I'm going through the most physically tortorous days of my life yet. Its really frustrating when the few feet from the living room to the kitchen is a 'journey'. This really is taking longer than I thought it would. Its gonna be a week tomorrow.

Like Mickey said, we take such simple things as walking for granted, and when we cant do that, we realise how much we need it. Hats off to people who have to use crutches all their lives. I swear its no easy job.

People have been really helpful..
Roomies get my food to me... respond to my shout for anything from upstairs, nunu, like always, has been there, and the isye 'junta' has been helpful too... i dont go to meetings, meetings come to me ;)

Haven't yet told my parents about it, just to avoid unnecessary tension, will probably tell them once I'm done with this, which, hopefully will be soon enough.

Damn!

The alarm(s)..

Me and Nimbo are roomies. We sleep at weird hours and wake up at weirder hours. And these weird and weirder hours are different for us both.

Me and Nimbo do all sorts of things online to kill time. We're at Georgia Tech you know... surely we cant sleep at 11. A few hours into the night, we realised we haven't done any studies and we have an early class or an assignment due or something, so we promise ourselves (or each other) to wake up early, like in 4hrs.

So our plan... we set 3 alarms... one is my cell, which these days plays the title song of Rang de basanti to try n wake us up, the other is a cute lil stop-watch thingie that I got from the career fair. It's pretty slick, you can store upto 3 alarm times in it. So we set them 5 mins apart. Like Nimbo says.... its like a mosquito... not loud enough to wake you up, but irritating enough to make you want to shut it. Now the third alarm is the one that Nimbo got from India. It has that standard alarm tone to it. But its the stupidest clock you can find. The button to turn it off is on its top, so all you need to do is take a wild blow.

Anyways... so 4 hrs after we decide to sleep... my cell goes off... I've become to efficient, I can shut it before Daler Mehndi utters a word. Then the mosquito goes off. Now its not loud enough to make it worth the 3 foot trip, so we let it ring for the one minute before it shuts down. Maybe one the third time, one of us finally shuts it. Now the last one, the Indian alarm, its real loud. The moment it goes off, its a race to who gets there and gets to unload the irritation on the poor lil thing with a good thud.

All alarms done, a sleepy thought occurs that maybe it is time to wake up. But then, old habits die hard, we always fish for the "5 more minutes".

Its usually me who finally wakes up 3hrs later. I ask him if he has a morning class (the guy with the morning class gets the priority to the bathroom), he utters a sleepy no, just so I'd go and he could sneak in another 45min of sleep.

When I finally wake him up after my shower, he looks at the Indian alarm and goes... FUCK!!!

Thats how the day starts at 580, McAfee.

I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.
I'm not a bad person.


Just tryin to rub it in..

yaaaaaaaaar is KK ne phir senti kar diya..

The song is Yaaron...

Going nowhere..

Okay.. so its the time of confessions again. I wonder why its hard for me to accept it when things are going wrong.

Hmm, so studies aren't going that well. I've screwed up a couple of tests which puts my GPA in a precarious position, one more slip and I may not recover. I don't think the tests here really test the knowledge about the subject, all they test is whether you know how to tackle exactly THE problems. But anyways, thats a different thing altogether. Let me just deal with what I'm getting right now, which is more than a handful. Taking Economics for this semester has been a mistake, I would've been better off with a special problem.

All my time management techniques that I used to have back in India seem to have disappeared. I seem to be working all the time without getting any work done. Where's the productivity dude??? Sometimes I feel like an admission mistake here at Tech, my confidence gets stripped* when things get desperate, and its not even like I'm having the kind of fun I'd like to have, there's hardly any fooling around. My chilling out time needs to be less on orkut and more at the gym. A movie with nunu is better than 10 episodes of friends.

* -> There are these moments in class when Alexopolous says "If you don't know this, you shouldn't be at Georgia Tech, you should be at Georgia state or something." And there are always more than a few of us staring at each other with helplessness, basically just feeling like shit.

