the early bird gets the weed

Earlier in the month, my resolution was to take up more healthy habits. I did, and I turned to gardening. So there I am sweating in winter, my back's killing me, my thighs feel like I've done 200 squats and I'm wondering if this is still healthy. But I forgot all that as I laid eyes on the seedlings trying to push up from the ground. It was beautiful: life taking place in front of me. I was already high.

And then Alfred Hitchcock's birds came. The other morning I found my babies, dead, their stalks jutting out like bones in a field of war. It was unsightly. I cursed at those stupid sparrows and I vowed that I'm going to feed their young to my snake while I do the opposite of work on the very very few crops that I'm left with. Not very healthy, I suppose.

Sleep is the girl who captured my interest with her doey eyes and returned the note describing her beauty with a look of a bitch. I like sleep but I'll pretend I don't need it, and she wants nothing to do with me.

Girls my age are getting married. Not only does marriage take away viable candidates from the dating pool, the very idea of it raises the expectations of the few other contestants remaining, who then want to look for "more" in a relationship, ruining the chances for many a men and scaring others shitless.

My 2 cents for the day.

Dumb and Braver

It has come to my attention that smart people are cowards. And keeping that in mind, the dumber you are, the physically braver. It was merely an observation before but I started thinking about it and it made sense. Smarter people have faster reflexes and I'm guessing, a higher order of intelligence that allows them to assess the antagonistic situation and their brain, in its own brave way, screams at their emotions to die down before the shit truly hits the fan. The mind offers reflex alternatives. Regardless of the fact that he or (I hope) she follows one alternative and decides to run for it, he'll or (I hope again) she'll be distracted for a full split second: the nerd gets taken down. I hope it's not my hypothetical she. But seriously, smart people develop options and often opt for those alternative routes. And a dumber crowd correlates inversely by literally refusing to think and enters the fight hard. It works and gets the job done. So ends the tale of the smart ants who worked hard in the summer and stored grain in the winter and were self-righteously wining and dining merrily in december when the stupid bear who forgot to hibernate came and trashed the place and ate the ants. The bastards deserved it after they let the grasshopper die.
 

woke up sucking a lemon

On my way to class today I happened to glance at the rather bright screen they've erected near Regent Plaza which keeps showing the news in mute. They have one on Tariq Road and I swear it lights the place up like a ghetto Times Square.
It's funny they're showing these silent adverts with women and doctors giving those informative speeches. While you're not disgusted by aunties with saccharine voices insisting they love their families and showing it by lovingly feeding them chunks of fried garbage, you can notice the has-been starlet and the frustration she packs for having an idiot of a husband and having to resort to do this cooking oil stint to pay the bills and pretending to love a kid who's a little bitch offscreen by making him ingest fatal amounts of cholesterol.
The kid should know that the future of child stars is not bright in Pakistan. At most he'll end up on the back page of Young World wearing red hotpants, sweets in his hands and a hole where self-respect used to reside. The Aunty knows about this hole all too well.
And the name of the channel on the screen? GOOD NEWS TV. Bits and pieces of other news thrown together without the voice track. It's brilliant! And I'm going to tell you how to get GOOD NEWS at home.

Step 1. Open your television to Geo
Step 2. Hit mute

It works every time.

x

But news isn't all that bad. There's some construction happening on this side of the bridge that is soon to smooth out the traffic to Defense and Clifton. Somebody built an awesome looking structure on the chowrangi between the two Habib banks on Tipu Sultan. Big TV screens are springing up on the road. Sharfabad got one of those cool signals with timers! Modrenity ki inteha!
Speaking of, the normal Pakistani man loves to be modren. But the very mention of a woman being modern, one in question usually starts sputtering out denials. The males here on the other hand will have no qualms about rising unabashedly to the occasion and some will even fake it. I love it when some poor fool loses it in a dispute and in that moment of confused anger, starts swearing in English out of spite. Fuckyou you! He had the last say but definitely not the last laugh.
For a woman in Pakistan, being called modern or advanced or tez is like being equated to a slut apparently. You just can't call a woman that. But they don't love it any less than every man. Men will have their boys' night out talking in lewd detail about her tits and ass, and women will have their kitty parties talking in lewd detail about her "figure" and her nonexistent sleeves. Throw in an argument and a resultant pillow fight and we have the opening scene of an all-girl porno.

