wish upon a star, but do you know what stars are?

I feel like I've been up forever--perhaps because I have been. My August 19 just ended, only 36.5 hours after it started in Hyderabad. It started v. surreally, too--Darragh, Kim and I went clubbing with the other expats before leaving for the airport. The club was called 'Ahala' (which I prefer to call 'Holla', as though it's alluding to SoCal-rap-speak), which has replaced a club that I went to in one of the Taj hotels in Hyderabad last year. Happily I only had one drink, which was key since they charge 750 rupees (~$16) for a single screwdriver. That sounds like the same extortionate prices that the government occasionally pays for screwdrivers, although the government's screwdrivers contain less Absolut and more metal.

Anyway, the ridiculous prices weren't surreal (although they should have been, given that that's more than I've paid for four-course dinner extravaganzas in India)--but it was surreal when photographers for the society pages in one of the local newspapers showed up and started snapping pics of us dancing. It quickly went from amusing to creepy as more photographers kept showing up, including a couple of videographers who seemed to be filming some sort of conservative Indian version of 'Foreign Girls Gone Wild' (conservative because we were all modestly attired, wild because they liked filming up and down from head to toe, v. slowly, in a way that didn't seem to be destined for the evening news). It will be interesting to see if these pics show up in a bona fide newspaper, or if one of my friends someday will recognize me on an illicit Indian porn site.

Being in India was great, but the trip home was brutal and I'm suffering from some crushing exhaustion. I managed to avoid falling asleep after getting back to California this afternoon, although it was a close call; I hit upon the brilliant idea of staying up by rereading one of my favorite romance novels ('Ain't She Sweet' by Susan Elizabeth Phillips), which worked like a charm since I couldn't put it down and so stayed up until almost midnight with it. Tomorrow, though, I need to get up and accomplish something with my day--my apartment is messy and I want it to transform from an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan. So, I shall take myself off to bed, and perhaps tomorrow I'll have energy to accomplish something (hahahaha, I'm so optimistic).