Friday, July 30, 2004
half a page of scribbled lines
For some reason, the lines seem to be smudged across the bottom half...like a border on a kameez - black, thorny vines curling their way across from one end to the other. Vines and ropes of roses.
Was never a nature person. Part of the landscape, what not.
Talking about sounds...forgot the radio.
Sparing a thought for the friend who said his music didn't comfort him anymore.
Mine neither.
But lately, everyone seems to be a bit of a liability. Feel like...disappearing into white sheets, into oblivion.
bits of insanity. taped together.
odd.
There's a difference between a blog and a diary, right? And, you want me to be coherent, right?
Ah, but I have no patience with the voices in my head tonight. Maybe another day?
Just finished reading White Oleander. (Tis also a michelle pffifer and renee zellwhatever movie). Quite amazing. Though, have to admit, I liked the way Fitch wrote more than the plot itself. Certain things stick in your head...
And certain people. (Some of whom I'll write about one day...)
So, someday huh?
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Lodhran pictures...
After the official DAMN you, you filthy questionnaire! ceremony...
...yeah, that's what they look like.
And that's what we look like.
4's a frequent number...
'love-shove is irritating' - sana.
Ashtray floors, dirty clothes and filthy jokes....
The sound of no hands clapping.
But can you see me scrambling to catch my thoughts
to hurriedly stuff them back in
(dirty starving chickens in a dirty rusted cage)
before they can rush out to speak to you?
Sounds...me and my deep connections to the telephone. Has somehow always figured a lot in the getting-to-know-you process. (For some reason, she keeps on using words like sharp clean tools this morning. And the dreaded smugness creeps in...)
Inertia creeps in...
lights that flash in the evening...
And she loves...
-people who mail back even if they have a long conversation with you on msn in the middle...
-...(actually, she made up a list just to say that)
(yo, harris :P :))
Somewhere down the line, this font got permanently linked with Dave. (He of his seemingly incurable depression. Only something in me understands?)
Everyone should try to listen to this song. (Finally saw the movie the other day...was the let down it was supposed to be...but man, this song rocks)
Can't Hardly Wait. (The Replacements)
I'll write you a letter tomorrow
Tonight I can't hold a pen
Someone's got a stamp that I can borrow
I promise not to blow the address again
Lights that flash in the evening,
Through a crack in the drapes
Jesus rides beside me
He never buys any smokes
Hurry up, hurry up,
ain't you had enough of this stuff
Ashtray floors, dirty clothes, and filthy jokes
See you're high and lonesome
Try and try and try
Lights that flash in the evening,
Through a hole in the drapes
I'll be home when I'm sleeping
I can't hardly wait
I can't wait.
Hardly wait.
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
knowin you better than you fake it...
From Apology - Mimi Khalvati
Humming your Nocturne on the Circle Line,
unlike the piano, running out of breath
I've been writing you out of my life
my loves (one out, one in).
I've pushed you out of the way to see
what the gaps in my life might look like,
how large they are,
how quickly I could write them in;
and not (at least till I've lost you both)
rewriting you only means
that the spaces I'm not writing in are where I live.
...
Read this a long time ago...could never get the ..'what the gaps in my life might look like...how quickly I could write them in' part out of my head...
Am living in spaces right now. Sort of a passageway...just don't know where to...
would say i'm lost but that indicates that i had a destination in mind in the first place...
shiny happy people
Always felt like I know extraordinary people living terribly ordinary lives.
Always thought that running away was the perfect cure to anything and everything.
(And do you always have somewhere to run away to?)
Sunday, July 25, 2004
life as a sitcom?
Me, I'm the leech. I'm the wallflower. I'm the bits of sand clinging to your clothes after a day out on the beach. Living off your life.
new random quote: Haven't you self-destructed yet?
So where's your handle? What're you all about? Where do I start pulling the thread that's gonna unravel you?
It's weird though. I've become quite self-conscious here. Too many people can read this. Somewhere alarm bells go off. My other diary, my universe tucked away from this life, was a haven. Strangers read about what I was thinking. So why is it so dangerous letting friends in?
home?
...
But all i can think of right now is...being back home. i was away for a week...interviewing strangers living on an alien planet...and now, being back in this house just reminds me of how far away home is. How i might never be home again.
Having moved about seven times in the past ten years has a way of making you adapt. To anything and everything. It has a way of making you associate home with cities - comforting, reassuring, unmoving land masses rather than houses that are fully capable of spitting you out as easily as they swallowed you.
It also has a way of making you leave bits of yourself behind everywhere. Somewhere in karachi, a six-year old is hiding underneath a pile of laundry, trying to muffle the sounds of her giggling. Somewhere, a seventeen year old is sitting on a cold, tiled floor at three in the morning, whispering secrets into a telephone. Somewhere, eight men are hard at work packing old dining chairs in a truck full of bits of my life.
