How to:

1. In a hurry, approach the top landing of a staircase.

2. Also in a hurry, notice that there is an empty garbage can waiting to be taken back downstairs.

3. Swoop down with your right hand to pick up the garbage can, removing your eyes from the staircase and therefore altering your initial trajectory.

(Note: the bannister cannot ambush you if you’re looking right at it.)

4. Inadvertently smash your left hand into the pokey and ornate ornamental bannister at the head of the stairs.

(make sure a hard corner is jammed very precisely between two of your knuckles so that the nerves of your arm are jangled all the way up to your elbow.)

5. Watch it swell.

6. Notice the sudden discoloration.

7. Perish.

Don’t cry over spilt milk.

Unless it’s very cold.

And you’ve poured a whole glass of it into your lap.

Having done so, weep.

bawhawwwhooohooooooo! <:o

It got better… 

This photo by request and request. I apologize for the cheap photo quality. Or well, actually, I don’t, because if I was really sorry I would’ve taken the trouble to hook my digital cam up instead of being lazy and using the webcam instead.

Well, I’ve got a busy few weeks ahead of me, and I have a rather large project which you guys might be able to help me with, you beautiful bloggers, you. I’ll post how you guys can help me out (Yes, you!) tomorrow. In the mean time, enjoy my first mortal wound picture.

Some blogs are easier to write than others. Take, for example, a mortal wound blog. All I have to do is hurt myself and a great story is born. Last week I mortally wounded myself while washing the car, but because I was over-busy with my momma’s arrival, I didn’t get the chance to write it up. It woulda been a good one too, considering how I sliced my pinky off on the razor-sharp edge of the license plate. Well, I thought I sliced my pinky off anyway. I had been just kind of sloppily moving a wet rag over the front fender of the car when suddenly there was pain and blood. I checked to see if my finger had fallen into the puddle of brown water on the floor, but it was still attached to my hand. It was a good thing too. I don’t know if I would’ve wanted a dirty pinky sewed back on anyway.

Complaining about things is always a fun blog, although not necessarily a good blog. Blowing off steam about things helps, especially in dealing with the heat. Yesterday it was so hot that I melted and trickled out of my chair. I tried to re-solidify but I the best I could manage was a skilful imitation of a wet rag draped over the sofa. Then I had a nap.

Or I could blog about food. Well, I could if I had eaten any, but as it is, all I’ve had today is ice cream and breadsticks. Alternately. For breakfast I had a breadstick. For lunch I had ice cream. For tea I had a breadstick. For dinner I had ice cream. It’s too hot to cook and it’s too hot to eat anything that someone else may cook.

Maybe it’s just too hot to do anything in general. Maybe I should just lurk in the cool basement and watch Strong Bad cartoons. Oh wait, I’ve been doing that already…

Oh well.

TROGDOR!!!!!

Mortally wounded my fingers while dismantling 15-foot trampoline. Will dramaticize it later. Right now it hurts to type.

Have a laff instead: from www.funnycleanjokes.com

You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that says, My God, you’re right! I never would’ve thought of that!

-Dave Barry

We have women in the military, but they don’t put us in the front lines. They don’t know if we can fight, if we can kill. I think we can. All the general has to do is walk over to the women and say, You see the enemy over there? They say you look fat in those uniforms.

-Elayne Boosler

I am not the boss of my house. I don’t know how I lost it. I don’t know when I lost it. I don’t think I ever had it. But I’ve seen the boss’s job and I don’t want it.

-Bill Cosby

If you can’t beat them, arrange to have them beaten.

-George Carlin

Instead of getting married again, I’m going to find a woman I don’t like and give her a house.

-Lewis Grizzard

The problem with the designated driver program, it’s not a desirable job. But if you ever get sucked into doing it, have fun with it. At the end of the night, drop them off at the wrong house.

-Jeff Foxworthy

Don’t spend two dollars to dry clean a shirt. Donate it to the Salvation Army instead. They’ll clean it and put it on a hanger. Next morning buy it back for seventy five cents.

–William Coronel

Sometimes I think war is God’s way of teaching us geography.

–Paul Rodriguez

Some women hold up dresses that are so ugly and they always say the same thing: This looks much better on.’ On what? On fire?

–Marsha Warfield

I went into a McDonald’s yesterday and said, I’d like some fries. The girl at the counter said, Would you like some fries with that?

–Jay Leno

I’m desperately trying to figure out why kamikaze pilots wore helmets.

–Dave Edison

If it weren’t for electricity we’d all be watching television by candlelight.

–George Gobel

Suppose you were an idiot… and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

–Mark Twain

I just broke up with someone and the last thing she said to me was, You’ll never find anyone like me again! I’m thinking, ‘I should hope not! If I don’t want you, why would I want someone like you?’

