I really am getting old!

Thanks to the stress of my prelim (round 2), I had been up late for many nights over the past couple weeks studying. I started snacking late, eating lots of sweet and fatty foods, and going to sleep on a full stomach. Eventually, I started feeling fatter. My jeans felt a little more difficult to get into, and it hurt like a bitch to pull them off without undoing the top button; something I have done all my life. I hoped that maybe, there was a possibility that all my jeans shrank when I washed them last. However, on Wednesday I looked at myself really well in the mirror and lo and behold, I noticed that I am beginning to develop a spare tire. My stomach is beginning to poke out a bit. It seemed to me that my love handles were about the only thing on me that were well-defined. So I went to the gym and weighed myself, and believe it or not, I gained FIVE pounds in less than two weeks! And those five pounds were sitting right on my waist.

Now to me, there's nothing wrong with having a few extra pounds. Especially on men, a little extra weight can sometimes be a good thing; men don't need to be slim and slender to look good. A bit of a gut is easily overlooked if a man has well-defined arms. However, when you're small like me, a tire around the waist looks TERRIBLE. You run the risk of looking malnourished and just plain screwed up. As a matter of fact, five pounds is approximately four percent of my total body weight so this is quite a gain. Back in the day, I could do anything and not gain weight; I could eat anything at any time and the scale wouldn't budge. All through college, I ended most nights with a sandwich in the snack bar before bed.

As such, there is no clearer sign to me that I am getting old than this sudden drop in my metabolic rate. Because I am complicated and have all of these complexes, I fear getting fat. This is mostly tied into my fear that getting fat would make me less attractive to someone I may be attracted to as well as my correlation between fatness and unhealthiness and hence death.

As I was walking back from the gym, I saw this guy who works in a store on Euclid. He is friends with a friend of mine, and so I had been introduced to him and have sort of talked to him a few times. Although he seemed very friendly, I always thought that he acted really awkwardly around me, and it sort of made me feel weird until one day he confessed to me that he has a huge crush on me. I was very flattered, although the feeling was not mutual. I felt a bit embarrassed, but I was still happy to know and now I see his awkwardness in a different light. Anyway, so as I was walking up Euclid after firmly establishing that I am getting fat at the gym and feeling a bit blue about it, this guy passed me. I said hello, and the customary quick "how are you?" I was expecting the usual, "good, how are you" to which I would reply "good" and he wouldn't hear it because he would have been past me by then, but instead he replied, "better now!" with a smirk. For the first time in my new fat life, I felt good about my physical appearance.

Anyway, now that Ramadhan is here, I am hoping that my daytime starvation combined with nighttime exercise and protein drinking will help me both lose the fat and gain some muscle. We'll see how that goes...

I'm Back!

My dear loyal readers, and by dear loyal readers I mean Chris, I have been MIA for a while. This is because of the extremely stressful process of partially re-doing my qualifying exam, which felt more like doing an entirely new qualifying exam, which felt like shitting out a frozen porcupine, but the good news is it all ended yesterday and I PASSED! Yay!!! I am officially a candidate for the PhD in molecular cell biology. In other words, I can now continue life doing what I was doing before, but without a gun to my head. This is a great relief for me, because given that my parents have a very good retirement fund planned, that fund being me, I need to do well in life. No pressure.

Now time to continue my life. However, from all emotional indicators, my life isn't as peachy as I think it could be. This year when I turned 25, I felt rather blue and depressed about it. First of all, I turned a quarter of a century. That is a milestone, I think. However, I didn't have that much to show for 25. And while some people who tried to console me used the usual educational achievements as the "things" I had to show, those types of things were not exactly the yardstick by which I measure success, per se. I think that it is a good thing when people do well in school and progress further educationally, and that such achievements do mean that the person has had some amount of success, but I am not sure it means anything if you haven't done any good in your life. I'm not one who usually measures a person's worth by things like where they went to college, or IF they went to college because I'm pretty sure that there are as many things interesting about someone because they didn't go to college as there are about someone because they did. Anyway, so I was blue about turning 25 and people consoling me about my "achievements" didn't help because to me, when I am lying on my death bed, seeing the afterlife floating towards me, I am not going to be calling out to my diploma to save me. I figure that in order to lay dying and not feel absolutely horrifyingly desperately F-ed, I need to be able to look back on my life and know that I had done good things. That somehow, because of things that I did, someone, somewhere, who is not related to me, has had a better life.

