Life? well it goes on…

It really does. Deaths. Births. Ups. Downs. Something that had a deep effect on you. Something that you’re indifferent to. Something that changed your life. It doesn’t matter what it is, it will be history tomorrow. We waste hours pondering over our past or our future and forget to do the most important thing-live in the moment. There’s a poster in my math teacher’s class that says “there is nothing more important than what you’re doing right now” and I read that poster everyday to remind myself, screw the past & the future and think about now. It’s working for me. My grades have gone up since I decided to pay my full attention to what I am doing at that particular moment, regardless of how pointless I think it is. I am so proud of myself, and yes I just did say that. My grades are exactly what I want them to be, well except for Physics but at least I have the satisfaction that I’m working my a** off in Physics, so I know I’m giving it my 100%-maybe I didn’t get the gene for Physics from my father but it makes me happy that I tried my best. It just wasn’t good enough, and that’s okay with me. I’ve stopped looking down at myself for getting bad grades because it’s not worth it. Why should I let a number dictate my happiness or my sadness? Why should I let a letter represent my mood of the day? Ten years from now no one will remember what grade they got, but they will remember that they spent their high school in depression b/c of bad grades. I don’t want to be one of them.

Last night I was getting creeped out about the fact that next year is my senior year, which means I start university in the fall of next year. It’s a scary thought, because high school is a safe zone for me; I know that no matter what I still have university to make up for it. But university is well…university, one step closer to real life. Anyways, I was thinking about how much I despise high school and the people around but then I started to ponder over what high school did give me. It gave me the most beautiful friendships one could ever imagine, I mean regardless of how irrational people are at my school I know that I have friends I can turn to when I need a shoulder to cry on or a hand to hold on to. And I know that these friendships are going to last my lifetime, even if time or distance do come in between, I know that whenever I meet up with these people it wouldn’t take us a minute to break the ice that time and distance has created. And honestly, these friendships are SO much better than some number in form of a grade that supposedly determines your intelligence.

I’ve always considered myself unlucky, but now that I think about it I might be the luckiest girl in the world. My problems concern whether I am going to get an A on a test, not how I’m going to prevent myself and my family from starving to death or whether I am going to live another day because of an illness. I have so many beautiful people to rely on when I need a break from life. They’re there to listen to me and even if they don’t care, I know that I am not alone.

High school has taught me so much about life in general. It has taught me that talent is a beautiful thing but if talent doesn’t work hard, hard work can defeat talent (okay I totally copied that off our basketball team’s shirts but it still holds true). It has taught me to be patient with ignorance and irrationality and also that not everyone is going to share the same view as I do. It has taught me that there will always be people who value materialistic things over people and relationships-and that they’re never going to learn.

So yeah right now I despise it, but high school hasn’t completely been a waste of my time…

Why I dislike Jersey Shore

A few days ago while skimming through news and the celebrity gossip I landed on a headline that read “Snooki’s book becomes a New York Times Best Seller”. It took me a while to fathom what I had just read while waiting for someone who would recant the statement. For those of you fortunate souls, who’re not aware of who Snooki is or those of you who have not lowered your IQ by watching Jersey shore, let me introduce you to it.

Basically, MTV has come up with a show where they pay people to party, wear clothes worth more than a normal person’s salary, make a fool of themselves and talk about how miserable their life is since their boyfriend decided to dump them because they were cheating on them. I mean, I’m not trying to raze the people working on the show, it’s their job. But what are we, as Americans, watching? I was thirty seconds into the show, right after the beginning titles, and I wanted to expose the person who composed the ‘title song’ to a macabre scenario. I will not include the lyrics because it’s not school appropriate but is that what American teenagers are being taught? That you can get money by fighting with your boyfriend, partying and wearing nice clothes? How is that even possible in the real world? When United States is suffering through the juggernaut of failed economy, this is what is being saturated into the minds of America’s teenagers. This show has clearly sloughed human intellect and reasoning by creating an irrefutable degree of stupidity.

