Hotel California

The place is devoid of a lot of things but beauty is not one of them. The people may not be as pure as one desires them to be but the clear blue skies and the almost lyrical expansive layers of the majestic ocean more than make up for it.

You can sit at the highest point of the Torrey Pines and observe the setting sun sink deeper and deeper into the colossal depths of the ocean like a giant ball of fire, creating hues of amethyst and amber all across the overshadowing sky, casting the last of its golden-red rays across the swelling water that extinguishes the sun's burning existence, bringing the day to an end. As you sit and witness this extraordinary sight, you feel spiritually alleviated, a force bigger than everything else taking root in the very core of your being and all else in comparison just melting away, all the worries, the problems, the real-world induced pain and heartache seemingly eased. Pre-existing faith anew, you close your eyes and breath in the essence of this natural delight and you experience a change in you as if you suddenly control your life, your fate. Holding on to that feeling, that sense of pure and absolutely alive existence you are more rested, more yourself than you are in your entire day living your life, being with people, doing your work.
This to me is the spirit of this place I now call home.

La Jolla at Sunset - without touchups :)

Random...very random

I have a problem...

1. with people who like to sit at the light even when it has turned green. I mean Helloo??? Move your stupid ASS!!!
2. with people who think its okay to bring bag full of food to a movie theatre and then chomp loudly throughout the movie...in my ear.
3. with people who eat loudly, period. You guys are adults, haven't you figured it out yet...CLOSE your mouth when you eat...humans not dogs remember??
4. with people at abc only airing a new episode of greys anatomy once a month.
5. with people who take an enormous amount of time at the checkout counters
6. with sales clerks at the checkout counter who think it appropriate to have loooooong conversations with EVERY SINGLE customer...are you kidding me?
7. with people at customer service who cannot speak English and who cannot understand you or make you understand anything...Note to walmart: time to upgrade your workforce phuaaaaleeese No Habla espaniol or Mandarin or Vietnamese for that matter.
8. with people who fwd chain emails..you know the ones with some religious, medical or moral connotation and that prophesize the doom of your existence and good fortune in the instance that you do not fwd the email to 5/6/7/8/6 or 20 of your friends. Right!!! So who died and made you the moral/religious/social police of the worldwide web?
9. with the people at my work:(
10. with the people who are making the Old Navy ads these days...have you seen the nonsensical crap these people are churning out? Enough with the retardedness (not really a word) already.
11. with the people who send 'exciting business opportunity' emails or text messages or voicemails, after you were stupid enough to be nice and friendly towards them deeming them as innocent fellow Desis. What a quick star way to loose friends and alienate people.
12. with men in general and a few in particular.
13. with desi people who refuse to grow up with time and still rigidly hold on to the ideas, theories and stereotypes that they were brought up with. In case you haven't figured out yet, you can be very annoying. These stereotypes apply to but are not limited to Women, money, life, parents, career, racial groups, ethnic groups, religion, politics, ideologies.
14. with American teenage girls. Build yourself some self-respect, stop dressing so old and selling yourself so cheaply to guys and enough with the crazy hormone induced, mating call like screaming.
15. with having to move every 3-6 months due to one reason or the other
16. with my inability to cook for myself every day, i am so not cut out to be typical desi housewife...thank God my first love didn't work out *shudder*
17. What??? number 17 already....hmmmm. I was just getting started :(
18. with my having so many problems, as K says it Issues In my Tissues

Sighhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

And so I grow some more

I like to be in control, I like to feel that I have a full understanding and grasp of things at all times. And I want to know where I am and where will I go from here. That is my comfort zone, the known, the regular, the straight forward. When things start to appear overwhelming, larger than life, or beyond the realm of my understanding and control, I start to freak out and take a complete reverse on whatever progress I have made and become mentally paralyzed. I can actually feel a mental block appear out of nowhere and wedge itself between me and whatever it is that I am supposed to achieve or understand. These mental blocks, these sketchy areas become my fears, my nemesis. This happened in 11th grade advanced mathematics and calculus class, it happened when I hit a plateau while trying to loose weight, it is happening at work right now (sigh), and it happened when I went through my very first break-up. I feel disappointed by all the things I did half-way and left them because they became overwhelming and made me loose interest. I am disappointed that I had to be nudged, pushed and wrestled into facing or perhaps overcoming my fears, making me think that I am perhaps not strong enough to do it on my own.

