The good twin ;-).

As I mentioned earlier, its the 5th birthday of my blog today :). And the gift is that I now have a copy of my blog (albeit private) on wordpress. Am yet to figure out how to setup the same theme and push all the photo-dependency from blogger to there. But one step at a time. Right now its a private blog, but if ever something happens to this blog here again, I'll take off and create the full fledged version there.

I said before that I was shocked to see all my posts gone. It was more than that, it was as if a part of me was torn apart. This shows you how much this blog has come to mean to me. I even declared that if I didn't recover the posts, I'd never blog again. But here I am :). I am so glad that all is well with my blog again (but that 1 post is still missing and google developers are yet to get back).

5 years. So many things have happened. Changes have come but some things have remained the same. My blog has become a companion whom I cannot afford to lose. Its not that I don't have any secrets from my blog, there are many things I don't write about here (there's still a part of me thats private and personal ;-) :-D). But for the most part, my blog is a reflection of my life. Its a day to day mirror, but remember even mirrors don't really show the true self of the person ;-) (the reflection is inverted duh!). Maybe there'll come a time when I'll open up more. Or maybe I'll become more close-mouthed about stuff (as if!). But what I do know is that I am going to be blogging for a long time.

Happy birthday blog, and here's to many more shared memories together :).

The whys..

- Why does the heart take such a long time in realizing something that the brain seems to grasp in a second?
- Why do we never say "Why me?" when faced with good times, but never fail to say it when things are bad?
- Why is it that when everything is hunky and dory, its credited to ourselves and termed "oLLe dese" (good phase or good luck), but when its not, its blamed on somebody else and termed "Ketta dristi" (evil eye)?
- Why do people suddenly realize that they have to be thankful for what they have, when they don't have something they want?
- Why are some people so wonderful (especially moms ;-) :-D) while others just don't seem to have a sensitivity chip?
- Why is it that sometimes you yourself cannot convince yourself?
- Why is it that our expectations of some people in our lives never decrease despite their never meeting not one of those expectations?

And finally
- Why is the doctor saying I have low blood pressure when it should be shooting off the roof top because of all the stress I've been facing? :-D (yes I am grinning :-D).

Rock bottom..

"Ya know I really thought I had hit rock bottom, but today it's like there's rock bottom, then 50 feet of crap, then me." - Rachel in Friends.

Strange how some quotes just seem to suit your life so aptly. In my earlier post I wrote how I was afraid to say "it can only get better from now on", but I have to admit, I thought it. Well, I thought wrong. On the fateful day of Feb 16th, I woke up to find that I have been locked out of my Google account (looks like it was hacked into). After some miserable hours I managed to get my password reset and login to the account, only to find out that my Orkut profile was deleted! The profile cannot be recovered and I have to create a new one :(. Still, the saving grace was that my blog was still there and nothing had happened to my photos or mails. Wrong! Next morning all the posts were gone, wiped out, deleted without trace from my blog.

I was shocked to say the least. I didn't have a backup of anything (had tried to do that earlier, but hadn't gotten any proper solution). I really thought Google was the big boss of everything and they'd have multiple back-ups of everything and nothing can ever vanish without their approval. Not so apparently :-\. Didn't know what to do at all. After one complete day of grovelling on the help forums, I found something out. If you subscribe to a blog on Google Reader, it usually has if not all, most of the posts in cache`, despite the fact that you are logging into the damn thing only after your posts have been deleted. I had posts from December 2006 to February 2010, but I started the blog in March 2005, so there were a lot of posts missing.

After about 5 days of to and fro on the forums (here's the discussion), there still wasn't any concrete solution. I was told that if I could produce the URLs of all the posts, they'd try and restore them. What the heck! I had about 300 posts then, how am I supposed to get all the URLs of those? I got around 200 URLs on the Google reader. I didn't know what to do about the rest. I remembered some of the missing posts, but didn't really remember the titles of the posts (blogger names the URL on the title). Tried searching in Google blogs, didn't work. After various permutations and combination, finally figured out a solution. If you search the blog name and say a month and a year, the search result usually shows the archived page of the month. If you click the "cached" version, then you get the old post. And so after searching for every single month and spending the entire day on the computer I finally had all the URLs of all the posts (you can see the entire list in the discussion above). Phew!

