Skip to main content

Split Yet Green

Apparently you cannot be green and divorced at the same time and there is obviously merit in that argument. My neighbor downstairs is a single dad who keeps his apartment so tidy that management of the property would likely pay him to use it as a model to show prospective renters.

Nothing looks like its ever been used. The books and CDs are lined up so carefully that you hesitate to venture near for fear of disturbing their order. Having been neighbors for three years now, my guess is it would take an act of God to fluster him or put his house in any state of disarray. The perfection is almost repelling. I'm not surprised that I have never seen any visitors at his place in all this time - it would intimidate me to sit on his couch.

When his little girl comes to spend a weekend, his house is the favored watering hole for a bunch of neighborhood kids including J at times. Unlike us adults who step even on his doormat gingerly, they don't think twice before trashing the place. But the minute they are gone, the apartment is back to looking picture perfect. Us moms wonder how he does it. I am guessing a lot of cleaning supplies are involved in this rapid recovery from the mess and chaos that half a dozen kids must necessarily leave in their wake.

His lost green quotient on account of his split marital status and obsessive compulsive cleanliness is probably more than made up by the Toyota Prius he drives.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more