Ahoy there, Megs!

Yes, this letter is from your future self but before you get excited and examine it to the point of tearing it to shreds in search of clues to prove this scientifically— read it.

As for advice, if anyone should be doling it out, it should be from you to me. You’ve got your head screwed firm on your shoulders. Up until you hit 21 that is, because then it gradually unhinges. So much so you’d easily pass off as one of those bobblehead dolls.

Although perhaps if there’s anything at all that I should point out, it’s that you have an inclination to look at the bigger picture. This is not necessarily a good thing considering you tend to miss the details and they almost always are of great consequence. Work on that, it’ll make you a lot more perceptive and sensitive.

Hmm…16… Well, by now you’ve probably discovered your sister’s law notes, her copy of the constitution and that life-determining document on child soldiers in Sri Lanka. You’re all fired up about child soldiers and will spend days doing extensive research so that you can write about it as your contribution for the school magazine. You hope that at least in some small way you can make a difference with your article.

Hate to break it to you little dreamer, but your article couldn’t so much as tickle the monster. And anyway teenagers just aren’t interested in that sort of thing. They’d much rather read those nauseating stories of lost love that your classmates submit than child soldiers, your World War II write up or your next piece on your own conspiracy theory about Shakespeare and Christopher Marlow.

But don’t toss it all out the window, now! It’s with this article on child soldiers that the seed of journalism is planted in your head. And journalism is the closets you’ll ever get to that illusive adventure you’ve always wanted.

School aside, don’t get mad at dad for not allowing you to go for any of the heavy metal gigs. I can’t imagine you, a naive little 16 year old, at a gig. You go for plenty later. So many in fact, you probably turn into the bobblehead that I am because of all the headbanging!

Speaking of dad, he’s going to teach you to play snooker this year, just like how he taught you to swim when you were 10. You’re going to be able to play pretty decently. He will however, leave for Europe again and once he returns the whole thing will be forgotten and you’ll lose touch with the game. Don’t let this happen. He’s a billiards and snooker champion and played for clubs, for Heaven’s sake! He can teach you so much… You could carry on his legacy! Okay, that’s the dreamer in us stretching it.

Also, try harder in convincing him to quit smoking. He’s 64 now and suffered a mild stroke just two days back and his got a train of other medical conditions, the causa causans of which being his chain smoking.

Yeah, 2009 isn’t very good. Mum was diagnosed with a tumour and underwent major surgery a few months back. You start to realise that your amazing superparents aren’t invincible and they aren’t immortal.

Apart from that your life is pretty good. You’d be amazed that something good will emerge from ALL the horrible decisions you make. Everything just falls into place. We are yet to face the trial of our life.

But you already know that. Since you haven’t got any problems of your own you’ve already started to help your friends through theirs.

Except this is when things start to take a turn for the worse. Almost all your friends’ problems are to do with their topsy turvy love life. After a while you’ll begin to wonder why you’ve never fallen in love and subsequently question if there’s something wrong with you. Of course that moiety of your life is going to get unnerving with a stalker, guys drinking themselves unconscious because you didn’t feel the same way about them and acting rashly. Regarding which, let me tell you this, boys are over dramatic impetuous gits. They’ll be fine and they’ll get over it. Well, except for two… but they leave the country anyway.

But don’t blame yourself and let the guilt of not being able to reciprocate their feelings eat at you. Because with that in mind, you will try to force yourself to fall in love, being the bobble head that you will become. Though I shouldn’t advise you against it, because you learn from it. You learn that this is just who you are, you’re emotionally detached beyond average. Which is brilliant considering you don’t have to suffer heart ache. I maintain that Lord Tennyson was horribly senile when he was struck with the ‘mal-epiphany’ that “’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”. What Tosh!

Right, so I think there are a few raisins of advice sprinkled in there… Hope you’ve spotted it.

Cheers!

Thanks for the tag Purple Socks Is Mine. I tag EyeOfTheCyclone and MiddleChild.

