Birthday

Bunked office on my birthday as planned. Had slept at around 3 the previous night, thanks to the cake that my room-mates surprised me with, and phone calls from friends, romans, and countrymen. Woke up all groggy at 8 AM, thanks to relatives, and vegetated at home till around 11, watching TV.

Had planned to go to Brigade Road, and so I went there. The day was hot as hell, and I sought shelter from the intense heat at Peco's, where I quenched thirst with beer while listening to Led Zeppelin. I was probably the only guy in the pub, and I shot the crap for a while with Nagesh, the bartender. I was getting a little bored, and so I called a few colleagues and incurred their wrath by asking them what they were doing in office, telling them with a devilish laugh where I was, what I was doing, and asking them to continue rotting at office.

A couple of hours and beers later, it was 1:30, and I went out, only to find that the sun hadn't relented, and was doing it's job with the same enthusiasm as a software engineer who has just got a 50% pay hike. I then went to a few second-hand bookshops and hung out there will about 4, getting, apart from a very bad sinus headache, the following books:

Something Happened – Joseph Heller
Picture This – Joseph Heller
The Hobbit - J R R Tolkein
Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring - J R R Tolkein
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - J R R Tolkein
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King - J R R Tolkein
To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway
The Short Reign of Pippin IV – John Steinbeck
Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
The Call of the Wild / White Fang - Jack London
Nine Stories - J D Salinger
Captain Courageous – Rudyard Kipling

Was totally zonked out and very hungry by the time I came out, and so I went to Pizza Corner and had one of them Sandwizzas or whatever you call them. The damn thing was hard as hell, and so you had to chew it a million times before you swallowed, and because I had the kind of headache that you can feel throbbing between your jaw and forehead when you chew, I was pretty much gone when I finally came out of Pizza Corner. Those guys can really kill you if they want to.

All I wanted to do was go home and crash, but then, I first wanted to pick up a few DVDs, and so I went to this DVD shop, and bought the following movies:

Volver (Spanish, directed by Pedro Almodovar)
Flags of our Fathers (English, directed by Clint Eastwood)
Letters from Iwo Jima (English/Japanese, directed by Clint Eastwood)
An Inconvenient Truth (the Global Warming documentary)
Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish, directed by Guillermo del Toro)
A Scene at the Sea (Japanese, directed by Takeshi Kitano)

Anyway, while I was picking up these movies, some dumb moron in the shop decided that the only way to find out if the music DVD he was buying worked properly was to play the damn thing really loudly while people like me were sitting right next to the speaker, looking at the DVDs. I almost killed the guy because my headache went up a notch higher after all that noise.

I finally came out with DVDs and a more intense headache, and finally decided I had had enough and took an auto to go home and crash. Spoke to my sis-in-law, and told her I probably wouldn't be visiting them (brother, her and their dogs) that evening because of my headache. I went home and had hardly laid down when my brother called up and told me that he'd pick me up in an hour, and so I got up, went to a barber's near my place and got myself a good head-massage which kinda knocked out (literally) most of my headache. I got back home, got ready, got picked up, and went to my brother's place, where I spent the next few hours drinking, watching some cheap tamil movie on TV while commenting on it non-stop (a pastime I have developed an affinity to, of late), having dinner, and playing with his dogs Charlie and Butch (probably the best part of the day). Whoever the quote was attributed to was right when s/he said "There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face". By the time I left, I felt much better, the headache now completely gone.

I went home, slept, woke up at 8 the next morning, and went back to office. :-(