Dazed and Confused

(yes the title's stolen from Led Zeppelin)
I’m a creature of habit. One little change in my surroundings is enough to ruin my day. So today, the left rear-view mirror of my bike snapped (a parking accident (yes there is such a thing)), it’s the less used one but nonetheless essential. I can’t ride with a single mirror as it throws off the visual balance of my bike. Today’s a Sunday and tomorrow, republic day, so the earliest I can get a replacement is on Tuesday. Like I said, I’m a creature of habit. This effectively means I can’t ride into the city till I get a replacement. Apart from the minor inconvenience of not being able to spot Audi's and Porsche's as they zoom past me, my bike sans the two mirrors just seems odd, the whole thing seems smaller, more compact, somehow a shadow of its former self. I can wave my hand around in the area formerly occupied by the suspended bits of glass and quite frankly it freaks me out. I feel like I’ve been castrated, like some leather-mask-wearing, chainsaw-wielding horror-movie-freak just popped out of my screen and lobotomized me, like I’ve been gutted with a blunt machete (you get the idea).
I’m disoriented confused and my life is seriously out-of-whack, I spent the day, the whole day, the entire-fucking-day browsing a single site and when I got out on my bike, I thumbed the starter at oncoming traffic (right thumb = starter, left thumb=horn). I can’t remember whether I dropped my bike today in the morning or if it was yesterday. If it was yesterday, then why did I take so long to notice the Picasso-angled rear-view, and if it was today, how on earth did I drop it before I left home?
The only lesson I can learn from this whole affair is that maybe it’s time I laid off the ethanol and stuck to artificially flavoured, artificially coloured, sweetened, tetrapacked 100% natural fruit juice instead. Oh yes.
It gets worse, I rode past an accident today, one of the riders that Terra mentioned in a recent post , rode into a bus and then bounced his skull on the road till his brains (apparently he had some to spare) were plastered to the road, like butter spread on a hot toast (yum –anyone like bheja fry? (no, not the movie(actual bheja fry(bheja=brain)))).
I forgot my debit/card at my supermarket (ratnadeep), luckily I have one of these setups that sends you a message on your cell every-time you spend on it, so I knew it was in responsible hands. I got it back of course, the girls at the checkout counters know me, I don’t have a fridge and am forced to buy my hybrid tomatoes there twice or thrice a week and oh yes, I have a metal stud going through my lip.
(There’s a two hour break between the last paragraph and the next one - I have a heated argument with my room-mate about how bikes transfer power from their engine to the rear wheel, he’s the engineering student , I’m the biologist and the one talking about clutch baskets and pressure plates and gear ratios).
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. An argument about ripping your bike in first gear vs. fourth gear, too detailed and too heated to get into in a post. Good fun and hugs all around once it was over.
I’m not going to apologise about this but my favourite word is “how”. Till now, I’ve studied with people who had been trained with answers from the finest textbooks, from molecular biology to genetics. Their answers were standard and sure to get them full marks in the half yearly’s, now I’m with folks who are convinced that menstruating women can spoil pickle and doing it doggy-style can ensure male progeny and I’ve found the most effective response to any assertion is “how”.
I’ve referred to programming as part of my work and for those who’ve been following my blog for some time (Aunty, Terra, Scissor), you know I have dabbled in a bit of biology, so what puts me into a tax bracket? Clinical trials. I work for ‘big pharma’ (find out who for, by skipping back a few posts). I program those reports that go to the FDA and the EMEA, I do safety reporting, I report everything that the authorities need to know about the safety profiles of our drugs.
Conversation with a close friend about the navy now, he lives ten feet from me, he’s polished off a couple of pegs at my place, but we still talk over Gtalk. His father is in the air-force and my grandfather was an admiral in the navy, we’re comparing ships we’ve been on. He’s been on the Talwar class frigates, I’ve been on a Rajput class destroyer and a Foxtrot class sub. HA!
Naaa naaaa naaa nananaaa nananaaa Hey jude!
I have twelve revenue stamps on my table, intended to use them for rent receipts for my tax returns, turns out, as the someone very close revealed. I’ve paid more taxes this year than I needed to, I’ll get a refund in maybe a year or two. I like the sound of that, I’ve heard horror stories of people who didn’t get paid for two months for tax deductions. I’ve been spared. The government owes me money. HA again!
Tuesday afternoon is never-ending , Wednesday morning papers didn’t come...
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
Each day just goes so fast, I turn around its passed.
And she keeps calling me back again.

And as I always say;
proc sql noprint
create table _BS as
select * from roomies
where upcase(logic) in ( 'FALLACY' 'PREPOSTEROUS')
and rationality != 'TRUE'
;
quit;

#You programmers should get this one, simple code, even if the syntax is SAS;
#Wildcards as in Unix, everything else is simple SQL, think ORACLE, think mySLQ;
#I hate people who don't indent code but the editor on firefox/blogger doesn't support indenting or " " the HTML code for spaces, so my code starts at the first column. Sorry about that!