Ramadhan

It's the month of Ramadhan and i will fast a whole month without skimping...

Shame on me; to declare what i did publicly..
But C'mon havent we all popped unassuming samosas into our mouths during that last eleven minute stretch to ifthar? Havent we?
Well, i have. And not just when i was ten either..

Again, shame on me.

But this time is different.
Yesterday was the first fast of the month and even though yeah i did think of Jeffri's Nasi Ayam and bubble tea too many times, i also did NOT put anything in my mouth.
Furthermore i didnt even lie or imagine myself in promiscous situations... i even missed Ugly betty to recite a few pages from Surah Baqarah!! I'm on target of one chapter from the Quran a day...
Even though i was late for Sahar, i managed to get ifthar and dinner on the table right on the dot. I didnt over-eat.

This is a first ever for me... I've always succumbed to temptation and such steely determination i never thought i possessed...
I guess since i'm head of my own house now it's all different. I dont know why i didnt throw myself into Ramdhan as fully as i have done now, all those years before. To think fasting can actually be fun... It's sort of like my fast evolved into much needed food for my soul.
This new-found efficiency and maturity i hope i carry on to the other months of the year as well. This ramadhan, i have found myself again.. Or at least i have found what i woud like to be like...
And no, it's not that Oprah Winfrey-ish "seek yourself inside out" spirituality crap i am talking about. This is real.


I am enlightened.
I am free.
There IS hope for me

And to think i feel this way with just a day's fasting...

Occasional obsession....

'Occasionally' comes way too often for me.
Like for example, when one would 'occasionally' ponder on his death and what would happen to everything he leaves behind...
Well, as i realized i've been conning myself into thinking it's an occasional thing i do... worrying about what would happen to my daughter should i happen to pass on early... After "occasionally" worrying about it for five days in a row, i now believe its an obsession...

Not that i would like to pass on anytime soon; i mean, i have to do my fair share of good to at least attempt to get into heaven. I would have to apologize to my mother-in-law....
And i have to pay back the tuck-shop aunty for my three samosas, two mirindas and five..no six, Jumbo jolly's.... i have it written down now here, and anyone reading this should do the right thing and inform my husband to pay up on my behalf, so i dont have to linger in front of the Golden (is it golden, or pearly in islam?) Gates and never get to go in!! That's what happens to people who dont pay up their debt, and that would be badddd...

Frankly, frankly frankly frankly i feel the hype about heaven is a bit over-played.... that is a blasphemous thing to say and by God i put that down and deleted it and put it back again....its like "Del...pause; look up to ceiling and be lucky u are not homeless and have ready access to a lightning bolt or something from heaven to easily strike you down... Ctrl + Z"...

I mean the whole sweating without smelling like an onion, and paths of diamonds and precious stones and rivers of sweet tasting liquid and not growing old and looking your best forever(that part i dont mind).... But i guess that's why i am human and God is God...
Maybe our stereotypical imaginations cant look past the whole Charlie and the chocolate factory sets, and paint pictures of candy umbrellas sprouting from the ground and licorice trees, and conjure up something different and refreshing instead..
if i ever get into heaven, and i hope i do because i dont fancy hell, i sure hope there are NONE of those pink swirly lollipops for traffic lights...

I've lost track... Now i am probably going to start obsessing about what heaven really looks like.

So back to the original idea behind this post : what if i die tomorrow? I have just three wishes.

1) I want all of you to cry for me.

2) Husband dearest will obviously play the father figure, but in case he decides to re-marry(and i'd have a few choice words of filth on that waiting when he reaches where i am...heaven preferably), I want my mother to take on bringing up my daughter. I dont want some woman i dont know to be a mother to my child.. I want my husband to take any important decisions on behalf of me, and to seek counsel from my mother if ever he feels confused, because she knows me best and she would know what i would want to be done.

