Distractible

My thoughts drift, spring, float, jump. Slippery tendrils wrap around one idea, only to slide off and voraciously grasp another, soon giving that up and tickling another, more colourful mental image. Sometimes I have the attention span of an octopus with ADHD and a hundred tentacles. My brain is a hundred-pus. It doesn’t matter if such a thing exists or not. It doesn’t matter if unicorns exist or not. Maybe they did, at one time. Perhaps instead of following the more evolutionarily acceptable path from water to land, they decided to go the opposite way and become narwhals.

On the Overratedness and Ubiquity of Profundity

When all of those around you are constantly lobbing their innermost feelings at you, the choice to not feel so intensely is almost a luxury. To not pretend to be deep when you’re out of your depth. To not mask the mundane and the hackneyed with meaningless, fabricated profundity.

I can be deep, yes. Everyone can. When I’m wallowing in the famed depths of despair, I become a poet, a writer, a philosopher. I drown in my own depth. I exult in my ability to articulate my twisted emotions in twisted sentences.  I believe it possible that I’m one of the greatest thinkers in existence.

I am shallow, too. I can’t, for the life of me, be bothered enough to relate the most beautifully captured photograph with the lyrics of the most beautiful song. A picture of me smiling is the same as another picture of me smiling. I smiled for the camera. Nothing profound there.

I admire sarcasm more than I do profundity. Profundity can be annoying. As can be pointing out way-too-obvious lapses in morality. As can be lyrical reflections on the ups and downs of life.

I can be shallow. It’s quite a relief to know that, really.

Just Another Winter Night

I gaze at the photograph on my laptop screen. It’s one of an inverted glass bottle stuck in an iron fence. I cock my head, stare at it a little more, squinting. There’s something about it that made me stop as I scrolled down, going through a photographer’s blog. Something that reminds me of something else, that fills me with a familiar and not altogether unwelcome feeling. I think of park benches in the morning, wet with dew, of coffee and of hand-knitted scarves.  Frowning, I give up trying to dissect what I feel and open the next tab: Facebook.

Photographs. More photographs. I click on the link to an album. I hover over a photograph for a moment. It’s one of friends, laughing, smiling. One of those pictures that have a yellow tungsten glow- a picture that you look at and smile as you remember a perfect day spent with perfect people.

But I don’t even know these people. I resist the perverse temptation to click on the photo to make it larger. There’s nothing like Facebook to make you realize how you hardly ever look good enough in photographs. And how alone you feel.

I give myself a mental shake, telling myself to shut up with the self-pitying thoughts already. I notice that I have a notification. I click on it. Somebody has ‘liked’ my profile picture. I stare at the photo. I look too pale. Maybe I should go out in the sun more, I think. Or turn off the tube-lights the next time I take a photo.

I sigh and sit back in my desk chair. It’s then that I realize that the electricity is gone. It’s been gone for a while, in fact. I’ve been hunched over the computer for some time, and my shoulders ache. With a pang of guilt over the time I’ve wasted, I realize that I’ve spent more than two hours online, doing what is best described as ‘nothing’. Stretching, I feel a pleasant kind of pain course down my spine. I sigh and shut my laptop, enveloping myself in complete darkness. After some blind groping around on my desk, I find my book light and turn it on. It’s funny how I use everything but a flashlight as a light source. I turn around and spot my mug of green tea, lying on a saucer on my bed. It’s ice-cold now. I turn to the bathroom to pour it down the drain, when I remember that I had put honey in my tea. Suddenly, I feel an intense craving for something sweet. I gulp it down, iciness and all, shuddering as it trickles down my throat.

My room is chilly. I touch the heater. With the electricity gone, it’s just a cold piece of metal. But my hands are so cold that I imagine that it has some warmth still. I curl up on the chair beside it, pulling my shawl tighter around me. I open a book, and clip my book light where it belongs. Maybe Jane Eyre will do for company until sleep rescues me from the frigid, solitary night.

Poised in Mid-air

I can’t write.

I’m not talking about any motor issues or hand-eye coordination problems or human-computer-interface challenges. I’m writing a post about not being able to write. This is more of a translation problem.

Emotion, for me, has always been an abstract thing. Granted, emotion is always an abstract thing; if it were an object I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to attack it with a sledge hammer.  Which is all the better, because I like to be able to feel, depending on the feeling, of course.

I’ll drag myself back to the point.

The way I see it, anything I think or feel exists in a dimension separate from that of pen and paper, of letters and words and sentences. Thoughts have their own atmosphere, something that can be felt, absorbed, wrapped about oneself.

