Slammer

My heart aches.
My mind races round and round the merry go-round.
Fear suffocates.

I scream, “Lock me up,”
“Can’t you see the stab, stab, stab that I inflict upon my self?”
But, no sounds escape my lips.

And, they marvel over my strength and tenacity.
So I drag foot-to-foot, hand to hand forward.

“Should I turn myself in”, I ask?
If I go, will I be able to come back?

Tack, tack, tack, the nails are pound into the wall one by one.

Spoiling the Apple

I am rushing out the door, running late for work. She shouts from her bed, “When you return, could you please help me with the laundry?” I pause, deciding whether or not to ignore her and blame it on my poor hearing. But, I decide to play nice and I turn around, march upstairs and prepare for the laundry discussion.

“Ammi, I won’t be home until late tonight, remember I am obligated to go to the fundraiser after work. Why don’t you have N (her son) help you?” She responds, “No, you help when you get home” “But, Ammi, I won’t be home until after ten pm or so. Just ask N, he certainly knows how to run the washing machine.”

I return home around 10:30 pm. Ammi again asks me to assist with the laundry. Flabbergasted, I ask, “didn’t you ask N?” She plays the game, ignoring my question and repeating her request. “Why don’t you show me how to run the machine tomorrow”, she says.

Unbelievable! Would someone please tell me why she refuses to ask her son to do ANYTHING, but has no problem asking me to do everything from cooking, to taking the garbage out and doing the laundry? This is especially baffling when I work an equal amount of long hours as her son.

Is it that she spoils him or that she is afraid of being a burden on him or both? It’s insane and it pisses me off to no end!

Occupying Time and Mind

Currently reading:

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

Recently Finished:

The Dancing Girls of Lahore by Louise Brown
I am glad that I read the book as it added to my Pakistani-culture knowledge base. The book is a biographical account of one professor’s studies of escort servicing and prostitution in Lahore. The author takes the issue very seriously and touches on the social implications of women used and abused and the never-ending cycle of tarnished women and their “bastard” children. This issue is undeniably real and the children of the “dancing girls” are doomed into a life-sentence.

I do feel that the book was lacking in substance and was not written with the best clarity. While I appreciated the author’s attempt to paint a real picture of Lahore and its culture, religion, landscape and language; I couldn’t help but feeling there were more history, psychology and sociology lessons to be learned by the professor. I felt the story being told just to be told and far more factual details could have been interlaced into the tale. I was surprised to learn that the author had spent several years living in Lahore for several months at a time while developing this story. It would seem that one who has that kind of first-hand experience would have a lot more to report and more culturally relevant insight on the issues.

Overall, it was a good read, but it dragged on to long and left me longing for more.


The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
I cannot adequately express how much I enjoyed this read. The book is a fantastically written fictional account about a boy growing up in Afghanistan. The book is fiction, but owes its huge success to the fact that it loosely mirrors the author’s own life experiences having grown up in Afghanistan.

The tale begins in pre- Russian invasion and Taliban rule and chronicles the joy-hood of two mother-less boys living the life of tree-climbing and kite-running. In the beginning, the boys are vaguely aware of their differing class (the author being the son of a wealthy business man and his best friend the son of the live in servant) and religious affiliations. It is with time and one act of cowardice compounded by family secrets and politics that the boys drift apart.

An escape from the Taliban and all things from the boy’s childhood begins with a near-death suffocating ride in a gas tank. It ends with the boy returning as a man to pick of fractured pieces of his childhood best friend’s and half brother’s remains.

The Kite Runner is beautifully fluid and is a must read.

Just Watched:

The Message
A tasteful and creative account of the Prohet’s life; another must see and own.

Life is Beautiful
A wonderfully written, produced, and acted story about human perseverance in the ugliest fate ever: the Jewish holocaust. This movie was so emotionally intense and beautifully written, one has to remind her/himself to breathe while watching.

The Art of Zoning Out

I am losing all patience! Presently I am hiding out in our bedroom, “working”. I took an extra long walk by myself earlier today and I went into the office for a few hours yesterday. Do you think she’ll notice my absence? It’s sad when I dread the weekends.

Five months is really too much!

As an addendum to the garbage post… We went out for ice cream on Friday night. After we finished I was preparing my trash for a trip to the garbage can. Ammi quickly rescues the plastic spoon which is an essential, rare piece that must be added to the collection. My DH raises his voice and says “No, Ammi, we are not taking that spoon.” Ammi blatantly ignores him. DH reaches over the table to grab the mint-chocolate chip covered apparatus; literally, a fierce game of tug-o-war takes place. Final score: one messy spoon shoved into Ammi’s fancy leather purse. Unbelievable.

The Baji Dance

Red, pink, gold
Hand stitched fields of flowers
Shimmer, shimmer
bangle jangle

Painted faces each tells a story
Of the beautiful woman glory

With smiles and pleasantries
And a shake, shake, shake-
Sway of the hips
This is the Baji Dance

Why I Hate Recycling...

Would someone please tell me why oh why my MIL feels the need to “save” everything as if she were saving a kitten from imminent death?

My MIL cannot stand to waste at any cost. This leaves me with cupboards toppling over with used cans, jars, bundles of newspapers, used sporks-you name it!

It drives me insane! At first I thought it was the coolest thing that she was the modern recycler and that we were learning to makes use out of our trash. I agree that we Americans are far too wasteful and I agree with recycling.

What I can’t seem to agree with is reliving my dirty fast-food secrets over and over. For example: I open up my pantry to locate some flour. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong!

The flour, five varieties of dal, the fried onions, the sugar, you name it, are each carefully wrapped and tucked into random KFC, Ragu and Wendy’s containers. This “storage” system makes absolutely no sense to me and makes me so angry. How the hell am I supposed to find the damn flour I want to scream, but I smile and bite my tongue one more time.

I opened up my cupboard to pull out a pan to fry an egg with. I am greeted with mounds of newspapers and old-junk mail envelopes, which are carefully stuffed between each pan, and it’s lid. She stands over me, telling me to be careful not to scrape the pans. “They are pans for God’s sake, they DON’T have feelings.”

Every once in awhile my hubby will interject. He will scream and go on a rampage and start pitching the plastic sporks, JC Penny fliers and KFC buckets into the trash.

The next morning, the twice-over garbage will be found washed and placed right back at their original place. My MIL has an obsession with “saving” the trash and cannot and will not let it go. While my MIL is here, the beautiful home that both DH and I work so hard to create is turned into the junk-yard found at Sanford and Son.

Help! I’m drowning in my own consumption.

Paggle

I ' m G o i n g C r a z y ! !