The anatomy of 'Greys'

“Sandra Oh is leaving!” screamed the blurb from my Facebook news feed recently.
“Sandra WHO?” I thought, dutifully clicking on the link. 
Turns out NBC's  prime-time drama, 'Greys Anatomy' hit the usual high finale note as the 2014 season ended. 

'All about my mom' book

Now, whenever I imagined blogging about TV, I saw myself indulging my immense 'West Wing' fixation, though it's passed into the annals of television history years ago. I imagined some delicious deep delving into it’s glowing idealism, deconstructing its themes and inferring its inner messages with an adolescent glee. 

Even my seven-year-old caught onto my mania. Mainly because I complained incessantly about my nasty addiction and how it was eating into my free evening time while spiking TV viewing hours into the stratosphere - compared to my usual near-zero baseline.

Things I heard today….

Waiting to board my morning train to work:
Cop on a bike: “Beautiful day today”
Train conductor: “They say it might rain”
Cop on bike: “Don't care. Just glad to see the sun.”

Keepin' it real.

Blog stats
Signed into my blog account and got a thrill to see the following stats on a 1 day old post:



They're reading me in Brazil! 

73 people in just 1 day!

As I furiously patted myself on the back and let the gentle shower of validation wash away my writer's insecurities, these sobering thoughts washed up.
1. "They" are not reading me in Brazil. Precisely 1 person - a freind on a work trip with nothing else to do - is. (Thanks Saikat!)
2. The 'Don't track my own pageviews' option in my account was not turned on. Undoubtedly, I'm reading my blog.
3. Technical difficulties made me delete then re-post the link on my FB wall, which is where I trap my unsuspecting victims readers. Some followed the second link to the same post  (from a combo of loyalty, coercion and boredom) and were double-counted.
4. The tally counts the people who landed on the page but not what they did next, which was hopefully not surf immediately away.

The water in that comforting shower ran out. I'm now trying to pretend that it never even happened. While re-checking my Traffic stats.

TFTT: Tasty Food, Tasteless TV

I'm one of those people who like all figurative worms to stay in the can, wriggling around disgustingly, where no light will ever reach. Recently though a few friends were gabbing (where else? On Facebook) and the lid popped right off. In a tidal wave of catharsis we 'fessed up to our 'Tasty Food, Tasteless TV' shame.

USH: Unapologetic Suspension of Housekeeping

I recently opened a can of worms labelled 'Things About Me You Wish You didn't know' and the first thing to crawl out was a taste for TFTT. That's 'Tasty Food, Tasteless TV' whenever hubby travels for work. My husband left for 10 days recently and out crawled another revelation: USH or 'Unapologetic Suspension of Housekeeping'.

You know this phenomenon, right? It's when that last pretense of keeping the home in order kind of quietly evaporates. Not that I keep a sparkling home when he's in it either, but at least the laundry pile gets the attention it deserves.

From him.


I add this in the interest of full disclosure and being the generous, open person I am.
And honest. I'm really honest too.

A pox on Chicken Pox!

Ever grabbed a bottle of Laxative pills when reaching for the headache meds? No? Me neither. But these little slips will happen. Hopefully with little more consequence than embarassment. Like here - Yash's adventure (over at Y on earth not) as her hubby tried to get the Flu vaccine and....well, read it for yourself. Fact-truer-fiction...you know the drill.

It reminded me of our own latest brush with bewildering medical advice.

'Iron' tokens and dated ring-tones

A few reminders today of my age and stage in life.
Age = 41.
Stage = harried mom who is recovering her footing and self.

The Twilight Zone theme song
               Squished together with a fellow commuter on my 8 am train to Boston, the haunting theme from the '70s show 'The Twilight Zone' snaked gently into the air.

The 'Just Married, Please Excuse' Contest

OR  Lord of the Rings – but not quite the way you might think

 

This post is in response to a contest being held by Yashodhara on her blog 'Y on earth not'. Her new book 'Just Married, Please Excuse' is out. UPDATE: turned out I was one of the 'winners' in this contest though that's not as much of an honor as you'd think given that 50% of contestants 'won' in one way or another. :-) Still, Yashodhara is a very funny writer and I'm glad I made her smile.

We got married twice, like many who have one proverbial foot in the U.S. and another in native India. The first was a ‘City Hall’ affair in California (over my spring break in grad school) where we actually understood the words sanctifying our union, while the other was the usual 3-ring circus affair in India comprising family, food, fuzzy shlokas and festivities.

Fat-finger Fumbles and grammatical travesties

The goriness of brutalized grammar on social websites has now surfaced in my life as an 'issue' for about the 523rd time. We've all encountered these travesties of vocabulary and grammer: they're/their/there, quite/quiet, its/it's, your/you're, to/too, then/than and so on. My friend Nan recently wrote a lucid opinion that got me started (watch this space for a link to it).

 

I seem to know as many victims as perpetrators of said crimes. However faulty grammar is a poor bidder for my emotional bandwidth, perhaps because there are so many more powerful daily irritants ahead in the queue, like judgementalism, boasting and self-promotion.

 

There’s also the fact that with the plethora of devices at our fingertips, a thought has barely to form inside our heads before we spit it out to our cyber communities via cell phone, laptop, tablet etc.