Author: Abez

Back from running amok in married-land. Will update soon, going out for dinner now. 🙂

Peace & Biryani Grease!
-Mrs. Abez

For a while we lived with people,
but we saw no sign in them of the faithfullness we wanted.
It’s better to hide completely within
as water hides in metal, as fire hides in a rock.

-Rumi

Here we are, coming to you live from yet another net cafe in Sharjah where I am surrounded by people speaking the national language, this according to Knicq bhai, being not Arabic, but Malayalam. hehe

I don’t know where to start. There are zillions of things to blog about, but I don’t know how to say them. Take, for example, the time I was sitting in the lobby of our hotel when the hotel manager, an Arab man in a white thobe and white head-thingy (amama?) came with an incense burner of Oud. I don’t know what Oud is, I only know that it is a fragrant wood that smells nice when smouldered in a funny little dish on the coffee table. Yesterday, the manager very happily brought this smoking, fragrant incense burner to us in his hands and said,

“Do you know this?”

“Yes,” I said, “It’s Oud, and it smells lovely.”

“Wait one moment,” he said, kneeling at my feet. (Abez sez: wha…?)

He then set the Oud on the floor and lifted the hem of his thobe so that the smoke wafted up into his clothes.

“See?” he said happily as his dress filled with smoke, “It makes your clothes smell nice!”

“Ok,” I nodded politely.

Then he grabbed the hem of my jilb (shock!) and held it above the incense burner and suddenly my dress was filling with smoke.

“Two weeks!” he said enthusiastically, “It will smell good for two weeks!” He then stood up and took his incense and went away, presumably to good-naturedly infringe upon the airspace of other hotel guests.

There were several thoughts that pushed into my mind just then. The first was: did he just grab my clothes? The second was, Thank God I’m wearing pants and the third was, should I tell him I wash my clothes more often than every two weeks? hehe.

For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devil’s tunes
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.

— Ernest Hemingway

There’s a difference between critical self analysis and analytical ego-stroking. I’ve noticed that most online quizzes only fit into the latter category. All results are good. You are awesome. You are a leader or a protector or a bright sparkly light in the human cosmos. Post these results on your homepage.

Are there any online quizzes that tell you that you are not awesome? That you maybe even suck? That you’re a lazy, self-satisfied machine who lives their life with blinders on?

There’s a difference between critical self-analysis and just criticism though. There should be a quiz that tells you what your failings are, gently, and then advises you on how to correct them. Basically, the quiz should say, you’re a good person in spite of letting your personality and your spirituality slip. You need to stop thinking that you are where it’s at and you’ve reached the zenith of personal development. Life is a journey, personality is a matter of evolution, and any time you’ve stopped going forward is a time when you’re making no progress. Any time that you’re not making progress is a time when you could be stagnating. Stagnating is one step away from going backwards.

I’ve missed Fajr three times this week. I was stagnating for a bit, and now I’m going backwards. I have so little Taqwa that I took the alarm clock this morning, turned it off and went to sleep with it in my hands. If I were, spiritually speaking, where I was just a few weeks ago, this wouldn’t have happened. And if, a few weeks ago, I had not stopped moving forward, I would not have been stagnating then so I could be regressing now- the regression being, not missing fajr, but missing Fajr and not feeling sorry. That’s the horrifying part. Everyone is a sinner, but to sin without regret… well… that’s a different matter altogether.

There has never been a single month in my life where I didn’t miss a Fajr, but to not feel the pangs of sincere regret in the morning is a definite backsliding. If I were to try and place my Fajr performance of now on a timeline of spiritual growth, I’d say I’ve gone back to being 19 again. At that age I was just struggling to pray five times a day, and I can remember making myself a chart that first month, just to see how many prayers I was actually missing. I remember that in the first month there were more than 20. They weren’t all Fajr. And I hadn’t felt sorry, only vaguely aware of them.

When I think of where I’ve been as compared to where I am now, it scares me. At my spiritual highest I look forward to praying. Where I am now, it has become something I have to get out of the way before I move on to other things, Astaghfirullah. This is the way complacency works. You stop. You rest. You lean back, and sometimes you sit down even though it had taken you months to get on your feet.

And yet, I can’t beat myself up too badly. Maybe this is because I’ve taken enough quizzes that tell me how awesome I am in spite of this. Or maybe it’s because I prefer to think solution-oriented thoughts. Yes, I am lame, spiritually substandard, lazy, and ought to be ashamed of my behavior. And yes, I will fix this. What’s my plan?

