overworkedtiredandnumb's Open Salon Blog

Job Hunting

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 16:09:18 -0400

Dear Recruiter for Temp Staffing Firm,

As we discussed this morning, I did not notice before you pointed it out to me that you had changed dates on my resume. The resume you sent to the hiring manager said I had worked until 2010, but in fact I last worked in 2009. I chose not work (and am fortunate enough compared to others that I could make that choice) and I choose now to deal the consequences of that decision now that I search for work again.

When you called me this morning, I was driving my children to school, so I answered on my bluetooth car phone, meaning that both sides of the conversation were audible to my 5-year-old and my 8-year-old. And during that conversation you asked me to lie. My children didn’t completely understand this, but I explained it to them, and then dropped them at school. Afterward, I called you back and made it clear that I would not support the date changes on my resume when speaking to the hiring company.

The whole lie was so pointless. Either I was qualified for the job, or I was not. As it turns out, I was not. The depth of my experience in testing routing protocols was never great anyway, as I pointed out to the hiring manager. Two years out of the workforce certainly hasn’t helped me learn more about routing protocols, but neither did it take away my basic intelligence and, thankfully, my integrity. Acting without integrity and honesty makes me miserable, more miserable than going jobless ever could.

I spoke with three engineers this morning and thoroughly enjoyed it. Yes, I’m a bit rusty from not working. I’d love to get back into it somehow. Unfortunately, the job you sent me to interview for needs someone with specific experience and with the ability to get up and running quickly.

You do no service to your clients by altering resumes. When I spoke to the hiring manager, it became immediately obvious that I was not qualified for this position. That gave me the opening to mention that my resume had been altered and that I was a bit upset about it. I was not sure whether or not this was common practice. The hiring manager assured me that it was common practice. Your clients seem to understand that you do them a disservice, but they accept it, pay for it, and move on. I guess the costs (like spending 2 hours on the phone with me today) are factored into their business plan somehow.

So, at the end of the day, no one except me is in any way upset that you altered my resume. But I am upset. Still. You drew me into a sleazy endeavor with very little warning or guidance. Please remove my resume from your files and go piss up a rope.

Home Again

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:09:26 -0400

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’m a big fan of cognitive behavioral therapy, the main premise of which is perhaps, to some, not very encouraging; namely, that “sometimes I think stupid things.” Stupid is a strong word, but the idea is that your brain pushes untruths on you: false projections, exaggerations, wild overgeneralizations. My brain is particularly good at presenting me with such absurdities packaged in a sort of romantic, melodramatic way. Frankly, they’re alluring. “I’m alone. I’m misunderstood.” Such ideas take you back to the teenage years and maybe even are a way to reclaim youth. If I think like a teenager, then I’m young! Hahaha, that would be so great if it weren’t so patently obvious and true that teenagers are idiots. See the trap? Sometimes I think stupid things.

The trap is particularly well-set during transitions. And the irony, right?, is that I seek transitions like a drug. I’m the one who sets the traps and waits to catch myself, offering up a great opportunity to bash myself around for a few months. This year’s transition is our return home from China, where we lived for almost 2 years. China was the last trap. The one where I prepared myself by not preparing myself and got zapped by the tazer of cultural differences that I will never understand. (Though I’d like to understand them there’s just not enough time or money to indulge myself in such a selfish pursuit.)

Now we are “home.” And we are not. We’ve returned to the very place that we left. Every guide and well-meaning friend warned that it wouldn’t be home. I *knew* it wouldn’t be home. It isn’t home. Now I have to make it home, especially for my daughters (aged 8 and 5). “This is not my home! I’m alone. I’m misunderstood.” Sometimes I think stupid things.

What does it mean?!

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 23:04:14 -0400

The Chengdu Chairman

In Chengdu (Sichuan Province, southern China), there is a public square overlooked to the west by an enormous statue of Mao Zedong, one of those statues of Mao saluting his people. Is he showing them fatherly warmth? Grandfatherly wisdom? Stern headmasterly direction? In Chengdu it appears as if he is ordering a venti latte, because the eastern side of the square features a Starbucks.

