Still flashing upon the inward eye

This is a really short post simply to kill time while I wait for my friend to come and pick me up. I am wistful and have a lot of time on my hands to be so. Thus I shall share my reasons for being so. I just came back from my "home" country. The point is that I no longer know where my home is. Here in America I am a non resident alien and in India...well I simply do not live there anymore. A friend was asking me today how I made it through my first year as an alien. I told him that you get used to living with yourself and by yourself. You get used to not having every meal everyday simply because you are too tired and don't want to cook for one lonely person. You also get used to being alone,not lonely just alone.

Home for me is across the ocean,miles away. Yet though this place is not home it is the only one I know right now. Here I have people who make this foreign land a home away from home. Sometimes I yearn for those smells of rolls and panipuri and the sound of those typical hindi gali and the buzz of a busy overpopulated city that made me so happy for 24 years. Yet now as I wait for the welcome call of my dear friend, I think that "this is my home now". I have made this myself. Its small disorganised and not opulent...but its mine! Hence its home now.

I am fed up of anonymity

Ok enough..I wanna be big and famous now. So any suggestions? how do I become famous and read widely? What do I blog about? My failure as a driver,my obvious reluctance as a cook? The new books i read? Maybe I should start a weekly review of books I read and recommend reading? maybe I should start a cooking recipe journal...people would probably read it more!! Hmmph!!

Artificial life..playing God..

Craig Venter has been said to play God by many. I wonder though..sometimes I feel like all scientists play God or at least try to during there miserable careers. Yes, miserable I say, because regardless of the holier-than-thou attitude scientists do not have a clue about the word "FUN".

Anyway..enough digressing. My sister seems thrilled that someone "created life". Strangely enough that doesn't seem very thrilling to me at all. I was unhappy but honour bound to burst her bubble. Biologists have indeed come a really long way. We can make DNA, replicate it, transcribe the RNA and make proteins from it. Its just that I guess no lab tried to put it together before. I mean Venter made DNA and put it into an organism generating a completely new one. Which is exciting..considering you can make it produce whatever you like. But I guess making a stable integration system will take a long time. But it does make you wonder whether you can make organisms with literally no faults, no mutational hotspots,no introns, very efficient DNA polymerases and minimal proteins working efficiently. There are in fact a myriad of in vitro systems that have been perfected that would sound like myths. Probable targets for drugs in many previously unconquered diseases are already present and viable. Its just that clinical trials take so long. So imagine having an organism that can virtually make your drug for you. custom made tailored science. First hand. Fascinating.

Anyway, I recommend reading Dr. Venter's autobiography and the paper where he annotates the design and synthesis of artificial DNA, the longest ever made.

You know you're a nerd when....

You name your pillow alderaan.

You name your orkut profile Asajj Ventress.

You buy a dish full of neurons.

You think mushrooms are Fun-Guy...!!! Get it?

You contemplate taking research samples from the mold in your coffee-maker.

Everything you do has to have a research paper linked to it.

You diagnose people with crooked fingers as having a dominant negative mutation.

You don't get half as excited as the rest of the world about artificial life! Dood,,seriously,,science is jading us!

Of red eyes,tears and empty pages..

So spring semester has begun,so has a new year. The pomp, fanfare and trumpet roll is sadly lacking in my celebrations of this year's arrival.

Firstly an old friend of mine suddenly managed to offload her entire life and its associated problems on me..

Secondly my personal life has recently start to suck majorly, like think humongously.

Thirdly my new lab is nice but the worms i'm working with are probably giving me indigestion and my eyes will probably die on me very soon because of the glare of the stoopid microscope.

Also my blog. Sadly lacking new entries and such. My poetic inspirations, all story ideas have emerged,flowered and withered and died. In this entire life cycle not one event has been chronicled for posterity. So the epitaph of all my creative lives is a lonely white empty page. Every day I yearn to write or at least put down in words the sorry life of mine that is rumored to be stranger than fiction. but every day I walk home alone,look up at the sky and know that another day will pass in my life unwritten,unremembered,undone. Thus my present lingers and hopes that it will be immortalised in ink. Yet as the pages of my book turn...they remain empty. The innumerable drops in my ocean of work leaves no beach for my poetry to sunbathe in.

Here's to the lugubrious secretions of my lachrymal glands, the bloodshot hue of my optic nerves and the blank pages of my hectic life...CHEERS!!

My Days of Daze.

Here lies the carcass of my life picked clean by the vultures of experience.

Days of Trepidation.

Following my advent in this new kingdom I call home ithink that ilife has too much of i-nformation in it. So iday began with i feeling very [censored] off. (Too much of the iAge). Something did not seem right. Sometimes in life you get this sour taste in your mouth when you wake up..and you can almost feel the bitterness of the day's medicines branding the mucous membranes of your delicate existence. That was how I felt on this particular day. Its one of those days when all you want to do is stay in bed and let the world Chaos around you. But there were lectures to attend and duties were calling very loudly and the service providers for Life very conveniently forgot to add answering machines for such situations.

Therefore I dragged myself out of bed and pulling my bedroom door open careened into the adjoining bathroom glad to have beaten my roomie to it. I shall tell you about my roomie very soon. For the time let it suffice to say that there was no, nay, negative love lost between us. So I go into the bathroom and realise its that Monday. The deeply darkly blue one. The one where the procrastinating weekend before you did not clean it out. Hence hurried cleaning episode of the bathroom ensued. Except the new bowl cleaner would not work. The darn thing was stuck. Bless its heart. It was again orchestrating the sweet symphony that was to sing my ballad of destruction. I showered quickly or planned to shower quickly. Like in a jiffy. except my definition of jiffy stretched a little-like by about an hour.

