Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
A mile a day...takes you far from home...;-)
Ran 6 miles today, at an avg speed of 5.5 miles per hr, and an incline of around 35 degrees (4 %, where 5% is 45%). Feel pretty good about myself, tho' muscles I did not know even existed are aching.
After the 1 hour run, I tried running without an incline on the treadmill. To my surprise, I could run comfortably at 9 miles per hr, for 2 minutes. Am planning to attempt a 7.5 minute mile this week...
After the 1 hour run, I tried running without an incline on the treadmill. To my surprise, I could run comfortably at 9 miles per hr, for 2 minutes. Am planning to attempt a 7.5 minute mile this week...
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Of marathons and midlife crises
Writing a post after a long time...could say I was too busy, but honestly, did not feel like writing anything...
I just registered online for the Hartford, CT marathon online...Its on October 11 2008. So that gives me around 10 weeks of prep time.
My goal is to finish it in less than 4 hours.
I ran around 5 miles today. Will update this space regularly with my time and training details.
I just registered online for the Hartford, CT marathon online...Its on October 11 2008. So that gives me around 10 weeks of prep time.
My goal is to finish it in less than 4 hours.
I ran around 5 miles today. Will update this space regularly with my time and training details.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Why its insane to count calories in food
We know some foods are good, and some are bad. How good, or how bad, though? Thats where we get into the tricky business of calories and the billion-dollar diet industry. I got this interesting article about counting calories off the net...go through it, it provides the much-needed link between the physics and nutrition
Counting Calories
by Paul Doherty
From Exploring Food Magazine Vol. 14 #4 1990
In my undergraduate biophysics physics course at MIT, Professor George Benedek burned a peanut. That may not sound impressive, but it was. Professor Benedek stood in the front of a small 50 seat lecture hall. He was a middle age man who had the build of a swimmer under a tweed suit, and he always wore white socks. He held the peanut in a loop of wire made from a bent paper clip and held the bent paper clip in a pair of pliers. He positioned the peanut under a test tube which contained ten grams of water.
Beneath the peanut was a large pan filled with water. A very large fire extinguisher stood on the floor nearby. I thought the fire extinguisher was excessive for a single peanut. For that matter, so was the pan of water.
Then professor Benedek set the peanut on fire. The peanut burned, and burned, and burned, and then burned some more. Drops of flaming oil oozed from the nut and dripped into the pan of water. The water in the test tube started to boil. When the peanut finally burned out, there were only eight grams of water left. Not only had the peanut heated the water from room temperature to 100 degrees Celsius, it had also boiled away two grams of water.
Heat flowed from that burning peanut as combustion converted the hidden chemical energy stored in the nut into the easily measured energy of heat flow. When you eat a peanut, your body does the same sort of thing: it converts the energy stored in the peanut into the energy it needs to keep running. As professor Benedek's demonstration showed, a little bit of food stores a great deal of energy in its chemical bonds.
More energy than a stick of Dynamite
Physicists and dieters are both concerned with the energy contained in food. And they both count calories.
Physicists measure the energy content of food by burning the food. To a physicist, a calorie is the heat flow needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. After burning that peanut, professor Benedek turned to the blackboard and calculated the calories that the peanut had produced. The burning peanut warmed ten grams of water from tap water temperature, 20 degrees Celsius, to boiling, 100 degrees Celsius&emdash; a temperature increase of 80 degrees Celsius. This temperature increase required 800 calories of heat flow. The heat flowing from the peanut then boiled away two grams of water, which took 1080 calories more, since 540 calories are needed to boil a gram. All in all, one burning peanut delivered 1880 calories to the test tube of water.
A single peanut contains 1880 calories? Those of you who know about food calories may be shocked by this figure. After all, an entire lunch doesn't contain 1800 food Calories. The explanation lies in the capital C. One food Calorie, spelled with a capital C, is 1000 times larger than one physicist's calorie, spelled with a small c. A peanut actually contains 1.8 food Calories.
Having the same name for two different units that differ in size by a thousand is one of the less logical parts of the language of science. From now on, when I talk about Calories, or calories, watch for that capital C.
To measure the Calorie content of food accurately, scientists use a bomb. A bomb calorimeter to be precise. The food sample to be measured is dried and ground into a powder. Then it is placed into the bomb calorimeter, a strong metal container surrounded by a water bath. The metal container is pumped full of pure oxygen at 30 atmospheres pressure and the food is ignited. The resulting energy release is fast and violent &emdash; just like a bomb. The steel container holds in the explosion. In air, not all of the peanut burns, but this isn't a problem in the bomb. Pure oxygen promotes combustion, and high-pressure oxygen greatly enhances combustion. All of the burnable parts of a dried and powdered peanut will burn in a calorimeter, leaving just a touch of ash. The calorimeter turns the energy stored in the peanut into heat flow. The temperature increase of the water and metal of the calorimeter reveals how many calories the food contained.
Since food energy and heat flow are both forms of energy, they can be measured in the same unit: the calorie. In the metric system, however, the unit of energy is neither the calorie nor the Calorie; it is the joule. For a physicist, the benefit of converting calories to joules is that work and all other forms of energy are also measured in joules. When food energy is measured in joules, we can estimate immediately how much work can be extracted from the food. Or conversely, we can estimate how much work it takes to burn off the food energy.
