It would have been better if I could hear more clearly

This Memorial Day weekend, I went to SFO. I live in Boston so it was a very long flight. Now we all know the bad things about a long flight; strange smells, feeling hungry when there is no food around, need to pee when you have a window seat and both the aisle and centre seat guys are sleeping. My worst experience was when I had the centre seat on a flight from Paris to Dallas and both window and aisle seat guys were sleeping and snoring into my ears. I swear I wanted to die that day (or night, my time zones were screwed up).

Anyway, this weekend none of these terrible things happened to me. On my flight, 31A and 31B was occupied by an unkempt young man and very pretty girl in red sweatshirt. As soon as we boarded the flight, they started talking. I could hear only the sweatshirt talk, but not clearly enough to make sense of what they were talking about. As irritating as it was, it reminded me of my days of college in India.

I studied at a place about 2 hour away from home and used to come home every weekend. We used to travel by bus and while most of my friends dozed off, I and gags would spend almost entire time talking. We weren’t loud or animated, just incessant. We never thought we were disturbing anyone, until one day a passenger decided it was enough. He waited till gags was off the bus and round me up telling me how stupid we and our debates were and how we knew nothing about life. Never the one with quick comebacks, I just let him lecture me. It was humiliating. Although it didn’t fix me for too long, I always looked around in the bus for him before I took my seat.

Watching unkempt and sweatshirt talk continuously brought back memories of my days and as irritated as I was, I was jealous that she was traveling with a good friend, while I almost always travel alone these days. When we landed, I took another look at them and I heard unkempt say to sweatshirt, “It was nice meeting you”.

What?? They had just met in the plane!

As I stepped out of the plane, unkempt caught up with one of his friends who was also in the same plane. Friend asked him, “Dude who was that girl. We could hear her all the way.” Unkempt said, “I don’t know man, she is gone so its not like I am going to get to fuck her. Why did I have to listen to her!”

While I walked away, I wanted to tell unkempt that while he was listening hoping to get laid, women rarely pour their hearts out to men we wish would see us naked. From where I stand, sweatshirt had it all planned out.

It aint no MacBook

but it is a salmon pink Dell and it is so pretty I want to wear it around my neck and take it to bed with me. This is my first personal laptop ever. I never thought I would need my own laptop because I have always got it from work and who needs 2 laptops (I know some people own even more than 2, but I think they are just pretentious assholes adding to the global electronic waste and we will pretend they don’t exist for today because I am happy and in love). I work in IT so giving us a laptop is like providing a pen to an accountant (or may be its calculators, I don’t know. My image of accountants is a bunch of balding men with big notebooks and pens). So now that I am going to leave my company, my employers would want their laptop back. Then this old, slow and perpetually infected laptop would be given to some rookie who would curse the living hell out of me for not leaving a week sooner or later, so he had a chance at a brand new laptop. Anyway, today I can’t worry about anyone.

For me this old man of a laptop would now be replaced by this suave young man who knows how to wear pink. Now if we can just get the initial few days of awkwardness out of our way and get down and dirty, we can start planning our long future together. 

Real life is ending

No I am not dying. Although let’s face it, even with all the joys of life, death can be infinitely more fascinating to write about, but that is a topic for another day. I am reading “Rubai’yat of Omar Khayyam”, and he blows the shit about life, death, heaven, and hell wide open. And he does it while he is drunk. He is my hero, at least for now, but I digress.

My real life is ending. This is the life with job, money, self respect, distance from parents and expensive stuff. And most importantly the satisfaction that your well-married cousins and increasingly anxious parents think that even though you are single, you do have your shit together.

But that is about to change. I am on my way to unemployment, in about 2 months, if I hold my head high and resist the temptation to beg for forgiveness from the powers that are my managers. In two months, I would be free. Free from deadlines, late night work calls, initiatives (how I hate that word) and over-worked, complaining co-workers (they will have one less complaining co-worker as well, so win-win!). I have kept this job for 9 years and I have liked it for about 2 and been good at it for about 6. Those initial 2 years, I was a naïve, stupid girl with a crush on my colleague and all I wanted to do was to impress him. Yes, impress him with work –talk about bad opening moves. What did I think he was going to say, I want to kiss the hands that wrote that piece of code? Although if he had; I would have been messed up at a whole new level. Anyhow, I never dated that guy but I got really good at my job and that initial push helped me ride along for the next few years. But last three years, I have just been waiting for things to get bad enough to quit. And now things just did get bad enough.

Anyway, I suspect that I would get some time on my hands since the job that occupies me for over 15 hours everyday is about to go away, I can finally create a sustainable blog – so here it is. Real life is ending and the dream life begins… in a few months.

(… if I chicken out and go back to my job, you would hear about that as well. So in my first post, I have admitted to being naïve, stupid, coward, incompetent and complaining.

At the least, I am honest.)