I had to call in sick on Monday.

Had been out all Sunday in the rain and sat through a miserable movie in a cold theater all drenched and so naturally I was sick. Also had to wear this moldy life jacket while practicing for a dragon boat race.

A talented and creative coworker, Emily Seawell, created this wonderful sick note for me using one of the myriad web applications available online.

Enjoy!

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This blog posting has nothing to do with Tampa Bay, but here goes.

We have a saying in my country that when two people fight, it always benefits a third party. The people who are in the fight always lose.

This story in one of the Indian newspapers mentions people from my state in India being killed in another state.

I don’t understand the political or ethnic motivations we have behind this kind of extreme action, but I do know that this is wrong. There is no argument in this world that justifies killing people.

There was another story a few days back of unrest in another state involving the same issues. So my question is, don’t we have enough enemies all over the world to contend with? Why do we need to fight amongst ourselves?

It just seems that since Pakistan and China are occupied with Al Qaeda and Tibet, our politicians have no one left to focus their energies on; so such unrests within the country are a great way to divert the attention of the Indian people from real issues and the failings of our politicians.

What we fail to understand is that we are presenting an image to the world that shows us as divided and belies our great culture based on universal harmony and all inclusiveness.

The same fight seems to be happening in the US too. Mrs. Clinton and Mr Obama are so focused on winning their party’s nominations that they have almost forgotten that an election is held to serve a Democracy. Working together would prove much more beneficial than working against each other. I know there is a lot of power involved in being the president of a great nation, but in my naivety I would like to think that the good of the nation should be of utmost importance.

And in the fight between the two Democratic nominees, John McCain will benefit.

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A colleague sent me a link to this video story(less than 5 minutes long) about arranged marriages. Like every other woman from India we have had this conversation or gone through the experience in some form or other.

So needless to say this resonated somewhere inside. It was ironical how almost all the married women interviewed in the story applauded the virtues of arranged marriage system and how all the single women shirked away from the concept.

Who is to say what works and what doesn’t? I have seen all types of marriages breaking up, irrespective of how it happened in the first place. Maybe as an institution it needs revisiting.

Kudos to Deepti Paul for taking her camera with her and presenting a slice of it. The video resonates because I am single and happy in America, although my parents felt that they failed in their duty by not finding a suitable man for me to “settle down with.”

Watch the video, you will get the drift.

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TAMPA - The mere mention of mangoes evokes within me a range of emotions. A series of images flashes in front of my eyes and I can almost taste the ripe, plush flesh of the fruit that is so popular in India.

Nothing drives home the fact I am away from my homeland like having to settle for the apology of a mango in local supermarkets.

Read Full Story | View Photo Gallery

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As I see my neighbor ride home in that honking big Hummer of hers while I slink by in my beat up jalopy, I wish I had the invisible mirror technology of James Bond on my car so that no one could see it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my little Honda, it has been with me through thick and thin. I have taken many a trips with it without any trouble. It still doesn’t give me any trouble but I am losing faith.

It has 166k miles on it.

I have a myriad of questions.

Will it still run?

What if I am stranded in the middle of the night somewhere?
What will I do if it starts to overheat and I have no gas station in sight and no water in the car?

Yes, yes, I have a cell phone. But what does that matter if my car gives up on me?

I have to have a certain degree of anxiety. After all I am a modern woman.

So I look at my neighbor’s Hummer with envy, and I tell myself I am doing a great service to the environment by running my Honda that gives me 33 miles per gallon. (in the city and yes this is indeed true). I tell myself, the Hummer is contributing to the fossil fuel extinction.

It is not the exterior that matters, it is how you are inside. I shall remain loyal to my car, till my mechanic convinces me to buy another.

I wish I could drive that Hummer, or at least not pull in at the same time my neighbor does. The dilemma of the modern woman consumes me.

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And now begins my nightmare of buying a car. Not a shiny, glossy, new one; but a used one that gets me from point A to B.

So I start with the classifieds in the paper and online searches. I am just browsing at the moment. I have to mentally prepare myself for the mouse clicks, footwork, phone calls and pricing issues.

I also have to brush up on my jargon, so that I am not treated as a “Ah! a woman driver!”

I just want the dealer to look at me and answer my questions pertaining to the car in a manner that doesn’t tell me that I am a caveman when it comes to a car. My apologies to the Geico caveman.

I sure can understand mileage, spark plugs, transmission, chassis, etc. I can also change a tire and put the coolant/anti freeze in the right area. Some respect here please?

For the moment I have several leads. Car Seeker at TBO.com, Autotrader, craigslist and local used cars sales stores.  What I don’t have is a used car that has caught my fancy.

