There was nothing in the forecast about snow on Sunday up until yesterday. But here it is, Sunday afternoon and I can't see a thing outside my window. Such thick fall of white insanity covering everything in sight. I should have known - what is Valentine's day without snow. I don't remember a Valentine's day without a little snow, and I don't remember a Valentine's day without a little sadness.

I remember one time when I was in college, it snowed so much that all classes were cancelled on the morning of February 14. That was a good start to Valentine's day for most of us. Then another year it was such a bad blizzard that those overpriced flower deliveries never made it to their recipients.  Then another time, I was an hour late for dinner because the traffic was horrendous with the sudden onset of snow.

I also remember all sadness of Valentine's day. And that sadness doesn't come with a lack of a partner or the wrong partner. Oh, none of that. It's because it's all so forced. The forced flowers, the forced dinner, the forced chocolates that I don't even like, the unavailability of dinner reservation and the pressure to get one. Perhaps the snow tries to cover the pretentiousness of it all but fails miserably every year. I hate things being forced on me. Love, of all things. Love should never be forced. It wouldn't be loved then. Valentine's day has become just so sad.

~Short Story~

We had been coming here at Kay's beach house ever since we were in college. Every spring. Every year. All of us would be here. Significant others changed through the years but we remained. The five of us. After college, I would see all of them during the year except perhaps Sam. We saw less and less of each other with each passing year. And then just only at the beach house.  One year he showed up wearing a bow tie. Looked like a compete idiot. Not many men can pull off bow ties, some shouldn't even try. Another year he was supporting a full bushy beard. His brownish-blond beard. Very unruly and unkempt. I wanted to run my fingers through it. I stopped myself from doing that.

While so many things changed, some things remained constant. Every year on the third night, I'll come out of the beach house around 2 a.m. when everyone else is asleep. I;d walk up to the shore and find him sitting there among the rocks, smoking. We never talked about it, never planned to meet, but it always happened that way. He kept coming back to the beach in the middle of the night, so did I. Perhaps to just remind ourselves of the life we once inhaled among the rocks, when the roaring inside us, the thrashing life, could easily drown the roaring of the ocean. Now there was just silence, except the mockery of the waves.

I sat next to him. He looked at me like he always did, with longing for something you've once had and then lost. He touched my bare feet with his hands. I let him. His hands were warm. My feet were cold. I could see him through the dark. His eyes were always bright bringing me to life.  He touched my head. I closed my eyes. I didn't need to see him after that, I knew I wouldn't be able to feel him much longer.

For a moment, it felt exactly how it used to feel when we were in college - all reckless and thinking that life was full of possibilities. Now we were old. We had learned to live with the voids in our hearts. We weren't even sad anymore. Now we are mature enough, and scarred enough to know when to surrender our happiness.

Sometimes when I am lying in the bed or on the couch, I stretch as if I am trying to reach for something. But there is nothing there except the wall of my imagination. Have I reached it, I wonder. What if I can’t indulge myself in my fantasies anymore. What if this is it. This life. These early mornings and late nights. These chaotic afternoons and silent evenings.

Sometimes I find myself humming a tune, reliving a moment and feeling a tickle in my heart. Sometimes I wonder if I have just conjured it up and it can’t possibly be real. What I felt and feel and touched was nothing but a figment of my overly dramatic fascination with this life and this love. I waited for something and then something died. It was over but then it begun. It’s a funny game.

This makes no sense - what I wrote above. Just like life sometimes. But you have to witness it and write it as best as you can hoping that someday it will give you an end that you’ll weave into a tapestry you always imagined.

I can whistle. I just can't whistle to an actual tune. I wish I could. There is something about whistling that speaks to me. When I hear Dylan whistle, for just a split second I pause, like time stops for a fraction of a second and starts again. I listen and even ask for more sometimes. There is something soothing about listening to the "Dock of the Bay" being whistled in the kitchen. Makes me realize all over again the difference little things make. That's what we need in life. More whistling.  I need more of you whistling.

