Monday, November 28, 2005

That's just the way it is... Things'll never be the same

Isn’t it just the irony of life that when I had no wish to stop blogging, when I had so many exciting things coming up like Christmas, trip home, weddings, babies, bachelorette parties, etc. to blog about circumstances forced me to take a break…

Update: Everyone scared me slightly about how much detail I put up so I have taken down most of the bitching. Here is a gist for anyone who missed out ;)

My boss was fired. Him getting fired set off a crazy chain of events… No one did any work for two weeks… everyone just stared blankly at their monitors, most people took 2 hour lunches everyday and at least thrice a week there was alcohol involved at these sessions, people fucked off whenever they felt like it and took it in turns to call in sick, people picked up fights with people they believed had been involved in getting him fired, people threatened to quit, people did quit, and of course every Friday night was a major regroup and re-strategise campaign at the pub …

I had a little work drama of my own in all this… but now that has been sorted too and the person I was really pissed off at got exactly what he deserved!

So now we’re trying to pick up the pieces and move on from everything that happened in the last three weeks. People will be missed, like my ex-boss and a couple of other friends who also left… I think that we all had a really good time in the last two years and now the party is really over! Well, nothing lasts forever…

Also on that note, my friend from Madras who came to Australia the same time I did and who shared my first apartment with me and S and who washed and ironed his own clothes and cooked his own meals for the first time ever at the same time as me, is returning to Madras for good in a couple of days. I will miss him… his turn of phrase is really quite like no one else’s… we could publish a book on all the funny things he has said in the crudest manner possible… The three of us lived together for 1.5 years and it seems like such a hazy dream now… None of us had lived away from home before, we were all spoiled rotten with never having done chores before, we missed our friends (and family) terribly and tried to recreate our alcoholic party Madras lifestyle in Melbourne and realised it wasn’t quite the same…

But we had our fun and games and wild nights on the town and quiet, reflective nights in. We also had our share of fighting and hating each other, there were car troubles and university troubles and financial difficulties and struggling to make ends meet. Everything was so new and strange… like smoking in our apartment, whenever we wanted, wherever we wanted (I’m so glad we stopped that dirty habit)… That whole first experience of living away from home is really quite something and its impossible not to form this incredible bond with the people you shared it with. And its also impossible not to pick up some embarrassing stories about each other along the way… I’ll hold my tongue though, don’t want embarrassing stories about me to get out!! So anyway, we hung out this weekend one last time in Australia and it was good. The cool thing is he’ll be there in Madras when we visit and he’ll be as jobless as us so we have someone to hang out with during the day like we used to…

I’ll come around and visit everyone real soon, ok? Must get back to work now!

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

How much is that doggie in the window? I do hope that doggie’s for sale…

Yay… I have been tagged at just the right time when I wasn’t sure what I felt like writing about. So here goes…

Seven Things I Plan To Do:
  1. Skydive
  2. Learn how to play guitar
  3. Get fit
  4. Tour Europe
  5. Get a dog
  6. Buy a convertible
  7. Design my own house

Seven Things I Can Do:
  1. Sing sing sing
  2. Survive quite happily on a diet of rice and curds and fried fish/chicken/mince/prawns/potato
  3. Sleep for 12 hours at a stretch
  4. Drink like a fish
  5. Shine academically
  6. Smoke like a hippie
  7. Make people laugh

Seven Things I Can't Do:
  1. Eat anything that has long slices of onion in it (or even any other kind of vegetable)
  2. Get out of bed without snoozing
  3. Drink gin
  4. Play particularly well at any sport
  5. Spend another Christmas without my family
  6. Spend my life without a furry four-legged companion of the canine variety
  7. Stop eating chocolate

Seven Things I Say Most Often:
  1. Fuckin’ hell
  2. Chooth (Hindi)
  3. Ey Watha (Tamil! I have no idea how the second word is spelt)
  4. As if
  5. Whatever
  6. Yeah right
  7. That only

I’m not tagging anyone but everyone is free to do it if they want… it’s a lot harder than it seems!

So then I analysed my things I plan to do list to see if I was close to any of them and I believe I am to some of them.

