shankar2k's Journal: Some Journal Entries I've Been Meaning To Write

Hello all, I know I haven't updated this thing very often in the past year. I haven't had internet access in my apartment since I moved out of Harvest House, and I usually don't feel like writing journal entries in my lab when I should be working (that doesn't stop me from playing video games and doing stupid web crawls though).

To catch up, I'm going to give a summary of some journal entries that have been swimming around in my head, but I never got around to writing.

• (Post Birthday Party Analysis) That surprise party (which I should clarify did go off pretty well) got me thinking about things like family and my relatives and all of that. But by the time I got back to Urbana it all got clouded up by all the things I had to do back here. Oh well, I'm sure the thoughts will strike me again at some point.
• (The Pernankils vs. Urbana) I think I mentioned earlier that my niece Srinija is coming to U of I in the fall. I offered to have them crash at my apartment for Srinija's orientation. In much the same spirit as this entry, I was going to describe my experiences hosting them. I have had people over at my place before, but having a whole family presented unique challenges. While Srinija and her parents were off orienting, I took the kids to OHOP, Putt-Putt golfing, and swimming, and then later we all went out to Courier Cafe and Custard Cup. It was pretty amazing that we could fit a 6-person family in my quaint two-bedroom apartment with no cable, internet, or air conditioning. It was like camping.
• (Moving Karma) This entry chronicles the exciting adventures Shankar had while moving three different peoples' stuff. We begin with our intrepid hero realizing that his lease for his old apartment ending on the first, but his new place's lease doesn't start until the 21st. The new tenants at his old place were nagging him to be out earlier. So with the help of "roommate" Matt, the two rent a U-Haul and put all of their stuff in storage. The next day Shankar is driven to St. Louis by his adviser to help move his adviser's wife back to Champaign (I know you might think this was shady of my adviser, but it wasn't). While in St. Louis, Shankar develops a migraine headache, jeopardizing his ability to drive the U-Haul containing his adviser's wife's stuff (Can you believe I was the most skilled driver they could find?). The amazing Shankar drinks about half a gallon of water and manages to hack his headache and drive the U-Haul safely to Champaign, and then races back to his old apartment so that he can clean up the place before the new tenants bitch at him, even though they were the ones that wanted to move in early. In the not-so-thrilling conclusion, Shankar, along with four others helps his friend Sue move her stuff into her place. In a moving anticlimax, they finish the whole move in two hours. Shankar collapses and forgets what happened the rest of the week. ::END CREDITS::
• (Beijing Baby!) I actually knew this one about a month ago, but I just wanted to make sure. Two papers with my name on them got accepted to the International Conference on Computer Vision in Beijing, China. I'm going to get to present the papers at the conference! The really cool and scary thing is that one of the papers was accepted for an Oral presentation, so that means I get to give a 20 minute talk on the paper to about 500 bigwigs in the Computer Vision field. I hope they don't eat me alive. My adviser seems to think I can handle it though. I'm so stoked!
• (Being a Nice Guy) This more introspective piece was going to fathom why Shankar is darned nice. I would first sidestep the (in my opinion) stupid issue of whether or not there are selfless actions, and just assume that all of my actions have selfish motivation. I would then explore all the reasons why I do seemingly nice things. Let's see:
  1. I believe doing nice things for people is my niche.
  2. Doing things for others lets me avoid dealing with my own problems.
  3. Helping others gives me a small sense of self-worth.
  4. That whole do-unto-others-as-you-would-have-them-do-unto-you thing (Though I don't really expect it, I just think it would be nice).
  5. It serves my own purposes (e.g., helping Sue move was the only way I could think to get back in touch with that girl)
  6. It just bothers my sensitivities not to help when it is potentially easy to do so.

  I would have also talked about how I can get too into it sometimes. Like for example, as I was moving out of my old place, I had an old computer that worked pretty well, but that I didn't need. I gave it to my downstairs neighbor, who had an even older machine, only to discover it didn't have a modem. So over the next four days, I search around for modems, eventually buying one from Radio Shack and then spending the rest of that night getting the darn thing to work with the machine. It was exhausting, but I felt bad for my old neighbor, because he had little knowledge of computers, and so would have been struggling on his ancient machine by himself. So that was a clear case of #5. I have let people use me and walk over me in the past, but I think as long I'm constantly aware of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, I should be okay. I think one of the reasons I had a hard time at Harvest House was that I tried to take in everyone's pain. I went over there a couple of days ago, and while some drama was erupting, I felt anxious for a moment, but then I realized that there was nothing I could do to help, but more importantly, it wasn't my problem to solve. So the only remaining issue I see is that niceness is sometimes considered a form of weakness. Well, maybe I am weak. I'm going to try to be less weak while still being a good guy.

• (Feeling Foreign) For my final catchup entry I would like to talk about not fitting in. My old Harvest-mate Rahul was kind enough to let me stay at his apartment while I'm homeless, and he happens to live at an apartment complex filled with Indians. I think there is at least one such apartment near every major university in the midwest. On Friday, Rahul and I were invited to a gathering of the Indian Immigrants, and I actually felt like a foreigner. It's not that they were excluding me, its just that I don't speak Hindi or Tamil, and I don't have much knowledge of Bollywood, and I don't know all of the expressions they use. It was strange because if I don't speak, I look just like one of them, but I'm not. On the other side of the coin, when I hang out with "typical" Americans, there is always a clear sign that I'm not one of them either. So once again I find myself trapped between the worlds. I'm getting used to it though. Its perhaps fitting that I saw the movie "American Desi", a cheezy romantic comedy about "ABCDs" trying to find their place in America. Its not all that great a movie, but it spoke to me.

Re:YO!

[shankar2k]

Thanks Sue!

In the future, you should probably sign who you are at the bottom of your post. This time I knew it was you because you were sitting across from me when you wrote this. :-)