I’m not smart.

I’m not smart at all. A good friend puts it endearingly (or so I like to think) in 2 words “dumb dumb”. I can understand why. I do stupid or silly things all the time. So what’s the latest stupid/silly thing I just did? I clicked on my ex’s twitter and fb profile to see what’s up with his life. I find it so hard how a person can just walk out of your life. We have come full circle – from strangers to friends to lovers to strangers. Isn’t that weird? It’s as if all the time in between didn’t happen, as if we didn’t for a short period of time share a history. And, now we are back to square one. Are you stronger/better because of the experience? Or perhaps, wrecked/destroyed by the experience? Who knows?

8 ways you know your friendship is real

Tags

Friendship

When I’m stuck for writing, making lists is one way out. So today’s list is on friendship! Why friendship? Because I’m currently arguing with a friend about his taste in clothes#.

You know that your friend is real because

1. when you call at 4am, your friend picks up

2. your friend isn’t afraid to call you out on your bullshit

3. when you are really crying and falling to pieces, you call your friend and he/she abandons everything to rush to your side

4. when you want to drunk text your ex, your friend confiscates your phone

5. your friend defends you in front of others when there is no benefit to them

6. your friend tells you when that shirt/dress/pants makes you look fugly

7. your friend willingly spends money to send you overseas texts

8. you just know it.

This list is by no means exhaustive. But, I’m stuck and I don’t know what to write. So this will do for this week.

#Disclaimer: I think everyone has taste in clothes. It’s just whether it’s good taste or bad taste.

Writing

Tags

writing

It’s really hard. I thought it would be easy to write a post regularly on a blog. It looks like I have underestimated the amount of time and effort needed. Before I knew it, a month has passed by without me writing anything on this blog. From now on, I’m going to make a commitment to myself to write a post on this blog at least once a week.

A bottle of body lotion

Tags

advice, friends, Lotion

I was asking a friend for his opinion on the purchase of a bottle of body lotion. He gave some advice that I thought was applicable to life in general. So, here’s our conversation thread:

Me: Hmmmm. I like the texture of this body lotion and how my skin feels after using it, but I don’t like the smell. I don’t like the citrus scent. Should I still get it?

Friend: I’m sure there’s better stuff out there, more suited for you?

Me: This is the first one I found that I liked the texture and how my skin feels after using it. And this is like after a 5 year search.

Friend: Okay then, then get it.

Me: You are good at simplifying things.

Friend: You keep the regular things simple, you have space for more complex matters.

Me: How do you decide what’s regular and what’s complex?

Friend: Regular – things that won’t be life-changing in the long run. Complex – requires a lot of brain power because a lot are at stake.

Honey and Beloved

Tags

Names

Who comes up with these names? I wonder as I look at my new Revlon Just Bitten Kissable Balm Stain in Honey. It’s a really pretty shade and feels nice on my lips with a minty taste to it.

But, no, I didn’t type this to write a review on my new lip product from Revlon.

Honey. Crush. Darling. Cherish. Lovesick. Sweetheart. Smitten. Charm. Rendezevous. Romantic. Precious. Adore.

Names inspired by romance, or at least popular culture’s idea of romance. Apply this product on your lips and be someone’s precious, honey, darling, cherished one, object of adoration, etc. If only it was so simple in real life. But the names work. The product is more than just any simply makeup. It sells a fantasy – a fantasy of romance, a fantasy of being the beloved one. The products line the lips which the other will kiss. Now, why isn’t there a shade named beloved?

A compilation of quotes from The Blind Assassin

Tags

literature, quotes

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood is one of my favourite novels. I’m rereading it for the umpteenth time. This time I have decided to do something different and compile a list of the quotes that speak out to me.