Skydive – just waiting for the right time or a trip to New Zealand

Learn how to play guitar – I can play notes E and F now. A friend gave me his old guitar which was very kind of him and he would’ve taught me more if everyone else present didn’t prefer him playing the guitar to me learning it. But I shall persevere…

Get fit – Been at the gym for almost two months now. Rather scared to check my weight and measure my waist because what if there hasn’t been any improvement?! Still I do feel slightly better so here’s hoping…

Tour Europe – Ideally, this will happen next year or the year after. But its just so expensive and I can see my entire life savings being blown away on the one trip to Europe. But I think it will be worth it… and its time I stopped spending every holiday of mine in India.

Get a dog – This one kills me the most. Right now I don’t have the house and backyard but more than that I keep wondering what the poor thing will do when I’m out of the house 50 hours a week! The dogs in Madras always had someone for company and when we returned from a holiday they’d let us know exactly how lonely they’d been by barking up a frenzy. Hey… that’s what my next post is going to be about… the story of all my darling dogs (and there were a few)

Buy a convertible – I really want to do this next year but there are many obstacles along the way like getting an Australian drivers licence (I’m quite certain I will fail the test – everyone does at least once) and of course, the big one – money! I could just buy any old car for less money but I think that since I don’t really need a car, it’d be fun to buy a cool car now at the age when I can do cool stuff and not want these things later in life when I am bogged down by shopping bags and car seats!

Design my own house – This seems the furthest away. In fact, I don’t think it’ll happen in this country in this lifetime (I’ll be lucky to even afford an average house off the block) unless I win the lottery… but since I don’t even play… I guess I can hope that I get a super high-paying job in India that will allow me to fulfil this plan…

So there you have it! Let's hope I make them all happen...

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Living life the easy way... And sippin’ on Bacardi Rum

Oh joy… summer is almost here. We’re on Daylight Savings Time and that always puts me in a holiday mood since the sun doesn’t set until 9 pm or thereabouts and as a result I always feel like I have some few more hours in a day and take things much easier. We have also had two gloriously hot 30 degree plus days this week and it was simply blissful… especially since the first one was Tuesday and a holiday for the Melbourne Cup of all things (public holiday so we can all sit back and watch the horse races is something else, but I’m not complaining… its our first public holiday since JUNE), and the second one was yesterday and I just couldn’t wake up in the morning so took a sickie… Have I ever mentioned that I love to sleep and once I’m asleep I really really hate waking up but falling asleep is a big big problem for me these days… Ah well, we can talk about my insomnia another time. Lets get back to talking about alcohol instead…

So with spirits we also have the whiskeys and the bourbons and it seems that as people get older they’re drinking more of these but this is one kind of spirit I just can’t stand… not that I haven’t drunk this also when really desperate but its not something I particularly enjoy. I remember that when I first came to Australia I drank a lot of Jim Beam because S and my housemate at the time preferred it and we were poor students so we couldn’t always choose what we drank so I just went along with it and drank it and the thing about it is that it doesn’t really get me happy high… it just gets me into that mode where I know I’ve drunk a lot but can’t really feel the fun effects of it… like when you smoke too much and reach a kind of zone… So anyway, one night in particular stands out when we the three of us drank Jim Beam the whole night and then S passed out and my housemate and I continued and suddenly it was 7:00 in the morning so I thought, “oh, what the hell, let me just go for my 9:00 am class now instead of missing it’. So I went… hahaha… what fun it all was. And it wasn’t my fault my stupid course had a class EVERY Saturday… did they not take into account that people like to get smashed on a Friday night!! But yeah, the whiskeys and the bourbons are so not my thing…

So is Tequila my thing? I think not… although I have always had shitloads of fun every time I went the Tequila route. But its not something I would be up for every weekend… its more a once every four months experience. At the last one, three of us slammed almost two bottles over a few hours and I yelled at everyone at the party and told them they better come to my birthday party the following weekend and on the way home I used up all my credit calling Rat and Sista T and apparently all I kept saying was “Yeah maaan, I’m coming next month maaan… yeah maan” and then just kept laughing hysterically of course. Good times good times… :)

