Friends

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http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/07/10.html

bravura: a showy display.

“You are not beautiful” These harsh words have to be endured by almost every girl/woman at some or the time of her life – unfortunately it is the chauvinistic setup of the society we live in. However it is not just male chauvinism which is at play here but something which angers me much more, though this is in no way tolerance or acceptance of MCP behaviour by men.

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Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.

Terrific Transformations
Modcloth

My Story of Transformation


I am the combined efforts of everyone I have ever known, although it took me awhile to realize this. Like a cautious bandit I have taken the experiences of those around me and studied them like a textbook. It is from these various scraps and patches of various personalities that I have been transformed into a beautiful, all be it, mismatched diverse quilt of experiences. I have not always been that way: I was born in Dallas, Texas where the majority of my family lives, but soon after my mother moved my brother and me up to Rockford, IL. I am not completely sure why, but she came here and opened a home daycare. Since I was young I grew up with children of all backgrounds in my house; this was the start of my development in diversity. Regardless, the move to Rockford uprooted me. It took away almost all connections from my family, from my father. I was a girl with no sense of history, no roots to keep me grounded, and since I could not keep still; I took to wandering.

I wandered from personality to personality like Jack Kerouac wandering after the stars. I tried on different pre-determined costumes, each feeling like some sort of doppelganger that almost fit, but there was something twisted, not quite right. I sought desperately for an identity, for someone to say, “This is you, you are rooted now, stop looking.” But it never happened, so I began to look at the family which I left so long ago. I began to wonder about my father; could he hold the key to me, my being? My father was not only half of me genetically but also in personality. My mother would often tell me I sounded like him, talked like him; I just knew he had to hold the rest of me. So, the summer before my 8th grade year I traveled to Texas and met my dad. I also met five half-brothers and sisters which came as a shock to me after being almost in solitude when it came to family. Over this trip I barely got to know my father as it takes years to break down the awkward, questioning emotions that build over thirteen years of absence. I had five days. Despite this I felt hope, I told him I intended to visit the next summer, but this would never happen. A year later, before I started my freshman year, my father passed away. Over the 4th of July weekend he drowned in a boating accident while saving my half-brother whose inner tube had capsized.

The news hit me like a plane dropping from the sky. I was sent crashing, I was defeated. I began my freshman year believing myself to be lost; half of me had been taken away forever. I was certain I’d never find myself and how could anyone around me understand? How could my classmates in my private school, most of whom are white, upper-class and from whole families, understand me? I was just this little black girl from the west side of town who knew nothing about herself. So, I blocked them all out and built walls around myself. The pain I felt, made me put on a new costume, “Adult”. With this costume came isolation I saw the conversations of my classmates as trivial since they weren’t trying to find themselves, they only spoke of soccer games and homecoming. I indulged in books as a means of external communication. I did not need to discuss the latest gossip at the lunch table when I could discuss, albeit in a bit of a one-sided conversation, the state of the human condition with Kurt Vonnegut or Feodor Dostoevsky. Classes in which I could express myself through the words of others became my best domain. Poetry managed to keep me sane in my turmoil and I wished to simulate the misanthropy of Henry David Thoreau.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year that my isolated authors began to fail me when I fell into the works of Zora Neale Hurston. It started with Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston wrote of a woman who could not connect with her community or anyone else and I felt a sense of connection I had never felt before. Janie Crawford became my best friend, I too was cast out from the African-American community because I went to a private school on the east side and my skin was lighter, but at last I had found someone who could relate to me, who was on a journey to find herself too. I soon read more works by Hurston and then I found Dust Tracks on a Road and I realized my connection was not with Hurston’s female protagonist but with Hurston herself. In Hurston’s autobiography I learned that she had lost her mother at an early age, she had never really known her family and as she says herself, “once I found the use of my feet, I took to wandering”. Hurston became my shining light I thought for certain I could find myself in her; she was the next façade I would put on. However one problem occurred Hurston had a certain penchant for human connection which I, in my isolation, did not understand. Hurston wrote of traveling the south and transcribing the stories she heard she was fascinated with the real human experience not that which already existed in the novels of authors. Dare I follow Hurston’s example and step out of my solitude? The answer would not be left up to me.

