** groaner alert **

A Mexican magician gets on stage and announces to the audience that he will make himself disappear on the count of 3. He went, “Uno”… “dos”… and then *POOF* … he disappeared without a tres!

Those jeans with big holes in them? Yeah, they are nowhere to be found!!

After a considerable number of years of running the risk of being called an Amish, I finally gave in and bought an Apple Watch. I am not entirely sure why.

I was in the store to buy an iPad for Sharmila and a laptop for Nikita. But I came back with an Apple Watch. For the curious, I did buy their stuff too – even I am aware how to keep peace at home. That awareness, admittedly, has grown over an intense period of trial-and-error, if you know what I mean.

Coming back to the watch, in the last few days, my life has dramatically changed. The most noticeable change is what happens to me when I receive a call on my iPhone. It used to be that every call would be followed by me screaming around “Where are my Airpods? WHERE ARE MY AIRPODS”. (I had to scream louder the second time since, more often than not, they were still in my ears). But now, I inexplicably keep yelling at the watch. And it works. But I am a sight holding my wrist up and talking at it.

In the store, I had a flashback of my last annual physicals and I believe I convinced myself that I need to track my health statistics to stay … well, healthy, I guess?

So, this Apple Watch of mine ostensibly tracks how many steps I take. And I have to reach 10,000! None of your “small step for you, giant leap for mankind” bullcrap.

Guess what? I am now fixated on that statistic. There is an extra weight in my gait. Instead of treading lightly – or at least, normally – I am stomping all over the place. I am morbidly afraid that the watch might not pick up a step here or a step there.

I am even sweating over whether I should move my watch from the left wrist to the right wrist. Maybe, being a right hander, the watch will be more sensitive to movements from there. Interestingly, there is also a helpful app on the watch to detect stress level. That seems to go up every time I worry about counting footsteps.

Of course now I am confused, on the whole whether I coming out ahead or behind.

Oh! Did I tell you about that sleep app? Reading up on the stress app, I found out that I need good sleep to reduce stress. You guessed it – there is an app for that!! So, every morning, instead of brushing my teeth first, I am lost in analyzing my sleep and all the times I apparently tossed and turned.

Between you and me, those have gone up dramatically ever since Sharmila came back from India. Undoubtedly, I am merely reflecting on the correlation without even remotely suggesting any causality.

Here is the funny part. Every morning, I wake up with a good and cheery mood like every single day in the past. But now, I realize from my watch that apparently I did not have a good sleep. Looks like I tossed and turned. And something about REM that was not very REM-like. Suddenly I feel so tired and exhausted!

I think I have this cause and effect thing mixed up. Sure enough, the stress app starts doing its antics when I realize this!

Being a technology neophyte, I have to admit that the allure of that brilliant screen and all those small colorful things trying to tell me something is intoxicating to me. They have all these apps I can put on the screen. They are called “Complications” – score one for Apple for telling the truth. Apart from being technologically challenged, I am not the one with any nose for aesthetics. If you leave it to me, I will jam in all those small icons in a neat column and row arrangement 🙂

Right now I have put so many stuff on the screen that it resembles more like the interior of a cockpit. I am fairly sure a couple of Complications more and I can land a rocket in Mars from my new watch. And I am constantly thinking about “What else should I be interested in that I can put on the screen?”. It harkens back to my TV watching days when I used to be too busy flipping channels constantly to really watch anything. It was like while the whole world was wondering what was on TV, I was preoccupied with “What else is on TV?”.

One final observation. I love how the watch detects that I am trying to look at it. I learnt that the accelerometers (I have no clue what they are – but I am sure they are very smart. Is this that Artificial Intelligence everybody has been talking about?) detects how I am moving my wrist to face my eyes and stop there – and bingo! that means I am trying to read my watch. Once I learnt about it, of course, it became an incessant battle between artificial intelligence and (allegedly) natural intelligence. I am constantly trying to fool it. I have tried slowly moving my wrist (it still detected), moving my wrist around a few times like a wand and then stop (it won), looking at it askance (it still won) and what not. I once even tried doing it while keeping my eyes closed. I am not totally sure who won on that one.

For all that, I will tell you what has not changed. Every time I need to check the time, I am still reaching out for my iPhone and checking it there !!!

… when you glance around your seat in the airplane and notice that everybody has a Budget Excel spreadsheet open on their laptop 🙂

#truestory #Delta1950

… this would really make my day… the puns for headline just roll off your tongue…

CNN reports:
“Man suspected of money laundering after $400,000 found in washing machine”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/11/23/europe/money-laundering-amsterdam-scli-intl/index.html

The two days in a calendar that I dread like the plague are her birthday and our anniversary. Not because I forget them. The school of hard knocks – also called Life – long back has taught me that the easiest way to forget your spouse’s birthday or anniversary is to … simply forget it once!!