Step One: Rebuild Taqwa. With enough Taqwa you get up for prayer even if you’re dying, because you are sincerely genuinely aware of how great your debt of gratitude is. Your death is always on your mind, not because you’re depressive or fatalistic, but because you know that death is the end of your opportunity to prove yourself worthy of God’s Mercy, and so you hurry up and work faster.

Step Two: Get to bed earlier. Until I have enough Taqwa to pop out of bed like bread from an overly-enthusiastic toaster, being tired only makes things more difficult. So I am making a new rule for myself. If I’m not in bed by 2 am, then I am officially an idiot. Well, moreso than usual…

Step Three: Figure out what the heck is wrong with the alarm clock! The high-powered, air-raid siren alarm hasn’t been working for the last few days, and we’ve been using the namby-pamby portable travel alarm since then- the quiet, little one that I can turn off in my sleep and then cuddle up with like an ugly, rectangular teddy-bear.

There. That’s my plan. It’s 1:40 already so I need to get moving. Please remember me in your duas. I suck.

Can you find my donkey?
He’s wandered off, y’know.
I’ve never really met him
So I’m not sure where he’d go.
I don’t think that I’ve seen him
Or even know his name,
But despite this, he’s valuable
And needed all the same.
You’ve got a donkey, too
Whether you know it or not,
But he may not be four-legged,
He may be a lamp or pot.
Everyone’s got a donkey,
It’s something that they seek.
Not an object that they’ve lost
And will find again next week.
Your donkey is what drives you
In search of all your dreams.
It’s pursuit is what leads you
On a life of heady schemes.
Some donkeys are ambition,
And others- zest for life.
Either way your donkey can
Cause happiness or strife.
So can you find my donkey?
If you help me I’ll help you,
And together we will search
For my donkey and yours too,
Or for my donkey and your trophy,
Or my donkey and your soap,
For my donkey and your dreams
Or my donkey and your hope.

-Z H Khan
6-30-97
4 am

How much is your anonymity worth to you? Because anonymity is a double edged sword, the privacy you cherish is the same privacy that people can hide behind when they take jabs at you. And really, who wants to be sucker-punched by someone they don’t even know? It hurts anyway.

Everyone’s life has different facets and each facet has its own appropriate time, place, and circle of friends. My blog is a personal place for my friends. I don’t know if I want haters, and I don’t want traffic due to morbid curiosity either. That’s why, I think, I publish some things on other websites but not on my blog. You can’t please everyone all the time. At least let the grouchy people keep to the forums. :p

Does this not make any sense darlings? Heh. It does to me.

Nod and smile, smile and nod. 🙂

This is one of the more amusing pictures I brought back from the UAE. This dress, it called to me from a boutique window, it beckoned and said, “Take me to your leader!”

At which point I stopped in my tracks, shook my head uncertainly and asked the dress to repeat itself.

“Excuse me?” I said unsurely to the store window, “Did you just ask me something?”

The beads (all one million of them) shook malevolently and the bottom of the dress started turning funny colors (check the photo!). The dress thundered “FOOLISH HUMAN!” and I took off running before it could threaten to suck my brain out. This mannequin was actually an alien. How do I know? Because it was dressed like a belly dancer from space.

Thank you and goodnight.

hold yer horses here people, update coming soon to a theater near you. 😉

We’re off to the Rainbow Steak House for a partee shartee. Biryani is being served. If you know what I mean. wink wink.

Today is our third day in the UAE and to be honest, I’ve spent most of it sleeping. I just woke up from my second nap today (the first was an hour, this one was three) and I have to say, man, I needed that. As far as desert countries are concerned, this one is a bit cold right now, and after coming over on a cold Gulf Airways flight and then stepping into the cool weather, I’ve lost my voice and I’m developing a cough. 🙁 I’m also battling chronic sleep deprivation. I was up all night before we came, I slept three or four hours the first night, and three or four hours last night. I’ve been keeping up my will to vacation with frequent and powerful naps, without which, I found I kept mislocating the elevator. I would be standing in front of the elevator then everything would start spinning and the elevator would be listing steadily to the left. The fridge was eluding me too, veering off the right when I approached it. I need all my concentration in order to successfully use such badly behaved appliances, hence- the naps.

