The New BFF

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 http://thememorystreet.blogspot.com/

In love with the Gun i.e., Gewehr.J.E. - PART ONE

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/

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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.