Happy new year.

P.S. 7, Elmhurst, Queens.
1997

Ms. Kennedy: "What would you like to be?"
Me: "I think I want to be a poet, but I know my dad won't let me."
Ms. Kennedy: "Well you know, you can always be a poet and be something else."

In elementary and middle school I kept a journal of "poetry." I wrote in it whenever I had a chance (even on the bus on the way to school). Maybe Ms. Kennedy was right. But every week and every year just passes, and the older I get the more I fail at making time.

What I'm trying to get at is- hopefully 2010 is the year that I am a poet and something else :)

On spiritualism

Thought I'd share a few of my favorite writings and quotes that deal with not only life, but the sentience of our souls if that makes sense.

The world is iconic, or it is ironic.

The devil, not God, heareth the zealot's prayer.

Judge people by the extent to which they are alive.

He is dead, who does not feel the Qur'an move in his hands.

We would change the world, did it not entertain us so.

There is justice, and there is just-us.

-Abdal-Hakim Murad

Let sorrowful longing dwell in your heart,

never give up, never lose hope.

The Beloved says, "The broken ones are favored."

Crush your heart, be broken.

-Shaikh Abu Saeed Abhil Kheir, Sufi Poet (967-1049)

"If a son of Adam had one mountain of gold, he would only want a second one."

"...be like the first and the better of the two sons of Adam who said,

'If you raise your hand to kill me, I will not raise mine to kill you;

surely I fear God, the Lord of the worlds.' "

-The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.

I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song that I came to sing remains unsung."

-Sir Rabindranath Tagore

Some ramblings...I should sleep.

Apparently the guy at the Vitamin Shoppe runs a mean hustle. If you hesitate to buy anything he recommends, he whips out his cell phone to show you pics of him flexing because he "personally uses this product." This one guy came in to buy chromium, but he was convincing him to buy a more expensive product by saying that chromium expires really fast. Meanwhile, a customer in the back about to purchase some chromium overhears and puts the bottle back on the shelf. The manager immediately runs back to reassure the guy that the chromium carried at the Vitamin Shoppe is of the highest quality only and "never expires".

I really want to go somewhere- I wonder where my next vacation will be and when, now that I'm working. My brother just told me that an acquaintance of his got back from a "vacation" in Bangladesh because it's the only place his parents would let him go haha (FYI, this acquaintance is the infamous pigeon killer. I'll keep you updated if I hear anything else about his rampage). So, I hope the next vacation isn't in Bangladesh because I'd really like to explore other places. The only planned family vacations we ever took (excluding Bangladesh) were to Toronto and...Niagara Falls. My brother and I were actually talking about this the other day. It was like 2 vans full of Bollywood DVD's and our entire extended family here in NYC--and my mom brought along daal and a rice cooker (I had totally forgotten all about the rice cooker until yesterday).

I guess traveling is just something I'd like to do alone or with a friend- I had a great time in Southern Europe this Spring, and in Kuwait exploring with my brother a couple of years ago. So iA at the end of this year I hope to hit up Paris and London. I love my family but they have different tastes in where they want to go I guess. For example, with my mom, I'd go to India because she really wants to go to Agra lol.

Good night xo.

The beginning of the restofmylife

No, I'm not getting married. First day of my full time job; or technically it's the first day of training. So my official first day is Thursday. Extremely excited, but still scared because of the responsibilities that'll face me in the months to come. I mean I've already been paying for my own things like my car and insurance but now I've finally switched over to paying for my own cell. For some reason, not being on the Family Plan anymore seems like a much bigger deal.

But the real thought that hangs over me is that after all those years of schooling, in Astoria, and Connecticut, and Stuy (which Sanam and I agree, was much harder than college), I've finally reached the end (for now). It's a good feeling, but also quite stressful. No more excuses- everything that I've ever dreamt of doing, I have to start working for, from this day forward.

Wish me luck (:

Love,

me.