For example, one food Calorie can be converted into enough work to lift an adult human two stories into the air. Professor Benedek would have calculated this as follows: one Calorie equals 1000 calories, which converts to 4200 joules. One joule of energy will lift a tenth of a kilogram, (a quarter pound, though my professors never used pounds) one meter in the air. So one Calorie or 4200 joules will lift a 70 kilogram (155 pound) person six meters into the air. To work off the 1.8 Calories from one peanut a dieter will have to climb to the top of a four-story high building.
Calorimetry reveals that a Milky Way® candy bar contains more energy than a stick of dynamite. The candy bar contains 200 food Calories. That's 200,000 physicist calories or about 840,000 joules! Nearly a megajoule! A megajoule of energy from a candybar can perform enough work to lift an average 70-kilogram human being 1200 meters in the air. That's higher than the cliff face of Yosemite's El Capitan. No stick of dynamite can do that! In fact,an ounce of dynamite produces only one-quarter as many calories when it explodes as an ounce of sugar does when it burns.
Of course, the body cannot convert all of the energy from one candybar into work. A lot of the energy goes into heat, and some of the work goes into digestion. Overall, less than 20 percent of the energy contained in food can be converted into work. (So don't try to climb El Capitan armed with only one candybar.)
Some countries that use the metric system have completely abandoned the Calorie as a measure of food energy. In Australia, for example, diet soda sports the label "Low joule Cola." In the United States advertisers can claim a can of diet soda has "less than one Calorie." In Australia the equivalent statement just doesn't sound as impressive: "less than 5000 joules." On the other hand, candy advertisements in Australia can say that you'll "get a megajoule jolt from our candybar!"
Burning peanuts in your body
When a peanut or a candybar burns, chemical bonds in their molecules break under the high temperatures of combustion, and then combine with oxygen from the air in a reaction called oxidation. In this reaction, fats and carbohydrates are converted to carbon dioxide( CO2) and water( H2O). The oxygen bonds in these compounds have lower energy than the original bonds holding together the fat and carbohydrate molecules. The difference in energy is released into the air as heat flow.
Your body also oxidizes the peanut to release energy and produce carbon dioxide and water. Your body does not burn the peanut&emdash; although, if the peanut was part of a hot and spicy kung pao dish you might feel like it was flaming away in your stomach. But the peanut releases the same amount of energy when it is oxidized in the body as when it is burned. Your body oxidizes the peanut with a low temperature process which is more complicated than the reactions that occur in a fire.
Consider how a muscle in your body gets the energy it needs to contract. Your body begins by breaking the peanut into chemical components during digestion. Next, these components are reassembled into other chemicals, such as glucose, a simple sugar. The circulatory system carries this glucose to the muscle. The lungs take in the oxygen, and hemoglobin transports it via the circulatory system to the muscle. Finally, the oxygen combines with the glucose, producing energy without a flame. The overall reaction is
glucose (C6H12O6) + 6O2 = 6CO2 + 6H2O + energy.
Part of this energy is released as heat which helps a warm blooded animal stay warm. Most of the rest is used to energize molecules of Adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. The energy released by oxidizing one glucose molecule energizes 36 molecules of ATP. The ATP molecules power your muscles. One ATP molecule is used each time a muscle fiber ratchets one step shorter.
Peanuts, as any dieter could tell you, are high in Calories. To figure out why some foods are so high in calories, you need to look at the chemicals from which they are made. A peanut is 48 percent fat, 26 percent protein, 16 percent digestible carbohydrates, 2 percent indigestible carbohydrates (like cellulose), 6 percent water, and 2 percent ash.
Calorimeter studies show that all dried carbohydrates and proteins produce close to the same amount of energy: about 100 Calories per ounce or 4.2 Calories per gram. So a 2-ounce carbohydrate-loaded candybar contains 200 Calories. Fats, on the other hand, contain a little more than double the number of calories per ounce as carbohydrates and proteins: 220 Calories per ounce or 9.3 Calories per gram. Peanuts are a high calorie food because they are nearly 50 percent fat. For comparison, celery is low in calories; it contains 94 percent water, no fat, 1 percent protein, 4 percent carbohydrate and 1 percent indigestible fiber.
A peanut has a mass of about one gram. Using the above figures we can calculate that a peanut should produce about 6.3 Calories when it is burned. Yet Professor Benedek measured only 1.8 Calories. In the classroom demonstration, a great deal of energy from the burning peanut was lost. This energy would not be lost in a calorimeter.
Of course, there is more to food than just its Calorie content. The body requires a balanced diet. For example, over month long intervals, the body needs a full range of amino acids to build new proteins so the body craves variety in its foods. I found this out on a winter backpacking trip. I wanted to reduce my weight to the minimum, so I decided to carry almost pure fat as food. After all, each ounce of fat contained twice the calories as an ounce of carbohydrates. So I combined butter with a little powdered sugar until it tasted like frosting. Needless to say, after three days of eating buttery frosting on the trail I couldn't face a birthday cake for years.
Dieters often forget that the alcohol in drinks or ethanol (C2H5OH) is a source of food energy. If you burn pure alcohol, it produces about 150 Calories per ounce or 7 calories per gram, about half way between the Calorie content of carbohydrates and fats. A one-ounce shot of 100-proof alcohol is half water, yet it still contains 75 calories, almost as much energy as an ounce of sugar.
