i am sam

If you spend everyday on a 10 on the high-meter, how will you ever experience a true high? Living through this last year I regressed a lot and grew up a lot. I saw compromise as a solution and not surrender. I experienced love as I had never experienced it before. I made some new friends, stregthened a casual friendship into a solid bond of trust and respect, lost a few cherished friends and learnt that I can never take anyone for granted or count on them to understand my point of view, no matter how close I thought we were. I learned to let go and I learned to never let go no matter what. I found out that my worth as a human being is not determined by my career or how much money I make. I found a tiny shadow of that inner peace everyone talks about and for that fleeting moment, it felt really good. I need to work on my zen side more. I had the HIGHEST of high and some abyssmal lows. I validated something I’d had a sneaking suspicion of for the longest time … I’m a bum at heart. But I made my peace with that. 

Even though 2008 was a terrible mad maxian year for me and almost everyone I know and I’m glad to see it’s back, I am glad I lived through it. It was a humbling, revealing, educating year and ultimately I am a better person because of what I experienced these last twelve months.

And yes, if you live your life on a 10 all the time, you might  become immune to a ‘high’ when you really need it, but you lived through it and it is your choice.

the countdown begins ….

In recent months, I’ve gone through a strange up-now, down-again phase. Some would argue that this wasn’t a phase but just my normal moodswings coming out to play a bit more. Whatever the reason may be, amphetamines include, I HAVE been surlier than usual when morose and on a deliriously giddy high when happy. Hormones maybe?!!! Or the fact that in exactly 30 days, I will no longer be Salma Warraich, crazy, opinionated, ‘aukhi’ Lahori chick with a curious accent and a decidedly stubborn no-can-do attitude. I will be Mrs. Salma Warraich A, the same firecracker forced by circumstances to be subdued yet outgoing, attentive yet not on the border of hovering, loving yet respectful wife, daughter-in-law, rightful heir to a kitchen where the normal fare is behari keema, coconut chutney and homemade tikkas (made on coal no less) as well as to the homicidal coconut tree which showers its bounty strategically onto parked cars and wall spikes resulting in shattered windscreens and ominous looking coconuts on iron stakes on the neighbours’ wall.

To tell you the  truth, I’m happy and more than a little intrepid. Having lived by myself on her own as she liked it for almost 6 years, Miss Independent walks the plank on the 30th of December, this year 2007 of our Lord. For the longest time, I have wondered if this will ever happen. Now, it’s happening at warp speed and I am just trying to hold my breath and keep up as well as I can in 5 inch heels and a full time career.

I’m scared …. can you tell?

There’s a person in my life who I can’t count on for anything – I won’t go into the details. I don’t want to gross out those with nobler sensibilities. This guy has been around for as long as I can remember. We started out rocky. Squabbles, spats, screaming, gouging bloodfests were the norm. Gradually though, we came to a grudging and rather tenuous peace. The years went by in a strange tense calm. One day we realized that really, we weren’t all that different, even though we were/are polar opposites. The requisite love which had been kept squashed down with smelly socks and inky handkerchiefs reared its head. We began to make allowances for each other’s eccentricities. He put up with my wild child behaviour and a conga line of inappropriate crushes/boyfriends/flings (because he knew all and I told him all). I put up with occasional temper tantrums, a lot of cricket mumbo jumbo (really? that’s his average and that’s his strike rate? Do I care????) Only when I moved to Karachi and I spent my first night in my very own first apartment sleeping on thing mattresses on a cold January floor while clutching tightly onto his hand, did I realize the bond we had. We weren’t just brother and sister born a year apart, vying for the same affections, the same prizes, the same limelight (which he graciously bowed out of and let me bask in), we were and are best friends and we have the scars (teethmarks, nail gouged neck, a faint scar on the right cheekbone) to prove it, for we didn’t give our affections just because. They were earned through test and trial and I like to think that I passed with the same flair that he sailed through all this tests with.

Saturday evening my Maru will be back in the land where the sun just drops by to say hello and then sails onwards towards warmer shores. He starts a career which I understand absolutely nothing of, except that it’s a prettyyyyy big deal to those who understand such mumbo jumbo … medical imaging in augmented reality. Can someone explain that to me?

I miss him already. He’s more than a friend or a brother. He is me!

Bless J.K.Rowling and her devious ways. Dumbledore is out of the closet. Apparently, the wise wizard wasn’t that wise in his younger years and found love with a man with a very evil wand mind. I like how she revealed it only when the kids who grew up on Harry Potter were old enough to understand and appreciate the fact. Free love for all. I admit I still find the idea a little creepy, but that’s probably because we desis grew up with such strong homosexual sub context to everything. Neil Patrick Harris (aka Dougie Howser … my first crush ) is arguably the strongest contradiction to the “ewww … that’s so gay!!!” syndrome that was drilled in me. Sadly though, and I apologize to all Desi men/women of such disposition, I can never ever picture/think/fleetingly pause on the thought of a Desi same-sex couple without a shudder. Every test result tells me I’m a left brainer but the way I function is so right brained it’s eerie. (So I guess I lie on tests). Anyway, what I am rambling on towards is this little nugget of TMI (That’s ‘too much information’ pets); everytime I think of homosexuality in our race (regardless of the couple’s social standing or religious inclinations or lack thereof) I GET A VISUAL OF TWO MOLVIS GETTING IT ON. And that, my loves, is what I blame my homophobic shudder on. I comfort myself by thinking it might not be homophobia but religion-phobia.

