So it's been nearly two weeks since I got home and the endurance test conducted by a seemingly dead dial-up connection, lack of good channels on cable TV and the inability to work properly seems to be setting in. So here's a thesis straight from the guinea pig himself...

You know you're bored when:

-> you spend a lot of time going through research papers and the only question that your efforts seem to bear is, "WTF?"

-> you wonder if gravity will prevent you from falling off the earth, if it were flat.

-> you're trying to set high scores in 'Raging Blades' on your PS2.

(Haven't heard of it? That's exactly what I'm talking about.)

-> you actually 'tune into' a show on Animal Planet.

-> you consider helping the investigators working on the Pakistani hand in the Mumbai Terror attacks because --> you think that Pakistan is being framed because --> highly trained terrorists don't use entirely Pakistani made Kalashnikovs and don't leave evidence like Pakistani branded toothpaste, shaving cream and other stuff on a hijacked ship and give away their roots that easily and the only reason they'd do this is because --> they want an Indo-Pak war so as to get Pakistani troops off the north-west frontier because --> that's where the Taliban remnants in Pakistan are based.

(The frequency of occurrence of the word 'because' here is directly and exponentially proportional to the amount of time spent thinking on this issue)

-> you write an article on the Mumbai seige and then decide not to put it up because it's even more boring than your own life now.

-> you're actually chatting with maggots because no one else is online on GTalk.

-> you finally get tired of chatting with maggots and log in to Orkut after 8 months so as to check your scraps.

-> you then revert back to research papers because you think artificial intelligence and network intrusion detection systems go well together; this inspite of the fact that you don't know shit about either.

-> you actually watch shows where an assortment of losers from around the country dedicated to loserness fight it out for the ultimate award in loserdom (MTV Roadies).

-> you start wishing you'd auditioned for the above mentioned adventure show, even though you can't go beyond 10 push-ups and the closest you ever get to physical activity in your day to day life is typing on a keyboard and blinking.

-> you realise you're too lazy to go for the auditions and wonder if they'd conduct telephonic interviews.

-> you think of the possibility of you being a loser because you actually thought of auditioning for the above.

-> you then switch to the Discovery Channel and watch 'Amazing Baby Videos' for a solid 5 minutes.

-> you then realise how badly you loathe noisy babies and try to connect them to global warming and crop circles, fail miserably at the attempt and hence proceed to hate babies even more.

-> you've renamed every song file in your laptop in a 'Artist: Song' format and sorted them into directories on the basis of 'Artist'.

-> you're anxious to know your grades. (This is serious)

-> you're solving Sudoku puzzles.

-> you decide to visit all your grand uncles and aunts, even though you're sure you don't know them and you're not sure if their EXIST property is 1.

-> you suddenly start using programming languages in your vocab like the end of the above sentence.

-> you actually blog about ways to tell if you're bored.

Zzzzz....