The Dieters Law
All of this brings us to one of the most important laws of nature, the law of conservation of energy, also known as the first law of thermodynamics. This is a law that anyone on a diet should know. It says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another. When you eat kung pao peanuts for lunch, the energy of those peanuts will be converted into another form. You can use the food energy to do work, or it can flow out of you as heat. If neither of these things happen, the energy will be added to your body as protein, carbohydrate, or body fat.
Your body stores the fat as an emergency food supply to carry it through times of famine. Once you've stored the energy it's difficult to get rid of the fat. Your body uses its fat reserves only when it is forced to do so, i.e., only after your body has used up its other food stores.
Using up fat reserves is also difficult because fat stores so much energy: 220 Calories per ounce. One pound of body fat will provide a person with 3500 Calories ( nearly 15 megajoules). If you didn't eat anything at all for nearly two days of normal activity, your body could power itself by using up just one pound of stored fat. Losing one pound through exercise requires working hard - playing soccer for 8 hours would burn up only one pound of fat. This is why rapid weight loss, more than 1/2 pound a day, is almost always the result of changes in the water content of the body. That weight can be added back just as fast as you lost it.
The law of conservation of energy raises a question: where did the energy in the peanut come from in the first place? When I was in grade school in the early 1950's, my teacher told me that all of our energy comes from the sun. She was right, mostly. Most of our energy, particularly our food energy, still comes from the sun. Food energy begins its trip up the food chain when light falls on a green plant. The plant stores the energy of sunlight in high-energy chemical bonds. Today, however, some plants are grown under artificial lighting, which is powered in part by nuclear power plants and by geothermal power. Some of the energy stored in the food we eat comes from the nuclear energy stored by exploding supernovas billions of years ago.
Nowadays, I'm a professor myself. If you visit my class when I'm teaching about food energy, you'll see a middle-aged professor with the build of a mountain climber, dressed in comfortable cotton shirt and pants. In my hand there will be a pair of pliers holding a burning peanut.
Scientific Explorations with Paul Doherty
© 2000 19 October 2000
Counting Calories
by Paul Doherty
From Exploring Food Magazine Vol. 14 #4 1990
In my undergraduate biophysics physics course at MIT, Professor George Benedek burned a peanut. That may not sound impressive, but it was. Professor Benedek stood in the front of a small 50 seat lecture hall. He was a middle age man who had the build of a swimmer under a tweed suit, and he always wore white socks. He held the peanut in a loop of wire made from a bent paper clip and held the bent paper clip in a pair of pliers. He positioned the peanut under a test tube which contained ten grams of water.
Beneath the peanut was a large pan filled with water. A very large fire extinguisher stood on the floor nearby. I thought the fire extinguisher was excessive for a single peanut. For that matter, so was the pan of water.
Then professor Benedek set the peanut on fire. The peanut burned, and burned, and burned, and then burned some more. Drops of flaming oil oozed from the nut and dripped into the pan of water. The water in the test tube started to boil. When the peanut finally burned out, there were only eight grams of water left. Not only had the peanut heated the water from room temperature to 100 degrees Celsius, it had also boiled away two grams of water.
Heat flowed from that burning peanut as combustion converted the hidden chemical energy stored in the nut into the easily measured energy of heat flow. When you eat a peanut, your body does the same sort of thing: it converts the energy stored in the peanut into the energy it needs to keep running. As professor Benedek's demonstration showed, a little bit of food stores a great deal of energy in its chemical bonds.
More energy than a stick of Dynamite
Physicists and dieters are both concerned with the energy contained in food. And they both count calories.
Physicists measure the energy content of food by burning the food. To a physicist, a calorie is the heat flow needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. After burning that peanut, professor Benedek turned to the blackboard and calculated the calories that the peanut had produced. The burning peanut warmed ten grams of water from tap water temperature, 20 degrees Celsius, to boiling, 100 degrees Celsius&emdash; a temperature increase of 80 degrees Celsius. This temperature increase required 800 calories of heat flow. The heat flowing from the peanut then boiled away two grams of water, which took 1080 calories more, since 540 calories are needed to boil a gram. All in all, one burning peanut delivered 1880 calories to the test tube of water.
A single peanut contains 1880 calories? Those of you who know about food calories may be shocked by this figure. After all, an entire lunch doesn't contain 1800 food Calories. The explanation lies in the capital C. One food Calorie, spelled with a capital C, is 1000 times larger than one physicist's calorie, spelled with a small c. A peanut actually contains 1.8 food Calories.
Having the same name for two different units that differ in size by a thousand is one of the less logical parts of the language of science. From now on, when I talk about Calories, or calories, watch for that capital C.
To measure the Calorie content of food accurately, scientists use a bomb. A bomb calorimeter to be precise. The food sample to be measured is dried and ground into a powder. Then it is placed into the bomb calorimeter, a strong metal container surrounded by a water bath. The metal container is pumped full of pure oxygen at 30 atmospheres pressure and the food is ignited. The resulting energy release is fast and violent &emdash; just like a bomb. The steel container holds in the explosion. In air, not all of the peanut burns, but this isn't a problem in the bomb. Pure oxygen promotes combustion, and high-pressure oxygen greatly enhances combustion. All of the burnable parts of a dried and powdered peanut will burn in a calorimeter, leaving just a touch of ash. The calorimeter turns the energy stored in the peanut into heat flow. The temperature increase of the water and metal of the calorimeter reveals how many calories the food contained.