But when it comes to slapping everything down on paper, I find myself at a loss for words. Quite literally. I find it aggravating that I can’t pull people into that little space in my head and make them see what I see.

Maybe this is what they call writer’s block.

But words are all I have. So I’ll just randomly sling paint on a blank canvas and call it art.

 

 

Turning Around

I’m back!

Rather, I have returned to my blog. I don’t feel the need to offer any explanations for my absence (of course- I’m boss here!). Just put it down to chronic writer’s block and the general bumpiness of life. (Who am I even talking to? Myself?)

I have returned, pretty much the same as before. Just a little chipped around the edges, with a few, almost invisible, hairline cracks running through me.  But after inspecting my face in the bathroom mirror, I figured that my eyes are the same distance apart and my nose has retained its position above my mouth.

The fact that my features are all in the right places offers me some comfort. Some things never change, I guess.

Anyhow, coming back to the blog, all my previous posts (barring the first one, perhaps) are kind of upsetting. I don’t really like the way I sound. I like randomness, but there’s something that doesn’t seem quite right about them. Sort of like a beret worn the wrong way.

But I plan to let them stick around. We all need to be reminded of our past idiocy at times. :)

Though I did delete one post. That one was positively pukeworthy. 

As before, this humble blog (sounds like a kind of insect) will remain completely random, filled with random musings, observations and writings. The key word being random.

A’s Are Spiky Little Thorns

Not as awesome as it looks :-/

You’ve envied them all your life- those students who just seem to nail it every time.

Things seem to be so easy for them. They live in an academic world with zero gravity. Even if the heavy spacesuits of illness, distraction or other activities pull them down for a bit, they’re up and about by the time the next test comes along, soaring even higher than before.

 Those A’s on their report cards are like little thorns that pierce you every time you even hear of them.

 No, I’m not one of those kids whose parents point out the A’s on others’ transcripts. I’m not buckling under the pressure to get straight A’s. I don’t listen to Simple Plan’s ‘Perfect’ again and again, just because I can relate to the lyrics- I’m sorry I can’t be perfect…

 Nope. No. I’m not your heroic Oh-My-God-Why-Does-Everyone-Want-Me-To-Be-Perfect-Do-I-Not-Have-The-Right-To-My-Own-Life teenager who dresses up her red-rimmed-from-crying eyes with tons of black eyeliner and obstinately hands in a report card that proclaims that she falls in the lowest-scoring ten percent in the class, then goes up to her room and slams the door, yelling at her parents to dare her to be somebody she’s not. Nope, I’m not the heroine here.

 I tend to get straight A’s. And I think I have a better idea of how spiky the first letter of the English alphabet can really be.

 Really. Acing that test doesn’t make your life perfect.

 You receive your result. Of course, your best friends are the first ones to find out.

Yes, they’ll congratulate you. They’ll tell you how they always believed in you; how they knew you could do it. They wrap you in warm, bone-crushing bear hugs, and good-humouredly pat you on the back.

 But, even though you’re dazed with relief, almost drunk, you don’t miss it. You can’t miss it- that look in your friends’ eyes. The one that says, ‘I’m happy for you. I just wish I were you.’ You can’t deny it. It’s there. It’s natural for them to feel that way. You know you would, too. But it’s painful nonetheless.

 Then come the chidings- “You were worrying for nothing. There was no need to worry so much. You get straight A’s. Now shut up.” Yeah, of course. You’re superhuman. Telepathic. Of course, you just knew you’d be getting straight A’s, right? A stands for Antidepressants. Duh.

 And then, all of a sudden, you’re unrelatable. You can’t comfort anybody, because (supposedly) you don’t know what failure feels like. You become ‘too good’. Intimidating, almost. “You got straight A’s. Leave me alone. Let my wounds heal.” Of course, nobody believes you when you say that grades don’t change things much. What would you know? You got the good grades. Nothing has changed for you.

 Yep. Straight A’s can get you into Harvard, but they can estrange you from your friends.

So much for a ‘perfect’ life.

The Summer Solstice and Edward Cullens

And so we bid farewell to another day of  Summer 2010. The day of the summer solstice to be exact. One of the hottest days I’ve had all summer, frankly!

I began my day with watching the sky change colour. I stood by the window and let the cool breeze of daybreak wash over me while I watched the jagged skyline above the mountains change from a deep inky blue, to a soft grey, to a dull yellow and finally an unbroken, sunny expanse of  perfect sky blue.

Was I feeling highly spiritual, watching the breathtaking beauty of nature unfold before me? Or was I waiting for the new day to bring to me my Prince Charming galloping on a unicorn, down a ray of sunlight and into my arms?

