I have been alone all these years with my irrational fears
And now before me I see
Someone with whom I agree
I found a brand new best friend
And it’s me!!
When the whole world goes blabladeedumdeebladeedum there’s always one person that you can always count on and that is you, you and you: YOURSELF.
Today Z and I spent hours doing nothing on the busiest road in Lahore, Shahrah-e-Quaid-e-Azam. Being girls, that can put us in serious social trouble. For both of us the day had a weird bumpy start and at the end of it we stood at Ferozesons seeing Self-help books: A thousand ways to be successful, A trillion ways to have your loved one, A gazillion ways to speak in public. What made us ‘kinda’ happy were the mute Buddha statues, paintings on ivory, second century armory and the art carved on wooden Mughal doors at the Lahore Museum and of course Pizza Hut. We had what we loved and cherished the moment of having it. There were no heavy words burped out by a constipated healer, because unless you really have the will to shrug off all the crap from your mind, you can never do so. It was both of us trying to make the both of us and our individual selves happy. And we did too.
The fact is that it is not a bad thing to be grumpy, slouchy , emo, moody until you’re not hurting anyone with it. It’s best to make yourself friends with people without depending on them. Depend on yourself for your crap, deal with yourself, indulge in activities you’re passionate about. Passions are necessary, even if they are fleeting ones. Don’t ever expect every single person around you to understand your passion. I work like a crazy bull as a freelancer and a home tutor. For what? Just to go to KFC, Pizza hut, Fri Chicks every month. My father thinks that it’s the most foolish thing a person can do, especially when they’re always short of money but when your heart wants it, you gotta do what you gotta do baby! Instead of wanting someone who’d pamper you, pamper yourself. Accept responsibilities which truly are R-E-S-P-O-N-S-I-B-I-L-I-T-I-E-S and not superfluous favors from you to people. No matter how much you avoid, you can never stop yourself from expecting a wee bit of something from the other person sooner or later, and in the current century we all know what that leads too. The time that you spend worrying about coming up to XYZ’s expectations should be spent on yourself. That is a form of self-obsession and it’s very likeable.
Moral: Learn a lesson from Dr. Doofenshmirtz i.e., find your new best friend and love him/her, and screw Dr. Phil aside for some time.
Dedicated to Zain at
Where there is blood there is life and where there is a woman there is love. No matter how much I deny the fact that science is my only love, and shall be till eternity, if Z were here today she’d jive seeing the woman in me that has now come out and for whom science is no more the only love, but a scientist has snatched the crown.
I had written my dissertation and had nothing else to do those days but to scrape up the ashes of it, finding my own mistakes, knowing them again, writing, cutting, re-writing. It had been my baby and was delivered while I endured all the conventionalities of childbirth from cramps to green puke, in every non-physical way possible. Mary was the first, but not by any means the last to experience the marvel often associated with her. We all dissertation-writers were.
I wrote my dissertation and plagiarized during the process to feed the fetus so it’ll come out perfect, referencing on the way to rectify my inevitable and innocuous sin. Frank et al., Radivojac et al., Xu et al., Xue et al., Ahmad et al., Matunis, Melchoir, Terrell, Voronoi, Gramatikoff, Shinbo, Schwartz, Kawashima and among them was Gewehr, J.E., Someone, M. and Someone-else, R., 2007. Bioweka – Extending the Framework of… and so on and so forth till we reach the page number of the publication which is not- though it was once- my concern anymore.
Problems are like viruses and the solutions that we put up for them are fairly similar to vaccines which may sometimes be nothing more than attenuated or tortured viruses themselves. An insignificant problem to solve a significant problem, I must say. Let’s just say that my dissertation was the whale, an extremely big problem which I solved by cooking up tiny problems of weather data for WEKA, reducing or increasing the number of instances I used in the data. Sometimes when the attenuated virus [which here is the protein/peptide data I was working with] wouldn’t do I simply killed it altogether. I forged data. It was surprising how the best accuracy was always achieved with forged data, over-estimation they call it for prediction models. My forgeries changed me to a pro at what I did. I knew Waikato Environment of Knowledge Analysis in and out. Atleast ‘in and out’ to a level that a below-average first-timer bioinformatician is supposed to know. The teeny counterfeits in data helped me know where the bigger problems in my project lay and on completion there was not a shred of fake or redundant data. Squeaky clean you can say.
There was a time when I wouldn’t sleep for many nights in a row, staying up working on something. It wasn't all when I had already spotted, caught, cut, grilled and eaten the big-fat-whale. Waikato Environment of Knowledge Analysis, or WEKA, was not my problem anymore, BIOWEKA was! Gewehr, J.E., with his supervisor Zimmer, R. Did I hate them? I did, till then I wasn’t sure of their sexes so I sometimes cursed them as men, sometimes as women. The link of BIOWEKA’s availability teased me with its name: sourceFORGE. The thing was out of my reach until finally I gave up the idea of it and completed by dissertation without any such thing. [To be continued..]
