finding out true love is blind
The turf war between the chefs is heating up, and we are all benefiting from it. It all began right around the time I got here, when Anup (who cooks for Gamma 301, which is where I lived at first) went on vacation. When that happened, everyone ended up eating in 402, which is where I live now and where Ranjit reigns supreme. Since we all got used to eating upstairs, and since we would rather eat as a group anyway, Anup came back to find that he had been usurped. I probably ate there twice in the month that I lived there, much to his continued chagrin.
However, now they're fighting it out over Matt and Ramsey, who still live in 301 but often eat in 402. Last night, Anup made Chinese food and Ranjit made Mexican food. To lure Matt and Ramsey back into the fold, Anup acknowledged that they would physically eat in 402, but he made up plates of his food for them and took them to 402, rather than letting them eat Ranjit's food. Ranjit was clearly upset about this, and despite his usually solicitous nature, didn't offer to heat up the cold plates for them, and kept pressing them to try his Mexican food instead (which, by the way, is very tasty, but is not really Mexican, since there is no sour cream, no guacamole, and some subtly wrong spice combinations).
Today, when I got home, I found that Ranjit had been cooking for three and a half hours, and he had made nine different Chinese dishes (noodles, fried rice, veg spring rolls, non-veg spring rolls, veg dumplings, non-veg dumplings, manchurian vegetables, chicken in garlic sauce, and chili prawns). I got him to admit that this was partially in reaction to Anup's offerings last night. This is quite amusing to me, and I can't wait to see what they cook up next.
I think that I'm getting sick, so I should be in bed--too much work, not enough sleep, and poor nutrition, combined with exposure to the plague that has ripped through the expat community, is potentially too much for me to withstand. So tonight, I came home by seven (shocking!) and finished 'The Rule of Four'. I've reverted to my childhood days when I could make my way through a 400-page book in two days, and I find that I missed those days more than I knew.
I thought that the book would be very similar to 'Angels and Demons', just with better writing, but I was wrong. Where 'Angels and Demons' focused almost entirely on ancient riddles, with a love story thrown in as a formulaic afterthought, 'The Rule of Four' turned out to be much more about love and loss, and the solving of the puzzle was just a red herring that distracted from the greater truths that the book was trying to impart.
Since the book was set in college, and since Stanford graduation was last weekend, it's probably natural that I started to feel nostalgic for the past. The strange thing about my college experience is that I feel like I had two wildly divergent lives in college; it's like I got to do college twice in four years, and the result is that one of those experiences feels like a faraway dream. I suppose that you could call those experiences Loro 1 and Loro 2--there's a pleasant symmetry to my college experience, in that it began, ended, and began again in the same dorm. I still feel very connected to my second college life; I keep in touch with my Loro residents, I try to see them as regularly as possible, and the experiences of that time are still fairly fresh in my mind. The first three years of college, however, are rapidly fading into memory, and it's hard to believe that I actually experienced anything that I know I did during that time. I have vague flashes, strange images of beaches, balconies, Phi Psi parties, and papasans, thoughts that encroach unbidden on my waking mind. But just like it used to seem like that could never end, now it seems like it never started, like it was all a dream that I had one restless night during my second life.
I think that life is a series of crossroads, where you have to choose what to keep and what to leave behind. It's like that old game 'Wizardry' that I played on our 486 computer--your knapsack only has a certain amount of space for things that you pick up, and every object you take means that you have to throw away another object in its place. There are things that I definitely want to keep from India--the memory of heat, the welcoming friendliness of the people in the office, the crawling sense of guilt regarding servants that holds me firmly grounded in the proletariat. And there are things from college that I definitely want to drop--the feeling that I could have accomplished more if I had made better choices at other crossroads, the bitter taste of friendships grown cold from misunderstandings, the knowledge that I spent so much time playing games that meant nothing, when I could have actually been living.
But now is not the time for regrets. I am coming back to California in approximately four months--and by the time I step on the plane, I want to have a better picture of what my destiny holds. If nothing else, 'The Rule of Four' reminded me of the importance of friendship, and also flung all my old academic curiosity back in my face. This is not to say that I intend to go to grad school (for those of you who read this in the office)...but I should be doing more with my spare time than watching VH1 and baking chocolate chip chewies. However, at this moment in time, chocolate chip chewies sound like the best thing in the world, so if I were given the choice right now, I would not be likely to turn them down in the quest for knowledge. Someday, though, I shall have more fortitude.