Mao is not ubiquitous in China. The only place I have seen him in the city where I live (Dalian, Liaoning Province, Northeast China) is behind the DJ in a nightclub. There, a young version of him gives the same salute, as if to say, "Dance on, comrade!" I've never figured out whether his appearance in the night club is meant to be ironic. In Chengdu it is surely not an intentional irony, just an accident of the Sino-schizo reality of the 21st century. Mao is not openly rejected, but there is very little of his ideology left to be found. Three decades ago, Deng Xiaoping took the country in a whole new direction when he reformed the economic system and supposedly declared, "To get rich is glorious." As far as I can surmise, no one ever looked back.

It is, in fact, easier to find a Starbucks in China today than an imposing statue of Mao. Back home in the US, I wouldn't call myself a fan of Starbucks (my husband is the coffee snob in our family, and rarely lets anything other than Peet's pass his lips), although neither do I avoid it. Caffeine + dairy + sugar is a powerful good thing. But I have lived in China for more than a year now, and here, Starbucks is my frequent refuge: a place with a decent beverage, a soft chair, and free wi-fi. If it had toilets, I'd just move in.

My Starbucks is located within An Sheng Shang Cheng, a shopping center. There are no toilets in the Starbucks, so if you overdo it on the lattes, you have to trek across the mall to a KFC, stand in an always long line and use a perpetually damp and splattered squat potty.

I go to Starbucks so that I don't go home and do bugger all. I have spent my time in China adjusting to a new culture (including the expat culture), a new language, and also to unemployment, which was not my lifestyle back in the US. Given that I might qualify as the world's shittiest housewife, this has been a big adjustment. Sitting in Starbucks pretending that I have a life is better than sitting at home, wishing food would magically appear in the kitchen.

When my friends and I gather at Starbucks, we enjoy peering into the mall at the newly urbanized peasant Chinese and their outlandish clothes. The mass migration in China has brought hundreds of millions of people off the land and into the coastal cities. They have access to modern housing, modern conveniences, and modern styles. What the women do with those styles is something like what a New Jersey gangsters wife does when her husband comes home with cash. Hair is big and heels are high. My friends and I are mostly the opposite, we are the REI/L.L. Bean kind of crowd.

My own orthopedically sound, not to mention safely reflective, shoe collection. Hell, I didn't even pull the Earth shoes out of the closet.

We are confounded by the fact that women whose feet were forcibly bound for several centuries now voluntarily opt to squeeze into some of the most challenging footwear available on Earth. The Communist Revolution brought previously unknown freedoms and power to the women of China. Mao famously said that women hold up half the sky. The foot binding custom was already on the decline when Mao came to power; Mao put it to rest forever. He also put women to work and set them on the path to political equality. In recent decades, specific non-discrimination laws have been enacted, though not necessarily observed. And yet, the women continue to bind themselves, in a sense. The women binding themselves today are not the elite rich ones of the past, they are the newly enriched (if only a bit), perhaps looking to verify their wealth with aching feet.

The women of China seem to de-liberate themselves with short shorts and f-me boots.

When I am alone at Starbucks, I try to read. I try to write. I try to study Chinese, which I am determined to master before I die. It will assuredly take me that long.

Recently I sat alone in Starbucks, pouring over my "to do" list (excerpts: review for Chinese lesson, buy a curling iron, buy bread, write something profound, read history book, find out why Flip Video software doesn't work after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6.6). On my Mac, iTunes shuffled randomly and I listened mindlessly until I noticed that Patti Smith's "People Have the Power" was playing. The song comes from Smith's 1988 "Dream of Life" album. The name kind of says it all, but here's one of my favorite parts:

I awakened to the cry
that the people / have the power
to redeem / the work of fools
upon the meek / the graces shower
it's decreed / the people rule

It's a good song. I have no idea what she was specifically thinking about when she wrote it, but to me it sounds like something right out of Mao's Little Red Book.

