My life is awesome.

This.

plus.

This.

plus.

This.

plus.

This.

=

My life, being awesome.

And I'm out.

Live without warning

Ignore the title.  After all, those are not directions I tend to follow anymore(edit: i just totally confused myself with this one.  im blaming ambien).  For example, currently it is 1:41am central standard time.  The moon is a strange color and is postulating in an eerie sense underneath the veil of fog that seems to want to bind and fuck that moon.  I've had some drinks tonight.  I've popped an ambien and I'm at the stage where I am seeing things.  And here, I sit.  Listening to 'Hurricane' on repeat for three songs, and then skipping to 'Alibi' for three songs, and continue ad nauseam.  I told myself I wouldn't write this entry today.  In fact, you couldn't blame me if I stopped.  My pajamas are half on, my hair in a ponytail, not a trace left of the smoky eye makeup I fancy so much.  So I'm feeling quite a bit vulnerable.  I can still feel his sweat on my skin and it is making me shudder.

This evening the plan was to go see a band (who will not be named, to protect the guilty) that my nephew loves. LOVES. I'm talking fist pumping, all capslock, LOVE.  Since the show was in Wisconsin, we road tripped it.  I remained noncommital on who else would be attending, only because the worst scenario ever could go down, and I really did not want that to happen, at all.  Moving along while I take you on the vague path to vagueville, I was walking up the backstairs to get into the vip balcony seats.  It was about two hours before the show was even to start but I figured I'd find a good perch and commence the drinking.  And then, it happened.

I didn't see him at first, but I felt him. Yes, that sounds creepy.  No, it really wasn't.  However it was awkward.  He (names omitted to protect the barely innocent) immediately grabbed me in a hug while two of his band members did the nervous shuffle-checkphone-lookoverthere thing that I wished I was doing.  It was a hug that lasted slightly too long, it was slightly damp, and I was kinda perplexed about it considering the last time I was in a room with him and his bandmates I told him to go fuck himself with a rake sideways, and he lunged to either eat my brain or chew off my face.  Not sure what his tactic would have been.  Either way, it was interesting.  I detached as quick as was polite and ran up to the balcony so I could peek down at the revelers below.

Take two.  I stopped writing this blog last night as I realized Three's Company was on, and I chose to eat some popsicles and watch that instead until I inevitably passed out from a combination of pharmaceuticals and faux exhaustion.  So let me pick up where I left off, only now this entry is sure to be lacking a bit of pizazz.

 I had plenty of time during the shitty opening act to let my mind wander, and right after some hilarious texting regarding my boyfriend's new nickname being 'Captain Brittania', I was haunted once more by the same creature from my past.

He apparently couldn't leave well enough alone as he stalked over to me, and grabbed my arm.  I was slightly confused as he had a hoodie on, and sort of looked menacing.  I was pretty sure that he had a fleeting thought about punching me in the ladyparts, but that's neither here nor there.  What transpired was an apology, for nearly attacking me, and that I didn't deserve it then.

WHAT!?! I was fucking floored.  Way to completely change the way I saw a person.  Even his professional image belied the words he said.  But there it was, spelled out before me, with an expectant impish grin waiting my acceptance?  So what could I do, at that point?  Considering that chapter of my life has long since been closed, it never left anything other than fond memories and a slight amount of shame, and my life is completely different from the person I was back then, would I really be petty enough to deny him that? Nah. So we toasted to old memories, old tour bus escapades, and whatever the future brought to both of us, independently.  He no longer had a weight of guilt on his shoulders, and let's face it.  I had comped drinks the rest of the night. Huzzah!