Since food energy and heat flow are both forms of energy, they can be measured in the same unit: the calorie. In the metric system, however, the unit of energy is neither the calorie nor the Calorie; it is the joule. For a physicist, the benefit of converting calories to joules is that work and all other forms of energy are also measured in joules. When food energy is measured in joules, we can estimate immediately how much work can be extracted from the food. Or conversely, we can estimate how much work it takes to burn off the food energy.
For example, one food Calorie can be converted into enough work to lift an adult human two stories into the air. Professor Benedek would have calculated this as follows: one Calorie equals 1000 calories, which converts to 4200 joules. One joule of energy will lift a tenth of a kilogram, (a quarter pound, though my professors never used pounds) one meter in the air. So one Calorie or 4200 joules will lift a 70 kilogram (155 pound) person six meters into the air. To work off the 1.8 Calories from one peanut a dieter will have to climb to the top of a four-story high building.
Calorimetry reveals that a Milky Way® candy bar contains more energy than a stick of dynamite. The candy bar contains 200 food Calories. That's 200,000 physicist calories or about 840,000 joules! Nearly a megajoule! A megajoule of energy from a candybar can perform enough work to lift an average 70-kilogram human being 1200 meters in the air. That's higher than the cliff face of Yosemite's El Capitan. No stick of dynamite can do that! In fact,an ounce of dynamite produces only one-quarter as many calories when it explodes as an ounce of sugar does when it burns.
Of course, the body cannot convert all of the energy from one candybar into work. A lot of the energy goes into heat, and some of the work goes into digestion. Overall, less than 20 percent of the energy contained in food can be converted into work. (So don't try to climb El Capitan armed with only one candybar.)
Some countries that use the metric system have completely abandoned the Calorie as a measure of food energy. In Australia, for example, diet soda sports the label "Low joule Cola." In the United States advertisers can claim a can of diet soda has "less than one Calorie." In Australia the equivalent statement just doesn't sound as impressive: "less than 5000 joules." On the other hand, candy advertisements in Australia can say that you'll "get a megajoule jolt from our candybar!"
Burning peanuts in your body
When a peanut or a candybar burns, chemical bonds in their molecules break under the high temperatures of combustion, and then combine with oxygen from the air in a reaction called oxidation. In this reaction, fats and carbohydrates are converted to carbon dioxide( CO2) and water( H2O). The oxygen bonds in these compounds have lower energy than the original bonds holding together the fat and carbohydrate molecules. The difference in energy is released into the air as heat flow.
Your body also oxidizes the peanut to release energy and produce carbon dioxide and water. Your body does not burn the peanut&emdash; although, if the peanut was part of a hot and spicy kung pao dish you might feel like it was flaming away in your stomach. But the peanut releases the same amount of energy when it is oxidized in the body as when it is burned. Your body oxidizes the peanut with a low temperature process which is more complicated than the reactions that occur in a fire.
Consider how a muscle in your body gets the energy it needs to contract. Your body begins by breaking the peanut into chemical components during digestion. Next, these components are reassembled into other chemicals, such as glucose, a simple sugar. The circulatory system carries this glucose to the muscle. The lungs take in the oxygen, and hemoglobin transports it via the circulatory system to the muscle. Finally, the oxygen combines with the glucose, producing energy without a flame. The overall reaction is
glucose (C6H12O6) + 6O2 = 6CO2 + 6H2O + energy.
Part of this energy is released as heat which helps a warm blooded animal stay warm. Most of the rest is used to energize molecules of Adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. The energy released by oxidizing one glucose molecule energizes 36 molecules of ATP. The ATP molecules power your muscles. One ATP molecule is used each time a muscle fiber ratchets one step shorter.
Peanuts, as any dieter could tell you, are high in Calories. To figure out why some foods are so high in calories, you need to look at the chemicals from which they are made. A peanut is 48 percent fat, 26 percent protein, 16 percent digestible carbohydrates, 2 percent indigestible carbohydrates (like cellulose), 6 percent water, and 2 percent ash.
Calorimeter studies show that all dried carbohydrates and proteins produce close to the same amount of energy: about 100 Calories per ounce or 4.2 Calories per gram. So a 2-ounce carbohydrate-loaded candybar contains 200 Calories. Fats, on the other hand, contain a little more than double the number of calories per ounce as carbohydrates and proteins: 220 Calories per ounce or 9.3 Calories per gram. Peanuts are a high calorie food because they are nearly 50 percent fat. For comparison, celery is low in calories; it contains 94 percent water, no fat, 1 percent protein, 4 percent carbohydrate and 1 percent indigestible fiber.
A peanut has a mass of about one gram. Using the above figures we can calculate that a peanut should produce about 6.3 Calories when it is burned. Yet Professor Benedek measured only 1.8 Calories. In the classroom demonstration, a great deal of energy from the burning peanut was lost. This energy would not be lost in a calorimeter.
Of course, there is more to food than just its Calorie content. The body requires a balanced diet. For example, over month long intervals, the body needs a full range of amino acids to build new proteins so the body craves variety in its foods. I found this out on a winter backpacking trip. I wanted to reduce my weight to the minimum, so I decided to carry almost pure fat as food. After all, each ounce of fat contained twice the calories as an ounce of carbohydrates. So I combined butter with a little powdered sugar until it tasted like frosting. Needless to say, after three days of eating buttery frosting on the trail I couldn't face a birthday cake for years.
