The Sunday Salon -- Apr 18, 2010

It has been HOT this past week, except in the evenings, when it would get chilly! I know I'd been waiting for summer since winter started, still I can't help but struggle with the heat as well! I grew up in Dubai (a desert), where I was for 13 years. Then it was back to home, in Palakkad, India, another hot place. Once I was done with my my UG, I headed off to Hyderabad, India, which is yet another hot place. I can tell you, I was relieved and thrilled when I came to Virginia, US. This place doesn't see as much snow as in the states north to VA, but it does get very cold. That was a welcome change for me.

It has been a relaxed weekend for me. Lots of reading, but I doubt I will be getting much time for that in the next few months. It's time for me to start writing the thesis and wrap up my research work, and for that, I'm going to be needing a lot of motivation to kick it into gear. I actually love writing. Since my 11th grade, I had an eye on a career that involved some form of writing, and in those days, I quite yearned to be a journalist, because, well, I was very opinionated then. Somehow that didn't work out due to many reasons (a discussion for another day), so I became an engineer instead. Now the main avenue for writing that I get is via blogging. I love getting creative with words and sentences, and particularly enjoy reading posts written in a beautiful hand (not my posts, I mean yours). Some times, I am guilty of just reading and not taking in a word of the review, simply because the author of the post has written such a lyrical post that I get lost in the aesthetics of the language.

I have another avenue for writing as well, and that is in my research when I write technical papers. (Yes, you read that right!) Technical writing is terse. No emotions, no colorful words, no repetition, no stress or emphasis. In short, it is one dry stretch of words that come together in an almost machine fashion. Can you imagine a writing as far away from the blogger style of writing? So sometimes, when I write a technical paragraph, I unwittingly write as a blogger. My Professor and my colleagues have pointed that out a few times, much to my embarrassment. And sometimes, when I blog, I write tersely, making it very technical. Thankfully you readers are so good that you wouldn't tell me that. :)

I don't enjoy technical writing. I can do it, but it is a form of writing so against and so different from the expressive form of writing that I love. My words are my medium. I am quite known to be someone who bottles up my emotions. There's only so much emotion that I will show you. But if I had to write, it will be much more expressive than my spoken words are, much more than I can ever show on my face. It comes from my growing up years, when I used to write as a way to speak my mind. Sometimes, I wrote in my head, and had internal conversations with myself. Sometimes, I write reviews in my head, and soon as it develops a structure or flow, I rush to complete it.

Anyways, I'm rambling. I started talking about the weather and ended with the hobby of writing.

Have a good Sunday blogging and non-blogging folks! Hope you have a good week ahead!