summertime

This is promising to be a fantastic summer, with the right doses of laziness and laughs. Hanna is going to be in the city for the entire summer starting next week, living with her ever so handsome brother and it will be great. Hanna is my fabulous friend I met working in Islamabad for a summer, she's currently doing her master's in architecture and is brilliant, funny and ditzy all at once. Mostly, she's just honest. Mira is going to be coming down on the weekends, and we're going to go to Cape Cod for at least one weekend. I've been living in a social desert for the past few months, peppered with spurts of debauchery. Not the evil kind, purely innocent but fun nights out and they are so refreshing. I'm tired of being tired from work and have stopped being a lazy three-toed sloth and it's so refreshing. It is my first summer that it's not a holiday summer - summer doesn't mean anything to these corporate types except that it's light later and that means we should work mote because it doesn't seem as late at 7pm. Not me, though. I'm leaving in a few months and moving on to something that requires more than a dumb monkey. I really honestly don't understand the ego that brokers carry around with them - their job is shit. It's a lot of money for shit, but really you can make a lot of money doing something even a little bit more interesting. I'd take a huge paycut to do something that was mentally engaging.. any ideas? I really honestly do enjoy economics, numbers and logic. But then the hours of a research analyst are often ridiculous and lest you forget, I'm lazy. I also don't want to wear a suit to work which may end up being a decisive factor.
Anyhow, my point was that summertime is here and it's going to be awesome. Lots of parties and things going on and time to return from my sabbatical.

A 'deep' one

There have been a few sudden deaths in the recent weeks. Well more than a few, I imagine, but I'm talking about the people in my life. Completely unexpected endings -- brain cancer, car accident, and simply not waking up. Now if I explained who these people were, it doesn't do justice to my relationship with any of them. Who I consider 'family' is not necessarily related by blood and while I wasn't directly related to these people, they are deeply missed. Mira's aunt was diagnosed with brain cancer a few weeks back. She went to the doctor because she was having bizarre episodes of memory loss and was told that the cancer had progressed too far to do anything and she would have 72 hours at most. Well, after few steroid treatments and three weeks of watching her painful deterioration, she passed. During those weeks, she lapsed into coma-like states to waken and talk about meeting with relatives who had already died and who 'weren't letting her come'. Then she spent days crying, begging everyone for forgiveness, for not being a good mother, wife, daughter, sister. Finally at peace, surrounded by prayers and love, she left. I have never imagined coming to terms with my own mortality in such a tangible way. What a brave, powerful woman. Salaam khala.

I don't have the courage to think of what I'll say to my Creator when he asks me about my choices. There is so much I could have done and didn't, so much I shouldn't have done and did. When it comes down to it, my everyday decisions define my life in the larger sense. Whether I wake up to pray or sleep the extra forty minutes; whether I appreciate what I have or moan about nonsense. There's nothing to say that tomorrow won't be the last and I am absolutely not ready for that. I know you can never be totally ready for death, but I want to be at peace with what I've done, how I've dealt with whomever I've met. If I did myself justice, I suppose. That certainly isn't the case. I've made a few resolutions on here, I know, but I suppose that's the point of the blog. What a stupid word - blog. If it was called anything else I may have a bit more respect for it. This isn't about a newfound fear or something, it's more along the lines of thinking independently, not worried about what others think while respecting their boundaries. It's about keeping a sense of the world around me and maintaining myself within it. Something about leaving a place better than when I found it.

This is all a bit heavy, and probably a little melodramatic. But really, any day could be the last and then what?

Hookey

I played hookey from work today, because quite frankly, my job sucks. The reason was 'inflammation in my gums', which isn't entirely untrue but pretty good, I thought.

So on my fabulous day off, I had a lie in and then played a round at my local golf course which isn't really a proper course but moreso a large pitch and putt with the longest hole topping off at around 170 yards. It is a beautiful, immaculately maintained short course open to residents of my uppity municipality. At midday there are about 5 or 6 people slashing and slicing, retirees and the like. I find it interesting how diverse golf is becoming, aside from prodigies like Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh, its average particpants are largely older white guys who have enough money to fork over excesses of 5-6m annual club memberships and 100 per round. Not to mention the background and connections necessary to get into the club in the first place. Anyhow, it is pretty cool to see different people around and as arrogant as that comment is, I have to say it. I mean hell, I'm 'different' but there were never any real restrictions on my playing golf aside from admission to the major private clubs in my vicinity, something I'm not missing at all as I have plenty of semi-private and public clubs to slash and slice in. My point is, its more accessible and the class divide is less obvious. If you want to play, you can and if you are good enough, you'll get noticed. I wonder where the next Tiger or Vijay will come from.

