Simple Pleasures

I recently moved to a new apartment. The more intelligent among you wince, envisioning the mind numbingly painful torture. The less intelligent will send me a congratulatory email. After signing my papers, the leasing office requested a small write up on my moving experience. The one paragraph I submitted contained the following words: broken, forgotten, ignored, cracked, chipped, dented, dinged, stained, damaged, torn, ripped, bleeding, scratched and smashed! Strangely, the leasing office has stopped requesting these testimonials!

It has been suggested that enduring the rigors of transplanting yourself from one location to another, without loss of life, limb, sanity or property (or what’s left of it after paying the security deposit), is a rite of passage. The successful completion of this prevents Nature from blackballing you out of the genetic pool! The moving experience involved hundreds of boxes, thousands of plastic packets and myself, intertwined in one of natures most beautiful yet poignant struggles. Defying all logic I had managed to pack my socks with the leftover food from the fridge, my shoes with my dinner plates and even a dead cockroach that had taken refuge among my clothes in its final moments (Sometimes I wonder if it was the smell from my dirty laundry that killed it, in which case I have found the ultimate excuse for leaving my sweaty clothes lying around the house. Cockroach repellent!)

Settling into the new house was a very unsettling experience. To add to my woes, the weather in my city could be as random as the costume change in a bollywood film song. Late in the night, just as I was moving hundreds of boxes from the car to my new home, a fat raindrop committed hara-kiri on my head, forcing me to ask myself this brilliant question: Which one of these boxes was the umbrella in? This question was soon redundant following the thorough drenching from a midnight storm. Dripping wet, the next question popped up in my head: Which one of these boxes was the dry underwear in? Mumbling and cursing my bad luck I wondered if it really had been that bad in my previous apartment? Was the ice-cold water flowing from the hot water tap that bad? Was the smell of stale dog urine from my balcony actually affecting my social life? Who could say that the mould growing in the bathroom gave me the allergic reaction that landed me in hospital? Was it realistic to expect the maintenance guy to repair the fire alarm in my apartment in just three months? After all, a fire hazard in a wooden building is so negligible!

Preoccupied as I was with all these thoughts, my mind was jolted back to reality by the more immediate need to relieve myself. Nature’s call had grown more insistent over the past hour and the cool breeze blowing over my wet clothes had only added to her appeal. I tried to find the keys to the new house but the urgency building up had slowed time down to a crawl. Papers, packets and clothes blurred in front of my eyes finding their way quickly to the pavement. The bushes around the house started to look more and more appealing. There! Found it! I grab the keys and rush to the front door. I fumble with them for a while, not knowing which one to use. I insert one in and turn the lock. It opens! Throwing the door open I skid and stumble to the toilet. I slam the seat up and let go. A sensation of pure pleasure rushes through my body in a warm gush, prickling the hair on the back of my neck. The smile returns to my face. The whole world looks rosy. Flushing the toilet I walk out. The wet underwear was forgotten and my regrets were no longer relevant. The glow on my face and the light spring in my step suggesting a lesson well learnt. Nothing beats the simple pleasures in life!

Heads or tails?

We are all either victims or victors of Probability. Belonging to the latter category means you end up with a large shiny Mercedes parked on the driveway of your million dollar house. Belonging to the former means you still have the Mercedes, but it probably has a broken transmission, a leaky radiator, and the brakes work whenever they feel like it. Oh! And not to forget, your two million dollar house sits in an earthquake zone!

Probability has this nasty habit of jumping up and biting you in the rear when you least expect it. Like the time you got caught in a thunderstorm and you commended yourself on being prescient enough to have picked up an umbrella while rushing out of the house. That elation does a quick left exit as you realize that of the six umbrellas in the closet you picked the one that had been chewed up by the dog!

What about the time you decided that the itch in your crotch was irritating enough for you to invest a few seconds from your life scratching it. Like your other investment in an Ice Cream chain in Alaska, this one also took a turn for the worst, when your female co-worker caught you in the act. Of the one thousand nine hundred and twenty two people who work for the company, of the four buildings the company has and a cumulative sixty floors of office space, probability picked HER to walk into YOUR office at the exact time of your indiscretion. There is a saying out there that goes something like this: “The probability of being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of the act”. Most of us are not stupid. We know when we are doing something wrong. It makes more sense to say: “The probability of indulging in a stupid act is directly proportional to the fear of being watched!”

