your love is gonna drown

I seem to have brought the rains with me ever since Sri Lanka; it rained on the beach, it rained in Singapore, and it rained in California during my first full day back. Today was lovely, but since I spent most of it in the office, I didn't see much of it. It was so strange to go back to work today--not that I did much work. Instead, it took the tech guys two hours to fix my computer after the issues that it became afflicted with in Sri Lanka, and then I had lunch with my manager, and then I tried to leave early but spent an hour and a half getting to the door because I happened to take a route past a lot of people whom I wanted to say hi to. I still made it out by four (a glorious achievement compared to Hyderabad), came home, and took a three-hour nap. This is not helping my campaign against jet lag, but I couldn't help myself. Since I couldn't sleep tonight, I went to latenight on campus with Can, Shedletsky, and Joanna, where I ate some absolutely hideous nachos and had a generally amusing time.

Last night was extremely entertaining, although I can't really believe that it was last night--time is flowing backwards and forwards in that strange, surreal way that stems from unnatural sleep patterns and the general sense of loss caused by moving halfway around the world. Tammy, Shedletsky, and Claudia had planned the first of a couple of surprises that required me to be blindfolded for a somewhat significant amount of time--the blindfold wasn't really necessary, but most of what I do with my friends isn't necessary, and so I accepted it as a matter of course. I was hoping and praying for Mexican food, but instead they took me out for Indian food. Bastards! Adit, Vidya, and John crashed the party, and there was some drama involved with that--Adit asked us to switch to Sunnyvale rather than Palo Alto because he was down there, and the place he chose was a fast-food-style dive in a strip mall, when Tammy/Shedletsky had planned to take me to a more upscale establishment. This led to a drama-filled showdown between Tammy and Adit; this actually amused me a lot, and was almost preferable to a regular ol' dinner at a nice restaurant.

Back to the office--it was so strange. Nothing has really changed, and simultaneously everything has changed. It feels like I never left, and at the same time it feels like I'll never find my place again. It's funny--when I was in Hyderabad, I would stay up way too late because I was talking to friends online, but now that I'm home, I can still stay up way too late talking to friends online. That's the beauty of a 12.5-hour time difference, I suppose. I know that I will recover from the wrenching sense of dislocation someday, but today is hard--it's like I was taken out of a puzzle into which I fit quite nicely, and I'm being shoved into a new puzzle where the pieces aren't quite aligned. I'm lucky that my relationships with my friends haven't shown any signs of decline, but I do miss the friends that I made in Hyderabad.

I could go on and on about this strange dichotomy between being happy and miserable, between being home and being homesick, but talking about it doesn't really help. Instead, let's talk about something more exciting: my new blog! 'Saradoesindia' can't continue if I'm not in India. So, what shall my next blog be? Please vote:

1) saradoestheworld
2) swampfest
3) sarawampler [prosaic but professional]
4) other suggestions from you, the reader

I intend to start it sometime this weekend, whenever I get around to creating it. I'd also like to clean my room, unpack (my bags arrived this morning), see some friends, and make some cookies--we'll see whether my ambitions are fulfilled.