My earliest mental block came at the age of 6 or 7, I am not sure. My father took me to the swimming pool with my siblings and started to teach me how to swim. He wanted me to lay down on his hands and put my head back in the water and let go. I don't remember it but I am sure I must have thought, are you bloody kidding me? What I do remember is completely freaking out, screaming, kicking and yelling and of course my personal best, crying. Everyone at the pool stopped what they were doing to become the audience of my very own Greek Tragedy. I don't remember what Papa was saying, but I am sure he tried to calm me down, but I kept kicking him, until he finally threw me out of the water and asked me to go sit in the kiddie shallow pool. I remember feeling relieved, humiliated but relieved. I wanted to learn, I really loved the water but it was too much to ask, letting go, loosing control, entering the unknown. SO I was relieved to be in my shallow kiddie pool with the 4 year olds. I gave up, I had control but I was sad. Since then other people tried to teach me how to swim, people who knew I wanted to, people whom I told how much I love it, but they all failed. And after a near drowning, my fears were confirmed, this thing is not for me, I am not strong enough and tried to make peace with it.

Over the years my control issues have worsened and it has became harder to get over the mental blocks that I set for myself. I hate the fear of unknown but I have no idea how to let go and just relax and enjoy the moment. I hate not understanding and not knowing stuff, even though I keep telling myself, no one human being is good at everything or knows everything. It is impossible. But of course the world of fears has no room for logic and reality.

But a few weeks ago, some thing happened, not in my life but in the life of someone close to me and I suddenly realised how exhausting this thing has become, this need to be in control, to be aware of everything, yet constantly live in fears and what a huge contrast this obsession is within itself. We all have contrasts in our personalities, some conflict in who we are consciously as opposed to sub-consciously. But it is too much baggage wouldn't you say? Would it be easier and freeing, without it?

So, what did I do? Well, I finally let go of the ledge, and I embraced the unknown. I learned how to swim. In just two days I overcame an almost three decades old fear and by doing so I overcame the biggest of all my mental blocks, the hardest and the most long lasting one. And the feeling compares to no other. I overcame a fear not because anyone forced me to, or nudged me into or because I had no other choice. I did it all on my own, because I wanted to not because I had to. I freed myself of something that had been a larger than life obstacle and which had cemented in my mind that I am not strong enough. This may not be the first time I have overcome something, but this definitely took the most courage and effort and that makes it that much more special.

And yes, it makes it easy and yes it has freed me of unneeded negativity in my life. That's what our fears are aren't they? unneeded, unwanted negativity. If I have no faith in me, in the path I have chosen I will forever be afraid of the unknown. But if I have trust in my own self, in who I am then no matter how low I have gone, or how hard the things are, I will overcome anything. My breakthrough moment came when my instructor asked me to float and pushed me underwater to the floor of the pool, I remained calm, patient and relaxed and sure enough my body slowly moved up and reached the surface.

Lessons learned:

1. Live in the moment
2. Let go
3. Free yourself of fears
4. Have faith in what you know, feel and believe
5. Be strong, calm and patient and you will always reach the surface, no matter how low you are

I am in the big people pool and I am floating and I am no longer sad :)

PING!!!

I chat with M
M is busy
I decide to bug M
I type 'do you love me?' and hit send.
I realise M has not received the message.
The message is sent to some guy
A guy I haven't talked to in 3 years.
Not talked to him since graduation.
we went to school together.
I froze and seemingly he froze.
I type OMG
He types ROFL
I type wrong window
He types ROFL
I stop typing
He types in that case I do
I recover and type hehehe
He types still LOL
Then we catch up.
Typical desi catching up, you single yes, me too, yayy, parents giving a hard time, i like freedom, peer pressure, friends changing diapers (their kids hopefully) left right center, feeling anxious, feeling left out, still stuck working in IT, me too, yaar, yeah too bad.
I lecture him about how marriage will be the end of his life, his freedom and he should only marry a girl out of choice and that he shouldn't have a hard time finding one since random girls are asking him if he loved them.
He laughs some more and asks me how did I get my parents to let up the marriage pressure off off me.
I impart wisdom" lots of patience and hard work and some turning 34 which makes me a dinosaur in the desi marriage market, and convincing them that as good human beings they cannot knowingly make life hell for a nice, good looking, educated Pakistani guy from a good family by marrying him off to me :)"
He stops typing.
I type ROFL
I sign off

Getting Over.....where????