Again a week went by without a word. You cannot fathom the frustration that I went through. Yesterday they finally said they had restored all the posts as drafts and I had to publish them all to get the blog functioning as it was (one URL was wrong, so there's still that to be worked out). They still haven't told me how or why it happened and I'm totally clueless. Atleast its a learning, have the XML backup and am planning to have a backup blog on some other site. That'll be my birthday gift to my blog this year.

Coming to my wounds, I'm fine. Stitches have been taken out and also the surgical strip that was put in as a replacement. There is a 1.5 inch gash on my forehead and a 0.25 inch one on my lip but they are very much on the mend. Right now I'm sporting the healing Frankenstein monster look (which is wayyyyyyy more hipppppp than the Rohini Hattangadi look ;-) :-D), so even though I feel awkward going out anywhere, thats alright to some extent.

So all's well right? Beep wrong again! You know that last year my MBA plans got cancelled (to put it mildly)? I had transferred the application to this year and had hoped to get some financial assistance. Yesterday I got a mail from the coordinator telling me that times are tough and financial resources are limited, hence they'll not be able to give any financial aid to me. I somehow expected that (usually business schools don't really dole out dough), yet felt crushed. It feels like I'm down and being kicked again and again. I'm so sick and tired of being treated this way! And I know tomorrow the situation can be worse.

So bring it on God! I'll take it like a woman - I'll be depressed, I'll cry, then I'll show you my middle finger and I'll get over it!

7 stitches in time..

3 days ago, if you had asked me when I have fainted in my life, you would have heard an emphatic "never" as an answer. Sigh, things have to change, right? My first faint happened on 10th Feb night at around 7:30 PM and how!

You know I was ill. Sri kept insisting on going to the doctor, but I had somehow put it off thinking that things will get better the next day. Moreover the plain fact was that I just was too sick of even thinking of getting up and getting out in the cold weather. Well, things weren't looking better at all, so on that fateful Wednesday evening, we headed to an Urgent Treatment center nearby to get me checked up. The checking in stuff was a bit slow for an "urgent" treatment center, but somehow got through that and soon was in the examination room. Since I was a bit weak and my brain wasn't running to its optimum speed, I had asked Sri to be with me when the doctor asked me questions, so in turn even Snugli was there for the incident. I told the doctor about the tablets I was taking and that I wasn't able to eat at all - as soon as I took a few bites I would feel full and nauseous.

They found that my blood pressure was a bit low and said that I was dehydrated. The doctor said that they would give me an injection for the nausea and hence I should atleast be able to eat/drink a little bit better. The nurse came in with the injection and here the story has to be split to give different perspectives :-p.

Deepthi's story:

The nurse told me that there would be a burning sensation when the shot would be given, so I expected that. But not the immediate reeling of my head. Suddenly I was in this calm place with some nice music playing - like this nice dream that people are trying to wake you up from and you don't want to get up. When I did come to, there was something cold being pressed to my forehead and my forehead as well as upper lip were paining like crazy. For a few moments I didn't even realize that I was lying on the ground, I was sitting on the examination chair when I was given the shot and hence thought that I was lying on that.

Sri's/the nurse's story:

The nurse gave the shot, put a bandage on (I don't remember getting the band-aid either) and turned to throw the injection to the dustbin. The next thing they know, I was falling to the floor directly on my face (make that forehead and upper lip, I don't know how my nose escaped hitting the ground) and there was nothing anybody could do about it. They still don't know whether I hit my forehead on the floor or a chair leg, but immediately the doctor was called and they turned me over to my back. I had blood flowing from my forehead and upper lip and obviously bad cuts both places and they started putting cold compresses for both.

