Single Life

Why do people choose to be single. I know people who have remained single throughout their life. There are also middle aged people who are single.

Who do they choose to remain so?

Single life is depressing at best. Everybody needs sex, atleast I assume everybody does. For a single it is difficult. Even in USA which is a more open society, it is difficult to have NSA. It is expensive and illegal to go to a prostitute, most importantly, it is also dangerous. Sexual frustration builds up, it affects everyday life. This is unbearable. Then people go to strip clubs, and pay women just to have their hips grinded on their thighs. Why would somebody want to do that. Unless of course somebody is as desperate as I am.

I dont know.

Most of all, there are emotional needs. Everybody has emotional needs. Everybody wants a shoulder to lean back on, to rest. The world can be a cruel place. Where does one find peace, if not on the shoulder of a loved one.

I would rather marry somebody with whom I am not perfectly matched, than remain single. A few months before also, I used to think differently. Now, things are slowly changing. I think most people come to this realization . Or maybe not. who knows.

Misc.

Life is lonely. I mostly mix with the Indian community here. Well, even that is an overshoot. Not really. I don't normally go to the "Indian" Association stuff like Diwali etc. WTF! Its kinda not my thing. I am more of a quiet person.

I mostly mix with people from my region (like people who speak the same mother tongue as me). So thats a quite restrictive friend's circle. Its a small one, but I used to feel comfortable in it. But these days, I find mot of these people terribly irritating. Most of them are from the cities, whereas I am from a small town. The small town disdain always shows in their regular conversations, which I like, totally totally hate. Its difficult to sit through their conversations sometimes these days, let alone participate. Also, there are a few new people in the group, who are like, extreme egotists.

Why is it so difficult for people to have normal, relaxing conversations, without demeaning others etc? And why does socializing need such enormous efforts. I mean its sort of affecting my studies too. I was supposed to do an assignment in the weekend. I wasted the whole time thinking about my obnoxious friends and all. This is so depressing. Maybe, I should change my friends circle. But thats easier said than done. I want to get out of PhD and this place asap, i am kind of tired of this BS.

or maybe a more optimistic thought is to go mix with a lot of other people. That might help. I dont know.

BTW, I am still doing the strip club thing. I spent about $70 the other day in the club. I sort of felt desperate, and cheated. The girl was some old hag, who promised me a few extra frills. She did offer the extra frills, but it was not as great as I thought it would be. The unaffected business like behavior does not turn me on. But I guess I am going back this week too.

WTF! I cant believe I am sitting here writing this. Havent had food. I have stopped cooking at home a long time ago. I survive mainly on Subway etc. I must go get some a subway 6 inch, and complete the rest of the homework. Although I dont feel like doing anything. I feel totally demotivated. No social life, no girlfriend, only dreary work. Well, the work does interest me and I guess that is why I am still surviving. But I am also sort of reaching a breaking point. I am tired of fighting battles alone.

Strip Clubs

First, let me just come out a little. I am Indian, as some of you might have already guessed. Thats not too much of a coming out anyway, since Indians make up the highest percentage of foreign grad students in the United States. But it helps to understand some of my cultural references.

I have started going to the strip club for a few weeks now. It seems to be the only safe, affordable, legal way of getting rid of some of my sexual frustrations. Also, I am "feeling" women for the first time in my life. Its kind of sad that I have never felt a woman's touch (not the motherly or the auntly one) in my life, and of all places, it is a strip club where I have to go to experience it. However, it is helpful to me for a number of reasons. It gives a safe outlet to my frustrated sexual desires, which keeps it from going too kinky and all. I am slowly becoming more vanilla, or so I hope.

Anyway, so I was thinking of going to the club today (I find it really funny that they call it a Gentleman's club) but dropped the idea because of the rains. Also because on Sunday there's a student discount on the cover in a more upscale place(again I find it funny, student discount in a strip club), so I thought I may as well waste my one dollar notes there.

