Dirtscapes

1) The chicks whom you used to LUST after in college, are all married. And they have kids.

2) You can relate more to Pink Floyd's Time than Metallica's Enter Sandman.

3) You've spent 5 years in a job, with random intermittent bouts of total bitter disillusionment about your chosen field of work, interspersed with random intermittent bouts of total complacent bliss. And you don't know which cycle is about to hit you next.

4) You really don't know whether the guys you used to hang out with in college are 'onsite' or 'offshore'. Because they stop sending you pix after their first couple of trips.

5) Owning a car doesn't seem like a big deal. Really. Each one of your friends now owns one.

6) Kids in your building call you 'uncle' instead of 'bhaiyya'. For those blessed with big foreheads and an overbearing sense of precocious maturity, rookie cabbies and rick drivers do so too. Sometimes.

7) You pass by your former 10/12th 'coaching class' where you tried to cram a year's worth of 'learning' into 2 months, and look at the newest batch of students standing outside. Geeky, unsure, fresh out of school, complete with gawky stances and horrendous clothes. And positively feeling that you were different from them at that stage in your life. You think you were, but chances are that you really weren't.

8) Blowing up 600 bucks on a single dinner sitting (with suitable tissue restorers) doesn't seem THAT big a deal. Till it suddenly dawns on you that it could have lasted you a week back in college.

9) You are now financially capable of footing enormous phone bills every month, but then it dawns on you that there is no one really whom you can call up and yap about incredibly insignificant minutiae in town anymore for hours together. Either because they have other priorities in life, or because they aren't in town.

10) You meet up with school friends, and while generally reminiscing about the good times, somebody says "Do you realize that we've known each other for over 15 years?". And you stop, stare and say "Yes. 15 years." There's this moment of warm, thoughtful silence, and then you pick up from where you left off.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29, 2006 at 5:12 PM.