Home & Hearth Update
Do you like ironing? I don't. I am terrible at it but when I have to have a go at it I spend an infinite amount of energy on each piece, especially the complex piece of clothing known as the shirt; I am sure most of amatuer "iron-ists" have had that frustrating experience where a crease erased on the shirt front leaves a crease on the back and vice versa. Since I will be shortly required to give up my default "bush" style of dressage, this will be a critical skill I will have to acquire. From a time-cost tradeoff outsourcing laundry (at $1-$1.50 a shirt vs. 30 minutes minimum per shirt that I take; soon this would translate into $30 in real world earnings - yes, time is money) is clearly a no brainer, and that is what I will do.
Yet, given my absent mindedness and general disorder, I am sure plenty of situations would crop up in which I will be required to do some basic ironing. For this purpose I spent the last 30 minutes boning up on ironing shirt "how-tos" (such as this illustrated one by BBC folks). Hopefully this will enable me to cut down on the time it takes to slay one shirt. That said, if I fail to make any headway in this business, I am seriously hoping that the home management will be able to rustle up a suitable girl skilled enough in the art of ironing as well. I guess such a lady would have to have that very desi college degree called "Home Science".* However, in order to avoid being attacked by "feminist" minded readers for being on the look out for a "servant" instead of a wife, I also open to the other option of getting out of the corporate-hood as soon as possible, and do something where creased clothes are prefectly kosher, for example, writing.** Meanwhile, someone should please tell Siemens to start selling the uber cool Dressman (at around $500 instead of the current price of £999 or $1900) in USA as well; this may save desi men like me from the "tyranny" of an arranged marriage.***
*This list made me realize that you can get not only a Bachelors but a Masters degree in Home Science!!
**So who wants to be my sugar momma? I will write (and cook, garden, clean house etc sans ironing) while you shall bring home the big hunk of bacon (or dal-chawal).
***Actually the current price point of £999 for the Dressman is not bad at all under the following calculations (thank you "McKisney bhai" for making me learn finance):
- Assume a two-person family that needs at least two pressed shirts/ blouses/ or shirt-like garments every morning.
- Assume that the life of the Dressman is 5 years.
- Assume that the price of getting one item ironed stays at around $2 (or £1) over five years.
- Assume a 15% interest rate.
- Assume all inputs that go into making the Dressman work, such as power, don't cost you anything.
Given this, the Net Present Value (NPV) of this investment is +ve (£890).
It would have been even better if the Dressman could be extended to handle other types of clothes such as trousers, dresses etc.
My Daily Notes
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Goofy Boid
To imporve the mood Buoy got a goofy looking pelican in its header. (Thanks Jerry, for letting me use this photo).
My Daily Notes
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A Tale Of Two Lists
I had read a while back commentary - somewhere in the less than shiny Blogsphere - about the city specific "personals" sections on Craiglist. So since this morning following a blog link, I ended up at the Craiglist Manhattan, I decided to write my own "brief" commentary on the nature of these things.
Some (very lazy) arm chair socio-athropology-ing - this consisted of a quick scan through a sampling of the first 100 posts on both the M4W list and the W4M list - enables to me to conclude that there is something to be said for evolution: (most) men seek women for sex, and (most) women seek men with an oblique, if not direct, eye on "mating". Further observation of the Manhattan "meat" market dynamics enables me to postulate that if you are an "exotic" (for example: latin or desi) woman the market demand for you is extremely high, and numerous sugar daddies with supposedly substantial "machinery" are waiting to be at your service. What about the view from the women's list? It seems to me - an very ineffectual "dater" - that most women have drunk straight from the trough of Cosmopolitan's "How to Find the Perfect Man In Five (or Fifty?) Dates?" kool-aid; one knows this is so when the adjective "handsome" shows up in more than 75% of the sample.
So what are the possible alternatives for an un-"handsome", un-"goal driven", un-"ambitious", un-"funny", Manhattan (or its close environs) bound, desi man like me, given that I am potentially an outlier in these demand and supply curves? I can try the "I want be u frnd" Orkut route but my inner grammar Nazi would rebel. I can try "hanging" at Myspace but my vocal chords aren't suitably trained to squeal "omigod" at bat-like frequencies. Or I can be more decisive and drastic, and make the switch from being a "consumer" to a "supplier" by undertaking a sex change operation: come daddy, come get yooshelf some exotic "sushi". But I think I can always do nothing, and be my usual bookish self, and persist in dreaming of writing some 21st century versions of Uncle Walt's eagles and "pent up aching rivers".
My Daily Notes
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