I began my junior year in this state, flying back and forth from solitude and companionship. Until I met two kids through my youth group they seemed to be different from me in every way, they were white boys, who went to public school, what could I possibly learn from them? At first I thought them immature, I assumed they had never felt the pain I had, but still I started talking to them. I found out so much about them, one boy had to leave his home because his relationship with his father was abusive. The other boy had also been abused as a child and spoke of his inability to find himself. I wondered how these boys, who had faced hardships, could smile and connect with those around them. And they told me it was because they were kids, and that’s what kids did. I tried to explain that I wasn’t a kid, I was an “adult” I read books and studied the deeper side of life, but they told me no. They showed me that I was a kid to, and that I had a lot of time to make up for.

I believed them, in two people I had realized I could not judge them based simply on the starting points of their lives, but once I got to know them I had learned from them. I was set off on a new passion, a desire to learn from the people around me instead of the books around me. I sought diversity and applied to various camps and programs in order to indulge this desire. I went to the Northwestern Civic Week Program in Chicago where I worked with homeless shelters for a week over spring break. Like Hurston, I recorded their stories I heard in these shelters and realized I can overcome anything. From their experiences, I defined myself as a survivor. I would no longer sit in Sorrow’s Kitchen as Zora Neale Hurston described it.

I looked back at my family with my new view on life. I studied my grandmother and said I am her arms that supported and calmed suicidal patients in hospitals as a nurse. I am her charm and she gave me the ability to take my gifts and help those around me, something I always aim to do. I studied my mother and said I am her strength, the strength that enabled her to raise four children alone and leave an abusive relationship, a strength that she uses in every endeavor in life. Through these people I defined myself.

I am Ashley Ray-Harris, an eighteen-year old black girl who lives in Rockford, Illinois. I am a girl who is inspired by diversity and attempts to bring a range of cultures across city and state lines. I am a girl who reads and connects with writers ranging from Voltaire to Zora Neale Hurston. I am a girl who is dedicated to studying languages and literature so that I can better connect with the world around me. I am a girl who is determined to take charge in whatever community I am placed in so that I can share my experiences, but also learn from the experiences of those around me. I am a girl who realizes I am not done defining myself and is eager to understand myself even more. I am a girl who does not regret her actions because they have made me who I am today: a girl who refuses to lose her identity, for when the journey to find yourself is a tumultuous one you are not likely to forget that which you have learned. This is me, I have found myself and I hope that you will accept this collage of experience and help it to expand even more.

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http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/07/09.html

fervid: marked by great passion or zeal.

I am fat and bits of me jiggle when I try to dance. If you need someone to put on a white beard and stand in for Santa at Christmas, you can call me.

I wish I could run. I wish I could work up the courage fast enough to do what I wanted to. So many things lost because I didn't get there fast enough.

I wish I didn't think about life with such a high discount factor, and hence, such a short termination period. I rarely think a day ahead at a time. I wish I didn't worry so much about the consequences of my actions. Life has been less than and more than what it could be because I wouldn't think right about the things coming up.

I am an alcoholic. I started drinking when I was doing my higher secondary studies, what others would call Junior college. I started drinking during those two years before I got into college proper. At least that is what I remember. I believe that memory could be wrong, I was, after all, a studious sincere student during those days, not the kind to get drunk. But, I think that was when I first did drink, a bottle of beer bought with coins borrowed from a dozen friends, split between, what was it, three, or four of us.

We were the king of the world.

In college I avoided drinking, for quite some time. Eventually during the second year, at blogglob's 'job treat', I split a beer with another friend. It was a hot day in the deccan, we were in the A/C Permit Room of the second best hotel in the town, and the two of us, after the beer split, were convinced that we were quite drunk.

I returned to the hotel for my next drink in college. I had won a few thousands in a series of quizes towards the end of the school year, and absolut69 and I went the 'garden restaurant' in the hotel to celebrate. The 'Garden Restaurant' was essentially the lawn at the back of the hotel, where plastic chairs and tables had been laid out in tightly packed files. This must have been in March, about the time when the temperature goes up from hot to murderous hot. In celebration of the heat that was, and to lure the students, and get back the drunks that had got on the wagon during the prohibition that had been in place till a couple of years before, the restaurants had began running 'buy 2, get 1' schemes. The scheme was so madly successful, that they had opened this, I suspect, illegal 'garden restaurant'.

We got drunk, I was for the first time in my life, wonderfully high. ab69 and I came back to college and proceeded to climb up to the top of the academic building, which had these huge concrete water tanks. We climbed on a couple of those tanks, and just lay there for a few hours.

