Last week, I started having a lot of trouble with my right wrist. I have occasionally had trouble with repetitive stress injuries in my wrist or elbow from all my computer work, but I’ve always found a way to manage it with ergonomics, massage, and rest. But this seemed like something different. I’d been sick with a cold at the time and only lying around anyway, not on the computer much. I started noticing a slight ache around my pisiform bone, and it got a bit worse every day, swelling and getting tender. By the third day I could barely …
Tag:
india
Let’s get this right out of the way: yes, there are open sewers. Yes, they can smell truly awful. There are certain streets in Tiruvannamalai where they are especially… breath-taking, even when they’re mostly covered with slabs of concrete. You learn to walk across them on an exhale, or if you have to walk parallel to them, stay as far across the street as possible. I don’t remember it being quite as strong last time I was here. Either the rain last month made it more noticeable, or perhaps I had blocked the memory. Sometimes you’ll catch a whiff of …
You hear a lot about the intensity and vibrance of India in the West, and you see pretty colourful pictures and shocking filthy ones, and you watch some Bollywood movies and you read excellent novels. But it’s hard to convey what that intensity is actually like in person. In fact, once you come back to the West and India isn’t part of your present moment any more, it fades into memories that just look and sound a lot like the pictures and stories you’ve seen and read. In a series of five blog posts over the next few months, I’m …
I don’t have a lot of time this week for a nice fat blog post, as these project deadlines are getting down to the wire and I’m trying to stay off the computer when I’m not working. But I’ve got a few odds and ends I’ve been meaning to share. The image above is a fairly typical Indian lightswitch panel, and it is to me one of the deep and meaningful mysteries of the East. There may be a few of these in each room. Generally, maybe half the switches on any given panel will appear to work as you …
Before I get you caught up on India, a side note: you’ve probably heard by now that Mount Agung in Bali finally erupted over a week ago, after two months of rumblings and tremors and steam that caused the evacuation of many locals, and a lot of travel concern. I almost didn’t go to Bali in October because of the volcano threat, but it turned out to be fine. And, at this point, it is actually still pretty safe there for tourists. Flights were cancelled for a few days, which would have been a major inconvenience and stress, but the …