–Larry Miller

My mom said she learned how to swim when someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. I said, ‘Mom, they weren’t trying to teach you how to swim.’

–Paula Poundstone

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they seem okay, then it’s you.

–Rita Mae Brown

Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you’ve got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.

–Jerry Seinfeld

Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant? I’m halfway through my fish burger and I realize, Oh my God….I could be eating a slow learner.

–Lynda Montgomery

Why is it that when we talk to God we’re said to be praying, but when God talks to us we’re schizophrenic?

–Lily Tomlin

The reason most people play golf is to wear clothes they would not be caught dead in otherwise.

–Roger Simon

Golf — a good walk spoiled.

–Mark Twain

Sensei Presents: Mortally Wound Yourself, In Bed.

I know it sounds hard, but it can be done. And last night, I proved it. Here’s how.

Set your alarm clock for 6 am, the appropriate time for Fajr prayer these days. When it goes off, wait for your roomie to pray first because there’s only one prayer-rug upstairs, and because that’s the way it works. So wait in your warm and comfy bed, and then be woken up five minutes later and pushed in the direction of the bathroom to do wudu.

Do wudu with cruelly cold water (I could pray faster than it would take the warm water to come into the tap) and then shiver your way over to the prayer rug. Do your best to be worshipful through chattering teeth.

I would like to take a minute here to describe the architecture of Pakistani housing. Most Pakistani houses are composed of plaster on brick, or RCC- reinforced concrete cement. None of them, not a single one, are insulated, and you could find a horned cat before you found one with central heating. What this means is that when it’s 50 F outside (10 C) it’s not much warmer on the inside unless you’re within the immediate vicinity of a heater. For all practical purposes, you live inside of a giant concrete refrigerator until spring comes and you thaw out.

It was 50 F/10 C last night, and foggy, and wet, and bitterly cold. The inside of the house wasn’t much better off. I tell you this so you may understand the blind enthusiasm with which I jumped back into bed after praying and nearly split my head open on a hard, pointed object that turned out to be Aniraz’s elbow lying on my pillow.

Then I died. And I have the bruise to prove it.

Now, there is some dispute as to whether her elbow infiltrated Abezistani territory and ambushed me, or whether my head was violating the border terms that had been decided in previous bilateral talks. (This is my bed, that is your bed. My bed, your bed. See?) . Our two beds have been pushed together so that both of them can be as close to the heater as possible, and there are often border skirmishes. She accuses my head of cross-border infiltration, and argues that her elbow responded with appropriate military measures. I maintain that my head was acting on it preexisting right to use the aforesaid pillow, as it is my ancestral pillow and its usage cannot be curbed based on the arbitrary Line of Control that Anirazistan has drawn up without consideration for the indigenous population. I would also point out that certain unsavory elements, such as Aniraz’s knee, have often made incursions into Abezistani territory to terrorize the native population and then return to the safety of their borders.

If it gets any worse, I will have no choice but to appeal to the third-party intervention for a peaceful and just resolve to the issue. Forget Mom, I’m taking this to the UN.

Click THIS LINK to read a really amazing and powerful piece of writing that a sister (not me, Thank God!) posted on the Muslim Writers Society. You must go. Sensei sez so.

***

Mortally Wound Yourself in a Musical Way –or- Killing me softly, with pineapple.

I didn’t know if I should bother telling people about this, because it may make me seem stupider than I actually am, but then I remembered, it’s impossible to make me seem any more foolish. Have I not already punctured my head on a tree-branch, jumped down the stairs and broken my ankle, burned my knuckles in a fist-fight with the oven and torn my thumb open on the dryer? Yes, I have. (surf the archives, I don’t have permalinks)

Well, lemme just say that I shouldn’t dance, especially while drinking pineapple juice. It’s a bad idea. See, last night Aniraz decided that we had never tried to dance, specifically:



The Robot

The Hustle

The Funky Chicken

The Macarena

So we tried. It wasn’t pretty. We almost killed ourselves laughing at each other’s horrid lack of physical coordination, and it was during one of these laughing and dancing fits that I took a swig of pineapple juice. A big one. You know what happens when you’re trying to laugh and swallow at the same time? You reach critical mass or explosion point or cold fusion or nuclear fission or something technical like that, and it’s a disaster. I was doing a good job of not spraying anyone with pineapple juice, and I was almost able to swallow when Aniraz goes, “Whoa, Pineapple Cannon!”

And that was when I died. I inhaled the entire mouthful of pineapple juice, not just a little, but all the way down into my lungs. Really man, I should’ve been drinking milk, it’s less acidic. It burned, my eyes were watering, my voice was strangulated and I was coughing and doing a good impersonation of a rat drowned in a pina colada. (alcohol free, of course.) Yeah, I died. And half an hour later I was still coughing up pineapple juice. The End.

