sidewalk scribbling

March 8 It was a weekend of accents, languages, beautiful women from Russia and smooth talkers from South America. It was a weekend of making connections, that spun out from our minds and fingers as we shook hands in the hotel lobby, or the fancy elevator with a clear glass ceiling (“always makes me feel like superman!” a girl from Sweden said), or in some windy street of Baltimore. From more than70 different countries, we all bonded over our majors, similarities in languages (so many Spanish speakers and so many Arabic speakers; everyone knew how to talk in English but if you met someone who knew your language, you were determined to exhaust your language’s vocabulary), and our exasperation with Americans using Fahrenheit for weather temperatures while everyone else, from Portugal to Bangladesh, felt hot and cold in Celsius. Everywhere else it is football but in America it must be soccer. And no, it is not a world series if the only country that is playing is yours – and sometime...

February 20 I was supposed to go to the gym today but I got a fever instead. On the plus side, I am getting some exercise putting on my sweatshirt and shivering and then taking it off a few minutes later, and back on and off. If I keep this going for the next 30 minutes, there’s my arm, shoulder, and back workout right here in bed! Learning to be a social worker is fun, because you can use the strengths-based, motivational interviewing techniques you’re learning on yourself. You also have a much harder time ignoring the comforts, or in social work terminology, the privileges you have. I could take the bus home, which welcomed me with a heating system, my pink sweatshirt, an electric kettle, tea supply and cupcakes already baked and ready to be shoveled into my feverish body. And then, because I have not had the time to watch too many TV shows recently, I have exactly five episodes of Private Practice to catch up on! Once my body stops feeling like it’s a puzzle put together on a ...

February 12 A piece of sun was caught on her ring and it glittered, rainbows trapped inside. Her bed sheets were a pale blue, and they made her feel she was on a cloud in the sky, especially when the sun was bright and sneaky, making its way into her room through the gaps. Do I want to wake up? She rolled over, stretching her arm out and looking at her engagement ring with the piece of sun and mini rainbows inside. It was a Sunday and she was lonely. She almost always woke up feeling lonely, because she wanted to wake up with him next to her but she couldn’t, because he was really far away. Gauging the loneliness meter, she felt she was about 5.5 on it. Which wasn’t so crippling. It was just a constant dripping in her heart that she felt perpetually, not the overwhelming waves that could sweep her away. She turned over and just like that, the rainbows and sunlight fell out from her ring. The red light blinked silently on her phone so she picked it up – an email. Hey Sara. I h...

February 10 So I feel like one of those Barbies that have had their limbs broken and then fixed awkwardly by 11 year olds. Almost where they should be but having just a strange look to them – and I imagine this is how it would feel. If of course Barbies could feel. Or like a yo-yo that’s wound up too tight. My muscles need to be stretched out, like an old coat or rug. Man, there I go again, what is up with these similes! So I joined the gym. It was like that episode of FRIENDS in which Chandler gets Ross to help him quit his gym membership but ends up with Ross joining instead. And I could see the Game Theory 101 chapter I had recently read come to life: the finely chiseled-jaw man pointing out to me why I should join that very day. Incentivizing, seizing upon my “costly signals”, and me handing over my debit card to him. $43, and a free one session with a trainer who measured everything from the circumference of my arms to my body fat – 27.5% of my weight is just fat. Posit...

January 30 I suppose sometimes my writing is reminiscent of overripe fruit, strings of hackneyed, honeyed words that I like, stale romantic litanies that hang like paper stars from black wires. I guess I could try a more real approach, use rougher words – like barks of tree? No! Concrete. Wool. Mold. Tie-dyed colors that do not look good together. I also suppose sometimes my writing is too melancholic, or “mopey”. “It seems like not fitting in is a common theme for your blog,” said one of my friends, words that are funny because they are just one little step away from the truth. I guess I may sound like I’m adrift every now and then, but over all I am quite happy. And to remind myself of this, I am going to turn my mopey face upside down, or at a slight tilt to the right and see the world from a different, happy angle. There was the day of the sun. It was finally warm enough for me to sit outside on my balcony in just a sweatshirt (and pjs, socks, of course), have my tea, and f...

January 22 That evening the streets froze. A thin sheet of ice formed over stairs and sidewalks and banisters, people were falling all over the place in a seemingly Domino effect, feet and legs running ahead, the body and butt being too slow to follow and thus, splat, flat on the icy ground. I was on the metro bus, on my way home from the second day of work, five thirty pm and dark as midnight. It was so warm and toasty inside the bus I wondered if I had to get off – could I not spend the entire night on the bus? Does it get to the final destination and then revert to the start, stuck in repeat? Would they kick me off once they realized I had no place to go. After all, buses are transitional places, you can’t really set camp on them. Maybe that’s why they don’t allow food or music on public transit here. They don’t want us getting too comfortable. As much as I was missing (am still) home, I’m slowly getting back into routine. Sort of like remembering how to bike, it takes a whil...

January 10 It feels like time stopped when I left my house in Karachi. The hands of the clock finally took a break, construction on the house next door stopped, layers of dust collected slowly in the terrace, and the leaves on the dead Neem tree never sprouted again. The sights are similar, the sounds exactly the same. From the ticking of the clock in our former lounge to the azaan from the mosque followed by the less melodic, more throaty azaan from the makeshift prayer area in front of our house on our street. The one or two cocky crows that come sit on the balustrade in the terrace when I come out to walk, waiting till I’m two steps away before they finally fly off. The Omore ice cream man who cycles in to our lane around 4:20 pm, and the Walls ice cream man who visits an hour later – the guard smiles and waves and I wonder how much his family in Peshawar misses him. The house next door seems to be perpetually under construction. It has started to look a bit like our house in I...