PFFFFT! Quit the cheesy talk. The truth is, I had spent the night with Edward Cullens. Yep, not one, but many teeny tiny Edward Cullens, feasting off my blood, which I could not help but give to them.

Jealous, huh? Wait till you can’t sleep all night because you’re donating blood for the advancement of several generations of those blood-sucking little beasties- MOSQUITOES.

I hate them for robbing me of my sleep. But while I was idly browsing the ‘net, I came across a bunch of  stuff about those little bloodsuckers. Turns out they’re pretty interesting. (After all, even Dracula was pretty cool!)

Feast on this:

  • Only female mosquitoes bite. They use the protein from your blood to lay eggs. (Oh, how I wish that they were feminists. At least I would be saved.) But wait a second…
  • Women are more likely to get bitten than men. (Even mosquitoes know that a woman is a woman’s worst enemy.)
  • More than one million people die each year from mosquito-borne diseases. (We could so do without them in our ecosystem!)
  • Mosquitoes prefer blondes to brunettes. (Yay!)
  • Dark clothing attracts more mosquitoes than light-coloured clothing.(Make your blonde best friend wear black the next time you go out. Natural repellent!)
  • Biting activity increase by 500 times when there is a full moon.(Guess they’re related to werewolves, too.)
  • The more carbon dioxide and lactic acid you produce, the more likely you are to attract a mosquito. Overweight people and very active or fidgety people produce more of this.(All the more reason to lose some weight.)
  • Electronic bug-zapping machines hardly kill any mosquitoes. They kill more of the bugs that birds like to eat.(Get rid of your annoying blue machine today!)

Why am I bombarding you with mosquito facts, of all things?

Learn to appreciate the beauty of Nature in those little beasties. They have a lot in common with Edward Cullen, y’know. :P

Of Obsessive Pen Clicking

I thought I’d finally start blogging about the (extremely) random thoughts knocking about in my head.

And when’s a better time than during my AS Level examinations to do that! I’ve never been able to understand why my creativity increases about 100 times during exams. Maybe it’s because my brain gets a little (okay, a lot of) extra exercise. Or maybe it’s because I just need an excuse to do something other than study. :)

Anyhow, yesterday I had a Physics multiple choice exam in the morning and a Math exam in the afternoon, and while I was trying to wake myself up during the unnecessarily long wait in the exam hall before the Physics exam , I couldn’t help but notice how the sound of clicking pens filled the hall. Like a bunch of demented grasshoppers that go click, click instead of chirrup, chirrup (grasshoppers do chirrup, right?)

The sound of furiously clicking pens, apart from grating on my nerves, got me thinking about how absolutely annoying yet extremely obsessive this habit is. Even though I find it really annoying, I’m also guilty of occasional clicking. Except that I click my mechanical pencil, which is much more productive than clicking a pen, since it produces more and more of that pencil lead you write with, whereas a pen clicker simply makes the pen nib go in and out of the pen (that sounds so weird!)

Okay, I’ll quit justifying my clicking.

The bottom line: obsessive pen (or mechanical pencil) clicking is annoying. Not for the clicker himself/herself, but for the poor non-clickety souls who happen to be stuck in the same room with the clickers.

Pen Clicker’s Pen: clickety, clickety, clickety, click, click, click….

My brain: God, when will this person stop?!

Pen Clicker’s Pen: Clickety click. Click. Click. (Has a tone of finality to it.)

My brain: Thank goodness!

And before you know it, there are so many people clicking their pens that you can’t even will them to stop. The more attention you pay to that clicking, the more annoying it becomes. It feels as if somebody is slowly and painfully clicking a hole in your skull with one of those pens. Maybe that’s why mechanical pencils aren’t allowed on the SAT!

Hey, pen clicking is so extremely infuriating at times, that it could be used as  a demonstration tool, instead of all those placards and slogans. A bunch of us disconsolate ( and justifiably so) Pakistanis could gather at Constitution Avenue with our clickety pens in front of a few loudspeakers, clicking away…

Clickety, clickety, clickety, click, click, click…..

That will make the Government listen.

The First Post

I don’t know if my blog will ever be a blog or whether it will just disappear amongst the thousands of blogs floating around in cyberspace. But, as with everything that I set out to do, I’ll hope for the best and expect the worst and, well, write. What’s the worst that could happen?

What’s the worst that could happen?

Do whatever you feel is right, take risks, and stand up for yourself. Live. What’s the worst that could happen? Unless you’re about to detonate an atomic bomb, you don’t have much to worry about. Never let the fear of failure hold you back.

Okay, I should take my leave before I start sounding like your mother.

Cheers. :-)