It was five minutes into the show, and I was lackadaisical already and had decided I was never going to watch this show again. I mean these people were arrantly fighting like cats and dogs not willing to conciliate and people apparently seem to enjoy it. I would rather watch a wrestling match than hear Snooki exacerbate at her boyfriend about how terrible of a human being he is. Concept of a delightful badinage is out of their dictionary. If I wanted to watch guys wear designer jeans, fuzzy looking jackets and tight zipper shirts I’d rather watch a modeling campaign than spend an hour looking at the guys in the show who quite frankly look like puffed chickens to me. It has took us millions of years to evolve from apes to the human beings we are today but once you look at the peacock shaped hair of people from Jersey Shore you try to figure out the difference evolution has made. Not only is this show easy to portend but also has a fatuous storyline and is marked by a paucity of original ideas.

Ten minutes into the show and a commercial break follows. I don’t ever recall myself being so glad for a commercial break. After putting up with ten minutes of yelling, screaming, drama and just plain old stupidity I decided to turn the TV off and tackle my APUSH homework. What terrifies me although is the fact that these very people also have a right to vote in our country. No wonder people like Sarah Palin get enough courage to preach their supposedly wise opinions. It’s because there are people like Snooki outsmart her in stupidity with her litany of things that make her life terrible. We wonder why people mock America’s intelligence when we have made a movie, silly bands and other merchandise for a singer, if you may call him that, named Justin Bieber, a show about partying and drinking called Jersey Shore, turned Snooki’s book into a New York Times Best seller and have a probable presidential candidate named Sarah Palin. Well done America, we have a bright future stored ahead of us.

I know some of you watch this show and this was not written to attack you individually or to express my saturnine temperament towards you, trust me I don’t hate you, but it really is hard for me to comprehend why any normal human being would waste an hour of their life on such low standard entertainment that drops your intelligence a couple of echelons. What I have alleged might not be the whole truth but this is what it seemed like to me. Honestly, I wish I could somehow countermand the time I wasted watching this show.

We must keep fighting.

Round and round in circles we run. We, so generously called the youth, are running against the wind. We run to stand out, we run to win, we run to breathe, we run to live, we run to be ourselves, we run to get away from our fears. Each step we take is towards a goal, sometimes we might not even know what the goal is. But we all are running. This escapade called dreams is where we all end with this running. Some find their dreams in reality, while others in sleep.How perfect is the world in our dreams, no boundaries, no restrictions, just us and our fantasy filled realistic world. Yes, it is real for us even though we may be brushed off as reckless teenagers. I am no different from you in any way. We both are constantly working against the propriety of this world to leave a mark. The feeling of invincibility is enough to make us believe that we will bring the change. The pressure upon us wears an invisibility cloak once we are doing what we love. It’s no more the pressure, in fact it turns into this adrenaline rush that forces us to make what’s expected of us our goal. Every single day trying our best to walk the path untraveled. Like E.E.Cumming said “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing it’s best night and day to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting”. We must fight this battle within ourselves until we run out of our last breath. We must keep fighting. We must keep resisting. We must keep trying to be different.

I understand Chris McCandless from Into The Wild. He was no different than us. He was sick and tired of the fake, materialistic, demanding world around him. He thought that the only truth left in this world is in nature. People wonder how he can be generous enough to dump his car, refuse his parents who offered to buy him a new one, burn his money and just go and live of the wild. When you’re living in a world that is constantly telling you what to do, what not to do, what is right, what is wrong. When you’re living in a world that tells you the number of degrees you have determines your intelligence and qualification for a job, and not your skills. When you’re living in a world where people you thought you were closest to, turn out to be full of lies. You just want out. You no longer wish to be associated with plasticity of the people around you. I think I understand the inclination he had towards wild, because wild is sincere. No matter how hard a dog tries to talk, he is always guna bark. Animals, plants, oceans, nature in general stays true to itself even despite all the changes it goes through. But we as human beings give into what’s considered ‘normal’ in this world. When will we learn to remain true to ourselves?

Death

Death is a life’s change event. It sneaks up on you and out of no where changes your whole world. Everytime we lose someone, a part of us is torn away. When a death occurs, you realize the true importance of life. Our everyday concerns seem mundane and futile in front of death. It makes you want to break free from all the shackles put on you by responsibility and live without any boundaries. It makes you realize how small you are in this world. And mercilessly it just stands there laughing at you and your immortality because it is eternal.

