At one with nature

It's come to my realisation that I have to pee more frequently when it rains. Which makes sense to me - I mean, you can see all that water, hear the pitter patter, it's only natural that you'd want to pee, isn't it? What I don't get is how, when I'm sitting in my windowless office in the furthest innards of our building, the rain can still make me want to pee more. Hell, I don't even need to check a window to know it's raining, I can just tell that from my bladderly complaints.

My bladder has developed some kind of intuitive, subversive connection with the weather, for which I feel both an awe and a decided disgruntledness.

Birthday picnic

For the last however many years, I've always had a picnic to celebrate my birthday. I mean, what's the point of a summer birthday if it isn't to get sun-saturated and strawberry-satiated in the grass?!

Jeet had reminded me a couple of weeks before of the Cloisters, which have long been on my list of New York must-sees. So I cobbled together a list of ye regular cronies, and suggested we all make the trip up there. There is an automatic, albeit unintended, distrust of the outside that comes with living in Manhattan. 190th Street?! People reacted. Is that even still New York?! But despite initial rumblings, everyone pitched up sans further ado.

In a moment of impulsive generosity, I offered to take care of all the food. I shouldn't have trusted myself. I woke up early the morning of the picnic (despite the remnant spinning head from the night before) and rushed to the supermarket to pick up supplies. Bread, cold cuts, fruit, tomatoes, lettuce, disposable crockery and cutlery, I was Miss Efficiency. Rushed back home, chopped up all the tomatoes and lettuce, packed every thing neatly into tupperwares.

Grabbed Delta's hand, rushed out the door with the coolers, forgot all the neatly cut and tupperwared vegetables in the fridge. Typical. This means we had rather dry sandwiches at the picnic, devoid of lettuce and tomatoes. It also means that poor Delta has been living on a diet of tomatoes and lettuce since then, in a valiant effort to make some headway into the food containers filling up his fridge.

Speaking of coolers by the way, that's a new Americanism I learnt thanks to the picnic. Delta and I were at the supermarket, and I asked one of the workers there, "Excuse me, could you please tell us where you keep your picnic hampers?" I swear to you, I thought that's what they were called.
"Hampers?!" Delta was snickering, "isn't that where you keep your dirty laundry?!"
"Oh. Really? It's not what you take to a picnic?"
"Not here, silly! He's never going to understand what you mean," he said, referring to the employee standing in front of us.

Turned out the employee didn't understand English anyway, ha ha, that's what I love about New York. I could have called it anything in the world, ultimately it was the repeated box-shaped gestures I was doing with my hands that helped him realise what I was talking about.

Birthday wish list

Dear Gawd (or Santa),

For my burday, could you please invent silent garbage trucks which do not wake up the entire neighbourhood?

I think I've been reasonably good all year. (Except that time Sarah's dog pooped in the park and I couldn't bring myself to clean it, but that really was an ungawdly quantity, I'm sure even you will agree?)

Sincerely, and with great faith,
Ficali

Baby boomers take the town

Ambling home from work together this evening, I was grumbling to MetroHom, "I can't believe the amount of new apartment buildings they're putting up here in the city! And worse yet, they're all still selling!"
"It's the baby boomers," MetroHom told me sagely. "As they retire, they're moving to smaller apartments in the city so they don't have lawns to mow."

I thought about that a moment.
"No," I disagreed. "Retiring people may move to retirement communities. But they wouldn't come to the city! It's just too difficult." I thought about dirt, and the traffic, and the honking cabs.
"Sure they would, where else do you get your laundry delivered to your doorstep for a couple of bucks."
"But the city has rats and roaches."
"The city has doormen who protect you from everything."
"But they would have to walk to the supermarket."
"They would have Fresh Direct. They would never have to walk anywhere again."
"But they would have to deal with cabs honking at them if they took too long to cross the intersection."
"Have you seen the old people here? They'd just flick off the cabs!"
"But they would - "
"They'd get restaurant food home delivered," he cut me off.
That caught me in my stride.
"Hmm, you're right. The city is really is a pretty cool place to grow old in."

I'd momentarily forgotten that these were the same people pricing me out of the housing market. But let's leave that aside for now. I'm quite enjoying this romanticised image of New York.

The pain of prevention

"Have you guys started thinking about vaccinations yet?!" Jenn asked.

