A Quiz Or "The Looming Deadline Weighs Heavy"

Guys Like That You're Charming

You're the girl most guys can't get out of their heads Even if they met you on a bad hair day :-) You just seem to "click" with everyone you meet So even if a guy forgets about you for a second... his friends haven't!

What Do Guys Like About You?

Does anyone else want to take a stab at this? All I could come up with was this:

1. So I'm the voice those schizophrenic cads I've been in relationships with will hear for the rest of their lives? Yikes!
2. Honey, my follicles are perfection. No bad hair days.
3. Click in double-quotes? Huh?
4. So maybe there is something to my theory that I really should be falling in love with a guy's best friend? Somehow they always stick around even after the guy is gone. What's up with that by the way?!

So a quiz that's neither lets me be enthusiastic for 5 seconds or descend into an obsessive fit about my current single status. What was the point in all of this? Probably that it gave me an added minute I spent trying to make sense of something that's neither here nor there - a precious minute away from the abyss that is chapter 4. In other words, thanks for sending this along X...it was the perfect excuse to procrastinate as long as possible. Back to work now!

On Friendships and Getting Older

Not too long ago, there was a segment one of the morning news shows (sorry don't remember which channel but it was either NBC or ABC or CBS) in which they talked about the inability of adults to form long-lasting friendships as we get older. I don't recall all of the details but the "experts" suggested that our best friendships are formed in the sandbox and all the way through high-school and maybe a couple of years after that but that's it. Everything after that is either part of a phase of our lives or limited in terms of the bonding that the relationship affords. One of the experts even went so far as to say that we just don't even make friends as such once we're past our late teens/early 20s because we're too set in our lives, routines, and identities to make time for new people to whom we have to get used to all over again and vice versa.

Personally, I think that's just plain wrong. Four examples in order of the year in which they occurred starting with the earliest. Why 3? We're told to use 3 examples when trying to make a point and I just wanted to be different. Also 4 because I think you could write off one example as a fluke but 4 seem significant. There's many more where these came from but I'm going with 4.

Example 1 - 1997: Asad and yours truly. I interned for 5 weeks at an ad agency where Asad worked. Asad was gone for 4 of them. He came back during the last week I was there and we hit it off instantly. And that week-long interactions metamorphosed into a lifelong bond. Funny thing is we've never spent as much time together in-person as friends that I'm very close to and have grown up with. But yet he's one of the first phone calls I want to make or e-mails I want to send when I want to share something, vent, or just be plain silly.

Example 2 - 1998/9: My friend, Z, is technically my friend A's wife. Ever since they got married 7 years ago she's become one of my closest friends. Again, don't know her from Adam (relevant aside: how that phrase makes sense is something I have yet to wrap my brains around but I use it all the time) but I love her to death and she's very dear to me. Both she and A are like family. We joke about how I've become her friend as opposed to her friend-in-law over the years.

Example 3 -2006: One of my most favorite gal-pals is M, who I've gotten to know because she attended the same college as one of my best friends in Karachi. We'd probably met maybe 3 or 4 times. But thanks to the wonder that is Orkut we've stayed in regular touch over the past year and seem to have bonded while jesting away about our present singlehoood.

Example 4 - 2007: Last month, a friend of mine, MR, put me in touch with a friend of his, Im, to discuss a book project that Asad and I are hoping to start. I've never met Im and last week was the first time we spoke. It wasn't even a face-to-face conversation but a phone chat that followed on the heels of e-mail exchanges. And it was one of the easiest, most familiar-feeling conversations that I've ever had in my life that didn't just talk about the project. As Im said, we were probably trying to "map" each other. Unlike initial conversations with people you're meeting for the first time where things feel slightly laborious - like a tennis match where you know it's over if you miss the ball - I felt right at home. And I already feel like Im is someone I'd consider a friend. I know I only hung up because I had to make dinner! It was like talking to a friend who has been part of my life for ages.

