Sunday, June 29, 2008

Secret life of P

Ok finally I could make myself type again!
After typing 30,000+ words, I didn't think I would ever again razz
Yessss..I submitted my dissertation 3 days ago :)
Final defense is in two weeks and I should be dead scared right now, but I guess my brain is still numb to feel anything. razz

So while I'm in this numb state of mind, I think I will do the 'Secrets' tag for Poo. I am very secretive and might not be able to confess my deep dark secrets in a normal state of mind razz.

Ok, so I am supposed to tell 10 secrets about me. Since no one in the blog world knows me personally, pretty much anything I write will be new. But I will try to think of some "true" secrets. After all, the whole purpose of my blogging is to write down things that I can't say out loud. So here it goes:

1. People around me know that I am very close to my parents, but no one knows that how possessive I am about them. I am the only child and used to getting all their attention. So anytime my cousins or any other kid came to visit us, I used to be very, very jealous. I would pray that they leave soon and do all kind of tantrums (like faking sickness) to get attention razz. To be honest, I still feel little jealous when they keep talking about their 6 year old neighbor. razz

2. When I was 6-7 years old, I stole (as in took without asking) a Strepsils from my neighbor's desk. I thought it was a biiiig Poppins and was kind of angry at my neighbor for not sharing it with me. So I decided to help myself. If you ever had a Strepsils in your life, you probably can imagine how I was punished for my bad deed. razz

3. I am very adventurous with food. I can eat (may not always like it) anything that doesn't appear gross and that another human being next to me is eating. Some of the weird things I ate when none of my friends wanted to try are bheja fry (fried goat brain), frog legs and chicken gizzard. I must say they tasted pretty good :)

4. Talking of eating, one of my regular nightmares is that I have lost some of my teeth!! I have no idea why I get this nightmare all the time. Anyone knows dream analysis?
The other nightmare that I get often is being unimaginably late for something (class, train, plane, etc.). I think subconsciously I hate my habit of doing all things on the eleventh hour. razz

5. I don't remember any of my good dreams after I wake up, but I remember all my daydreams. As my profile says, I am a compulsive daydreamer. I think about future a lot and to the finest details. The fun part is that a lot of my daydreams have come true to the minutest details :) For example, long before I decided about my career I simply dreamt of working in US. I would imagine different professions at different times, but every time I will imagine living in an apartment in some place of US with a roommate, doing all chores myself etc. It was like deja vu when I first arrived in US and started living with my first roomie :)

6. Currently I live alone. Some of my friends think I must be very unhappy to be living by myself. But actually I love, love, love living alone. I always did. Anytime my parents went out for the day, I used to feel like the king (ok queen). The last two years have been the happiest time of my life. And to tell you a bigger secret, I am really scared to move to CA because very soon I might be living with J and won't have the whole house to myself :(

7. My friends were very surprised when they heard about J for the first time because I never showed interest in dating. They thought of me as the most unromantic person. What they don't know is I have been a hopeless romantic since ever and always believed in the 'someone somewhere' philosophy :) I just don't believe in casual dating or kissing every frog coming my way. razz

8. My first major crush was on a neighbor. He was the heart-throb of all girls in my school and he was quite a casanova too. To him I was just the ugly kid whom he has to (against his wishes) escort to school everyday :) Now we are friends though and he even calls himself my 'fan' on orkut. biggrin I don't have any romantic feelings for him anymore, but I still feel happy whenever he writes to me. razz

9. I always loved going to school (duh..that's why I am still in school). But, I hated going to my music school. I love music and singing, but the problem was that my mom sent me to an Indian classical music class and I totally hated it. So every Sunday I will have fake stomach aches, cough and one time I even tried getting a fever by putting an onion under my arms (got the idea from some brilliant bollywood movie biggrin). Sometimes my tricks worked too! The other times, I would go to the class and lie to the teacher that we had guests at home and that is why I couldn't do my homework (i.e. practice the aa-aa-aas). I never had to lie about my school homework though :)

10. My profile says that I am ambitious. The secret here is that I have some crazy ambitions, such as being part of research projects that will take me to space or Antarctica or get me a Nobel Prize!! For now, I feel happy knowing profs who have achieved these or hold a cardboard cutout of the Nobel Prize. razz


Pheeww....thinking of 10 secrets is more difficult than I thought!

