Riding in the rain …

Yesterday had been overall a sort of a down day because of a variety of things but all of that disappeared in an instant when I left work in the evening. The reason? Rain! Rain you ask? Yes, rain 🙂 It was raining cats and dogs and I rode through it all! It’s a great feeling to have the rain slashing into your face, you doing about seventy or eighty on your motorbike and there being nobody on the roads! I was screaming at the top of my voice and composing a song about riding in the rain at the same time. It went something like “Riding in the rain, ugh ugh, Riding in the rain ugh ugh, Raindrops in your face, stinging like mace, Riding in the rain, ugh ugh!” :p Yeah, I know … stupid :p But it was a totally awesome experience and while I felt as if I would meet imminent death at times since I was swerving and weaving in and out between vehicles at times and splashing noisily and muddily through puddles at other times, I just loved the whole feeling. I should do it more often and simply forget about all the other stuff that goes on in life – the stuff that brings you down 🙂

Meeting of minds and clashing of souls

Yes, I know it’s been a while since I’ve updated this page but my only excuse is that I’ve been fairly busy with so many other things – but that really is no excuse since this is supposed to be a reflection of my thoughts and I shouldn’t put my thoughts on hold <g> Anyway, I’ve been busy and then I was in Kurunegala and now I am finally back. Even though it’s a Saturday, I went to work since dial-up costs are prohibitive here (you have to pay for even local calls) and Net access is cheap at work since it’s free and I was missing Jen since I’d been at home for the last couple of days with very brief forays online to talk to her. So I rushed to work so that I could talk to Jen and catch up on all that had been happening in her life.

While I was talking to her however, I heard some great news from another friend of mine. Since it is something personal about somebody else, I will not go into details here but suffice it to say that I have been vouchsafed the power of prayer once again 🙂 I have always known that God is listening if you pray to him but sometimes it is nevertheless surprising when you receive a response so quickly – does that mean you have no faith or just that you don’t expect God to respond quickly? I don’t know … But I just know that God is listening.

Jen and I talked through the day while I worked on a variety of things – including installing SP1 on my notebook machine which I took to work with me. How well do we know anybody around us? Sometimes we think we know everything about somebody and then a casual remark opens up a whole new area of their lives that we never knew about and we find ourselves pleasantly surprised (or shocked/horrified etc. but this particular instance was a pleasant surprise – nothing negative at all :p) to find that there is a meeting of minds between yourself and the other person on a subject that you thought they wouldn’t be interested in at all. I treasure such moments of discovery about any of my friends. Maybe it’s because it’s just another cementing of the bond between them and me or maybe because it reaffirms that I am not alone in this world in the way I think or look at things – then again, it might simply be because I’ve found something else to talk about with them. Whatever the case maybe, I do cherish such moments and now that I look back at this entry, I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this :p

Fini?

Sometimes trying to help people and trying to be nice just doesn’t seem to be good enough. Certain things have come up in my life which might mean that I give up on all of this – the journals, the development work everything. At the moment, I am not sure where things stand but by tomorrow I might decide to delete this site and a few other journals online as well as take down my software related sites as well. At the moment, I just feel so sad and bereft of all support … I am really wondering if it is all an illusion and the people around me are as nice as I’d thought all of them to be. Oh well, this is just to warn those who might read this page – since I don’t want to suddenly stop writing or take the site down completely and leave you all wondering. It’s been fun knowing you all and in some cases it has been a real privilege. Thank you for the good times and the bad times were probably my own fault… See ya on the flip side!

Of friends and the past ..

All the testing on BlogMan yesterday meant that I made no post here at all but to find out all the techy junk, you’ll have to read the other blog :p I have found a new friend who is one of those select few who enter my "inner circle" :p I make friends easily but I don’t let most people know about the weird stuff that goes through my head – OK, you may beg to differ since I write about a lot of things here that are totally weird (or maybe not – depending on how you look at it <g>) but then again I don’t write about *everything* here. There are things I leave out – personal stuff, the weirdest theories I have about the world and reality etc.

