Oh, my aching bones…the Ac air finally has my throat in a critical condition, and I’m coughing all day when I’m at home. The funny part is that the cough disappears when I’m in school or when I’m talking on the phone, but the worst part is that it gets worse when I try to sleep at night. So there I am, coughing like some frail old woman and feeling every bit like one, until even my muscles ache like crazy, and I can’t get any sleep! Hai….well, can’t do anything about it (although maybe if I stopped drinking Pepsi on the sly it would help)….and there’s a GREAT bit of news this week! Waj and I have finaly, finally, got around to actually talking to each other! Actually, if I were to begin from the beginning, I would say that my parents have at length seen that I am not an untrustworthy kid anymore and have bought me the best li’l cell phone in the world! But more about that later….God, I was just SO happy to talk to Waj! It seemed so weird at first; she talks just like she chats, but to actually hear her voice was awesome! You just ask her, I was not fully prepared for her call, even tho she’d miss-called several times, and I was sooooo excited I lost my breath! Although Waj shud be grateful for that, because if I hadn’t, I would have shattered her cell and mine with my ultra-piercing screams (none of you know what that’s like, thank your stars). But today, my credit’s gone : (…. I’ll have to wait until the weekend to get a card, so that’s the end of messaging and calling for this week. Just you wait joy, I’ll get you too…no one’s gonna escape from me now that I’ve got what I’ve wanted for so long….muhahahahah….i’ve been simply crazy for the last few days. AUR….guess what armaan? I saw your pics at miss ayesha’s wedding today! Actually it was the mehndi pics, and a classmate of mine had them. She was just taking them back to miss ayesha when I threw myself on my knees (no, really!) and begged her to give them to me! The prospect of seeing not only you in a lehnga but also seeing a teacher (who has always been a tomboy since I saw her 6 years ago) being an actual bride was just too much! But everyone of you cousins looked the same, so there was nothing to do but go trembling to miss ayesha and ask her to point you out to me….allah ne meherbaani ki….she took pity on me in my predicament and pointed you and hiba out….u looked great in that colour yaar! And hiba was so cute, with every one of her teeth shining out…anyway, just wanted you to know that. Oh yeah, and miss ayesha looked really good, esp. in the photosession. And lastly, plz forgive me for this unfocused, confused post, I’m in the queerest mood today, and most probably will remain so as long as I continue to grow up, live through new experiences, and be faced with unwanted studying every night! And as my SAT 2 is looming ahead, things do not seem to be looking up for my mental condition. Tally-ho!

Hartaal over!!!!!!!!

Now that I’ve finally got a breathing space which means a weekend in A-2 without any tests or absolutely urgent assignments due Monday, I can finally sit down to write this blog update. And the first bit of news is …I’M BEING STRANGLED!!! No one ever told me the second and final year of a levels was going to be so tough!! But then, no one I ever heard of has the same combination of subjects I have either. Why does this happen to me? Why must I not only suffer, but not also have several fellow-sufferers with me, like everyone else does? There you are Niqabi, is that enuff whining for you? Actually, I kno it is gonna get much worse than the Business teacher giving us news of a test the first day of school and the Maths teacher getting more and more insane as the days go by, so I’m just counting my blessings right now….i’ve got a lot of gaps between lessons, I’ve got my own locker without anyone bothering me to share it…I can’t do this. I have to complain. I HATE THAT SCHOOL!!! You know what they just went and did? The second I got out of A-1, the second I was immersed in those pathetic studies, with only one year to go to get out of that hideous building….u kno what they HAD to, absolutely HAD to do???? They HAD to offer Psychology to those snotty bratty A-1s!!!!!! Didn’t they know I am simply crazy about psychology? That it’s my favourite subject after literature?????That I bug my cousin(who’s majoring in it) to tell me each and every disorder and mental disease that pervade mankind? Don’t they know I adore those psychology textbooks of hers? Don’t they know that the sort of psychology I love is not offered in the university I want to go to????????? What am I going to do? I just hope the A levels coordinator would let me sit in on some of the lessons, but I’m absolutely SURE they would schedule all of them to clash with my lessons. I’m just getting crazier and crazier thinking about it… Well, here’s this boring blog update, I’m sure everyone would have given up checking up on my blog, so maybe it’s safe to post this criminally typical post here…and criminal psychology is the coolest of all!