And what the fuck is up with everyone about going sleeveless? Why is it an issue on another level? Though for men, I can understand. It looks...unsightly. It doesn't make sense, however, when mothers start giving shit to their daughters about their clothes having no sleeves. They aren't okay with sleeveless shoulders but they're cool with inch of cloth carefully labelled sleeves. It makes it look less like morals and more like appearances. God have mercy, I'm not learned in Islamic injunctions and arguments of modesty to say anything in ethereal terms but in humble rationale, I can't think how a flap of cloth makes any difference to a woman or society in general. Like Bob never used to say ironically, times...they are a changin'.

An Open Letter to James Cameron

Dear James,
I'm a big fan. I loved Alien and even more, Aliens. I love the fact you used the villain from one movie as the hero in the sequel and made that Austrian face so Hollywood that later, they elected him Governor. Sir, you are an icon in film making and a god among genre affictionados. So then, why oh why would you get a sex change and make that shit peice Titanic. And have that break the roof of the box office? Only if the boys knew that Katy would start signing documents that made sure she gets to take her clothes off for every film she made in the future. But hell, it made money and made girls remember your name, so grudging kudos to your success with that. Titanic's heart would go on and on but after the 653rd remix of Celine Dion's number, the scene began to sink. Slowly Sting's Desert Rose and it's billion remixes started hitting Mohammad Ali and maybe in the confusion of figuring what the fuck Sting was trying to mumble in that song, people started to forget their Tittanic phase. Boys, who did not play sports often, started to dream about the next movie you were going to blow their minds with. I, on a personal note, began hoping humbly that this new secret project you were working on would make people forget you ever made Titanic. But you fucked it up again.

With your gender reassignment, I see you've been taking high doses of your hormonal therapy. You took the ultra cool Uhura from Star Trek and turned her into a naked pixie in the forest. That would not be such a bad thing if she didn't cry so funny. "Maaahh ahhhh". What the fuck. I don't want to hear Chewbacca give birth. I don't want Michelle Rodriguez to be a nice self-sacrificing martyr. I don't want to see expansive and never ending shots of Pandora that you spent millions on and are dying to show off. It's boring. And was it just me or did no scene during those avatar/navi bonding session raise a hair? It was bland. Especially when the dumb aliens just take in a random dude into the intimacy of their tribe. And everything just fell in to place, eh? I'm loving these cheesy messiah storylines taking place these days in movies that just just drop out of the sky with plugs to fill in the plot holes. And the obligatory deus ex machina at the end. It was only cool back when Neo gets shot and wakes up seeing the world in green. Just thinking about that is making me regret going to avatar when i could have been watching the Matrix on high def. All in all, it was a mediocre affair and I kept wishing I hadn't seen and loved Dances with Wolves before.
And blue aliens with tails riding scary black alien horses and attacking mankind is eery. It's paranoid of me to say but there had to be something subliminal about the movie. Why else would you spend so much money on a movie with that recycled a story? Fine. Even I was dying to see it, knowing the general story and probable plot twists. I bought the hype. But how could anyone watch this again and why on earth would you ever want to even recommend it to anybody? So why is it breaking every record! I'm bitter it did well. Sorta like when we got Asif Ali Zardari as the president. Now I'm convinced more than ever that Satan was somehow involved in all this.