Dieters often forget that the alcohol in drinks or ethanol (C2H5OH) is a source of food energy. If you burn pure alcohol, it produces about 150 Calories per ounce or 7 calories per gram, about half way between the Calorie content of carbohydrates and fats. A one-ounce shot of 100-proof alcohol is half water, yet it still contains 75 calories, almost as much energy as an ounce of sugar.
The Dieters Law
All of this brings us to one of the most important laws of nature, the law of conservation of energy, also known as the first law of thermodynamics. This is a law that anyone on a diet should know. It says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another. When you eat kung pao peanuts for lunch, the energy of those peanuts will be converted into another form. You can use the food energy to do work, or it can flow out of you as heat. If neither of these things happen, the energy will be added to your body as protein, carbohydrate, or body fat.
Your body stores the fat as an emergency food supply to carry it through times of famine. Once you've stored the energy it's difficult to get rid of the fat. Your body uses its fat reserves only when it is forced to do so, i.e., only after your body has used up its other food stores.
Using up fat reserves is also difficult because fat stores so much energy: 220 Calories per ounce. One pound of body fat will provide a person with 3500 Calories ( nearly 15 megajoules). If you didn't eat anything at all for nearly two days of normal activity, your body could power itself by using up just one pound of stored fat. Losing one pound through exercise requires working hard - playing soccer for 8 hours would burn up only one pound of fat. This is why rapid weight loss, more than 1/2 pound a day, is almost always the result of changes in the water content of the body. That weight can be added back just as fast as you lost it.
The law of conservation of energy raises a question: where did the energy in the peanut come from in the first place? When I was in grade school in the early 1950's, my teacher told me that all of our energy comes from the sun. She was right, mostly. Most of our energy, particularly our food energy, still comes from the sun. Food energy begins its trip up the food chain when light falls on a green plant. The plant stores the energy of sunlight in high-energy chemical bonds. Today, however, some plants are grown under artificial lighting, which is powered in part by nuclear power plants and by geothermal power. Some of the energy stored in the food we eat comes from the nuclear energy stored by exploding supernovas billions of years ago.
Nowadays, I'm a professor myself. If you visit my class when I'm teaching about food energy, you'll see a middle-aged professor with the build of a mountain climber, dressed in comfortable cotton shirt and pants. In my hand there will be a pair of pliers holding a burning peanut.
Scientific Explorations with Paul Doherty
© 2000 19 October 2000
Sunday, March 23, 2008
The Great Depression
Part of the reason I have not been prolific with my blog, is the ensuing depression following my 29th birthday last month. In an age where 25 year old bankers and 24 year old techies are making twice as me, not to mention look all lissome and, well, young, I was pretty much crushed by the prospect of forever bidding youth goodbye...
So, after alternating eating and drinking binges, and a period of missed deadlines at work, I've decided to pull up my socks, and have made a list of things to do before I turn 30. (which will be in about 10 months). I hope this gives me some kind of focus, and will help me keep track of things I really want to do in life. I'll keep you guys posted (and put in pics, wherever possible), if and when I manage to accomplish each of these things -
Things to do before I turn 30 (in no particular order)
1. Backpack through one of these 3 places - Amrika, Europe, India. Try to do all 3 before turning 35.
2. Learn Swimming.
3. Get into a fist fight (already did that), but this time, with someone atleast a head taller, and much broader than me.
4. Write a book. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, a memoir, watever, just write something and submit it to the publishers.
5. Learn a new language (preferably Spanish, French or German)
6. Get a six pack (the real Hritik Roshan/Brad Pitt one, not the fake SRK one), and maintain it for atleast a month.
7. Run a marathon. If possible, do a triathlon.
8. Drive through Route 101/California 1. (might need vikrant's help to do this)
9. Attend atleast one of these events - Mardi Gras, the carnival at Brazil, SXSW, Burning Man, Lollapalooza, the Edinburgh festival, or Glastonbury.
10. Buy a house (or atleast put down the downpayment and sign on for a mortgage)
11. Test myself physically - row through rapids, go bungee jumping, sky-diving, scuba-diving...
12. Visit (atleast) one of these places - Prague, Paris, Buenos Aires, Istanbul.
13. Visit London
14. Gamble, with huge stakes, at Vegas.
15. Try to get atleast one picture with a bonafide movie star.
16. Eat atleast one meal at a world-renowned, 5-star restaurant.
17. Watch a Yankees-Mets game, and a Knicks game (preferably against the Lakers or the Cavs) at MSG.
18. Ride a Harley Davidson (or a BMW).
19. Buy an expensive tailored suit.
20. Organize, and host atleast one private party at a nightclub in New York.
So, after alternating eating and drinking binges, and a period of missed deadlines at work, I've decided to pull up my socks, and have made a list of things to do before I turn 30. (which will be in about 10 months). I hope this gives me some kind of focus, and will help me keep track of things I really want to do in life. I'll keep you guys posted (and put in pics, wherever possible), if and when I manage to accomplish each of these things -
Things to do before I turn 30 (in no particular order)
1. Backpack through one of these 3 places - Amrika, Europe, India. Try to do all 3 before turning 35.
2. Learn Swimming.
3. Get into a fist fight (already did that), but this time, with someone atleast a head taller, and much broader than me.
