Rati Gupta

            On Tuesday afternoon I had my first day of work at OCADU for 2019. No matter when I have to work it always breaks up my day but certainly mornings and evenings are certainly worse than posing from 15:10 to 18:10. I worked for Nick Aoki on the sixth floor. He seems pretty easygoing and quite knowledgeable.

            I killed a young cockroach in the washroom. I don’t recall having seen a cockroach at OCADU in the more than thirty years that I’ve worked there.

            For the first twenty minutes or more of class Nick gave a lecture, there was a twenty minute break in the middle and Nick let me Go more than ten minutes early. While I was there I finished a second or third reading of Percy Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry”. He echoes a lot of my thoughts on the topic of what poetry is. I think that all writing, including speaking is at least an attempt at poetry. If all writing is poetry then no science, philosophy or art could possibly exist or be taught without poetry because to be taught these things all have to be written about.

            I stopped at Loblaws on the way home to buy black sable grapes.

            When I got to my building I realized that I’d forgotten to put my Ontario Works income report in the mail, so I rode a block west to the post box.

            I read most of the introduction to Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater”.

            I heated a piece of pork tenderloin and had it with a potato and gravy while watching two episodes of The Big Bang Theory.

            Spoiler alert!

            Tam Nguyen, Sheldon’s best friend from high school comes to the university to show his son around. Sheldon has never mentioned Tam to anyone and it turns out that they had a falling out that Tam didn’t know about. Tam had promised to come to California with Sheldon but then Tam fell in love in Texas and stayed, so Sheldon had to face a scary new place alone. Sheldon forgives him when he realizes that his life turned out fine after all.

            Meanwhile Penn and Bernadette arrange for a dinner date with Raj’s fiancé, Anu, to find out why she wants to marry him. Anu has the ability to get them into the most exclusive places. She tells them that she had bad luck with relationships and finally decided to make her family happy and just go for an arranged marriage. Anu gets them drunk and gets them to dish some of Raj’s secrets like the fact that he uses women’s deodorant, cries when Hugh Jackman sings and takes baths with his dog.

            Anu is played by Rati Gupta, who is an actor, a dancer and a psychology major. I don’t find her character likeable so far, though maybe she’s not supposed to be. She seems kind of selfish and mean spirited. It seems like a cop-out for the writers to feel like they have to have Raj get married before the end of the show. They should just have him finally admit that he’s gay and marry a guy, or even better, have Howard admit that he’s in love with Raj and have him leave Bernadette for him.

            In the second story, Raj’s friends come to see his planetarium lecture and Howard meets the director. When she hears that Howard is an astronaut she suggests that Raj invite Howard to co-host one of his planetarium shows but Raj is against it because he doesn’t want to share the spotlight. He eventually gives in.

            Since Amy is too busy with her neurological research to work on the asymmetry project as much as he would like, Sheldon talks the dean into taking Amy off her project and turning her lab over to someone else. Needless to say, Sheldon was in the doghouse over that until he made things right.