A feeling of Discontent

The following song would be the perfect soundtrack to this dream I once had:

Crack The Shutters by Snow Patrol

You cool your bedwarm hands down
On the broken radiator

When you lay them freezing on me
I mumble can you wake me later

But I don't really want you to stop
And you know it so it doesn't stop you

You run your hands from my neck
To my chest

Crack the shutters open wide
I want to bathe you in the light of day

And just watch you as the rays
Tangle up around your face and body

I could sit here for hours
Finding new ways to be awed each minute

'Cause the daylight seems to want you
Just as much as I want you

Its been minutes Its been days,
I remember all I will remember

Happy lost in your hair
And the cold side of the pillow

Your hills and valleys
Are mapped by my intrepid fingers

And in a naked slumber
I dream all this again

I went to school in my father's car today because mine wouldn't start. I try not to drive that car because I get really conscious doing so, like my dad himself is sitting with me whilst I drive. It's awkward but the radio works. It was a shitty morning but the song made it nice.
Now my whole day would have went well had I heard the song without a shitty day to return to. So now you end up pissed tired and feeling like you should feel miserable but actually feel nice and fuzzy inside. Which makes you question your sanity in the short term.
What happens during that is that something in your mind seems out of place and you have no idea what that deficiency feeling is all about. Like you're lacking something or missing it. You can't identify it but you wish you could fix your serotonin levels with a slap to the head. It doesn't work so you tend to enthusiastically take up vague projects that you know you'll never complete. But anything to pass the time. It gets worse and you start getting shifty and your heart beat gets louder and more irregular. Your span of attention has now turned to a crab which scurries away as soon as it spots anything and you beg to God for peace of mind.

Sometimes, all you ever wish for is the Snow Patrol song to go forever. Irony goes well with the metallic taste in your mouth.

6th Jan - Monty Ate Today

Today is the 7th but yesterday it was the 6th and the day my snake ate his first meal at home. Poor guy was called an earthworm by anonymous some. But the way he bit into the chicken liver and coiled around it and slowly started eating it up was awesome. I only wish it were live food so Monts could practice some of that real life instinct shit you see in formulaic movies where a wild animal's kept as a pet and is later rehabilitated into the wild and there are always happy tears in the end. Monty looks like he's always smiling. His jaw's just curved like that. Kinda like how Heath Ledger's Joker had it but nothing that sinister. He's a good boy. And now he's looking all round, moving with awkward jerks around the bulge in his stomach. I didn't have my regular phone on me because that one was stolen by a certain individual or I would have made a movie and uploaded it right then.
Syed Jibran Ahmed is a thief.

"definitely something" in the time of cholera

Chapter 1.
I'm falling asleep and I can feel everything around me turning hazy. My bed starts to melt away and the colours of the walls are bleeding on to the floor and everything is merging into a ball of white space. And I'm nowhere. And it's perfect.

-
People don't normally remember this because by this time, they black out. I would have too, if it wasn't for the jedi mosquito trying to bombard an opening in the deathstar. The little fucker kept buzzing inside my ear until I started hearing machine gun fire invade my white sanctum. I snapped out (or in) and started slapping around wildly to get him to stop so I could return. But it looked like Luke Bloodsucker was on a mission and that mission had something to do with the inside of my ear. I did fall asleep eventually.
-

Chapter 2.
I'm walking with my old house behind me when this small car stops and I get in. There's Girl, a mother and a sister. And a driver too. Apparently they've come to drop some haleem off and I'm guiding them to my house which now is apparently not that near. I'm sitting between the mother and the girl in the back and after familiar pleasantries are exchanged between me and Girl, her mother's asking me where my house is. I don't remember the dialogue now, but I remember it moderate in tone. The lane to my house comes and I purposely have it avoided because I need more time with this Girl. And the scene changes.

-
It's morning by the way and I'm up early and I needed to write this before I forgot everything. The forgotten dialogue between me and the mother was articulate. She knew even if Girl didn't. Her emotions were controlled and she wasn't being harsh. She was stern though. She scared me but there was nothing not to like.
-

Chapter 3.
We're on Tariq Road when I see the broken windows, a few cars running scared, people breaking down and laughing. It's like hartaal in Wonderland. We pick up our speed and we're on Shahrah-e-Quaideen, going towards Faisal. It was weird because the people outside were happy. Like they were going to a picnic at breakneck speed. The car to our right had a girl sticking out and professing her love for ... diggi? Her windshield was broken, so either she was in shock or she was just reaching out at desperate times. We move further and I see Salman and "Usf" under the flyover, standing like they're at Liaquat's. Thank God there was no Liaquat or he would have insisted I pay him back an imaginary Rs. 350.

