Indian Ameri

“I can feel the positive vibes from you”, and he gave me a wide heartful smile. While he expected me to say “Yup!”, I just stood on the door way, staring at his eyes, trying to rejuvenate the lost confidence in me. Unfortunately, I ended up nodding my head in disagreement and disbelief. Strangely stress has been the only friend, constantly trying to gain my attention. Instead of ruing or ranting my ways out, I’ve been holding my composure with simple twist of incidents. The three things I did to overcome the bugger this week is note remembering.

Wednesday night, I was invited for a dinner. Decided to get some flowers in celebration of his recent marriage and managed to squeeze in a few driving minutes to Kroger. An old lady around her late 70’s saw the dozen yellow roses in my hands, as I ran towards the queued up aisle and commented, “Someone special is getting flowers” at the top of her voice. With the day completely engrossed in an analysis, and since I was running in a hurry to keep up with my schedule, my blood narrowed to her level of loudness. A few faces turned towards me and I instantly froze for a second. Her age, her warm smile, her quip, overall her interest in an internationals opinion to get flowers for someone ‘Special’ [my friend’s wife? :o :))] made me soil out and offer a couple of roses to her with a smile and say, “Flowers for 'this' special lady too.” “Oh how nice of you! Now run. She is waiting. Shoo.. Shooo…” she shouted (loud) again. Couldn't stop laughing till I reached my friend's apartment. Had a great dinner followed up by a meeting with a senior friend (one of the very few who inspired me to take up academics) who came all the way from another country for her one week training.

The bee seemed lazy compared to me on Thursday. The effect of cricket has made me really focus a great deal of concentration on my work and at 10 pm after my cricket practice, I was exhausted. By 2 am I gained some life and decided to take a nap. A few minutes into my bed, I heard the chirps of birds. Took my chair out to the patio, sat down on it, and listened to the birds chirping, figuring out - where they were hiding and which one made its characteristic chirp. At 5 am (Yes! 3 hours of bird watching) spread some rice grains on the patio and went to bed. With the rice half gone in the morning, decided to build a bird grain cage/hanging whenever I get some free time. I just need to make sure that ‘Puddles’ (The stray cat I and another friend found in a puddle of snow molten water) doesn’t disturb them while he has his taste of milk in my patio in the mornings.

Finally, the day when I was drenched in ice water since I ended up saving the game, happened on Saturday when I played a Captain’s knock to march the team to victory. Though I was tired out of the not-out from the ‘first ball till end’ game, I ended up watching the fireworks in Louisville for the Derby festival. Another hour of driving back to Lexington, I was tired enough to sleep over the restaurant table. But somehow, the pressure of yapping, from my other roomie boiled my blood to a level of forking his life out with the silverware. Luckily, I was encountered with this cute 6 or 7 year old kid. She was crayoning out a house with the help of her dad and once in a while she returned the wave we gave her. Instead of killing my yappy roomie for tormenting me, I forced/pushed him into using his Origami skill to make a swan out of the paper napkin. Went over to the cute kid’s table, asked for her red crayon, drew the eyes for the swan, and gave it to her. A heart filled thanks from her parents, followed by a coyish smile from her was enough to bring all three of the friends to feel accomplished.

Hope this luck of running into anti-stress agents continue to occur this week too. Now its time to get back to work, and finish it off before I crash for a power nap in the evening.