I bought a vintage 1970s copy of Mao's little red book in Shanghai, one that includes an English translation side-by-side with the original Chinese. Less that five minutes perusal of it yields this quote: "The richest source of power to wage war lies in the masses of the people." The Chinese Communist Party today understands that such power is a double-edged sword and they have gone to great lengths recently to suppress any gatherings of people who want to put their power behind something other than the Party.

In the midst of the uprisings of north Africa, meetings or "strolls" were proposed on a Chinese language web site based outside of China. Such sites are in theory inaccessible to the Chinese populace (and to me) because the government maintains the Great Firewall. In practice, most Westerners living here use a VPN service (some of which have experienced great difficulties lately) and many Chinese citizens probably do the same. The government moved quickly to make these group strolls impossible by installing construction barriers at the appointed places, posting uniformed and plainclothes policemen at them, and running street sweepers down the street at the appointed time. The government has also moved to shut down prominent underground Christian churches, which had been tolerated for many years. (The New York Times has covered recent events in China stories here and here, for example. All of their China coverage is indexed here.) Prominent Chinese citizens, such as the artist Ai Weiwei are being locked up for talking too much about people power. Any Chinese citizen who wants to discuss the power of the people will be shut down, and fast. Perhaps forcefully. Ironic, no?

The Western press makes much of the lack of a free press in China. They are at least partially justified, but I also think they enjoy the ego boost that they get from pointing fingers at oppressive autocrats. Pretty easy targets, really. The press in the US does enjoy free speech, but sometimes opts not to take advantage of this and sells itself to the highest bidder. (If you enjoy reading eviscerating takedowns of the pompous mainstream media in America, I recommend Glenn Greenwald.) The Internet in China, just as in the US, has given the people greater opportunities to freely express and report on issues outside the mainstream/government controlled media. The obstacles are greater in China, but not insurmountable.

The lack of a freedom of public assembly here in China seems so much more draconian than the constantly discussed Great Firewall and government censors. There is so much more to our first amendment than just the freedom of the press. The US Constitution's first amendment restricts the activities of the Congress, grants rights to the press, and grants rights to the people:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Congress can't pass a law to make you, and the local police can't force you, to refrain from peaceably assembling. As a rule, America does an admirable job of hewing to this law and principle. (OK, insert your counter argument here, proving me right and wrong at the same time.) Not so in China. China probably has a similar provision in their constitution, but everything in the Chinese constitution is trumped by the stability card. The Chinese suffered more than a century of instability at the hands of foreigners, and more significantly, at their own hands. The Party plays the stability card constantly (newspapers are chock-full of editorials singing the importance of stability and stories in which leaders extol its necessity), and backs it up with force.

Chinese student's lovely hat and Jimmy's skanky one

My Starbucks is popular with expats and with Chinese students from the local university. I occasionally strike up a conversation with one of the students. One day last week I was bored but unmotivated. I didn't want to read. I didn't want to study. As I was standing in line, I noticed a young man, young, well-dressed, kind of cute. Probably Chinese, but maybe not. And he was wearing an Alabama hat. Not much different from the one my husband, Jimmy, wears, only with a different color scheme. Jimmy's Alabama hat has now seen time on three continents through four seasons. Twice. Oh GAWD it is skanky! And he still won't wear the new one I bought for him. The A, to me, is as clear as a bell. Hmm, stranger things have happened. One time, on a volcano in Hawaii, with a broken down rental car, I ran into some fellow Alabamians. So I spoke to him.

If I were home in Alabama, I wouldn't have noticed the hat. In some other place in the US, especially outside the South, I might have simply given him a knowing glance and nod, the silent "Roll Tide." Here in China, I had no clue whether he knew what he was wearing or not. So I start with a cautious, "What's the A for?" He offered an unsatisfactory answer: "It's a baseball team." Uh, no, buddy, it's not a *baseball* team. I backed off. "Nice hat," I said, and took my decaf iced latte with me to a soft chair. I figured I'd be studying after all.