The beginning of the end...

Ahhh…so, the thirteenth and last first day in school was today-make any sense? Hope it does, can’t explain it rite now. So after two months of waking in the afternoon and sleeping in the wee hours of the morning, I had to get up today at 6:30 and get ready to go to school-ALONE. Not one of my relatives in Lahore have reached the end of their holidays yet *pout*. Anyway, today wasn’t so bad. It was just that now I have a business studies test on Thursday on everything we did last year, in addition to 5 questions, 3 case studies and 2 chapters to read by next week…why, WHY is our teacher a spiritual descendant of Hitler???????????!!!!!!!!!! Just thinking of it makes my head spin…. i don’t want to start studying so thoroughly right away, pleeeeaaassee have mercy!!! It’s only the beginning of the year, who cares if it’s the final year, we’re still rusty, for heaven’s sake! And the second and last class of the day was Literature and…the teacher didn’t show up *great, big, eyes-rolling sigh*….if it’s not one extreme it’s another! So I’m writing this just as I’ve come back, when all the frustrations of that BLASTED school are still seething inside me. All I did was talk and talk and talk, strangely, no one seemed like a stranger even after the whole summer holidays….on the contrary, they seemed to be even more close. I’m not talking about official friends, but those girls whom u just say hi in passing, make jokes with in class, and are just OK with in general. All right, before I forget….it’s just this silly theory about Dumbledore that someone made up after HP 6…do any of u remember when, halfway thru the book, Snape was heard refusing to do something that Dumbledore had asked him? I didn’t remember it until I heard that idea….cud it be that D was asking S to kill him? And at the end when he was pleading and saying ‘Please….Severus….please’, cud it be that he was asking him to kill him now?….i don’t kno why he wud do this, but I’m telling u, one of the reasons I threw that book down when it was finished was the way that ***** killed Dumbledore. He was supposed to be a great man, a wise person…A CHARACTER LIKE THAT DOES NOT DIE PLEADING, HE DIES FIGHTING, STANDING UPRIGHT, NOT LYING ON THE FLOOR AND ASKING HIS ENEMY TO SPARE HIM!!!!!!!! That woman seriously does not know how to kill off characters.

the inevitable 14th August post

So Independence Day rolls around again---strange, this is the only time I can remember when I wasn’t overly excited by it being 14th August. Why? Maybe it’s just the heat that’s making me sluggish, or the fact that I have become increasingly irritable over the years, or just that I am one of those ultra-cynical, disillusioned youngsters that are only happy when they can perceive the darkness and evil in something. I guess that would explain my watching the war scenes and murders in all those movies and drama series about the struggle for Pakistan; I just want something ghastly to ponder and cringe over. I remember the time when it was almost 23rd March, and there was this old black-and-white series on PTV called ‘Jinnah say Quaid-e-Azam’ shown late at night, about 2 or 3 a.m. it also happened to be a time for school holidays and hence my insomnia bouts, so I stayed up several nights watching it all: the murder attempt on Jinnah, the trains filled with corpses, Jinnah and his daughter parting ways (I simply hated her for what she did), etc, etc. What I needed, and still need, is emotion, sometimes so powerful it can only be expressed by silence. Then I sat down (it was near 5 a.m, I write the time down before starting), then stood up again, and wrote eight pages in red ink, in the shape of a letter to Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, the fatigue, or just the tension, but it was the first time I ever really comprehended what had been sacrificed for my homeland…and that is what had made me cynical. The fact that our state now is almost stagnant, our hopes are more pretentious than real, people change the channel when the national anthem comes on, the little flags that decorate houses near 14th August are strewn on the roads the next day (I wonder where they go eventually…down the gutter?)…no matter how many one picks up there are always more that are desecrated. It’s not like I’m utterly in despair; there are Pakistanis who are revered throughout the world and Inshallah there will be many more to come…it just seems like there’s a whole lot to do…there can be no rest, there can be no laziness, no indifference, no indolence…it’s going to take some time before action finally wakes up...I just hope I can be one of those to do something about it.

