My dream job

Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Raheem

Assalam alaikum wr wb,

I've been behaving in the most appalling way with my parents. Last night, I wasted an evening doing things for and communicating with people that really don't care, don't know and can't help even if they did. I haven't written from my heart in weeks. So, when my mommy came home early from work to be with me, I was more restless and frustrated than a celibate Paris Hilton. I didn't want to go for a walk and shop for clothes. We sat in front of the TV and there was nothing on. I said, "TV is stupid" and I turned it off. My mom said I should watch Supernatural until dinner was ready. I said I didn't want to watch Supernatural. And I didn't because Jensen Ackles breaks my heart. Is that silly? I don’t care. But I guess I kind of do because I mentioned it. I'm contradicting myself, but so be it. I contain multitudes, in the words of Walt Whitman said.

Then I said that I would exercise. Then I said I didn't want to exercise because it was boring. I think I half-screamed in frustration. That sudden savagery frightened me.

I feel like tearing myself apart and reassembling myself into something that I can understand, that other people are not frightened to touch. What's happening to me?

This morning, just the sight of my mother coming home from her morning shopping trip made me want to yell with frustration. They let me sleep, instead of taking me with them – more as a kindness to themselves than to me, I guess.

And then my mother told me that because someone was going to my home country, they wanted to buy my grandma a sweater. They'd just come from the supermarket, but it just hadn't crossed their mind while they were in the supermarket. So now, after lunch, they wanted to go, in what I perceived to be a waste of everyone's time because of bad planning. My mom asked if I wanted to go with her. I can't remember a time when I have been angrier. "Don't piss me off on a weekend, Ma. Both of you just came from the supermarket and you didn't buy it. I'm always dragged here or there on parental maintenance – taking you walking, having to put up with Dad's coddling."

My brother went to see U2 – 3D last night. It's not fecking fair. I feel like a prisoner in my own house. I go from work to office and back. And I sit in front of my computer again, trying to make people thousands of miles away care about me. But they usually turn their attention away from me just before I can heal, and keep it to themselves and their own ordinary lovely lives just long enough for me to wonder what the hell is wrong with me. But what does it matter, even if they do? I can't love myself. Terrible am I, child, even if you don't mind.

So what does all of this have to do with my dream job? Because of my crap job with its crap managers, anxiety is the only feeling I've felt in a long time. So I figure that if I can get a kinder job, maybe I can be kinder to myself. I know that's not entirely true. But I need to believe that change is possible and that it will come.

This is what I wrote in my journal some days ago:

"What would an ideal job be for me? I can work as long or as short hours as I like. I can dress according to the people or situation I'm in. I get to meet interesting people on a daily basis and most of all, I create. I can stand on my head, sit on the carpet, cross my legs, stretch my arms, belly-dance. There should be no restrictions on my movement and hence on my creativity. I can take a day off to pick away at a personal project, should I choose, whether it has to do with family, a creative or a domestic project. Should I choose to take my mother museum-hopping, I can do so. I would like a job in which I could collaborate as much as possible, like we do in hitRECord. We help each other tell stories. Synergy just doesn't happen in corporate environments – at least not in the one I'm in. Yes. Ultimately, I want to tell a story and tell it good so people can enjoy it."

But most of all – and this is something I know a job cannot create – I want to be happy around other people. In my head, I see them yelling to me from across the street, inviting me over to their house for Passover, wanting me to meet their families. I see myself living with people not bound to me by blood, but who love me like blood anyway.

My relatives' behaviour – particularly my eldest brother and my aunts – have led me to believe that blood may not be all its cracked up to be.

I see someone (not my mother) crying at my wedding, threatening my husband with grievous bodily harm if he hurts me and both of us weeping in each other's arms as I leave her at the airport. I see a friend trustworthy enough to be my maid of honour.

I want to feel worth my skin, of the grace God has given me. I want to be of some use to someone. A lot of use – indispensable – to others.

Why do I feel so tragic all the time? It's really tiring.

Wassalam and Fee Amanillah,
Zed.

#1

Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Raheem

Assalam alaikum wr wb,

Most of my posts are going in a general direction. But sometimes, I just want to have a chat and there's no one around to chat with, so I might just blather. Or rant. Depending on how lucky you are.

So this is the first of my blatherings.