Well, fun times eh? They got me up to the examination chair where the doctor determined that the cut on the forehead was deep and she didn't know whether she could stitch it up without scarring it up. Plus she wanted a CAT scan done so we had to go to the emergency room (ER) of a hospital for that. By this time, my brain was back to its optimum function and I said that I would get the stitches as well as the scan at the hospital (well, there is this old story, where I got stitches from a general physician and there's a blatant scar on my leg to this day and I certainly didn't want a repeat of that on my forehead with this general physician :-p. The story I'll talk about some other time). And so we got checked out and Sri took me to yet another hospital which we hadn't yet explored here in Lexington and after initial formalities, they soon got me on a bed and answering questions.

They did a pregnancy test since there would be lots of radiation in the CAT scan and then the scan itself on the head and the neck (cannot believe I am learning the full form of CAT - Computerized Axial Tomography, today!). Meanwhile Sri took Snugli to one of his colleague's house for dinner. By the time he got back, the CAT results were up - thankfully everything was okay with my head and neck and the surgeon was about to stitch up my forehead. One thing I like about doctors here, they tell you everything :-D. Its like a constant commentary on whats going on. He told me how he's using small sutures so that the scar would not be prominent and that my upper lip cut would not require any. And so I got 7 stitches on my forehead and a glue to support my upper lip. I'm supposed to go back for stitch removal after another 2 days. The surgeon kept saying how he was sorry that I was having a bad day and I remember thinking "you don't know the half of it" :-D.

So you can see, all has been well with my household the previous few days :-p. Its still not the end of the story, but an ongoing saga, so I can't say these are the learnings from the thing or whatever, but sort of ongoing observations:

1) I managed to successfully scar another person for life. Darsh keeps teasing me that he was scarred for life when he saw the gory sight of some white stuff and blood in my chipped off leg (in the incident mentioned above) and now its the turn of Snugli. The poor thing was a witness to the entire fall and the gory sight of the gaping hole in my head and was saying "Amma Amma" when I came to. Maybe she and Darsh can compare stories and notes later on how they were impacted, hehehehe :-D. Seriously speaking, I don't think she even remembers it now :-).

2) No matter how bad a situation is, I have realized that it can never get to my sense of humour :-D. We went to the second hospital and the surgeon actually asked me "Do you know where you are?" and I laughed out loud. Despite the pain, the trauma, the everything!! I was reminded of the very filmy "Mein kaun huun?", "Mein kahaan huun?" etc, hehehee.

3) I never knew what fainting was about. Now that I know, it feels strange to miss out on a few seconds of your own life (a few seconds was all it took) and to rely on others to find out what happened to you. I had this classmate who'd faint all the time and I remember scorning at her for being so weak. Now I can sympathize more and understand the helplessness of it all.

4) Whenever something bad happens, we think why? I find myself wondering what I did to deserve this. I keep replaying incidents from my India trip and thinking that maybe I behaved badly with people and this is the reward. Yeah, thats the depression speaking. But then no matter how I behaved, this is me. This is the person I am. This is what you get. This is not an epiphany. I'm not going to become a saint/sorceror just because this happened. And so I convince myself that this has nothing to do with what I did in the past. Heck, God has better things to do, right? But then I regress and get right back to it :(.

5) Another reality check has been about looks. I always thought I wasn't too obsessed with my looks (I am a little bit obsessed, but who isn't?), but this incident has sorta brought me down to earth. Right now, I have a hugggge gash on my upper forehead and the entire forehead area is swollen. Plus a scar on my upper lip + entire upper lip swollen. I look like a version of Rohini Hattangadi in that weird makeup applied by Sridevi in the movie Chaalbaaz, hehehee (here's the scene on youtube). Yup, I have a sense of humour about it, but my self esteem has taken a beating. I keep looking at Sri's eyes to find out whether he looks at me differently. Pathetic, I know. He doesn't, but the doubts don't stop. Atleast with Snugli I know for sure, the child doesn't know the meaning of pretense yet. I wonder whether I'll ever look like myself again. Or is this the new me? :(((. I am even afraid to say "it can only get better from now on", thats what I thought before I went to the treatment center :(.

