Choti Choti Khushiyan

I just realize how dorky engineers are!!! I was racing around and bouncing off the walls just cuz a voltage went from a lousy 0V to a not so magestic 3.3V!!! And I can guarantee people must have thought this guy has gone nuts!

Ok I m nuts but thats not the point! Engineers ki choti choti khushiyan is the point! We are the most easily satisfied bunch! We dont want a bloody porsche or the office with a view! We just want our damn projects to WORK!!!

Argh! But wee do want a porsche, and an office with a view (to a beautiful secretary of course! Not those views of the city! Thats just lame not to mention boring!)

Alone

I m a weirdo, a freak! I live alone, I eat alone, I work alone, I like being alone… Heck I even talk to myself. That makes things quite easy for me, I have to take care of my own shit, I dont have people to blame for a lot of shit but myself. Most of the time I feel awkward among people, even the people who have known me for ages.In fact I prefer strangers for some reason, maybe because they are more interesting than a person you know.

So I learnt that getting real estate is a bitch, especially when money is definitely an object of great GREAT reverence! Even more so when you like living alone. Khair, Getting to the point, I got a flat shared by 5 Paki blokes and I ll be the sixth. And now I m starting to feel very VERY queasy about it, sharing a living space with 5 Paki guys…. Ok Paki guys are different from the rest of they guys, especially when its just guys. Its like a wolfpack. You show weakness, abnormality and/or fart differently, you get slaughered at the altar of amusement and ravaged like being attacked by hyenas…. almost literally, and whats more, You get to listen to crappy music all day…. wait, wait, lemme rephrase crappy Pushto music (since a dude there is Pathan… and you dont mess with a Pathan’s stereo! You never know… he might get….. well lets just leave the subtleties of masculine behavior at that).

I move in two days…. and I cant imagine how much shit load of stupid stuff I have gathered in the course of ten months that I have lived on campus! I have a small fridge for one, a desktop comp for another. And a shit load of stuff I dont need and have never used! like broom, bucket, mop and what not! And suffice it to say its a pigsty.

Getting back to living alone… I just realized this… I have been living alone for about 6 years now.

ProcRastinating (Take 1) Happy?

Ok, if you need to know how much a grad student procastinates, read phdcomics !

So this is me procrastinating

Ok, it first started out as a simple doodle, then it turned into a project. Now it actually looks the way I want it to.

Interesting

The most awesome shirt I have ever seen! Hahahahahahahaha

My paper and its demise

The story goes that we have bee going through a slight rough patch these days as I got my scholarship rejected, my project was not going so right, and then I was pushed into a testing stage prematurely, and to top it off since I have returned from Pakland, I have this bad (and uneasy) taste in my mouth which I have had before but cant quite make it out. Somehow it is so familiar, yet I just cant place it in my string of memories. Khair

here is the paper, actually the unedited version. the edited version is on my laptopster.

So now about the paper, when I was about to finish and submit the paper, my sup comes up and tells me to not submit. Ok the problem is that I completely agree with his reasons, that our work is premature, we have nt done complete testing and we need the user experience survey data too, which is a real bitch. It still pisses me. And so much so that I m like a rabid dog these days, I go after and ravage anything that so much as steps my way. My temper is so short that even my first love, my computer has been a target… I just broke my keyboard the other day.

Khair… So lets stay away from people for a while.

Listen to this… Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Hmph

I know I m an ass and that I m too full of myself… maybe a bit too much, but lately I have been amplified by, I dont know, circumstance., Yes lets blame it on circumstance.

Khair, I m writing this paper and even though I know I m the most pathetic of writers, I just can make heads or tails of what I write, especially on this paper. I just want to get over and done with, this word searching in lieu of soul searching is so…. boring.

And I need a drawing/picture editing software for this damn paper…. pain(t) is not going to cut it.

Countdown to Submittion (if that ever happens)

I knew writing research papers was a bitch, but I did nt know they would actually be this bad… To tell the truth I m doing nothing, I write like just for two hours or so in the day and sleep the rest, but then, it should be fun by my standards, right? WRONG! Its the constant reminder that you are worth nothing in this world and that your life’s work amounts to the Planck’s constant! Ok now I m being overly dramatic, its not my life’s work… Heck I dont even have a life!

Khair four days to go, till the deadline and I have nt got my first draft yet, I ll have you give it to my sup sometime tonight or early tomorrow. And the real bitch are the diagrams and the tables, I have nt used paint so much in the entire life as much as I have used in this past week. But I also got to learn LaTeX out of this experience which is somewhat good.

Finally, that wierd feeling in the pit of my stomach? The one I have nt felt in a long while…. its back! And this time around I have no idea why! Maybe that why I m sleeping so much, or maybe its just the ramadhan taking its toll, lets wait and see. My “Eid” would be on 17th, thats when the submition is, the real eid is on 20th I think.

Married women hate group (or something like it)

Aaaaah! Love (fake) and weddings are in the air. I have five acquintances who are tying the knot in the very near future. And two of them are chicks.