Then he sat beside me. Okay, pal, I'll give it another shot. "Are you a student?" I asked.

"Yes."

"What do you study?"

"Film directing."

"Oh. Who is your favorite director?"

"Blah-de-di-blah-blah." He named some American action-film yahoo.

"Oh, not Chinese? I am a big fan of Zhang Yimou."

"Blah-de-di-blah-blah. I like Tom Hanks. Forrest Gump."

"Oh, may I see your hat? Ni de mao zi, wo ke yi kan kan yi xia ma?" Aha! Yes, there inside it said, "Crimson Tide."

"You know in the movie, Forrest Gump played football, not baseball. Here," my enthusiastic pointing follows, "at Alabama!"

Blank stare.

Ok, I wasn't going to bond with random Chinese youngster over his very attractive hat. He had no idea what his hat meant, especially to me. Much of my family settled in Alabama in the 1800s. Alabama is home, family, fun, and, especially football. At the club with Mao behind the DJ they play some freaky mix of "Sweet Home Alabama" and the Chinese, Russians, and Africans dance and sing. I feel like "double rainbow guy." What does it mean?!

"I should study. My Chinese is very bad." I dropped my gaze back to my books.

He tired of waiting for me to chat some more and abandoned the chair beside me. Leaving space for the next student to pounce.

"Can I ask you a question?" she asked.

"Sure. No problem."

She pointed to two words in her notebook.

"Fatigue," I enunciated. "Symptom." I said it twice. That's a tough one.

"Are you a teacher?" she asked.

"No, I'm unemployed."

"Can you be my friend?"

"Sure, I'm here all the time. Many days."

Her hat featured a rainbow. If I couldn't make the boy understand Alabama, there's no way I'm going to explain a rainbow to this girl!

"Can I have your phone number?" she asked.

"No. I'm sorry." I replied. And here the genial east-meets-west atmosphere broke down. She was not angered, but disappointed. Hell, I was disappointed for her. But not so disappointed that I was going to invite one of the random 1.3 billion into my life.

I want to know more about China and the Chinese. I want to know what Mao means to the new generations. Why he is on the nightclub wall, for example. It is fascinating to contemplate the effect a single man can have on a nation, especially a man who both rescued and ravaged that nation. Mao is like a car wreck that you can't take yours eyes off. China has always been a mystery to the West and never more so than now, when the contradictions of Mao and Deng and the Internet and authoritarianism and stability are so obvious. Or is it some stunning natural phenomenon? And I'm double rainbow guy, "What does it mean?!"

But it is so exhausting. Some days I find that all the coffee in Starbucks just isn't enough to take me down that road.

Mmm. My venti latte tastes good today.

Reality Check (India, part 4)

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 05:02:34 -0500

This is the story of my trip to India with my husband, Jimmy, and my daughters, Eleanor (8) and Hazel (4). Days 1 and 2 are described here, Day 3 here, and Day 4 here.

Tuesday, Day 5 -

Today is reality day. And the reality of India is poverty. Mile after mile of it. This morning we are scheduled to drive to from Ranthambhore to Jaipur, the administrative capital of the Indian state of Rajasthan. So that's roughly 100 miles of poverty on our slate for the day.

We are picked up by Swaroop, the driver who will escort us for the rest of our journey around northern India. We stuff our bags and ourselves in a small white Toyota van. (A few days later we will finally register that every damn car in India is white.) Swaroop is originally from the state of Himachal Pradesh, in the Himalayan foothills. He and his family now live in Dehli. Just like Swaroop, many Indians come to Delhi, India's capital and main northern metropolis, for work. Not all are able to bring their families with them. Swaroop is the first of several people we speak to over the next few days who has three children. India has had a family planning program since the 1950s and can boast that birth rates have declined by 40% since then. But methods were notoriously draconian, including forced sterilization, and there was plenty of resistance and backlash. Modern family planning education emphasizes women's education and rights, including promoting the idea that having a daughter is just as good as having a son. But the average number of children per family in India is still three.