I really despise death. It leaves you hollow. Something that you can surely survive without, but for the rest of your life that piece of you would always be missing. It’s like the dark, better to avoid it than to confront what’s inside it. I don’t think death is hard for those who die. Another adventure perhaps. But for those of us who’re left behind, it sucks. But what sucks even more is knowing that life will move on. People would grieve and then all will be forgotten eventually. Because that is the harsh reality of life, it goes on.

Personally, death would be interesting. My curiosity to find out what happens after we die is far greater than my fear of death. That is not what I am worried about. What concerns me is the death of someone close to my heart. I know how obvious this sounds. But when I lost my parents, I was really young. After their death, nothing affected me for a while. I didn’t shed a tear on my grandmother’s death and I was really close to her, because I thought the worse was over. I thought that I could never value anyone as much as my parents in my life ever again and so I would be indifferent to death. And I was right to an extent. Death doesn’t affect me, it’s the suffering that it leaves behind that breaks my heart. I never wept at my grandmother’s death because we had been expecting it for years. She was sick and in pain and death only relieved her pain. And I think that’s how it will always be. About a year and a half ago when I had recently gotten a Tumblr, I wrote something about how I didn’t understand people who considered suicide. I thought such people were weak and pathetic, but now I understand why. Death relieves the pain. It’s blissful, if you may.

‘We’re drowning in information and starving in knowledge’-Rutherford D. Rogers

A sixteen year old high school student, in her junior year, wakes up to the screeching alarm clock and prevailing stress of her AP classes, with her mind mourning over the colossal amounts of information it has to preserve. The human mind perceives knowledge based on observations and what it engulfs from the surroundings. So basically it has to be fed something, like wise every other organ in human body, to synthesize something. But the information itself is useless unless catalyzed by creativity.

Now when that sixteen year old spends four hours trying to memorize Causes of the American Revolution, her mind will start to wear off. After that, no matter how hard she tries, she will end up not learning anything. This leads to a question; why is their so much pressure on human brain? Why is it that she has to spend so many hours straining her brain just to remember some facts which she will forget by the next day when she can utilize the same amount of time in learning something less stressful and more knowledgeable? This continuous stress on an ambiguous mind leads to the severe abhorrence in students towards education. The dreadful memorization contributes to apathy for knowledge hence no one craves to learn. The repetitive failure because of not being able to reiterate piles of information replaces the profound desire for learning something one wishes for. And this results in lack of appreciation of knowledge. That very teenager, who although will do her best on every test and will go with the flow, will never witness the magnificence of what she is being taught. The beauty behind the mindset of people in that century will be a stranger to her since she doesn’t have time to ponder over such ‘non-beneficial’ thoughts. And when a growing mind doesn’t have time to think and be creative, the world that trails ahead is a sad world.

In 1984, George Orwell creates a world of imprisoned thoughts. He invents this imaginary character, Big Brother, who is basically the god of a certain society and controls everything that is going around. He implants theories in people’s minds, theories such that if enforced a person would be willing to believe that “War is Peace”, “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength”. Although the society has deep information regarding what’s going on in the world, altered version however so, it still lacks imagination. Human mind has to be fed really inauspicious ideas about life indeed to trick it against thinking. “ThoughtCrime” as stated in the book against any intellect that dares to think outside the given perimeter is punished. The amount of information thrown upon us creates the very same perimeter, except maybe we are not banished for thinking by the government.

The sea of information is a misnomer to starve that sixteen year old brain from knowledge. The load of that data tires the brain creating a diversion from real issues. This diversion leads to creation of a biased opinion in that mind since it runs short on the correct ‘food’ of thought. It lacks enough knowledge to form an unbiased opinion therefore leading to a large majority having similar beliefs. A technique used by politicians to dictate people’s lives without actually being accused of a dictator.

It’s about 2 am and the sixteen year old still loathes what follows the next day. Not because she despises knowledge but because her brain is leaking facts. She awaits some sort of an epiphany to balance out the load on her brain, but alas she drowns in the ‘knowledgeable’ information.

2000-2010

Hmm this was probably the worst & the best decade for me. I lost four very important people in my life and those days, now that I look back, were terrible for me. Probably my darkest days and even though I learned so much about life from those days I wish to never revisit those days/memories. I think there was way too much sadness the first like eight years? But it got so much better. I learned three most important things a person could have: Patience, Love and Fortitude. Words would fail me if I begin to describe the important of these three things in life but here’s my attempt.

