starry eyed surprise

I had my Q1 review via cellphone this morning; yes, Q1 ended at the end of March, but I was pretty difficult to track down while I was getting ready to come to India, and now that I am here it is hard to coordinate my schedule with that of my former manager. I took the call at my apartment before going to the office this morning, which was good because I didn't risk being late for it, but bad because I could get more easily distracted in my room with a view than I could have in a windowless conference room. And oh, what a view--it's reproduced below for your edification.

What you cannot see from this view is the image that completely snapped me out of the usually-focused state that I enter when talking to managers--the sight of a man walking into the field below, squatting beside a scrub bush, and defecating in broad daylight. He was too far away to actually see anything indelicate, but it was blatantly obvious what he was doing, and I was so arrested by the fact that this was happening in front of me that I completely lost my train of thought. I wasn't entirely surprised, because someone had said that people frequently use the field behind the apartments as a latrine of sorts, but I hadn't seen it before and so was caught offguard. If the intense 105-degree heat and the fact that there are several drivers who sit downstairs all day waiting to take me wherever I want to go weren't already enough of a deterrent, this just convinced me that I never, ever want to walk around and explore here. At least not in open 'nature.' If my mother can recount the time when, as a toddler, I stepped in a mudpuddle and started sobbing brokenheartedly because I had gotten my feet dirty, you can only imagine my reaction if I someday embed my delicate gold sandals in a pile of human waste. I will leave the rocks and scrubbery (for I cannot call it shrubbery) outside my window for someone else to explore and conquer.

Despite that, my review went off with flying colors. I'm getting settled in at the office, although I still don't feel busy enough--but I guess that's to be expected, since I haven't gotten to the point where I have regular meetings and a rigid agenda on top of all the work that I want to accomplish. Right now, what I'm doing is actually doable, and so I suppose I shouldn't be complaining.

In another instance of things that I profess to hate turning up in my life with alarming frequency, I've found that a lot of foods here that are attempting to be Western end up using fetal corn. I'm sure other people don't call it fetal corn, but you know what I'm talking about--the baby corn that shows up in California salad bars, even though any good Iowan knows that the only way to eat corn is fresh from the field, straight off the cob, and covered in butter and salt. The crap in salad bars is just an ear of corn that was aborted before it could reach its full potential. So imagine my surprise when we ordered pizza for the office last night (from Pizza Hut!) and the vegetarian option came covered in fetal corn. Luckily for me, I am not a vegetarian, so I chose the chicken and pineapple (aka Hawaiian for Muslims)...but the sight of fetal corn on pizza made me laugh. Pizza Hut, though, is really quite tasty, which is huge--the food in the apartments is very good, but sometimes you just want pizza, you know? And I'm always starving at the office--lunch is completely unappealing to me (they serve Indian food every day except Thursday, which is Chinese food--and it's always either a chicken or a fish dish, and I'm getting sick of chicken and I don't really trust the fish, so there goes that), and they have Lays potato chips but they're all weird flavors like 'magic masala', so I'm not eating those either. Therefore, I subsist on crunchy peanut butter sandwiches and the occasional bowl of corn flakes, and survive on idealistic dreams of perfect non-fetal-corn pizza.

I got really good feedback from one of the managers today that my emails are too long--it was refreshing to actually get feedback on something that can be improved, and I appreciated it. However, do not expect any attempts at conciseness to spill over onto my blog; I'm already going a little crazy because I am not communicating like I do back home (and by that I mean all the freaking time), so the blog is a good outlet with which to remind myself that I am still capable of stringing words together somewhat intelligibly. However, I really should go to bed, so I will leave you with this tidbit from my brother (he who turns twenty in three days):

"Tonight I enjoyed a frozen pizza supper with my father, which was interrupted by a bat flying around the living room. Dad beat it to death with a pillow off of the couch. Supper continued un-phased."

I really, really wish I could have seen that. The pillow he was referencing isn't particularly large (it's square, perhaps a foot and a half across) or threatening (it's a lovely forest green), but for a brief moment in its life, it suddenly became a deadly weapon. My brother elaborated on this in conversation and told me that my father actually held his dinner plate with one hand while swinging with the other, but ended up handing the plate to my brother so he could get a better grip on the pillow. It takes a lot of skill to hit something equipped with a) sonar and b) wings with a pillow, so I'm quite impressed.