I have been off chasing a dream.

Well, one of them anyway. And I am still not there yet. It is amazing how much energy and effort and dedication it takes to materialize anything. Makes me wonder that perhaps it's really because we don't want to put enough effort into our dreams that they never materialize. We imagine that there is always another day to work on it, that perhaps tomorrow, perhaps next month, I will put my act together and actually get to do what I really love. But we never really get to it.

Over time it becomes such an unattainable idea. We have dreamed it so many times that it no longer has any room in the real world because it would just never materialize as perfectly as it has in our minds. We will stumble and fall, and we will fail. We do.

I almost let a dream fall. I was ready to take an eraser to my soul, wipe the dream that I had carried for so long in my heart. The dream had lain dormant for so long that I felt like I no longer walked towards it. So, I was going to let it go. Then I realized that I had confused the stillness of everyday life with not wanting it anymore.

Now, I am trying to not let the real life get in the way of my dreaming.

Online personality quizzes are becoming increasingly popular and it looks like we'll believe just about anything, however vague, they'll tell us. We don't hesitate to flaunt about these elusive results on facebook/twitter and somehow feel enlightened about ourselves. Well, how about you take a stab at the following questions and see if you can answer them for yourself. Who knows, they may enlighten you too. 

What’s the kindest thing you almost did? Is your fear of insomnia stronger than your fear of what awoke you? Are bonsai cruel? Do you love what you love, or just the feeling? Your earliest memories: do you look through your young eyes, or look at your young self? Which feels worse: to know that there are people who do more with less talent, or that there are people with more talent? Do you walk on moving walkways? Should it make any difference that you knew it was wrong as you were doing it? Would you trade actual intelligence for the perception of being smarter? Why does it bother you when someone at the next table is having a conversation on a cell phone?

How many years of your life would you trade for the greatest month of your life? What would you tell your father, if it were possible? Which is changing faster, your body, or your mind? Is it cruel to tell an old person his prognosis? Are you in any way angry at your phone? When you pass a storefront, do you look at what’s inside, look at your reflection, or neither? Is there anything you would die for if no one could ever know you died for it? If you could be assured that money wouldn’t make you any small bit happier, would you still want more money? What has been irrevocably spoiled for you? If your deepest secret became public, would you be forgiven? Is your best friend your kindest friend? Is it in any way cruel to give a dog a name? Is there anything you feel a need to confess? You know it’s a “murder of crows” and a “wake of buzzards” but it’s a what of ravens, again? What is it about death that you’re afraid of? How does it make you feel to know that it’s an “unkindness of ravens”?

Source: "Two-minute Personality Test" by Jonathan Safran Foer.

More Photos: I Romanticize

"People, where you live," the Little Prince said, "Grow five thousand roses in one garden... yet they don't find what they're looking for..."

"They don't find it," I answered.

"And yet what they're looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water..."

"Of course," I answered.

And the little prince added, "But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart."

The Little Prince went back to the roses again.

"You're not at all like my rose. You're nothing at all yet," he told them. "No one has tamed you and you haven't tamed anyone. You're the way fox was. He was just a fox like a hundred thousand others. But I've made him my friend, and now he's the only fox in all the world."

And the roses were humbled.

"You're lovely but you are empty," he went on. "One couldn't die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass. Since she's the one I sheltered behind a screen. Since she's the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose."

It's the time you spent with your rose that makes your rose so important. You become responsible forever for what you've tamed. You're responsible for your rose.

~ The Little Prince -  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 I love what books do to me. Every time I finish a book, I look different. It's in the glow in my face coupled with utter exhaustion as if I have just gotten off a long flight, but I am about to meet the love of my life. It's in the way I talk, the way I listen, and the way I describe the colors. It's such an exhausting journey but a thoroughly satisfying one. The kind of journey that sticks in the memory and you speak about it for years to come.

