Saturday, October 29, 2005
cheese
vodka sounds like high heels on a stone floor. it's 8:14 pm on a saturday night and i sit here, in the after of straightfaced confessions and chocolate. sit here, with a night of finger clicking goodness to look forward to, words weaving sounds and shapes unfantastical.
i know i'm a prisoner of this attraction. you're a fist stretched out in yawns of oblivion, you're four fingers with short nails, that have a way of looking old and sightless under a particular orange streetlamp. everyone's faces looked different today, cracked into smiles, into upturned wonder and apprehension and,
a town a slims-trail away, those were what he delivered the last time i remember, times different much much.
wunnerful
Friday, October 28, 2005
When I was younger, I had a thin rectangular book of blue, green and yellow. Tall thin letters, tracing out maps, important and self-contained. Paris, or London, or another place that my parents travelled to before I was thought of.
this in
post secret is almost an exact replica.
And i've been living from one weekend to the next. Sometimes while walking to class, climbing one stair after another in small heels and old jeans, it's strange thinking of how I pulled the off switch on a friendship so fast.
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/matchbox-twenty/90664.html
Sunday, October 23, 2005
another
The night of the dead batteries.
Of the shopping near places almost familiar, ripe with scents of forgotten-almost-dreamt-up long agos.
Haven't taken a really long walk in the longest time. My skin seems like chartered territory. I censor my own dreams. What about someone's imprints on your braincells?
There's something very 80s about
'when you walk into the room
you pull me close and we start to move
and we're spinning with the stars above...'
They weren't ashamed of being mushy in the 80s. Frizzybig hair and frilly swishing skirts, spinning round and round. Loose jerseys and tight jeans. They had frames and they liked it. We'll somehow always revere the decade we were kids in.
smht laughed across a longdistance phone call and told me he told me so. Sometimes i surprise myself by liking the byrds version of mr tambourine man. Right now, i want to be walking down that one particular stretch of shops, close to the church, leading to finger chowk. k will remember.
'you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts
What's so amazing about really deep thoughts?'
'It doesn't remind me' seems like the quintessential 2000s song. I like being in dreams. But nonamefaces have been a regular feature lately in mine. Casino Queen. Queen of Hollywood. I don't like the title queen, it sounds cold.
I now know what DOTA means. Do you?
Monday, October 17, 2005
no alarms and no surprises
Someone is yelling
naaras next door. But why would they yell
naaras in lahore? must be the tv, must be.
i slice lemons and miss inappropriate people. it must be an art and a science and a superhumanness to cook and serve food when you can't have any yourself. s and i awkwardly shift from one foot to the other. i love subway for being open, but it feels like sin in the afternoon.
the still-persistat
naaras mingle with a cricket game outside and startled, i must go out and investigate. cricket. it's been so long.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
i love sharpened pencils but i sleep through earthquakes.
shift in and out of focus, i hadn't taken a picture in days.
shiny shoes don't belong in corners. they belong on feet tipping sidewalks bathed in lime and orange.
and i can now color segment in euclidean distances but can't seem to wrap my head around it in photoshop. i need some clay tonight, fingers buzzing for outofworld activity. notes on birthday cards in senior year read like yearbook messages. the word 'last' will be ruthlessly worn out this (shortshort) year.
you, who i gave my hemingway to, i wish i'd asked for it back.
the strangest thing that i've opened rozas with is probably a polo, split into half and handed out across cars in rushingracing to iftari trips. karachi and tracing circles again and again. ever gone back to a much walked-over place at 6 in the morning? stubs of late nights, trashcans smittered with crunched paper bags, abandoned and spent.
songs of last summer, and alison krauss can only ever remind me of addy, slow clunky music, plucking its way through defence market and cars filled with ketchup and roll smells. (kabab roll must also be a karachi word, can't remember hearing it here much). i wanted to write about the glinty eyes, the non-permanent-marker scribbles that s made on my arms, two eyes that looked egyptian and clear.
on every street almost almost dies out and revives in dusty streets, polished shoes, and the word inevitability.
"there's gotta be a record of you someplace...
you gotta be on somebody's books"
"somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete"
you of the glinty eyes, i didn't want to miss this place when i leave.
Monday, October 03, 2005
head over
Wondering why there're tons of songs called Head Over Heels.
My favourites this one.