Patience. So important to just survive. Patience is when you know the other person is wrong but you still hear him out hoping that he got something right. Patience is hoping for the rainbow after the rain. Patience is bearing out your pains and sorrows in belief that your future will be better. Patience is giving your mind a little kick when it becomes too narrow to engulf other’s beliefs. Patience is in a teacher explaining something to his student over an dover hoping that he would understand a tiny part of it everytime. But most importantly patience is calming that storm of anxiety in your heart which otherwise is huge enough to destroy you.

Love. One of the most important concepts known to humanity, an idea that’s over rated but it’s not, a feeling that is written about all the time but very few actually find it. I never believed in love, obviously I was too ‘young’ to or maybe too delusional. My idea of love was some fairytale-prince-meets-princess story, and yes I still do believe in that call me a fanatic all you want. What I didn’t realize was the true meaning of love. Love is simple. It sees no boundaries. Religion, culture, race, sex, ethnicity, social status, age, looks, language-all these words are meaningless. It exists in trivial things like making funny faces in front of an infant to make him stop crying. It exists in great things like taking a bullet for someone else. It works against hatred. It prevents people from falling apart completely. It brings hope. It rejuvenates one’s soul. Love creates you. Love has enough power to completely shatter you, and we name that power hatred. Love is not delusional. The idea of having someone who cares for you is not plastic. Heck wanting someone who wants you back is not clichéd. Love is not over rated, in fact love is rare. No matter how much you deny it, we all are in love. We all seek for love in different forms. Tell me something, tomorrow if you run someone over won’t you feel something for that stranger? Won’t you help him out? Even if you’re too scared to, won’t have that lump of guilt in your throat? That guilt is love, love for humanity. Love for humans. Proof that there is a bit of humanity in you. But the reason why we are not able to find love is that people assume since it’s simple it should be easy. No one’s willing to work hard for it. No one cares enough to fight for it. No one thinks it’s worth giving up for.

Fortitude. Probably my favourite word from this language. The power to stand up every time you fall. Do you have any idea how immense this power is? Fortitude is knowing that the whole world thinks of you as a failure but proving them otherwise. fortitude is knowing you won’t make it but having enough courage to see it through no matter what. Fortitude is extending your limits and hoping your this fall was the rock bottom and everything would be up from now. Fortitude is enjoying this roller coaster called life. Fortitude is having every reasonable excuse in the world to give up yet you keep fighting. Yes, that is the power you probably need the most in this world to survive. I mean all these superheroes, every episode of captain planet, it wasn’t until these superheroes were severely beaten that they got up for the one last time and defeated the evil.
P.S. I know I didn’t do justice to these three words but this is what basically defined my decade. happy New Year ya’ll

Stories

There are 6,885,500,000 souls on this planet. Each soul different from the other. Each writing a unique story. Can you imagine the gratitude of six billion stories being formed? This has been happening since the earliest of times, since the existence of man. Each one of us has a different story to tell and a different way to orate it. A painter composes his thoughts in colors. An athlete in his endurance. A teacher in his understanding. A president in his leadership. And yet we all write. No I don't mean scratching a bunch of symbols on a piece of paper by writing. Writing is creating. Be it emotions on your heart or memories in your mind or punching keys on a keyboard: you're creating something. And that creating is writing because it becomes something that you can always refer back to.

You remember when you were five and your mom used to read you the bedtime stories? And that was the only thing you looked forward to when you were asked to go to bed? That magical feeling of believing that everything ends well? Every story is a ravel of that world. Dragons and fairies and magic doors and animated animals were not just fabrications of your imagination-they were real. As real as it could get and you believed in it. You believed in the goodness of people and the power of fortitude. Ever wondered why kids are so much more happier than adults? Not only because they are unaware of the negative aura of this world but also because they live on the fact that dragons can be defeated. Stories give you hope and we could all use some hope at times.

