Aug 1

Stagnancy inspires no creativity. While I blame myself for the fact that I am currently stagnating, the past has already happened and can be of no further consequence, save as a reminder.

I hang now in a strange limbo between the familiar and the new. Like the school student who enjoys his summer vacation until the solitude becomes monotonous and the lack of activity becomes a melting pot of days, each blended into another. He looks forward anxiously to august first so that he can meet his friends and be challenged again, have something that has to be done again, only to find that the first day of school is postponed for an indefinite period and he is left to sigh and cross off each of the colorless days as they pass by.

Stripping away the layers

Life is a continuous process o stripping away familiar layers of people and places and finding new ones to replace them with. Can’t help miss the old layers though.

Tabula rasa

New house, new life, new family. While I find myself missing my own home and room and siblings and mom and cats, it’s also interesting to be in a new place.

Of course, for someone who has never been away from home for more than ten days at a stretch, there are moments of sadness where all I want to do is go home and be in my own room and my own bed again, surrounded by the familiar, but that’s nit likely to happen.

So basically we’re now waiting to hear about our visas, adjusting to life as a plural entity.

Forays into Writing again: Part 1

Silently, from the back seat of my car, I made note of the telephone poles extending greedily into the clouds above, as if mimicking wooden poles that held up wedding tents, pointedly guarding against an accidental falling of the sheet of blue sky. It was a Thursday morning and I was on my way to work, like any other day, except that today, feeling slightly introspective and somewhat pseudo intellectual, I had noticed the telephone poles.

Who am I, you may ask, that I am ingraciously pawning off my thoughts and parts of my stream of consciousness on yourself, an unsuspecting reader who was simply perusing these first paragraphs? Where I come from, we call each other brothers in religion (even the women) and often impose on each other in this manner, with a “excuse me bhaisahab” said in the right mix of politeness and need.

Anyhow, let me not deprive you any longer of the knowledge of my identity. I am one who is claimed by the upper middle class recessed that live in the city of Karachi. I am decently educated, although I discard enough of what I am taught to be suspicious of those who claim authority on knowledge, and I am underpaid and overworked (as we all like to believe we are) at a modest Partnership Marketing firm which posesses delusions of grandeur and the soul of satan when it comes to making a quick million rupees.

My personal characteristics are not one that would set me apart if you should meet me on the street. Like most of my class, I speak both urdu and english with a modicum of proficiency and like most of my class, I would be more willing to claim an above average proficiency for english as opposed to urdu. Some may call me overweight, although I consider myself simply somewhat plump in certain areas that ought not to be posessing such plumpness. Unlike most women my age, I do use little to no makeup in my daily life, but I bend occasionally to societal laws to allow myself to be paraded at weddings and occasions with the right amount of makeup forcibly applied by my mother or my sister. I am also married, as evidenced by a thin, sparkling band on my left hand’s ring finger. Of this miracle I shall speak later. Suffice it to say that I am an ordinary person who, like all of us ordinary people, believes herself to be capable of extraordinary things, given the opportunity, and that I am indistinguishable from any one of my fellows who make their daily morning pilgrimage to work in this city.

So what’s the latest? Let me try to con …

So what’s the latest? Let me try to condense this into a short post:

A) My job sucks. I’ve been here for a good 1.5 years now and in that time while I learned a good bit about reality and how the world works and how life is unfair and so is your boss, I’m sick of it now. To top it all off, I’ve been promised that an employee evaluation will take place within this month, and at that point I had two choices: I would either accept that and say fair enough, I hope you hold true to your word OR call my boss’ boss a big fat (and ugly as ass) liar. Guess which I did?

B) Have applied with husband for an Australian Visa. Application looks good but even with the best case scenario, the visa would not arrive till end of november this year. So until then, I can’t quit my job, else I’d have nothing to do and no money to spend.

C) Inflation is killing me. Assholes at work keep putting off a raise till I eventually just leave the country and current salary is not allowing me to save anything at all in these expensive times.

D) My brother is an asshole who refuses to grow up. Talk about a goddamn Peter Pan complex. When will this guy learn that modeling and being a steward and partying all night will not get you anywhere in life and that you need to seriously focus on your studies and work to get anywhere? 24 and still a goddamn idiot.

