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!!