When Pidgin Gets Confusing

If you’ve grown up in Colombo the chances of you being monolingual are very rare. Surrounded by at least two ethnic groups, you’re bound to pick up a language that isn’t your mother tongue.

I do realise I’m stating the obvious, but the thought of Sri Lankans being linguists struck me like a brick to the head the other day. I was trying to speak to someone in Sinhala, and as usual I was frantically searching my brain for words that I blurt awkwardly- punctuating my sentences inordinately with fullstops, exclamation marks and question marks- and being pleonastic about it to boot . And in the bungling gush I threw in a Tamil word!

This caught me by surprise because Tamil isn’t one of the languages I grew up around. I hope I pick up on the language, I can add it to my collection of garbled languages.

Garbled because, while it’s all good and well, when you’re as mixed in ethnicities as I am you tend to learn too many languages that you get very confused at times.

I had to learn about 5 languages at the age of six. This was something my little brain couldn’t handle (what with all the different rules of grammar, alphabets and pronunciation, how could you blame me?). If my brain were a bowl of cereal, the languages I’ve learnt are the Froot Loops. In order to speak a language I’d have to locate Loops of the same colour and string them together.

Here’s how confused I am– I can count up to 5 in Sinhala, only to trail off from 6 to 10 in Arabic. While speaking in French or Malay I inadvertently toss in a few Sinhala words. Or the reverse, like just the other day I was trying to say ‘key’ in Sinhala and ended up saying ‘konchi’ which means ‘key’ in Malay.

Not to mention for the past three days I’ve been ransacking my mind for the Sinhala word for ‘monkey’ but all that comes to me is ‘monyet’, the Malay word for it. I’m too stubborn to ask anyone what the word is, because I know that I KNOW the word for monkey in Sinhala and I’m determined to pick it out of the recess of my mind that it’s lurking in!

But I guess all in all, most Sri Lankan’s are lucky. Coming from this cultural mallum, we’re either bilingual or polyglots. Unless you’re grasp of languages is sketchy like mine which can leave you frustratingly helpless at times! To the point where you misplace your National Identity Card, get served wrong orders and generally never get what you ask for.

The Mad Scientist In Me Asks…

“How about we play around with DNA and actually create a superhuman being”?

Yes, it’s been contemplated widely, but then it’s never been possible with ‘ethics’ cropping its officious little head and turning the idea to stone. So I’ve been trying to think up an ethical way to bring superheroes out of the pages of comic books and have them walk/fly/crawl among us.

The way I see it, gene manipulation is the only way to go. Unlike the half-baked theory we’ve read in comic books in which most superheroes were either blessed/ cursed with their extraordinary powers after being exposed to radiation by some means.

Take Marvel’s friendly neighbourhood Spiderman who got his arachnid powers when a radioactive spider gored its pincers into his hand or Daredevil who was sauced with nuclear waste. Back here in the real world, mutations of this sort aren’t likely in the least.

Chances of radioactivity altering your entire genetic make-up instantly giving you the ability to shoot sticky webbing through your wrist, scale walls with protrusible hairs made up of steel-like keratin or gaining ‘spider-senses’, are as likely as you seeing Punisher pirouetting in a pink tutu (apologises for any mild trauma that description might have caused). And in the case of Daredevil, if you were deluged in nuclear waste, the reaction with your cells will have you sooner floating to heaven than kicking Kingpin butt with the use of your echolocation powers.

That rules out radioactivity mutating cells to give people abilities that defy nature. Which leaves us with GENE MANIPULATION!

Now the legendary method of genetic engineering requires identifying and isolating the gene you want switched- using restriction enzymes, and then filling the vacant spot with the new gene. Sounds simple? Far from it. And then there’s rejection of the new gene to worry about… But it’s been proved to work in the making of a Frankenstein chicken! Alright, not exactly “Frankenstein” although I’d like the bolt of lightning scenario, it’s a lot more dramatic. But the chicken did have its moment, as scientists waited with bated breath, purple in the face and about to pass out– for a tweet. No, it wasn’t a geeky chicken that was ’social network’ savvy, it was a chicken with the vocal chords of a quail.