I think everyone I know has already done this tag. If not, please consider yourself tagged and share your deep dark secrets too. :)

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Wrong number

In the past month at least half a dozen visitors to my blog landed here by searching for 'dump a man' or 'dump a married man'!!
Google seems to have mixed up the name of my blog and a post I did on a TV series called 'The mind of the married man' :D

If you are one of those readers, I'm sorry to say I cannot be of any help to you. I have absolutely no experience with married men or dumping any kind of men. I only dump my thoughts here and occasionally make fun of my very single man.

Google engineers, if you happen to be reading this by any chance, can you please do something to stop such mix-ups?

Friday, June 13, 2008

Lucky Friday the 13th

6 black blobs on a Western blot makes P the happiest girl on the planet :D
Yooohoooooo!!

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Spreading the nerdism

Tagged by another geeky grad student Solitaire. This is a fun tag about books. But, unfortunately the 'fun' part goes missing from the life of grad students :(
You can skip to the red paragraph in the end if you are interested in some guessing games.

OK, so here are the rules of the game:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge the person who tagged you.


I have two text books just next to my computer right now. I picked one and guess what, page 123 has a full page graph and and only two sentences in the caption!!

Hi hi..very tempting opportunity to stop, but I decided to try the second one.

So here are the 6th, 7th and 8th sentences on page 123 from 'Programmed Cell Death in Plants' by John Gray:
"E2F homologs of Arabidopsis build a small gene family with three members (Vandepoele et al., 2002).
Constitutive misexpression of E2Fa resulted in enlarged cotyledons due to prolonged cell proliferation (see also Figure 5.1 De Veylder et al., 2002).
The proliferation rate was dramatically increased when the E2F cofactor, DPa, was coexpressed."
Sounds like a foreign language? You are not alone. Doesn't make much sense to me either :D

Ok let's make this game little interactive for my non-specialist friends.
I'm posting the cover of the book. Can anyone guess what the picture is of? (Hint: It is of course a plant part, and it is taken by a very powerful microscope that can make micro-nano millimeter sized things look life-size).


Not tagging anyone.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

What goes around comes around

Conversation between me and J sometime in 2005-06:

Me: I love the song 'Koi faryad' from 'Tum bin'. Have you heard of it?

J: Yeah. Nice song but don't remember the details. What is special about it?

Me: Well, other than the fact that it is a Jagjit Singh song and picturized on Priyanshu Chatterjee, I like the subtle romance in it. Even the dialogues in between are so nice. There is a scene in the hospital where Priyanshu says to Sandali "Janta hun apko saharey ki zarurat nahi, main sirf saath dene aaya hun (I know you do not need any support, I just came here to give you company)". I love his sensitivity and respect for the girl's independent nature!

J: Hmm.


FAST FORWARD....

Conversation between me and J last night:

Me: I am fed up with so much nonsense work (was referring to all the official work related to graduation, OPT application, job application and things that I will need to do when I move after graduation). You are happily sitting 2000 miles away. Why don't you come here and do at least some of the 'manly' work for me? I will need to get rid of some heavy furniture, get my car serviced etc. etc.

J: Hmm. But I thought you want to be independent and don't want anyone to support you. Remember you told me about that song! I call you everyday. See, I'm being so sensitive and respectful.


How does he remember only the things that he can use against me??
But yes, considering he calls his parents once a week and his friends twice a year, one call EVERYDAY is quite sensitive :p

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Happy to be alive

I have been cribbing about work and all other problems. Today, I'm just thankful I'm alive and safe. What made me so grateful?

A tornado hit our area last night. My labmate and I were on the road when her fiance called and warned us that a tornado warning has been issued for our area. We were still about 15 minutes away from home. We were really scared because there was hardly any place to take shelter on either side of the road. The frequency of lightning and amount of rain kept increasing as we kept getting closer to our town. I don't know how I managed to keep driving with minimum visibility, hail hitting our car and a very shaky leg :) Finally we found a office to take shelter in. The care taker of the office was really nice, let us and few others in. We were sitting in their basement listening to the radio until the storm passed by. Some reports say that it touched down lightly just about a mile from where we were! No major harm done. Some uprooted trees and light posts and power failure in some areas. We came back home but the siren kept going on for another hour and news reporters kept telling that there might be another one coming. I was really scared all night. Was sitting in the middle of the house away from the windows and calling my friends and family. Went to sleep thinking that I might wake up in a different place :p

Fortunately I woke up in the same place :)

I am happy today to be not blown away and really grateful that no one was harmed.

And among all this, a dear friend, who has been like my elder sister since the day I arrived in this alien place, gave birth to a beautiful baby girl!!

Life is strange but not bad :)

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Calvin knows best

Time to get back to 'inflating weak ideas, obscuring poor reasoning and inhibiting clarity'. Sigh!