I dont want shared custody between my mother and mother-in-law either. I dont want my mother-in-law taking on my place mostly because :
a) her ideologies and theories i dont believe in.. Mami, Friday the thirteenth isn't a big deal.
b) she has her own daughter and when eventually she has a child by her , my girl will be on the sidelines naturally, as she will have to be a grandmother to that kid as well...

Of course my girl can visit and stay over at my mother-in-law's place if she likes, but she must NOT be forced to stay over for lengthy periods of time because she is not a Gypsy and cannot have more than one home. I want her to have a stable life. I also do NOT want her to visit various saints, dead or alive, who claim to have visionary foresight. I want her to respect them for being leaders but not indulge in their lime-cutting escapades to ward off evil eyes or whatever...
I want her to follow her heart, conscience and most importantly, common sense. I want her to be practical and sensible in following religion and i dont want her to succumb to any innovations out of what is already stated in the Quran and the sunnah.

I want her to her to be taught and guided ONLY till she comes of age and till she can fend for herself and think for herself. When she is capable of fending for herself she can do whatever she likes.

3) I want whoever who knows me and who has read this post to pass on this message in case i do go ahead and kick the bucket... And since the only one who reads my blog is Nimra, you know what to do babez!! :)

What precedes getting a brand new dvd player??

Getting brand new dvds of course.... Yay..

SO i got The Namesake, Pan's Labyrinth and Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain.
And i must comment.

THe Namesake... sucked.
Not as good as the book...
The only thing worth seeing in the movie was Kal Penn's blissful face... sighhhhh

Pan's Labyrinth... Did i even live before i watched the movie...
LOVED it.

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain... meaning "The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain"... hilarioussss....
It's french and if you can stomach all the "hhrrhh"s and "Au"s you'd love it...
It's about this girl with a dysfunctional family and dysfunctional friends, an unusual imagination (read : borderline schizo), and a suicidal pet fish...
what more makes a good movie??

He loves me.. He loves me not..

Know that feeling?

When you assume(more often than not) someone is in love with your man and is doing all she can do to get him into her clutches....
Those bleak days of cold uncertainty when you casually drill him about the calls he got for the day and if "Anyone.. no one in my mind, though" from his past tried to pop in suddenly...
And then after you've been so blatantly obvious about the whole thing, try to cover it up in a guilty "Oh, i'm only doing this to protect our marriage you know... I dont want anyone butting in"..

I know the feeling only too well....

PaRt one of the great saga of silly wife writing soppy poems about a girl who didnt want her man in the first place...
Silly wife writing silly soppy poem to drown her embarassment

1... 2... 3..

Written on a balmy Thursday night :

You probably love him too,
Only, not the way I do
Or do you think the same of me?

Yours was obviously not meant to be
But then if it didn't, how else would he belong to me?
Should I then be thankful to you?

How thin it is....this line that separates
The would-have-beens with the never-to-bes
And how morbid, the thought that precedes the dawning of it....

Will the past, because of its unbroken state
Then shatter the fragile present?
Will it tear and rip open and eat away at us?

Will it link?
Act as a bridge,
And connect?

Will it fester?
Confuse,
And trick Just Conscience?

Will it linger in the threads of memories?
Creep back into dazed reminiscence,
Paint its way on forgotten rainbows.....

Will it just go away,
I hope.....

The end.


Sheesh....

I bleat as I bloat

(Excerpt from the diary of a teen mother)

The worst thing about pregnancy is that you pee every time you sneeze (in addition to every time you cough, or breathe really hard, or sigh, or screw your eyes to figure out an iota of substance in the ‘Wild Elephant’ billboards fifty metres in front of you…)
It has come to affect me so much, that I now carry an extra pair of underwear and hope in every fibre of the universal trait that I wouldn’t ever get in an accident and have someone open my bag and check out the hideous grey wreck three times bigger than an average woman’s.

I am nineteen and pregnant... and look it.
Yes, it was an accident and no, it wasn’t anybody’s fault.

