“I can’t even count how many women I’ve slept with”
:One of the female executives of a partner startup company as we exchanged notes on how in the early days of our companies we doubled up people in hotels/ on trips in order to save costs.
“It’s all about chicks man, it’s all about chicks”
:Random drunk guy in the back of a cab in Cambridge who motioned us to put the window down while I was parked next to the cab at a stop light so that he could tell us his deep thoughts!
“Are you guys gay?”
:Roxanne. - okay, okay, there is no story behind that other than my friend who I was visiting happens to live in an area which is considered the gay-area (he claims he didn’t know before he moved there.. yeah right 
) And so when his neighbor saw three of us guys returning late at night, she asked us… “Are you guys gay” (maybe I should also menion that she was so drunk that we were afraid she wouldn’t make it up the steps okay).
Writing this blog as I sit at Starbucks by the window - unfortunately all the comfy chairs that I like are occupied and so this was the only alternative. Right on the other side of the glass pane, every so often there are people standing in order to smoke. It’s kind of ironic, since one of the things I had put on my list of things to bitch and moan about recently was smoking and smokers!
My grandmother used to smoke about two packs a day. My dad probably still smokes about two packs a day. So you would think that I would be used to smoking and that it wouldn’t be that much of a bother. Having now spent close to the decade in the US where luckily there is some respect for non-smokers (unlike India, Europe and a lot of the rest of the world), my tolerance for smoke and smokers seems to be bottoming out.
This past weekend I was out with some friends for dinner and drinks to a bar where I literally had to leave my mouth open and breathe through my mouth because the smoke was making it impossible for me to breathe normally. But that’s more me than the smoke or the smokers since I’ve realized that I actually cannot tolerate smoke more than a certain degree very well. My nose just doesn’t think it’s supposed to function well in a smoky environment and contrary to the orders sent down to it from the brain, it just goes on strike.
But that said, I so have a basic problem with smokers. Why is it that smokers feel that it is their right to keep throwing their butts all over the damn place!? Regardless of how educated or well to do a person might be. When it comes to smoking, they seem to have no qualms about throwing their cigarette butts right where they are standing. Walk outside any building and you will see a collection or smelly cigarette butts all over the damn place.
Secondly, why is it that smokers thing that they are just so freaking cool… maybe they think that just because they smoke the exhaust of their lungs is sacred and thus it is their duty to make sure that they direct the “holy-smoke” directly towards someone who isn’t as lucky to be able to produce their own holy smoke.
Oh… and how can I not talk about the smell. The noxious smell of smoke in someone’s breath or in your own clothes after you’ve been to a smoky place. Ugh… disgusting. What’s especially bad is when the next morning, as you wash your hair you can smell the remnants of the previous nights smoky excursion.
You could take the most beautiful woman and all she has to do is put a cigarette in her mouth and start to light up and it’s an instant turnoff. (Ironically, I seem to see more women smoking than men these days)
My grandmom stopped smoking finally after a series of illnesses which required that she stop smoking. But I definitely didn’t make it easy on her when she was smoking. Her birthday presents were usually little table-top placards with anti-smoking slogans on them. They said:
Kissing a smoker, is like licking an ashtray.
Kiss a non-smoker and feel the difference.
Cancer cures smoking.
Ahh… I guess I’m done with my rant about smoking… I’ve had enough discussions with my dad over it, since I won’t go into his room any more when I’m home, since it put plainly, stinks. I guess my only refuge will be when I eventually move to California where I can go to a bar and get a drink, without coming out smelling like someone sprayed hydrogen sulphide all over me and my clothes!
One of the things that Richard Feynman mentioned in his anecdotes in Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman and What do you care what other people think? was to treat everything in life as an adventure and an experience. My guess is that in the heart of hearts Feynman was as much of a geek and an introvert as the next person and his telling himself to take everything in life as an experience and an adventure was his way of getting himself to do things which he would otherwise be hard-pressed to undertake.
This hasn’t been the first time that I came across that concept. My mom’s been tried to din the same thing into me for years now and one of the sayings in my school journal used to say: Life is an experience… live it. However, the concept behind taking risks and essentially doing things which would go against the grain of preserving one’s image is something that definitely doesn’t come easily to me.
People (including those close to me) have over the years developed expectations of how I act, behave and how I would react to things. But the truth is that the “expectations” that they have developed are based on a façade and they really do not have any idea of how I would really react to behave under a given situation - especially if I wasn’t always trying to live up to their expectations. My external reaction is often determined by what people expect of me in a given situation, and not what the nascent reaction would be. So it’s a catch-22. A chicken and egg proposition. People expect me to react a certain way and therefore I do thereby reinforcing their expectation of how I should be acting. The net result is that I often come of giving people the wrong impression of what I really want or think.