Dedicated to Madee http://madeehahassan.blogspot.com/
It had been 22 years of what D.H. Lawrence narrated in the ‘Rocking Horse Winner.’ I sometimes felt as if I had gained the third eye during that time. The exact words, movements, expressions, timings, moods, etc. of the members of the household were un-explainably predictable. Life was a consistent déjà vu.
When the weather is too calm, a bit too calm, you can hear its quietness maliciously gnawing and snaring at you. It tells you a storm is on its way. Relationships are quite the same. Too much constancy can lead to the arrival of eccentricities that all of us face regarding the beloved. After all, we know them too much. Pushing the truth away does not change anything. A bit of loathing in love does not harm it; it’s merely a fulfilling completion. Shreds of hatred lament the time when love would be gone altogether, and loneliness will bury its claws deep inside of you.
On a day like that, when things were unreasonably stagnant, I killed my mother.
There was nothing very special happening that day, just my father’s 60th birthday, my sister’s dinner with her colleagues and my exam preparation. Echoes crying for money reached my ears several times a minute. I didn’t care to see which of them came from the walls of the room and which from the flesh filling its corners. Somebody slid the cupboard. The television blared with the loudest sound possible, possibly a desperate attempt to tune out other sounds raging through the atmosphere. It was a war.
New clothes became the cause of dispute. My mother was bent on delaying sewing clothes for my sister. She needed some rest and said she’ll do them later. That pissed K off. K was the feeding hand of the family. Nobody held her off like that. A few minutes earlier she had added to my information that I had done a very mean piece in telling mother that the dinner had been delayed, which I had done most innocently, otherwise her clothes would have been sewn by then.
My mother walked around the house. Deaf. She was immune to the angry grumbling; opening, closing, smashing of the fridge; banging doors; tsk tsk-ing at the walls, doing nothing, something, everything, things. She did ‘doing’ until her veins gave way and sweat dripped off of her forehead. It was because of her children, us, and she lay down. It was time to knit another elegy in memory of the dead.
It was hard to study in those circumstances but I tuned out the quietness. It could tear me up otherwise. I safely collected all of it within me, had been doing that for years. “I need a glass of water.” There was a puff of smoke and stumbling smatters of ‘concentration.’ There are two people outside with you. Can I study in peace so I can bring sacks of green somethings for you as required?
“Water?”
I got up. It wasn’t abnormal. I had to. Religion implored me to do the same. I filled a glass of water from the tap and took it to the TV lounge where TV blared. K was lying on the sofa. Her eyes were not visible behind the sheen of her spectacles, but the lines on her forehead were obvious. Her mouth was tightly pursed, giving her ovoid face a funny look. She had the TV remote placed on her chin, other end of it resting on her chest. One leg sluggishly rested on the back of the sofa while the other was curled dreamily beneath a cushion. Y was enjoying social networking on the laptop.
“Did I have to come from the room, leave what I was doing, because you were busy doing what exactly?” None heard…Anger. Breathe, breathe, breathe. It’s a happy birthday; he’ll be home soon. Breathe.
I was her daughter. Not using the tongue was hard for me. “You could have told her to bring it. She’s not lazy when she needs clothes.”
The glass came flying towards me and landed near my feet. It shattered into a thousand pieces.
What was the matter if one of us used their tongue for a change? We could ask questions as well, say no, mock, moan. We had the brains to get mean too. She was a mother. We will be mothers someday. All of us are daughters, including her.
It was me who chose the largest shard of glass. A face came near. Panicked eyes screamed. Hands pushed me away as I stabbed her mouth, her teeth, and her tongue. I wanted her to bleed everything out, if there was anything left to say, once and for all. I wanted nothing to be left behind.
The world had gone quiet. Peacefully quiet. For the first time quietness didn’t plummet down into its own depths, it hung there, surrealistically serene and beautiful.
A moment had passed while I stood there with the glass in my hand. She took it herself.
It came out of nowhere, “You could have told her to bring it.” I stopped myself quickly and turned around to leave, as quickly as possible.
There was a loud crash. I turned around in a fierce attempt to retaliate only to find her staring at her feet. Expressionless. Shattered glass lay in my feet. Surprisingly a sigh of relief left my lips.
Predictability is good. Prescience can save life because accidents are first-time occurrences. Self-control comes from experience, whether in real or in intuition, it doesn’t matter.