It’s 4:50 pm and I woke up about ten minutes ago. The view from outside of our window is of a nice market area with shops of rugs on floors with hookahs spread between the patrons, strange boutiques, and the occasional upscale perfume shop. (The sandal wood and itar and some lovely thing called ‘Oud’ had snuck out of the door to tease us before we even got to the shop.) Also, we found a Baskin Robbins. That was a good and lovely thing, especially since the guy working there spoke Urdu. In spite of living abroad, I’ve never actually traveled to a country where I couldn’t speak to the shopkeepers, and after trying out my broken, nay, positively defunct Arabic out on other people, I was ready to hug the nice Indian man with the ice-cream scoop when he said he spoke my language. Hallelujah. We ordered a triple sundae and three spoons.

We ate ice-cream until we found it difficult to walk back home. We spent 20 dirham. I don’t yet have an andaaza (a proper idea?) about what the value of a dirham is. I know it’s 16 rupees, but things are priced differently here. A small bottle of water was one dirham, and that’s cool, but the ice-cream sundae was 20 dirham, and that either means that water is very cheap or ice-cream is very expensive. I’m not sure yet.

In the boutiques we wandered through, the average price for a dress was about 600 dirham. Walking through Marina Mall, we saw a phone that was priced at 5000 dirham. I’m all confused about the money here. Like Pakistan, different denominations are not only different colors, but they’re different sizes, and a handful of change involves a red, blue, green, and purply bits of paper in all different sizes that make me think of playing Monopoly. With Bedouins.

The people walking the streets seem like a very wide mixture of humankind, there are of course, the Arab men in their gleaming white thobes (Thobe: the shirt that never ends!) and the Arab women in their gorgeous black abayahs and then there are Phillipinos who work in the shops, and they’re dressed like Americans. And the waitresses at the Steak House last night were in vests and short skirts, which was very weird initially. And the man who stamped our passports at customs was a deep and lovely black, and instead of the African accent I was expecting, his mouth issued forth rapid-fire Arabic. It was almost as weird as seeing that Chinese guy who sings ghazal in Urdu. Yes, he’s real. Does anyone else know who I’m talking about here?

Well, everyone else here is dead asleep, since naps seem to be catching, so I’m going to sneak over to the refrigerator and see if I can find the leftovers from dinner last night at the Rainbow Steakhouse. We’ll have some pictures soon, InshaAllah, right after I wake up and go take some, haha.

Peace & Shawarma Grease,
-Abez

UAE Vignettes:

This morning in the airport lounge, I went to do wudu for Fajr. As I walked into the bathroom and began my religious splishy-splash, I noticed a Pakistani woman come in behind me. She was dressed in a fancy green shalwar-qameez and she had a little girl, maybe one and a half years old, trailing behind her. I noticed, in the huge full-length, wall-long mirror, that instead of going to the bathroom, the woman began looking around the bathroom sneakily. You can always tell when someone’s trying to be sneaky. The effort it takes in trying to seem nonchalant is always a dead give away. She was definitely trying to be sneaky. First, she set her bag down on the counter, but when she turned and saw that she would be visible from the lounge when the bathroom door opened, she picked her bag up and carried it into the corner of the bathroom, directly behind me. She set her bag on the floor and began to rummage around in it with her back to me. Then she suddenly turned towards me with a cigarette dangling from her mouth. She lit it and sucked down on it like it was the very breath of life.

Walking down the aisle of the plane mid-flight, I heard a man’s cell-phone go off. He had no plans on answering it, apparently, so it rang a few times and attracted the attention of the petite stewardess walking in front of me with a pot of coffee. I swear, she went razor-back. If you have a dog, then you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, then a dog going razor-back is the snarling, teeth-baring, fur-standing-up precursor to attack. The stewardess, she went razor back, and reversed up the aisle to where the man was watching the phone ring. She said, ‘Excuse me sir, cell phone should be off.’ The man picked up his phone and, looking superciliously through the stewardess but not at her, dropped it into his pocket without turning it off. The stewardess repeated (as she bared her fangs) “Sir, your phone.” The man looked at her as if seeing her for the first time and took the phone out of his pocket. “My phone?” he asked innocently. She snatched it from his hand, turned it off, and gave it back. That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for the rest of us who can’t believe it when people refuse to turn their phones off and seem to harbor secret plans of wanting the plane’s equipment to go loopy and make us land nose-first in the ocean. Ha!

