Happy Birthday To Me

No, that's not a pathetic cry for acknowledgement, but rather just a statement of fact. I'm 31 today, a number much more palatable than 30 was, as the transition out of the entirely-youthful 20's seemed painful a year ago. By this year, though, it's just another number. Since Ladan's in Phoenix and I'm going to Orange County this weekend to go snowboarding for the first time with Bharath (a birthday present from Ladan), I don't have any real plans for tonight. I may try to earn a dinner at a local Indian restaurant that apparently gives free entrees on birthdays, but that's about it.

I did, however, do something today that will hopefully have significance for the future: I applied online for three local colleges for the Spring 2007 semester. It seems that all the schools in DC that have international relations programs require both macro and micro economics classes as prerequisites to even submit an application, as well as a testable foreign language proficiency. Since I've only ever taken one economics class - a Syracuse University course taught at my high school when I was a junior - and that was oh, 14 years ago, I decided to just take it again rather than try to figure out how to get credit for it.

The local colleges I applied to all offer night classes for both courses, meeting once a week each for about three hours. If I could bang out both economics classes this semester, I could then spend the summer studying Spanish, in order to meet the language requirement by the time I (hopefully) start applying around the end of the summer for Spring 2008 admission. Also at some point in there I have to take the GRE again, because results are only good for five years and I took it back in 1998. (D'oh!)

It's sort of strange considering spending two nights a week in a classroom again after always having my nights free since finishing grad school six years ago. But luckily these colleges are dirt cheap - each course costs less than a hundred bucks - so that's not an issue. And if taking these classes starts to give me some peace of mind in regards to feeling like I'm finally on a career/life path that I can feel excited about, then that's immensely more valuable than any money I may have to spend up front.

An Unwelcome Message From The Mailman

Occasionally I get prank phone calls, or more specifically, prank phone messages, on both my cell and office phones. Strangely, the calls always show a caller ID number that matches that of a certain friend of mine whose real identity I'll protect and innocence I'll presume by simply referring to him as "Richard C". But I'm certain that such a friendly, considerate, kind-hearted person such as he could not possibly be harassing me in this manner. There must be some mixup.

Anyway, on New Year's Day I received a message apparently from that most well-known of all wack Bay Area rappers, E-40, AKA The Mailman, AKA Charlie Hustle, AKA The Ballatician, AKA Captain Save-A-Ho, AKA 40 Fonzarelli, AKA 40 Water (you can see his website here, where I think the street signs speak for themselves):

"Hey wassup Greg, this is E-fawdee, I'm just calling all my weeples out there to wish you a nappy new year. Alright, later!"

Disturbingly, this is the fourth or fifth message I've received from this bama, whose music and style I loathe with a passion. E popularized the goofy "ghost ride the whip" anthem, as well as the "hyphy" phenomenon, and has helped wreak incalculable damage to the Bay Area's hip-hop identity. E has made a style out of rapping in a high-pitched, erratic, annoyingly sharply-enunciated voice that is like nails on a chalkboard to my hip-hop sensibility. It must be that my vocal distaste for the guy has come to his attention and now he's trying to win me over with niceties.

Well, I got news for ya - it ain't gonna happen, E, it just ain't. I'm still upset about that time in '95 when I unsuspectingly bought your album "In A Major Way" because you had 2Pac on the "Dusted N Disgusted" track, and how shocked I was with what utter crap your material actually was. And to think that you hailed from the same area that produced Solesides/Quannum and Hieroglyphics! I felt violated. Violated!

So make sure ya heard, E, I ain't no fan and never will be. You and all your wack hyphy associates can just step off!