Probability is like that big bully in your high school. It has a cruel sense of humor and has no qualms against humiliating you in public, repeatedly. Like the time you were marching at “Eyes right” in your school parade and the elastic on your shorts chose that exact moment to snap. One hand up in a salute and the other holding your shorts up is not exactly the way your PT teacher taught you to do “Eyes right”. Your entire life flashes in front of your eyes and you wonder if you could rewind back to that exact point in time when you decided that today was the day you would not wear a belt. It’s also at this very point in time, you imagine, that the big bully Probability calls all his friends into the room, chuckles and says, “Hey guys, watch this!”

There are people who will argue that events in our life are dictated by choices we make. To those people I say phooey! In this vast playground we call life, choices are just that, choices. You can go this way or that way and the ultimate consequence is unpredictable. All you can do is gear up; wear that helmet, put on those pads, don those gloves, grab that bat, look up as you walk out onto the field and say a quick prayer. You can also hope that the big bully is having a good day and has found someone else to bowl bouncers at.

As for me, having given up the game of one up-man-ship with Probability, I hurt retire; hang up my gloves and walk slowly back to the locker rooms. In this moment of surrender I ask you to please excuse me. I need to go fix the brakes on my Mercedes.

Neighborhood watch

Ever wonder why man decided that living with other humans in a social community was a good idea? Because he took this decision when technology was not advanced enough to allow his noisy neighbors to play techno music at 3 in the morning!

When your friendly neighborhood Neanderthal decided that having his best bud share a cave next to his sounded like a good idea he failed to fully and completely comprehend the repercussions of his actions. Yes, they could now go dinosaur hunting whenever they wanted, or just chill out by the swamp at any time, and there was always someone to come over and play “Whack your wife on the head with this club”, but not in his wildest dreams (and they were pretty WILD back then …remember…we were still quite low on the food chain!) could he predict the outcome of his actions.

Ten thousand years down the line man has built skyscrapers that sore into the smog filled skies, converted alligator infested swamp land into sprawling gated communities (with a few gators still hanging around for aesthetic purposes! Getting your leg bitten-off is a selling point for apartment complexes nowadays!), and has even figured ways to make $600,000 for 1000sqft sound reasonable. Yet, the one thing he hangs his head in shame and cries quietly about at night, away from the pointing fingers and mocking laughter of society, is a way to get his neighbor to turn the volume DOWN on his stereo system to a level where a lobotomy without anesthesia causes less pain. Thumping bass from a stereo system and a good night’s sleep were never meant to exist in the same universe! The laws of physics need to be re-written and Einstein discredited for his theories before we can start to make sense of this equation. If the entire hullabaloo behind parallel universes is true then somebody got it all wrong when they relegated these two to the same one.

For millennia, humankind has trudged across barren, inhospitable land, journeyed across mind numbingly vast oceans, endured the searing heat of the deserts and the bone-chilling cold of the poles, cowered under the constant fear of death at the hands of strange tribal headhunters (looking to add to their collection), suffered from diseases that debilitated the strongest humans and left them at the mercy of the elements, ate the grass on the ground, drank water from stagnant pools, bit and crawled and scratched and clawed their way across innumerable odds, all in search of new, un- chartered territory, providing un-seen vistas and spectacular sceneries, to see the world as god meant it to be seen; in all its splendor and glory!.

Wrong!!

All he was looking for was about 100sqft of land where his annoying neighbor would not drop in un-announced on a so-far wonderful Sunday morning and start to bring him up-to-date on the problems he has with his bowel movements (with sound effects too…oh! how difficult it would be for you to imagine his pain without the sound effects! God forbid that he be so rude as to make you stretch your imagination that much!). No wonder explorers like Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan and Neil Armstrong decided that decades at sea, away from loved ones and life as they knew it, or risking life and limb riding in a giant bomb transporting you across the infinite expanse of space, were far better than enduring another story involving the neighbor’s travails in the bathroom!!! I am also quite sure that most major discoveries of the past millennia were instigated by an annoying neighbor who drove someone to such desperation that cooped up in a dark, dank and sunless lab for months at an end, trying to determine the size of an atom using nothing more than a broken magnifying glass and imagination, was far less painful than having to put up with the idiot next door!

But wait a minute, it almost seems like there is a positive side to the existence of neighbors! Do we dare say that the life we lead today, filled with the technology, gadgets and modern conveniences, from microwave ovens to hot tubs, computers to digital camera’s, electronic alarm systems (which, by the way does not keep any of your neighbors out!) to electron microscopes, have come about by this deep seated need in an individual to hide his mortal soul from a fate worse than death we call neighbors! This thought almost blows me away. Repugnant as it may seem, maybe those nasty creatures actually do serve a purpose! Could it be true that every living being that the good Lord placed on this earth (including that freak-show-reject neighbor of mine), has a significant part to play on this planet? The months I spent justifying my neighbor’s existence as the price I pay for the sins of mankind, were they all in vain? Am I wrong, so completely wrong?