However, now they're fighting it out over Matt and Ramsey, who still live in 301 but often eat in 402. Last night, Anup made Chinese food and Ranjit made Mexican food. To lure Matt and Ramsey back into the fold, Anup acknowledged that they would physically eat in 402, but he made up plates of his food for them and took them to 402, rather than letting them eat Ranjit's food. Ranjit was clearly upset about this, and despite his usually solicitous nature, didn't offer to heat up the cold plates for them, and kept pressing them to try his Mexican food instead (which, by the way, is very tasty, but is not really Mexican, since there is no sour cream, no guacamole, and some subtly wrong spice combinations).
Today, when I got home, I found that Ranjit had been cooking for three and a half hours, and he had made nine different Chinese dishes (noodles, fried rice, veg spring rolls, non-veg spring rolls, veg dumplings, non-veg dumplings, manchurian vegetables, chicken in garlic sauce, and chili prawns). I got him to admit that this was partially in reaction to Anup's offerings last night. This is quite amusing to me, and I can't wait to see what they cook up next.
I think that I'm getting sick, so I should be in bed--too much work, not enough sleep, and poor nutrition, combined with exposure to the plague that has ripped through the expat community, is potentially too much for me to withstand. So tonight, I came home by seven (shocking!) and finished 'The Rule of Four'. I've reverted to my childhood days when I could make my way through a 400-page book in two days, and I find that I missed those days more than I knew.
I thought that the book would be very similar to 'Angels and Demons', just with better writing, but I was wrong. Where 'Angels and Demons' focused almost entirely on ancient riddles, with a love story thrown in as a formulaic afterthought, 'The Rule of Four' turned out to be much more about love and loss, and the solving of the puzzle was just a red herring that distracted from the greater truths that the book was trying to impart.
Since the book was set in college, and since Stanford graduation was last weekend, it's probably natural that I started to feel nostalgic for the past. The strange thing about my college experience is that I feel like I had two wildly divergent lives in college; it's like I got to do college twice in four years, and the result is that one of those experiences feels like a faraway dream. I suppose that you could call those experiences Loro 1 and Loro 2--there's a pleasant symmetry to my college experience, in that it began, ended, and began again in the same dorm. I still feel very connected to my second college life; I keep in touch with my Loro residents, I try to see them as regularly as possible, and the experiences of that time are still fairly fresh in my mind. The first three years of college, however, are rapidly fading into memory, and it's hard to believe that I actually experienced anything that I know I did during that time. I have vague flashes, strange images of beaches, balconies, Phi Psi parties, and papasans, thoughts that encroach unbidden on my waking mind. But just like it used to seem like that could never end, now it seems like it never started, like it was all a dream that I had one restless night during my second life.
I think that life is a series of crossroads, where you have to choose what to keep and what to leave behind. It's like that old game 'Wizardry' that I played on our 486 computer--your knapsack only has a certain amount of space for things that you pick up, and every object you take means that you have to throw away another object in its place. There are things that I definitely want to keep from India--the memory of heat, the welcoming friendliness of the people in the office, the crawling sense of guilt regarding servants that holds me firmly grounded in the proletariat. And there are things from college that I definitely want to drop--the feeling that I could have accomplished more if I had made better choices at other crossroads, the bitter taste of friendships grown cold from misunderstandings, the knowledge that I spent so much time playing games that meant nothing, when I could have actually been living.
But now is not the time for regrets. I am coming back to California in approximately four months--and by the time I step on the plane, I want to have a better picture of what my destiny holds. If nothing else, 'The Rule of Four' reminded me of the importance of friendship, and also flung all my old academic curiosity back in my face. This is not to say that I intend to go to grad school (for those of you who read this in the office)...but I should be doing more with my spare time than watching VH1 and baking chocolate chip chewies. However, at this moment in time, chocolate chip chewies sound like the best thing in the world, so if I were given the choice right now, I would not be likely to turn them down in the quest for knowledge. Someday, though, I shall have more fortitude.
posted by Sara @ 10:54 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home