Skip to main content

Fast Forward

I met F through a mutual connection who thought it might be interesting for us to network given our professional backgrounds and interests. F was pretty upset when I needed to reschedule last minute. I gave him a pass given he is older than my father - and he is a career academic. Not the kind of person who deals with having the whole world stomping on their calendar and needing to fight for personal time. Maybe something he did not need to deal with in the course of his career. I did not have a good feeling about this meeting but second guessed myself and decided to meet him anyway. 

F turned out to be a person who stopped being curious about things a while back but based on years of practice had muscle memory to respond correctly to new information and opinions that contradicted his own (I had plenty of those) in our short conversation. I wondered why our mutual connection had decided this would be a good learning experience for us both. I can learn something from talking to just about anyone - always have. Maybe my bar was too high for F given his extensive resume and age. I might have been hoping for a nugget of wisdom that would have clarified the many confusions of my life. 

None of that happened and judging by the flow of conversation, it is unlikely further engagement would yield those results. F insisted that I watch a short video he had set to music that helps explains his current avocation. He insisted that we do it while on the call so trying to be polite I acquiesced. That musical presentation had the vibe of something from forty years ago - perhaps that point in time when F became incapable of incorporating anything new to his repertoire despite having good intention. He was incredibly proud of his production and I did not have the heart to tell him that what I thought of it. 

After the call, I had to take pause and think about what lay ahead for me - this could me a few decades out, untethered from the reality of the day, living in my la-la land, imagining that I am still at the top of the game when the world has moved so far that no one knows what game I am even talking about. F is luckily not blessed with much self-awareness or insecurity about his place in the world - I may have a bit too much of both which will make things worse I suppose. 

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

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 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