Life is all about getting over things. Get over adversity, get over sickness, get over challenges and obstacle to reach a certain goal, get over depression, sad times, heartaches, get over financial hardships, get over being mistreated, get over disappointments and of course related to all this get over people.
You meet so many people during the course of your life that it is actually impossible to keep connected with all of them. It is also quite impossible that you would want all of them to be a part of your life, since you may not like most of them or most of them may not like you. Regardless, people come and people go without you having the need to actually get over them.
But then there are those people who enter your world to touch it in the most special way, they impact you, your life, the way you see the world, in the most significant manner. It is special, the time you spend together, even if at the time it may seem quite ordinary, but it just might be influencing who you will become for the rest of your life. They are parents, siblings, friends, relatives, teachers, lovers, or sometimes they are all of them. You share a bond with these people, a special connection that can get you through hard times, times of self-doubt and struggle, times of loneliness and frustration, times of disillusionment and disappointment. They make you want to believe and live and love, they make you feel that you can do anything in the world as long as they are there standing by your side, rooting you on. They love you for who you are, and accept you as you are. You trust them, you rely on them, you grow in their company, no matter what your age, you are happy when they are with you, no matter how hard the times. They become your guardian angels.
But then there are those, who do nothing for you, yet they hold this same degree of importance in your life. They are just bright and happy people who may not even be aware of how much they mean to you, but you cherish them, because you love who they are.
And then there are those few whose lives we have touched, we have given them knowingly or unknowingly and have never felt its impact deep enough or long enough to realise that we have become something special to them. You may or may not realise your importance in their lives but you will always find them, in your corner, quietly admiring you and making you feel special.
No matter how these people come to matter in your life, whether through mutual admiration or via one-sided, loosing them is the hardest thing of all to recover from. It doesn't mater how you loose them, what is worth noting is that when they leave, you feel a part of you has left with them and no matter how many people you may have in your life and how much love you receive, you never feel whole again. A part of you is lost forever. You are not the same again.
People die, they move on, you move on, everyone has their reasons, who cares. The bottom line is, you have lost the connection, that support, the understanding, the love, the friendship, the comfort, its gone.
You loose money, you work two jobs get it back. You loose a house, heck it was never really yours. You have obstacle and hardships, time heals all, it changes, you get on with your life. But what if you loose a parent? a loving sibling? a wonderful friend? a passionate lover? What if they abandon you? What if they change? What if they betray you, hurt you so badly that you may not be able to trust again? What then?
I have always had these questions, and even though I have lost a few loved ones along the way, I still cant seem to find the answers. I used to think perhaps time is a great healer and eventually you get over everything, but now I am not so sure.
Of course, we move on, we laugh again and meet new people and get successful and we may even forget remembering these lost few, but do we really get over them? Maybe the pain disappears, but do the scars ever go away? We live our lives weighed down by the baggage of these losses, their shadows casting soft darkness over our behaviors, our habits, the way we deal with other people, the decisions we make, the manner in which we form new relationships. Our expectations are forever adjusted and we are forever fearful, of repeating a mistake, of loosing another friend, of bearing pain again, of feeling alone again, of falling down and never being able to walk again. Yes, we live in shadows. Some people may be ghastly aware of this, while some block it all out to live their lives in a peaceful delusional state, but we all have our shadows.
All this pondering makes me believe that perhaps we are not supposed to get over these people. These people hold the most significant of our memories, the most profound of our influences, the most remarkable of our experiences and the most wonderful of our associations. When they left they also taught us the harsh realities of this life, the bitter and ugly truths, which helps us become stronger and somehow wiser (of course this is not true in a lot of cases) and grown-up. Maybe cynical and bitter as well, but that is a choice.
Regardless of whether we like it or not, they remain a part of our lives one way or the other and forever influence the deepest working of our sub-conscious minds, while posing great challenges to the loved ones still dealing or putting up with us.
I guess we are better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all.