• “But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.”
• “The word has gone forth. You can’t cancel half a line of it.”
• “Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning.”
• “She rests her forehead against her knees. After a minute she says, What am I going to do? After – when you’re not here any more?”
• “Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I’ve known has had a way of going missing. They skip town, or turn perfididious, or else they drop like fies, and then where are you?”
• “Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges, then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it’s noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.”
• “there’s often more in silences than in what is actually said”
• “Even if love was underneath it all, there was a great deal piled on top, and what would you find when you dug down? Not a simple gift, pure gold and shining; instead, something ancient and possibly baneful, like an iron charm rusting among old bones.”
• “What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very much.”
• “Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.”
• “Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself, through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and snuffles, romance only sighs.”
• “More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rick lack it, and if you eat it you die? … Nothing.”
• “Having experience both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.:
• “What is it about me? can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me?“
• “Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involve forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves.”
• “The lover is a demon-lover because he isn’t there.”
• “The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing sooner or later.”
• “What isn’t there has a presence, like the absence of light.”
• “You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labelled bones.”
• “It’s hope that spins these fantasies, it’s longing that raises these mirages – hope against hope, and longing in a vacuum.”
• “Should is a futile word. It’s about what didn’t happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.”
• “In the beginning was the word, we once believed. Did God know what a flimsy thing the word might be? How tenuous, how casually erased?”
• “How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next – if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions – you’d be doomed. You’d be as ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.”
• “The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
• “What is it that I’ll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn’t yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me.”

I’ll update this list as I proceed with my familiar journey.

“Make me a sandwich”

Tags

Jokes

4 words. Okay, I didn’t choose to write on this particular set of 4 words randomly. Let’s give it some context. This was lifted from a conversation with a good male friend at our faculty’s open house.

Friend: Make me a sandwich.

Me: I’m hungry and I didn’t even make myself a sandwich.

Friend: I make better sandwiches.

At that point in time, I could let it pass as a joke. But after thinking it through, it’s an old joke and it persists. It definitely has sexist connotations to it. So what’s so sexist about it? It implies that a woman’s rightful place is in the kitchen. With reference the context of my friend’s comment, it has the implication that he as a male can make better sandwiches, therefore, I as a female have failed if a male can do better than me in the kitchen.

I will admit that I cannot cook, and my friend can definitely cook better than me. In fact, he is not the only male that I know who can cook well. But, that is beside the point. So what’s the point? Please stop making sexist jokes as they perpetuate the perception that females’ identity should be conceptualised in relation to the kitchen.

Disclaimer: If you want to tell me that I can’t take a joke, I suggest you don’t bother. A joke is never just a joke. It draws on existing cultural norms for it to work. Jokes are one way of teaching others what is the norm, one way of making that lesson less forceful and more palatable, one way of drawing difference and commonality, and also one of the many ways to insult a person.

An open letter to the person who comes after me

Tags

friends, projects, strength, writing

I’m reading the post project report for a project I completed in March. It’s amazing how neutral, how neutered everything sounds. All the emotions, gunfire, crossfire, blood, injuries, etc were erased with those black inky words on white paper.

Those sleepless nights, numerous text messages, words that I can’t retract, bridges built, bridges burnt, documents edited, expectations met, disappointment, etc. How could a post event report fully capture the project as it was, like how it really was?

Even with me writing it out like that fails to capture the experience of it for me. In that way, everything that happened has been diluted to a palatable sample for the person who comes after me (if there will be such a person). Nobody will warn the person of the potential bloodshed, the emotional anguish and turmoil, the sleepless nights, the bridges burnt, the feeling of putting in your best and not being appreciated, of people raising your expectations and disappointing you, of how tiring it can get halfway through the journey. What the person will read is an extremely neutral post project report and perhaps, a few others will tell the person that it is a journey worth taking.

Yes, it is a journey worth taking because of what happens along the journey. But the journey is only worth it if you set off with the aim to learn, and not to simply react to the things that happen and give up and blame life. To the person who comes after me to take up the role of project director for this event, friends are your most important pillar of support. They will help you get through everything and anything you thought you could not survive.

And always remember this: you are a strong individual. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. You will definitely emerge from this experience a changed person. Only you can decide whether this change is for the better or not.

the first

Tags

first, musings, possibilities

I stare at this blank text box. The possibilities frighten me.

Nonetheless, I should start writing, or more accurately typing. There’s no pen and paper. This is a laptop. So typing or writing in digital ink my first post on wordpress.

First. The first is always given significance and importance. So, what should my first post be about?

There’s so many firsts in life – first child, first birthday, first friend, first love, first day of school, first day of the year, first kiss, first time having sex, first this and first that. The list is endless. Some firsts have more importance than others, some are simply trival in the larger scheme of things. Honestly, how many firsts can one remember?

Not much, only the ones that one deems significant.

Well, this doesn’t seem much for a first post. But, it will do. I have to start somewhere, and this makes as good a starting point as any.