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May 07, 2007
5 great things
1. Leaning over the sink to eat a mango ten minutes after I wake
2. Opening the doors and pulling the curtains aside instead of turning on the lights
3. The luffing sound of the ceiling fan, as opposed to the buzz of the AC
3. Hearing birds, insects and peepers when I go to sleep
4. Using power outages as an excuse for a walk
5. Afternoon break: lunch, shower, nap
Posted by jb at 10:40 PM | Comments (3)
An entry about cockroaches
I slept in the tent last night, on my bed. Well, on three bed frames that I pulled together from two rooms. I set the tent up after switching on the light in one of the house bathrooms and catching several cockroaches re-enacting what I can only guess was a scene from Die Hard II. I killed two of them (one with the base of a steel cup as it tried to scurry up the wall) and then walked out of the bathroom and saw two long antenna poking out of the sink overflow mouth in the living room basin. Between this, the mosquitoes (not very many, but they carry filarisis), and the biting ants (flesh eating might be a better term... Hari told me about them. He had an infestation in his house and woke up with tracks of blood down his legs) I chose to sleep in the tent. I may do this for a while. I have considered purchasing some fake grass mats for the bed.
So it looks like I will get my grass bed. But the grass will be plastic. And there will be a tent in the middle.
Posted by jb at 10:38 PM | Comments (0)
May 06, 2007
After a morning of moving and an afternoon of cleaning and setting up and running to the store, the author of this blog entry sits down at a table in an empty house in Kerala, India and thinks
Wow, this is going to be more difficult than I thought.
Posted by jb at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)
May 05, 2007
The Haircut
Found a barbershop (a gents haircut shop) today and got a haircut. The same haircut that I have had since 2002: number four on the sides, scissors on top to even it out. The results vary widely from barbershop to barbershop but this one was nice. My hair grows pretty fast, and faster on the side of my head than the top so a balloon head devil horn profile creeps in about once a month and then I search around.
I like barbershops because they vary only within a narrow range, leaving individual barbers to localize in the details. The haircut that I had today was basically like the haircut I had at Ruffini's in West Grove, PA when I went to high school. Both were run by an older guy who focused on the repeat customers while some newer guys took other walk-ins. Ruffini's had a television at the side of the room with a game of baseball or football on depending on the season. He always had the same 12 issues of Car and Driver and an issue of Motorsports world. I didn't see any magazines today but there were some waiting chairs and some newspapers and a radio playing in the background, which fitzed out after we lost power. Cricket season is over but I suspect that the dormant TV in the corner runs matches during the year.
Some small differences: the barbershop today strung curtains between the chairs to provide privacy and the barber put talc on the back of neck which he swept around with a brush. He also used a small circular comb instead of the regular straight comb and did a lot of fixing and straightening. No razor work (Ruffini's did the hot lather and razor touch up around the ears, which has to be great for hyperactive kids) but there was a razor in the jar of cleaning fluid. When I paid, the barber, a guy in his twenties, asked me to come back and I think that I will.
Of course this was a good haircut and there are notable haircuts and not so notable haircuts. I used to go to Johnny's in Central Square and then switched over to the Barber Shop on Dunster street in Harvard after Johnny hired an iffy haircut guy who tried to give everyone, even the mostly bald guys, a pompadour. No TV at Johnny's but I did watch someone walk in an try to fence a 40 inch set before Johnny threw him out.
Photo of an Indian barbershop by MarellaLuca, who has an entire series on Barbers
Posted by jb at 02:53 PM | Comments (0)
The Pizza Cone is a horrible concept
Pizza corner, over in Spencer's Junction in Trivandrum placed some fliers the front desk of the Ginger hotel. The fliers, about 4x7, show calzones, focaccia, pizza sandwiches and pizza cones. Nowhere do they show an actual pizza. I'm not even sure that they make it. I spent some time this morning trying to decide which was less appealing: the pizza sandwich or the pizza cone. Eventually I went with the pizza cone, which looks a bit like an ice cream cone, with a thicker, doughy base stuffed with wads of white cheese, red and green bell peppers, and mushrooms. It is the next best thing to saying "Look, I don't know what I want to eat this afternoon, why not just give me cheese in a tube?" Anyway, the pizza corner people call it a Conizza, which is not the most inspired name. What happened to "Cheese Horn" or "Pizza Round Spear Tip" or "Cheese Rocket." I'd buy a cheese rocket. It's the sort of thing a kid would ask for and eat while riding his radio flyer bike back to the picket fence house with the TV antenna in the kitchen at the end of the dirt road near the baseball diamond.
Posted by jb at 12:14 AM | Comments (2)
May 04, 2007
Auto rickshaws give you that immediate, fatalistic feel for traffic
The house came through today, a three bedroom condo in Trivandrum, in Belhaven Gardens.
Took an auto rickshaw 30Km back to the hotel room near Technopark. When I first arrived in Trivandrum, I was looking forward to the Technopark. My hopes were crushed when I found out that it was devoted to technology and business process outsourcing. Nary a synthesizer in sight.
I'm flying back to Gurgaon the week after next, then back to Singapore for a week at the end of May.
Television still acts as a cultural ambassador. It probably has the widest reach of any medium. I think about this when I flip through the hotel channels. MTV has altered itself for India and now plays music videos. Other shows are dubbed in Hindi (a good narrative would have given me a "moment of awakening" when I saw Skeletor speak in Hindi on the dubbed version of He-Man yesterday but still nothing happened). The only totally undubbed and unaltered channel is the WWF channel. Strangely, WWF is popular in the little India section of Singapore as well. Crowds of people sit in plastic chairs outside the beer joints in little India, watching WWF, drinking beer, and conversatin'. Activists might like to believe that the current administration has made a strong impact on Amercia's image in the world but I'm beginning to suspect that Vince McMahon and John Cena have had a bigger impact.
Why do hotels offer free letterhead in the room desks? It's not as if I want to convince someone that I am an employee of the hotel. Maybe the hotel staff just sits there, waiting, so they can say "ah-ha!.. you used the letterhead...you work for us now."
Hari and I have been discussing transportation. I'd like an Enfield Bullet but a motorcycle requires a license which can make things confusing from a residency standpoint so I might need to step down to a scooter. In the best of all worlds, I'd get an auto rickshaw and give it a custom paint job. It would look badass and I would not get soaked during the monsoon season. it is weird that nobody buys an auto rick unless they are running a taxi service. sure, they have very little power but they are darn handy for errands.
I have not gone hiking or been to a museum/ art gallery in months. I miss both of these things.
I'll bet that there are vampires with a sweet tooth who chase diabetics around.
I've been thinking a lot about the baby crying contest in Japan, where Sumo wrestlers pick up babies and make faces and the baby that cries the loudest wins. Given the way memory shapes itself in infants, it could be that this event becomes the first fixed memory for some of these kids. What sort of first memory is that?
I wonder whether event amnesia is a common feature among kids who are developing an active memory. I might see something (like the sumo wrestler) that could become my first permanent memory but then some part of my brain elects to "lose" that first memory, waiting for something more pleasant.
It would be fun to make iron-on placemats that I could permanently affix to my table.
Posted by jb at 11:15 AM | Comments (3)