I also had time to do a bit of browsing online, catching up on reading. In the past few months I've lost interest in the news. The headlines are a joke in themselves. Whatever the story might be, whatever interest I may have had in it is completely washed by the stereotypical, aggressive and simplistic tone of the headline. I mean something like Iraqi Insurgents go on Rampage, Kill 69 is such a stupid thing to print. A basic degree of common sense will force me to tell you that I doubt they are not all Iraqis and, unfortunately for your simplistic mind, my friend, they didn't go on a 'rampage' like drunken elephants. Okay that wasn't on a new source I regularly read, but still, I see that on the backs of newspapers on my train ride home and just swallow the hard knowledge that the reader of that paper believes that when Iraqi's, or anyone who isn't 'us' defends themselves it is actually a rampage.

The other day I read in the BBC about trains in Iran having female-only cars and permitting women in the other cars only if they were accompanied by a male relative. On the same day, from the same webpage I read about female-only traincars in Japan because of rising incidents of groping on the crowded trains. In Japan, this change is lauded as a stride towards women's rights, preventing them from enduring discomfort on their daily commute; while in Iran, it is a restrictive practice further evidencing the dire state of women in Islamic socities.

That isn't my real issue with the media though. Well I suppose part of it is - the popular media is a joke and should be forbidden from reducing complex issues to a simplistic one-sided view. Screw freedom of speech, if you're a moron you don't deserve to speak. My real issue is that this is how things are. Nuclear tests. Darfur. Burundi. Guantanamo. Iraq. Palestine. Famine. Poverty. This isn't how things have to be but instead how they are. What's the point of burying myself in it when it is just going to continue, business as usual. Analysing it, discovering truth under truth isn't going to change the fact that injustice prevails more often than justice. The way that things are isn't going to change, Americans are both too dumb and too powerful to make a change and the rest of the world has its own shit to worry about. We want to drive our cheap plastic Hummers and Ford Explorers because we can, and we refuse to pay the $10 a gallon the rest of the world pays for gas because, well, why should we? So why bother thinking about it and creating my own personal hell by obsessing over the children killed in Rwanda or the families destroyed by the Janjaweed in Sudan?

My disgust comes down to everday people. The ones who think it's okay to interrupt someone else in mid-sentence; that it's okay to push someone aside to be able to carry on down their path; that it's okay to push past someone through a door; that it's okay to blow smoke in someone's face; that it's okay to throw rubbish wherever it may fall. These behaviours stem from a deep malfunction in basic human decency. They extend much farther beyond this but these are everyday symptoms. And then there are the women with two rodent-like dogs in matching Hermes collars, with their $7m handbags strutting around Park Avenue moaning about the pollen in the air. Look at the flowers you cow. Where do these people come from? What in your mind justifies such arrogance? Don't get me wrong, I love handbags and shoes and things, and I'm fortunate enough to be able to afford them but also smart enough to know that I don't need them which, ironically, is the biggest fortune of all. I don't know what it is that is frustrating me, this may be coming from something not right with me. Why don't I love this as much as the people around me do?

And how have you been?

Well, must say I am warmed by your welcome back. Not warm enough to have anything useful to say. My job has become just short of unbearable and I'll be over the edge any day now. I have to stick around until the end of the year before I move onto something more engaging because if I leave now, I will look like a flight risk to my next potential employer. I am still one-quarter way through The Life of Pi as I am one slow reader. Still loving it and still wanting to get through it. My want of sleep still wins over my curiosity. It is already May, can you believe it? I can't. I'm still on the whole, the year has just begun roll and thus have not made any great strides towards anything. Summertime is upon us and my chub still needs to budge. I have bought a new set of beautiful golf clubs and I expect many late summer evenings at my local course perfecting my transformation into a large cat. This is so bloody boring. I'll write soon, peace out.

Zsuuu Zsuuuuuu

Hello, friends. Are you still awake? Well, this past month has been thoroughly enjoyable for me at least. Spring has arrived and the tree limbs are no longer barren, there is sunlight streaming through the windows until 7 in evening, the azalea buds are on the verge of explosion. And the bloody squirrels are eating my petunias.

My lovely and dearest ape came for a fleeting visit, spent most of it harping and moaning on how much America sucks and the rest of the time golfing. When I returned from Sydney, it was a bit of culture shock for me and it has been an overload for him. Actually it was thoroughly an overload for him and he let his thoughts be known. Still enjoyed his visit though, because of course time with the apple outweighs (in more ways than one) all those grievances. I'm so tired of waiting to be with him. But things are still in limbo, he wants to be a scholar like Buster Bluth.

And so dealing with admission cycles and getting funding puts marriage on the back burner. Unfortunately in our religious context we don't really have the liberty to be together outside of being married. That being said, I have another year at least to focus on myself still have a bit of work to do towards my fitness goals and growing up in general.

I had some deep thoughts while walking to work this morning that have distanced themselves now. I'll get back to you on that one.

So, how have you been?