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.

… happily ever after

It is a little known fact that good old Sleeping Beauty, the achetype for women everywhere (primarily because she lay dormant until a random Handsome Prince arrived to awaken and whisk away from drab dormancy), did not want to be awakened nor did she particular want to be whisked off.

What people do not realize is that before she was “Sleeping Beauty”, a purely subjective name provided to her by the ancestors of modern marketers, the crone-like matrons of her time, as a marketing gimmick to attrack the target audience, i.e. princes of a marryable age from far and wide before she got too old and became a burden on her parents (ancestors of the modern Pakistani parent), she was simply Aurora and she had no grand ambitions nor any driving ambition. And that was okay.

As she lay there, immersed in her dream-based world, she was perfectly happy and had no need for a man to come by and drag her out to reality, where the flowers die after blooming and the sun sets and disappears.

And so, as she was awakened and dragged off to some distant kingdom while all and sundry rejoiced, she couldn’t help thinking “is this what I really wanted?”, but it was already too late. And they lived happily ever after because once the bride is gone to “apna ghar”, nobody bothered to keep in touch and check on if she was actually happy. Details like that would spoil the happy ending.

The Return

As I type, I feel around me a cough-syrup induced haze that clouds my mind and makes my eyes sting if I keep them open too long. 

Having made a belated new year’s resolution to start blogging proper-like once again, I now speak to you from the dark recession of the underbelly of the corporate world.

Fairly or unfairly, I blame the corporate world of squeezing my creativity dry one drop at a time to pitch the same ideas to various clients. When nine hours of the day you are steered in certain “acceptable” directions of thought and idea generation, over a period of time you automatically close off the “unacceptable” (or shall I call them unprofitable) avenues of your thought process and start running with the herd.

And then there are the drones who do not think anymore, who believe it is futile to think about that which you believe you cannot (or do not want to) change. It is my fear that this environment of soul sucking that I call the industry I am employed in would slowly break me down in to individual components of profitability from my wasteful self.

And so I must bid farewell to those patient enough thus far to follow this random and indulgent train of thought and attempt to feebly promise better things to come as I try to reclaim the recession of my mind. Adieu!

A fresh start

The fact that things word out (dare I say miraculously) may be proof of a higher power watching over us. But then again, the fact that there are so many other more deserving candidates for these miracles than I throws this into further doubt than ever.

Confused? You’re not the only one.

the walker

When you’re walking, the city pulses beneath you. As your feet (separated from the rough stones that make up the pavement only by a thin layer of cowhide that passes for women’s shoes) steadily chew up feet after feet of distance, you can feel the energy of the world at large slowly enveloping you. 

If you walk long enough… you become one with the city and fear becomes irrelevant.

Others, as you know, will not understand the urge to walk. Once accustomed to vehicles that get you from point A to point B at your pace, often within minutes, spoil us, give us theillusion of safety. When you are a part of the streets, you do not these security because you have no possessions. 

When you walk, you are forced to move at the pace of the city. You can no longer barge through a tide of people, you must bend, circumvent, move in less than the path desired because you are now one cell in a much larger organism and you walk accordingly.

Thus, I walk. I am a faceless dot in the larger canvas of the population. As a dot, I take the time to register other fellow dots making their way through the same path. Each one has a strange story to tell and I only wish I could hear them all.

torch

She gazed into my eyes and cackled “I know your kind. No one will ever understand you and you will always be alone. I should know…”

Leaning back, she then laughed till she cried. Or cried till she laughed, for the life of me I cannot remember which.

“happy?”

You know you’re having a weird weekend when you’re stuck sitting in class on a Sunday morning staring at the tops of trees rhythmically waving in the wind and humming depressing Iron and Wine songs to yourself as a teacher fervently tries to stuff some appreciation of the beauty of standard deviation into your sleep numbed skull.

Naturally, I retained focus on my train of thought i.e. whether I was happy instead of statistics. I was forced to conclude that I was, lack of blogging activity being a clear indicator of little to no internal strife and/or brooding.

Happiness, to me, is a grassy hill at night. Lay on a hill and watch the stars as they stare unblinkingly back at you and the odd shapes clouds form. It’s been too long.

What’s happiness for you? This blog is far too full of me already, please drop a comment about what makes you happy. Be honest, though. Go nuts! And thanks for reading.

black

It is a black day. I am haunted by the smile of the young man to the left, a LUMS Bsc. student who decided on the 22nd of April (coincidently my birthday) to take his life soon after he was expelled from LUMS due to his inability to bring his GPA up to standard in his final year.

No, I did not know this young man. I wish I had. His name was Hashir Munawer and he hung himself in his LUMS hostel room, where he was found by his brother. He was also in his fifth year of what is traditionally a four year degree, I was in the same position less than a year ago.

The reason this seemingly happy young man in the photograph haunts me is because he was like me. In fact, scratch that, he was like me and what I would have aspired to be. Confident, charismatic, a wonderful person [as per those who knew him], extremely talented at his work and making friends wherever he went.

the will

Only one amongst billions that made it and to what end?

Is there anything a single person could achieve that would justify his/her edging out so many others for the privilege of being born? The right to be human?

Whose would be the sadder lot: the one who “won” or the ones who remained and ceased to exist before they had begun?

Angels and demons swirl around me and ask me what is my Will. I remain silent, as always. Soon they will leave me alone. And they do. Always.

mental prostitution

What the heck is all this about, you may be wondering upon reading the title of this post. it’s quite simple, really, and it’s an idea I’ve been toying with for some time, and after all the beating it’s taken, it deserves a chance to be aired on this blog.

Prostitution, of course, consists of people (mostly women and Deuce Bigelow) being made to engage in the activity of having sex with someone to give pleasure to the person on the receiving end, and being subsequently paid to do so.

Now personally, I have difficulty understanding why it is that people have so much issue with sex in itself, much less sex as a means of income. Given the choice, I would not indulge in it myself, but I am fortunate enough to be literate and able to earn a reasonable living without having to resort to blow jobs a la mode. Unfortunately, a lot of women out there aren’t and many of these turn to prostitution. Leaving aside the moral justification for preventing someone from exploiting their talent (when someone is talented with a guitar, we call them rock stars and practically worship them), their looks (when people do this in the mass media, we call them actresses and supermodels and make them walk up and down runways for our viewing pleasure) and their skills (if I can make ugly shapes with metal, people call it art) to make a living if the person wants to and is in no way being forced into it, my post is about mental prostitution.