Blind and Crying in the Mall

For well over a year now I've been wearing glasses that have a number of cracks in the lenses, including one particularly annoying one directly in the line of sight of my left eye. I'd put off getting new lenses mostly because I didn't want to shell out the hundred bucks or so that it'd cost to replace them. But while in Arizona with Ladan over the New Year weekend, I realized that I should use any eye care health insurance benefits I had before the year ended. We went to the mall and I got an eye exam - my right eye had deteriorated a significant amount, while the left just a little - but then they told me that they'd have to order my lenses and it would take up to a week to receive them. Thus I'd have to wait until I returned to California to get the lenses - which meant that I'd lose the use of the benefits for 2006, since I wouldn't be back there until January 2. Damn!

This past Saturday I went to the mall and to my surprise they had my lenses in stock. I wanted to keep my current frames, so they took my glasses and told me to come back in two hours. Not having expected them to be able to do it the same day, I hadn't brought anything to read with me to pass the time. Nor was I able to drive home, or anywhere else for that matter, since I now couldn't see very well.

I had no choice but to just walk around the mall. As soon as I left the store and entered the rest of the mall, I was hit with the realization of just how terrible my eyes had become - I felt nearly blind! Faces and signs were fuzzy until I was within about five feet of them. Finally I located a mall directory and looked for a book store, assuming that in a mall this size, there had to be a Borders or Barnes & Noble, some place that I could sit and pass the time reading - nope, just a Borders Express, d'oh!

As I hadn't eaten anything all day, I decided to go to the food court. Another challenge: how am I going to read the menus? I stumbled around, trying to find something I could read. I settled on Sarku Japan, mostly because I was familiar with their menu and knew that Chicken Teriyaki was an option. I got my food, sat and ate it as lots of shapes buzzed around me, then finished and found that I still had an hour to kill.

Again walking around the mall, my eyes started to irritate me; I kept blinking and then noticed that they were watering, and little "tears" even started dripping out! What the hell? Did my feelings get hurt or something? Am I menopausal? What am I crying about?! As I walked and wiped my eyes clear, I figured it out: I've gotten so accustomed to walking with my eyes shielded by glasses that when I don't have them, the wind hitting my eyes makes them water! It's completely ridiculous, but true; I noticed that I could very clearly feel the air ramming into my eyes, and it was uncomfortable.

OK, so I can't see where I'm going, and now I can't even walk. I'm about as close to being helpless as I've been since my senior year of high school when I fractured both my elbows playing basketball. And it's not a good feeling.

Resigned to defeat, I chose a comfortable chair next to the glasses store and just waited it out. Few things annoy me more than having to kill time, especially when I could be reading instead. After about 45 minutes of this torture, I returned to the store and they went to fetch my glasses.

To add insult to injury, I'm still not sure that these new lenses are entirely correct; I've got weird halos around bright objects, especially at night. Seems like I'll need to make another trip back to the mall this week.

This time though, I'll be sure to bring a book.

Finishing A Most Suitable Book

Last night I finally finished Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. This 1474-page behemoth was the longest novel ever published in English back in 1993 when it came out. The book is absolutely adored by a friend of a friend of mine, and the intensity of the reverence for it piqued my curiosity to the point where I decided I had to read it. It was over two months ago that I began, and it took me longer to finish than I expected it to.

Carrying the book around for so long was certainly an attention-getter: a mid-40's Indian woman at an airport told me she quit reading it because it was "much too detailed", while a grandmotherly white woman asked me on an airplane, "What on earth is that book you're reading? I've never seen such a huge book!", and lots of other people have commented on how unbelievably long and seemingly insurmountable the book appears to be. Seth even pokes fun at himself, when he has a woman ask Amit, an author:

"Why, then, is it rumoured that your forthcoming novel ... is to be so long? More than a thousand pages!" she exclaimed reproachfully, as if he were personally responsible for the nervous exhaustion of some future dissertationist.

"Oh, I don't know how it grew to be so long," said Amit. "I'm very undisciplined. But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends."

