The last few days here

The month has been pretty eventful.. First the tooth goes, then there is the visa interview (which goes quite well, thank you) and then comes the flurry of mind-numbing shopping where I almost buy half of Dadar, follow it up by buying half of MG Road and Ravivar Peth, and at the same time try to meet up a dozen or two friends and relatives.

Its been a strange time. I quite happy about leaving India. I was getting bogged down by the monotonous nature of things here. And going to Florida for MS is like a fresh start. New people, new place. Independence. Solitude. And hopefully, probably, I get to study something I will truly enjoy.

But leaving Pune means I have to restart the most painfully slow process that also scares me the most: making new friends... Its taken me a good four years to be comfortable with some of those in my engineering college. And it had taken me an equally good time to get close to those from junior college, japanese class, math olympiad class and so on. I've been trying to catch up with most of them & re-do the bonding and stuff. But couple that with the fact that I've managed to almost screw up potentially good friendships in the past few days means that it has been a mini-roller coaster ride.

Though I like the fact that I can say, I've friends in Calcutta, Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Chandigarh, Uruguay, California, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Ohio, Alabama, UK, Germany and so on. Feels nice.

Florida is calling. And I'm leaving for it on the 7th of August, 2007. If you haven't met me here by then, lets hope to meet up in Gainesville, FL.

Teething troubles

Wisdom teeth suck! They come at the wrong places, routinely cause pain and sometimes come up heading in the wrong directions. Ask me about it.

I had this wisdom tooth coming out horizontal!!! I mean, which tooth is so self-disrespecting enough to do that! I know that I nap most of the time, and it might have been confused with whats up. But it should learn from the other teeth...

Anyways, the point being that since I wish to go to the US, where dental care is expensive, I had to get my teeth fixed in time. The teeth cleaning exercise and then repairing the fillings activity was done in the last month, between my papers. What was left was the rogue wisdom tooth. Since the tooth had also decided to not pop out of the gum surface, it was double trouble. The dentist I go to does not do surgery. "Surgery" he called it!!! Me = shit worried. I hate hospitals & blood & things poking into me. (That I love to watch violent Tarantino-style movies is something else. Its not my blood, flesh etc. Its good make up!) Add to that the fact that I hate swallowing pills without chewing them and that you can't chew pills, meant I was stuck.

But I got around these worries somehow. Being stuck in a foreign country in pain is much less likeable than 2 days of agony, worry etc. So, the "surgery" was scheduled for today - 4th of July (Happy independence day my american readers, if that category exists). The doc who performs the surgery visits the clinic only on certain days. And today was one of them. I went there, a bit tensed up, at 12.30 sharp to hear that the doc was late.

45 mins of staring at nothingness or stupid Femina cover pages and doc arrives and summons me immediately. I sit on the chair and he asks me, "Which tooth?" Now it was 6 months back that the tooth hurt and I honestly didn't remember whether it was the right or left. I mumbled vaguely and told him to check the X-rays. :D (I am smart) Somehow, my guess - the right lower tooth - was right and he promptly pumped in two shots of anasthesia. Man, do they work fast!

I had my jaw wide open and eyes tightly shut so I actually didn't realise the he had finished injecting. Then he went out to work on another patient. Since I had nothing to do but wait, I suddenly recalled the great Feynman's antics. And I started to check how the anasthesia was holding up. First the lip starting going heavy. There was the mild pain due to the injection. The inner wall of the right cheek started going numb. Amazing thing is, there is distinct partition of whats "heavy" and whats not. Then anasthesia was working full time. It affected a bit of my ear too. Though the upper part of the ear did scream in pain when I pinched it.

I was asked to sit out in the waiting room for some time again. I sat there again. Bored to death. The doc then called me. And I got nervous. Those things might hurt. And I dint want to see any part of me being cut up. He made sit on that amazing inclined chair. Assuring me that it wont hurt, he fished out his tools and asked me to open my mouth. The cutting up happened quite fast I think. And then pulled out the drill. I think its the drill, or jack-hammer or powersaw. I didn't have the nerve to look at the THING that would wreck havoc in my mouth.

A dentist is essential a mechanical engineer. Or maybe a carpenter. Thats what i was thinking when he shoved that drill in mouth and started cutting out that tooth. He shoved, pushed, leaned on the drill and did everything possible that could get me to try and remember all the 33 crore Gods... I just kept praying that his drill didn't slip and cause permanent damage. Once, after about 5 mins of power display, he did try to pull the tooth out. He tugged, then kept his hand on mouth to hold my head down & tugged again harder. Back to drilling!

Thankfully, tooth extraction is a much shorter process than doing some filling. The jaw doesn't have to be kept open for eternity. He removed the tooth quite quickly, I must say. And then proudly showed it to me. Then came the stiches. They were done quite fast too. And off to home I was sent, with instructions on what to & what not to eat. Two days of drinking juices, syrups and non-hot stuff.

Sucks.. especially when its raining and all parts of your stomach and tongue crave for that hot steaming "kanda bhaji". Such is life...

Looong time.. I know

I suddenly lost the enthu to type out the details about the last day in Goa. Too many things came up that time. The exams, unfinished project work, some other irritating problems, the delay in getting my I20 form and so on. So I took my own sweet time to write this last post...

just to try out the picasa feature here is the slideshow of the photos:



the link to the photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/mandarharshe/GoaTrip