The cross posting experience on Micro.blog is so so so poor. So many clicks. So much ambiguity. Like cross posting options should be visible at all times below post window and let me choose where I want to cross-post. Even the smallest things ugh.
Swim meet weekend at University of Maryland College Park. This is the location I absolutely hate coming to because of insane traffic on capital beltway. This year though because the kid is older, we are now in the morning session, which means the swim meet starts at 8, warmups at 6.30, so that meant leaving home at 5.30am, and which meant we were all up by 4.30am this morning. We get here and the parking lot is already full! Did the fucking Americans camp out here all night or something? Unfuckingbelievable. Anyway 2 days of this and I will be ready for some nice naps!
Wait Amit Agarwal, yes that tech blogger who made google scripts earns 13 million a year?!! wtf. Totally chose the wrong profession 😂
If FIFA signs up with Ticketmaster for World Cup ticketing then there is no question in my mind it will be an epic disaster. If Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is any indication, then it means 90% of all tickets are going to be bought by scalpers and bots who in turn will put them on reselling platforms like Stubhub/TickPick for thousands and thousands more. People will complain and still end up buying them anyway, and Ticketmaster won’t care because they own half of the resell platforms also anyway so they make more money. I really hope they take the Olympics route that Paris did and lock down the resales to their own platform, and prohibit price gouging by resellers. In fact at Olympics if you resold a ticket, you actually ended up losing money because you spent 10% in reseller fees and you couldn’t sell it for more than the actual ticket price - that was a splendid model, and I hope FIFA does the same!
Not only was Blockbuster one of my favorite tracks of the year but it’s single shot video was also my favorite music video this year. There is so much going on in the video and they pull it off perfectly in a single shot!
Thanks to our kid, our household listened to a Taylor Swift 10x more than any other artists. In fact we listed to Taylor Swift more than the next 10 artists listening time combined! I blame the kid squarely 😆
Season 15 of Coke Studio Pakistan was so good that half of my top 15 tracks this year were all from one season this year! And a A R Rahman song makes an appearance!
There is no question Maghron La and Blockbuster were two of my favorite tracks this year. The kid obviously skews some of this stats.
My kid is doing combined Civics-English research project and topic she chose income inequality and access to education as her topic. She gave me initial thoughts and I am really looking forward to her paper when she finishes it!
For the longest time I was on United Healthcare and it was nothing but a pain. They started out OK a decade ago but dealing with them for any of my prescription medications was a royal pain. The specialist would need to fax in an authorization form, every fucking month to get me specific supplies. Due to health issues I was recommended by two specialists to do an endoscopy and colonoscopy few years back, and UHC denied my pre-authorizations for the procedures multiple times. When I came back to current company went with Blue Cross who immediately approved both procedures within a week of getting appointments and requests by specialists. Even the pre-auth nonsense that my doc has had to do every month has gone away. So yeah, knowing the absolute scum of company UHC is I have absolutely zero empathy for the CEO or his family. Fuck off.
Temperature 31, feels like “16” because of wind, will go down to 11 at night. The most awful time of the year is truly here. I can’t wait for the warmup next week to feel like a normal december. This is late Jan/ early Feb weather right now and I have not been gently ushered into it. Fuck cold. I want global warming to to create endless summers everywhere! (Ok, pls take that last line with a /sarcasm tag and do not latch on to me)
Why are flights so damn expensive to Las Vegas from east coast. Every time I feel like doing the Big 5 national parks from Las Vegas, the price of air tickets puts me off completely. A hundred dollars more I could be in Europe!
I didnt realize that 9x12 is such an odd photo size to print. Most places do not print this size. I got a few prints from nations photo lab and i assumed everyone printed it only to figure out nope. Ugh!
I rarely share personal photos here but felt like sharing this one. I took this in 2010, a few months before mom’s passing. Today 3 out of 6 people in this photo are no longer with us, which makes us want to cherish the rest 3 even more. My mom’s side of family has always been very close knit and us 1st gen cousins are also close knit mostly because of our shared experiences growing up with each of these women at some point in our lives. At different points in life us cousins have spent months or sometimes years growing up in their houses in different cities, or in their younger years some of them at ours when we were small kids. (The second generation of all these cousins are really going to miss all that attachment and closeness of growing up together. Half of the 2nd gen are in the US and other half in India, and with time+distance, there is literally nothing binding the 2nd gen cousins together.)
One of most under-talked topics in India is how hard Indian men have it when they lose their spouses, especially our parents generation and ones before. If the man passes away, the women amalgamate into other families far more easily than men do. If the family does not have a son, then the women don’t have much problem joining their daughter families, or even women’s extended families and become one of their own. They have so much more to give to the household than men can, and more often than not, men are mostly seen as a burden once their wife passes away. I am not justifying the men here, but saying that’s just how society looks at in India. My dad went through the same experience years back when he became a widow, and had it not been for my brother back home, its unlikely he would have a found a “home” per se, and most likely be living alone by himself. My grandpa did the same when he lost his wife. But my great-grandma just became a part of my grandpa’s family after she lost her husband. My dad’s sister didnt live alone when she divorced her husband - she just became a part of our family for the longest time before she re-married someone else. This is such a uniquely men issue, at least in India.
Last night I and a cousin were catching up reminiscing our shared time spent with aunt who passed away, she quipped, how will our uncle live anymore and where? The son’s here in the states, and while his daughter is in other part of India. While my uncle has his own family in the town, there is literally no chance he’d be spending time with them. In a matter of 7 years his house that used to be filled with people has gone literally empty - kids moved out, his own elderly mom & died within an year of each other and now his wife after after few years. I really feel for him now that he has nothing but an empty house to come back to every day. I hope that in time he figures out a way forward like my dad did (though much thanks to my brother more than anyone else!), and in time finds a path ahead that keeps him happy and motivated.
Sigh, as if to make it all worse I came to know just now that my cousin and aunt’s daughter is pregnant and my aunt knew. They were waiting to share the news more broadly once she had recovered. This feels like history repeating itself in the family and I am watching my own life from 14 years ago play by. Mom’s passing, her knowing we were expecting back then, and the devastating feeling it came with that she would not see her grandchild. This feels all too real seeing this play out again for my cousin. Life can be very cruel at times :(
Woke up to a sad call that my aunt passed away back in India. She was mom’s sister and second person now amongst the 5 sisters to have passed sway. This one hurts because I spent so much time with her during my engineering days, practically living in their house whenever I was bored of hostel. She suffered through some great pains in the last few months, a side effect of beating cancer a decade ago. I am glad she is at peace finally but also feeling very sad about how young she was. A decade and half later another of my mom’s sis has left. 2 years ago my grandpa and their dad passed away too and I am glad he was not around to see another of his kid suffer and pass away. I guess we are all at that stage of life now where a 5am call means something bad. She was barely 54-55 at best. Gone too soon :(