4. Write a book. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, a memoir, watever, just write something and submit it to the publishers.
5. Learn a new language (preferably Spanish, French or German)
6. Get a six pack (the real Hritik Roshan/Brad Pitt one, not the fake SRK one), and maintain it for atleast a month.
7. Run a marathon. If possible, do a triathlon.
8. Drive through Route 101/California 1. (might need vikrant's help to do this)
9. Attend atleast one of these events - Mardi Gras, the carnival at Brazil, SXSW, Burning Man, Lollapalooza, the Edinburgh festival, or Glastonbury.
10. Buy a house (or atleast put down the downpayment and sign on for a mortgage)
11. Test myself physically - row through rapids, go bungee jumping, sky-diving, scuba-diving...
12. Visit (atleast) one of these places - Prague, Paris, Buenos Aires, Istanbul.
13. Visit London
14. Gamble, with huge stakes, at Vegas.
15. Try to get atleast one picture with a bonafide movie star.
16. Eat atleast one meal at a world-renowned, 5-star restaurant.
17. Watch a Yankees-Mets game, and a Knicks game (preferably against the Lakers or the Cavs) at MSG.
18. Ride a Harley Davidson (or a BMW).
19. Buy an expensive tailored suit.
20. Organize, and host atleast one private party at a nightclub in New York.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
haikus for everyone...
11:30 on a Monday morning...am neck-deep in work resolving issues, when i get a message from hema - 'Hey, can u send some haikus within the next half hour...I forgot to do my assignment'...I read the message, and do what any conscientious employee would do...immediately bang out some haikus, and also enlist my colleagues' help...the phantom ship one is my colleague's, the nonsensical ones are mine...
spring is (nearly) here,
the green leaves, pretty flowers,
farewell, to the snow
obama inspires,
hill perspires,as does the Mac
do the people care?
drunk, high, at bleeker
and macdougal, with my friends
yet another weekend
Phantom ship moves through
waters hushed in mist. Foghorns
question the darkness.
Standing on the edge
Thinking about life, morose
Sadness surrounds me
I'm running around
the whole day, towards something...
or away from it?
spring is (nearly) here,
the green leaves, pretty flowers,
farewell, to the snow
obama inspires,
hill perspires,as does the Mac
do the people care?
drunk, high, at bleeker
and macdougal, with my friends
yet another weekend
Phantom ship moves through
waters hushed in mist. Foghorns
question the darkness.
Standing on the edge
Thinking about life, morose
Sadness surrounds me
I'm running around
the whole day, towards something...
or away from it?
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Yet another weekend...
I'm at a swank, post modernistic Greenwich Village apartment with my friend, I do not know how I got here, and we are staring at this beautiful woman screaming at us to get out...Its Saturday morning 3:30 am, and all i can think of at that time is the Wall Street Journal that we stepped on near her open door (you conservative bitch...)
Let me begin from the beginning, which was Friday evening...
The night started innocently enuff, with me going to the Met at 7:30 with Keith and Anne from work (not their real names, and if u read on, you will know why...). The Met, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of the most famous museums in the world, and is tremendously boring during the day except for the fact that its on Central Park, and theres really no entrance fee to get in (you have to give a donation, but if u can endure the withering looks, u can get by giving a buck). But come evening, and the whole place changes...its as if the damn thing has been swished over by some fairy queen's wand, and has suddenly become sexy and mysterious...part of the charm is the long shadows of the UES buildings over Central Park, but most of it is the tremendous lighting they have and the way the architecture shows up at night. So they have this 'After Dark' series at the Met, where the museum is open till 9 on Fridays and Saturdays, and you can pretend to look at the sculptures (some of which are quite amazing, to tell u the truth), and head to the Balcony Cafe and the Wine Bar, where you have a magnificent view of most of Central Park and most of Manhattan's beautiful maidens with their hedge fund husbands or trust fund boyfriends, having an early Merlot before going and painting the town red (and of course, the well-meaning and extremely beautiful cougars trying to snare one of the afore-mentioned arm-candy).
After a lot of people-watching and a little drinking (all we could afford, considering the ridiculous prices), we took our leave of one museum and dived headlong into another, the Guggenheim at 86th, another famous, slightly more interesting museum because of the fact that they have these avant-garde (yeah, the gratuitous French phrase to burnish my stupid post...) modern art pieces, like the latest from this chinese guy with 3 one-syllable names (he's damn good, tho'), with the centerpiece being 9 cars in different stages of free fall from the ceiling of the central space to the ground (to represent a car bombing, apparently).
Thankfully the lines were pretty short due to it raining heavily (i.e., we were one of the few drenched unfortunates in line). Once we got in, it was magical...the center space has apparently been created by Frank Lloyd Wright, an artist who Ayn Rand proclaimed as coming nearest to Howard Roark in his creations...and the cars hurtling towards apparent destruction almost made me want to turn into one of those annoying 'cultural' types, when thankfully the free appetizers arrived and I came back to frat-boy earth.
After the gang and I feasted on some decadent fried stuff, way too expensive martinis and people with plum lips and high cheekbones (that last was equally provided by both sexes, so Anne had a field day too), we began what my friends had primarily come out that night to do, mingle with the beauties over wine and maybe snare someone interesting for afters...
