Thursday, March 31, 2011

Will (not) Power

Read that some people have addictive personalities – it’s not their fault that they can’t resist booze or nail-biting or shop-lifting or whatever – you can’t blame them. You gotta blame their parents – for birthing them with addictive genes.

I do not smoke or drop names or shop-lift. Which proves that I can really resist any addiction that pops its ugly nose into my life. To test this theory of my iron will power, I decided to put to the test the one thing I adore – chocolates.

Monday: No chocolate all day. Late night, woken up by a kid (mine) who fell off the bed. Went down to drink water – and saw the chocolate slab I had NOT eaten all day. Also saw the time. 1 a.m. It is not today. I have survived today without chocolate. Sat and ate it.

Tuesday: Met a friend for coffee. She wanted to eat a chocolate truffle pastry, but said it’s too fattening so please would I share it? I agreed to help her out. (Also remembered I had eaten a chocolate slab at 1 this morning.)

Wednesday: Had mid-week blues. Internet was down. Took out the store of emergency choc hidden. Ate half of it. Mid-week blues qualify as emergency.

Thursday: Did not eat any chocolate. Drank 3 mugs of hot chocolate. DRANK, did not EAT.

Friday: Thank God it’s Friday. Almost the end of my non-choc week. Gotta celebrate. Ate half a Lindt bar. The other half looks lonely.

Saturday: Been a pretty healthy week, innit? Ate some squares of dark chocolate. Very good for the heart. Very healthy. Ate all the squares finally.

Sunday: Went for a long walk with S. Burnt thousands of calories. Felt faint and weak and thin. Ended up at Corner House and ate a Death by Chocolate. Aptly named. But only to avoid feeling faint and weak and thin.

Learning: I have had one week of resisting chocolate. I cannot. I have an addictive personality. It is not my fault. I blame my parents.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

M.A. Tech

If you think I’m tech-challenged, blame it on my maternal genes. My Ma and Technology are definitely not twins separated at birth.

She talks back to the Voice Recordings from the bank. I overheard her telling the phone voice the other day, “I already pressed ‘2’ – I pressed it 4 times already.”

She once called me in office in the middle of an important meeting to ask me, “The second orange light on the washing machine is now beeping. What should I do?”

She is almost single-handedly responsible for keeping the Indian Postal Service alive – pain-stakingly buying cards and writing long-hand letters and buying stamps etc… and takes it a personal insult if someone sends her an e-card in reply. I’ve offered to write her emails, if she dictates them. Ever-willing to give it a try, she starts her emails with ‘I hope this reaches you on time, and finds you in the best of health.’ (Ma, I object, this will reach instantly, and he was in the best of health when he sent you an email 5 minutes ago, to which you are replying. His health couldn’t have deteriorated rapidly in the last 5 minutes.)

She whacks her DVD player when a DVD gets stuck while playing, and IT STARTS AGAIN.

On second thoughts, she doesn’t really need technology, see. She has an in-built memory chip which remembers the birthdays of all her cousins, nieces and nephews, down to the time they were born (making it impossible for anyone to fake their age). She gets the stains off the kid’s clothes when the washing machine has thrown up its hands in surrender. She bakes better cakes than any auto-timer microwave magic could dream of. And she’s got some patented copyright to make her grandkids feel that they’re the smartest guys around. Now, that’s something that technology hasn’t invented yet.

Ma 1, Tech 0.