So glad this week is over...baby seals

Almost a month! A lot has happened.
Europe was amazing. I could totally see myself living in Rome but at the end of the day NYC is NYC. Haha everyone there was like, "whoa, you're from NY, it's my dream to go there!"

So I had the worst week ever- aside from school stuff like a midterm, a paper, and a project due over three days, I get my wallet with my whole life in it stolen in Watertown. I hate thieves. Luckily the cards can be replaced and the only thing I'll have to pay for (well in addition to the cash I had in there) is getting a new license (and wallet, I guess). I have no idea why these people don't just take the money and leave the wallet/cards they can't use cause obviously the owner will cancel them.

The plot thickens as I'm heading to the police department to file a report on the theft...I get pulled over for doing nothing wrong :( The cop tries to make me believe that I ran a red when the light was clearly green (not even yellow). I tell him what happened to me and he acts like he's doing me a big favor by giving me a warning and not fining me, but writes me a citation anyway for something I clearly didn't do.

Other than that I am currently obsessed with baby seals.

It's so terrible that they're being clubbed :(.


Really cute video:

"Don't Pet This Kitty"

I am officially terrified of this creature. I wouldn't watch this in the dark...I couldn't stop laughing but at the same time I was so creeped out. The guy claims she was never abused but just hates men and so reacts this way to them.











And a Jasmin cat related moment:

lemonCUPCAKE23: omg in history today
lemonCUPCAKE23: the professor goes
lemonCUPCAKE23: anyone here know what lolcats are
lemonCUPCAKE23: i was the ONLY ONE
lemonCUPCAKE23: everyone stares at me
IW: hahahahahhahahhaha
lemonCUPCAKE23: and i go "what, i make them..of my kitten.."
lemonCUPCAKE23: BAD idea.
IW: hhahahahhahaha
IW: good lord, I would have paid money to have been there
lemonCUPCAKE23: yeah luckily i was a senior and there were mostly freshmen in the class so like i didn't feel like that big of a loser...like whatever they're freshmen

Planning on catching up with my readings ALL DAY.

Further proof of my praying cat

Cute until she gets annoying. SO much homework this semester. Had such an amazing weekend, and it needs a part TWO...so I'm going home February 13th-16th to chill with the marauders again.

I was lucky enough to get four birthday cakes this week, including my first ever birthday ice cream cake!!! I would be so jealous of my brother growing up because only HE would get an ice cream cake with his July birthday and what not. Dayna, Angie and I ate the chocolate funfetti cake all weekend. Too scared to weigh myself.

Excited (:

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to IBM and particularly to our Finance community. You are joining our company at a challenging, but exciting time in our century-long history. As the world's economic landscape becomes more global, open and competitive, IBM has the unique ability to transform business and society through innovation and technology.

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I hope that you find your experience at IBM a rewarding one. I look forward to you joining our team.

Mark Loughridge
Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer

F My Life

http://www.fmylife.com

Some favorites:

"Today, I was feeling sick, so I called my boyfriend who lives down the street to come and keep me company. He replied with, "no, I can't come over, I'm busy, I'm playing xbox. FML"

"Today, all three of my meals consisted of 2 hot pockets. FML"

"Today, my parents told me that they received a letter from a prison. Being curious they opened it up and read the entire thing. It was from this girl I randomly met. Now I have a prison stalker and my parents think I date felons. FML"

And the King's pick:
King Iem (7:48:17 PM): Today, I got a text from my roommate asking me if it was cool that my ex was coming over to console him because he's sick. FML

Luckily I did not have an FML moment today as on most days.

Webcamming is my new obsession. The twins love seeing me do stupid stuff like balance Paris on my head (don't ask). Angelisa and Dayna arrive late tomorrow night, it's going to be a busy weekend. I need another smoothie or something. I don't know why I only drink over-sweetened stuff, water never does the trick.