So before we get to the grand finale of my favourite type of alcohol ever (and which you should’ve guessed by now if you know me even a little or if you have been following the alcohol posts closely ;)) lets talk about sweet tasting and some not so sweet tasting liquors and such. I’ve always been a Baileys on the rocks fan for just a quiet dinner and night in type thing and I’m very attached to Kahlua for sentimental you me and you reasons. So guess what… it is also possible to get extremely fucking high on this deadly combo particularly if you are slamming them both together… So one sunny AFTERNOON, four people slammed a bottle of Baileys and Kahlua and guess what me and my friend slammed next… we finished a whole disgusting bottle of Sambucha… oh my god, that stuff tastes GROSS… but we slammed it… and I was very very high, I kid you not. We also went clubbing that night after all this and I had a good time dancing for a while and then went stumbling to find a bathroom and instead I went into some employee area and literally stumbled down a few steps and twisted my ankle and just lay there in a heap for some unknown period of time. I really have no clue how anyone found me or helped me out of there… the next thing I know I’m in the lounge next to the ladies bathroom and there’s an ice pack around my ankle and all the ladies who came in kept asking me if I was alright and if I wanted anything… so I bummed a couple of cigarettes and lay back on the couch with my leg lifted and smoked away until S found me (and I don’t really know how he found me… I was rather out of it to realise that people would be wondering where I was)… That was such a fun night… even the whole ankle experience… at the end of it all on the way home, in extreme drunkenness I started crying for my Mommy and its so funny that I started crying for my Mommy because my Mommy is not the ‘oh you poor thing, how did it happen’ kind of Mommy… she’s more the ‘serves you right… this is what you get for going out at all hours and drinking and what not’ kind of Mommy.

So this of course brings us to the end… the best kind of alcohol ever… (drum roll, please)… RUM… sweet smelling, molasses fermented rum… rowdy, ass-kicking, rum… Ah rum, how I love it. I’m very glad that I got off the vodka in the early days and switched to rum… what a whole new world it was… I’m at a loss for words right now… I should probably be under the influence of some rum to write more eloquently about it … my favourites are Old Monk (I hate Old Cask for some reason) and Bacardi Lemon (affectionately called lime juice)… but I also like plain ol’ Bacardi Superior and Bacardi Oro and Reserva… I’ve had some lethal Jamaican Coruba rum and I think after Old Monk, my favourite Indian rum is good ol’ Kodais (I don’t even know how its spelt… I am referring to the Bangalore one)… But has anyone tried Bacardi 151… I think its 60% alcohol or something and I almost threw up slamming half a shot and couldn’t even drink it when it was mixed with coke.

But I’ve drunk rum at the oddest of times and the oddest of places and it has always delivered a good time… I’ve drunk rum with coke and orange juice and sprite and pineapple juice and I’ve even drunk it with fucking water whenever we’ve run out of coke at a slumber parties at my house… Old Monk & water is just fucking foul by the way… we’ve finished a whole bottle of Bacardi at 5 am as we watched the sun rise and the train glide into Londha station one hazy December morning… … we’ve drunk it in paper cups in backseats of cars with no ice and warm coke and we’ve sipped it in style sitting in beach house gazebos… we’ve mixed it in 500ml bottles of coke to quickly slam on the road on the way to a party (the ever present “ready mix”) and we’ve drunk it in Pina Coladas and Mai Tais… I’ve finished a quart of rum in my room one night by myself and sneaked down and stole some of my Dad’s to keep the buzz going one jobless night.

Under the influence, I have professed my love and undying friendship to many a rowdy rum compatriot… I have danced till the cows came home and sung till I couldn’t sing another note… I have pretended to be sober with family and how many times have I driven home in such a state… I have puked my guts out and laughed my ass off… I have cried like the world was ending and I have eaten like there was no tomorrow… I have yelled at anyone who would listen (including my boss) about my current depressing work situation (this actually happened last Friday in a marathon Bacardi session – I think I had at least 12 drinks in total) and I have karaoke-d like it was going out of style… all in all, I really do love that little drink called rum. Remember that Bacardi ad with all the people chilling and drinking in the tropical island type place and on a yacht and such and singing this song…

Be what you want to be
Taking things the way they come
Living life the easy way
And sippin’ on Bacardi Rum

I used to love that ad before I started drinking and I’d actually forgotten all about it until now. There may not have been yachts or a tropical islands but we have had some very good times sippin’ on all sorts of rum… May the good times roll on… Cheers!