Afghanistan is wrinkly. Seen from above, it is a reasonable facsimile of chocolate frosting that’s recently been whipped. It has folds and crisp, sharp edges from where the beaters were taken out and left stiff ridges. It looks distinctly… tasty. Now you know why they’re fighting so hard for it. I’d battle for Chocolate Frosting Land too.

Abu Dhabi is a big golf course; a very green and lovely one with more palm trees on the sides of the roads alone than Pakistan has within its national borders. One of these days, I’m going to roll my sleeves up and try to climb one. When no one’s looking at me. As I scale greenery on the side of the road. (You! Stop looking!)

The Kitchen is its own country. The apartment of our lovely and amazing hosts has a kitchen that’s bigger than my bedroom. I’m not joking. It’s huge. I’ve never seen so much counter space and so many cabinets at one time! Living in Pakistan, where kitchens are the size of walk-in closets, my sense of kitchen space has been warped. Back home I’m used to being able to work the stove, the microwave, the blender, and the kitchen sink without moving from my central position.

At the Moment: It’s time for lunch, I heard the ding! of the microwave and I can smell parathas frying. Pity me for messing my stomach up the day before coming, my lunch will consist mainly of yogurt and fruit, but you know what, I put a serious dent in the fig population that used to inhabit the coffee table. Best. Figs. Ever. Excuse me, I think I may have missed a few.

Um, I haven’t had lunch yet and I still have clothes at the tailors. Two, they’re at two different tailors. Chai is on the way to wine and dine us at Chez Daddy. While out, I’ll harass my tailor. (Riaz Saab, barai mahrbani, is ki daman pay double siali marna, varna ajeeb lagay ga!) My tailor and I have an interesting relationship. I give him clothes, he does weird things with them. I take the clothes back to be fixed, and we have communication problems. In the end, after two or three return trips and confused bi-lingual exchanges about what’s wrong with the shirt, things are fixed, eventually, and we all live happily ever after. Sort of. Well, about 40% of what we give him lives quietly in the back of my closet and sees very little use (five inch cuffs, come on!) but still. He’s a willing a polite man. And he always does things in a rush for us, which may be part of the problem, but anyway. I have to get dressed and go eat tikkas. InshaAllah next time I blog will be from the Yoo-Ay-EEEEEEE!

*phew*

2 am and now I get to sit down. But only for a bit. I have to pack my shoes. Yes, I’m packing two days in advance. Yes, my shoes are in little plastic bags. Yes, I’m weird like that. But I’m really excited! Wheee!

The time is 4:42. It’s t-minus 78 minutes until guests arrive tonight, but we can’t be cooking or cleaning because someone (acutally, 12 someones) has rather unexpectedly showed up to view the house. They’re getting the tour upstairs while we, the scullions, hide downstairs with flour on our shirts, food waiting in the oven and visions of sugar in our tea. Owlie did try to throw some sugar into my tea just as we were running away (that would be just as the people were arriving) but most of it missed and landed on the counter. She squirted some milk in the direction of my teacup too, but that landed in a pile of grated carrots.

As bad as the tea is, I’m enjoying this little break. Parties are really the most fun for the guests, the hosts have to set up and clean up, both before and after. But that’s ok. I wouldn’t be minding it at all if we would just get back to setting up and cleaning! Everything is on hold because there are seven men in the living room negotiating details of the house sale. There were five women too, but I think they’ve gone back to the car (or cars?) to wait.

Well, the only consolation is that all my guests are friends, only a few are real adults, and none of them will mind if we put them to slave labor just to get the last minute preparations done. My mother, in fact, recommends that all the decorating for a party be left undone, so that the first guests to arrive have something to do while you’re still slaving away in the kitchen. I think I’m going to take a roll of crepe paper and some tape upstairs. Somewhere, we have tin-foil fish (Undersea Journalism Club Party: 2000) and possibly a few grass skirts. Voila! Instant fun!

Ok, it’s now 4:52 and they’re still here. Hmmph. Owlie gave up and went to take a shower. I’m going to pray Asr and go through my extensive and stylish wardrobe (oops, am I lying again?) to see what I haven’t worn to three other parties this year already and maybe, just maybe, I’ll iron it. Decisions, decisions. :p

So here’s my big Friday blog: we’re going to the UAE! Yay! My ‘rents are going to the UAE to check out property and new acquisitions and they’re taking us along! Shopping, baybee! I’m going to stuff myself on cream cheese and shawarma and stuff! Stuff! They didn’t want to take us, and I started having flashbacks of 1993 when my father and brother went for a three-day tour of Jordan and Petra (first class) without taking anyone else along. They came back with only stories of the amazing stone city they had seen, much to our chagrin. (my dad went to Petra and all I got was this lousy t-shirt?)