When you love someone but it goes to waste
could it be worse?
Lights will guide you home,
and ignite your bones
and I will try to fix you.

Coldplay

Twenty-two

So I didn't think I'd get a midnight call this year but exactly at midnight who else calls but my dad...first time he's ever done that in 22 years.

Dad: "Baba, did you know you were born on a Tuesday? So many years later, it is now a Tuesday again. You were born at 7:05AM."

Being the baby that I am I just started crying at his words, I don't know why but I've never bothered to know what time I was born at. I guess I knew it was on a Tuesday or a Thursday. And like all these years he remembered and decided to bring it up on this birthday.

Kumar (aka Anik aka Faisal Mahmud my dear and only brother) serenaded me with a badly sung, but still sweet "Happy Birthday Dear Emo Sister" when he heard I was crying lol.

Great start to the day, shortly afterward King Iem appeared to return my vacuum...followed by G-Boy and Fahim with a "giant cupcake birthday cake" (picture to be posted later) they spent all afternoon baking.

Shout outs to all of my amazing friends, I feel so lucky to have met you guys! Although... Gaurav got me with cake to the face eventually haha. Revenge will be mine with posting the video of him shrieking in horror and running away from my (baby) kitty! jk...a little.

Lots of peace + love.

First week of classes

Five days a week, this is going to take some getting used to. A lot of homework this semester...I cut back on my work hours because of it.

So much Management.

Monday
9:00am-2:00pm: Work
3:35pm-6:15pm: Project Management. Haven't had this class yet cause of MLK.

Tuesday
12:45pm-2:00pm: GB401 (Strategic Management).
2:10pm-3:25pm: Archaeology and Ancient Civilization :)
3:35pm-4:50pm: Career Management. Really nice professor.

Wednesday
9:00am-1:00pm: Work
2:10pm-3:25pm: Organization and Environment. GREAT class.

Thursday
2:10pm-3:25pm: Archaeology and Ancient Civilization
3:35pm-4:50pm: Career Management

Friday
12:45pm-2:00pm: GB401 (Strategic Management)
2:10pm-3:25pm: Organization and Environment

So Very Sick

Man I can never sleep after fajr, and what's made it worse is the really scratchy throat I've had the past couple of days. I sure hope it's not from giving G-boy a ride to school this last week cause he had some weird Indian flu or something. Hi G-boy, if you are reading this, I hope you're feeling better cause I'm not!

Anyway I'm going to have to stay in bed all day because if I try to talk I will just gag. Even if I don't try to talk I will gag. And I need tea and lots of it but if I drink it now I definitely won't fall asleep :(.

And gosh...I don't want to unearth my car. I've left it for a day and the snow's probably become all ice now; should've listened to my dad and cleaned it yesterday. At this point I can't even tell which one my car is in the lot, gonna have to poke around and have a look-see. School's closed and opens tomorrow but I guess I have to head out to Staple's at some point to get notebooks and stuff.

My current obsession by the way is taaz.com, I mean I've visited all those online hair makeover sites before but this one was really amazing. Sanam sent it to me. It actually looks kind of real unlike the other ones where it just looks like a bad wig. Will definitely experiment here before my next haircut. It's like the little Barbie makeover game my sisters play but for adults!

Kumar had a terrible reaction to the pic of me with what was supposed to be Beyonce's blonde hair:

lkaotix: it snows OUTSIDE for a day and you get sick
lkaotix: i play tackle football in the snow and dont get ssick
lemonCUPCAKE23: did you see me blonde
lkaotix: how do we have the same genes
lkaotix: get well soon anyway
lemonCUPCAKE23: we don't
lkaotix: and yes
lkaotix: it was quite nice work
lemonCUPCAKE23: you have the good immunity genes
lemonCUPCAKE23: i have the good looking genes
lemonCUPCAKE23: i think it was a nice trade-off, don't you think
lkaotix: i soooo saw that coming
lkaotix: but i also have to thank fahim for killing my taste in beyonce
lkaotix: that's gone forever
lemonCUPCAKE23: what the hell beyonce is the best thing ever
lemonCUPCAKE23: and fyi that was all me, not fahim on ps, it's this online makeover site

Bronx License Plates Vol. 1

As promised...saw this on the walk home from Rizzy's house. By the way, I was supposed to time the walk back but forgot to. It was probably 20 minutes.