I love what I give back to the books. Like memories - memories of the trains and the car rides, I have taken them to. Memories of all the parks, and lakes, and beaches where I've spent so many lonely evenings. Of the countless connecting flights and foreign airports. Memories of a some shy flower petals that found their way into some pages. We deposit little parts of ourselves in the books we read.

I love what books do to me. If happiness truly exists, it's found in books.

I Romanticize

Something about Sundays has lazy written all over it. Even if you do so much work, it still seems too lazy. I love waking up to Sunday mornings and sitting by the window with my coffee, especially when it's raining. The house is so quiet on Sundays, even when we play an old Sinatra record. I love to hear the tck tck tck  of the raindrops falling into the pool, and the water streaming through the backyard sounding like a waterfall.

Breakfast takes forever on Sundays. He sits on the kitchen table with his New York Times.  We speak briefly only when I announce my displeasure at the half eaten bagel that he has been nibbling for the last few hours. He smiles, and does not improve his pace of eating. I roll my eyes. Unlike other days, I make myself an orange spice coffee as a treat. Something about Sundays begs you to treat yourself with something special, no matter how small. It makes you dream of a day at the spa. Sundays ask for mindless browsing of magazines, baking banana bread just so the house is filled with the cozy aroma of bananas and chocolate, and go berry picking.

Sundays warrant a trip to the farmers' market. I take photos while he tries to shop. Sundays make you crave carnival food like corn-dogs and funnel cakes.

The couch is so inviting on a Sunday afternoon. It calls for marathons of old, long-forgotten T.V. series. Sundays ask for eating on the couch and not doing the dishes afterwards. It invites long baths with chamomile salts and lavender scented candles. Sundays tempt to share some skin under the covers to blues classics and make some moments unforgettable, as the rain continues to fall into the night.

The last time I saw him was in October five years ago. We sat on my favorite bench, but we weren't making any good memories. He was there to tell me what he had decided. He was there to tell me that he chose her over me, and that was it. He didn’t give me a chance to ask any questions or to get any closure. He didn’t give me a chance to cry and yell at him. He just walked right out.

The next time I saw him was five years later at a funeral. Our paths would have never crossed again if it weren't for the death of someone we both knew. Funerals have a way of bringing everyone together. They expect that we put everything else behind us and just get along even if it is for only that day. So I did that. I got along just fine with everyone, including him. I knew he was more devastated than I was from this loss, and I couldn’t help but feel sadder for him than I did for losing a friend. When we looked at each other, I could tell that he was surprised to see me there. Perhaps he didn’t think I would actually come, or perhaps he just didn't think about me at all. But once he saw me, he couldn't stop looking at me. So I walked up to him. We shared a few words about our loss. We tried to console each other, but we couldn’t really. How do you get over someone’s passing? You can’t really. You just learn to live with it.

We are wired to cry and feel sad, and regret many thing we have done when someone we know dies. We cry for someone who is no longer with us, and quite possibly is in a much better place than most of us. We cry when that someone has found their peace, when someone has lived and seen, and is now finally resting. We have a hard time letting that go, but we don’t ever care to shed a tear for the living. We kill something inside each other everyday, and we don’t mourn that loss. There are ways of dieing that don't end in funerals. Hearts break, lives change, even completely destroyed, and we don’t even shrug.

It doesn't matter if he feels sad, or guilty, or even if he apologizes. It's all done now. I died then, and he can't bring me back to life for himself again. I can't unfeel what I have felt.

I suppose he'll just have to come and cry at my funeral too.

Many read this book growing up. The rest has seen the movie. [If you haven't, please go read it, then watch it.]  Some are swaying to its soundtrack these days. I did all of these.

The beauty of the character Jay Gatsby is that he can be interpreted in many ways. Yet, most of us choose to marvel at the intensity of Gatsby's love for Daisy. He dedicated his whole life, his whole existence to the quest of finding her love - to attaining her. He knew on some level that she did not love him, but he did not want to believe it. If only she would leave her husband, if only they could go back to the past, everything would be just okay. He would be happy again. He would be with Daisy.