- I miss my daddy driving with me to work in the mornings. He's so funny and cute and the more I talk to him, the more I realise what an extraordinary life he's had. Like Jamie Callum says, "When I look back on my ordinary life, there's so much magic though I missed it at the time." But I can't sort of sit him down and say, "Tell me the story of your life." It doesn't happen that way. Conversations are how it happens. Lots and lots of them.

But I cut him loose because it was time. It's time for me to find a way to be at least semi-without him. I will not be COMPLETELY without him. That's just not the way Asian families work and that's not the way I want to be anyway. But I do need to be something outside of here, outside of him and us and Mom and my brothers, at least some of the time. Because sometimes I feel stifled. Sometimes I need space and Asian families are not good at space.

- I posted this on HitRECord today:

"Bismillah.

The last time I left my office for work, I almost had a major panic attack. I staved it off and managed to carry on. The results, in terms of output, were not great. But I'm proud of myself. I really am. I managed to calm down without the drugs.

Without the drugs. Without the drugs. Without the drugs. That's so huge for me. Using the methods that I was taught in therapy, I managed to calm down. I learned something and I put it to good use. I'm really proud of myself Alhamdulillah.

Let my boss yell at me. I can't tell her I'm battling social anxiety. I won't tell her. It's none of her business. It doesn't matter what she thinks anyway.

Can you tell that I'm both scared of getting yelled at and proud of my strength at the same time? I feel like Jack in Fight Club smiling with a split lip and a mouth full of blood."

- I've been wondering about pain and why people give each other pain. I guess it's about power. I've been thinking about my abusive ex and now - just now, in fact…the tears are still fresh on my cheeks – I was thinking of my brother and all the awful things he said about Islam some years back. He was picking a fight. He was pushing a button. He was trying to hurt me, trying to make me cry. That's all it was. I didn't know anything. Why would he ask me if he really wanted to know the answers? I didn't know the answers and he didn't want to know them anyway. He just wanted power.

I'm proud to say that most of my life, I have never felt that corrupting power and I don't ever want to feel it. Alhamdulillah. God protect me. Aoudhubillah.

I guess human-on-human crime on all scales has always been about power and politics. No? Yes? I'll find out Insha Allah. As the prophet (SAWS) said, "Gain knowledge from the cradle to the grave."

Wassalam and Fee Amanillah,
Zed.

I almost forgot HitRECord!

Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Raheem.

Assalam alaikum wr wb!

Well, it would be extravagant to say that HitRECord changed my life. That, to me, implies, some sort of lightning bolt event that shakes you up and turns you upside down. That's not what HitRECord was. And that's good. Because I've been struck by so many lightning bolts this year, I'm still sizzling.

Artistically, HitRECord opened my mind up to a million possibilities. I had somewhere I could put my words and someone to toss sentences at. My little heart sang as my words got caught up in images, videos, songs and on the tongues of people on the other side of the world. Who woulda thunk it?!!

I've begun to love images again as well. I'm still a little jaded - or maybe a little frightened? Either way, I have the courage to view film a little differently now.

I made a Get By sign for Woody's project. And quite by accident, I have stumbled onto my love of art again. I used to love art class when I was a kid. I was no Michaelangelo, but I loved the smell of oil pastels on my fingers and getting my hands dirty with paint and pencil ash. I had a lot of energy and getting down and dirty and doing something with my hands really expended a lot of that.

Now my trabajo requires me to sit in front of the computer for hours and sometimes, I feel that, if I see another screen, I'll throw a shoe at it. And sometimes, I place my life in such a tiny constricted space that I really can't be productive. So I'm hoping painting (particularly pastel painting) will help me get out of my head a little.

But most surprisingly of all (to me at least), HitRECord helped me redefine community.

My parents always have stories of their youth in Kandy. Stories that have been handed down for generations and probably been mutilated in the process, but they're still pretty interesting and I can tell a lot of emotion is caught up in the witnessing, the telling and the retelling of those stories. Seriously, they were involved in some of the most pivotal events of their neighbours' lives - wife-beatings, divorces, child-birth, drug abuse, alcohol abuse.

One thing I hate about living in the city and in the new millennium is that we don't have that sense of community.

Sometimes you want to yell and scream, but you know that no one's listening and no one cares. But on HitRECord, people do. They might not always respond, but you know there's a soul behind a pair of eyes watching you type furiously in the night. I know there is because people have sent me PMs saying so, perhaps months after the fever has passed, but still...it means a lot to me.