We leave our hotel and swing through the town of Sawai Madhopur. For the first time we see life in semi-rural India during the cold light of day. The roads are dusty and litter-strewn. Motorcycles whiz by us as we overtake tractors, buses, jeeps, tuk-tuks, sedans, trucks, bicycles. If it has wheels, it is on the road; and Swaroop wants to pass it. He points out one truck constructed with spare parts from a variety of other vehicles. The front end is two wheels with a slapdash engine and steering column on top; it looks like the Wonkamobile.

Camels pull carts of people and carry enormous bags of what Swaroop says is animal feed. Well, I guess there would be lots of that, because I see animals everywhere. Yes, the well-known sacred cows wander through the streets, but so do dogs and boars. The boars, rooting in the garbage for scraps of food, seem to be the main garbage collection scheme. There are goats and sheep here and there.

There are also pedestrians everywhere, while jeeps, tuk-tuks, and buses are positively bursting with people. People, people, people.

Many, but not all, of the men wear western-style clothing. Others favor white Nehru suits or the white homemade wrapped clothing that Ghandhi favored, with huge white turbans. There are many, many more men on the streets than women. The women are all home trying to wash the red dust out of their husbands' white clothing, I think to myself.

But the women stand out. They are simply spectacular. Not a single one wears muted colors. Yellow, orange, red, purple, green. And that's just on the scarves. From basket-balancing head to ringed-toe, they are covered in vibrant, rich colors and patterns, which are contrasted against their dark brown skin. Surrounded by dust, filth, crumbling buildings, and mangy animals, they look like they are headed to a party.

Groups of schoolchildren are visible in shabby uniforms. Other children, perhaps too poor to attend school, look even dirtier and shabbier. The small infants go bare-bottomed.

Trucks are elaborately decorated from end-to-end with paintings, streamers, bells, and all manner of bling, in a style my friend Julie has labeled "bedazzled." On the rear the words "Use Horn Please" are painted, so that drivers will honk before passing. Swaroop takes this advice to heart and leans on the horn incessantly. He remains calm, but fidgets with his mustache. Swaroop sports the classic Indian handlebar mustache. I've read that the Indian tradition of facial hair is going out of style, but I notice no such thing in my time there. The variety and volume of beards and mustaches is delightful (although, please Jimmy, just don't do it).

The main commercial building style is a row of up to 20 single-car garage-sized rooms built of concrete. These serve as fruit and vegetable stands, phone shops, convenience stores, barber shops, restaurants. Much of the housing appears to be stick or concrete huts with only three walls. A few Hindu temples are visible. Their architecture is elaborate, even when they are small. Lots of men are sitting around at outdoor cafes (dhabas) or around storefronts, chatting. They gather at the barber shops and those who can afford it treat themselves to a professional shave. I see people bathing at public hand-powered water pumps, and watering cows at the same pumps.

I am overwhelmed by my lack of comprehension of the scenes I have witnessed in just one hour. As we exit Sawai Madhopur and enter a more rural area (some awesome rural shots accompany this story about water issues in Rajasthan), I borrow a scrap of paper from Eleanor and begin frantically writing notes. Now we are in a region dominated by beautiful yellow mustard fields, broken up by the occasional grove of mango and guava trees or field of low, green, bushy plants that I think are beets. More scribbling. Over the course of the day (a five hour drive) we see the same scenes that we saw in Sawai Madhopur repeated in small villages and towns, interspersed with the fields of mustard. The only noticeable variation is that the buildings are 2 to 3 stories in the towns, only 1 story in the villages. Neither the people nor the buildings give any hint of greater wealth; the range seems to be from slightly poor to desperately poor.