I have to confess, it hadn't even occurred to me. Having grown up in India, I somehow go through life on the naiive assumption that my body already naturally contains the entire gamut of immunities needed to safeguard itself against all potential world-known infections. So while our planned trip to Ecuador conjured up all sorts of romanticised images of the Galapagos, I had, in typical Ficali fashion, forgotten to take into account the practicalities of health concerns.

So I responded with an embarrassed, "Eeps. Which ones do I need to worry about?"

"Well, there's Yellow Fever."
"And there's Hep A," Doug added.
"And you should probably think about tetanus and malaria."
"And don't forget your insurance won't cover any of this." They smirked. I narrowed my eyes.
"And there's one of them you need to get about six months in advance, so you should probably go to your doctor right about now."

Crikey.

So I quickly hopped online, nifty googler that I am, to check from a source of authority what I really needed to take. And I found, to my disappointment, that Jenn and Doug were right. As usual. On all counts.

Looks like I'll be calling ye' ol' doc for Yellow Fever-and-HepA-and-tetanus-and-malaria. At the very least.

Now I'm just hoping that none of them are administered on the buttocks.

Did we stop to think of the day after?

I was waiting at a traffic light to cross the road yesterday, when a road-cleaning car passed by. You know, one of those cars with two rotating suction fans in the front, inching painstakingly along the road. It rattled and boomed and groaned past me, ploughing through the trash on the road, leaving behind it a wake of surprising cleanliness.

I was just marveling at it's apparent efficiency when suddenly it came to a clanging halt by the sidewalk. The driver craned his neck out the window, trying to catch a glimpse of what had gone wrong. A streamer had gotten caught in one of the front suction fans. So he parked the unmanoeverable car to the side, jumped out, rounded the car to inspect the fan. There was nothing to it but brute force, so he braced his feet against the tire, took hold of the streamer, and leaned back, using bodily weight to coax the streamer out. The streamer suddenly snapped, and he fell back, plomping his bottom sharply on the sidewalk. He stood up quickly, glancing around to see if anyone had noticed, dusting his posterior and hurrying back to the car.

Looked like things were functioning again, because the car immediately re-started down the road. It proceeded another twenty yards or so, and then came to a stop again by the sidewalk. The cleaner peered out the window. Another streamer in the suction fan. Sigh. Again, he clambered out to assiduously cater to the fan, like he had probably done at least twenty times that morning before I saw him. The whole process was so painstaking, and he did it so conscientiously, it tore my heart.

I can't believe we've invented satellites that can study pluto, and we haven't as yet got around to inventing road cleaning cars that can cope with the aftermath of July 4th celebrations.

Weekend with the girls

"Let's do a white trash weekend in Atlantic City!!!"

"Huh?!"

"There's got to be spangles. And it's got to look very eighties. And there's got to be some resemblance to the episode in Sex in the City when they went to Atlantic City for the weekend!"

"Huh?!" Jenn was excitedly cooking up a plan again.

What with this being one of Sarah's last weekends before moving to Seattle, it called for a girly weekend of fun and frolic. Sarah's departure is a terrible loss to us. So what if she's doing it for her fella, is that justification enough to quit the group?! I try to bear a grudge, but then I look at the radiant beam in her face as she talks about living with her man out West, and it's impossible to not just be happy for her.

So it came to be that we found ourselves, reasonably early for a Saturday, bundled into a Greyhound heading for AC. Other than the five of us, everyone else on the bus had to be in the senior citizen category. I never knew old people were such gamblers, the sly foxes. But now after this weekend in AC, the next time I bump into an old person I'll exchange a knowing look with them. Now, I know.

The busride to AC was pretty uneventful. Unlike the busride back, when we found ourselves in seats right by the toilet. I have no idea what people do in bus toilets, but after surviving that unbearable stench for the entire return journey, it's safe to say I'm sworn off bus travel for the foreseeable future.

When we got to AC, we headed straight for the boardwalk and strolled along the beachside bars. Found a rooftop pool and planted our posteriors right beside it. There's something about radiant warm sunshine and chilled white wine that just goes together like peas in a pod.

Over the course of the evening, we proceeded to bless with our presence each of the beachside bars in linear fashion. A wine here, a beer there. A cocktail, and then some dinner. And before we knew it, the entire evening and night had silently slipped by, and we could already see the soft glow of the rising sun as we strolled on the boadwalk back towards the hotel.

That's the beautiful thing about a weekend with the girls. It was a weekend of continuous laughter and shared experiences. Of swapping tales and opening hearts. Oh yeah, and of becoming millionnaires.