And since I m the one who is stuck between the rock and the hard place, I have to listen to their rants. Not that I mind. It’s just that there is such disparity between my used-to-be single “acquintances” and soon-to-be married acquintances. Now men are a bit bearable in their rants for the obvious reasons that they are less rants and more of a Parade! Mind you that these assholes were the same ones who used to say marriage is so over-rated in that very ominous fake-beverly-hills accent. Argh hypocricy! Now they cant wait to get married (read get laid), which is understandable.

OK now lets come to the main course of the day…. soon-to-be-married women folk. Now this one chick I know, was so against marriage just a few months back that I secretly thought that she was probably a guy! And now? She just cant wait to tie the knot! Heck if she got her way, she’d probably elope with her new toy and get married! Comon! Hold your horses and live a little! Watching her I have come to know, that no matter how feminist, how butch, how modern, how “philosophically balanced” and my personal favourite “the intellectuall superior to denounce the “institution of marriage”" a woman is, they just cant wait to get married. Yet they will put a facade of intellectualism/hip modernism/work/whatever, which I have yet to find a purpose for.

Ok now for the desert. Women can do anything, but the only thing they cant not do is get married, even if they dont want to. And they will make the most lamest of excuses for it. And those excuses are what’s so interesting.  Cuz they will tell you not that how they dont want to get married, but how they do want to get married!

So this is a hate post? NO… but my problem is that I want people (women folk) to get their story straight. At least acknowledge that you want to get married, (I m talking about the ones who dont plan to get married in the near future.) but you have not found the right guy yet. Now is that so hard to say. And this is one reason why I love the policy of this blog. She is truthful and confident about it. Now that is mature! The rest, write that down and…    GROW THE HELL UP ALREADY!

Love and patriotism

Love and patriotism, two of the most over-rated feelings we have. Yet we aspire to them more than goodness and all other crap.

Khair, I was chatting with a mixed group of people, they were from all over the place, and suffice it to say, they were fascinated why I was a Pakistani. What they could nt understand was my country is pathetic, its filled with stupid, fucked up people who care more about Shahrukh khan than the place they live in, its dirty and its horrible (I would nt deny that), yet I love it, I m patriotic about it and I would go back there one day.

Well I launched into one of those riddiculous speeches about motherland and great people and other loads of crap that I could come up with, but later I realized something, why I and the rest of the Pakistani’s love their country (at least overtly). You see, the best lover that you can have is the one your have to fight with, you have to make an effort to get close to, you have to go through all the bad stuff, the screams and the shouts and the acting outs to actually get to the core. and even though you ll end up hating them, but you ll love them nonetheless. Hate and love are not exclusive or’ed!

An American, or an indian, or some european bloke would love their country cuz there are so many things to love. A Pakistani would love his or her country not because there are many things to love, cuz frankly there are nt, and those that are are being taken away one by one. But because there are so many things to hate that we learn to find things to love in all that mess. And its the effort that makes you fall head over heels for that country. You go through so much crap that you end up saying, I went through all that just for you my love, for in the end you are worth it.

Thats why I love my country. Not because its a bed of roses, but because its not and yet for me it is, and it is mine, Mine all mine.

EDIT: listen to this song,

Epiphanies at 2am

Ok if I (or any other grad student for that matter) ever gets an epiphany, a great idea. it would be either at 2 in the morning or on the throne (aka shit can)! I ve had this idea when I was on the throne at 2 am in the morning about my project…. but sadly I cant implement it because of time constraints (read paper deadline to meet).

This made me realize (somehow, dont ask how) that I have a ton of obsessions. Here are some to name a few.

1)  The person I m leeching this month (and the next month, and the next month, oh they keep changing) (Yes I m a total stalker)

2) Whatever I m working on…. these days its my project.

3) Computer games… I fell for them when I was 10, have nt got over them. The first game I saw was Dave, the second Doom 2, and thats when I started to program computers. Since then there is no turning back!

4) Gadgets, I need to get the next big thing in town, and I get so obsessed to get them that I pretty much dont care how I get them. I should nt give examples cuz they would make me look really bad.

5) My imaginary friends…. I dont have real ones so, what can I do, cant stop my mind from roaming.

6) The book that I ve just read…. I m really susceptible to new ideas, it takes a while for me to make my own opinion I guess. Yeah I m gullible.

7) Being loved, or lack of. I run away at the first sign of emotion. I never understood why.

Anything Macho…. obsessed with muscle cars (old ones) and some of those cute sports cars too, Choppers (Its a dream to buy one),  Leather Jackets and old looking sunglasses (Dont like the new trendy ones).

9) Aircrafts…. especially Fighters. There was I time when I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer so bad! I could name the plane and its specs just by looking at a silhouette since the age of six!

10) Taking stuff apart. Oh my parents used to keep screw drivers and tools away from me when I was little. and now that I can afford them, there is no stopping them. And really? I dont fix them. I just open them up and leave them as is.

11) Black t-shirts and blue jeans, thats all I wear! Seriously? I have about 10 black t-shirts, and 8 blue jeans! I have only one blue t-shirt, and That too because someone gae it to me out of sympathy!

12) Short nails and hair. Cant stand long nails, I have to keep a nail cutter on my desk! And if dont like other people having long nails especially! Somehow it grosses me out!

13) Me. Obviously.

EDIT:

PHD Comics Rule!