What’s brilliant about this method is that the switch is made at a very early embryonic stage. So all we need is a few eggs and sperm (of which there’s plenty), have them fertilized and allow the embryos to develop in a laboratory. Of course this is a bit of a trial and error method and we’re going to have quite a few anomalous and abominable looking animals before we create a chimp that can defy gravity and whiz through the air…

And this is the bit where I can’t seem to think of a way around that hulking nemesis ‘ethics’. Standing rigid with folded arms in our way it’s going to be tough but just think, “what if”? What if we had our very own clone army with super powers?

Of course there are more obstacles that stand in our way. The next problem hurled at us, is what will these superpowers be?

Sadly, choice is limited. Taking into consideration the forces in the laws of physics that keep our good planet Earth from floating  aimlessly through the vast expanse of the cosmos, we are restricted to certain superpowers.

Here’s why (for convenience of reference let’s name our superhero Bandu), Bandu won’t be able to have Flash’s power to travel faster than the speed of light because E=m0/-1√v/c2!

According to a concept proposed by none other than the wire haired physicist, Einstein:

If an object is already travelling near the speed of light, it can’t move much faster, no matter how much energy it absorbs. Its momentum and energy continue to increase, but its speed approaches a constant value—the speed of light. This means that in relativity the momentum of an object cannot be a constant times the velocity, nor is the kinetic energy given by 1⁄2mv2.

So Bandu will just keep getting heavier as he runs a nice groove around the planet, deeper and deeper, until he finally hits magma! And Bandu is toast.

But what we can do is add on specific genes from other animals. Gills are a bit complex… but we could try. Webbed feet? Organutan arms? Think of the possibilities…

So if you’ve got any suggestions as to how this can be achieved ethically do feel free to share your ideas. I’ll be sure to credit you in my acceptance speech when I’m awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Disclaimer: No animals were harmed in the writing of this post. Mosquitoes, on the other hand, were shown no mercy.

Do’s and Don’ts

What not to do when going on a Trek (through hell ).

DON’T wear sneakers!

Don’t be deceived by the image. These shoes aren’t designed for rough terrain. They’re no different from Sam Vimes’s cardboard sole shoes. Yeah sure, Sam likes it that way ’cause he can tell where he is just by feeling the cobblestones on the street, but when you’re legging it through a trail, and a rough one at that, the last thing you want is to feel the ground!

With sneakers on you’ll first feel EVEY single stone. A bit later each stone will feel like a sudden spark of electricity shooting up your foot. If you press on, eventually, your foot becomes numb. Yup, sneakers are a definite no-no! If you’ve got nothing else when taking on a trek, go buy yourself a proper pair of trekking shoes.

Do eat and get plenty of rest before your trek

You need to be charged up for it. ’nuff said.

Do take water and food along with you.

If you think you’ve got enough food and water, you haven’t. Take more. And then some…

_______

Do’s and Don’ts aside, I got a fair share of cuts, scratches, leech bites and bruises.

Got a cut on my wrist trying to fish for some mackerel… out of a tin can.  Yeah, alright that may not seem very ‘rough n’ tough’, but when there’s nothing else but can of jack mackerel, and 10 people share it right out of the can… THAT’S… ok, pure desperation caused by hunger. Heck, if we didn’t have that tin can we would have resorted to cannibalism and eaten each other by night fall.