E) My mother keeps encouraging my idiot brother to explore and find himself and not actually work hard at anything conventional if he doesn’t want to. Apparently I’m surrounded by idiots who think money grows on trees and that education, work ethic and focus don’t reap the same volume in benefits as partying, exploring your inner zen and bouncing around all over the place academically and professionally does.

F) People at work have begun to distance themselves from me slowly over time. I suppose I can’t blame them since they are stuck here at this workplace for an undetermined time until they can find a better opportunity, while I am more or less going to be off to greener pastures within the year. I do wish they wouldn’t broaden the gap quite so much before it’s even time to leave.

tired and bored

I am bored.

I am so bored and uninterested in anything I have been doing from this morning that I spent three minutes shuffling along my phone on my desk, absent mindedly thinking it to be my mouse.

I am so bored that the inane babbling of personal conversations over the phone that are taking place in the cubicle next to mine are simply fading away as they reach my ears, despite their intrusive initial volume.

I am so bored that I am fantasizing about getting up and walking out of the office right now and going home, after switching off my phone and otherwise blocking off any means of contact for anyone to harass me with questions about what the hell I think I’m playing at.

I am so bored, I’m considering walking into the office of the ill-bred boor that runs this place like it’s his daddy dearest’s kingdom and asking him to shove his employmet opportunity where the sun don’t shine, which is what I meant to do ever since a week ago when he was blatently rude to me.

I am so bored that despite my computer screen being very openly viewable for anyone and everyone who walks through the office, I am trying to play facebook poker. Scratch that, I don’t have headphones here so I can’t hear the warning dings before it automatically folds me out.

I am so bored that I want to kick my CPU till I damage something inside it, thus enabling me to sit at my desk uninterrupted while they scramble to fix my machine so that I can get back to work.

transitions

I dreamed of a hours I had left behind. As I peeked through the dusty windows, I saw within all that I had ever left behind and never missed. Until I saw it through that dusty pane. All my belongings that had been left behind, waiting patiently for me to return, like old friends.

death

 

There is little else that so appropriately sums us the existence of all that lives on this planet than the birth and death of a kitten. We are all born naked, screaming and terrified, clutching vainly at the delicate thread that binds us to fragile existence. We shakily gulp down a few snatched morsels of air from this world before we are forced into the unyielding darkness of nonexistence. From dust to dust.

RIP babies, we will miss all that you could have added to our own few pathetic breaths.

of Fireflies and the human condition

After reading reviews citing it as one of the most depressing movies ever seen by users, and with an IMDB user rating of 8.2, plus a top 200 slot in the IMDB Top 250 movies list, I finally got down to watching Grave of the Fireflies. Yes, it’s an anime movie (fairly short, about 80 minutes long) and while I generally get quite depressed over movies displaying the lamentable human condition and the general apathy of society to this condition, I was underwhelmed.

It saddens me to think that our species as a whole and myself as a single unit of said species may have, in the name of art that oversteps its own chalked lines in terms of depravity and pathos, desensitized itself to suffering in general. I cannot speak for anyone apart for myself, which is why I rarely bother speaking at all, but to be desensitized to the suffering of your fellow man, in my opinion, makes one confirmedly set themselves apart from the rest of the species as a whole and judge outside ourselves. In order to judge in this way, one must either me tremendously concieted, be the holder of delusions of grandeur of the highest order, or simply be mad. Which of the above most accurately describes my own condition, I have yet to determine, due to a lack of an objectivity about the self.

… work calls, as always. Musings to be continued another day.

expectation

When does the newlywed bliss wear off? I wouldn’t know personally. All I do know is that when a woman walks into an institution around which there has been such a hype built from birth (we’ve all been there, it is the rare Pakistani household in which there has not been jokes of marriage at every opportunity), there is an overinflation of expectations.

As the days go by, they slowly deflate to a reasonable size, and then deflate some more because men are really rather silly and we need to make room for a lot of silliness before we can accept them as partners.

I suppose what I’m saying is, expect to have great expectations and expect to have them chopped down slowly as you adjust to normal life. The grand gesture is not always coming, nor is it is always a fairy tale. Sometimes it’s just two people trying to adjust to each other and dig out a way of life.