Revisiting the Dark Times

i guess you could say it began the summer before freshman year.

filled with the prospects of an entirely new existence in high school,  i was quite the exuberant ingenue.  it was a rather repressing two years in middle school, the formative years, they say.  it was then that i learned of the cattiness of other females.  then that i felt how deep a wound words can inflict.  then that pain was taken and stored away into a mental box, created of thin  plywood, wrapped neatly with a velveteen ribbon.  it was that time of year when i met a boy who changed the way i saw things.

to protect the (plausibly) innocent, names are being left out.  but im sure everyone can recall the rush of blood to the surface skin, the tingling sensation of young love/lust/curiosity.  this boy spent alot of time in my company, and we spent the heat of the summer at a local park, wrapped in each others embrace.  sordid, i tell you.  but as summer came to a close, so did the affliction of a boys affection.  i never spoke to him beyond our last tryst ,  and when i went home i felt this unrequitted emptiness.

leave a girl alone with her thoughts, and a lot can happen.

i recall a night alone in my room, listening repeatedly to my Better Than Ezra cd, stuffing a towel under my bedroom door so i could sit at the window and smoke a parliment light (without inhaling, of course) and breathing in my own misery mixed with the scent of egyptian mist incense. i dont know what first made me grab for it, but it was easily within reach, as were random odds and ends i had always scattered around my bedroom.  i do, however, remember the first tearing sensation as the safety pin cut into the virgin surface of my ankle.  i felt that familiar rush of blood, the swelling of the surface skin, and that night i fell asleep; serene and problem free.

this was repeated numerous times, different tools to impliment the visual raping of my skin. a pin, a paperclip (unbent), a razorblade, a pencil eraser (yes, it burns the flesh off slowly, tortuously), and the big time: a fresh exacto knife.

Now some of you might be reading this and wondering to yourself how fucked up i am, exactly.  truth be told, this is merely a diatribe of past transgressions. moving right along..

 I was always careful to hide my cuts, preserving the areas i dwelled upon with the flick of subtlety to my thighs, the backs of my legs, my upper arms.   a slice for a bad grade, a scratch for an arguement with any one of the suitors i had at any given time, a sharp splinter drawn off for the sheer hell of it. and at that point, it progressed.


i didnt cut all the time.  mainly when something became too harsh for me to bear, it became my skin's responsibility to carry the burden of my emotional instability.  sometimes, many times, my life was pretty free from troubles.  but other times, the worst times, i lashed out physically onto myself, carving my own inefficience at coping.  sometimes it was so bad that the scars became visible to all who noticed.And sadly, I wasn't the only to participate.  I was weak, and someone else began to inflict the same type of pain upon me.  Why not? I'm sure he thought.  He wouldn't take any blame for it since it was something I did to myself, too.  I was more ashamed of these than anything, and  I spent two years trying to hide the six jagged stripes upon my left forearm, and the deep gashes upon my right bicep.  Not many know those were someone else's creation.  I merely allowed them to think I was the maestro of this type of artistry, to avoid the shame of letting someone break me down into nothing. 

i dont know why i quit cutting. it just stopped, as quickly as it set on.  i dont think i can replicate the feeling i used to get out of it. maybe it was a game best left in the box, bundled up with a few pieces missing, left behind and almost forgotten.

self destructive, you say.  fuck that.  self preservation, i say. 






I've edited to add that this is a blog I posted in 2007.  It's amazing to me how memories can come full circle only to play on repeat again in a few years time.  It seems to be a persistent niggling feeling that lies dormant until it hits once more, full throttle and piercing into my skull until I want to shriek and pull at my flesh.  In the same vein, it is comforting to be awash in these familiar feelings.  It reminds me that I can, in fact, feel.  Survival.  Always a common song we sing.

Another Random Picture That I took.

i remember running through the wet grass/and falling  a step behind/both of us never tiring/desperately wanting

A Brown Girl's View on Terrorism

As a kid, I grew up in an upper-middle class suburb outside of Chicago.  Majority of my friends were either white, or had immigrant parents like mine who were "living the American Dream".  I fit right in with everyone, we all ran the streets as late as we could playing Ghost in the Graveyard or fishing for catfish in the lake out back.  No one saw color, or race, or anything like that.

Imagine my surprise then, when I found out I was different. 

I was 4 years old when my parents announced my grandmother was going to be visiting us, and staying in our house for about 5 months.  I didn't know much about her, other than she was my dad's mother, she didn't really speak English very well, and she was from Pakistan which to me, existed on the same planetary line as Mars.  I had no idea where Pakistan was, but I did know she would come bearing gifts and that had me rubbing my greedy little hands together in absolute glee.  When she finally did arrive, all of my gifts were so beautiful.  I had hand painted china dolls in traditional Pakistani clothing, matching outfits for myself, tea sets, and the final gift which my grandmother presented to me with such gusto; a backpack printed with the Pakistani flag, and a glitter glue headline proudly proclaiming, "PAKISTAN" across the front.  When my grandmother asked me what it said, I was so excited to show off my reading skills (I had already diligently worked my way through the Berenstain Bears books) that I announced exuberantly..

