Me Firsts!

Insomnia strikes again. It’s 3:30 am on Monday September 4, and I am up doing the second best thing I do when I can’t sleep. Blog. At the same time I am listening to Yahoo’s online radio, checking Orkut and pacifying Sas on YM every now and then that all is well with my life and nothing is not the way it’s not supposed to be. We are also testing each other’s knowledge of Anand’s dialogues.

This is a long weekend. September 4 is a holiday in the US. Labor day, not very sure what all that entails but I know the bit that affects me the most...no classes. I was supposed to go to Seattle this weekend to meet a friend, but that didn’t work out, and fortunately so because I managed a few achievements here in Moscow itself.

1. On Friday, I attended my first potluck here. At my teacher’s house where everyone from the creative writing department was invited. Their house is situated atop a hill and the view from the living room is to die for. Valleys and rolling hills, and huge old trees all around the house. Picture perfect. My contribution to the potluck was keema (with ground beef though in the absence of ground lamb). Drank the combination of bourbon and tonic for the first time in my life.

2. Had breakfast at an utterly odd time in an all night café. After the party on Friday evening I had gone to my friend Parul’s house, she lives in the same neighborhood so that makes impromptu drop-ins possible. We sat up and chatted till 2 then decided we were hungry enough for breakfast so drove 20 minutes to an all night eatery situated in the campus of Washington State University, where keeping in mind American quantities we ordered one plate of all kinds of sin, split that and devoured it to our satisfaction. There is something incredibly liberating about doing this sort of a thing with another girl in the middle of the night. (Chill Ma, it was perfectly safe.)

3. Managed to activate all the voice chat facilities on Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk. End result? Conversations--with voices, sounds, laughter, and life-—and with some of the people who matter the most. It was incredible...I was actually talking and not merely typing into a clinical chat window. I could talk and hear words in Hindi and Bangla...oh nothing has ever sounded better. No wonder so many revolutions have centered around languages. If you spend days talking and digesting foreign language(s) nothing sounds sweeter than your mother tongue. And if it is a nearly free service it is saccharine.

4. Introduced the virginal and winding mountain roads of Idaho to some kickass Punjabi music. Moscow and its roundabouts—-where Parul and I went for a drive today—-has probably never heard Tenu kala chasma jachta ve, jachta ve tere mukhde pe. Wah wah wah! Kya lyrics hain! This song and several others like it were introduced to me in my days in Chandigarh, and since then, I, who never thought could end up tolerating Punjabi pop, has actually gone ahead and invested time, money and resources into procuring more of the same.

5. Saw my first movie in an American hall. What leg-space! Not that I ever complained in Indian cinema halls, leg space was always more than adequate for me! But I remember how Prashant grumbled, and grumbled and then grumbled some more when we went to see Rang De Basanti. Poor man, he did look thoroughly scrunched by the time the movie ended. So what movie did I see? Snakes on a Plane. Why? Because I love unrealistic special effects, and this movie is currently very much in the news not just because of its creepy crawly subject but also because this is the only movie so far in the history of cinema to have generated massive publicity in blogosphere. It’s a stroke of marketing genius that the film is a hit thanks to the pre-release publicity done by bloggers.

Ok my eyelids are beginning to feel droopy now, so I guess I will tend to them. As Rohit would say, “Jeez man! It so sucks! Sleep is such a waste of time.” I agree.