So yes, after much negotiation and daughterly whining (daddy, you never take us anywhere!) Owlie and I have our tickets booked along with our parents’ and we’re all excited. It’s nice that we get to look around the UAE before actually moving there too, because as much as I like surprises, I’d prefer that a permanent move to a new country have as few as possible. If it’s searingly hot, I want to know that before I bring my sweaters next time, and if they don’t really have belly-dancing scorpions, then I’m just going to have to take some from here. Be prepared! that’s the boy scout motto. I may never have been a boy scout, but I met a girl scout once, and she tasted like cookies. I digress.

As crazy as this sounds, this is my first real vacation, ever. Yes, I’ve been down on weekend trips to grandma’s house and summer trips to Pakistan and summer trips from Pakistan back to the US, and once I spent four days in Jackson Hole, but that was for a conference. I also got to spend a weekend in Alexandria (not Egypt, Virginia) but I have never been anywhere that wasn’t the US or Pakistan. Hey man, this time we’re even staying in a hotel and buying things like shiny hijab pins and halva and maybe even a sand dune. I like sand dunes, I’ll get one and my golden mole can live in it.

So yeah, I’m going to Dubai! I’m going to Dubai! Woohoo!

I’m not updating until Friday. Hold your breath until then. I am too.

Who was he that said

The immortal spirit is dead,

Or how dared he say

Hope’s sun hath passed away?

An enemy of the sun,

Standing his roof upon,

Bound up both his eyes

And cried: ‘Lo, the sun dies!’

–Rumi

Also folks, Hemmie is doing research for homework and needs you to answer some romantic questions. *wiggle eyebrows* See her survey here.

So today I had my first karate lesson. Hi-YA! In case you’re wondering, I never found a female martial arts instructor, but I do have the next best thing. Or at least a somewhat good thing. Ok, I have an instructor who makes fun of my coordination. He elbowed me in the head. I kicked him in the butt when he wasn’t looking. He delivered the lesson while halfway watching the Discovery Channel and halfway leaning on Owlie’s chair. He taught me the three basic blocks and then told me to practice and stop looking like such a girl. He made me do all of them ten times (my shoulders hurt) and I have another class the day after tomorrow. My little brother, the accidental teacher.

He’s not a trained instructor, but he’s the only instructor I have, and I happily submit to the good-natured abuse in exchange for martial arts training. *insert Bruce-Lee noise here* So maybe after a few lessons I’ll be a deadly weapon and I can break people over my knee without breaking a sweat. Or, at least be able to block them in three different ways…

So yeah, I’m sore, but I’m slightly more skilled. I get a day off from martial arts tomorrow, because I have to hop on the elliptical trainer and then lift weights. Am I boasting? A little, but I need something to show for this pain, and like the lizard who jumped from the high iroko tree, I will praise myself if no one else does. *flex* *yelp!*

Aaaaaaaaaaarrrgh… yeah, that’s it for my blog. I’m sore all over, and my little brother is a funny teacher. Yay!

In somewhat obscure and indirect reference to what I’m about to blog about, I’m going to type out a passage from Slaughterhouse-Five.

The Englishman got up in the stage, and he rapped on the arm of the throne with a swagger stick, called, “Lads, lads, lads- can I have your attention please?” And so on.

What the Englishman said about survival was this: “If you stop taking pride in your appearance, you will very soon die” He said that he had seen several men die in the following way: “They ceased to stand up straight, then ceased to wash or shave, then ceased to get out of bed, then ceased to talk, then died. There is this much to be said for it; it is evidently a very easy and painless way to go.” So it goes.

Although I’m not the most enthusiastic of fans for the book, this passage from Slaughterhouse-Five is one that stuck in my mind and hasn’t been dislodged since. I like to think that if I were a prisoner of war, like the protagonist Billy Pilgrim, I would be more like the English prisoners than the American ones. While the British prisoners sang manly songs, kept their prison camp clean and treated their imprisonment as a difficult but somewhat jolly camping trip, the American soldiers kicked over the latrine buckets, fought with each other, and made others as miserable as they were.

At this point you might wonder whether I have plans for being a POW. (prisoner of war) I’ll tell you a little secret- I’m already one. There are strict rules, my freedom is limited and death could approach me at any time.

