dazed and confused.....

On the crappiness scale of zero to ten, the day was an eleven. started off well actually, the sky a perfect blue and the trees a blazing green – thank the lord the rain has breathed new life all around, the city having been deprived of monsoon this year – at work the floodgates opened with shit heading my way, it is not the firefighting I fear, it is the rudeness of people that I have to face with or “work around” that bothers me no end.

The thing about public relations is that if you are a service provider, then there will be some asshole who will take advantage of the adage that 'the customer is always right'. I find that handling customers in Karachi is a lot easier than ones in Lahore and Islamabad, people just have different operating parameters elsewhere not that Karachi does not have its share of assholes. But in general, people have less time to talk crap and take crap in this city.

What saved and salvaged the day was the music on my headphones as I juggled emails that would not let up till late in the evening and it is not even the middle of the month when the real number chasing begins. Apart from sampling beck, I came back to a safer place, my audio library on my PC and turned the headphone volume so loud that my colleagues knew the kind of day I was having.

Had to come home early to drop the little one to school for her ‘turtle watch’ beach trip…noticing that she was so excited about it, i forgot all about my day

something happens to me when one of them is in the front seat, not that one feels like a concerned parent being tossed intelligent and impossible questions at random but the danger of maniacal traffic outside drives me so mad ….Karachi has really gone downhill with rash drivers galore ...no patience at all….with ramadan round the corner, must get mentally ready for more madness on the streets

With the little one scampering off to the school gym, I head to the music store and I find absolutely zilch. No beck no cake in fact I feared that in response to my query with the store clerk “app kay pass cake hai”, I feared that with my luck, he would blurt out some profanity…in fact what really happened is that I asked him if he had any beck cd and he gave me a typical response which basically meant that i should get lost or start listening to the kind of crap every one else listen to...."oops i fucking did it again", brittany freaking spears . I remind him that in the last ten days I had given him a request for a CD that i saw he had noted down but today he was feigning ignorance about having spoken to me…ever. The thing is these people are absolutely clueless about music and they are just a chaapa-khana, a money making machine duplicating CDs

Don’t know why but I felt quite sad after the whole affair…I reach home and the elder one has his homework done all wrong and I just lose it at this point…I do not recall shouting so much at him....he was surprised at my eloquence but every-time I shout at him, his big brown piercing eyes remind me that he is just the sweetest kids but why is it that he not do his work properly...i just cannot understand....

his eyes tone me down every time and maybe this is part of being a parent that you could be shouting at them but your heart is melting inside. the poor kid has to do his islamiat and urdu all over again thanks to his evil dad

So right now I feel nothing, I feel mentally drained, my feet hurt, work has turned me into an insomniac fretting over the crap I will face in the morning…..again….