I am grateful, believe me, that I didn't hurt my eyes or nose or teeth or fracture the skull. I'm only upset that this has overshadowed the good times I had in the India trip and the stuff I had planned for this month. But I'll survive :).

Anyhow, they say a stitch in time saves nine, so 7 stitches in time? Saved me from looking like a cyborg with a large hole on its forehead :-D. Although, that would have been really cool in an alternate world :-D.

The sickness factor..

Anytime I return from India to the US, I always feel heart sick and you know that. This time the heart sickness came hand in hand with actual physical illness. I fell ill as soon as I got into the first flight - had a bout of diarrhea and fever and by the time I was in the second flight, I was so weak that Sri was managing Snugli completely. So for the past 3 days I have been suffering through both the sickness plus the added bonus of bad wintry weather with 3-inch snowfall (usually I would have worn my coat and gone out to finish my annual snow sculpture, but hey, I'm sick :-p)..

Imagine going from a warm, bright, happy and healthy place to a cold, dull, sad and sick place in a matter of 24 hours :(. I'm too dehydrated for even tears to come out. Depression is in me and around me everywhere. I thought it just couldn't get any worse than that, but well, I thought wrong..

(more to come)..

BTFYA 7 - And the happily ever after goes on :).

Well, 5 years ago, Sri and I took the big, plunge, tied the knot ;-). After that day, this is the first anniversary we are spending with parents and siblings. So that was special for today. Sadly, Snugli has been ill for a couple of days (has a bout of stomach infection), so the celebrations were subdued to say the least :-(. Even the dinner we had planned for the entire family had to be replaced by a pizza takeout :-\. Oh well, hopefully tomorrow.

I'm still in India, so don't really have the time for a long post. I also don't have too many photos of my wedding scanned, so don't ask me why I am writing the post :-p. I am going to just put up the ones I have put up already.

On Varapooje, my most prominent memory is of sitting like a doll and being presented with lots of items (dolls, jewelery and decorated stuff) from my in-laws :-D.



That night I slept at my house since it was so near to the marriage hall. I am teased to this day that I must be the only bride who didn't spend a night in the hall :-D. On second thoughts, I should change the "slept" to "not slept", 'cause the whole night I cried and cried and hardly slept for 2 hours. My mom, chikkamma and I slept in the same room and somehow one of us would start crying and so would the others :-\.

My wedding day started with the water sump (underground tank) being fully empty :-D. I remember waking upto the commotion :-D. The highlight of the day according to me was not really the mangalyadhaarane but the dhaare. Somehow the moment when the poojaris cut the bride from her gothra and join her to the groom's felt more of a real marriage moment to me than the tying of the three knots. It was surreal and I had tears in my eyes. It was not really that the emotional attachment was being cut, but the ritual somehow hit home the fact that I was being "given away" :(.




But the best moment was the Arundhathi nakshatra viewing. I'm pretty sure I mentioned this in my blog somewhere, but here goes. Sri and I were talking outside the hall on the varapooje night when we were discovered (hehehehe) by the teasing cousins/parents troupe :-D. So when the star viewing ritual happened, mom teased us saying that Sri has shown me the star the previous night :-D. Well, the photographer captured the moment :-D.




The reception was full of smiling, smiling and more smiling. Our faces were numb with smiles, yet we smiled. At friends, acquaintances and even strangers, we smiled smiled and smiled :-D.




5 years later, we are still the same people with the same faces, albeit a few inches thicker round our waists, still continuing to discover, continuing to learn, to accept, to adjust, to just be, to live and to love :).