But he'll be called Finn (or Phinn) which is rakish and cute.

lillian elizabeth is a good name - it even looks good with out capital letters.

The filters for my furnace are confusing me.

going for a walk was much more fun than looking at furnace manuals

One of the best feelings in the world is having a human being utterly limp on your shoulder.

This is true, even for a confirmed NotHavingBabies person. My godson did this to me a couple of times, and it made me very happy.

I like the name Lillian Elizabeth very much, but fear I will be calling her Princess TickyBox for as long as I know her.

Remember the conversation last week about paying shocking amounts of money for clothes? I take back everything I might have said about not *really* being one of those people. However, the terrifying amount of money I spent this weekend gets me fabulous, custom-made-to-my-measurements, Gother than f*ck shoes. With bats on them.

Tiggy, I'm susanw on LJ, and I just friended you.

Plei, do you think she'll demand to be called Lily at some point?

We'll be calling her Lily from the start, though how we spell it is up in the air.

Tiggy, I'm minim_calibre, but as I never check my user info these days, drop a note in my last entry so I remember to friend you back.

Okay, usage question:

"Female" used as a noun. [edit: Specifically when referring to human beings, not any other species.] As in, "It looks like a group of all men, but when you look closer you see that one of them is a female."

It drives me BATSHIT in a way that I can hardly articulate.

Am I crazy? Do other people dislike it/object to it as much as I do? Or even a little?

"is a female"?

Um, no. No and no and no. "Is female", fine. "Is a female", no.

Susan and Plei, friended!

Plei, i think Lillian Elizabeth is a beautiful name. whoever said that it looks good lowercase is correct too. all those l's and i's together.

who here has seen Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights? would i be wasting my time?

12/18/04

12/23/04

12/26/04

12/28/04

1/1/05

Now that I've got all that travelogue happy crappy out of the way, I can get down to purging my brain of random thoughts and scenes from India thus far.

India is a dirty place, man. It's all so...ghetto. There are no trash cans anywhere (littering is a way of life), which may explain the lack of paper towels.

My brother and I spend all day quoting Group X ("Do you like those? Do you have those, to sell?"). And Strong Bad ("And my boots...would be rocket boots."). And Dead Like Me ("Reggie, don't say 'effing.'"). And making fun of Mischa Barton.

Another thing that's changed is that Toli now has a battery backup system for when the power goes out, which it does quite often. In fact, this week is our lucky week, during which the government has been deliberately diverting power from the village to the city. Next week, another village gets to lose power at inconvenient times.

Also, there seems to be a new eatingware system. Everyone has these large paper plates and homemade-looking (the backs are product labels) paper bowls and plastic glasses, as opposed to eight years ago, when we sometimes ate on giant leaves. A couple times now, there's been an occasion for the entire village to feed itself, as everyone sits on the ground cross-legged (Indian-style, as it were), and the children distribute the food. Men and women eat together, and by together I mean separately. Don't drink the water, though! We only drink filtered water, Bisleri; a brand name that, like Coke, has come to refer to all liquids of its class. Though Pepsi seems to be more popular in India.

Speaking of schladies, where are all the hot womens? In two weeks, I've seen less than ten girls I'd deem pretty attractive (defined as, "Hmm, let's look at her again...and again...dum dee dum, oh maybe again."), and no one really loins-burningly hot. Plus, those less than ten are probably all related to me anyway. Maybe I really do find non-Indian girls more attractive. I mean, I could find ten attractive girls in Ann Arbor just by taking a ten-minute walk. Maybe I've been accustomed, grown to embrace the American standards of beauty. But I've had genuine crushes on Indian girls in the past. This might prove to be troublesome. Cause it'd be damn nice if the next girl I fall in love with would bloody well meet with my parents' approval. (And also, would love me back. But that's an entirely different matter.)

We saw Rugrats dubbed in Hindi. It was awesome, especially the voice of Chucky.