The leeches weren’t too fond of me though. I had only two of the little blood suckers bite me. One at my ankle and the other on my clavicle (shoulder blade). St.Fallen and Little_Boy_Blue on the other hand… The leeches were drawn to them… possibly the effect of the weed in their blood

Here’s how leeches suck blood:

A blood sucking leech attaches itself to the skin of its victim using its suckers. It makes a small wound in the surface of its hosts skin using three serrated jaws just inside its mouth. It then releases saliva into the wound, which contains the anti-clotting agent called hirudin. This keeps the blood flowing freely. The saliva also contains a substance that blocks nerve transmission from the pain sensors in the skin, so that the victim does not notice its bites.

It may sound like something out of a horror flick but it’s fine. You don’t feel it. You’ve got nothing to worry about ’cause the only superficial blood vessels are your veins. So at the very most you’ll just have a bit of a scar for a few days.

And here’s the bruise I got after a buffalo pulled a Zinedine on me…

The picture was taken this morning, it’s turned a ripe shade of deep purple now.

It was a crazy trek but the guys were awesome. All the rest of you girls should join them on their next adventure. You’ll be in safe hands I can vouch for that.

As for me, I’ll be sitting out the next one. My parents weren’t too pleased that I hadn’t kept them up to date every second of the day about where I was and whether I was still alive. So I’m going to have to wait for this to fizzle out before I can go anywhere with friends again

Crazy Elaborate Dreams

I don’t really know why I have sci-fi dreams, I haven’t watched a sci-fi movie in… a very long time! Well, here’s what I dreamt last night…

I took another bite of my bar of Snickers while shifting my weight from one foot to the other. “Not much longer”, I managed through a mouthful of chocolate, malt and peanuts to a friend beside me. He nodded with nervous concurrence. We were among a horde of others clumped together at an open field, gazing into the vast expanse of the sky. Just then the curtain of grey altocumulus clouds began to disperse. The time had come.

The clouds wafted slowly, first revealing two blue grey moons, perfectly aligned. They scattered further to reveal another two and then two more. The sea of people surrounding us began to stir as they pulled out hand-held telescopes and cameras and zoomed focus into the lunar spectacle. The atmosphere was eerily somber though. 14 celestial bodies perfectly aligned were in plain view but there wasn’t a single utter of amazement.

Within minutes rich plum dusk seeped across the heavens making the 14 moons more prominent. Little sparks of electricity shooting from one moon to another were now visible. With a heavy sigh I swallowed the last of my bar of snickers. The prophecy was real. The elimination of the human race by a mighty alien force had been set in motion.

Okay, done rolling your eyes? I know it sounds silly but this isn’t some story I’m making this up as I go along. I’m just relating what I dreamt!

But fine, I’ll just write the rest of it in points, leaving out the details.

My friend and I return to his home, where the other to of our gang are already waiting for us. The friend I went with and one of the other two, are geniuses. They start doing the complex math needed to put into action my plan to defeat the alien force. Yeah, I’m the leading the team . The other friend, like me, is a flying ace. The two super brains, had built us space pods.

Silencing an argument on quantum physics, a holographic image pops up of the alien force that was preparing to destroy us, out of something that looked somewhat like a DVD player. They looked very human (probably why they felt Earth would be the best planet to occupy). And one of them was actually kinda hot.

Anyhow, while I and the other flying ace wait for the genius-duo to sort out the math I strum my guitar (This could be ‘cause I actually miss playing my guitar. I’ve been too busy.) while at a Tai restaurant ordering Tom Yam soup.

And that was when I woke up. Anti-climax eh? But like I said, that’s just how the dream went. It was actually very detailed and lots more happened but it’s just too crazy… like Tom Yam soup! Why? Why Tom Yam?

This isn’t the first time I’ve had a sci-fi dream though. There was one about a rebel AI microchip. Of course not all my elaborate dreams are Sci-fi. There was the dream about a warlock and how I got a wizard from another dimension to defeat her. Or the one where I escape after being captured by gremlins… And lots more!

I do have ordinary dreams too. Just the other day I dreamt that I was driving somewhere in my sister’s car in the middle of the night and the brakes gave away.

Anyone else have these crazy complex dreams, like my sci-fi dream?