Chapter 4.
I'm swimming as a child in my Nana's house and it doesn't feel right. I remember feeling vulnerable, conscious of my surroundings and uncomfortable. Scene fades.

-
I need a smoke. I'm going to the roof.
-

Chapter 5.
The car is there again and Girl is at the back, as am I. Sister is nowhere and the mother is in the passenger seat. There's a primordial and emotional air and my hands are freezing and Girl takes them in hers. I feel warm inside.

Chapter 6.
We reach my house and the mother leaves her and the sister at my house. No haleem though, that seems to have vanished.
I take them inside to the safety of my house and we're climbing the stairs to the terrace. I believe it's my old house. I can hear my entire family there and the sister's talking to me about something I can't remember now. She was smiling and she walks over and sits with the khandaan, seemingly comfortable. But Girl stays with me. She walks in my old room and she's talking to me about everything but i can't hear a word. I'm just looking into her. Now I know why they call it dreamy.
The last thing she talks about is some football match between Arsenel and Astonvilla and I swear it couldn't get better than that.

Epilogue
I wake up with a smile at 7:30. It's one of those dreams where you don't want to wake up from. You linger in bed, dazed and happy. You wish you could or would stop because it is, after all, just a dream.

x---x

I killed the annoying mosquito in the end.

.

the Top Three

Nothing beats the cold wind rushing by your face and your hair flying when you take a trip down to the airport. No wait, nothing beats the cold wind rushing by and rustling through your hair when you're returning from the airport. It's usually that you drive slowly when going there because you have other people in the car with you, more likely older relatives and you would prefer to be tameezdar. But when you're returning, it's a different and more reckless story. That's where you turn the volume dial over and over and make the wind slap your face. I have a cold (damn you crab masala allergies!) and I could feel the viscosity of my sinus grow tenfold but it didn't matter. All I was thinking about were the three women I really really like to see in movies. They're all very stunning and accomplished and each has their own style to acting. I find all of them superhot (even if people don't agree with me on this) but it's just not the way they look that makes them appealing. I've seen plenty of smoking hot women fade away much like the cigarette smell in the very humble abode I call my room. Each of them has their own thing to them that somehow grabs me. This reminds me of a girl who I think looks rather like a clown but strangely, hot too. Not beautiful, because as I mentioned she looks like a clown. And don't get me wrong, I hate clowns and the way they look and the way they act and I definitely do not have clown-o-philia. But there was something about her I couldn't put my finger on that made her appealing and I could understand what was behind all those men falling for her. So anyway, all three have this individual thing about them that I can't identify and although I'd love a chance to meet any of them, I think I'd probably end up stammering and going red and not being able to talk at all if I did ever get the chance. They are (in no particular order):


Jennifer Connelly


I remember her from way back as the girl from this obscure movie about goblins and an orangutan (which I later learnt was called Labyrinth). I saw her again much later in one of my favourite movies, Dark City and she soon established herself as one of my favourite actresses. Jennifer Connelly, as her name suggests, is Irish by descent and Jewish on her mother's side. And sultry from all sides. I didn't see Requiem for a Dream and A Beautiful Mind wasn't too great but I found Ang Lee's Hulk remarkable and she was amazing as Betty Ross. And then came House of Sand and Fog in which I was blown away by her character. And when she tries to seduce Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Blood Diamond for information and finds herself a part of his fight, there was an appealing layer of subtlety to her. I can't say but there's something definitely about her that makes me want to grow a flower or something in her name.


