Men Don't Cry

I heard quite often "men don't cry"
Though no one ever told me why
So when I fell and skinned a knee
No one came to comfort me.

As I grew to reasoned years
I learned to stifle any tears
Through "Be a big boy" it began
Quite soon I learned to "be a man".

Then one long night I stood nearby
And helplessly watched my son die
And quickly found to my surprise
That all the tearless talk was lies

And still I cry and have no shame
I cannot play that "big boy" game
And openly, without remorse
I let my sorrow take its course.

So those of you who can't abide
A man you've seen whose often cried
Reach out to him with all your heart
As one whose life's been torn apart.

[Ken Falk]

Where does wisdom come from?

Even though the bench had a plank missing from the base, but when you sat on it you couldn't feel it missing. The wood was a very dark brown. The frame of the bench was made of a very very heavy kind of iron. Very solid. Really heavy, but there was a leafy design in the part on which your arm rests, which would have given it a really artistic look when it was new. There were splatters of white paint all over it, as if it had been sitting under something which had been painted white and the bench was utterly neglected through the whole process as if it wasn't there at all. I imagine later someone removed it from the freshly polished neat and clean place and placed this worn out 'thing' where I found it, under a very old, very huge, very shady tree. The tree had millions of clusters of leaves of a very very dark, almost blackish leaves. Maybe emeralds were black in some world. The grass that must have grown in a time was long, dry and faded under the wood and iron. I was only in F-9 Park, Islamabad, but it seemed like a tiny patch of forgotten land, where I spent some 40 wonderful minutes imagining what the tree or the bench might have seen to become so wise :)

Vote for Imran Yuan?

So yesterday I decided I need to improve two things. My Urdu and my general knowledge on post-khulafa Islamic History. To do that I started reading Novels by Naseem Hijazi. There is one called 'Akhri Chataan'. Roughly it means something like 'The Last Mountain'. Anyway, so I started reading it and there came the mention of Mongols and Genghis Khan. It didn't have much detail so I started reading on them on the internet and whoa! I thought if Tamerlane [Temur Lang] was a descendant of Genghis Khan via Kublai Khan, and if Kublai Khan named The Yuan Dynasty, and if the Mughal Empire was a descendant of the Mongol Empire, then maybe.. just MAYBE, our Khan brothers are actually descendants of the Yuans!! So, then that makes Imran Khan... Imran YUAN!!

Wow.. I'm such a genius! *sigh*

The Yuckiest Recipe

This ridiculously yucky thing called a papaya leaf extract is kind of saving my life so I thought I should post how to make it as a lot of people were asking me about it :) For those who don't know what it does.. it stops your platelet count to drastically go down. So, here goes..

First you need two really big, fresh papaya leaves. I put a teaspoon in the middle of one just to let you see how big it is.

One leaf should be big enough to give you a full tablespoon of extract. The doze is two tablespoon fulls a day. If the leaves are smaller you should take more than two.

You only want the leafy part. No stem or sap. The sap is very milky and when you break the stem away it will ooze out. You should wash it away. I'm not sure why because all it really contains is papain but that's what I have been told. You can decide for yourself though. [Or you can research :)] This is what the sap looks like:



Once you have the stem removed



you should wash them thoroughly. I prefer to partly break it upbefore I wash. It makes the job easier :)



Now you need a mortar and pestle.



Break up the leaves further. Leave out the fatter stemmy parts. Put them in the mortar and pestle and pound them to a mush.




Take a bowl and put a clean cotton fabric piece on it. Put the mush in the bowl over the cloth.



Now gather the cloth and squeeze the mush so that the extract comes out into the bowl. I didn't have help so I was taking the pictures myself so I couldn't take a picture while squeezing, but this is what the cloth with the mush looked like after I had squeezed out the extract:



And this is what the extract looks like:



That's it! The yuckiest recipe ready to drink! Oh, and it works great with vitamin C :) If you have low platelets you also want to take a lot of calcium :) Happy platelet growing!

Lazy Sunday

Happy Mothers' Day to meeee :D

Does life really go on?

November 1st, 2009. I heard the words no mother should ever have to hear. "It must have been for the best, but your baby girl has died". Somehow, I already knew it had happened. I was just hoping my sixth sense was completely wrong. I spent the next day in the hospital waiting to be discharged and sent home. They tell me it was only a day, but it still seems like it was a thousand and one years.

The first few months were easier. Everyone remembered her. They would sometimes gather courage to talk to me about her or listen to what I felt like. Then slowly people started forgetting. They started to play the 'hush' game around me and believed I was starting to forget too. That soon my memory will fade and become blurry. My pain will lessen. My heart will beat again. My life will go on and I will move forward with it. That never happened. My life has stopped. I am at a stand still. Waiting for something to happen. It never does.

When a person dies, what keeps the people close to them comforted are the mementos. The memories. The pictures. The videos. Some clothes. A song. A broken lamp they loved so much. When a baby travels to heaven breathing just a few breaths you have nothing. There is no comfort.

There is a constant struggle in my life to move on. Everyday I try to live forward but I'm only standing. I sleep thinking tomorrow will be the day but wake up at the same spot. Its a hopeless cycle.

People tell me it was for the best. That God has planned something better for me. That it will all be okay in the end. I'm sorry but these are exactly the things I don't want to hear. It will never be okay. Even if I have a million rainbow babies, she will never be here. I will never be able to hold my first born in my arms. I just want to cry and for once I want someone to let me cry without making the situation awkward. I don't want you to comfort me so I would stop crying. I don't want you to tell me I should be brave. I want you to accept me when I am weak and faithless. I want you to say yes, she is gone and it is heartbreaking!

I want an understanding friend..

Testing myself

Ok, so I desperately wanted to start sketching again and the first thing that came to my Naruto crazy mind was, of course, a Kunai. So I realize my drawing is almost perfect, if I may say so myself, but my shading really lacks definition. I think the dark really needs to be darker. hm..

Starting to sketch again

I used to sketch a lot when I was still studying, but being a perfectionist I always hated whatever I sketched. I tore and threw away every single sketch I made during college and now I regret it to a heart-breaking extent. I have now learned to be less critical of and more satisfied with what I do.

I want to tell you how this happened. I saw people who are far less talented than I am boast about being such expert artists that it hurt. Yes. It hurt like someone had stabbed me right in the lungs and I couldn't breathe. A few days ago someone proudly sent me a snap-shot of a sketch of a door they had made. The dimensions were so distorted that if it was real world the door would never be able to fit inside the place that had 'artistically' been left in the wall for it. That's when I decided to start something I had stopped doing because I thought I was bad at it. It seems I never was so bad at it. Maybe I was competing with Da Vinci. Not anymore :)

Naming my blog. . . AGAIN.

So I didn't really have a lot of posts in my blog but four posts in a lot of years was still something. I opened my blog today, just to check whether my posts were still there and :o! They were not! Blogger tells me I have never written a single post.. ever! In fact I didn't even HAVE a blog! And I don't remember this site being called blogger. No, it was called blogspot! So now I have really used up all my gas being angry on blogwhatever and I don't have anything more to say.