Guess who got dropped at office before 8:30 today. Answer: someone who got moved around at the gym at 6 am today.
I am up for an award, for sure.
Life does seem to be different. Cleaner, more efficient, more roomy. We are super excited to settle in our life here.
I have quite a few ideas of things to do.
McK said yes.
I feel humbled and I feel infinite gratitude. I am indebted to so many people for helping me shape my life the way I wanted. N, Z, Abhi, S for their continuous and always positive support. My family for being there at any cost and in any scenario.
I can think of quite a few things I am going to do for both our families, for the kids in our families, for a few causes that are close to my heart- education, female empowerment and languages.
All my life, people have told me that I was wrong. Dead wrong. Not just in my calculation, but in my way of calculations. The way I thought about things. The way I looked at things. Society gaslighted me left right and center.
It was only when I went to grad school that I started seeing things in perspective, and realized that maybe I wasn't wrong about everything after all. My life after coming back was one difficult war, but I actually came out a different and super resilient person.
I like studying cause and effect. This has been my lifelong pursuit.
I think I have things to do. No time to waste.
Abhi thinks it sounds fairy-tale-ish that I applied to just one place, and that place was McK, and they said yes. On my part, I feel more satisfied and relieved than blissful.
Surprisingly, I feel no negativity. I do not feel 'relieved' to get a chance to run from my current situation. I have learned to love the current moment. As I was just lecturing Z, life is an incredibly rich and complex phenomenon, something that none of us can grasp fully. We, the poets and the writers, try but fail mightily. But even in our failure, we retain a very nuanced view of life, as compared to the democratic point of view.
Still, my main feeling is gratitude.
I have frustration, and nothing else. Nothing, really. The only jobs in the market are from my current employer and my last employer. My salary is good for wiping tears and nothing else.
My preparation for Sunday seems to be crap. Yet I don't think feeling bad is going to fix anything. These cases are inherently hard and my brain refuses to think. Still, it is what it is.
I miss Karachi but life here is nice. I am a bit tired of being no one but such is life. The money over there would be tolerable and I am not beating myself up over anything. Of course I will find another way, if it doesn't go well, which is really hard to predict right now.
We are super excited to move to our new house and have a stable life for once. Yesterday I had crazy fun at an office party. I will be working hard and partying hard now.
My take home salary in 2023 is about half of my MS stipend in 2017. I should calculate the derivative.
I woke up in the evening and feel slightly depressed. My emotion regulator is back in Karachi and I am trying to resolve things on my own.
For quite some time, I have been realizing the faults in the way I see the world. I have always been able to see the faults in the way other people process the world, but being able to see mine is very rare.
Anyways, I went to an office party today and I was surprisingly social. Very social, by my standards. I talked to a lot of people and it was fun. My agenda was to get integrated back in the team, and get integrated well. It worked.
As for the work, it is what it is. Same goes for my salary. After all, there is no point in whining about things. That is not going to change anything. Why waste your effort in doing something that will yield no result? I think I complain because deep down I know that I am not doing anything meaningful to change anything.
Not doing anything is an exaggeration, I do try very hard at times. It is just the lack of consistency that results in weird dead ends. My current interview situation is tricky, with a third one scheduled to evaluate me properly. I haven't prepared for it yet, and I think I mostly need to prep and stay confident.
After all, I did give a very nice first interview. Prepping is the only thing I can do to change my situation. If it works out, fine. If not, fine still, and I will try something else. Most importantly, I do not hate my present the way I used to do once. The trick is to keep working.
I have been hibernating since 2018, and it shows. I have no economic capital, no social capital, no career capital. I have been getting by on super duper easy mode.
It shows.
Eight months of marriage, and I consider myself one of the luckiest women in the subcontinent. And one of the happiest. And the derivative for these is positive. I told N in the days leading up to our marriage that I had calculated that I was the luckiest bride in Punjab and Sindh for the last 100 years.
The only thing missing from my life is a second coffee. I just had one and I am not sure if I should have another. I guess I'll let the caffeine from this one settle first.
We have a massive power outage and it seems to be affecting network coverage too. I came out of my house to this nice coffee place, but then they started having issues too. So it is difficult to get anything done. Some recent events got me thinking about my life too- though not for long.
By now, I have realized that if one keeps pointing towards the same set of problems in one's life, this just implies that the real problem lies somewhere else. This applies, for example, to my whining about being worthless in life. I just saw the evidence for Sep 19, Sep 20 and realized that I have been saying this forever. To my credit, I got out of this mindset by Sep 2021, although I had my own issues-admittedly much smaller-in that time slot.
I'm listening to this nordic music that I discovered last summer and god, does it remind me of khaplu and altit fort!
Back to my issues. I have been saying since forever that I have no worth, in a whiny tone. First of all, this is a fact of nature and I embrace it with all my love for wisdom. It does not make me feel bad about myself. I am neither inferior nor superior to anyone else, and this is not going to change.
Anyways the real cause of my lack of worth is generational-my abba jee does not have worth of his and I have inherited this lack of stature. If this bothers me, I can always work on building my worth. Our society is highly antagonistic to progress, but this is not my problem. Worth is highly tangible and if it is there, one can see it. The real utility is only partial-I want to be able to afford a coffee every day and not once every six months.
I guess human beings have to be a highly organized unit. If I want to have gloria jeans in the morning, I must work for it in the evening, because abba jee has no worth. Otherwise I can't have it. This is a simple law and I can't go against it. Last month was an eye opening month for me, as I ran out of money within a week or something. That hurt.
Worth, worldly as well as literary, must be built. Blood, sweat and tears must be poured in. The output of this process can be measured, no doubt about it. The only thing that is growing in my life is my social media following, but I am just a bit skeptical about it.
I think the rest is going to follow.
Last week I had a cool interview, but missed a paper deadline. Ah well. All in a day's work. I would have screwed up my interview, but N acted as my emotion regulator and made me see sense. It went well, but this place has a low acceptance rate, and I don't care like I did back in July 2022.
To be honest, the most important thing is the realization that I have no worth, and I'm not building it by writing here. This is an outlet for my emotions that I keep using for the sake of old times, but it isn't contributing to my literary life.
What else have I learned? I move on. From situations, and realizations. Yes, you realized something. Now move on.
I have learned that giving an average amount of time to tasks can give really good results, but I have to put in this time.
Money, output, social following and real change, these are going to be my objectives from now on.
Z plays the sweetest tabla ever. The other day, I called him up when he was in his class and stayed on the line to listen to it for five minutes or something.
I have let go of my melancholic tendencies, and happen to be the liveliest thing alive these days. I feel the joy of life very very keenly-the second fills me with happiness, the minute with the joy of a lifetime. What more can I ask for? Also, I have recently taken the challenge to be the happiest person I know. So many minor annoyances just fall away when you look at life from the lens of joy.
About my writings- honestly I need to access my inner feelings. I am simply writing from an extremely cognitive place. I want to be able to access my emotions.
So I have spent 32 years of my life learning theory, but none practising it. Maybe a month or so, but nothing more.
It is time I started putting my theoretical learnings into practise. What the world of practise demands more than anything else is output, so I will be working on that from now on. My output needs to be in a human-friendly format, so I can't just keep ideas in my head. I hate doing work with zero impact so I will be looking for ways to maximize my impact to effort ratio, all while increasing my effort.
On Friday, I had a nice interview with a guy but they are a highly selective lot so I can't say anything. Besides, I have another interview left. Besides this besides, I simply do not care. If one avenue closes, a thousand others open up.
I will go learn some python and take a test. High time I learned this language. Also I need to finish a translation. That would be all.