Rizzy's mom's biriani was great ;-D and so was the rasmalai. We watched Saathiya since I had never seen it. Vivek Oberoi needs to stop touching his hair. The movie itself was touching, especially when family stuff happened (the daughter being kicked out etc.-same deal with my older sis blah blah). I liked how they were realistic with the whole relationship falling apart after marriage thing, so un-Bollywood. But really, that stuff doesn't just happen after marriage. It happens when any two people are together for too long; and they made it out to be a bigger problem than it really is. Loved most of the songs though, obviously.

I hope there's good stuff on TV for Christmas Eve...can't believe it's gonna be over so soon. I wish my little sisters still believed in Santa lol--they saw the wrapping paper I said "Santa" used to wrap their presents in my closet last year and it's been a dead subject since!

New Year's Eve...

...is almost here and I still don't have cable at home. This means that once again I will miss out on the event I look forward to every single year- the Sci-Fi channel's Twilight Zone Marathon. The only other person willing to watch the whole thing with me is Shuvo probably, but he is all the way in Jamaica and obviously it's not cool to have girls over. Not to mention that it would be hard to disguise me as male due to my 15 year old girl voice (when will it go away?).
Let me start off by saying that The Twilight Zone undoubtedly has some of the most creative pieces of writing in American television history. Sure, some of it was corny (hey it was the 1960's...think of desi shows now, I guess it's of the same caliber), but the majority of it is still appealing to us 90's kids. Also, if you haven't watched the series, you obviously miss out on all the references that are everywhere nowadays.

My favorite reference (not episode, persay):
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
You know, the hideous ape-gremlin creature terrorizing William Shatner on the airplane's wings? No one believes him because it's out of view whenever he has someone look. At the end of the episode he's taken away in a straitjacket, but the damage to the plane shows that something did indeed try to sabotage the plane in-flight. That thing is everywhere, from The Simpsons to, most recently, Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa. When I was in the theater barely anyone else laughed at the scene during Madagascar and I was shaking my head lol. I mean it was even in the Twilight Zone movie from the 80's, wasn't it?

Time Enough at Last
This is another one that comes up from time to time (it was in The Simpsons also). A banker that never has time to read or do the things he wants to is the only survivor of a nuclear attack, and heads to the library to read books for the rest of his lonely life...dude ends up breaking his reading glasses though when he sits down and opens one.

My favorite episode would be The Howling Man, but here are some others along with it:
The Howling Man- A man claims to have trapped the devil and tells his story.
Nightmare as a Child- A woman with repressed childhood memories re-lives her past.
After Hours- A woman at a department store isn't really who she thinks she is.

Anyway, I will probably be watching them online at cbs.com and pretending it's the marathon.
As for today, I will be watching a movie at Rizzy's house. It's 11:25 AM and I'm gonna eat breakfast now!

Featuring: Tales from Kumar

Law and Order late last night: When a girl is murdered, a wannabe rapper named "Gotz Money" is the first suspect...the detectives enter his apartment for a search.
Gotz Money: What are yall doin in Gotz Money's crib?
Ice-T: We Gotz a warrant.

Lol seriously?

But this got me thinking, I should really be starting off these entries with pointless stories from my 19 year old brother, Anik (better known to my friends as Kumar), starting with the most recent.

*Disclaimer* All of these stories really did take place as bizarre as they may sound. Also, I'm fully aware that I'm endangering the credibility of my blog with their nature.

