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. 

Random Art.

as much as i love autumn, im giving myself to ashes.

This is entirely random and thoughtless.

me. in a lost galaxy/face on a milk carton

I sometimes peruse my documents and find gems like this.  On a sidenote, if you find my nose, please return it.  Holy saturation. 

3 a.m Chronicles

I've always enjoyed the quiet that the after midnight hours afford me.  That is when I feel my most creative.  I often paint, or write, or ponder at that time, easily slipping into a pattern of silence charged with frenetic energy.  That aside, it's when I feel the least vulnerable.  I suppose this pattern started for me when I was little, because I had an unhealthy obsession with zombies.

It wasn't an absolute love.  It was a love filled with abject terror.  It was a fascination that always led to me hiding under the stairs of my basement, clutching onto my Teddy Ruxpin doll (which I would subsequently chuck out of my hiding spot, because that thing was fucking terrifying too) and hoping that my supply of ecto cooler wouldn't run out before impending doom.  However I could not stop watching zombie movies, or thinking about zombie attacks, or in more bored times, pretending I was a zombie.  I spent many hours perfecting the Thriller dance (because my love of dance would obviously allow me to join a street gaggle of zombies who inevitably broke out into rehearsed numbers) and watching every Romero vhs I could get my hand on (procured from my brother's friend who rode a purple scooter and convinced me that he was Prince).  As I got older, the zombie fascination continued, only it took a morbid turn.

I had an apartment off-campus during college, and it was directly across the street from what seemed to be an abandoned cemetery (this would also indicate the first in a long line of homes I've lived in that is situated within a block of a cemetery).  We were far too hip to invest in curtains, so I spent every single night sitting in the front room, paralyzed with fear as I could barely make out the figures of a dragged zombie two step heading towards me.  I would come home at night (usually smelling of menthol cigarettes and bad decisions), collapse on the couch, and then inwardly panic that I would awake to see a decomposing face staring back at me.  When an upstairs apartment was finally vacated, I breathed a sigh of relief as I was able to move to an upper floor and surely zombies couldn't scale walls.

Well yeah.  Tell that to Hollywood who then began to churn out zombie movies in which the zombies were not only in shape, but outwardly aggressive and would rip your fucking face off given the chance.  Wonderful!  This brought a whole new set of horrors to my life, as I spent my nights pondering what, exactly, I'd do in the event of an inevitable invasion.  This continued on in home after home, and would have ended until I moved into the condo I bought.

You see, we have an underground heated garage.  Which is wonderful in the Chicago winter as I never have to heat up my car, or scrape the ice off the windshield, or any other things that make the winter mundane and less magical.  However, this lair has it's downfalls.  For one, running the perimeter are storage units for each of the condos, which are fenced in.  Cool, right?  Except there is a large enough gap to crawl over, so you wouldn't be totally protected.  Second of all, between the parking spots are these odd recessed minicaves, that could totally hide an emaciated zombie dripping with blood and gnawing on a spleen.  Of course because I live on the top level and have a double unit, my parking spots are the furthest from the elevator, so when I exit my car (if I'm alone) I sprint to the elevator and try to act normal in case anyone sees me.  However if I'm with someone else, I go into immediate warrior mode and play the part of the bad ass chick should something pop out to attack me.

I'm not sure when a zombie attack will happen, but I know it will. And when it does?  I'll be ready.

a typical night in khan castle

Today is the dumbest day ever.

And because of that, I'm going to listen to David Bowie to make it better.

Update.  After watching this video a few times (yes, it's one of my favorite Bowie performances, but mostly because as a kid I always wanted to be on Soul Train.. or Solid Gold) I feel slightly better.  But this day still pretty much sucks balls.  Is it summer yet? Summer is sure to be much more fun. /angst

A Darling Idiosyncracy

Everyone has bizarre habits.  For example, I know a toenail biter.  This guy who shall remain nameless habitually bites his toenails.  Why?  I couldn't tell you.  Perhaps the enticing aroma of sweaty socks and toe fuzz is just too delectable an entree to pass up.  Perhaps he is so hardcore into his vegan-ism that he feels organic and unadulterated foot sweat is his only means of survival.  Or perhaps (and in what I think is the most plausible scenario) he is just an odd bird.  I also know a girl who breaks her food into baby bites before she eats it.  No matter what it is, it is subjected to torturous mutilation and furtively stuffed in her mouth like a chipmunk.  Victim of a strange cultural ritual, or just a strange habit?  You decide.

Apparently The Brit thinks I am weird as fuck though.  I'm not sure why, as my life is relatively normal (save the copious amounts of sugar free popsicles I consume, or the fact that I don't drink water and instead unsweetened barley tea or that I cannot stop bouncing my knee because I have so much pent up frenetic energy) and it's not like I'm a toebiter or anything.  While I do have weird food habits, I would say that the one thing that bothers The Brit the most is that I'm a hoarder.

No, not in the animal hoarding sense.  Or the "I can't see your floors" sense.  I hoard money.  It's a habit I picked up when I was little.  Growing up in a house with an older brother and sister in which my sister, the protector, was often gone out with her friends.  My brother, the torturer, used to tease me mercilessly (including one time when he was stoned with his friends, and offered me a dollar for every egg he could crack over my head.  Five year old me stood there patiently while I dripped in egg goo, and to date I have never received payment for the 9 eggs!) and somehow, a thought stuck in my head that he would steal my loot. So I began to hide it.  Not in large amounts, maybe a dollar here in that book, or two bucks in a china tea pot.  I ended up carrying this habit into adulthood.