OK, so we might not have a little tight-knit community like my parents had in Kandy. But still in the act of RECording and Re-RECording, hearts, souls and butts are put on the line. And we remind each other that we are not alone. WE ARE NOT ALONE. And that's a huge deal.

HitRECord allowed me to figure things out in my own time. It allowed me to stumble in the dark, crash into things, maybe upset a few people, but eventually find my place.

And for that, I thank you, Joe, Dan and Teafaerie and everybody beautiful on that darn anachronistically polite forum. Woo-hoo! We made into the new year! I honestly didn't think I would, but here I am, hours away from '09. And you guys had a huge part to play in that. Really.

Wassalam and Fee Amanillah,
Zed.

Truth – a post inspired by my latest counselling session and HitRECord.org.

Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Raheem

Assalam alaikum wr wb,

I've been thinking about why I create art for this thread on HitRECord.org.

A fellow poster on the HitRECord forum prompted me to examine my intentions on entering journalism, since I've been dreaming of being a screenwriter/filmmaker since I was a kid.

This morning's counseling session was all about questioning my perceptions and internally validated truths. I go into a situation expecting something. My feelings of anxiety make any molehills into mountains. My body language changes, expecting an adversary in my interviewee, rather than an ally. My interviewee perceives this change and reacts accordingly, further validating my beliefs. Heck, just thinking about it constricts my chest. My expectation is validated and becomes what I perceive to be a "fact", when in fact, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

These three trains of thoughts converged to form the following ruminations:

What is truth? If I assume (for the purposes of convenience) a binary opposition between truth and fiction, how will I know truth if I do not know fiction and vice versa?

(I don't actually know the answers to any of these questions, but I suppose I'll just sort my thoughts on the matter.)

I've been taught that journalism should be based on hard cold facts. Facts should be checked and rechecked and re-rechecked. But what exactly is defined as hard and cold? Where are raw emotions less acceptable journalistically than numbers, figures, laws and political positioning? Why is the macro (the externally verifiable) always more important and "serious" than the micro (the unquantifiable)?

Let's take the credit crunch as an example. It is more acceptable for me to speak to a stockbroker, a financial analyst, an economist at a university than it would be for me to speak to the average Joe having to deal with lost jobs, lost houses, lost dreams – though those feelings are just as real, just as important and just as crippling as anything Lehman brothers or GM might be facing right now.

All of this, for me, points to the political nature of truth. Truth is not as solid as we think it is. The "truth" will change, depending on whom you talk to. Different people will approach the same facts in different ways. Also, as I was taught in my Global Politics class, they're always leaving out something, usually something inconsistent with their world view. Even numbers, as implacable as they might seem, do not grasp the whole picture.

Truth is also contingent on titles, on appearances, sometimes even gender - men's opinions are sometimes accepted ipso facto. You see a dude's picture next to his column in a newspaper. He's wearing a suit and the jowls and smug impression of a white middle-class man. The caption reads, "So-and-so is the weekly columnist for blah blah daily." Why do you believe him? Why should you believe him? What are his qualifications? Even if he does have an impressive pedigree, that doesn't mean he's smart. Look at Ann Coulter; that cow went to frickin' Cornell University and her spew isn't good enough to go on my garden.

Still, I have what I reckon is an insatiable curiosity – for machinations both at the macro and micro-level. I want to know what people think. What they really do, as opposed to what they're supposed to be doing. What they say their jobs are and what they really are. I think I'm a dirt-digger. I live in a country with its head so far up its butt, it's eyeball-to-eyeball with yesterday's dinner. I've seen people screwed over too many times to not want to use my voice in their defence. What I can do, I will do. I suppose it might be penance in a way, throwing myself in harm's way like this. It is also justifying my privilege, rather than ignoring it. I believe, as God's servant, that that's why He gave me the blessing of education.

But why do I write – or create art, more accurately? I create so that I can drop back into myself after a long day. So that I never lose my sense of wonder. So that I can fight off the sense of jadedness that comes with adulthood and the damn "real world". For me, writing (and hopefully soon enough, film-making) is about escapism, catharsis, about finding new meanings, new beginnings, exploring new vistas, new perspectives. I find my creative writing feeds the sort of curiosity I manifest in my journalistic work and vice versa.

Must truth and fiction necessarily be in dialectical opposition? Why can't I live at the apex of these two beautiful forms of expression?

Yes I can. I am a journalist and a writer and hopefully soon, film-maker.

Thanks for listening.

Wassalam and Fee Amanillah,
Zed