Twenty-Five Things

So, I got sucked into this random game on facebook, where each person writes 25 random facts about their life, tags 25 people, who then write 25 facts about their life and tag another 25 people, and so on. It's turned out to be more fun than I had imagined (especially the part about discovering that one of your professors used to be in a band called "fretful bourgeoisie" :D)

Since I spent that much time writing this, I thought it deserved a space on my blog as well. Here we go:

1)I just finished my last fellowship essay. It was about the meaning of happiness, and I had 3000 characters, including spaces, to write it in. I managed to use every one of those characters; the essay is exactly 3000 characters! In a geeky way, that makes me happy.

2) I think SMSes have taught me a lot about editing. I almost always type messages longer than 160 characters, then read them several times trying to bring it down. And I get weirdly happy when i manage to bring it down to the exact character limit (paisa vasool). Yes, still geeky.

3) i always find my dog cute, but i find her especially cute at moments like what happened a few minutes ago: she wanted to bark at the courier company guy who was here to deliver something, but she was too lazy to get out of bed. So she continued to remain snuggled up under her rug (she manages to do so in a way that not even an inch of her body shows) and continued barking. You could hear disembodied barking, and if you looked carefully, you could tell that the rug was moving a little, but you could not see the dog. I laughed for a long time afterward.

4) I have had 3-4 hour long conversations on the phone. Better yet, I have had such conversations with Saurabh and Sachin, whom most people don't consider big talkers.

5) For most of my growing up years, I wanted to be a lawyer-- by the time I was in eighth I had even picked the law school I wanted to study at! I dropped that dream suddenly in tenth grade, I don't remember why, but I'm glad I came to my senses.

6) I got my first thesaurus when i was seven, long before i knew what a thesaurus was. I first used my thesaurus in fourth grade, when i decided that the peacock in a certain essay of mine wasn't just happy but rhapsodic. And no, i didn't know what rhapsodic meant. I just liked the way it sounds (I still like the way that particular word sounds).

7) When I was six, I used to say that I wanted to be a teacher because, that way, my kids would get into school easily (I was completely scarred by how difficult it was for my brother and me to get admission to school since we had moved to Delhi in the middle of the school year).

8) I think in at least three languages. I also write my diary in all 3 of them.

9) I have had fifteen surgeries in 16 years.

10) I still remember the dream I had the first time i was under anesthesia. I dreamed i was being chased by a bull because i was wearing red... and I can still picture the entire dream.

11) As I was slipping into anesthesia when I had my third corneal transplant, weeks after finishing Study Abroad in Argentina, the doctor asked me to count to 20. I got to around 12, then murmured, "this is really boring! Can I count in Spanish?". I was already too drugged for him to protest so he agreed, and I remember feeling really happy to be counting trece, catorce, quince...

12) The combination of pink and green nauseates me-- literally makes me feel ill. I believe there was a reason nature made green-pink blindness the most common form of color blindness.

13) I have mixed concrete and loved doing it. And I think my proudest moment was watching a family cook on an ecological stove I had constructed.

14) I have seen an opera at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires because Chris bought me tickets for my birthday. We followed so little of it that, 30 minutes into the opera, he nudged me and exclaimed "Did you realize it's in English?!" We left in the intermission thinking the opera was over, only to discover the next day from another friend that we missed the second (and, she claims, much better) act.

15) I have ice-skated in an open air rink in -40 degree weather in Mongolia (let's not get into the consequences here, shall we?).

16) I spent my early childhood in the Himalayas and, even today, I think I belong there more than anywhere else. I plan to move back sooner or later.

17) Speaking of which, I don't think any river is anywhere near as beautiful as the Beas. I may be a wee bit biased because I lived literally on the bank of the Beas for a year, but I consider this an objective truth as well. Of course, the Beas also a pretty violent river, and it completely swallowed up my childhood home... the land on which i have the fondest memories is now a riverbed.

18) Throughout 11th and 12th grade, I used to get up at 4:30 AM every morning, so that I could have plenty of me-time before my school bus came at 6:45.

19) When I was three or four, my brother and I ran home from school very excited about an unexpected holiday. When our parents asked us why, we happily told them that our teacher had been murdered (she was found in the school's water tank). If that makes me sound like a horrible person, consider that the teachers at this school rubbed bichhu-buti (posion ivy) on our legs as punishment for not doing HW and forced us four year olds to use the forest as a toilet even though there were toilets in the school.

20) When I was five, I studied in a missionary school that I absolutely loved, even though we could be punished if we spoke in Hindi, and even though our morning assembly started at 9:23 AM (or, for some reason, that's the figure stuck in my mind). In 1st grade, we had to pick a "hobby class" in school, and I chose stamp collection.

21) In 11th and 12 grade I managed to get my 2 closest guy friends to MAKE birthday cards for me. I think I embarrassed the hell out of them, but those are still the most beautiful cards I have ever seen.

22) I consider myself the luckiest person in the world in terms of having good friends and good teachers. I know, I know, many people think they are the luckiest in that regard. But I really am.

23) I once convinced my grandmother I am lesbian in order to get her to STOP bothering me about getting married. Unfortunately, it only worked for about 6 months.

24) I have promised 8 people that I will write to them this weekend, and 3 more that I will call them this weekend. I better get started.

25) When i started this, I had nothing to write; now I feel like there's so much else that I could have written but I've already reached 25! In many ways, that's the story of my life.