We like to live in the past.  If only we could change a few details from our past, we could fix everything. We could be happy again.  But the sad truth is, you can't be happy by yearning for the past because you are yearning for something that does not exist. It's foolishness. It becomes an obsession. Gatsby was border-lined obsessed with the idea of being with Daisy.  He turned his whole life into such a perfect fraud that he even fooled himself. He forgot about love. He forgot about his real  life, or what he could have gotten out of it for the sake of attaining an idea from the past that ceased to exist. Perhaps it never even existed then. If it did, Daisy would have waited for him when she could.

I cannot possibly have respect for anyone like that. No obsessed man ever loved. No obsessed man ever attained his obsession and was happy, and I think that is precisely what Fitzgerald wanted to convey through Gatsby. He wants us to remember the fine line between love and obsession, and the consequences of crossing over.  The "Great" in The Great Gatsby is so ironic.

I want to think of him as a great person, but the more I think about it, the more I can't. He is not great. Fitzgerald's character is great, the way it is written. But if Jay Gatsby was a person, he would not be great.

In a world which is increasingly becoming lonely and miserable, we don't need more Gatsbys. Please don't be a Gatsby. There is no nobility in obsessing over something that does not exist. Desire leaves us heartbroken, it wears us out. Desires can wreck your life.  You deserve to be happy. You deserve a better life than Gatsby's.

I love taking photos around our house on quiet Sundays like this one. I like capturing all the silly things we keep buying, all the seasonal decorations we get so excited about, all the little arrangements we keep making, the piles and piles of books and movies that add to our comfort. I love to look at them knowing that they make our lives so rich. I can feel the love among these walls, and hear the laughter from room to room. I didn't think it would turn out half as much as it did when we bought this house.

Too many people think they'll buy a house and it will be their home. But a house and a home are so different things. Home is not what you buy; it is what you make. And this one, is mine.

So this is how it works: I listen quietly when couples talk, and if I get lucky, I make them forget that I am in the room at all. Following is what you get when a writer knows too many couples. Needless to say, X is a woman and Y is a man -- I have to maintain their privacy :-).

Y: Dinner on Valentine's Day is at 6 so plan accordingly.
X: Dress up?
Y: If you don't then it would be weird.
X: Am I coming down there to you?
Y: Yes, and no more questions. I already feel you know too much.
-On confusing surprises
---

X to Y: So if I go and make out with a girl, that would technically not be cheating right?
---

X to Y (showing him new curtains in the living room): Now this is what I call a surprise, not the one that you gave me yesterday - Oh, the AC is fixed, that you didn't even do yourself!!
---

[At a home decoration store, picking out a bed-sheet set for Y - looking at a checkered black and white bed-sheet set]
Y: I like it but its a little too much like a bachelor, right?
X: Its kind of something you'd see in a guys room who brings a different girl over every night.
Y: Yeah, you're right..... ummm... but...*pauses* 
Y: Its Okay. You can keep coming over.
---

[During an argument]

X: Yeah teach that to the next wife!
Y: Yeah, it's all about trial and error.
---

[While putting his head on her lap, and being cheesy]
Y: You see now, even if someone were to give me a million dollars, I won't get up from your lap
X: If someone were to give you a million dollars for getting up, I will kick your off of me right now!
---

What a Sunday it is. To feel pampered when I am broken, to get breakfast in bed (eggs, hash browns, pancakes, and orange juice to be exact), followed by a delicious cup of coffee. A pair of hands tucking me under blankets and pillows because I am bed-ridden for a few days. Medicine delivered on time after every few hours; light music to sooth my hurting head. A few books by the bedside to give me company for when I want to engage in some literature, and feed my fantasies. A few kisses on the cheeks and fingers caressing my hair from time to time. Warm, delicious hot chocolate in the afternoon. The newspaper read and discussed. Long distance phone calls on and off throughout the day. An Al Pacino movie in the evening. A slice of cheesecake for the lady to sum it all up. The feeling of the warmest, coziest bed at night. Sleepy little me.