I came out of the shower 15 minutes late already and frantically looked around for my brush and my clothes. Again I had lazed around all weekend wallowing in self pity hence no laundry-no clean clothes. Have you ever worn stale clothes over freshly bathed and scented body? Its an experience to soothe the nerves and calm the mind. (if you haven't got the sarcasm yet you're zoned out or just simply do not have brains. Please desist from reading further .)

So I realised that today's lecture was by this really old gentleman,on the merits of energy production in our bodies,mitochondria to be exact. Since most of the energy producing machines in my body seemed to be defective I had a personal grudge against this lecture. Also the fact that the professor tended to trail off,trip over wires every two minutes, fell over edges of the stage twice and turned off the projector by hitting the wrong button; probably had a lot to do with my apparent dislike. (By the bye he trailed off whenever I started writing a sentence...it was like a brownian ratchet voiceover.)

Therefore I decided to further my cause in this country by legalising my presence. In plain english I was going to get a number issued by the mighty horses of this kingdom. So I made my way to the international student's office.

Mishap one: I left my apartment and halfway down realised I had forgotten to bring the garbage out. My apartment was going to stink to the skies when I got back. I walked out through the double doors straight into a sleet of icy needles of rain. No umbrella and all documents in non-waterproof bag. I was halfway to exercising my lachrymal glands rigorously.

Mishap two: Upon reaching the office drenched and feeling like my cats when they are forced to have a bath, I discover that I am one hour early. Spend the rest two hours listening to other similarly depressed and godforsaken graduates trying to figure out horse language.

Then I was called. The advisor gave me the letter I needed and then told me to lie low for awhile. I was already late in applying for this number that was going to save ma life,in fact it was going to be my life. Then she advised me not to go alone to the social blah blah office. It was far she said and lots of hispanics on the way. Don't go alone, she admonished. I nodded gratefully and hoping my day had changed for the better left to go back to my lab.

Mishap three: Do not know what possessed me then. But my spirit guide must have felt disappointed. the day was not being malicious enough. Therefore it imbued me with a sense of wrong confidence. I decided to go to the social blah blah office by myself. Ha! I'm a big girl were my brave thoughts. So I set out to take a bus from the train station. I reached there,it was still raining. I waited for the bus. It took forever. I waited, and waited and waited and.......

I debated taking a taxi, thought about the zillions of terrible consequences all of which ended in me being dead, and rejected it.

Finally the bus arrived. I got on Smartly and asked the driver the fare. He was gracious and told me pertly. Next I couldn't for the life of me figure out where or how to pay the fare. It was ifare again. The electronic ghosts just do not stop haunting me. The imachine was ready to take the ifare. Only i couldn't count out the necessary ichange. So embarassed the driver helped i out. Red in the face from iexertion i sat down. The fear and trepidation in my heart as I traversed those lonely miles,alone in a strange kingdom filled with sea monsters and bogeymen , I cannot bring myself to write. It fairly caused my breakfast to regurgitate. Thank god I hadn't had any.

Mishap four: I reached fine. Got the next letter from those horses fine too. I exited the horse stable and headed to the bus stop. I sat there alone for around ten minutes. Strange people walked in and out of those streets all staring at me as if I were an alien metamorphosed into human shape. I started to hyperventilate. I picked out a helpful looking homo sapien and asked him about the whereabouts of the next spaceship..err...bus. He looked at me funny and said in 45 minutes. Apparently I'd missed the previous one by seconds. I could almost hear the elements singing the same ballad of destruction in glee. I started walking down that deserted road. I hoped I would not meet anyone. I pulled my hood down and broke all records of walkathlons. I was close to running. Then I saw a lady with a black hat and a dog on a leash. The dog looked mean and ready to lick bones clean. I crossed the road surreptitiously to avoid her and ran into a street game of basketball being played by six feet tall giants. Mumbling my apologies I fled shaking and miserable. Desperate to get home. Unfortunately for my custom made song I made it back to the college bus stop unharmed. Tired and panting but whole. I thanked my stars and made my way to the bus I saw standing there.... Only for it to leave the instant I started towards it. I made no attempt at catching it. The Gods had conspired. Their Will be done. Thoroughly defeated by Fate, Weather, Horses and Public transport I slumped on a tree stump and waited for the next bus. And no I did not have a crow ablate on me.

I came home to contemplate a sorry Day and to Rage against the elements. I also lay down to give my aching legs a rest from the 45 minute near race with fear that I had indulged in. It seemed pointless now. Strange how in the brightness of your familiar room the fear seemes to fade. But I knew it was real. I knew it was lurking around waiting to leap onto my shoulder and grasp hold of my life again. I turned off my faculties and mindlessly tuned in to the iWorld. My iSalvation.

Days of Drop:

My scream

Why am I here,

In the middle of nowhere,

Shaking in fear-

Life is so unfair.

The empty rooms

echo in silence,

like haunted tombs-

In deathly cadence.

The tears flow unbidden,uncalled

Wretched I lay frozen and appalled

at my mind crowded in anarchy

Filled to the brim with lethargy.

So I sit alone and stare

Out of windows into dirty nights-

That unfold in tumultous despair.

Take me away, take me away,

From this place to the one I care.

Lift me away,lift me away,

From this hell to the clouds I pray.

And the silence screams into the darkness

Swallow me,Oh swallow me-ee!!

And the heart yearns into the stillness,

Embrace me,Oh embrace me-e!!

The fire burns down to ashes

The sun hides behind the stars.

The vacuum upon her closes,

Her screams ring from afar.