memoirs of a diva

when was the last time i finished an entire book in one day? today was: waking at eleven, dropping all going-out plans, just lying in bed the whole day listening to the rain and finishing How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild And Got A Life (really really hilarious book, everyone who's ever applied to university in the US, especially if they're indian, has to read this), receiving unexpected $$$ from the parents and grandparents because today's the tamil new year. my grandma made my favourite payasam, a sweet soupy rice thing which is one of the very few indian sweet things that i like. in the evening, when i had about 15 pages of the book left, i had a bowl of payasam and then a bowl of my mom's special aglio olio. it is heaven. these are the ingredients to a perfect first day of emancipation

yes friends, i have finally ended my little stint at citibank :):):) and it really is the beginning of emancipation, because after the A Levels there was the rush of university applications which only got over at the beginning of jan (and even then there was still the michigan application left), and the second week of jan i started work, and that hasn't stopped until yesterday evening!

yesterday was a sort of emotional rollercoaster. slightly less dramatic than that. in the morning i was totally pissed off with my colleagues because a couple of them were sitting and bitching about the others, and i was So So SO glad it was my last day. it wasn't the first time i'd played witness to vicious bitching. and honestly it's not like i'm morally averse to bitching or anything -- i'd be the last person to declare something like that, or the most hypocritical one if i actually did. but it's just depressing when everybody's bitching about everybody else and nobody bothers to shut up if i'm around, because i'm just an intern and i'll be gone soon and all that, and i'm left wondering whether it's just immensely poor judgement on my part to think that any of them are nice people.

but by the end of the day i decided that i would miss them. a couple of them (the ones being bitched about in the morning) were away manning a citibank booth at the Affair With India exhibition in the meritus mandarin, so in the evening they called me up to say bye and that they would miss me, which is very sweet. my slave-driver told me that she was very depressed that i would no longer be around, and it was cute because she confessed that it was partly because now she'd have to do her own work. so i forgave her for her slave-driverly ways. and i had a long conversation with the manager who has to sign all the forms that i submit for processing, after i reassured her that the 20 forms i was putting in front of her were the last i'd ever put in front of her, hopefully. she's 24 and her parents are bugging her to get married and they're trying to set her up with nice Indian boys and she was moping because she doesn't have a suitable alternative to present and therefore might have to give in to an arranged marriage. and she has no logical objection to arranged marriage, knows that there's a high success rate (gee it sounds like a surgical procedure) and she personally knows arranged-marriage couples who are very happy, but the thought that she might be part of the whole institution soon just left her really bemused. and it occurred to me that she's not much older than me and it's not unlikely that i'll be in the same situation in a few years. it certainly is a bemusement-inducing thought. anyway loads of them were promising to take advantage of the three-day accommodation rule in UofC dorms, so hopefully maybe i'll have a chance to see some people whose priorities won't include visiting chicago's famous Dead Cows (read: steakhouses, which are unfortunately on the top of kitson's hitlist if he ever visits me in chicago. i suppose i should atleast thank him for informing me that chicago's famous for it's steak, it's a good piece of trivia to be aware of.)

to come back to the exhibition at Meritus Mandarin, that was how i spent my wednesday evening. i'd told them i wouldn't mind manning the booth if i was needed, but thankfully i wasn't. instead, i met my mom at the exhibition where she wanted me to see some jewelry she was thinking of buying, but she didn't buy that; instead she bought me a pair of gorgeous indo-victorian chandelierish earrings. they're really long and bright though so i'm going to have to look hard to find an appropriate occasion for them. or just rock them with a black top and jeans.

and then we went for the "exclusive fashion show" by rana gill, who is an indian designer and therefore one would expect some indian element to the clothes. instead, there was a lot of lace and polka dots and black and red and white and balenciaga-esque jackets and marc jacobs-esque skirts. when you're trying to sell to a room full of indian women who're valued customers of the citibank NRI division (or wives of valued customers, more like) it's unlikely that they'll be wanting to wear miniskirts made of basically one layer of lace and nothing else. it was a thoroughly uninspired, uninspiring collection, AND the show started a whole HOUR later than it was supposed to, after which the indian ambassador delivered a long boring speech, after which the models trotted out. though the balenciaga jackets are probably at less-than-balenciaga prices so my mom and i are planning to check them out at mumbai se sometime. now i have Time To Go Shopping With The Maternal Unit! yayyy. anyway, because the show started so late and was so boring, my mom and a bunch of her friends decided to leave halfway. thank god, because my boss and HIS boss were there and my mom kept saying she wanted to talk to them. my boss's boss doesn't even know me, but my mom insists that she wanted to talk to him anyway because he's a good friend of my uncle who got me my job. it would have been totally embarrassing anyway.

but i must say, if there's one thing i admire about my mother, it's her ability to talk about anything to anyone. everyone, really, because if that evening proved anything to me, it was the amazing diameter, circumference, HUGE area of my mother's social circle. she couldn't turn in that room without bumping into someone she knew, and it really takes a special kind of energy to remember everybody's mother, son, sister and ask after them and Be Interested In So Much Small Talk. while i just stand to one side and shove my hands in my pockets and smile. i felt completely out of place anyway because my mom dragged me there straight from work, and there i was in my work clothes, surrounded my saris and salwars and dresses and skirts in ever colour you could possibly imagine. the indian expat world is such a mindblowing whirl of utter madness.