So here's the part where I'm supposed to say something profound, but instead have to admit that I still don't fully comprehend what I saw in India. In the end, we spent several days on the road and every ride was the same: bumpy mile after mile of dust, poverty, animals, honking, swirls of fabulous colors, bling-covered trucks, and vibrant people. I have no idea if the Indian people are happy or sad, if the richness of their culture compensates in some way for the lack of welfare. The colors and the swirls of activity stand out against the poor background. Rich me prefers black. I take my own health, wealth, and education so much for granted that I have no idea what I would do without it. Could I wear bright colors (or white!) and thumb my nose at red dust and God(s) and say, look at beautiful me and my beautiful colors?! I would most certainly have less autonomy and die younger, but is that the sum total of my ambition? Live long, individually? Is there something in the crazy chaos of poverty-ridden India that lifts people up in ways that money cannot, or that money subverts, even? Why do they wear the bright colors and bling-out their trucks? What do they see in life that I don't?

Originally, our rides in India were supposed to be "rest days" during which we refueled ourselves for sightseeing. But the sightseeing we did from the car was the least restful time of all, even if we were just sitting on our asses. We didn't doze in the car, we stared in wonder and our minds were endlessly twisting through the whys and hows. Pondering, especially, how so much beauty and so much poverty could exist in such close proximity.

One day, Jimmy wondered out loud if we were "using poor people for entertainment," and I assured him that although we were both mesmerized, we were not simply entertained. "Consider it an education," I said, "We both enjoy learning new things and we have learned the reality of India." But now, a few weeks on, we are still overwhelmed by what to do with that knowledge.

Tiger, Tiger (India, part 3)

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 05:02:32 -0500

Days 1 and 2 are here. Day 3 is here.

Monday, Day 4 -

Today is jeep safari day. When Jimmy put in the long hours planning our trip to India, he thought that the kids might like some time away from museums, palaces, forts, and temples. And so the first real destination of our trip is Ranthambhore National Park, a tiger preserve established in the seventies. The park is home to roughly 40 tigers, but also an enormous variety of other wildlife.

Ranthambhore guide

We are met Monday morning by a guide/tracker and driver. We take the front bench in their two bench jeep. Behind us sit three young men from Jaipur. They are a bit shy, as are we, but friendly. As we pass out of the gates of our palace hotel we are treated to the site of local families tending their sheep and goats. The landscape is scruffy and dry. The air is crisp and slightly chilled. The sky is blue. This is gonna be good.

Local goat herder

At the entrance to the park, we stop to purchase tickets. Hawks land. Not the winged kind, but the kind with t-shirts, hats, and postcards. They are persistent, trying to get my children to don a hat. The hawks know that a parent will fold when the kid starts begging. "Do you want a hat?" I ask Hazel, in a well-rehearsed routine. She shakes her head no. That's my girl. One mango lassi for you. Mango lassis are the currency of choice in Hazel-land. Before this trip both girls were promised that they could have all the mango lassis they could drink, as long as they behaved well. Hazel has been docked several times for bad behavior and her running average is "all you can drink, minus 3," a threat that carries more weight than you might think with a 4-year-old.

Ranthambhore Fort

As we enter the park, Ranthambhore Fort becomes visible on the ridge above us, we pass through an inner gate and our guide is suddenly in his element. After ten years working in the park, he has mastered both tracking wild animals and entertaining tourists. We pause briefly for some snaps of a huge banyan tree (not even the largest in the park) and yet another formidable gate. Several buildings and memorials existed on the land when the Maharajahs of Jaipur ceded it to the state of India at the time of Indian independence (1949). The buildings are all in ruins. Previously it was kept as a hunting ground for the royalty. They didn't hunt it clean, though, because now we see the ruins of several buildings on a small island in a lake where several large Sambar deer are grazing. They are huge. And gorgeous. They are surrounded by peacocks.

Sambar deer

Our guide's head darts here and there and on we go. I'm scanning all around trying to drink in the beauty. Then we screech to a halt. "Down there," he says, and points at the dusty road beside the jeep. "Tracks." Oh yeah, tiger, game on!