So while I played the straight man in the conversations, Keith and Anne went to town...within minutes Keith was intently chatting up a foxy co-ed, while Anne was using me to front her flirty conversation with this hulk of a guy from somewhere in the Carribean...(and he had the Bob Marley dreadlocks to prove it), who possessed a big smile and a bigger speech impediment. A sample -
Subbu - 'So, T (dreadlocks guy), is this your first party at the Guggenheim...'
T - grunt...gugga...Central Park...muttering...grunt
Anne - (looking quizzically at me) 'Thats, um, nice...so where are you staying?'
T - (saying something nearly incoherent...), grunt, ...sexy...grunt...
Anne - Thats so sweet, thanks (apprently he had said something abt her hair, which she understood perfectly, leading to my observation that a woman will know a compliment in any language)
Both Anne and T glaring at me - (Anne) We are going to get another drink, do u wanna come (her glaring eyes indicating that any answer in the affirmative would make things unpleasant for me)
so I slunk off, and started talking about the relative merits of spring vs winter with this beautiful European-looking couple. Just when I was getting warmed up and ready for my 'Spring might have the sun, but it will never have Christmas' schtick, Keith came up to me, breathless, and blurted out - dude...I met this chick, she gave me her number, and her address! I have to go see her! This is awesome! Shes hot! I made out with her! I owe the bartender 30 bucks!', all in the space of 5 seconds...
As I struggled to process this barrage of information through my drunken stupor, he continued - 'Come, we have to go...she stays in the Village, I have to go to her place...'
I needed another screwdriver, or 10...Weakly, I took him to the bar and made him close his tab out (not forgetting to get my couple screwdrivers on his card, proving that a drunk desi is every bit as cheap as a sober one).
Fortified, I tried to reason with the bugger But pleas of 'its almost 1', 'you can call her and meet some other time','get the f$%k out, I'm going home', fell on deaf ears. We took one look at Anne, who was having Carribean for dessert, and trooped out of the museum...We took a cab to the west village; once there, I immediately took him to the nearest coffee shop, and tried to get some coffee into his system, and some sense into his brain. Besides, I was feeling pretty far gone myself...
'Right. I agree with you. Lets just go get some beer.' Better words were never spoken. Finally, I had managed to drum some sense into his head. We went to this pub at Macdougal and W4th. After a couple of pints of fine belgian brew (which is pretty strong, BTW...), I settled back to make sense of Keith's ramblings about the girl he made out with earlier...Soon enuff, my attention started to wander, and I started thinking about what I wanted right then, more than anything else in the world...chicken tikka, and some biryani...
I sat up with a jolt...I had fallen asleep...Keith was nowhere to be found...Oh shit. I ran out of the bar, and tried to find Thompson St (he had mentioned that the girl lived somewhere on Thompson, near the park). Luckily, I managed to find the apartment building, and my friend, Keith, sorrowfully sitting nar the front door...'The bell doesnt seem to work, and she is not picking up her phone...'. Thank God...I was about to drag him from there and take a cab, when someone walked by us, opened the door, walked in, and Keith ran inside. Curses. I had to go with him...He ended up reaching the apartment, found the door open, and just walked in...No knocking, ringing the doorbell, nothing...I ran in to stop him, and reached this amazing, duplex house...man, if this is where Caroline stays (her name was Caroline), I would gladly marry her...The living room had all these amazing pieces of furniture, art on the walls, the works...I was admiring the kitchen when I heard a scream...apparently Keith had reached the bedroom upstairs, found Caroline sleeping there, called out her name...only, the woman who got up was not Caroline...She had given Keith some random address, which jus happened to be this woman's home...It was right about then that I noticed the Journal at the door...
Epilogue - Anne called the next day..turns out she came out of the museum with the dreadlocked guy, stopped for a smoke, and ran for her life when he offered her a marijuana cigarette instead...
PS - been super busy, hence no blogs...will try to keep u guys updated with such happenings more regularly...
PPS - I saw Donnie Darko for the 2nd time, and understood it better..Best.Movie.Ever.
A question for the movie geeks (and Rawat, you'ld better stop watching English movies if u dont know the answer to this) - Connect Donnie Darko and Superbad...
Let me begin from the beginning, which was Friday evening...
The night started innocently enuff, with me going to the Met at 7:30 with Keith and Anne from work (not their real names, and if u read on, you will know why...). The Met, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of the most famous museums in the world, and is tremendously boring during the day except for the fact that its on Central Park, and theres really no entrance fee to get in (you have to give a donation, but if u can endure the withering looks, u can get by giving a buck). But come evening, and the whole place changes...its as if the damn thing has been swished over by some fairy queen's wand, and has suddenly become sexy and mysterious...part of the charm is the long shadows of the UES buildings over Central Park, but most of it is the tremendous lighting they have and the way the architecture shows up at night. So they have this 'After Dark' series at the Met, where the museum is open till 9 on Fridays and Saturdays, and you can pretend to look at the sculptures (some of which are quite amazing, to tell u the truth), and head to the Balcony Cafe and the Wine Bar, where you have a magnificent view of most of Central Park and most of Manhattan's beautiful maidens with their hedge fund husbands or trust fund boyfriends, having an early Merlot before going and painting the town red (and of course, the well-meaning and extremely beautiful cougars trying to snare one of the afore-mentioned arm-candy).