so the reason for leaving the fashion show early -- and it really set a trend, because after we left the ballroom most of the crowd also began trailing out -- was that there was another India Week event left to attend that night. the coutts cocktail at an art gallery owned by my mom's friend. sponsored by coutts private banking which is headed by gayathri aunty's husband. i am totally impressed by him and his career; one day i will be an incredibly wealthy private banker as well. half the people from the fashion show also turned up at the gallery, but it was such a pity we stayed at the show for so long because half the damn paintings were sold :( i really liked a couple of them, and there was a scary mostly-black painting, a silhouette of a man's face, still unsold that my mother and i had to convince my dad not to buy because it was too scary for 10,000 dollars.

OH! and there was this guy called harsh chaya, i think i'm spelling his name wrong, but anyway he's a zee tv actor who used to play a hot doctor called manas on my mom's favourite now-finished show Astitva (manini are you reading this?) he was at the gallery, and when my mother saw she started doing such a good imitation of a crazy fangirl that i got really quite scared. she and her friend went to him and starting chatting while my dad and i stood far away and pretended not to know her. she actually tried to take my dad's phone so she could get a picture, but thankfully she realised that that was just a little bit too far across the line between social sanity and insanity. but i suppose it's her version of bumping into, say, patrick dempsey at an art gallery. which could quite easily open if i manage to wiggle my way into an equivalent social circle in new york someday. exciting exciting exciting dreams! my mom's art gallery friend is very unlike charlotte york, though. randomly. yesterday my mom went to see the same actor in a play, apparently he was very good. i have to admit he was one of the better actors on astitva. and he's quite hot. hotter in person, though he had a weird pretentious orange scarf around his neck. which is one of those things indian men do, so it's excusable i guess.

my birthday surprise and the ensuing embarrassing pictures will probably eventually be showcased on nasty's blog, so i won't go into painful detail here. suffice to say that the pink flowered pajamas made an appearance. and i was wandering around pandan valley in the dead of night with those pajamas on, a big white teeshirt and an armful of frightfully, luminously psychadelic lightstick-bangles. a chase that led to a cute little coffee bean double chocolate chip muffins with cocktail umbrellas stuck in, a balloon stuck to the ceiling, a mother who impressively managed not to give the whole scheme away, sleeping at 5 am, waking up to see nasty and kelly off, and then waking up again to welcome my grandparents, and then sleeping somemore until it was really time to get my move on and go see claud's exhibition. got pricked (dirty!) for the bone marrow thing.

and oh! my grandparents brought me my Lush products. they got the big sizes of everything because i forgot to tell them to get the small ones and therefore ended up spending an enormous sum of money that my parents promptly berated me about. so i have a $60 shower gel now called Sonic Death Monkey. i have never used such an expensive shower gel in my life, so every time i feel a strange mixture of guilt and pleasure. Sonic Death Monkey smells (i almost typed tastes!) deliciously of chocolate and coffee and oranges. it is a lovely warm scent that's perfect both for waking up and for going to sleep, so i love it. however it's a bit strong so i'm going to have to get a new bottle of something really clean-smelling and inexpensive like... dettol shower soap or something, to alternate with, just so i don't get sick of Sonic Death Monkey before i've used and enjoyed enough to justify the price.

i also have a great new hair moisturiser called The Strokes (hello claud! don't you love the name?) and a shampoo called Cynthia Sylvia Stout which has actual cognac oil in it, and therefore smells like cognac which is a scent i'm undecided on, but because the bottle cost about $40 i'm forcing myself to like it. atleast my hair seems to like it pretty well, thankfully. and another shampoo called Rehab which i haven't used yet. and a face scrub called Angels on Bare Skin, which is very similar to Herbalism but i'm still disappointed that Herbalism wasn't in stock when my grandparents went to the store. i loved the strong mossy green scent of Herbalism. if there are two things I love about Lush, it's the names of the products and the smells.

i have made sure that there is a Lush in Chicago -- hopefully US dollar prices are not so horrifying but i recall spending a lot of money even in the UK which is the home of Lush, so my fetish for all things Lush will not be easy on my pocket when I'm living in the same town as one of the stores :/

i should also go find out if there's a Kiehl's in Chicago, because I don't think I can live without my Blue Cleanser. i've abandoned the Blue Herbal Astringent Lotion, but the cleanser is really working wonders. salicylic acid is my friend.

last sunday i went for lunch with chit, bought books, came home for a while because a maid i had about three years ago came to give me a birthday gift and say hi to my grandma. she's really sweet, she used to play card games with me at night when i wasn't sleepy. then chit and i went to watch Inside Man, which was pretty entertaining but like most mystery/thriller movies doesn't sustain itself all the way through to the end. good acting, however, and clive owen's hot as ever. Lipstick Jungle, which i finished this morning before embarking on Opal Mehta, is a curious book. sometimes it's Female Power, sometimes it's trying to balance out the man-woman equation with arguments against feminism, sometimes it's inspiring, sometimes it's plain sentimental. it's not very well written and nothing much really happens, but it'd make a good TV show, which i think it's going to be made into soon. someday i'll read Candace Bushnell's other books, especially Sex and The City, and see how they compare to the show and to Lipstick Jungle.