My back aches, my breastbone aches, my shoulders ache and my (ahem) down there also aches. I’ve transformed into this bundle of aches and pains.
I can’t run, I cant jump I cant play volley…. I cant walk down the lane to get Tipi Tip, which apparently has Ajinomoto in it and that, I have been told, is lethal for my baby, and “would you please stop eating it or you’re going to mess everything up?”.
But amazingly, I feel no grudge, no anger and absolutely no regrets at all for having the baby.

It is amazing how considerably ‘mellowed’ I’ve got ever since I had him in my life…it’s a ‘him’ today… and yeah, I can tell because I’m the mother(Hell, I’m a mother now and I might as well use the term to my benefit once in a while)…
And I’ve caught him move too… it’s amazing… like a whale breaking the surface of water… I can do nothing but stare at my tummy endlessly for hours on end.
And Google “Unusual Persian, African and Arabian names” for the little rat.

I am highly attached to it. I imagine him at one, two, three and picture how adorable he’ll be. That’s all I know… that he’ll be one of the most adorable kids I’ve ever seen…. His features are a blur. In those rare moments of realization, when sense kicks into me, I merge his father’s and my appearance together and come up with a sort of distorted beard-y version of a kid and it freaks me out so much that I stop and resume my face-less, chubby-bodied kid daydream.

Sometimes I get all pensive and wonder if the world will be a better place for him, if politicians will learn to squander for the poor and if my child will ever take me seriously.
Sometimes I get all hung up on the tiny details of my own childhood and wonder if they will ever reflect in my baby.
Will he love animals and equally love pinching their tails? Will he look both smart and lost at the same time? Will he master the art of talking his way out of situations?
Sometimes I wonder if I would want my child to take after me...

Getting married (and staying married), is not the big deal. The bigger deal is when you are responsible for the material and intellectual nourishment of a kid. The bigger deal is when you have to be the kid’s ears, eyes and nose (and buttocks) for like the better part of the first decade of his life.
The bigger deal is when you have to stop going to college and help the kid out with homework, boycott regularly watched and memorized and watched again reruns of SpongeBob for a few hours of shut-eye knowing that you’ll need to bank in every bit of sleep you can get.
Yes, I’ve been warned and how do I feel?
Not worried, amazingly. I have currently adopted the stance of a trekker, treating the future as adventure and welcoming it whole-heartedly.

I love my baby. I can’t wait for him to come out.
But I cannot, cannot stand to think about the whole delivery process… can it be anything but gory and blood-drenched?
And can people please stop asking me if I dread it or not?

Seven and a half good reasons why procrastinators procrastinate

1) In the highly magnificent circle of life, time plays a major part in everything that happens. It is the very core of it all. A procrastinator, in defying time and twisting the great circle of life to fit into his or her own warped schedules, technically becomes a master then, of everything in the universe!

2) They are always late, so tomorrow always seems the better day to do it.

3) It’s interesting to see if the person on the receiving end will buy your excuses of your grandmother dying a second death. Coming up with probable excuses is more of a daunting challenge and that appeals to some people so much so that they create scenarios in which they could silently giggle at outwitting the other person with a dumb excuse.

4) They believe in the over-rated importance of inspiration hitting them, and wait for it to happen. This can lethally take up to weeks, months and billions of seconds of endless, fruitless waiting, and when they finally get down to business, they’ll find that the inspiration they were looking for was always there. Only thing they couldn’t see it.

5) Which brings me to the fifth point: They never learn! A procrastinator can dish up brilliant work when they are finally forced, and then they look at what they’ve done and they go “oh, well that was interestingly easy. I could have done that ages ago,” but the next time they are given something to do they always opt to do it some other time. They never learn.

6) The whole idea of borrowed time is so tempting and makes it look as if you’ve got loads of hours on you shoulders today even though you’ll be cramped tomorrow.

7) And they are lazy.
Plus, they always have something better to do.

7 1/2) Their existence spices up the gene pool and contributes to the concept of ‘variety in people’! True! After all, it does take all sorts of people to form a world!
Half a reason, because it’s not a reason really…. it just makes a procrastinator feel better!