Tiger tracks

We plunge into a creek and all of us struggle to photograph a beautiful heron calmly sitting there as we fly through the water. "Now is the time to look for tigers," the guide explains, "We will have time later to look at other things." We spend the next hour or so touring the area. We see more tracks, more deer (including beautiful spotted deer) and peacocks We also stop several times while the guide chats with other guides in other jeeps and trucks full of tourists. Their exchanges are in Hindi, but all seem to be saying, "Yes, I saw the tracks. No, I didn't see a tiger."

Then the guide shushes us. "A call," he says. I heard nothing. We are not likely to simply happen upon a tiger, he explains, but the alarm calls of prey may indicate where the tiger is this morning. We all instantly turn into ears. I shush the kids. An enormous shriek pierces the air. Everyone's eyes grow and we look to the guide for, uh, guidance. "Mating call," he says, "Deer." Mating call?! Can I see big deer mating, please, Mr. Guide? In my head, I start rehearsing my birds-and-bees-and-Sambar-deer speech for Hazel and Eleanor, when off we rush again.

We spend the whole of the morning like this. Zipping around. Listening. Looking. Awed. Expectant. We see kingfishers, tons of magpies, an owl, green parakeets and langur monkeys. During one stop the fearless magpies (technically, rufous treepies)start landing on our jeep. As Eleanor struggles to use our binoculars to find magpies, one lands on her head. She is delighted. I am delighted. We are all happy. We have been warned that the chances of seeing a tiger are not great, but at this point, who cares?

Friendly magpie

Langur monkeys

Back at the hotel for a short lunch break we all agree that tigers would simply be the frosting on the cake. I fully understand that good fortune, Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma must all simultaneously prevail if I am going to see a tiger. Or even Sambars mating. But cake is cake, and that's good enough.

Our afternoon guide arrives with a Swedish family already settled in to the front bench of the jeep. We climb into the back bench and head back out. The Swedes, like us, are an expat family living in China. They are friendly, but not effusive. Definitely Swedes. The afternoon seems much calmer than the morning. Hazel dozes. Our guide actually pauses to show us a fisher eagle, baby crocodiles, more deer. We stop in the middle of a wide stream to watch a Sambar. At one point, I see another large male rear up on his hind legs and wail a cry of love. "Baby, I love you!" I think he says.

The afternoon is fully spent and we turn back to the park entrance when the guide prompts the driver to take a quick detour on a less-worn road. We are all content and quiet. I'm fiddling with the camera when I hear, "Tiger!" We stop. Tiger?! Where?! I see a big tree and that's it. We inch forward on the bank of a muddy creek bed and there he is in the creek bed. Maybe 20 yards away. "Number 23," the guide informs us. Hello, Number 23! A male. Huge. Unbelievable. The words "oh my God" escape my lips several thousand times.

Even Hazel knows that sighting a real tiger was unlikely

He pays little attention to us and settles into a dry spot for a late-afternoon cleaning session. Big paws. Big tongue. I don't know if a tiger has thoughts, but if he does, this thought surely dominates: I am the shit! Every motion he makes is self-assured. He fears nothing. We stare and chat and grin and watch him shift around like a house pet trying to get comfy on your bed. He's posing like a model. Our driver makes various noises to get his attention, without much response until the guide walks around to stand between the jeep and the tiger. The tiger starts thumping his tail and the guide opts to get back in the jeep.

Tiger, tiger

We agree it is time to leave him alone and head back to the hotel. We are all grinning like idiots. The formerly sedate jeep is now a party on wheels. Eleanor and Hazel, with Jimmy's encouragement, invent special tiger dances to celebrate our triumph. Even the Swedes are grooving in their seats. We pause briefly at the gates to watch a band of langur monkeys. Two of them are mating. Whatever.

We finish the day with our nightly feast of grilled chicken, curry, naan, beer and lassi. Then more dancing.

Oh my God!

Bonus footage: me babbling and filming tiger