I feel a bit of a duality here and also feel me going off at a tangent (and not talking about what I originally intended to talk about – but let me save that for another day and follow this thread of thought …) Now most of the time, I say my life is an open book and everybody is free to know anything about me. Heck, I write about almost everything in my life on this journal … but that’s not quite true because for the longest time I never spoke about my former marriage, my ex-wife or my son. The reason I carefully left those things out has nothing to do with how I feel about privacy at all but rather to do with Sri Lanka and how things are perceived here … basically it was to save my parents from heartache and embarrassment (though I can never understand why *they( should be embarrassed about something that I did) in case somebody from Sri Lanka or our family read this journal. I’ve decided to totally let go recently though and so am willing to talk about even the stuff that I didn’t talk about earlier.

Again, my comments need a little bit of explanation – at least about the Sri Lankan society bit. Here in Sri Lanka, everything is stratified and compartmentalized – you marry from your own class, own race, own religion and anybody who strays outside is an embarrassment and usually ostracized by their family. I have never cared for this kind of behaviour or this kind of society and didn’t really worry about how others felt when I got married but then it became evident that this was a source of great mental agony to my parents and to spare them any further anguish and embarrassment when dealing with our relatives, I refrained from talking about my marriage and later divorce on my journal. Then I came back to Sri Lanka and my parents wanted me to get married again and that made it an issue again because a person who has been married is sort of "devalued" in the marriage market. I have always had problems with the fact that my former marriage was not mentioned when my parents wanted to find a bride for me and I always intended to let the girl know before everything was finalized if it ever came to that because I wouldn’t have felt at all comfortable in getting married to a girl under false pretenses. However, that never came to be fortunately since I told my parents that I wasn’t interested in marriage at the moment :p

OK, I see I have really strayed now … But I guess what I was trying to get at was that these pages are an open window into my life and I talk about everything in my life (at least now) here but that does not mean that this is the sum total of my thoughts and experiences. There are still areas that I will not talk about here just because it involves other people and that’s the issue I really wanted to write about today but since I’ve already written at length, let me save that for tomorrow 🙂

Of visas and vicious assistants …

I called the US embassy yesterday since I wanted to inquire into going to the US again and find out if it was even worthwhile to make a visa application. I have spent around US$ 2500 already (not saying that Jen – who is the main reason for my two trips to the US – isn’t worth it mind you, I would spend hundreds and thousands of times that amount if I had the money but that not being the case, I’d like to save what I have if possible) and didn’t want to spend another US$ 100 on a visa application and then find that I am rejected. Plus, if I got rejected for a visa here, I can’t reapply for a certain time period – not sure how long but I think five years was mentioned …
Anyway, I called the embassy and asked if I could talk to a visa officer. The person I got was a Sri Lankan employee of the embassy and she says that I can’t talk to a visa officer just by walking in and that I should apply for a visa. I told her that I’d already been to the US twice, had problems with the INS and wanted to explain to the visa officer the situation and get his/her opinion before I applied for a visa. She says, "I can’t tell you anything about it!" and I asked her if she was a visa officer and she said no. So I told her that I wanted to talk to a visa officer and she says "The visa officer does not answer the phone!" and I said that that was fine but that the last time I had visa problems, the lady I’d spoken to had asked me to simply come see a visa officer and that was all I wanted to do. She says, "You can’t speak to a visa officer and I can’t help you. So bye!"

I was seething by this time but there really was nothing I could do. I could try walking into the embassy but she’ll probably be there since I had to go through this same assistant the last time. I want to call the embassy again and see if I’ll get a different assistant since I know there is another lady who is more helpful. But in the meantime, I’m stuck with a decision as to whether to spend $100 (which I don’t mind so much but I do mind not being able to apply for another visa for five years) or to just walk in there and try to talk my way through. I hate it when Sri Lankans do this to you – from what I hear, this is always the case since they seem to get this sense of power over us poor mortals by doing this.

Of course, since I seem to be stuck here for the moment and all I really want to do is to be across the Atlantic so that I can at least be close to Jen, I think about all I can do is look for a job over there. Of course, finding somebody to sponsor me would be the tough part – I am even willing to pay the sponsorship fees (as long as they aren’t over a couple of thousand bucks of course) and pay my own fare over there if somebody would just hire me. Only problem is finding somebody like that :p There are no CEOs of large corporations reading this blog are there? :p If so, how would you like to hire a coder who can work in C/C++, Java, Delphi, C#, FoxPro, Oracle, VBScript, Vantive and a host of other languages/development environments? 🙂 But seriously, if anybody can help me out in this (know any people who might be willing to hire etc.) I’d be forever grateful – anybody?