and i'm bored of blogging now, so i'm going to go see if there's some other mindless book i can conquer within the next few hours. maybe the Judith McNaught daph got me for christmas. after which i will return to something more intellectual, like White Mughals which I was in the middle of when I acquired Lipstick Jungle on sunday. and then Guns, Germs and Steel which chit got for me :) my entire bookshelf awaitssssss meeeeeeee!

and as a last incredibly random thought, how can gwyneth paltrow stand to be married to chris martin and not just DIE of all the hotness??? try sitting in a darkened room and listening to the last line of Fix You. it's a bit of a nonsensical song, but that voice. ohhhh it kills me. i have to see coldplay live atleast once in my life. and that last line just came on, because i'm looping the song, and i had to stop typing for that entire ten-second timeframe because i literally couldn't move my fingers. that voice. there are moments in time when certain songs/sounds just do something to your insides and stop you in your tracks. Strange and Beautiful by Aqualung used to do that to me, but not anymore. St Patrick's Day still does that to me. the last line of Fix You does. it's one of those feelings you hope you never lose the ability to feel.

I think, if I were one of Heather Armstrong's crazy fangirls, I would totally buy this t-shirt and send it to Leta. However, I'm not a crazy fangirl, am I? Noooo, I'm only the girl who's planning an eventual road-trip to Utah.

I am also liking the 99 Luftballoons tee, but it's this same icky pale blue that I already have Spaghetti Western in, and frankly the colour looks quite horrible on me. spaghetti western and bone gramaphone have both been relegated to the pile of TShirts-I-Wear-To-Bed. bone gramophone's not an icky colour - it's black - but it is unfortunately considered by most to be a rather ugly tee. ah, well. Bone Gramophone, I loved you once. you're cute with pajamas anyway.

aaandddd speaking of clothes, it looks like i'm going to have to seriously stock up on heavy duty winterwear. my uncle dearest has already advised me to go to llbean.com and landsend.com because it's the end of winter and parkas and gloves will be dirt cheap now. i think i'll check out blufly.com as well to see if they have any burberry on the cheap, but i guess it's final and confirmed that the big-ticket expense of the lifetime will be arriving in august/septemberish so perhaps i should be a bit nicer to the parental units.

i skipped work today, ostensibly due to a stomachache but really because i couldn't bear to get out of bed. i finally woke around 1230, had my morning milo with lunch. and i read a magazine -- discovered that skin whitening products are the Big Thing in the beauty industry. a couple of months ago all anybody could advertise was microdermabrasion without the microdermasion. so you had skin refinisher and massage refiners promising the same results as microdermabrasion without the pain and the expense. and now you flip through a magazine and every single big beauty company is advertising whitening/lightening/brightening. from lancome blanc expert to clinique dermawhite to diorsnow pure to chanel blanc essentiel to anna sui whitening intensive to sisley phyto-blanc to SKII whitening source (but ok skII has always advertised whitening etc, to give them appropriate nonbandwagony credit) to elizabeth arden sheer white to estee lauder cyber white to even the body shop's moisture white. that's 9 big beauty companies in one magazine, all with major ad campaigns for Whiteness. or "melanin evacuation" to quote dior. clinique goes so far as to claim that they can turn dark spots into "melanin dust". and chanel promises to put melanin production into a "sleeplike, dormant state" so it'll be as harmless as a dormant volcano. i don't think there's any better evidence of the power of the beauty industry to corner a customer, bombard her with jargon and ensure that she'll leave clutching a hundred dollars worth of products that she's convinced will make her beautiful overnight. ok i know i'm the last person who should be so cynical about this because i could very well be exactly that customer and in fact i'm putting chanel's new foundation down on my list of things right now. but atleast i know that mica and liqourice extract are good for my skintype =]

ok and now i've finished vacuuming my room and clearing cupboard space for my grandparents who are arriving on saturday with 5000 rupees worth of Lush products! i only asked them for 8 things; i am horrified that it came to so much :/ but i am very pleased, one of the products is a chocolate-orange shower gel called Sonic Death Monkey :D thank god for nice-smelling shower gels; if i had given anybody a vacuuming hug earlier (i just had my post-vacuum shower) they would've fainted. and randomly, my house is filled with insects that are taking refuge from the rainy climes outside. i killed a moth on my wall, there was a huge wasp in the dining room that my dad chased away while i cowered inside my room, and there's another moth near the tv area. ick. ok now i have to go wash my hair mask out. today's really the day i did a lot of things i keep telling myself to do but i never get round to. vacuuming was one, clearing cupboards was two, giving hair some much-needed nourishment was three. if only i could've fit in Make Long Overdue Appointment with Eye Doctor, Learn French and Learn to Drive. ok i shall sleeeeep.