Home, where my best friend's playing with her dogs on her front garden in the late afternoon sun. Where H, whom i haven't seen in two years is hanging out. Where the yellow-walled room in my house near the sea still remembers me as a boyband-obsessive, room-painting, trashy-novel-reading teenager.
But the city slumbers on, sleeping the sleep of one having long forgotten past lovers in new-found miseries. Unresponsive. And I'm sure quite, quite oblivious.
but it's good
that i'm not angry...
She surprises herself. She's turning out to be so many different people.
Wild and muted? Things that don't make sense have a home of their own in her life. But the pieces keep falling together into a picture not entirely unfamiliar. So whatever you do, don't presume to know me. You might be right.
angry
For some reason, I always thought that anger was endearing in a screwed up kind of way. Sort of showed that you mattered.
Comes down to the same old..being indispensible to something or someone....crap.
Realised what this line meant today...
"She thinks happiness is a mat that sits on her doorway..."
(ps - matchbox twenty are brilliant...)
Saturday, July 24, 2004
Entering a universe
Getting to know you.
Abstraction suits her well. But is everyone's story the same?
Tell me when I'm close to falling, for I'm turned away from the edge.
Life's jerked back to normal. To waking up to the sound of my mother shouting out the time of day and proclaiming how ridiculous it is to wake up after the day has died a quiet death. To watching mindless TV, stuffing catty chins in my mouth and taking swigs of cold, cold tang. To coming online, and bugging sana to speak to me.
To wondering about anything and everything and nothing at all.
The odd phone call. The hellos exchanged half-way across the world. Pretending all the miles between us can disappear at the drop of a vowel. Talking about the day, the hour, the minute.
And nothingness sets in.
far away
was thinking of writing about all the people who're far away from me right now, who i miss talking to...but then...almost everyone i know is. :|
Just got back from Lodhran...had fun fun fun. Worked like hell though...about eight hours of work in the field followed by another two hours at the resthouse coding out questionnaires, finalising them for checking so that we could be scolded for our mistakes the next morning on the way to the commute...What made it all fun was the people. I've never seen a bunch of more over-efficient people in my life. We surpassed the targeted number of surveys EACH day...And don't even know if it was because of dedication or just the fact that we were all on a roll...high on the lassis and the countless pepsis and late nights...
Met some ...interesting people. Got to know a few acquaintances better. Though I do sound smug like hell sitting here saying that. Contact with people whom I've lived with for the past seven days will inevitably eventually dwindle down to the occasional 'hi' muttered while passing each other in the halls...
I hate acquaintanceships.
And another block of memories slowly concretises...sets in...becomes more and more removed from reality each time it's accessed...
And Lahore is now home. Boring and uneventful.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
name - goo goo dolls...
And even though the moment passed me by
I still can't turn away
'Cause all the dreams you never thought you'd lose
Got tossed along the way
And letters that you never meant to send
Get lost or thrown away
And now we're grown up orphans
That never knew their names
We don't belong to no one
That's a shame
But if you could hide beside me
Maybe for a while
And I won't tell no one your name
And I won't tell 'em your name
Scars are souvenirs you never lose
The past is never far
Did you lose yourself somewhere out there
Did you get to be a star
And don't it make you sad to know that life
Is more than who we are
You grew up way too fast
And now there's nothing to believe
And reruns all become our history
A tired song keeps playing on a tired radio
And I won't tell no one your name
And I won't tell 'em your name
I won't tell 'em your name
Mmm, mmm, mmm
I won't tell 'em your name... Ow!
I think about you all the time
But I don't need the same
It's lonely where you are come back down
And I won't tell 'em your name
very touched.
Signing into od (my other diary - the community i've been part of for more than three years...), and reading the notes that people've left. Notes that
aren't condescending, or shallow, or there for the sake of being there. Nothing quite like it.
But this is ridiculous. It's a commentary on a commentary. Thrice removed from reality? Wasn't supposed to be this way. Why remove yourself from reality? Make your own! DIY!
Another day.
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
if it works, it ain't broken?
or something very profound.
keep wondering about why i linked this thing to orkut. sorta like spreading yourself too thin. though orkut did a pretty good job of doing that in the first place. knife scraping bread, leaving crumbs all over...
yeah, soapbox, audience, ...the works. step in, make your presence heard, felt, read, or otherwise painstakingly explicit.
don't falter, for we will not catch you. we're standing at the brink, waving towels and white flags. anxiously. do float to the surface sometime soon.
Jumping on the bandwagon? nahhhhh
hm. somewhat different from od. have decided to name it future recipient of glory and honour.
watch this space and other stories.
owning web space is the highest form of indulging in vanity.
don't read me, let me read YOU.
