Me :P

I promised myself I'd put up one post a month. But I guess I'll just have to add that to the long list of promises (mostly to myself) that I've broken. Now you know why I hardly ever make New Year resolutions... I just can't keep them up! There was this one time when I resolved I'd brush my teeth twice a day. I did fine till July, and then I fell back into my old habit of brushing only once (that too in a cursory way) a day, unless occasion demanded otherwise (now, just why did I have to tell you that?? Oh well... now you know me a little better!).

I never realized how hard it can be when someone says, "Tell me something about yourself!"... After studiously avoiding the 'About Me' fields on Orkut and Facebook, I was really stumped when someone asked me to say something about myself. Seriously, what should I say? That I brush once a day?

I did answer that question. I ended up talking for a very long time, and I never really finished. But that got me thinking... I barely know myself!

I know internship was supposed to be all about self-discovery and deep introspection and... you get it! Well, in Pondicherry, I was too busy having a good time to do any of that. But in Adukkamparai, where I had very little work in the hospital and even less things to do in my free time, I could’ve sat in my room (it’s really too hot to sit anywhere else, unless I sat in the bathroom. Bathrooms are good places to think, but… never mind) and thought. But I didn’t do much of that, because I thought it’d be really boring.

However, I did notice a few things about me that I hadn’t done before:

• I’ve gotten good at washing clothes, and I enjoy it too
• I read fast.
• I knew I talked in my sleep, and occasionally walked, too. But once, when I was in Vellore, I sleep-dialed my friend’s number and called him, at 5 in the morning. It wasn’t an accident, and I’m sorry it happened, especially since it was an out-of-state call.
• I’m fussy about breakfast
• I tan easily
• I can eat ice cream really fast
• I talk incessantly
• I have over 1400 songs on my laptop, but I listen regularly to only 148 of them
• I like giving lectures. We had to give a set of orientation lectures to the MBBS students in Vellore, and I enjoyed myself immensely
• I like bus journeys.
• I like making lists.

I guess that’s about all the ‘self discovery’ I’ve managed to do. I spent my free time doing more constructive things than thinking about myself. Here’s what I got up to:

• I read 21 books- Three by Jeffrey Archer, one Agatha Christie, five by Michael Crichton, two by Ken Follett, two by Amitav Ghosh, two by Arthur Hailey, three by Erich Segal, a collection of Egyptian murder mysteries, and two Mills and Boons whose names I do not remember. I often fell asleep while reading those. My friend wondered how romances can put anyone to sleep, but believe me, they do.
• I also read the Bhagavad Gita. Though I’m not a religious person, I liked reading it. I don’t claim to have understood it fully, but bits of it made sense, and the message was pretty clear.
• I watched 12 movies, most of them Tamil. Most of them sucked. I even watched No Smoking, which was harder than the Gita to understand. I gave up on that movie, ultimately.
• I took to making pencil sketches. I’m not very good at it, but I have a weird love for pencils and plain, white paper. I’m not a very creative person; I usually just copied the picture from somewhere… pictures on book covers or photographs
• I learned to sleep in the afternoons. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s the boredom, but in spite of being the same person who, as a kid, used to sit and make toy chairs out of the cardboard cartons of toothpaste tubes (or embossed foil photo frames out of used toothpaste tubes, or I'd write messages on the mirror using toothpaste… you might say I had a thing for toothpaste) when the entire family slept, I started taking after-lunch naps. Long ones, too.

Some 'self-discovery', huh? :P