It served me well in college, as I always had beer money, or money for new books at The Strand or money for falafels ( I haven't yet pontificated my love for these little balls of heaven, but I'm sure that blog will come soon) and it served me very well in my early 20's when I needed tattoo money.  Now that I am 30, I find it still serves me well but the dollar amounts are higher.  I funded a new pair of Alexander McQueen booties without tapping into my bank account or credit card this way, as well as a random spa weekend in the same manner.  However The Brit thinks it is bullshit (but to be fair, I think he is more than a little jealous.  He can't even hold onto a dollar in his pocket).

It was late last night/early this morning that I truly found out how much this does, in fact, irritate the living shit out of him.  It was circa 2 am and I was a wandering drone around Chateau Khan, waiting for the Ambien to kick in.  I have a tendency to meander, wraith-like, around the living room so that if someone were to be walking outside, they'd think some bizarre ghostly creature was appearing in all the windows (#funshitidowhenimbored).  But I quickly tired of that, so I decided to look around and make sure all my hidden money was where it was supposed to be.  I should mention that I do that obsessively, too.  Moving right along, though.

I walked into the kitchen, hoisted myself up on the counter, and grabbed the box of Special K.  Looked under the cereal. And staring back up at me was a Post-it with a smiley face hastily drawn on it.

Now I admit.  I began to panic.  Not a full blown, all out scream fest, more like the feeling you get when you hear your parents begin to discuss sex, assuming you are adult enough to handle that type of psychological warfare (spoiler alert parents: your kids want to assume the last time you had sex was when they were conceived. and thats it).  But still, I figured maybe I had taken the money before my trip to New York and totally forgotten about it.  So I moved on to the next hiding spot.  I crawled army style through my living room (this is 100% true), snagging my already sore shin on a safety pin that had apparently made its home pointed side up on my carpet.  I yelled louder than I should have (but I had to have some sort of theatrical effect) and continued to crawl, convinced I was going to hemorrhage to death wearing an old Garfield nightgown that I got when I was 12.  I pondered my impending obituary as I checked underneath my wall unit for the DVD case to Prenom Carmen, hoping to see the familiar envelope of cash.

NO FUCKING DICE.  Instead in it's place was another menacing Post-it.

Replacing your cash with my molester smirk

Now, I may be scatterbrained.  I may be neurotic.  I may be melodramatic.  But stupid I am not.  I grabbed the phone, confirming it was only slightly after midnight in Los Angeles, which meant The Brit was either closing in on being drunk, or asleep.  As it turns out, he was asleep which worked in my favor, as he was more apt to tell me what I wanted to hear rather than act like a dickhole and lecture me.  

Me: Where's my money? (I may or may not have spoken in a Russian Lady Accent)

Britty McBritpants: What money? (Definitely in an English accent. No fun)

Me: You know what money (Taking obvious cues from Law & Order: Sumi K edition)

BMBP: Did you check all of your.... spots? (said with such disdain)

Me: No. What did you buy? 

BMBP: Check all of them, then call me back.

Botheration.  I went spot to spot, looking for my purple envelopes, only to find, yes, the rapey smile goading me at every turn.  Unfuckingbelievable.  I was pretty pissed at this point, but not really acting on it as the Ambien was starting to kick in and I was moving as if through quicksand.  I finally gave up on my game of Cloak and Dagger, and called him back.

Me: What the fuck (At this point, sounding like my mouth was stuffed with marshmallows)

Him: Right bedside drawer, white envelope.  Good night and you're welcome (a few kissing noises that I hung up on because I had mere seconds to uncover this mystery before this episode ended).

I tiptoed into my room and checked my bedside drawer.  Tucked underneath a copy of 1984 was a plain envelope which I promptly tore open with my teeth.  Inside was a letter that said the following:

You Dear Girl,

I leave home for weeks at a time and I do not like the idea of you holing money around and telling everyone about it.  We know some shady people so for your protection I have deposited it into your savings account.  You can thank me when you don't get raped and robbed.  I love you.

And included inside the note was a deposit slip, dated the day he left.

Some may find this sweet, but I was infuriated.  The whole point of this game was to have money for an emergency, and if I were in a situation where I was robbed and or raped, I'm quite confident a potential burglar slash rapist wouldn't think to check my cereal cabinet (and a note to potential burglars or rapists: I only have cereal in my cabinet now, so unless you really want some Special K with red berries, you are out of luck) and I also have a pretty advanced security system (which totally includes a war cry that I have perfected.. and a secret hidden cache of weapons procured from my psychotic ex).  Now what would I do if I needed to buy something spur of the moment?  Rather than having that Christmas morning feeling of opening money envelopes, I'd have to be a regular boring adult and use my credit card, or worse, go to the bank. While I appreciate the fact that he doesn't want me raped, he basically stole all of the joy out of my life.

Update.  As of noon today, the dollar amount in my savings account mysteriously dropped back to the same level it was the day before my boyfriend headed back to Los Angeles.  I may or may not have also bought a new box of envelopes.  I've also found some new hiding spots.

Sumi: 1. Brit: 0.