Rachel McAdams


Wow. In this case, one can probably tell I posted the picture before I said anything. Rachel McAdams looks ordinary to me one second and breathtaking the other. I didn't mean ordinary like plain, just conventional. People tend to ignore the ordinary but there's so much beauty to be experienced and touched in this world in the most ordinary of people and things. Rachel McAdams is an embodiment of and testament to just that.
To be honest, I never really noticed her in her blonde teen roles but she was enough to make an honest man out of anyone in The Wedding Crashers. I saw The Notebook only about a year ago but I stopped watching that in the final last minutes because I knew where it was going and just didn't want to see it/couldn't bear it. But wow. And just to catch her in action, i went to see Red Eye on the big screen. Red Eye!


Amy Adams


Amy Adams is a red. I'm beginning to think I have a thing for redheads. That green-eyed girl from Lost (spoiler) who dies from those nasty nosebleeds is a red so is Isla Fisher (who was also in The Wedding Crashers with Rachel McAdams as her psychotic sister or something) who is brilliant in her comedic roles as well being a total stunner.
Amy Adams is the girl who lives next door to you and you've been in love with her all your life. You get girlfriends, she gets boyfriends and you pass her off as a friend who's also your neighbour. You don't even know you're in love with love with her. I think I saw her the first time in Talladega Nights with Will Ferrel and I definitely thought she was way better looking than the wife. I saw her again in Enchanted which made me remember her name. I have a confession: I loved Enchanted. But in my defense, I like these Disney movies. Even The Little Mermaid. Amy Adams is beautiful in her serious roles and really cute in others. There's something about her that makes me want to get to know her and introduce her to my parents or something. And...I can't wait for Leap Year.

Only in the Movies

I like to indulge myself in the movies. I don't know about the other kids but I've been fed movies since the age of 5. A good weekend with my Nana always had a movie premiere in there somewhere. Whether it was rooting for Beastman or getting goosebumps when the iconic "thump" of the T. Rex left ripples in the water in Jurassic Park or even sneaking into these stupid new cinemas where you can't enter without your "family" without a girl to watch promising but turns-out-its-shit movies like Jumper, the experience was always the same. The lights dim, the reel spins, stupid ads for things I didn't know existed come, the national anthem plays and we're off. And if you missed this and God forbid, the trailers you should just go home because it's just not the same. The beginning credits set the mood for the film and I'm there hungrily eating at whatever the director throws at me. It's surreal.
My favourite genre of movie would be just that: genre films. Genre films have this old school thing about it which I can't place. Maybe it's the B movie buried under the high budget or the way the men are men in film noir but I love them (speaking of B movies, the third canonical Universal Soldier is out and I loved it. Dolph Lundgren and Van Damme are there! Washed out/cokehead's written all over their faces but that just adds to the atmosphere).

But the thing I love most is when something actually happens and it feels like it just jumped out of a movie. It's ironic that it's so real.
So there are different situations, or genres if you will, when it starts to feel like that. There's that romantic/comedy moment or just plain comedy. There's a thriller when there are bombs exploding and snipers are posted on the roof of your school and your friend starts pointing them out using clock hands. Walking straight, without looking up: "Guard, 12 o'clock! Sniper, 5 o'clock! Hot girl, 9 o'clock!" And then there's complete and utter horror which makes you literally piss your pants. There was a letter I mentioned before briefly that came from a state prison in California a while ago, addressed to me. I was excited and I wanted to write back. But then we googled him. And I pissed my pants.


My guy Maldonado here killed his dad and made a stew out of him. He fucking ate his dad! And that is why he's serving his life sentence for it. And he has my address! *this is the point the music from Psycho starts playing in my head*
And I imagined this person to be in for being a drug mule and regretting it and rehabilitating himself for when he gets out, starting life in the US of A. This shit made me want to pop a few benzos and hope to dear God he never gets out. I've had my rough patch with my dad so I tried to understand but this...this is literally insane. it goes beyond the traditional realms of horror and treads on the subject which scares me the most: the human mind gone wrong.
Ever the optimist, I can now safely say that at the least one person finds me delectable.