While my online v.2.0 has been in the doldrums neglected and tugging at my little narcissistic self with its tempting little sweet nothings, my Karachi-weary very real self has been busy … living life … which as John Lennon aptly said, was happening while I was busy making other plans. And oh boy, is life happening and sucker-punching me in the process with one surprise after another.  But I am up for it and well, the pain and the high that follows is just so sweet. No, I’m not high or drunk or loopy. I’m just very VERY sleepy … and maybe just a wee bit looped out.

So, here’s the thing! Talking to a long-lost friend (talking used rather loosely here, as we only exchanged about 20 emails and no verbally articulated words … oh the woes of this digital age … I LOVE yapping away as said friend will attest to), I found my way to his blog where he’d written a post that classifies all bloggers rather neatly into categories. I’ll link to the post later or I might even bug him and reproduce it here; that was one category … the plagiarizers! I, as always, digress…

One of the categories he had listed was of ‘the whiners’. I also LOVE whining and lamenting my lot in life. Although, in hindsight, it is not so much my lot in life as the absolutely demented decisions I’ve taken when the forces that be present me not with a light spring shower of choices but with an absolute Karachi monsoon downpour. The reason why I was staying away from my blog (amongst others) is that I was sick of my own whining and I have a LOT to whine about (really, I can go on for days). What brings me back then? Well, here’s the premise and then what was eating away at me that led my elusive self back to blogging.

A and I are making a list of places to visit together and I got a text from him saying he’s putting Sudan on the list. Really?? Isn’t there a civil war going on there? I know there is because Angie Jolie and Clooney have all gone off and whored that land to ensure they make their annual quota of Vanity Fair covers. Though I would love to visit Sudan and Cambodia and Lebanon, they’ve all gone through or are going through an internal strife of some sort. This got me thinking: while I go on about my crackpot, off-his-rocker boss and the soulless place I work at, while I worry about Ammar’s work visa being processed and how to schedule things so that my wedding happens in that ten day window when the stars will align and there will be peace and joy in the whole world and everyone who matters will/might/probably on a 70% chance be able to make it, there are people worried about whether a bomb will go off if they go out to stock up on groceries, whether a missile will come crashing through the wall, if they and their children will live through the night.

Meanwhile, in our own country, the powers that be in a very precarious state are brokering deals with the woman who along with her debonair *cough cough* husband raped the land and its people and its coffers so that a Surrey pub could be replicated in their nth millions worth of mansion and their charming children with Mensa-esque aspirations should never want of anything. People who know nothing of religion are killing and dying for it, the holier than thou Human Rights Bullshit representative is shrilly shrieking on every television channel, a socialite/to date thought of as extinct white rhino turned serious journalist is bringing SERIOUS insights through her very thought-provoking and lucid sit-downs with the powers-that-want-to-be and the free press has given its censors and sense of propriety the year off while they film people being shot and tape them writhing and dying and play it on loop all day long on television.

Perspective!

Something that is so sorely missing in our lives that everyday is like a day at Comedy Central.

Take a deep breath, close your eyes and THINK!

Ok, the picture may be grainy, but I can recognize Reema’s fat hips from a mile away. I’m sorry, but what the eff was the woman wearing at the Lux Style Awards? Not that I care but she looked like a pouffy drag queen straight from the Stepford Wives. *Ughhhh* …. what is wrong with these women? Why do they think frilly, pouffy, china doll dresses are sexy or even mildly attractive??? And sure, instead of hiding your figure flaws, namely elephantesque hips, why not attract everyone’s attention to them by wearing a taffeta skirt with a crinoline (more likely a hula hoop, these ladies don’t have the sensibility to go near a crinoline).

My sense of fashion and my dinner are deeply offended! Excuse me while I go throw up!

The only reason why I watched Ali Saleem slut it up in drag and put on display his inner porn star on TV was the fact that he seemed as original and irreverent as they get in this land of the pure.

Well, turns out we have the same favourite shows.

Begum Nazi: Honey I’m a trisexual. I’ll try anything.

Samantha (SATC circa Season 3): I’m a trisexual. I’ll try anything once.

It’s a sad sign when you feel outraged for having your faith in a Pakistani drag queen’s profane yet surprisingly mullah-endorsed sense of humour shattered.

sometimes you’re just supposed to pick yourself up, dust off the emotional debris and keep on walking … sometimes you just can’t do that ….

I have to blog. I have to write. I miss both. I can’t do either.