So, my bus was going along the street where the joint is. I suddenly remembered the conversation with a stripper I was having. This stripper, who was particularly kind to me in letting me touch her, told me her name was Kendra. So I was searching for the name in the club website,but could not locate her in the dancer schedule. So that reminded me of an old old Hindi movie I saw in my childhood, where the herione is a "wasted woman" who asks the hero "mere naam nahi puchhoge?" (Wont you ask my name?) and the hero answers "Poochne se faayda, tum jaise ladki to kapre ke tarah apne nam badalte ho" (Whats the point in asking, girls like you change their names as frequently as they change dresses"). I also remembered how strict my parents were about watching Hindi movies. Apparently, watching such movies were supposedly going to spoil your character. huh!

I had a silent chuckle about their conservatism, and what that has led to. Simple entertainments were not permitted since they would spoil the child's character, and here is the child, a few years from that, going to cheap strip joints and spending money on a stripper. I was wondering what they would think of the success of their parenting! :-)

Socializing at Conference

I am at a conference, like some top conference in my field. I am still not comfortable with a lot of stuff in the field. In terms of science, I feel like I will have to learn a lot before I can really go to most of these talks and understand stuff. I understand some of the stuff, but a lot of it still eludes me.

Anyway, what eludes me more is the socializing at conf. thing. Important people talking to each other etc. Advisors are supposed to introduce you to people, but A doesn't. And I don't know why. A knows almost everybody worth knowking here. But she has not introduced me to anybody, not even her own advisor. This is ridiculous! A is not really a bad advisor in many ways, but I found this totally totally rude. especially because this is not the rule. She is introducing my former lab mate to a lot of people. So, i was majorly pissed throughout the conference, trying to go about like some outsider standing in a corner.

Whatever, my talk went okay. Although I would have liked to go to a conference more directly related to my work. People here are sort of excited about the work but they don't understand the nitty gritties of the work. So, I did not get extremely relevant questions. rather it was more like "I saw X happening in the movie you showed" or "what happens if you do Y experiment"

Its again one of those Monday mornings, the way Monday mornings should never be.

I came in late. Was partying with friends till late in the night yesterday.

I am checking out social networking sites on the net since then.

I need to do a lot of work, but havent started yet, and its already "late lunch" time.

Yesterday, there was a lot of discussion about online romances that friends and acquaintances are having over these social networking sites. Over the years, I have become severely dependent on social networking. One of the major reasons for that is the absence of an offline friend's network that I can rely on. I am kind of a shy, bookish kind of boy, and socializing has never been my forte.Online social networking seems to be the ideal way for me to socialize.

However, I sort of felt frustrated to know, that inspite of the endless hours that I "waste" on the sites, I have not been able to come up with a single semi-serious fling!

I guess I am to serious to flirt or something.

Anyways, I want to to change that. I need to. Its not easy being a a single grad student in the US when you are a foreigner. First, race and skin color become an obvious barrier in dating. Secondly, it is also difficult to find somebody of your own liking, in your school. Its much easier back in my native country. I dont think I explained myself properly there. Will try to write more about it someday. But I guess the only chance that I have now is through online socializing.

Other than that, I dont see much hope for myself.

Also, my PhD is in tatters but I will talk of that sometime later.

Furtive Glances

I am sitting in the library, trying to wrench out data from a set of experiments.Bored and feeling sleepy. One of the advantages of sitting in the library is that you can catch glimpses of the legs of nice girls. Right now, a fat white girl with glasses on, is sitting beside me. I am staring at her legs.

Slowly, this PhD which is sort of falling apart (or has always been like that), and the absence of a significant other, is making me sick. I am thinking of going back to my higschool sweetheart, with whom I sort of broke up. She doesn't seem sexy enough, I also have a lot of fetish issues, which makes it difficult for me. But otherwise, she is a nice girl. This semester is sort of the litmus test for me. Both academically and personally. The life of a "loser" looks interesting for some time, but there is also a time when beating off to varieties of internet porn and other's sexual experiences becomes so boring. I have never loved somebody in my entire life, it seems. It also is rather sad...