So what I'm getting at is this. Based on my experience, which might well be anomalous, I think the "experts" are completely wrong. I'm a relatively private person. I'm fairly outgoing but I draw the boundaries before interactions happen. Of course these boundaries are flexible and change as the dynamics change between myself and another person. But even with my closer friends, I do hold on to a line. Others might disagree because they mistake my friendliness - which I generally am - for 'friendship'; IMHO the two are different. In these three instances, the boundaries I tend to hold on to seemed to have given way instantly. So it's not that I'm more gregarious which alters my experiences and, hence, my opinion about this news segment. I've encountered the four people I spoke of above at an age when we're clearly not playing in the sandbox and there isn't any teenage angst to bond over. Yet we seem to have conquered the odds of the rigidity of lifestyle and personality that supposedly and inevitably accompanies aging according to these experts. I'm not sure why some people hit it off and why people bond. I think they just do. I do think that there's a certain resonance and comfort level that draws people together...an overlap of experiences, ideas, thoughts, feelings, circumstances, what have you. But I don't have a more profound explanation to offer. Still, the idea that we can't form meaningful friendships after a certain age strikes me as absurd to say the very least. What do you all think?

Tuesday morning quiz-blogging

You Are Apple Green

You are almost super-humanly upbeat. You have a very positive energy that surrounds you. And while you are happy go lucky, you're also charmingly assertive. You get what you want, even if you have to persuade those against you to see things your way. Reflective and thoughtful, you know yourself well - and you know that you want out of life.

What Color Green Are You?

I do like them apples so this worked out just fine!

Why a Ph.D?

Since Saad D asked....

To be honest, I wish I had a more profound answer with movie-like charm but Ph.Ding was a happy accident for me. You know one of those stories where you know you always wanted to do something and then battled all odds and reached all your goals and then some. There might be sparks of it in my account (more on that below) but it wasn't like I knew I wanted to get a Ph.D. when I was 5 years old. Okay I did enjoy pretending to be a teacher while I got my homework done - my family members gladly obliged and played students. In fact, I actually taught my mother's mamu ( mother's mother's - my grandmother's -brother...irrelevant aside: what I find immensely fascinating is how in the Urdu language we have a specific name for each blood relationship that within 4-7 or however many letters spells out your relationship with someone with more precision than the generic "aunt" or "uncle" affords) how to read and write in Urdu since he didn't know how. His English was impeccable but since he grew up in British India he never actually h-a-d to learn Urdu. But I digress.

What I wanted to write was that teaching was something I was drawn to and I knew I always wanted to teach but I never claimed it as what I wanted to become. Because there was something more I was looking for. When I lived in Pakistan, advertising seemed to speak to that "something" I was in search of for the longest time until I moved to the US. Two years of liberal arts courses pushed me out of the all-too-popular MBA into media studies. Grad school came and I taught at a number of colleges. It reminded me of my love for teaching. But more so, grad school, specifically working on my MA thesis, helped me see how much I enjoy finding better arguments.

Some might use the "making jigsaw puzzles" metaphor to describe the experience. But I think that's inaccurate. Why? Because someone else defines the picture. You, as the puzzle solver, simply fill it in. Puzzle maker is probably closer but I just don't like the connotation that puzzle might carry here - I don't get excited by the thought of puzzling other people or having them follow the exact contours of the picture I see. I'd much rather they engage in a conversation with me. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm not the biggest fan of one part of the process of writing in that it forces me to spend huge amounts of time all by myself. But I do like being able to use words to unravel that which bewilders me. And that's back to my decision to go for a Ph.D.

I love the idea of delving into something that bothers me, hurts me, bewilders me, puzzles me. I like questioning it, diving into it, breathing it, existing in it. Till I can fill those spaces that I think are missing in others' accounts of it. Doing that doesn't make my account definitive - it only fills the gaps that I feel (notice I wrote feel and not think because I truly believe that what we write about is stuff that makes its way into our lives as our guts notice it before we can begin to rationalize it) are problematic or that I think are plain and simple important enough to merit greater attention than they have now. Basically, unmuting the silences that aren't spoken but they are definitely out of our reach given our present ways of thinking about stuff. It's a lot like artistry. You figure out what to represent and how to represent it and you hope it resonates with people - not in the sense that they agree with it but that they grapple with it. To me, this is the better argument...and it's an interest in better arguments about specific things about the social world that lead me to Ph.Ding.

