sidewalk scribbling

Little things can really get you down sometimes. Invisible motes of dust sticking together to create spoofy balls of dust (bacteria and infinitesimal specks of dry, dead skin. Ew.) – it’s like you spot a tiny brown ant scurrying on the kitchen counter and then the next time you turn and reach for the sugar tin, there’s a whole army of them marching in a line better than any you’d find in the immigration area at Karachi airport (but that is a pretty low bar). It’s like you see a bug on the grass where you’re sitting and immediately feel itchy all over and it doesn’t even matter that you most probably do not have four beetles having a relay race up your leg, because, if you think about it, in some ways ghost bugs are worse than real ones. Once you see that spot of ketchup drying on the kitchen floor, or a handful of different-sized crumbs lying at the base of the couch you just cannot un-see it and your eyes keep flitting back to it just like your mind keeps flipping ba...

October 21 I like where I am right now. St Louis is an explosion of bright colors, its streets are easels and god is spilling red, yellow, orange and green all over the place. Some parts of the city are so beautiful it really takes my breath away. Sidewalks are permanently covered in dry, crunchy leaves, a child’s paradise, better than any trampoline I think! The weather doesn’t really remember if it is summer or winter and every now and then we get a day warm enough to wear t-shirts. And as much as I hate dreary days now, sometimes a cloudy, overcast sky just makes the fall colors stand out even more, it’s kind of like the trees are playing Holi! Anyways, so its mid-semester and I seem to have gotten the hang of homework, work-work and house-work. I still stress out about crumbs, but less so about group projects that loom around the corner, despite all telltale signs suggesting people are not going to be quite the go-getter types that one would want to have in one’s gro...

September 8 Sometimes the universe seems to be a giant puzzle in the making and you stand above an empty, gaping space for hours, quite positive that you will never find the missing piece because the vacuum cleaner ate it up and it is now slowly disintegrating at a large dumpsite with sad, discarded heaps of stuff. And then, one day, suddenly, it appears and falls in smoothly, like it was meant to. The other day we were waiting for one of my roommates to come back from work so we could go to the Hispanic Festival, and when she finally came back, she told us she needed to cook… and just then we heard metal trays clanging in the heavens, a giant hand moved curtains of leaves aside, sweeping them across the sky, and soon the sound of rain surrounded us, gaining momentum, joined by the sharp, hard knocks of hail. “I’m glad we had to wait for you,” I told my roommate as we all rushed to the backdoor in the kitchen and peeked out, venturing into the covered patio, feeling the co...