Things changed after I came back from vacation at the end of the second year. We had the second year second semester exams. The semester before that had been tough on a lot of guys, and they had given an improvement - where along with the current semester's exams they could repeat the papers for the previous semester and try and improve their grades. When the grades came out, I found out that a) a lot of guys had managed to improve their grades b) I had flunked a paper. My ranking in class went down from a respectable one in the low teens down to being below 50 percentile. That turned into a liberating experience. I decided that a) fighting for tiny bits of advantage is way too much work, b) and thus, I might just concentrate on having a very good time in college.

During the third year at college, I was drinking more regularly. I shifted to white liquor (Gin and Vodka, because I got more alcohol per rupee, as compared to beer at the restaurants in the town.) I started occassionally smoking while drinking because I heard that the kick was better. It wasn't because of the academic disappointment. That didn't really pain me a lot, because a) I decided that I didn't need grades because I certainly wouldn't try to go to US for Post-Grad studies, b) I was fairly certain that I could get a job (IT sector boom was at its peak about then). It was partially because around then I was completely infatuated with someone who was in love with someone else. I didn't have the right tools to deal with something like that and I started depending on drinking to deal with it occasionally.

After that, except for the times I have been with my parents, I don't there has ever been a week when I haven't had a drink. But, then there have rarely been periods when I just drunk once a week. Over the seven years since the third year in college, I have averaged at least three drinking sessions a week. But, then my greatest problem is not how often I drink, it is a question of how much. I discovered binge drinking, drinking till I black out and end up doing embarrassing stuff. I discovered that I could drink to the point of blacking out, induce vomiting to purge my stomach, and begin drinking again. I discovered that I could drink through more than a bottle and half of whiskey, if I kept my hourly consumption to about two large pegs with loads of water. I found out that I could avoid hangover through the simple expedient of drinking a lot of water.

I have ventured this many summer on a sea of madness, far beyond my depth. This has to end. I do not propose to be a teetotaler, but I want to stop binging. To that end, I want to see how long I can manage to completely abstain from alcohol. I would like to believe that I can surprise myself.

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=df94591a02dd66b282a82d0a54683293

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/07/08.html

apogee: the highest point.

Last week Aditya released two jQuery plugins

• jQuery shiftcheckbox plugin: This plugin was inspired by how GMail checkboxes work when clicked in combination with the ‘Shift’ key. See demo
• jQuery shortaccesskey plugin: This plugin is a great help in keyboard enabling your web applications with very little effort. See demo
• The last plugin is Img Notes v0.2 which I released some time ago and it allows you to display notes over images like Flickr or Facebook does. See demo

Without a doubt jQuery is the favorite javascript framework for everyone at SANIsoft. Developing plugins for jQuery is very easy and very well documented.

Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.

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http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/07/07.html

shibboleth: a word, pronunciation, saying, belief, practice, etc., that distinguishes one group from another.

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http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/07/06.html

verdant: green.

After a hdd crash about two years ago, I haven't had any Shusheela Raman songs with me. Today Yesterday I collected a few albums from tandavdacer.

I am currently listening to the song 'Amba' from the album 'Love Trap'.

I used to listen to Shusheela Raman a lot during my days in Calcutta. After the extremely late night drinking session, after my fellow drunks had fallen asleep, in the early hours before the crows started cawing, in the early hours before the sun rose, in the heat and humidity that is Calcutta, or in the cold foggy Calcutta morning, I would listen to Shusheela Raman in a loop, smoking like they were about to ban tobacco, drinking the last dredges of liquor, surfing endlessly, or trying to write my pretentious lj pieces.

Listening to the song again after so long reminds me of that state of mind. Drunk out of my mind, not happy, just very very contended.

It feels like eating something really nice. Not too sweet, or hot. Just something with really deep flavour. Like a piece of fine bitter chocolate, or a warm croissant.

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=33b7a0576c94957daa398d2915f85dbf

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/07/05.html

affray: a tumultuous assault or quarrel; a brawl.

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http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/07/04.html

rampart: fortification.

marut sent me a forward combining his two passions Photography and Chuck Norris Facts. It was about a photographer called Ken Rockwell, and as marut explains:

[Ken Rockwell] has a popular camera review and photography gyan website. Problem is he is extremely opinionated, and has a penchant for trashing expensive cameras in favor of cheap point and shoots...

I spent the last night and early hours of the morning today in the company of the beatzo beatzo and tandavdancer drinking and going hyper with insane banter. If you have had the pleasure of drinking with the tandavdancer, then you would know that once he is drunk, he is apt to start telling you about the awesomeness of the things that he love in an berserk rapping spree. The passion he carries in to one of these conversation is very infectious.