Anyway, I have to collect a few data points and try to draw a graph it seems. Hence, I will take leave for now. In the following days, I plan to give you a glimpse of my sad "single male in an unhappy PhD" experience. There are very few places where I can rant as freely, and talk my mind out. Hence, I will use this space for that.

Is this true of all advisors, or is it my advisor and my project alone?
Why does A ask the most stupid questions?
I dont understand this. Seriously.

May be I don't explain clearly enough. Or it may also be that A is not paying enough attention to my project. I propose two different stuff, with different boundary conditions, and a long explanation for each set of experiments. A puts a note saying how are these two different!
Seriously!
did you go through them?

Maybe I am being too harsh on A. But I feel mad today, with too much stress and too much work.
Fuck!

I am really annoyed at Fedex.
I am supposed to recieve an important pacakge.
mo'fuckers got an imconmplete address from the company which was shipping me the package.
Then they did not deliver because the address was incorrect.
I offered to pick it up from their facility.
They asked me to come over.

I went by bus to some run down place where nobody would even found my body if someone shot me (yeah, the place was scary even in the afternoon).
This guy checks for ten minutes and tells me that the driver is not back.

What the fuck!

The guy wasted my whole day.
and now he is going to waste tomorrow too.

dude! I have to work.
I cant have some stupid shipping company clerical error waste my days.
This is ridiculous.

just wanted to rant!
That is what this place is for.

Also, I am desperately searching for a girlfriend.More on that later.

I am planning to update this blog yet again. I never write blogs regularly. Even my primary blog suffers from lean phases. For months, I never write anything, and then, suddenly, I realize, that blogs are the great blessing of the internet, and it is the best way to spend one's time on the internet.

I intended to make this blog my secret diary, a place to record those thoughts, which cannot be written in the public blog,for various reasons. However, even in this world of anonymity, it is difficult to shed the mask and come out of the closet (not in the oft used sense of the word). However, it is important, that I do write about stuff that is bothering me, and cannot be shared with friends, family etc. for reasons, that will become clear in future posts.

I am passing through a transition phase in my personal life, which may either turn out to be a success, or may finally amount to nothing (which I fear), finally pushing me to the margins of middle class social life, a fate which I want to avoid at this stage of my life.

However, as usual, it is lunchtime, Friday, and there is a lot to be done, before the meeting on Monday with S. I have not even started doing experiments,let alone interpret the results etc.

So, the rant has to take a backseat for the present. The weekend will probably find me in a more candid mood, provided I get work done properly today.

Okay. There was not much that I could show my advisor at work today. A was definitely not satisfied. She did not explicitly say anything, but I could make out from her answers that she expected more work. The other thing that jolted me a bit was FSP's post about the amount of work that graduate students need to give in.

I need to make certain effective changes to my working order. First of all, I need to draw out a schedule for the week, and try to stick to it. As circumstances change, I should try to update the schedule, and keep track of what went "out of schedule where". Secondly, I need to keep wokring on parallel tracks, so that I get results on thing B even if thing A fails (and C and D and so on).
Also, I need to make a schedule for the day as soon as I come to the lab. This is important so that I do not waste time. Half the time, I don't know what I am doing. I am working, trying to fix things, but at the end of the day, there is not much to show for me. Also,not to mention, I spend a lot of time doing idle things in the internet. Like yesterday, I was looking for Nabokov videos on youtube.

Anyway, the other thing is that I must try to build up from simple stuff. There is no use trying to do complicated stuff and getting frustrated. Also, I should have an idea at each point of time about the results, accuracy etc. that I expect, and I should try to get some data as I go along. probably the pangs of repentance are strong since I have just gotten out of a meeting, but let me make a point of recording this, so that it does not get lost in the recesses of of my mind while I think of other things. I am going for lunch now. I will come back and devise a plan for today after I come back.

