at a happy interaction that gets added to my "People are unbelievably nice to me (I wonder why)" list, I relive moments that are already on that list, and my faith in all the good that dwells in the heart of people becomes good as new again. The faith has always been (I am convent educated), but moves into the corners of my mind if I don't keep a tab on it. So I wanted to list them out for me.

This one time, when I was in the 11th grade and struggling with the 'what next' questions about my career, I was walking to my tutorial classes for Chemistry ( I still don't understand organic chemistry) and I had to go cross a very busy street to get there.

The Indian Democracy has made it a free for all. On the roads (as almost everywhere else) you can pretty much do as you please. As a driver, its totally up to you if you want to wait for pedestrians to get across a road or you want to scare them out of their wits by not slowing down at all. Not that the pedestrians feel the need to use a crossing even if they see one; its always the shortest distance across to get to the other side, irrespective of the volume of traffic. *This is only my humble opinion.* (I would like to see someone trying this in firang-land).

Coming back to what I was saying, there was this busy road that I needed to cross to reach my destination, and quite unlike anyone around me, I was waiting for the traffic to lighten before I attempted it. A white maruti car stopped (it took me a while to comprehend that someone behind the wheels had actually stopped to let me go). I did, and when I was on the other side of the road, I turned around to thank him. He was still there (many people had jumped at the chance of safely crossing that road). I thanked him with a little smile, and he smiled and nodded back.

I don't remember the face of this man, but I remember exactly the smile he returned. It was a smiled smile.

That was a moment of euphoria right there. It was like the colors of the universe had washed themselves afresh. A bag of endorphines had burst itself free in my head and I was at peace with my existence again. For a while.

That is a lot of word to use for such a small incident. But, I could write more about it!

I cannot live like this.

I have been gifted with a brain that I have lofty expectations from. For starters, I expect it to hold far more than what is fair, really.

I tend to lock things up into little boxes and chuck them into what I would have ideally liked to be a black hole in my mind. But, to my utter disappointment and dismay, the black hole in actually a malfunctioning blender, it keeps throwing things into my face from time to time.

Back in 1999, I took my first Art of Living course (completely my father's idea) (Like everyone else, I was also trying to get the answers to life's mysteries single handedly). I was perhaps the youngest in that bunch of really old, consistently-unhappy-with-life people, and therefore not exactly one of them. But I was there anyway.

For one of the group exercises, we were required to narrate our life stories for the benefit of our immediate audience. Poor me had all but only 17 years of experience at living life (and would therefore be expected to have the shortest life story)

BUT it was I who spoke for the longest, poured my heart out, and cried profusely.

My narration was totally about the fears I faced after my Nana's demise. I was in 8th grade when we lost him. I started believing fervently that I had to pray every night before going off to sleep to keep everyone I knew away from any kind of harm. I also distinctly remember that the days when I would miss out on this, I would be paralyzed with fear, expecting to hear bad news.

This insanity did not stay with me for long (Several other kinds on insanity have creeped in since, but this one in particular soon ended)

What was totally surprising to me about this incident was that I had no idea I had this in me, it was only after I had talked about it (and it wasn't a conscious decision to do so) that I could acknowledge its existence.

The malfunctioning blender spilled its guts again today. And made a fine mess.

I am afraid I cant live like this. I also pray for better confrontation skills. And a break from me.

a brand new year

Another year.

When I was a very little girl and still in the process of grasping the concept of time (I just knew my numbers till ten and I couldn't wrap my head around the idea that sixty seconds make a minute and sixty minutes make an hour. Therefore, when my mother would tell me to wait for a minute before she could attend to my tantrum and I was to wait for counts to ten done six times before I could call for her again) ( I still didn't get it then, but at least I was distracted enough by all the math my brain was required to do without a pencil)

I lost the original intention of writing this. (Funny how consistently I am prone to distraction, and have been so for as long as I can remember, maybe I should put it in my list of new year resolutions to get some improvement done in this aspect of my being)

Continuing the little girl story, when I was a little girl, years seemed so far apart, there was a WHOLE year of school to go to, two term exams, one final exam, one summer break, one pooja break, one winter break and several weekends. Time was a mammoth, a giant that was so proportioned that it could only move slowly, very slowly, from one day to the next, till three hundred and sixty five significant days had been counted before the next one arrived.

In a conversation on this topic, a wise man told me that humans comprehend things in relative terms. A six hour journey will seem terribly agonizing to a four year old, while people my age will see it as a relatively short drive. To be more lucid ( at least attempt it), a period of six hours is a bigger fraction of a four year old's age and will seem like a longer time to him than to a grown up. (The math would be thus : 6/[{(4X365)+1}x24] , the same thing , in case of a 28 year old like me would be 6/[{(365*28)+ 7}x24], the results are roughly, 0.00017 and 0.000024) I am not sure if I have been able to exactly explain what I wanted to, but the whole idea is that since it is all relative is appears different. (!)

Gosh! I wish I could put it better!

In a previous mulling on similar lines I imagined life to be a pinwheel, and focus on its rotation speed. From a third person perspective, I pictured it as starting slowly but surely and gaining acceleration with every spin till the life reaches its end. Strangely, I never did give much thought to the pivot in the pinwheel, and now when I am thinking about it as I write this post, I would like to call it, stereotypically, things that bind you to things around you. And having written that, it seems pretty inconsequential in the current argument.

I am not sure what was the original intention of this post. perhaps I wanted to tell myself that time is on the run, it always has been, and I have lived long enough in total apathy to the fact that moments are evanescent. That I should spend more time doing things I love and counting my blessings than I do kicking myself for not being as perfect as I would like to be. I am not talking about acceptance and a consequent complacence, I am talking about acceptance and taking charge and making change. The desire to be a better version of me.

Here's hoping!