Now don't get me started. I seriously lack good things to look back upon and it's beginning to carve a little hole in my soul. Hence my turning-25-depression. So I pledged to myself that by the time I have another birthday, if Allah spares my life to see it, I will have something to look back upon and at least be satisfied that the hole in my soul is slowly closing. Now I recognize that "doing good" is all relative. Some people may consider giving a handjob to a homeless man in the park doing good. I mean, if you think about it, there aren't that many people willing to do it, and it would probably make the man happy. But this is not what I mean. I am looking to provide longer lasting happiness; the equivalent of a daily handjob, in my previous example. So I responded to a craigslist ad seeking an "intern for a nonprofit". I figured, hey, if they're a nonprofit, they must be doing good. They need someone to research grant opportunities and do office work part time. It's an unpaid position, which is great, because I want my payment in afterlife points and money tends to nullify afterlife points sometimes.

It turns out the nonprofit is an established organization called "Doorways" that provides housing and medical care for people living with AIDS. Perfect! I have an interview next Thursday, but the woman accidentally responded to my email address with the words, "good candidate, me thinks...", so I get the idea they think that at least on paper, I'm a "good" candidate for the position. This should also make for some very interesting blogging, if I do end up a part of that institution. So this is where my life is headed and hopefully, next year at the end of May, my soul will be less porous.

Somebody Got a New Phone...

... and it wasn't me! It wasn't anyone I know either. So how do I know that somebody got a new phone? Is it because statistically speaking, as I am writing this, somebody somewhere in these Great States will get a new phone? No. It's because I have been inundated with a barrage of calls at the strangest f-ing times from a wide variety of numbers. We've all been on the giving and receiving ends of wrong number dials before. It's not a new thing. But few have had to deal with the stress I am currently undergoing because some hoodlum got a new phone.

It all began around Sunday night/Monday morning when I was sound asleep in my bed at about 12:53am. My phone rings and I do not recognize the number so I silence it. Now my new phone is quite cool because you have the option of leaving the alarm on with the ringer off. So if a call is received, the phone will not ring, but it will ring to wake you up in the morning. Thanks to Shabana, however, I no longer use that option because she has filled me with the fear of not being in contact should there be a night-time emergency. As such, I always sleep with my ringer on now. And that means sometimes being woken up at odd hours by Beenie calling from Paris, but it's a small sacrifice. Well, it WAS a small sacrifice. Back to Monday morning. At 12:53 I silence the phone, only to be disturbed again at 12:54 by the same number. No message was left, mind you. So I silence it again, thinking if even it is a friend calling from a land line, at least they'll leave a message and I'll check it right away. No message. I fall back asleep, and lo and behold, bitch calls again at 12:57. I pick up and she is speaking some incomprehensible rubbish. I inform her that she has a wrong number and that it is ONE THE F@*K AM and do you know what she did? She HUNG UP ON ME! I was actually polite. I did not actually use the F-word. I said, it is 1 am please stop calling me. She did not even apologize!!! What a whore!

So what did I do? I called that bitch back at 6:00am and then hung up. One point me.

Several other phone calls came throughout the week, each from different numbers. Another middle-of-the-night set of calls came on Thursday at 3:30am. This time I picked up and made moaning sex noises until the man on the other end hung up. He too received a 6:00am call. I automatically wake up at 6:00am every day for a few minutes. I am weird. But it is working well with my new phone calling lifestyle.

My most interesting call happened this morning around 9:00am. It came from an 888 number so I figured, maybe it's Trini calling with a calling card or something, better pick up. I pick up and it's an operator assisted call... from a CORRECTIONAL FACILITY!

Oh. My. Allah. Who the hell has a new number close to mine with friends who call almost exclusively after midnight and now, from jail?! I didn't bother to accept the operator assisted call because I really didn't want to be explaining to some felon that he has a wrong number.

Did I mention that I am scurred?

Accent on de Trini

I have officially lost my accent. My beautiful Trini accent is no more. Or so I have been led to believe. It used to be foreigners who could not tell the difference between one English accent and another who would tell me they thought I was American. They were usually Chinese or Korean. That was okay, because I probably would not be able to tell the difference between Chinese and Korean when I heard those languages spoken; and they're completely different languages! But recently American people have been telling me I sound like an American. And this hurts. Not that I don't like the American accent; I just love my Trini tongue more. The richer Trini kids who tried to be cool in school always spoke with slightly American accents. So after spending 2 years in Canada between the ages of 5 and 7, my accent was permanently changed to a more "upper class" Trini accent, though truth be told we were from the gutter. So it may be true that I never had an authentic Trini accent to begin with, but at least I had one. Why does it matter?