True, my house is not patrolled by armed German soldiers, at least not most of the time, and the one dog here isn’t trained to hunt down and maul escapees, but sometimes, this place is full of unruly Americans, just like Billy Pilgrim’s camp. We fight and bicker, we mope and rage against the boundaries that hold us and the limitations imposed on our lives. We’re more like sulky, belligerent children than soldiers, if you ask me. We see our time here as a waste, an irritating, exasperating waste that makes us want to kick over the latrine buckets and punch the next non-com we see.

We waste a lot of our time and energy on being angry, and then we don’t have any left for the effort to live happily. We’re tired and bruised from fighting with each other and exhausted from the constant effort that constant rage requires. We can’t be happy because we’re just too busy being mad. And then we wonder whose fault it is. Stupid non-coms…

*sock!*

I’m not the only crazy one here, and whether or not you realize it, you’re a POW too. You’re trapped in this world, you’re limited by the circumstances around you and the only way out of this place is in a body bag. You can sulk around if you want to, you can complain about how you can’t do this and no one will let you do that. You can beat your head against the boundary walls until you’re bloody, but you know it’s not going to help. You could grow quietly miserable, you could waste your time languishing, staring out into space and pushing your food around your plate for no reason. You could grow tired and old and die long before your body does. Go on, resign yourself to misery. After all, you are in prison, even if it is the length and breadth of the entire earth, and you are stuck here, and no one will give you what you want. Go on, it’s not like you can do anything to make yourself happy. Oh no. Let us all lay down and die.

Or hey, here’s an idea- we could use the prison bunks for doing chin-ups. We could talk to the other inmates and get to know them. We could take life’s lemons (and barbwire, and latrine buckets) and turn them into lemon meringue pie and lemon pie squares and of course, lemonade. We can turn our limitations into challenges, turn our adversaries into worthy opponents instead, and look for ways around the brick walls instead of just banging our heads against them.

It’s true, no matter what you do you’ll still be a prisoner, and you’ll still be stuck here until Someone says otherwise, but you decide how to serve your time. That, Momma dearest, is why I am a happy camper. Now if you’ll excuse me, the other men are putting on Hamlet in the mess hall and I’m playing the lead.

*salute*

Went out for dinner with my momma and the giant little brother. My little brother stole a balloon for me. Granted, it had been floating on the restaurant ceiling for over an hour with no one to claim it, and the kid who let it go probably left a long while ago, but still. After all, my brother had gotten up to get the balloon when he saw a toddler reaching ineffectually for it. The kid was obviously about seven feet too short to get to the balloon. My little brother, being extremely NOT little, easily reached up and took the balloon by the string. Then he offered it to the kid, who gave him a look of shock and started walking away backwards. And that’s when I got the balloon instead.

I tried to think guilty thoughts about having the balloon when the kid wanted it, but the kid passed on it after all. Inside I was going, wheeee! I have a ballooooon, I have a balloooooon! But outside I wore a serious and hopefully dignified face as I walked out of the restaurant with the cheerful orange orb floating behind me.

(wheeee!)

I took it home and drew a happy face on it. Then I tied it to a dead 9-v battery and placed in center stage on the dining table. Sometime during the night the balloon lost its will to float. It was dozing peacefully on the table, and I hadn’t the heart to get rid of it, so it was moved to the buffet. Shortly after lunch the balloon made a come-back, and someone hit me in the nose with it. And then someone else squirted me with diet 7-up from an erupting bottle, but that’s a different story.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a balloon. I’ve recently purchased balloons, but I usually gave them to Owlie with breadsticks or cupcakes tied on the ends. No one ever got me a balloon, not beyond the high school years, and certainly no one tied anything edible to it, which, if you ask me, is a pretty brilliant idea. Why put corn dogs on sticks when you can tie them to balloons? I’d buy that for a dollar! A floating basket of fries? Amazing.

This random blog brought to you by the Kabul Restaurant; good food, surly service, free balloons.

You can’t make me! nya-nya-nya! hahaaaa!

I was going to write about our awesome Lahore trip, but instead I’m overwhelmed with other things. I feel confused, I feel elated. I feel tired, I can’t sleep. I want to lay down and wake up with perfect mental clarity. Crayon, Hemmie, Chai, remind me to explain later.