Recently, I’ve tried to make a concerted effort in order to do things which people would not normally expect me to do – because I believe it’s about time I stopped worrying about what other people expect me to do and instead do what I think and feel. Of course, that’s a lot easier said than done - and every so often I find myself taking two steps forward and one step back and sometimes - one step forward and two steps back, because it’s not easy to reset expectations.
Blogging is simply one form of doing things which people would not expect me to do. I doubt anyone I know would have thought that I would go out and start publishing my thoughts in a public medium, let alone be talking about things which I do not even discuss with people in person (including this). The others I’ll refrain from mentioning here, since it’s something people will just have to figure out for themselves and some … maybe not.
Things you own end up owning you.
:the chracter of Tyler Durden in Fight Club
When I first saw the preview of the movie Fight Club, I told myself that “oh, I don’t think I’d be interested in seeing this movie as it looks like a fucked up movie.” So I never made it a point to see it. Then over the past several months multiple people - and some of them people who’s opinion I respect - told me that I have to see this movie. They told me that they can’t tell me anything about it and I just have to watch it. They did tell me that it had a slight cult element to it, which did get my curiousity piqued enough.
So I finally borrowed the DVD from a friend of mine - and it sat on my desk now for a couple of weeks. I put it on a couple of times, but everytime I would begin to watch it, something or the other would come up (generally an IM from someone while I’m watching the movie on my computer since like the guy in the movie said… I only need a single-serving movie player - a movie for one…so the computer works just fine thank you…) and I would never really get to watch more than the opening scene.
Well, tonight, I came home - no scratch that - back to my apartment and popped in the movie and saw it straight through in one sitting. And here is what I really think… I think that is one of the more fucked up movies I have seen and I would put it up there with something as stupid as Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs (can you tell that I dislike movies by Quintin Tarantino and I’m glad that hasn’t made another one in recent times?). What a stupid freaking movie. I cannot think of enough words to kind of pick it apart as well as I would like to.
The guy was a freaking psychopath. And yes, everyone in the world has problems of their own and everyone has things about their life that they like or dislike. I am less disturbed about the movie. I don’t as much of a problem now with seeing people blow a hole through their head with their brains splattering all over or with people beating each other into a pulp… TV and the news has done a wonderful job of de-sensitizing us to the horrors of the world. That is now entertainment for some people. If people can watch stupid shit like WWF and call it entertainment, then heck showing people getting their brains blown off as a form of amusement isn’t far behind now is it.
What *really* bothers me about this movie is the fact that some people actually thought of it as a good movie. Had they described it to me as a “disturbing” movie, I would have been okay with it and probably not been so harsh. But there is a significant different between good and disturbing. It is okay for a movie to be disturbing — because it makes you think. Some people actually told me that they learnt things from this movie. I am afraid to think what they learnt if they called it good and not disturbing.
I’ve now maintained for a long time that the mind is fragile — that’s something I’ve not written about in detail on public blogs — yes there are still things which don’t make it out in to a public forum. It is had enough for people to keep their thinking straight and honestly I just don’t have faith in the ability of the person on the street to be able to look deep enough into a movie like Fight Club in order to figure out what they really should take away from it.
For me, the only thing this movie did that was positive was that it re-affirmed my conviction that the greatest thing to fear is losing the ability to think rationally and your grip on what is perceived as reality. But I knew that already, and I don’t think I needed Fight Club to remind me of it again — I see enough instances of it around me everyday.
P.S. After I wrote this blog I was putting the DVD away and noticed one of the quotes on the inside cover. It said: “…a witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone crunching violence that actually thinks it’s saying something of significance” — Kenneth Turan, L.A. Times. Now… if that was the best thing the makers of this movie could pick to quote from the L.A. Times, then gee, I couldn’t say it any better myself.
Flipping through the inside cover of the movie…it seems clear that the movie was intended to be provocative and my reaction to it was in line with the reaction fro a lot of other people who put it more eloquently than I did — but the sad fact is that I don’t have a sense of humor about this stuff any more. It would be humorous if you still believe that “it’s just a movie,” but when you know that there are people out there who are deranged enough to even believe what they see in a movie, then it’s not funny any more.
Some of the choice quotes that are included in the cover of the movie (really, I did get these from the cover..):
“I would deliver a long tirade against it if it weren’t such a dog — such a laborious and foolish waste of time …” — David Denby, The New Yorker.
“Fight Club is to intelligent men what Catherine Breillat’s Romance is to inteliigent women — an insult” — Gregory Weinkauf, New Times, LA.