In short, I absolutely loved this book. The book chronicles the lives of four Indian families in the early 1950's who are related by marriage and friendship. It's an extremely engrossing, detailed, moving story that attempts (and succeeds) to address the enormous issues of religion, caste, politics, and marriage in Indian society a few years after independence. Seth creates a ficticious state called Purva Pradesh in which the story mostly takes place, and populates it with a huge cast of characters, all of whom are given sufficient time to develop their own personalities and go through unique but often inter-related experiences. It sounds cliche, but I was genuinely moved to sadness, surprise, disgust, regret, and out-loud laughter at different times by the characters.

Having spent over two months with this book, I had begun to feel that I was part of these peoples' lives - or them of mine. I met the members of the Kapoor, Mehra, Khan and Chatterji clans - Pran, Savita, Maan, Varun, Veena, Kedernath, Bhaskar, Mr. & Mrs. Mahesh Kapoor, Rupa, Lata, Arun, Meenakshi, Aparna, Dr. Kishen Chand Seth, Kakoli, Tapan, Dipankar, Amit, the Nawab Sahib, Firoz, Imtiaz, Saeeda Bai, Tasneem, Bibbo - and an equal number of other characters who played pivotal roles: Jawaharlal Nehru, S.S. Sharma, L.N. Agarwal, Rasheed, Baba, Sunil, Haresh, Malati, Kalpana, and Kabir among others.

I found the book absolutely fascinating and very well written, and am genuinely sad to be done with it. The ending left a bit to be desired though, as it seemed that all the loose ends were neatly tied up within a few short pages. And the last page was a disappointment to me, as it seemed anti-climactic and irrelevant. But these minor flaws did not detract from the other 1450 (!) pages that kept me continually wondering what would happen next.

Surprisingly, other than the physical pain from holding such a heavy book for long periods of time, the actual length of the book didn't ever feel overdone, or excessively wordy. Every passage had it's place, and I can't think of a single section that seemed unnecessary.

After hearing such profuse praise for the book, I think I understand what all the affection and fondness is about and why it has such deep meaning for some people, and to the extent that I can empathize with a culture that I am pretty familiar with but is not my own, I feel it now too. It's definitely one of the best novels I've ever read.

Questioning Team Loyalty

As I often do, I started writing this from Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, care of the free wireless internet service available throughout the airport. I arrived at 7 for a flight at 8, forgetting that in addition to the increased traffic due to the holiday, Phoenix also hosted the Fiesta Bowl over the weekend and the city was overrun with football fans, many of whom waited until this morning to return home. When I walked into the airport, I was greeted by the longest check-in line I've ever seen, and immediately I was sure I wouldn't make it out of there for a few hours at best. Surprisingly, however, the line moved very quickly and I actually made it to my gate with 20 minutes to spare.

After watching the herds of Idaho and Texas fans file through the security checkpoint line, I was again reminded that what boggles my mind is the impression I get that so many people believe that vocal and visible allegiance to an athletic team is some sort of defining personality trait of which a person should be proud. To my mind, pledging allegiance to a sports franchise is the ultimate in sheep mentality, in effect no different from religious fundamentalists who kill in the name of their prophet or god. Yeah, I realize that's a harsh comparison, but I'll let it stand just to irritate certain people (Rich? Bharath?).

The whole idea of feeling loyalty to a team is just foreign to me. What does it actually mean? I could understand if the actual players and coaches stayed with the team during their entire careers; but only in very rare circumstances do athletes choose to do that these days. The people change and the strategies change over time. How can someone say they've been a fan of a particular team all of their lives? What do they feel allegiance to, the mascot? The colors? Some people meakly give answers like "the tradition", "the aura", etc., intangibles that they themselves don't even really understand. Instead of finding players they like and supporting them regardless of the team they happen to be on, serious sports fans actually abhor such logic, instead valuing being loyal to the abstract "team", especially when said team is doing poorly!

My other beefs with sports fans will await a later posting. For now, please, crazed sports fans, please someone present a rational explanation of why being loyal to a team is defensible and logical, because I just don't get it.