Dear Hemmie, Demi-Hemmie, Hemmie-Momma, and Z-Bhaya

Oh, and Blogistan too. Hello. I’m back. I’m paying the price for my lavish vacation and 1/4th of a cake (I’ll explain later) with a definitely inflamed stomach, and me with no zantac. Hmmm. I also fell asleep shortly after I got home this evening, so now I’m groggy. And my face is on sideways. Ask Crayon. She knows what I look like when I wake up. I fell asleep on Saniya’s living room floor with my toes in front of the heater, and when Crayon woke me up she had to laugh at me first. It’s the piggy-eyed, pale-faced sleepy look. And it’s very fashionable, I assure you.

I have to go to sleep now. Really. Props and Salaams to Hemmie & Co. for the lovely whirlwind vacation to Lahore. Props and love to Crayon for the drive. Love and regrets to Ushi & Co, we hadn’t the time to crash Ushiland. I’ll explain tomorrow. I need to lay down. And I need some Gaviscon.

Peace & Nihari Grease

-Abez

dear momma. and aniraz. and blogistan.

umm. im not abez. but i’ve always wanted to be. sort of. i mean. she plays some mean DDR. which is a waste of chocolate energy if you were to ask me. but then, not too many ppl ever ask me anythyng, and it’s sort of sad. if you know what i mean.

and i’ve never done thys before. it’s all her fault.

first, she’s made me kidnap her.

and now, she wants me to blog a post on her blog saying ive kidnapped her. except she’s the one with the napping kid. (that would be crayon’s narni). she’s strange like that. but i still love her.

additionally, i’d like to annouce ive decided kids dont get pinker than narni. unless you dress him in orange, and then he turns orange, but in any case, he has to be the most adorable kid in the world. and he has great potential. see we went out today, and he’s already had drop dead gorgeous women drooling over him (yeah, that’d be a few of them besides me and bez). i sense a potential don juan. which reminds me, eroll flynn was rather handsome, no? (although with all his looks, i have yet to sit through a single movie of his).

you know, i really have nothing intelligent to say. it’s that tym of day when i’ve consumed four year’s worth of chocolate, and i need to fall in my bed and die for a few hours. but she’s all bright and cheery (although im sure i was feeding the coke to narni… i dunno where bez’s getting her buzz from).

the point being, she needs to sleep. i mean i need to sleep. i mean someone better start making some sense soon, or imna wash thys city in blood. or coke. umm. coffee?

oh yeah. she ate all of 1/4th of a cake.

and i sat there staring at her in horror. 0_0

In yet another futile attempt to get diurnal, I went to bed at 11:30 this evening. Imagine my dismay when I began waking up around 2:30. I tried to fight it and pretend like I was happily sleeping, but it didn’t work. No matter how firmly I told myself that I was sleepy, I couldn’t make it. I never got to see the end of that dream with the piranha teeth. I was using them as a pair of scissors. This is not wholly outlandish. Natives along the Amazon River used the toothy-fish jaws as scissors for hundreds of years, and when foreign missionaries brought scissors, the locals appropriately called them ‘piranhas.’ National Geographic is responsible for that dream.

I also woke up with a serious peanut-butter jones. My brain cued the Pink Panther song and I snuck upstairs and made myself a sandwich, but I didn’t get a glass of milk because the fridge is broken. It won’t cool anymore, we might as well be keeping the mayonnaise in the cabinet. Our milk is super heat-treated and tetra-packed and processed in hundreds of ways to give it long life and funny taste, but to keep it from smelling mashqooq (suspicious), someone put it in the freezer. So I could have had a plate of milk, but not necessarily a glass of it to go with my dry and gluey sandwich. Now I need a shoehorn to pry my jaws apart.

(Tangent: once I bit a Wheetabix without milk. I almost died. Try it! It’s insane!)

It’s very tragic, really, not having refrigeration. It’s such a blessing, Alhamdulillah, to be able to store foods that would otherwise go bad almost immediately. We have an unopened liter of milk, but if I took the top off now I’d have to drink the whole thing (or die trying) so that it didn’t spoil. Same with eggs. They would have to be cooked and eaten within a day or two, or only bought one at a time. Not convenient.

