A new girl joined us at work recently and she dresses too nice for the small office that we are. I felt so bad that I started wearing pants to work. (Nope, I did wear shorts before)

The Egg by Andy Weir

You were on your way home when you died.It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And that’s when you met me.
“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”
“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.
“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”
“Yup,” I said.
“I… I died?”
“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.

-- From and continued here..

Only the best piece I've read in recent times.

This weekend, I slept in a tent in a huge clearing. It had rained in the morning  but the night sky was perfectly clear with a moon which had just started waning. We took the top off the tent and slept staring at the stars. Walking around in natural moonlight with no other sources of light, in the forest, is an out-of-this-world experience. You come to realize how much external sources of light have spoiled you when all you needed were your eyes.  

English, here to stay.

"I recall an incident that Crystal describes in his book Global English — it happened in India some years back, involving a street protest in support of Hindi. The banners were largely in Hindi, but there was one very prominent banner that read ‘Death to English’. The event was filmed on world television and of course it was this banner that reached more people around the globe than any of the others. You can see the quandary facing the people — write your message in English and you compromise your identity, but you do connect with a worldwide audience! (Just as an interesting aside, you could compare here the predicament of early English writers. John Wallis wrote about the growing significance of English in the 1600s — yet, his grammar of English Johannis Wallisii grammatical linguae anglicanae was in Latin. Even into the 18th century, Latin continued as the language of scholarship and by writing Principia Mathematica (1687) and Arithmetica Universalis (1707) in Latin, Isaac Newton reached a wider audience — besides, English still wasn’t deemed respectable enough for such learned and technical texts!)"

- Excerpt from here by Kate Burridge, prominent Australian Linguist.   

Huge deadlines and lots of work piling up. Leaving everything behind for 4 days of disconnect in the mountains of Colorado. Should be fun.

To the next two weeks

For I will be swamped with work, and have to take support calls and be homeless (crashing a friend's place). And also a lot of my plans have been thwarted by twists of fate, so here's a 'Fuck you' to the universe.

Aurora over an Icelandic volcano

Found this piece of gold online. If I ever live to see something like this, I'd forget every care in the world.

Sounds on a quiet night by the lake

Air conditioner motors and static buzz of electricity.
Trilling bugs and chattering crickets.
Croaking frogs and the scampering raccoons.
And the silence of the glassy water reflecting the starry night sky.

Control

Here's to those moments when you don't have control over what you feel, as you lay bare and vulnerable to the resounding music pounding on you wave after wave.