Talking of books, is anyone here interested in Harry Potter? I know chij bachee is, dunno bout the rest….anyway, has anyone read the sixth one? I was a Potterhead a few years back, but then I guess I grew out of all that hype…I just read the books now, instead of raving over them and trying to write ‘Unfinished tales’ of Harry Potter in my spare time. But the sixth book was a bit of a disappointment. Sure, it was exciting to have it there in my hands, but I don’t think it was worth the wait. When I finished the fifth book, all I wanted was the sixth book-urgently. But there are a lot of boring and possibly sadistic ppl in the world, and apparently, Rowling’s one of them…she kept it so long I forgot how the darned story went! Anyway, it isn’t like the Half Blood prince is BAD, it’s just gotten a bit too monotonous. I think I can safely say that it is the worst in the series…it just leaves too, too much for the seventh book to reveal. Or maybe I juts didn’t find it that exciting because my darling, sneaky, idiot cousins told me who was the doomed major character fated to die in the book, and who the Half blood prince was. *sigh* why does this happen to me? Well, let me know who has read the book so I can tell u something, this theory that a friend cooked up about the end of the book…I can’t say it now in case someone hasn’t read it and will kill me for revealing anything.

it's raining!!!

It’s raining, it’s falling The old man is snoring He went to bed And he bumped his head And he didn’t get up till the morning Why do nursery rhymes always have to be so cruel? An old man bumps his head, which can be pretty dangerous, the baby cradle falls, everyone dies in ‘Ring a ring of roses’ (btw, did anyone know that was a song about smallpox?); even ‘Happy birthday’ is littered with references to the birthday person in a zoo. Ah…always wanted to get that out of my system…yeah, so it’s raining now, it’s not so much like an oven here, then. I simply love the rain, one thing I especially like is the way everything becomes so much brighter and cleaner (except the roads). All the good things in life feel even better in the rain; the feeling you get after taking a good long shower, drinking a mango milkshake, writing, finishing, and editing poems, or just snuggling down with a good book. When u look out of the car window in the rain, the world is all blurred, but it suddenly seems a better place than the real world…I don’t know how to explain it…but it doesn’t look real. Then you get confused; are the bright tress and grass outside real, or the window you’re looking out of? By the way, has anyone read a really good book lately? I can’t find any more of the books on the book list the lit teacher gave us, and I’ve finished the ones I bought. (Warning: please dun read Madame Bovary, it’s just too boring compared with ‘One hundred years of solitude’)…so anyway, please gimme a good suggestion quickly; I’ve had to revert to my li’l sis’s Malory Towers books! (They’re lovely, but I just feel to childish reading Enid Blyton now)

back back back

Seems like a whole other life back here…yeah, I’m back from Karachi, been here since the third actually, but the oppressing heat was just too much for me. Plus, I rarely even had time to see a computer over there; my loving cousins had, as usual, planned every minute of the day right don to the last second: the beach, boating, shopping, staying up late, and what not. The only thing I didn’t do was go online…seems a bit strange now. Anyways, those of u who were in Lahore at this time HOW DID YOU SURVIVE???!!! I mean, it’s like an oven in here. When I was about to come out of the air-conditioned airport in Lahore, this huge wave of heat came and struck me full in the face, which added even more to my depression at not being able to see my cousins for another year. Anyway, I guess it’s time to come back to reality now…life is not all about fun, I guess…and it’s not like I don’t have fun here right? I’ll go and make myself familiar with blogs again now, read a few new blogs, increase my social life in Blogistan...that’s what I was thinking of as I was on the plane on the way back home. That is, when I wasn’t trying to figure out whether the man sitting across the aisle was Inzamam-ul-Haq or not. Both my sisters were sure he was, but I still tried to get a full view of his face…of course, the biggest hint that he was was the fact that he read an Urdu digest ever second of the flight. Anyways…I’ll stop hankering on and on, or else I’ll start on every tiny detail, and it’s only interesting to me, so bye for now…and I’ll be c checking out everyone’s blogs now…tut…mein to peechay reh gayi yaaarrr L