Hold on…hold on…wait…yeah…I take it all back…no doubts, no second guessing, no uncertainty there…I was right…I was right all along…

Its 3 in the morning and my neighbor just turned the music on again

Travel Unravel

A twin propeller plane. Two lines of single seats along the inside separated by a foot of floor space. Twenty people squashed together like sardines. The bone jarring rattles and shakes of a flying object attempting to escape the clutches of gravity. My nose buried in an in-plane magazine. Prayers mumbled through chattering teeth. The sweat dripping off my forehead slowly coursing its way across my glasses. My eyes fighting to focus against the dizzying reek of aviation fuel. Eyeing the little crack on the window pane, willing it to stay together till the plane landed. Stomach turning drops and climbs as the plane flew through turbulence. My toes curled tightly against the bottom of my shoes, hoping that this one random physical act would miraculously keep this flying heap of nuts and bolts in the air. But wait a minute. I’m getting ahead of myself. What I really wanted to say was, I love to travel!

You would think that a typically boring one hour flight from Tampa to Miami would be the most improbable setting for the adventure of my life. But guess what, it was! This journey somehow transformed into a fight for survival (All through the flight I FOUGHT this intense urge to jump off the plane. So yes! It was a fight for survival….in a way.) Why jump, you ask? Well, it seemed like a logical thing to do at that time, considering the alternative would mean plunging to death in this monstrosity of engineering! I might stand a better chance of living by taking a leap of faith out of the plane (it would also serve the dual purpose of fulfilling my dream of going sky diving one day!)

The plane was held together with spare parts from World War 2 and lots of crossed-fingers (and some of those crossed fingers were the same arthritis plagued ones that had put this glorified tin can together…so I didn’t place too much faith in that!) My apprehension was certainly not helped by the captain of the plane, a tyro, Latino casa-nova, with ruffled hair, dark aviator sunglasses, swaggering around with the top two buttons of his uniform undone. He would look more appropriate standing on the side of the road whistling at passing women. I also remember this big lug of a guy, who had somehow managed to squeeze his 6 foot 5 inch frame into the miniscule seat behind me. His knees brushed up right against his chin! He was traveling with an old lady, obviously his mother. Just as the plane took off he leaned over across the aisle (not too difficult, he was already occupying half of it!) and said to his mother, “Next time, I’ll pay the extra hundred dollars!”

There maybe some people out there who at this point might ask me, very wisely, I might add, “Why did you book yourself in this death-trap?”

Oh! wise one, let me put it this way. I didn’t!

All this, because of one pure, unadulterated moment of insanity on the part of a company secretary who decided that if getting me on time to my software training meant laying MY life on the line, then so be it, she was willing to do so!! I could have been booked on a Boeing 737 leaving a few hours later but the secretary believed that creature comforts like fresh air, leg space, and my right to live where an unnecessary financial burden on the company and cutting back on these would save a few dollars (which they could then use to put up a small memorial in my honor, subsequent to my unfortunate demise in a plane crash!)

The plane landed safely at the airport (Not before scaring all of us half to death by bouncing on the runway, twice, during touchdown.) The big guy sitting behind me whimpered, which I found highly amusing. Hey! Don’t judge me! I’m not a sadist. It was just this mental picture of a big, huge guy, ensconced in this teeny-tiny chair cracked me up! Heck, I was more worried that if he had peed his pants we might all drown inside this plane!

I literally jumped the last three steps off the staircase from the plane.

As I ran into the terminal, i was stopped by an attendant at the gate and he handed me something that looked like a coupon. A discount coupon for my next ride on this flying coffin! I resisted the urge to shove it back down his throat but just as I moved past him I let one of my carry-on bags bump him hard, right in the crotch! Oops! Sorry! (Yeah, right!) I walked on and kept a lookout for a trash can. I sure as hell was not going to use the coupon. I was not ready to die yet.

Just then, from out of the blue, a brainwave. The smile returned to my face. A gleam in my eye. A spring in my step, my heart a flutter. I put the coupon back in my pocket, and walked out the front entrance. Barely able to contain my excitement I touched my pocket again to see if the discount coupon was still there. Just as I flagged down a taxi, this one last brilliant thought raced through my head…“I wonder if secretaries take vacations!”