My Nano Second of Fame

Ah, finally. My days of toiling away for an undisclosed audience of Web surfers, perhaps 6 loyal readers and other curious onlookers were coming to an end. My blog was about to hit the big time. Millions would track it down to voyeuristically follow the bumblings and mumblings of yet another single woman in some city in some corner of the world. They would search in anticipation of those sexy, glamorous posts that make every 32-year-old journalist living the inevitable life of Carrie Bradshaw – who cares if you’re not in NY, not working at Vogue, not screwing multimillionaires, or not owning a single pair of Manolo Blahniks. This blog could still get its 15 mins. of fame, damn it! Oops. Make that a nano second, please.
I was tracked down by an intrepid reporter from a mainstream Indian newspaper to be asked that profound qs: what is a quarter-life crisis? It is apparently the "it" topic being covered in hazaar places these days to take the pulse of desi youth and all that. But coming from the same tribe, I was happy to spew, umm, some profundity and help out in her quest. Would I be willing to be quoted as a 32-year-old singleton? Would I be willing to give out the name of my blog? Would I be willing to eat cheese and crackers for an entire day? The answers to all those questions were yes. And then the article came out and I clicked on it and scanned for my name, or my blog’s name, at least – wait! Where was it all? Missing. Where was my profundity? Missing. I wasn’t too disappointed, though. For two reasons:
1. Since it was about the QLC (did this acronym exist before?), there were too many people in their 20s in the piece. The very judgmental editor pushed me to the bottom of the copy. And I don’t know who made this decision – writer/editor – but the quote they finally did use was the least interesting and had no context to the rest of the story! But of course I understand sadistic journalists. I’m one of them.
2. And since I do have a blog to air my rants, perhaps you, gentle reader, might care enough to read my Original Pearls of Wisdom for Fascinating Feature Sunday Piece:
“What is a quarter-life crisis? A quarter-life crisis is supposed to be when you hit a wall and you don't know what the future holds for you or what exactly you want from life. If you take it more literally – if the average life expectancy of a person is 75, you hit a quarter-life crisis at 25. But with life expectancies growing, so does the age of the crisis. For today's youth in India it could mean getting everything you want by 30 – job, marriage, kids, house, car, world domination – and then hitting a wall. What next? So it doesn't matter if you're single or not, I think everyone goes through this process. The crisis may be more magnified if you are single and face societal pressure to "settle down" in the more conventional sense. Will I ever get over this crisis? Unlikely. I need to sustain my blog traffic.”
Oh, and please don’t ask me the name of the newspaper or a link to the article – totally irrelevant, and if you’re that curious, I’m sure you intrepid types will find it!!

Why DC Ain't So Bad, Y'All

Now that I have been back in DC for more than a week, let me do a brief fifth grade summary of why I like staying here instead of whining about how much I miss India… especially since I have been extolled the virtues of London and NY on more than one occasion this week…those comparisons are totally unfair! Those are cities. Let's not compare apples to oranges.
So anyway: I like DC because I see history everywhere I walk, because I see dead Christmas trees waiting to be collected in January after the fuss of being lit and surrounded by presents, because I do bump into the same people at the same 5 places and I don’t really mind, because I see at least four different skin colors on the metro who are reading books like “Freakonomics” or “Confessions of a Video Vixen,” because there are a lot of smart people who take their work and fun in equal seriousness, because you can get a very good crepe for $7, because nothing beats Bush bashing when you’re in a bar a mile away from where he lives, because I don’t have to live in a house behind a picket fence in the suburbs and spend my weekends at Home Depot, because even though people recycle relationships, there are still enough crazy singletons and crazier married friends who keep it interesting, because there are at least SIX Scottish terriers who live on my street, because I can still walk home at 12 a.m. and feel relatively safe, because even though nobody cares what you’re wearing, they will say you look nice if you do or not say anything at all if they’re indifferent, because nobody here is totally indifferent to the world around them and for the most part they do know what’s happening in sub-Saharan Africa, because for every cabbie who has conned you there are two cabbies who are pretty decent, and because this year, I might, I just might be convinced to run a marathon in this cause celebre-fitness obsessed capital.