A meditative rose

Overheard at Michigan and Randolph …

Desi woman on cellphone: “I would never have sex with a virgin … unless he had good home-cooked south Indian food to offer”

My new best friend

You were supposed to have a commitment problem!! — Sex and the City

Ok .. so that’s my guilty pleasure .. the one time a week my TV comes on.

So maybe the only thing I have in common with Carrie Bradshaw is being neurotic, but I would be as freaked out if an ex decided to take the plunge … also think I would feel better if he got together with some random floozy, rather than someone I could respect. Because that way I’ll just think I had bad judgment, not that I wasn’t good enough.

Aargghh … don’t know why it matters. I don’t even like him very much any more. Though I’m still trying to do the friend thing. Don’t think it’s working. But he cried when I told him I didn’t want to. Don’t know why. Didn’t ask. Just couldn’t see him cry. Don’t know why. Since I don’t really like him that much any more.

Really.

I’ve been thinking recently about how much I’ve changed in the last few years. I sometimes think once you decide to go down a certain road, ask certain questions, you can never go back. It’s like taking the red pill … you can be perfectly happy without knowing the ‘truth’, but once you do, there’s no way you can accept the illusion you’ve been living with. That way, you live a more intense life for sure, though it most definitely won’t be as stable or safe.

But what if you can go back? What if you can go back to looking for contentment and happiness and stability, as opposed to stimulation and intensity? Is it a choice you can make whenever you want, and are we scared to make it, just because it is a choice, and we hate all decisions?

If all you’re ultimately looking for is happiness (please, let’s not get into the suffering vs. happiness discussion - social conditioning or whatever, I do value happiness), does it matter at all how you get it? Is it possible to go back and be happy? In other words, if I chose to get married and live in the ‘burbs, is it possible that I would be happy?

The story so far …

Poor Corporate Slaves (PCS), while slaving away at their usual 300 things at a time, come up with interesting findings and possible new opportunities. Findings are considered to be interesting enough and opportunities are considered to be possible enough by Not-so-poor Corporate Slaves to want to invest more resources into them. Since PCS cannot be diverted from the other 299 things they are working on, and since it is considered especially cruel to make each PCS do the job of more than 2.4 regular human beings, Over-Paid Consultants (aka you squeeze our wallet, we’ll squeeze your balls) are brought in to add value through their broad industry experience accompanied by sharp functional expertise (or at least that’s what the pitch said). Meanwhile, the PCS use their powers of logic and creativity, backed by, well, knowing what the hell they’re talking about, to come up with some more detail around the interesting findings and new opportunities.

Forward to 10 weeks later.

It is two weeks before the OPCs’ presentation to Not-so-Poor Corporate Slaves. OPCs set up flurry of meetings with PCSs. PCSs have discussions that sound suspiciously similar to discussions had 10 weeks earlier. Then OPC pulls up slide outlining initial interesting findings and says: You know, this is a really Interesting Finding. I think you should pursue this Possible New Opportunity. The other stuff? Yeah, it doesn’t look possible to find that information. I wonder why noone’s looked at it yet.

Somehow, I don’t think it was too rude to point out that’s what they were being paid for. Strangling them … am thinking a jury might just have been lenient …

A couple of months ago, I read Mangs’ post about being assaulted on a train journey from Chennai. Reading it was … gut-wrenching … not just because of the feeling of being violated such an experience causes, but also because, as most women growing up in India, I have had experiences of this sort myself, and have denied them not only to the world, but also to myself. Reading this reminded me of those incidents, brought back feelings I thought I had suppressed enough to have forgotten back to the surface - no, I hadn’t forgotten at all.

After reading it though, I comforted myself thinking it was all behind me. I would never have to travel in a DTC bus again, I would never travel by train again. Essentially, I thought I could buy my freedom from a world populated with such pervs through plane tickets and rental cars. It was a selfish thought, I didn’t think about solving the problem, but I thought I was safe.

Then I read this. A 55-year old Indian man molesting a young woman on a domestic US flight. She screamed. He is in jail for seven years. But it means I’m still in the same world.

Came across this hilarious article in the Nytimes, about how people stay away from buying real estate because they have deeper issues with making a commitment (and I always thought it was the obscenely high prices …)

Well, having gone through this process myself a few months ago, I realise that this link between committing to a house and commiting to a relationship (based on experience and a solid NPV model) is tenuous at best and a self-created smoke-screen at worst. I approached the issue from the other side, realising that I was fast turning into a ‘toxic bachelorette’ (term coined by one Smugly Married Person). Having been conditioned into thinking that was a Bad Thing, I figured I should get over my fear of commitment by getting myself to commit to a place to stay (would be a big deal - have averaged 7 months in an apt over the last 3 years), before actually getting into a relationship that had any hope of going anywhere (more on that another time - know I’m going to get comments of the sort, why does it have go anywhere etc., but what the hell … pls to refer to depreciating asset post)

Anyway, so here’s why the link doesn’t work …
- It reminds me why I hate commitment. Over the past few weeks, I’ve considered moving to NY, and to Malaysia (don’t ask). Not that I would necessarily have followed through on either of those anyway, but being reminded that there might be something better out there, and I can’t get up and explore it makes home and hearth seem more like ball and chain.
- It’s not really a commitment. Based on my trusty NPV model, I need 3.5% appreciation in value for 3 years before I break-even on selling. I don’t think 3 years is the timeframe my mom has in mind when she says I should ’settle down’. And of course, assumptions can be convenienly tweaked to bring that break-even period down even further.
- I’m constantly looking for my ‘out’. I just surfed through rental listings on craigslist (yes, that’s what I surf craigslist for), to see what I could expect to rent my place for if I had to leave right away. I think if I were married, I’d have a divorce lawyer’s number on speed dial.

Btw, the article makes an interesting point about how single women are scared about buying 1-BR condos because it implies that they are resigned to staying single forever. To that, I say - 3 years, sister…

And as for me, I’m clearly resigned … though in a good way