Murphy's a h8r

For the record everything about Coke Studio irritates me. I'm not really sure why, and my irrational response probably shows that I'm a douche. This weekend I was hanging out at a friend's place. This friend and her boyfriend happen to be from Pakistan, and are very into douchey music like the doors. Besides this they listen to a lot of Pakistani music and had a whole bunch of Coke Studio on (I think it was Coke Studio at least, typically vaguely classical instruments, acoustic guitars and warbling). So I got to hear this song called saari raat (literal translation: all night) about this dude who's up all night wishing the worst for some person. There's a verse in there which actually says:

jab teri aankhein so jaye
aur teri yaadein kho jaye
tere tan main tere man main
tere ghar ko aag lag jaye
aur tujhe jaag na aaye

vague translation:

when your eyes fall asleep
and your memories are lost
in your body in your mind
your house should burn down
and you don't wake up

:O

Whoa, Coke Studio! What's with the intensely hate-filled songs? Needless to say, in my douchy tradition I've started listening to this ode to ill will and started vicariously enjoying the hate.

In other news tomorrow I'm attempting to drive to the hospital for my appointment. This will be my first time driving somewhere which isn't work or the mall, as mentioned earlier. I've got my GPS ready, though, GPS lady, I don't see how announcing 'in 750 meters get on the highway' is a useful instruction. The roads of Dubai are horrible where if you miss one turn you're halfway to Sharjah before you can turn around and fix it. So I really hope she's a little more useful tomorrow. And it also doesn't help that I had thai food for dinner, where my bravado made me ask for 'thai spicy' level of spicy and now I have a potentially upset stomach. The egg fried rice was rice, egg and red chillies. Red chillies EVERYWHERE. In a 5:1 ratio to all other ingeredients. God, I hate the GPS lady and the thai so much.

my yoga place is shut because it's friday, i want to get drunk but then my brother won't let me drive to the mall at night to pick up thai food.

this weekend is fraught with conflict and choices.

cheap bastard Murphy

Dudes. I’m so bored. I think I want to start applying to schools. I’m not even sure I want to do an MBA. Maybe an MSc in something gnarly like Finance or Agrarian Economics. I wrote that and went off to look at websites for business schools and now my head hurts. I don’t feel very competitive anymore, or maybe I’m just lazy and used to having a job where I turn up and they pay me and the thought of going to a business school and being surrounded by hypercompetitive ambitious types who are all trying to see who can get by on the least sleep is very very painful. Which is why I like the sound of a mellow MSc or MA. But nothing fruity, like my best friend’s soon to start course in Semiotics.

I think I’m just old and lazy.

I feel crabby and irritable. I’m not going to go on about how I’m surrounded by petty misers, because even I can realize that the problem clearly lies with me for surrounding myself and liking these petty cheap bastards, and what makes it so much worse, for going on whining about it. Fuck ‘em and fuck whining. From now on, there will be only chillaxing and chillaxing to the max.

I’m going home for two weeks in October and I’m already thinking about who among these people here do I trust enough to leave my plants with. The obvious answer to the question is also probably traveling at the time. My plants are kind of fussy. The place that I bought them from gave explicit instructions to water them only once a week. That sounded wrong to me, but considering I have no prior flora related experience, I shrugged and tried it. On the second day itself I could see immediate droopage. So I started watering daily, but that didn’t help. I tried moving the plants around and that didn’t help, if I’d left them out on the balcony they’d have charred to a crisp. So I finally figured out the perfect schedule, water them every alternate day and leave them during the day on the ledge next to my window-wall, so they get sunlight all day. Then in the evening, my paranoid / super smart brother forces me to pick them all up and move them out of my room because I sleep with the door closed and will apparently die of carbon dioxide poisoning.

So, BASICALLY, I need to figure out who I trust enough to make sure my precious plants don’t wilt. Otherwise I’m going to have to lug them to India with me. Where my cats will promptly tear them to shreds and sit on them.

**

I’ve just returned from a super quick lunch at home with my brother. An advantage of living practically next door to work. I’m very ready to put in the remaining 5 odd hours here and get a move on this weekend. This weekend I’m ready to get vaguely acquainted with the city and its very confusing roads. Couple of days ago I had a day off and had errands to run and actually left my car at home and took a cab because I couldn’t even fathom driving around the city and actually getting where I wanted to go. So far the car has only been to my office, the mall and home. All three locations are within a 2 kilometer distance, so that’s something that clearly needs to be worked on.

From somewhere on the internet: ‘it is actually urgent that we connect with the world, not hide from it with drink or drugs or television or literary skill; that paying attention to nothing but the movie inside one’s head will ultimately kill you’

I’m evidently a diarist, here. Calling people names and pasting random stuff off the internet.

the fan on my newish macbook pro made a scary sound and altogether stopped today. it restarted, but has left me nervous, like a concerned parent whose kid has just coughed up blood. luckily my child is still within warranty.

i continue to maintain a delicate relationship with the truth. i choose to ignore certain truths about me. i get enraged at the fact that some people insist on lying to me. and they lie, how they lie. everyday, with shamelessly straight faces (fonts?). i tell myself it doesn't matter, everyone doesn't need to share everything, but i'd like to have defined rules which say that some people do.

i just had a three day weekend, a very successful three day weekend. i slept a lot, wasn't irritated once and felt calm throughout. i cleaned and cooked and oiled my hair. did i tell you about my bedroom? one of my walls is a giant window and my view is of the desert with a number of skyscrapers and an artifical / man made bay. it's the strangest kind of beautiful, i never knew i could find a combination of greys, blues and dust pretty.

my mother wants me to buy a four wheel drive. a big, sturdy car that will keep me safe. a) i don't have the money b) i don't want to take a loan and get stuck here paying it off c) i don't know if i can drive a truck. dubai feels like the most unstable city in the world. everyone is here with a very short term plan in mind, it's like the world's one night stand. everyone's cut off from their definition of normal and the mangoes here have no smell. everyone's struggling, the local emirati women take loans every time they leave the country so they can buy designer clothes / bags / shoes / perfumes. there is nothing holding any of us down.

the more time i spend here, the more disconnected i feel. i can't tell if i'm being paranoid or if its my intuition. i have no trust left, i'm just driving around, going to work and learning how to cook.