It’s sad that after all that pineappley suffering, we still can’t dance:

The Robot

The Hustle

The Funky Chicken

The Macarena

We can, however, do:

The Gag

The Choke

The Cough

The Pineapple Cannon.

***********

I must take a moment here to give props were props are due. Since our recent adventures with the PTCL walas and our broken phone lines and the bribery and all that, we’ve discovered at least one nice man. PTCL-wala Irshad (unlike Sadaqat D. Loser) fixed our phone line the first day we reported it to him, and when, out of sincere gratitude, he was offered a cup of tea or something, he turned it down. He doesn’t take anything for doing his job. No money, no mithai, no tea. The End.

It’s always such a pleasant surprise to find honest people. May Allah bless him and keep him in an ever-increasing state of Iman. Ameen.

Ah Mondays. I mortally wounded myself, and I would take a picture except then the picture never looks as painful or life-threatening as the situation really is. Hmmph. What now? I burned three of my knuckles simultaneously while baking cookies. Not at all exciting. Basically I punched the over rack while trying to slide in a tray of cookies. The oven rack started it. I was like Lissen here Mr. Oven, you will take these cookies and you will bake these cookies and if you burn these cookies like you burned my cookies last time, I will destroy you.

Then the oven snorted and made an unmentionable comment about my mother’s apron and I admit, I threw the first punch. Wham, right into the oven rack.

:::tsss::: (that’s the sound of my knuckles turning magenta)

The oven’s heat, I think it might be some sort of self-defense mechanism. But anyway. I think I’m having a hard time blogging because I’m really, really tired and it’s still 3 ½ hours till bedtime, traditionally observed at 2 am on weekdays and 3 am on weekends.

***

And yet, I return! It’s tomorrow now, (Tuesday) and I’m not at work…HAHA! Woke up this morning feeling substandard and I decided to stay home. I called and postponed the class that was scheduled for this morn and then I flopped myself down on the sofa for some sleep. I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to get up and do something useful.

One thing lead to another, and eventually up to me kneeling on the floor with a can of WD-40 and a screwdriver, taking my computer chair apart. (What can I say, I have a fever.) I was trying to adjust the height, but the chair was all dusty and rusty and needed greasing. I battled the chair for a while, thoroughly greased it (and myself) and was ready to put it back together, so I picked the chair up by the arms and tried to put the rod back into the base. But, since my fingers were already slick with WD-40, one of the arms slipped free, and the heavy chair swung in my grip and crashed into my left knee, unidentified pokey-thing foremost. And then I died.

What a morning. Not only have I bruised and punctured my knee, I’ve also turned my cuticles and the tips of my nails black with lubricant that won’t wash off. And on top of that, the chair STILL isn’t tall enough. I should have gone to work. –sigh-

Sorry my blogging has been even more sporadic than usual. It’s monsoon season, and the phone line is cut and re-connected several times every hour. You never know when it’ll be back, and even when it is back, you never know whether it is good enough. Apparently the PTCL (Pakistan Tele-Communications Limited) people made a mistake and routed our phone line through Siberia, cuz every time we pick up the receiver it sounds like a snowstorm. Snowstorms are very inconducive to internet connectivity.

And now I’m just typing to bide time between the moments when I will sprint back to the phone and lift the receiver, trying to surprise it into producing a dial tone. Oh well. Now that I have my comments back I’ll re-ask the last poll question: What’s the weirdest place you ever prayed? –or- What was the weirdest experience you ever had while praying in a public place?

I haven’t been a bad blogistani, really I haven’t, it’s just that we haven’t had a working phone line for days. I dutifully typed it, I just couldn’t post it. Here it is.

Funny that He-Man should come up in the comments on my last post, because I actually saw an episode the other day and I almost died laughing. Lemme just say it was more impressive when I was a child.

Sensei Presents: Mortally wound yourself while attempting two complex tasks, such as walking and talking, at the same time.

Remember kids, don’t try this at home.

In this instance, park your car under a shady tree on a hot day and step out. Upon exiting, discover that a man is asking you whether or not you want your car washed. Politely say no thank you and close the car door. Start walking (here’s where it gets complicated) away from the car, and turn your head to tell the insistent man that you really don’t want your car washed. (filth is a deterrent to finicky thieves) By turning your head, you have taken your eyes off of the space in front of you, which actually contains a stout and very pokey tree branch. So bang the side of your turned head on the tree branch and hear a loud –gong- noise go off inside of the rapidly deflating ball that was once your skull.