I find the Chuck Norris Facts and its clones, similarly infectious because of the excitement and energy they convey. So, after reading the forward, I needed to find out about the context of the discussion to better appreciate the forward (you can be a forward glutton, or you can be a forward gourmand, the choice is entirely yours.) Googling around about the Rockwell fellow and the topics in the forward was quite instructive. For example, I learned that Rockwell is apparently a major Nikkon Fanboy, and that L-Lens is a line of very high-end lenses made by Cannon.

Since Ken Rockwell is quite famous in the photography circle, there are tons of pages discussing him and his advice. I landed up on a page discussing this guy's advice regarding bokeh. If you are, like me, not a photography nerd, then you probably don't know what bokeh is, so let me save your googline time and share my learnings. Imagine that you are watching a movie, and the scene is set at NIGHT in a balcony looking out into the city lights. The actors are standing in the balcony, and the the camera is pointing outwards towards the city. Now, since camera would be focused on the actors, the city light in the background will be out of focus, rendering them soft and slightly smudgy. That effect of having light sources in the out of focus area of a picture is called bokeh. If you want to, you could check the google images for bokeh.

Bokeh, is derived from the japanese work boke (暈け, or ボケ approximately meaning blur or haze).

While I was following up on the Rockwell side of my browse, I had also been reading up on Krish Ashok's post on board games and the need to Indianize Chennaize Monopoly. In the post he made a point that I entirely agree with,

On the subject of Monopoly ... I quickly realized that playing by the official rule book made the game rather one-sided pretty quickly, sort of like how Tamil audiences in the 90s could predict, to the accurate nanosecond, when Goundamani was going to beat Senthil.

I loved the line, and I figured out that Goudamani and Senthil were movie actors, but I didn't quite get the reference - did they perhaps appear as hero and villain in a number of movies? A bit of googling later, I can now inform you that the two formed a famous comedy double act in Tamil movies and as implied were quite a bit into formulaic slapstick.

The thing is that I generally love double-acts. I am absolutely addicted to stand-up comedians and much though I love George Carlin and Lenny Bruce*, double-acts always offer a little more in terms of energy and quickness. If you want a break, I would recommend this video clip of Abbott and Costello performing their routine "Who's on first." The advantage in double-act is that it makes acts like Who's on first much easier to perform and watch**.

Most double-acts depend on the play between the two comedians, who usually would have assigned roles. One of theme would be the straight guy, who is the comic foil, a reasonable person trying to make sense of a perverted world, and the other would be the funny guy, who is the airhead floating about driving the straight guy mad. Now, double-act is also a standard style in Japan, where it is referred to as Manzai。

The interesting thing that I learned today was that in Manzai, the straight guy is called tsukkomi and the funny guy is called - boke, which as you may remember is the root from which 'bokeh' is formed.
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*I really can't say I know much about stand-up comedians, but I do know that I loved what little I have heard of these two. George Carlin, even when he was old and shockingly beyond the edge with his vitriolic attack on 'The System', 'Religion' and on general human excesses, he still was inventive. Eventually it doesn't matter if you got a potty mouth, if you can be innovative with it.

**Consider this transcript of Lenny Bruce joke. While the pitches and the style varies for the various characters, it still may be a little difficult.

Here is one thing I assume ladies don't know about gentleman. They don't know that you can idolize your wife, love her so god-damn much, be on your way home, have no carnal thoughts whatsoever. Whilst driving on, he has a head on collision with a Greyhound bus. Fifty people end up on the highway, and the guy makes a play for the nurse.

"How could he do it at a time like that?"
"I was horny."
"You were horny? Your foot was cut off!"
"I don't know, she had a cute ass and I got hot."
"He is an animal. You got a hard-on with one foot."
"I don't know, got hot."
"You got hot? He is a disgusting creature. You don't know, on the way to the hospital, people were dying, this schmuck was telling the nurse, 'Just touch it once.'"
"You were saying that? You were saying it to the nurse, just touch it once?"
"That's what he kept saying. Please touch it once. Touch it once. Like a moron, he was saying that. Please touch it once, or look while I touch it."
"Did you touch it?"
"No, I had a headache."
"Oh good, that's good.""You were horny? Your foot was cut off!"

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http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/07/03.html

doughty: valiant; brave.

Sangita! If there was anyone in my life I place after my mother it would be her. Even though she is just a year older to me she always held that place of a woman I could go to for comfort. I have known her since I was fifteen. We grew up together, kept in touch for a long long time but as fate would have it, life took somewhat divergent paths about ten years ago.

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Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.