I'm reminded of something Nietzsche wrote in "Genealogy of Morals": "There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowledge”; and the more affects that we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we know ourselves to deploy for the same thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing—and our “objectivity”—be."

Which brings me back to my last post. Thanks Saad for making me put my finger on it publicly...but it still comes back to what I said earlier...it's pretty darn entertaining. It's being part of the process that Nietzsche talks about in the excerpt I included above that I thrive on.

What am I going to do with it? That question is not irrelevant [although if somebody wants to ask me about that, well e-mail me or call me and I'll share because it's I feel it's too personal to blog about...at least until I make the decision and things fall into place] but the more important one for me is: "what have you done with it?" My answer: I've become a more educated being in that I've gotten a wonderful opportunity to spend time to read, think, percolate, and write.

Telling it like it is?

Over the last few days, I've met several starry-eyed 20- and 30-somethings who want to tread down The Ph.D. road. Apparently, without any knowledge of why it happened, I seem to have become the poster-gal (okay at least one of them) amidst South Asian folk.

Earlier today, I was asked for the umpteenth time why I opted for a Ph.D. (I don't get why asking me about my experience PhDing might be helpful to anyone. An undergrad sure. Perhaps even a Masters degree. But doctoral work is a completely different animal....that's a long post that I plan to write one of these days.) And before you judge me, nopes I wasn't in a bad mood. Just trying to find the right answer somewhere between hilarious and brutally honest.

And my answer was - drum roll please: "I honestly can't put my finger on precisely why I did it but it's been pretty entertaining most of the time! And even when it's a bitch, give it some time and it'll be a funny story you tell the grandkids!"

Why I think the 30s are more fun than the 20s....

One of my very dear friends (yes M, I mean you :-)!) sent me a forward on being part of the 30+ club that got me thinking and I jotted down a teeny-tiny list of why I happen to like this decade a bit more than the one past. Hmm okay perhaps a bit premature considering I've only been nesting in my 30s for a year and the 20s had 10 whole years to do their thing but still.

Needless to say, you might disagree with what I've jotted down or have other things to add but here's what's on my list so far:

1. You know the difference between a mattress that's new and one that's been broken in so that it fits all the curves of your body? I think the 30s are kind of like that. You form an identity, test-drive it, make adjustments, and then end up with a 'you' that you like. Of course I've always liked myself but because I know who I am and what I want out of life - to use a cliche I'm more comfortable in my skin rather than simply performing roles to win applause - I like myself not just because I have to but because I truly do.

2. This might be overkill with the mattress metaphor but bear with me for just this point. You know how when you get a great night's sleep all is okay with the world? Well when you like yourself as I mentioned in #1 above then your relationships are so much better. Not that mine were crappy before but I think they're meaningful in a whole new way that render them more fulfilling....and hopefully vice versa for the individuals in that configuration.

3. I'm less afraid and more gracious when expressing my distaste for something or someone I don't like. I will admit I could do with more grace and patience but I've got another 9 years if I'm going to master that before entering The 40s.

4. There were things on my to-do list for "the 20s" that are still unchecked but I now have the maturity, as well as the benefit of hindsight, to be grateful as well as happy that it's probably better to carry them into my "30s" for a whole host of reasons.

I'm sure I'll add to the list as I make it beyond 31 but this is good enough for now. Curious to know how the other 30-somethings as well as those folks who are past their 30s but wouldn't mind walking down memory lane for a bit feel about this.

Why oh why?

Why oh why doth February hath only 28 days?

My (public) contemplation of this question ought to clarify the present relationship between my derriere and 'life'...yikes!

PS: I think I'd might have settled for 29 even but no such luck.