Sometimes you break a leg, and the next thing you know, you are being spoiled. Sometimes, you need to break a leg in order to realize what you are blessed with, and how much you are really loved. We quickly lose sight of that. A sudden break from your daily life allows you to take a look at it in a whole new light. It forces you to think about what's really essential and what's completely useless. It summons your courage and that of your friends. I think once in a while, it's important to break a leg or an arm, or sprain an ankle, or bruise your head. But it's important to break something in order to heal, and to get some perspective on life, and love, and God.

I hope you had a wonderful weekend, too.

Love, when sprinkled with some humor is the best treat.

Following are moments in time - said, said to, overheard, told in stories, recalled during drunken moments, and teased about. Needless to say, X is a woman and Y is a man -- I have to maintain their privacy :-).


Y: Its not fair. It is not fair. It is so not fair.
X: What?
Y: That smile.
You can't just smile at me like that. Then I have to say yes! Not cool missy!
---

Y: I was thinking you just don't talk while making love.
X: Yes, you are right, mostly I don't. My mouth has better things to do.
---

Y: But you are my sweetheart, you are the cherry on my strawberry cake...oh sorry, cherry is an inappropriate word.
---

X: Wow.... this was a good kiss!
Y: What are you trying to say about all the other ones?
---

X1: What are you doing for Valentines day?
X2: You mean, besides him? (looking at her boyfriend)
---

X: In bed I can be quite mischievous, especially with the men I really like... wait... that did not come out right.
Y: No, it didn't... I really hope you are only with the man you *really* like :P
---

Y1: So did you ever work up the nerve to talk to that girl?
Y2: Yeah, one time she sneezed and I said 'God bless you.'
---

X to Y: Alright, alright. I will kill you softly. Oh, I mean kiss you softly.
---

Talking to her two male friends...
Raaji: I don't know how people have the guts to cheat on their partners. I mean, why can't they just break up first before they go on to pursue their new love interests. I can only do one man at a time.
*they stare*
Raaji: Oh, that did not sound right.
Rob: Gee Raaji. Who are you doing these days?
Matt: Raaji is doing someone!
*both high five*
Raaji: I did not mean it that way!

but of course it was too late for that....
---

:-)

After reading some Urdu poetry and prose here and there on this blog, a lot of the readers asked me to write more in Urdu. A lot of my friends have asked me to do the same.
I must admit that this language has been a very important part of my life, my personality—myself.

So I collect beautiful words of my language and compile them in An Elegant Emotion. I capture emotions… I liberate feelings for the sake of my language… for the sake of love.

Do blogroll it and visit. Thank you.

http://anelegantemotion.blogspot.com/

What do you think is the best part of Christmas?

For me, it's not in going crazy shopping for friends and family… it's not really in decorating Christmas trees or cooking delicious food or entertaining guests. It's in the coziness of season. It's in the happy faces. It's in the pretty snow.
I especially love singing carols during this time of the year… dancing to the tunes of old Christmas classics. All of those songs bringing back good memories… heart-warming memories.

Remember “Driving Home for Christmas?” I listen to this song almost every time I am traveling home for the holidays.

I have some of my happiest moments with Jingle Bells. Signing it with friends at the top of my voice sometimes sitting in the café, at others on the road at 2am.

Holiday season brings so many goodies. I love the smiles I get from all over. The comforting touches. The smell of burning wood. The text messages and phone calls from friends around the country… I know there are Angels Among Us.

…and then Christmas is about romancing. The cozy coffee dates. The holding hands and kissing under the mistletoe… those endless late night phone calls. Signing “Let it Snow!” sitting by the fire.
.. and All I Want For Christmas Is You.

Of course, this time of the year is about memories. Last Christmas I Gave You My Heart… Need I say more? :-)

So, people have a Holly Jolly Christmas!!


*I am so full of Christmas carols right now… Hehe.