Cycles of change

I’ve read in several places that all things are cyclical – of course, I can’t right now recall where I read this except for a vague memory of a science fiction story or two which talked about human history being cyclical etc. Anyway, things in my life seem to be cyclical too. I’ve noticed the greater cycles – the ones which seem to take years. I think I just started another cycle and that one seems to be a five year cycle and seems to have a valley or a peak (probably a valley would be more appropriate since to me that’s where things start) in October. I’ve also suddenly become aware of minor cycles – things which happen over a few days (maybe four or five days) and then repeat again over and over. Some cycles can be good but certain cycles I wish that I could break out of – yes, all of this really sounds cryptic unless you know what I’m talking about :p So why the heck am I writing this at all if I’m not going to talk about what these cycles involve? Probably just to hear my own thoughts and to put them in order more than anything else.

I don’t think I should be going into the minor cycles at the moment but the major cycles as far as I am concerned, involve career, relationship and family. I think I started a cycle in 1997 when I left for the US and it ended when I came back this year and another one seems to have started off around October again – I don’t know where that one goes but if I can still recall this in five year’s time, I’ll probably be able to tell whether it is really an exact cycle or not. Or maybe I’m just looking for order in a chaotic life, who knows – certainly not I :p

Wedding March or the Ides of March? :p

Since I am off the marriage stakes, my brother has become the latest contender in our family :p Of course, I’m sure that most you either know or have guessed by now that my own reluctance to be part of an arranged marriage stems from the fact that I’ve fallen in love with Jen <g> but be that as may be, my parents are actively searching for a bride for my brother now and he seems not too averse to the idea provided that they find a girl who meets his specifications. I should explain something here – or several things actually :p

The first thing is that in Sri Lanka (and in many other Asian countries too …) brothers usually get married according to age – so the younger brother cannot get married till the elder brother marries. It’s different for girls though – if you have a sister of marriageable age, you are supposed to get her married before you look into your own marriage :p For instance, my sister (who is three years younger than me) got married about ten years ago whereas my parents weren’t that particular about getting me married till recently and that too was probably because I was blocking the path to wedded bliss for my brother 🙂 Anyway, now that I have told my parents that I don’t want an arranged marriage (and that I would tell them once I’ve found the girl I want to marry – who incidentally is Jen and she tells me that she feels the same way but we still haven’t met in person …), they’ve decided that it’s time to concentrate on my brother.

Of course, that brings us to the second point – while love marriages do occur in Sri Lanka and other Asian countries, they still aren’t as common as arranged marriages by parents, especially in the more orthodox families. So my parents will try to find a Sri Lankan, Muslim (all of that is important to them :p) girl from a family that they deem is suitable and then the girl will have to fit my brother’s criteria and of course, he’ll have to be what she wants in a husband and finally the wedding (or at least the negotiations for a wedding) can take place. What a lot of work! :p

Love makes the world go round …

I wrote rather disparagingly about love a couple of days ago and wondered if there really was as much true love around as people seem to think. And right on the heels of that rant I saw an article in a Sunday newspaper over here where it is said that "love at first sight" might not be just the stuff of books or mushy minds :p Dr. Helen Fisher of the Rutgers’ University Center for Human Evoluionary Studies, New York is supposed to have said that "You can fall in love in less than eight minutes of conversation. Humans are animals that were built for love at first sight. You can simply look at somebody and trigger that brain chemistry for romantic love."
I am not sure how far this is true and if love at first sight equates to the "pure love" that I talk of – the kind of love where you put your loved one(s) ahead of yourself. But I thought it was kind of interesting to note Dr. Fisher’s comments …

Incidentally, speaking of love, my love Jen has been making her presence felt on these pages :p So I’ve changed the banner for the site to include her as well – sorry if I am not describing your side of things too well baby, so feel free to let me know what your description should be …