Head Over Heels
-The Go-Gos
Been running so long
I've nearly lost all track of time
In every direction
I couldn't see the warning signs
I must be losin' it
'Cause my mind plays tricks on me
It looked so easy
But you know looks sometimes deceive
Been running so fast
Right from the starting line
No more connections
I don't need any more advice
One hand's just reaching out
And one's just hangin' on
It seems my weaknesses
Just keep going strong
Chorus:
Head over heels
Where should I go
Can't stop myself
Outta control
Head over heels
No time to think
Looks like
The whole world's out of sync
Been running so hard
When what I need is to unwind
The voice of reason
Is one I left so far behind
I've waited so long
So long to play this part
And just remembered
That I'd forgotten about my heart
Chorusx3
Always thought that "head over heels" was "get over here..."
this is a close second.never heard these.
Saturday, October 01, 2005
october
s draws and redraws circles in operating systems class, and i realise that he's playing that game. Eyes closed, draw a circle. If your circles are perfect, it means something.
"He sort of went to karachi and never came back..." doesn't seem unnatural at all.
Deep golden burnt crisp yellow. Bushes like troll children. Suddenly a silent rocking boat in a sea of giggles-hysterical. A triangular patch of sun slid back and forth in sync with the motion of the train. Man melts into yellow, burnt crisp foreground.
We took pictures of clothes stealthily in a maria b changing room, and revelled in tossing into shape plans on the fly. Something triggered off You're So Vain while waiting in a shiftingslow line at Totayle. The last days of summer, a city your own, and a gas station, the tyres mumbled in the sheer abandon of the day, the moment. But the jokes at the new shisha place did make me realise that a was turning into someone I never knew. I wore the same shoes for five days straight, the shiny black sandals with the bright blue stone right in the middle of jangles, the ones that k let me have.
There's a sun around the bend.
But at the moment it's pj on repeat, sleep-inducing, haze-filled midmorning classes with predicates and much danger. Blinking through an avenue. They glide across podiums, jabbing greenboards with chalky fingers. Caught up in science, eyes glimmer, brimful with talk of pipelines and von neuman machines. There's almostalways a we in the pdc, lunch is till three, and we serenade half-filled sleepy parking lots in flourescent lights.
I count all the songs filled with sun that I can think of on the last day of summer, summer's almost gone, it's the month with the birthdays, and the new symmetric age.
"I found myself outside one of my mandatory courses one day, it was an exam..and I just couldn't get myself to go in. I never did, left the place, never completed that degree." a story someone once told me, explaining regret.
jam LUMS
The jam, rec room, friday night.
I basically ripped off f's concept for this pic...actually, I'd just seen f's picture of a model's feet curled around a stool in perfect pants and perfect shoes. And at the jam, all I had eyes for was people's legs while they were performing. I can't remember what song these two were doing though.
guitars2
Probably the first face here. Forgot what this guy was called, f probably knows.
wood and wires
Improvised dj stand, two rec room tables stacked on top of each other, and wires winding wires everywhere.
black
..and shinythroughdullness yellow.
from behind the dj's table
Well, Ibaad's table anyway, even though he wasn't jiggling disks, but close enough.
blue and wires
wish this picture'd been less blurry :| Was again behind Ibaad, who was patiently standing by to let me take a picture, paused in the middle of fiddling around with wires and twirling knobs.
i'm not colin farrell
"The Art of the Novel - The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes"-spirituality
-homogenisation
-perpetual present
systemise being vs flesh and blood - going from one day to the other
*find identity in a paper cup
*to resonate with the masses, have to write their truths?*people participating in history
courage is nothing more than suspension of the imagination"Knowledge is the novel's only morality"
"single divine Truth decomposed into myraid relative truths parceled out by men"
"the world as ambiguity"
"Unity for mankind means: No escape for anyone anywhere." ->Knowing more and more about less and less
"They discover no new segment of existence"
"Now if the novel's raison d'etre is to keep 'the world of life' under a permanent light and to protect us from 'the forgetting of being'," <- situated knowledges history a continuation
"The novel's spirit is the spirit of continuity: each work is an answer to preceding ones, each work contains all the previous experiences of the novel. But the spirit of our time is firmly focused on a present that is so expansive and profuse that it shoves the past off our horizon and reduces time to the present moment only. Within this system the novel is no longer a work (a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future) but one current event among many, a gesture with no tomorrow" BT and gorpy might find these familiar. Random winter cleaning, notes taken on a reading in a class like no other, a teacher like no other, ever ever.
