andirealized

Originally published at awaitstheday. You can comment here or there.

(It’s about time that I documented this part of my existence. Forgive me for the clinical dissections and impersonal language. About 60% of my decisions in Finding A Man are due to my instincts, but I’ve learned that “I just don’t like him” is not as good an excuse as pointing out a glaring lack of a checkmark on a list. So here goes.)

I’m currently 28 years 9 months and whatever days old. I’m straight (for those of you still wondering) and so busy with work and school that I’m man-less right now. My parents, being the good Indian folk that they are, have appointed themselves to be my two-person matchmaking army. Indian males of the world, beware: my parents have probably already found you, evaluated you, and found you lacking or promising based on either superficial (height, skin color, education), spiritual (Bible-believing, God-fearing Christian who can stand his own in a theological conversation with my dad), or simplistic (you didn’t respond to their email or phone call) criteria.

Suffice it to say, very few men come out of that test and are still considered ‘suitable’ for me to meet. And just to be sure they’re looking for the right things, my parents have continually asked me, “What are you looking for in a man?”

I don’t know, Mom and Dad. There is no simple answer to that question. I’m mature enough to know characteristics I find appealing now may not last in the years to come, yet the husband I think I need in the future is probably different from the reality of who I will need when that future becomes present.

To make my life easier, I’ve divided my criteria into two successive categories: who I want, and who I probably need. ‘Who I want’ describes a base population of men that will (hopefully) have some of the additional qualities described by ‘who I probably need.’ I’ve given the ‘who I want’ list to my parents, but ‘who I probably need’ is the criteria I use in my personal evaluation when we meet face-to-face.

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This post is password protected. You can read it at awaitstheday, where it was originally posted. You can comment here or there.

This post is password protected. You can read it at awaitstheday, where it was originally posted. You can comment here or there.

This post is password protected. You can read it at awaitstheday, where it was originally posted. You can comment here or there.

This post is password protected. You can read it at awaitstheday, where it was originally posted. You can comment here or there.

I’ve begun ‘shadowing’ a physician at a nearby hospital for the semester, to get some ideas for my dissertation topic. Since I have a habit of forgetting things, I will be journaling the visits that I observe. In the interest of privacy (and covering my butt from HIPAA) I’ll be locking my shadowing posts.

If you want to read these posts and can’t read this Livejournal post, then please contact me for the password.

Originally published at awaitstheday. You can comment here or there.

Since Christmas, I’ve been viewing the world as though I’ve always lived with blinders. I can categorically claim that it is not fun relearning the world after 23 years of operating in a certain way. I feel as though I am 28-turning-45.

Ever since I was five years old, I’ve been building up walls to guard my mind and heart. This is not as strange as it may sound – we all have experiences in our lives that cause long-lasting reactions in our souls and our very thoughts. Mine occurred early in my life. My safety mechanism has always been predicting someone’s next move. In other words, I only wanted to know people long enough so I could predict how they would react in any given situation. And much like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, I created a mental repertoire of personality traits and body language cues for any possible scenario. If person A is praised for doing a good job, he smiles contentedly and thanks you for the compliment. When person B is praised, she will smile but will feel guilty for being happy, so she won’t thank you for it but she will instead react with a self-deprecating comment. These analyses became instinctual to where I would not have to verbalize it in my mind: I knew it with a look.

I would only venture out of my shell when I needed to ‘figure out’ someone’s personality. After I felt I knew them well enough to predict their moves, I would retreat back behind my walls. The irony was that I was always disappointed when someone would not make further overtures to be a closer friend.

This continued until I was 20, when I finally found a friend who was willing to continue those overtures; in fact, she was so stubborn about it (and I was so flattered) that we became best friend almost without us realizing it. She worked her way through my psyche, her love and friendship flooding into the empty crevices of my soul as though she was a river and I was war-ready Orthanc. Much of those walls crumbled in face of her support, but a few stubborn ones remained – in particular, my prediction ‘instinct.’

It was only this past December (2011) that I realized the core problem of my ‘gift’: I had only ever been exposed to a finite number and types of personalities in my life. I had always refused to believe my ‘instinct’ was wrong, and had consequently been rudely surprised by people who were worse than I’d ever expected them to be. This wasn’t naivete – this was blindness. It was the classic example of living in a bubble.

This rude awakening came in the most common, yet most surprising (for me) form possible: I was betrayed by a final exam. A colleague and I had been taking the same class and therefore were both submitting final projects for that class. Colleague came to me one day and asked if I had included a section in my write-up. I replied that I was not because we had never discussed it in class and it seemed out of the scope of what our professor wanted. Colleague agreed with me and said they would not included it, and that was that.

A few days later, when I collected my graded final project from my professor, we went over my grade. Surprisingly, he had deducted points for not including the section that Colleague and I were discussing previously. I explained my reasoning for not including it, and he looked at me and said, “I understand that we did not go over this in detail in class, but we did mention it. Even [Colleague] included it in their report.”

I was floored. Colleague was someone I had worked with closely since my first day in Richmond. We had almost all the same classes, we had all the same friends (because I introduced Colleague to them and ensured that Colleague was invited to everything I was doing). In short, we were almost inseparable, and even our friends treated us as an entity. So for Colleague to do this felt like a betrayal.

I could not look at Colleague in the eyes for the rest of December and all of January 2012, I was that pissed off. Slowly, I began viewing everyone and everything with new eyes. Some of my other friends have surprised me with their kindness and their maturity, while others clearly do not think of me as highly as I think of them. In particular, there is a subset of my friends that seem to enjoy spending time with Colleague without me; they even spend time in downtown Richmond (which is not usual) and don’t think to invite me, even though I am the only other person of our friends who lives downtown. Last year I was always asked, but this year I’m not.