After a lot of people-watching and a little drinking (all we could afford, considering the ridiculous prices), we took our leave of one museum and dived headlong into another, the Guggenheim at 86th, another famous, slightly more interesting museum because of the fact that they have these avant-garde (yeah, the gratuitous French phrase to burnish my stupid post...) modern art pieces, like the latest from this chinese guy with 3 one-syllable names (he's damn good, tho'), with the centerpiece being 9 cars in different stages of free fall from the ceiling of the central space to the ground (to represent a car bombing, apparently).
Thankfully the lines were pretty short due to it raining heavily (i.e., we were one of the few drenched unfortunates in line). Once we got in, it was magical...the center space has apparently been created by Frank Lloyd Wright, an artist who Ayn Rand proclaimed as coming nearest to Howard Roark in his creations...and the cars hurtling towards apparent destruction almost made me want to turn into one of those annoying 'cultural' types, when thankfully the free appetizers arrived and I came back to frat-boy earth.
After the gang and I feasted on some decadent fried stuff, way too expensive martinis and people with plum lips and high cheekbones (that last was equally provided by both sexes, so Anne had a field day too), we began what my friends had primarily come out that night to do, mingle with the beauties over wine and maybe snare someone interesting for afters...
So while I played the straight man in the conversations, Keith and Anne went to town...within minutes Keith was intently chatting up a foxy co-ed, while Anne was using me to front her flirty conversation with this hulk of a guy from somewhere in the Carribean...(and he had the Bob Marley dreadlocks to prove it), who possessed a big smile and a bigger speech impediment. A sample -
Subbu - 'So, T (dreadlocks guy), is this your first party at the Guggenheim...'
T - grunt...gugga...Central Park...muttering...grunt
Anne - (looking quizzically at me) 'Thats, um, nice...so where are you staying?'
T - (saying something nearly incoherent...), grunt, ...sexy...grunt...
Anne - Thats so sweet, thanks (apprently he had said something abt her hair, which she understood perfectly, leading to my observation that a woman will know a compliment in any language)
Both Anne and T glaring at me - (Anne) We are going to get another drink, do u wanna come (her glaring eyes indicating that any answer in the affirmative would make things unpleasant for me)
so I slunk off, and started talking about the relative merits of spring vs winter with this beautiful European-looking couple. Just when I was getting warmed up and ready for my 'Spring might have the sun, but it will never have Christmas' schtick, Keith came up to me, breathless, and blurted out - dude...I met this chick, she gave me her number, and her address! I have to go see her! This is awesome! Shes hot! I made out with her! I owe the bartender 30 bucks!', all in the space of 5 seconds...
As I struggled to process this barrage of information through my drunken stupor, he continued - 'Come, we have to go...she stays in the Village, I have to go to her place...'
I needed another screwdriver, or 10...Weakly, I took him to the bar and made him close his tab out (not forgetting to get my couple screwdrivers on his card, proving that a drunk desi is every bit as cheap as a sober one).
Fortified, I tried to reason with the bugger But pleas of 'its almost 1', 'you can call her and meet some other time','get the f$%k out, I'm going home', fell on deaf ears. We took one look at Anne, who was having Carribean for dessert, and trooped out of the museum...We took a cab to the west village; once there, I immediately took him to the nearest coffee shop, and tried to get some coffee into his system, and some sense into his brain. Besides, I was feeling pretty far gone myself...
'Right. I agree with you. Lets just go get some beer.' Better words were never spoken. Finally, I had managed to drum some sense into his head. We went to this pub at Macdougal and W4th. After a couple of pints of fine belgian brew (which is pretty strong, BTW...), I settled back to make sense of Keith's ramblings about the girl he made out with earlier...Soon enuff, my attention started to wander, and I started thinking about what I wanted right then, more than anything else in the world...chicken tikka, and some biryani...
I sat up with a jolt...I had fallen asleep...Keith was nowhere to be found...Oh shit. I ran out of the bar, and tried to find Thompson St (he had mentioned that the girl lived somewhere on Thompson, near the park). Luckily, I managed to find the apartment building, and my friend, Keith, sorrowfully sitting nar the front door...'The bell doesnt seem to work, and she is not picking up her phone...'. Thank God...I was about to drag him from there and take a cab, when someone walked by us, opened the door, walked in, and Keith ran inside. Curses. I had to go with him...He ended up reaching the apartment, found the door open, and just walked in...No knocking, ringing the doorbell, nothing...I ran in to stop him, and reached this amazing, duplex house...man, if this is where Caroline stays (her name was Caroline), I would gladly marry her...The living room had all these amazing pieces of furniture, art on the walls, the works...I was admiring the kitchen when I heard a scream...apparently Keith had reached the bedroom upstairs, found Caroline sleeping there, called out her name...only, the woman who got up was not Caroline...She had given Keith some random address, which jus happened to be this woman's home...It was right about then that I noticed the Journal at the door...
Epilogue - Anne called the next day..turns out she came out of the museum with the dreadlocked guy, stopped for a smoke, and ran for her life when he offered her a marijuana cigarette instead...
PS - been super busy, hence no blogs...will try to keep u guys updated with such happenings more regularly...
PPS - I saw Donnie Darko for the 2nd time, and understood it better..Best.Movie.Ever.
A question for the movie geeks (and Rawat, you'ld better stop watching English movies if u dont know the answer to this) - Connect Donnie Darko and Superbad...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)