Hopefully, Insha’Allah, the repair guy will be available even though tomorrow is Friday. If not, I’m thinking of putting everything that hasn’t spoiled (yet) into a laundry basket and setting it on the back porch. It might freeze there, but at least it won’t get smelly. And we can defrost it later if the dog hasn’t tipped it over and eaten everything. Never mind the laundry basket, maybe I should find a safe.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Possibly try again tomorrow. I tried to get on schedule yesterday, but it didn’t work. Tonight I made the resolution to get to bed before midnight, but when I realized I was still awake at 2:30, I gave up the charade and went to work on uploading Vora’s layout. I had to break it first though, because I tend to make at least one huge mistake per layout that doesn’t show until I’ve uploaded and published the page on blogger, a time when I then realize that I misaligned one of the columns and the shoutbox is resting somewhere south of the equator when it should be at the North Pole. Yes, those are technical terms. Yes, I eventually fixed the problem.

So it’s 5:33 am and I have no new mail and no one on my buddy list. The dog was awake until about half an hour ago. I know this because she had stuck her face in the basement window from the outside and whined at me. I let her out for a run around the lawn. As unconditional as a dog’s love it, the company isn’t very good though.

Hi Woofadar, isn’t the sky beautiful tonight?

*drools*

That ring around the moon is called a corona, and it has nothing to do with beer at all.

*snuffles floor*

Do you ever wonder about the sky, dog-face?

*stares blankly*

Good dog.

*wags tail*

Fajr begins in about half an hour, and once I’ve prayed I’ll be ready to sleep. I’ll only get about three hours worth though, because I’m supposed to accompany my Momma to a Scrabble/Tea/Shmooze luncheon that begins at 10:30. (Crayon, are you coming?) I’ll have to pretend to be both witty and awake, something I’ll should manage alright so long as the sleep deprivation doesn’t make me nauseous. I have another option though. I could choose not to go, which would make my Momma vanquish me when she got home, but I would still have to wake up. The real-estate agent who’s working on the deal for the house and Chez Daddy is coming over tomorrow at 1:30 or 2-ish, and it does have to be reasonably clean. Not perfectly, just reasonably. I could wake up closer to noon and still have the house looking cheerful, but then I’d miss out on the lavish lunch that this Scrabble group always does.

It’s 5:43 now. Yay! The first of the azhans has just been called! I love that about Pakistan, how you always know when it’s prayer time because when it is, the azhan is called. No consulting prayer charts, no wondering in Ramadan whether it’s really Maghrib yet. I love living in a Muslim country. But hey, even if you don’t, you can still hear the azhan with this cool program! Enjoy!



www.islamicfinder.org

Look Ma, I’m awake!

Those of you who are familiar with my schedule (the best blogs are posted at 3 am) will share my mother’s amazement when she reads my update later. It’s 8:12 am and I am vertical; as in upright. AKA, not in bed. I have to say, it’s rather cold out of Bed, and I am accustomed to laying toastily inside it from after Fajr until a bit before lunch.

So yeah, the house is cold and quiet and the car is dead. Since Daddy Dearest is unable to fix it from such and such a distance it will remain cold and dead unless some miraculous event enables me to locate and properly use jumper cables, a feat that would possibly require changing my gender first. I don’t know what’s with females and cars. I think because we’re told that cars are a ‘guy thing,’ we let them take care of things. This saves your cuticles from motor-oil stains (mine prefer ink instead) but on the downside, it means that you’re helpless to start your own car if no one else will help you.

I know that people with disagree, saying they know how to change tires and put oil and wiper fluid in the car and water in the little hole where the water goes, and actually I do too, but I have all the confidence and expertise of a nervously trained monkey. Come on, when’s the last time you saw a monkey changing a tire, eh? Did they look like they knew what they were doing?

I’m not all girly. I have a manly scar on my hand from putting oil in my car. I rather ingeniously managed to cut myself and get motor oil inside, so I have a half-inch scar running diagonally across one knuckle that has a gray line from where the oil was not cleaned. It’s like a tattoo of sorts, but less aesthetically pleasing.

Oh yes, and I assemble furniture. I love it. Beds, cabinets, tables, and once a fifteen-foot steel-framed trampoline. It’s good, clean fun, and since they started letting me use the power drill, things are a lot more exciting.

(zzzoooom? eeeeeek!)

This began four score and maybe less years ago when Big Bro was not present for the assembling of a cabinet my dad had just brought from K-mart. I was the next oldest child. I brought my father the screw drivers (flat and Phelps) and he let me beat at a few nails. A hobby was born.

My dream is to one day own a power sander. The first place I’ll use it will be my father’s scratchy and calloused feet.

(zzzoooom? eeeeek!)