"PANCAKES". 

And that was the first moment in my life that I realized I was not brown enough.

There would be many more moments like this later in life.  Like the time when I went to visit my cousin the diplomat at his new post in New York.  He spoke to me in rapid fire Urdu, and in a flustered moment I responded in Spanish.  Or the time when I went to Pakistan, only to be appalled at the fact that cows and livestock roamed the roads freely, and often contributed to traffic jams.  Or when, in Pakistan, I was fascinated to find out there was a small village in the foothills of the Himalayas, in which they held a book of my families ancestry going back a few hundred years.  Pretty insanely cool, if you ask me.  But in that same vein, since 2001, the world has gone under a rapid change that has made me feel more "brown" than ever.

To stray off topic a bit, I'm just going to say that terrorism has always existed, though people suddenly think it's a new thing created solely by Muslims to hunt and kill white people.  Untrue.  There have always been terrorists, of all races, creeds, colors, sizes.  However it is an unfair stereotype put onto muslims ever since September 11th. 

Now, forgive my erratic mind for jumping around, but there is just so much I want to say on this subject, and so little room for me to type it all (otherwise you'd be reading a seriously psychotic look into the way my mind works. And that doesn't work out nicely for anyone).  But I have to say that seeing the death of Osama bin Laden has made me question the people around me as human beings.  I'm going to get super serious for a bit, but I wonder about the way people work when they hear of something like this.

When Osama bin Laden was killed, my immediate thought was, "It's about time".  Not joy, not unadulterated cheering, but a blanket statement at the fact that a man that was hunted for so long had finally met his demise.  However I saw people around me praising God, or claiming it was the best news they had ever heard.  And this made my stomach flip.  

Why does a death justify many deaths?  Who is the animal here?  We celebrated in the streets that OBL had been killed, but didn't we feel horrified to see fundamentalist Muslims doing the same thing at America's expense? 

As a country, we tend to assume "the terrorists" struck first, and we struck back, heavy handed.  That's not the case, however.  We have been monsters for years upon years upon years, killing in the name of peace.  Does that solve anything, though?  At the end of the day, is your life any different because Osama bin Laden is dead?  Was your life different when he was around?  What changed?

I know I have a barrage of questions, but it's mostly because I cannot fathom the mindset of someone who takes delight in the death of someone.  Regardless of how evil or negative or horrible they were, their death will never replace the lives lost.  It will never give an answer to a child as to why their father or mother or brother won't be coming home.  It will never, ever, finalize an equal playing field for countries everywhere, and no one will step up and say, "We're done.  This is the end of war."  9/11 forever changed the landscape of the world, and things will never go back to how they were, no matter how many people died.

I'd also like to add that the people who are vehemently demanding to see the death photos of OBL are disgusting.  Why on earth you would want to see the image of a dead person is beyond me (and I say this having witnessed some pretty gruesome deaths, why the fuck would someone be cool with seeing this shit?), and again.. seeing the image will not suddenly make all right in the world.

In other fun facts, I've actually been to Abbotabad, where OBL's compound was.   My father had his military training in the school there, and I visited the camp as a child.  There's a picture of me in one of the family albums next to a guard on an appaloosa horse (who I named Belinda, after my obsession with Belinda Carlisle), proudly pointing to the sign and holding my father's medals.  But to be honest,  I don't really remember that town.  Most of my memories of that trip to Pakistan involve animals and my inability to comprehend a country without pizza or a McDonalds.  In many trips after though, I was touched by the warm welcome I received from strangers, or the hospitality, or the absolute beauty of the country.

I'm going to end this here because I've gone completely off track and have done nothing but ramble, but please take a moment to reflect on what's going on in the world today.  And if you are celebrating someone's death, does that make you any better than them?

My cousin and I with a goat in Islamabad, before it was slaughtered. I decided to serenade it with some Wham! while my cousin instead decided to ride it triumphantly around the yard.