Kumar is staying over at our cousin, Omi's...at about 2AM, everyone except Kumar and Omi are awake. Kumar heads to their kitchen for a drink of water when he sees a shadow dart across the room. Knowing that everyone in the house is asleep, he runs back to Omi's room screaming- "Yo Omi! You got some sort of jinn or spirit in your house." Omi starts to freak out and both of them creep back to the kitchen. Turns out it's some "bangla guy in a lungi eating in the kitchen who appeared from some dark recess of their house." He doesn't have any fam in the U.S. and pays Omi's family for board...Omi knew all along but played along to freak out Kumar.

The End. If I don't have any new ones to share, I will refer back to some classics.

Also of potential interest- the license plates in this neighborhood yo...if I ever see MAIN EVNT or PUNISH U again I'll be sure to take pics.

Update from a couple of days ago: Kumar is annoying. So Eclipse and Breaking Dawn came in the mail the other day, and my dad hand-delivers them to me. "Look at how good Nupur is, always reading books! You never read books anymore, Anik." Anik: "She just reads love stories, look at them, they're about romance." If I wasn't brown I probably would've been red, and I tried to defend myself by mumbling stuff about them being vampire novels. My dad didn't say anything else. Damn you, Kumar.

Christmas in the Bronx

It's too cold...I love shopping though so I ventured out :)
Kitty is getting cuter day by day. When her pupils are extra-dilated she looks like puss in boots from shrek lol. She looks a little evil when her eyes are in slits and almost like a completely different cat altogether.

Three more weeks at home- will build a snowman with Rizzy at some point. I watched Barbie in a Christmas Carol today with my sisters, it was an OK movie, not as good as her other ones haha. A little boring; it needed more of a change in scenery because everything, except "Christmas Past" was set in her bedroom and theater and that is a little pet peeve of mine when it comes to movies. I like lots of different settings. They finally had a non-white doll as one of the "lead" characters which was a first. They were going for this whole Victorian England time period, which was great, but they didn't show much of it and it didn't quite feel like Victorian England anyway.

I got Naurene the Christmas Carol doll already (see left) and it'll be here like December 24th, but I haven't ordered Farhene's Mariposa one yet. I'll get to it. I told Naurene she can't open her one until the other doll comes too...we'll see how that goes.

Coming soon...

I'll eventually post the stories I wrote for my short story class this past semester, once I'm not totally embarassed by them. But so far, I've uploaded pretty much everything I've written that's worth sharing from 2002 up until this year. I figure this blog will come in handy when I'm scrambling for stuff to put in my culminating experience for my liberal studies major. Or if my computer dies a horrible death, my past 6 years of writing won't be in vain. I also threw in some of my favorite poems and quotes as well. I uploaded everything in order so the further you go back the older the writing is, and I added the labels tab to the side to make everything less confusing.

I also have at least three poems in my head that I should write down pretty soon, because they don't come into my head often (and definitely not at convenient times, mostly when I'm trying to fall asleep). And, confirming the "price for creativity" that we were talking about in my psych class a few weeks back, I only get inspired when I'm not so happy. Coming across three ideas in about a month is a pretty good thing in my opinion, but I guess that also tells you about my current state.

I'm typing this as my amazing 2 and a half month old kitten, Paris, is curled up against my leg. I love how she finds me everywhere...she was getting really annoying when she kept trying to climb on my keyboard though but she eventually gave up and fell asleep.

I wonder what I'm going to accomplish this winter. Aside from homework for my wintersession and reviewing Piecework submissions, I need to order Eclipse (finished New Moon this past Friday), and get Mariposa Barbie and Christmas Carol Barbie for the twins. I want to start re-reading the Quran this break too.
Ang's birthday is next Friday, and the three of us are gonna revive our Holiday Scavenger Hunt after a 3-year hiatus. I'll probably finally pierce my nose that same day.

And lastly, I need to do something about getting Paris spayed, although I think 3 months might be a little too early.

Update: I've added a new tab on the side at Steve's request.