You know, when you’re a kid, you get all excited at the prospect of hitting your head on something and actually drawing blood, just like on TV or in every Desi film. It’s especially easy to draw blood from a head wound in Desi films, the heroine trips and falls and hits her head on the dirt and the director yells ‘CUT!’ and they break out the gauze and the ketchup. As a kid, every time I hit my head (which was often, which explains a lot) after I got over the initial shock, I always had to check if it was bleeding. To find out that the pain I had inflicted on myself wasn’t bloody-wound-worthy was a big disappointment, all that pain and nothing to show for it. A head-wound was a battle scar, a badge of honor, something to take to show and tell and gross your classmates out with the next day. But Alas, (Alhamdulillah!) I never got one as a kid.

I spent lunch that day with one hand working my lunch and the other rubbing my head. Aniraz kept asking, what, it hurts that much? What’s wrong with you?

I dunno, I answered, it just feels like I punctured my head. And I DID, now when I’m a boring old adult with a black stain-resistant head scarf, NOW I get a bloody head wound and I don’t even KNOW about it till I get home. And now I have no one to show it to, except Aniraz, who thinks I’m a doofus for attacking a poor defenseless tree with my hard old head. (that tree had it coming I sez!) All that pain for nothing. Hmmph.

All the things I thought I wanted as a kid aren’t turning out the way I thought they would. I wanted a big scar, just like a pirate, and now I have one from having my appendix out and I can’t show that to anyone either. I wanted a parrot (I liked pirates, ok?) and when I finally got one a few years ago it was the most vile, malicious, hateful creature on God’s green earth that I ever had the displeasure of meeting. Officially she was named Sweetpea. Actually, she was called The Green Menace, Spit’n’Vinegar, Craven Raven, and She Who Bites The Hand Who Feeds Her. She was such an unholy terror that when she escaped her cage and flew the coop one day, we actually rejoiced.

Oh well. The kids at the school where I’m subbing had a class pet today. I say today because it is unlikely that they will have it tomorrow. Sitting prominently on the teacher’s desk, in a small water-bottle lined lovingly with pink tissue and pencil shavings lives Hanori (sp?) the class’s beloved…drum roll please…bottle fly. Get it? The bottle fly lives in a bottle. He. He. He.

In a tribute to the mental inadequacy of flies, Hanori the fly is trapped in an open bottle. He crawled in through the top and can’t seem to remember where the exit is. He spends his time walking around in circles and staring at me with the trillions of facets on his beady little eyes. His hobbies include climbing, licking the ground upon which he stands, and rubbing his hind legs together pensively.

Methinks that Hanori will not be with us for very long. Class pets live short, harried lives as it is, but I think this one may die sooner rather than later. Especially since his diet consists solely of pencil shavings.

Sensei dizzily presents: How to Mortally Wound Yourself While Doing Class Work.

or- Amnesia and You: Making the Dream Come True.

Proudly and smugly finish your class work exactly half an hour before you have to leave for class, and then try to print it out. Then realize that the printer isn’t hooked up. Crawl underneath of the filthy computer table in high-heels and nice, clean work-clothes, and fumble around with the wires blindly. (Note: make sure that your computer has faulty wiring somewhere, otherwise you won’t be able to get electrocuted) Get zapped with an invigorating surge of 220 volts, straighten up reflexively and crack your head on the top of the desk. Swoon. Collapse. Perish.

Wake up with a stylish purple bruise on your temple and try to remember what you’re doing under the computer desk with the dust bunnies and the filthy, snaky cables that go to computer accessories we don’t know how to use. Then discover that (in typical Lollywood fashion) you have AMNESIA!!!!

(cue melodramatic theme music, quickly wrap white gauze around head and stain with ketchup)

I’ve decided that since I have amnesia, I should forget everything, absolutely everything, especially those things that I don’t feel like….errr….can’t remember to do. Like work. What work? I teach?! Where am I? Are you my mommy?

I have also forgotten how to clean off the table and how to do laundry. Really. You never know how long it will take me to recuperate, so you can’t burden me with housecleaning or work right away. I have to build up to it slowly so that’s I’m not overwhelmed and I don’t have a nervous breakdown.

After an accident like this (plus a new identity) I could become a superhero. You know, all really great comic book characters were created though accidents of some sort. Spiderman got bit by a radioactive spider. The Joker fell into a vat of toxic goo, and a million other minor characters got zapped with electricity while handling chemicals of some sort. Me, I was surrounded by dust bunnies when I got zapped. I don’t know whether that makes me good or evil, or what kind of superpowers I have. Maybe I have the power to summon dust. My room is certainly dusty, and my entire computer room is covered in a not-so-fine powdering of terra infirma.

Hmmm.

Maybe I should try again. Maybe I should take a bar of kryptonite or plutonium or chocolate down into the computer’s wire jungle next time. I get zapped every time I stick my fingers in there. I might as well make the best of it and get some really great superpowers.

Yes, even aside from the ability to summon dust.