A few days ago I was walking to my government class, alone for once. It was really cold and pretty and I thought I should take the long route from outside the buildings which is about a good six minute walk. Instead of trailing in my own thoughts, I looked around at the people for the first time in years. And I felt I understood everyone. Every face with a different expression. Every soul with a different emotion and yet among all this ambivalence I found something ubiquitous-a story. There's a story behind every little crush and every gossip exchanged. There's a story about every friendship and every joke. I felt alive not because of the weather but because of a fire kindling inside me. I want to write stories: of old and new, of fire and ice, of tress and animals, of everything. I want to write and write and write until I get tired of writing. I want to write for the people who deserve a voice. I want to write for people who already get too much publicity yet no one really knows them. My English teacher yesterday asked me to think about joining the newspaper staff. I had been planning on doing so but after that bit of 'appreciation' I realized this is something I love. I don't care if people think Pakistani's are terrible at English, I am going to write for it is my haven and I love it.

Facebook

The clock strikes 2:30 PM marking the end of our school day. Alas, it is the end of a tiring day and our brain has lost all its acuity by this time. Normally a person would be expected to go home and rest; maybe take a nap or watch some T.V. to relax. But we, the high school students, or teenagers in general run to our laptops/computers and log on to the depraved yet reputed website-Facebook. Oh no homework can definitely wait but updating our status to “Had a terrible day at school” must be done immediately in vain attempts to gain some sympathy from our esoteric fellow classmates. And so the process of procrastination begins. The debate over who has the most amount of homework, who has tougher classes and who had a worse day starts off and soon you realize its 6 pm already. Oh no we still have to reply to all those comments about how ‘pretty’ our supposedly artistic profile picture is. And so we begin our series of ‘thank yous’ and ‘no I am nots’. And by the time we’re done replying to our inbox messages and our wall posts and the rest of our fan mail, its 7 pm already. By now we have sumptuously wasted about three hours on Facebook and finally force ourselves to begin homework. But wait, “OH LOOK! A notification” and we go back to wasting some more time. Now it’s about 9 pm and we have done nothing fecund so far. So we garner ourselves to get off the computer and open our textbooks. When we go through our homework we realize we need to print a million pages of notes from our teacher’s website and so while waiting for the website to load our mind fiats us to wander off to Facebook, again. The idiosyncrasy of not seeing the little red highlight on the left side of our screen disappoints us a bit and therefore we start delineating gossips on Instant Messaging or “IM’ with our friends. The conversation goes something like this: “did you know [insert name] is in a relationship with [insert name]?” “But how did you find out?” “Obviously it’s on her profile.” “Ooh! let me stalk!” And so by the time we start homework its 10 pm already and consequently we’re up till 2 am working on our homework. This leads to our sophistry the next day about how we barely slept last night ‘doing our homework’. Facebook is not just a distraction from homework; it enervates one’s mind and acts as a dissocializing agent. Some people have hallowed logging on to Facebook and so they start living in the figments created by cyber-world and loose their touch with reality. It’s an ignominy that they are aware of what’s going on, on a friend’s Facebook profile but are impervious to the everyday mundane concerns which will actually affect us on a greater scale. Facebook also makes a person less social when it comes to real life because when one is talking to someone in real life and the conversation gets awkward one can’t always excuse oneself by saying ‘brb’(be right back) and log off on them. For once we actually have to make an effort and talk to the overweening people upfront. Sadly, I too am a culprit of this penchant towards Facebook and probably seem like a hypocrite speaking ill about it but my opinion still holds. And come on you have to admit such ubiquitous addicts are the reason you ever actually got a Facebook account and now even a nuance from your everyday routine of ‘socializing’ seems like a calamity.

The hardest things in life are the most rewarding things. Why you may ask people like to take thousand AP[Advanced Placement, basically university level courses in High School] classes when all they do is complain about the amount of homework they have? It's because when you get an A on a test in an AP class, you feel real happiness. It's like all your hardwork pays off and so you're willing to do thousand more tons of homework as long as you get to experience that few moments of happiness in shape of a reward. It's not that you have to do good anymore, it's more that you want to because that feeling is so addicting and mesmerizing. I was debating on taking Med terms instead of Econ next semester and I dropped the idea, not because I want to look nerdy[well sort of that too] but also because I want to challenge myself. Next semester is going to be hell but that's the fun part of school you get to experience hell in a heaven at the same time. Like a paradox. haha oh English Lang & Comp -_- So next time when you're thinking of giving up you should think about the feeling of content and happiness you get when you achieve something impossible or really hard. Be it finishing all your hwk for once ;) It's definitely amazing.

No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.
And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life.
It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new.
Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else ‘s life.
Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Everything else is secondary.
-Steve Jobs