Well, in America, having an accent can be an advantage in some social circles, especially educated ones. In Kentucky or Alabama, people will just not understand you and may lynch you. But in more educated social circles such as university campuses or the East and West Coasts, some people enjoy hearing words said in a different accent. This leads them to listen to you more if you speak with an accent because the mundane act of listening to someone speak is spiced up a bit when there's an interesting accent to go with it. Of course this depends on the accent with which you speak. Jamaican accents are almost universally accepted as the accent of a pot smoker who is totally chill; probably not good for board meetings. German accents may not go over well with those of the Jewish persuasion; just a hunch. Indian accents are terrible. Learn to speak properly and suppress the urge to use the accent whenever possible. British accents are the creme de la creme. You can say anything with a British accent and sound sexy and sophisticated. "You are a low down nasty son of a bitch" said with a British accent is often mistaken for a compliment in America. As a matter of fact, the British accent is so damn hot that it can make being a prostitute seem glamorous. Doubt it? I looked at one episode of "The Secret Diary of a Callgirl" (don't tell Muzza) and she was discussing all sorts of whoresome details, but with a British Accent. I never knew whoring could be so chic.

My Trini accent has usually been well-tolerated, and actually the more Trini someone speaks, the more American people seem to like it. Unfortunately, I am losing it. This all began when people started asking me to repeat things. I HATE repeating myself. So I learnt early on during my first weeks here in America that I needed to pronounce my r's differently. That Connecticut was said as if there was a 'd' in there somewhere, and that 'butter' actually had no t's (budder). "Pass the budder" always gets me what I want; "pass the butter", not so much. Alas, my accent has become seemingly permanently changed due to my desire to conform. And this takes away from my specialness, which is not going over well with my ego. Popping my collar has not helped, nor has trying to undo the damage because I can't remember how it is I used to speak in the first damn place! Sigh... maybe I need to go home and immerse myself in Trini-ness for a while...

60 Dollar T-shirt

I am a very bad spender. I am an even worse saver. But I guess that is redundant because if you have bad spending habits, you're prolly not saving much. Unless the bad spending habits are like Papa Bear's... his bad spending is due to the fact that he does not spend at all. But I can bitch about that another time.

As you may be aware, Gereshisimo is getting married in Chicago this weekend and I'm going to witness the union of her chocolate face self with her vanilla face parter John. I cannot tell you how excited I am to see their children (whenever they have them...) because it is no secret that multiracial babies are superior both genetically and visually to pure-bred ones, on average. I say on average because I am perfect, although I am pure bred East Indian, but I am an exception. But I digress.

As I tried on my clothes for the wedding, I realized that due to my dark chocolate complexion, I looked a bit strange in the "wrong" light without an undershirt. It is times like these that I consider bleaching my skin, if only momentarily. White people never really have to worry about this problem of contrasting under a white shirt. One more reason why being brown can be hard sometimes. Anyway, so my only undershirt has a very obscene Banana Republic print on the front (it was 8 dollars at the outlet; give me a break). So I decided I would go buy me a new, plain white undershirt at Macy's. I went all the way to Macy's by train so that I could save money instead of going to, say, Union Station, which is closer but likely to charge more and have less variety of plain white t-shirts.

However, as I walked past the men's shoe section, I noticed they were having a SALE. And this is always what ruins me financially every month. Shoe sales at Macy's. To make a long story short, I ended up buying a nice pair of white Lacoste shoes for 40 dollars (SIXTY PERCENT OFF!!!) which was a steal. I was lucky enough to get the last pair and it was my size. Those shoes had my name on them and there was no way I was letting someone else come and take them away from me. However, by the time I got my 3 pack of plain white t's, I had spent 60 dollars, which is far more than the 10 I went all the way there to spend in the first place. Bah. At least now I have a pair of Lacoste shoes and I can be cool like that lead singer of One Republic, who is the only other person I have ever seen wearing them. Unfortunately, no one knows his name. Regardless, I am cool.

Now I'm off to Gesh's union. See you on the flip side!