I’m desolate. I have already passed the 1.5 year mark in my stay here in Richmond. I’ve been here long enough that when I visit my parents for the holidays, they introduce me to their friends as “our daughter who lives in Virginia.” There was a time when I could even see myself making a permanent home here since I had a great group of friends around me. Now I find myself clinging to any semblance of New York left in me. Now I’m aiming to graduate a year earlier so I can move away from this place and go back to a city that’s actually pedestrian-friendly. And now I’m realizing that I may never keep in touch with some of these friends that I made here.

Maybe I am taking Colleague’s betrayal too seriously, but if I would never consider doing such a thing to Colleague then I would expect the same courtesy from Colleague (especially after all of this time we’ve spent together). And now I am left here in a fog, wondering if I will ever find out what these people truly think of me. Part of me is glad that I still have a few walls left to hide behind.

Originally published at awaitstheday. You can comment here or there.

Imagine your typical day: You wake up at 5:30 or 6am, depending on your commute, to reach work at 7am. After going through security and maneuvering your way to your office, you are bombarded with emails and phone calls. Reports need to be completed, meetings need to be attended, communications must be sent to outside locations, and money needs to be found so that the company can run for another day. Lunch is simply a way to keep your mouth occupied while working. Eventually, you leave work at 7pm to continue working at home or to collapse into a heap.

Anyone entrenched in their own daily hustle can relate to what I’ve just described. But what I’ve really described is my summer experience at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Silver Springs, MD.

While most federal agencies are maligned, the FDA appears to be more maligned than usual. This could be a result of the numerous food/drug/device scares that we must deal with as health consumers in a technologically advanced age. But I believe it’s because the FDA is in the middle of a tug-of-war between consumers, manufacturers, and academics. Consumers want protection from injury and death by relying on the FDA stamp of approval, while manufacturers want a faster review process so they can make money as well as protection from litigation by having the FDA stamp of approval. From where I sat, the FDA wants to prevent that next adverse event for just a little while longer. Yet academics stand on the outside of this foray and blame the FDA for not doing an adequate job.

True, one only has to look to our Congress is to realize how poorly any government organization is doing in this time, but I think the naysayers need to understand what it’s like to work for the FDA.

You might believe you worry constantly about your job security, but what you truly fear is being fired or laid off. Now imagine walking into work one day and being told, “Thank you so much for the work you do! We truly appreciate all of your efforts. However, because the U.S. Congress has not approved their budget, we are unsure if we will be able to pay you for the next month.” Clearly the full breadth of meaning behind ‘job security’ has not reached your world.

You might also be irritated with a person in your workplace who is clearly not doing adequate work. If you approach a supervisor and file a complaint, you fully expect to see said person reprimanded and consequently fired if he/she does not correct their behavior; simply put, there are repercussions for questionable behavior. Now imagine receiving a new drug application filled with data that supports the need to approve the drug. However, after reading through it yourself, you notice some possible issues with adverse effects. You decide to approve the drug, but ‘strongly urge’ the manufacturer to continue studying adverse effects in this drug once it reaches the market. You see, you are only allowed to ‘strongly urge’ further study because federal law has not given you the clout to force a manufacturer to comply; essentially, you have filed your complaint but it is entirely possible that repercussions will never occur.

Or perhaps you are a consultant on a 10-year project for another company; while you have fulfilled your duties, the other company has dragged their feet in beginning their project so you’ve been left with nothing to do. After 2 years (making this a 12-year project), you finally receive some results from this company. Yet the data they give you is so incomplete you are unable to do anything of note. Now imagine a drug company is running a 10-year post-approval study but drags their feet in getting started. Imagine that you are employed by the FDA to oversee the progress of this study, but because progress is practically non-existent, you have been reduced to sending reprimands to the drug company, asking for more progress and faster work. It is now becoming a 12-year study, but federal law does not allow you to do more than make recommendations.

The recurring theme here is that our own laws are preventing the FDA from doing more to help. Granted, I met very intelligent and not-so-intelligent people during my stay at the FDA, so there are internal politics that need to be smoothed out before the FDA can operate optimally. But stupid or genius, slow or fast, I respect every single FDA employee for putting up with this idiocy.

We like to complain about the so-called ‘red tape’ that we have to deal with federal agencies, but no one ever complains about the true culprits: the representatives in the government that we vote for who implement this ‘red tape.’ What is essentially a massive cycle of bickering may never end, but you can be sure the FDA is doing what they can.

Originally published at awaitstheday. You can comment here or there.

This post is password protected. You can read it at awaitstheday, where it was originally posted. You can comment here or there.

There was a time, not too long ago, when I Googled “Actress Sujatha” and could only find a 150 by 150px blurry photo of her. If you Googled her today, you’d find the public life of a woman that I called my aunt for 27 years of my life, but apparently never knew.

This post is mostly for my own benefit, but it is also for yours. This was a real-life woman who loved her children, her husband, and cooking – in that order. Second to my mother (filial loyalty dies hard), she was the epitome of a ‘lady’ in my eyes – always graceful, always soft-spoken, but never a pushover. I didn’t know her as well as I wish I had, but I do miss her.

• Wikipedia
• My uncle, crying. I’ve never seen that before in real life, and I hope to God I never see it again.
• Times of India
• The Hindu
• India Glitz
• Kannada Galatta
• Mangalorean.com

But this is my favorite – they do a wonderful job explaining her acting.

Originally published at awaitstheday. You can comment here or there.