Did I say used cars? I meant pre-owned vehicle.

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A week ago, my path crossed a snapper turtle’s. She was on the side of the road, all curious, adventurous and ready to cross the mighty road in front of her.

Her curiosity, unlike that of a cat, probably saved her life. She paused to look at my car, hurrying down the same road she was just about to cross.

I stopped too, alerted by her big head peeking out of the shell. I got our of my car to see if I could do anything to lure her back to the pond that she came from, to prevent her from getting crushed by an oncoming vehicle like mine.

She was huge and frankly, I was scared. So I waited on the side of the street with her for a braver driver to come our way. She waited with me.

So when that brave driver drove by and stopped, I was thrilled. She was just perplexed and a little annoyed by the delay.

I explained the situation to the driver, admitted I didn’t want to be bitten by her and I would rather he put himself at risk than I. A tad selfish, but hey, I was protecting the environment.

So he tried to pick up the turtle by the sides of the shell and she didn’t like it.  She reared and snapped at him and the poor brave soul had to take a step back. He then proceeded with caution and had to shove the animal with his foot into the grass and away from the road.

She didn’t disappear even then. She stood her ground, disgruntled and menacing. We shoved her as far as we could and then drove off.

One good deed of the day done.

Recently the log for backyard bird counting broke records in number of observations.

Although the snapper is not a bird, that was my backyard animal, and I haven’t stopped counting. I do get a red cardinal, or I think it is the red cardinal, pecking at the bird feeder outside my home. Keep counting.

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I can feel my bosses breathing down my neck. Haven’t updated the blog in a while and I am wondering if my year-end evaluation will have a sentence or two about it, or maybe not.

But lately there was so much to read all around with such a lot happening in Tampa Bay and with the Gator mania that I didn’t think anyone would even bother to click on this blog.

These days I am trying to figure out which animal is responsible for the brown earth mounds right along Bruce B. Downs Boulevard. I am going to take a picture on my way back home and figure out if we are seeing termites or ants or moles, or any other animal that makes such brown hills.

Worth exploring. 

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We have has so many animal abuse stories lately that it has affected even my tough heart. My usual reaction to pain is to tell my brain not to think about it. If I don’t dwell too long on the thing causing me extreme pain, I can usually stifle my urge to cry. It works most of the time. And when it doesn’t, well, I go ahead and have a good cry. Or spill my guts out to the few friends I have left.

All in all, I will say that I am blessed. I am blessed because I can articulate my pain, I can tell someone about it, and I have some recourse if I have been unjustly treated because I live in a ‘civilized’ society.

But the concept of civilized has been seriously tested given the incidents of some ducklings being trampled in Brandon, the legs of a crane being torn off in Pasco and cats being torched in Tampa, along with several other such incidents.

I don’t own a pet. I don’t go crazy over dressing animals and taking pictures. I love not having to pick up after a dog, because I don’t have one. I like animals at a distance, maybe peeking at me from its little brush home, or the green snake that suns itself on the banana plant, or the occasional turtle that loses its way and wanders onto my porch. I let them be, and they let me be myself. I do shoo away the lizards, I admit. My colleague told me that a newspaper works best. It lets me keep my distance.

I steadfastly follow the rules. No feeding the animals. I respect the fact that they own the earth as much as I do.

I wonder what makes a person drive a nail through the head of an animal that can’t speak. I wonder what gives someone the idea to stomp a duckling. I wonder if these people have a child, or plan to have one. I wonder if they are out looking for a homeless person to beat up, or bully a defenseless child, or mug an elderly woman.

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Forgive me blogmaster, for I have procrastinated. It has been a month since my last blog post.

And in the blogosphere, that is an anathema. So my salvation is hanging by the thread.

My life has been so mundane in the past few weeks that I encountered nothing interesting at all in my immediate world to write about. 

That is life. 

We never count the ordinary things that make our lives comfortable, we don’t thank our lucky stars everyday when we reach home safely without a dent in the car, or we have enough money in the wallet to buy the groceries and that our children have completed their homework. We don’t think twice about that stuff.

What stays in our memory are little mishaps that dog our day-to-day existence. We recount when someone nearly caused an accident, or sent a rude email, or the boss was in a foul mood, or if one didn’t get their just desserts or something else that makes one miserable. 

So to correct that, I am going to pay homage to my mundane, incident-free life. I lived an ordinary few weeks, I took a quick trip out of town, I didn’t have a single accident, no one tried to cut in front of me, and I am having a calm, albeit a sleepy day at work.

So maybe I can still have my salvation. A cup of coffee is all that I need to reach the pearly gates.

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I was a full moon evening on Friday as I was driving home.

