April showers indeed. I am definitely glad to be out of Winter’s Cloak. Get rid of the layers. it is akin to shedding skin, finally.
It seems like the mention of spring resonates with ideas of happiness, colour, flowers, nature and inspiration. Does it seem like spring has affected me? I sure hope so.
It was one of those moments – midnight’s insanity, if you will. A rush of creative juices caused by the onslaught of the impending amount of work and life questions. Yep, it’s April and well, hey, look who decided to do NaPoWriMo. The motives for doing NaPo (this time around) I think has changed from being a fun/creative pursuit to something of a cathartic spell. I should probably look out for NaPo meetups or something of that sort in Philly.
I’d like to paraphrase a friend (Not copying it, because it’s not mine and hence the beauty of it is lost in paraphrasing), who, in a NaPo poem wrote something along the lines of:
Art is a form drug which upon entering your mind ensures that no other form of expression is enough to feel heard.
I intended to write a longer post about NaPo, but then I opened my email inbox to find out I had a futureme letter from exactly a year ago. It turns out I was quite apprehensive about grad school – where I would finally end up and what it would be like and all that. I was also quite animatedly wondering over which TV show I should start watching (Apparently, I had just finished Homeland and Once Upon A Time).
The biggest chunk of it had to do with the undergrad project time though! About trips to Donut House, Cream Centre and Dhaba mingled with the frustration of lack of data. I think we managed to pull out the majority of data *only* in the last few weeks before the project review day. It was a huge sigh of relief that finally, the cells grew, and the stains and microscopy worked. And that finally gave us the much needed RNA for some qPCR work. I would’ve been pretty displeased with myself if I hadn’t managed to get all of that done because although a lot of time was spent troubleshooting (and singing and cursing for the scaffolds to set properly so that the cells would grow on them), I did want to get some good information out of it.
And the other part of it was filled with nostalgic incidents. Of course I was also obsessing over all the places I had to visit (read : eat at) in Chennai before leaving.
I think futureme is a pretty amazing website. On one hand you can use it write letters to your friends, but also the ones to yourself are really some of the best. There’s a sense of raw thoughts, unedited that your punch out on the keyboard which is sure enough to stir up your memories. As I’ve said before, I’m a sucker for nostalgia. The insights and reflecting upon all that has happened in a year can be overwhelming, intriguing and amazing. It’s beautiful; and one of the best surprises you can give yourself.
Speaking of which, apparently Cake Walk has been shut. Such a tragedy, that is. A place central to all of our birthday events (eventually the guy realized it’s not worth raising an eyebrow over what message we wanted on the cake) and sweet-tooth cravings post college/beach.
Jumping Gene 
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