There's a whole new cast of characters here. Vimalbhai's gained weight (he went from looking as skinny as I am to looking like the lead singer of Modest Mouse). I finally met his wife, Vibutbhabi (we have specific names for all kinds of relations: my bhabi is my brother's (or in this case, cousin-brother's) wife). She's very nice, and we joke around a lot. I communicate with her in my best broken Gujarati. I can't conjugate properly, but I have a basic vocabulary. They have a daughter, Vidhi, who's a total brat. She's my niece! But I want to trade her in for a better, nicer model.

Dipakbhai fancies himself an English-speaker now, though his English is about as good as my Gujarati. He is now apparently on his third wife, after having both the wife he eloped with and the wife his parents chose for him leave him. Reshmabhabi was pretty quiet and shy at first, but in the last few days we've seen her talking.

I've also finally met Nishaben's husband Vinesh, though to me, he's Patel, being my cousin-sister's husband. This is not to imply his last name is Patel (though I'm sure it is); that's just the name for that relation. He's (continued...)

( continues...) cool; we went on a motorcycle ride. They have a five-year-old son Shivam, who is now my favorite nephew (I think he's my only one, but shh). The day I met him, we instantly got along, as I picked him up and turned him upside-down, and he began to cling to me. He acted like a little puppy, so I started calling him Puppy, and the name stuck. He picked it up too, as he now responds with "Yes Puppy yes Puppy yes Puppy!" (Vibutibhabi always thinks I'm calling "Bhabi!") Just now, I watched my puppy write the whole alphabet, uppercase and lowercase, and the numbers up to 100. He's a smart puppy.

Everyone in this damn village seems to know us, even though we can never remember who they are. I walk down the road, and someone will call to me, ask me how I am, invite me in for some water or lemonade. I can barely remember all their names and how they know us, though the faces look familiar.

There's this cow next door. Every now and then, it will moo like the dickens. And it never stops being funny.

My little sister has a stash of little fun-size Snickers she shares with me. She also brought my brother and me crackers and cookies one time. She labelled a bunch of Dasani water bottles for us that she keeps refilling so we have our own water to drink. One time she replaced mine with Limca, and I burst out laughing because it was so unexpected and so nice. Another time, she filled it with lemonade. She's a good kid, fourteen now, but I don't think she's matured yet. She still feels like my baby sister.

I'm getting new glasses. They're half-frames. They're pretty sweet. My brother's getting emo glasses. No one else in that place knew what we were talking about, but if you saw them on him, you'd have to agree that we had a winner.

Besides Limca, another good Indian thing is Krackjack, the "world's first sweet and salty cracker." There's nothing exceptional about it, but it's just so good for some reason. It's kind of a glucose biscuit, but not as hard.

In a bizarre turn of events, we were walking in Navsari one day when we ran into Mitesh, a friend of mine from my dancing days whom I hadn't seen in at least three or four years. He was here to get married (he introduced me to his fiancée, who said nothing, which led me to believe they had found her here). Just walking down the road in Navsari. Man.

Up until a couple days ago when we finished them, my brother and I were reading Crime and Punishment (for school) and The Stand (for Lost), respectively. We read every chance we got, taking the books with us when we went out, to read on the way. People kept commenting on it. Some of the older men were supportive, gently encouraging and allowing us to read, telling us where there was better light. They saw it as a good thing, a sign of intelligence and learning. Others kept criticizing us, telling us we were reading too much, that we'd strain our eyes, blah blah blah. I'm on bloody vacation. Let me fucking read.

Our days, for the most part, have been unexceptional. Shopping trips to Navsari and Surat, visiting the houses of people we don't know, attending the weddings of people we don't know, getting diarrhea, getting a sore throat, still having a cold. I've surely been getting enough rest, though. We usually conk out between eight and ten, and after a night of sleep in a rock-hard bed getting bitten by mosquitoes, we're woken between six and eight for the day's activities. It's hard to stay in bed anyway when the whole village is up and ready, singing the morning prayers.

India is a dirty place. I'm not married to its charms and grace, but it's nice in its own way. Everyone's Indian. Just like me.