Perfect, huge, circular, yellowish, blue moon.

And yet it didn’t look beautiful through the maze of street lights, store fronts and electrical overhead wiring.

As busy human beings we don’t get time to stop and smell the roses and I rarely feel a twinge of guilt about it. After all I am human. A busy one at that.

I am content if I get a glimpse of roses through store fronts and can buy a chilled bunch from my grocery store. I watch the grass on the roadside embankments. The only bird chirping I hear is an awful alarm in my office building when someone fails to pick up the phone.

Like I was saying, I am not overly disappointed if I don’t walk on the grass or feel the sand between my toes, but something about the moon paling in the distance got to me.

The Starbucks sign was brighter and rounder, the neon light of the night club was bluer, the street light was more yellow. The old woman on the moon was crisscrossed by the overhanging TECO poles and wires.

It was beauty marred. The headlights of my car illuminated the road in front of me, the exhaust left my share of pollutants on the street behind me.

Like I said - beauty marred.

Once in a blue moon, I would like to see the full moon uninterrupted.

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Think about it, if it is about convenience how do I get slapped with a fee? What is the whole point of paying online or over the phone and trying to go paperless and save a 39 cents stamp if one is to be charged $3 or $10 for the convenience of trying to pay bills?

And some of the companies don’t even tell you till the very end that a convenience fee will be charged if one attempts to try and save some trees and spare the paper shredder.

It is not as if filling up online personal information database or talking to an automaton on the phone is very convenient.

I don’t consider myself a penny pincher, but there is something really wrong about having to pay extra on top of all the various penny and dime taxes added to the bills. (whine whine)

Of course I have a choice - to continue with the snail mail payment plans. But the point of convenience is to be convenient.

Imagine if all the fees were dropped, even more people would pay online or over the phones, the companies will have to send less paper to homes, think of all the trees that would save. How naïve of me to expect that!

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Today was a day of accidents.

I saw three ambulances on my way to work, one accident just before the intersection of Bruce B. Downs and 138th Street, one disabled truck on the side of northbound I-275 just after the Fowler exit.

Another accident close to the Sligh Avenue exit on the same route.

Nothing major, small incidents that clog the roadways. Nothing that can be used as an excuse to be late to work.

Drove to work at 20 mph on an interstate with the minimum speed limit of 40.

Took one hour to cover 16 miles.

Did I mention it is a Monday morning?

An article a few days ago said Tampa would soon have traffic like Atlanta (in the year 2010).

Is it 2010 already?

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I was at a local grocery store the other night, close to closing time. As I headed out, I saw a grandfather struggling with the groceries and trying to keep his grandchild in his line of vision.

The little girl was scampering around, and headed the opposite direction from that of her grandpa. I stopped and mumbled for her to turn around and head in the general direction but the child was distracted and in her own little safe world.

She hurried along, oblivious to where her relative was and stopped short when she came across a pair of sturdy legs. She looked up, startled, into the face of a man who was filling water from the water vending machines.

Her face changed from careless to stunned and then fearful within the split second.

She looked up, spread her arms out, and said, “Please don’t take me.”

The man who was filling the water was stunned too, he was not in a good situation. He looked around and was almost relieved to see me watching them.

The girl by then had run back to her grandfather, and I am guessing she will not wander too far from him.

It made me incredibly sad, to see that we live in such times where a 5-year-old has to be made aware of the dangers of abduction.

It was a good thing that the man was in a crowded grocery store with someone witnessing the whole situation, or it could have placed him in an awkward position.

Try explaining to someone why a child is requesting you not to take them away.

I walked out, in some ways relieved that the child was aware enough, in other ways apprehensive of the vulnerability of a child.

The missing and dead children on the news don’t help either.

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Someone was mentioning in the lunch room about how rude people have become lately, and was wondering if the newsroom was running a story on it. The problem was that rude behavior is so rampant that it has just become another thing we just deal with and move forward.

From children to drivers to sales and customer service people, it seems that rude is the way to go.

When I had moved to Tampa about five years ago, you could see a wave of a hand as a thank you gesture if you let someone cut in front of you on the road. Gradually, the number of such nice gestures has been replaced by the flip of the finger, sharp honking etc.

We hear of road rage and learn how not to react to an uncivil driver. We learn to be civil when we call for customer service and are met by rudeness. We learn to hold our tongues when we encounter angry customers calling.

There is no excuse for being rude, it just leaves a bad taste in the mouth and ruins someone’s perfectly good day.

Most of us want to live in a civil environment in peace. It is not too difficult to think before one speaks; it saves a lot of aggression and anguish.

I just know that what goes around comes around, and if it is rudeness going around then it doesn’t make for a good return package.

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