New Year's Resolutions

How appropriate that I came across this passage on page 1240 of A Suitable Boy today (234 pages left, baby!):

"1952: The fresh and brilliant digits impressed themselves upon Pran's eye as he opened the morning newspaper. All the past grew veiled by the first of January, and all the future glistened ahead of him, emerging mysteriously from its grubby chrysalis. He thought about ... the mixed gifts of the previous year. And he wondered [what] the coming year would bring him."

For the past few years I've sat down and written out New Year's Resolutions; admittedly, most have gone unfulfilled for one reason or another, but I still indulge in making an annual list, inspired by a sense of a new beginning, along the lines of the passage above.

This year is no different; I've been thinking about what my most important resolutions should be for a few weeks now. Frustratingly, they haven't changed much from previous years, but this time I've decided to focus on a small number of really important ones instead of a long list of desires. That way I feel that I have a better chance of actually making progress toward finally reaching them.

So in order of importance, here are my four resolutions for 2007:

1) Get in and stay in shape. I'm thin, so lots of people assume I'm physically fit, but the truth is five years of cubicle life have atrophied my body to a pathetic state. I've got terrible endurance for any type of physical activity and my overall strength remains pretty poor. I get aches in different parts of my body now that never concerned me 10 years ago. Last summer I worked out for a few months, but then a trip to South Korea derailed my progress. Similarly, I worked out for about two months recently but then the trip to Nicaragua again brought an end to the program. The problem for me is that I just genuinely dislike being in the gym, lifting weights, running, etc. But this year I found that with an MP3 player I can at least escape from the soulless pop radio that blares into every gym, and motivate myself with some aggressive metal instead. So this year I vow to start and maintain an exercise program that includes eating better.

2) Learn Farsi. Because it's just downright embarassing now. After six years with Ladan, my knowledge of Farsi has not progressed beyond the very basics. I've started and stopped learning from a number of books. I've heard the Rosetta Stone series of language learning tools are really good, so somehow I'm going to acquire one soon. Additional motivation comes from the fact that Ladan's parents arrive in three weeks for a two-and-a-half-month visit, and even though their English is almost sufficient, I really want to be able to converse with them more fluidly.

3) Make a solid move toward bettering my career and life plans. I've been bitching about my job and career for years now, and finally this year it looks like I've got a game plan. Ladan and I are tentatively planning to move back to DC (not the DC metro area - but rather DC itself) over the summer, and also start grad school programs part-time while we work. During my last visit I checked out GW, Georgetown, JHU and American University, looking into their International Relations (IR) programs. It finally dawned on me that all three of my concerns - feeling resistant to further technical or engineering coursework, wanting to "join the fight" and start working for or against issues that matter to me, and the desperate need to leave the defense industry altogether - would be addressed by an international relations program. Why not make a career out of an area of interest that I feel passionately about and actively read about in my free time? More on this in a few days.

4) Become a better flight sim pilot. Yeah, really. It sounds silly, but it's true. I've been playing flight simulators for what, 18 years now? Damn ... and I still just suck. For the past five or six years I've put minimal time into flight sims, instead shifting the vast majority of my gaming time to shooters and RPGs. But my inexcusably poor virtual combat piloting skills are starting to bother me. I need to begin a serious program of study and practice in my two favorite sims - Lock On and IL-2 - and gain enough proficiency to feel confident in my ability to finally join the world of online flight simming. Common sense dictates that flying and fighting against other people ought to be the best sim experience, and it's about damn time that I man up and just do it. I've put a lot of money into building computers and buying peripherals that are intended primarily for flight sims; I need to start getting a return on those investments.

So those are my resolutions for this new year. Sure, I've got lots of other smaller goals, but these four are my most important ones. Check back in exactly a year and prepare to be blown away by the fit, Farsi-speaking and IR-studying Maverick I've become.