Obama rant: No,I did not listen to Obama's speech yesterday. Although it was at lunch time,I decided not to watch it. Mainly because I do not feel like hearing him nowadays. In years, for the first time, I had believed a politician,among many, but it seems to me ,Obama, like many things American (no offence meant!) is just another consumer good, marketed nicely for the American people. His intentions to usher in a chage have in doubt from the first day, since "tough talking, Israel sympathizer" Rahm Emmanuel's appointment. His appointments form then on have become murkier and murkier. Where are the liberals in his team,may I ask? Where is Krugman?
I definitely expected to see someone of that stature and political color as he or Stiglitz in the administration. With all his talk of bipartisanship,I am not impressed. One has to take a political position, and Obama now seems more right of centre, rather than the left of centre image that he has tried to portray in the media in his days as a "phenomenon". More dissapointing, however, is his complete silence on the Gaza issue. With all his talk about a more compassionate foreign policy, this is what he finally does. Complete,complete silence. He now seems to me to be just another pompous fool (clever he certainly is, wise maybe, but no, not compassionate for sure) who knows his way with words, but cannot walk the talk.

Dostoevsky: I am trying to read Dostoevsky, for the first time. I have started "Crime and Punishment". I have gone through the first 40 pages. Looks good, but I would wait to give an opinion. I liked "Sonia is the eternal victim, till the world lasts".

Just wanted to add this, before I go. My life is now centered on work, and reading books (literature that is). I am trying to add the gym thing into it, but no quite working out. Seems too tiring for me. Also, I am kind of feeling the need for a relationship now. and then there's this girl whom I dont like, has fallen for me. She was drunk last weekend, to the point of being wasted, and she almost told me what was on her mind. But, I abhor her to the point, that I cannot have a working social talk-for-a-few-minutes-on - an-weekend relationship with her, let alone a proper "intimate relationship". Why do I get hit on by the wrong girls? This was the problem with my last girlfriend too.

Anyway, there's too much on the plate now. Research wise, or otherwise. Now,let me get some food on my plate to eat!
(Ah, the lunch in the univ sucks!:x)

Why did I stop writing

dont know. For one thing, I was taking a break,during the Christmas-New Year. and then, I had sort of stopped writing for no reason. or rather,I had (have) gone back to the old habit of social networking,which takes up my time in the office. I guess I will try to revert back on Monday. Today is a Saturday. I had planned to work, but somehow, it did not materialize. I can go to the office now. But I have certain other things to look into. I have to wash my clothes.

I am going through a tough time with my PhD. As I have already realized, the PhD was a wrong choice for me. I wanted to do theoretical work. I am more of a sit-with-paper-pen-do math kind of a guy, rather than a make-things-work kind of an engineering kid. Hence, doing hardcore experimental work was a bad choice. Above this, my experimental work, I believe, is tougher than the average PhD. At one point,I thought this was totally impossible. Now,I am getting certain insights, but I still think, there is a long way to go, before I can produce anything in terms of experimental results on this. My ideas are hitting a dead end, I am often hitting my head on the wall (not literally, at least not yet!) and nothing is coming out. Hence, the situation is quite difficult.

I would have shifted to a different PhD. I had tried doing it in my own Department. However, it did not work out. Also, with the economy in a recession, there is no point in applying again, and be left with no PhD.

Things are difficult. I am trying to manage things, but slowly they are getting out of hand. I giess more than a researcher, I have to become a manager at this stage, trying to find out what is the shrotest and most efficient path to a PhD,rather than the ost innovative one. I would probably get a chance to do my more innovative work after my PhD, not during it. I should be going off to wash my clothes, and carry on the normal columns from Monday.

Meanwhile, it is horribly cold outside, and the heating in the room is not sufficient. The travails of a graduate student :(