The projects seem to be going nowhere... the data we've been given for the warehousing project is so messed up. It feels more like a comp sci project now. The DO project just won't take off... maybe cos we have no deadlines for it?? I'm afraid we're taking it way to easy.

I think Sandeep (tech waala) puts things into great perspective. He breaks down complex things to simple reasonings. I think he's gotten the closest to putting the finger on where we're going wrong. Its not that we're not doing enough. We're just not doing the right things.

I want to make better use of classes. Finally I'm able to follow some probability classes, cos I've managed to clear some things out. Warehousing is chill.. not a lot is covered in the time. I've stopped attending economics classes, he talks rubbish, he's not audible, and he puts half the class to sleep. This is a self study subject (a mistake in the first place). Its the DO class that I need to start making sense of real soon. Its getting seriously out of hand now. Mainly cos I haven't been handling the assignments the way they're meant to be. Time...

I think its time to go back to schedules. This feels like the time in the 1st year of Inter (only a million times intense) when I felt like shit when the results were out. And then sap had really got me going on the improvements thingie... I guess that was the first time in my life that I had actually started studying. Yeah, this feels like it... deep in shit, need somethin to get you back up (put your ass on fire).

This post feels good.. I've already had a couple of remedial measures built up in my head after puking all this out here.

Closing note: Why do so many profs keep using the phrase "Welcome to tech"?? I know wat its like now, so stop sayin it, and stop makin yourselves sound like monsters waitin to eat up bees.

Deeeeeeeeeep Lyrics...

Yahaan sab kuch hai maa phir bhi
lage bin tere mujhko akela..

Es absurdo saber como hago tu voluntad
Y te vuelves amor luz en la oscuridad
Tu no lo ves y esta escrito en tu piel
Yo lo escucho lo siento lo se.

Sonries y se que tu puedes oirme
Que tu piensas en mi
Y yo puedo sentirte
Estas entre el cuerpo y el alma
Callada y total

If getting raped is inevitable, you might as well enjoy it.. :)

Who would've thought...

Perhaps Love...

Perhaps love is like a resting place
A shelter from the storm
It exists to give you comfort
It is there to keep you warm
And in those times of trouble
When you are most alone
The memory of love will bring you home

Perhaps love is like a window
Perhaps an open door
It invites you to come closer
It wants to show you more
And even if you lose yourself
And don`t know what to do
The memory of love will see you through

Oh, love to some is like a cloud
To some as strong as steel
For some a way of living
For some a way to feel

And some say love is holding on
And some say letting go
And some say love is everything
And some say they don`t know

Perhaps love is like the ocean
Full of conflict, full of pain
Like a fire when it`s cold outside
Or thunder when it rains
If I should live forever
And all my dreams come true
My memories of love will be of you

--John Denver

Midtown from Piedmont park

Courtesy: flickratlanta.blogspot.com

Yes nunu, it is a beautiful place.. :)

Guilt...

Its the worst feeling one can ever have.

and I'm so full of it, in ways hard to imagine.. but I have to look the other way.

:)

Intimidated..

Thus spake Prof. Chris Alexopolous:

"This homework is going to be quite taxing, it is going to be very hard. But I had 3 intentions in my mind before giving you this:

The first intention is to scare you.
The second intention is to get you hooligans off the road. I'm sure I will not see any of you working out beside me at the gym from tomorrow.
And the third intention is to shake off your rustiness and prepare you for the things to come."

"You want to treat these two chapters like they were your girlfriend. Take it to bed, embrace it if you want. Do what you want, I don't care, but know it inside out."

All this in that trademark Greek accent. I'm loving this!!!

Tuesdays and thursdays, 4:30pm, when this class (probability models) ends, there is a gathering of the desi ISyE grads just outside the instructional center. We all crib about how we left well-paying jobs (or job offers) and came to Tech... for this? We all crib about how badly we wanna go back to India, we even start discussing the flight fares. Ten mintes later, we're all back in the lounge working our asses off.

Prof.Alexopolous, your first intention was fulfilled on Day1, the second is almost fulfilled, now that we're here, lets hope the third one gets fulfilled too.

Back to work...