The problem is that I am not the one who believes in grand celebrations and gifts and parties and special dinners and all that to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries. A quiet drink together? Yes. But nothing more. I have always marveled at all those Facebook posts I get from my friends with sparkling photos of them surrounded by innumerable friends in dazzling dresses with a cake thrown in here and a candle over there on such special days.

And I have wondered – with no less measure than my marvel – what made them wait for a day decreed by some random Gregorian way of counting an integral number of times of the sun going up and going down repeatedly to show such love. Why not pick a completely random day? Or two days? Heck, how about every day?

If a silver jubilee of a marriage has taught me anything it is that such clinical assessment of sanctity of revolutions of the sun is not going to get me anywhere.

Fearfully, I admit her birthday is around the corner.

I can almost sense the tension growing from the pervious night.

“Will he get me something this year, at last?”, she will wonder, more hopefully than realistically.
“How weird is it that our mind believes that one thing one day somehow outweighs the value everything else done all the other 364 days? Have we all reduced our feelings to Hallmark card templates?”, I will philosophically wonder.

Both quietly.

Both waiting for the storm that is welling up not too far.

I will spare you all the details but the conclusion will not surprise anyone. Somehow I will be at fault. Somewhere, I will get a lecture that I do not care about her.

“But, I was the one who suggested that you go back to India
to be with your mom a month after you came back. It was I who told you that I will take care of the daughter in spite of having a job in a different city. How come that does not count?”
“I did not ask you for that”, she will righteously declare.
“And I was the one who searched online for two days and got you tickets. And arranged for all our travel in India. I even called up the driver to be at the airport to pick you up when you arrive at the dead of the night. How about that?”
“I did not ask you for that”.
“I even went to the extent of arranging you to be at the 24-hour restaurant in a five star hotel so that you can relax, eat and refresh while waiting for daylight so that the driver can take you for the ride home. How about that, huh?”
“I did not ask you for any of that”.

Normally, I would walk away trying to compute how is our brain wired that unasked for events carry less value than the expected-but-not-gotten ones.

Normally, like I said.

Not this time!!!

You see, her Highness after relaxing and refreshing in the aforementioned hotel, messaged me – a full half world and ten and a half hours away to call the driver – who was merely hundred yards away downstairs in the garage to come and pick her up from the lobby.

Might I mention, like always, I did what she asked me to?

I can’t wait to pick her up from the airport on her birthday when she comes back.

With a broad, all-knowing grin and folded arms. (Even I know it would be rude to tap my shoes and go Tut Tut along with that).

But no gifts.

“Did the driver show up when I called him?”, I will ask innocuously.

Ha! Ha! No more of those “I did not ask you to”, this year. Game, set and match.

I have to think about something else for next year now!!

If I am still married.

To the same woman, of course!!!

Sat down at the breakfast table this morning after my run and saw this packet on the table. No idea whether this is for Sharmila or Nikita (fairly sure it is not for Jay Jay or me) but that really does not matter.

This just makes no sense to me.

First, did you know that there are different kinds of makeups – like the stubborn ones, the compliant ones and the – I guess – schizophrenic ones? And how do they even decide whether the makeup is stubborn and not simply misunderstood?

Hilariously, there are degrees of stubbornness, it would appear. Neutrogena prides itself in dealing with the “most” stubborn ones.

99.3 ???? Not ninety, not ninety nine, not ninety nine decimal nine … But precisely ninety nine decimal three??? Did Neutrogena go around putting makeup – nothing but the most stubborn variety, mind you – on one thousand women in a mall and then go around scrubbing their faces only to find that the results were unsatisfactory on seven such women?

I had to chuckle at that #1 Choice of Makeup Artists bit. Those artists are made up for sure.

I am not done. Yet.

Why 114 towelettes? Whose great packaging idea was that? Not 100, not 120, not 125 but 114. Hundred and fourteen? Did some family of 19 people demand that they be able to divide the towelettes evenly amongst them, or what???

Ok. Now I am done. I need to scrub out some sun tan I got on my face from my run 🙂 🙂

As one photographer to another, let me ask you… “What phone are you using these days?”
😉

Check out the invite I got. I thought the role this lady plays – elegant and upscale social events for single Ladies and Gentlemen in Metro Atlanta – was pretty intriguing. I blurred the picture and redacted some of the info to maintain privacy.

But I have noted down the names of the 11 friends that I have who are connected to her. I have a few interesting phone calls to make today 🙂 🙂