I get by with a little help from my friends

So I am in NYC and doing my best to enjoy my life 🙂

I went home for Garba one weekend and I wore a red chaniya choli.  I went with my parents and I saw a lot of aunties and uncles there that I used to see when I went to garba when I was in high school.  There used to be a lot more kids there, now it was just the aunties and uncles and they were all going ooo beta ketli moti thai gayi (look how big you’ve gotten) and wow where do you study now and what do you do.  It kind of just made me realize that time is a funny thing. It just keeps on going on.  Everything that you have right now, will be a memory soon. So, just enjoy it.

 

Aane wala pal, jaane wala hai . Ho sake to isme zindagi beeta do , pal jo ye jaane wala hai…

 

Then the weekend after I went to garba here at school and I took a friend of mine who is Jewish, let’s call her E and another friend who is black J, and another friend Kyle who is Korean and I dressed up E and J and saris.  When we got there everyone was looking at us like woah a white , black and brown girl in saris! So we were a colorful bunch, saris and faces both. I enjoyed exposing them to something that they have never seen before.

 

Then last Friday , it was E’s birthday so we cooked falafel from scratch at her place. Falafel, israeli salad, Chocolate cake, chimchuri sauce.  It took us a good 3 hours , but it was a lot of fun.  I am getting into cooking now.  I think after I graduate and have a proper kitchen, I am going to get random recipes online and start cooking.  I want to learn all of the things that my ba makes really well and also all the things that my mom makes and I want to learn some new funky stuff too…like falafal and hummus, cheescake, chocolate cake, cookies etc.

 

After the cake, we went to this Halloween party for a little while. It was pretty lame, but it was fun enough.

 

Life lessons:

1. It is good to do housekeeping of the people in your life.  I used to think that that is a horrible thing, but it is actually quite healthy and necessary.  I am the type of person who can’t throw out a sweater even though it’s 10 years old and ripped because I used to like it or I have fond memories of it.  By extension of that part of my personality, I realized that I do the same with people.  I can’t forget people, or stop keeping in touch with people who I have grown apart from because I feel like that is inhumane and ‘mean’. But It is simply not true. I think that often times in life there come times where it is best to end a relationship explicitely or inadvertently and to try to fight that because of attachment can lead to no good. 

Recently, I told a guy who I tried to keep in touch with for the last few years, not to talk to me.  I think it would have been better if I did that a long time ago and kept it that way.  But I am glad that I did right now because that relationship was adding nothing but more stress to my life and I just cut it off at its source.  I think these issues come up in today’s world because of Instant messenger and facebook and email because people are able to keep in touch without really keeping in touch.  In the natural scheme of things people would naturally lose touch if they move or don’t intentionally decide to be friends with each other.

2. I think that the old naive, idealistic me would have said that I can still ‘be friends’ with D or that we can still ‘keep in touch’ but now I know better.  So I think I am making progress in terms of letting go of my attachments.  Even in the Geeta it says that you shouldn’t feel attachment to material things or people. Buddhism says that attachment is the root of all suffering.  Those guys knew what they were talking about , for sure.

3. I still don’t know what to do with D.  I think that I can get over everything but he keeps on calling me and it takes a lot  out of me to ignore his calls.  It is just a complete waste of my time to try to reason with him and tell him to stop calling me.  He knows whats best for him but he is too weak to actually do it.  He needs to be single right now and not talk to anyone , not me or Rima, and just figure things out for himself. But he is too weak to allow himself to do that.  He is forming one bad habit after another , making one wrong decision after another and I mean it’s too bad and I feel bad for him but it is not my responsibility to ‘help’ him.  I think as a friend, and not an ex gf, I can say that he has fucked up his life BIG time and he is doing absolutely nothing to change that.

I guess the only thing I can do is not pick up his calls.  I don’t think that it is fair that I am the one who had to break up with him, and I am the one who has to have all this self control when in fact he is the one who cheated on me.  If you cheat on someone then you have to be man enough to break up with them. It is only fair.  and if you are not man enough to break up with them, then you have to accept it when they break up with you.  He is not doing either and it is jus tnot fair to me.  But I guess thats my naseeb and life isn’t fair so oh fucking well. I’ll live. I am living.

 

 

In the meantime, I am thankful for the people in my life right now. Kyle, Matt , Monica and Erica have been my go to people for this stuff. They are my biggest supporters, cheerleaders and listeners right now.  And I can’t thank God enough for putting these people in my life right now.

In the meantime, I want to focus on school and do well so that is what I am doing today.  Showering, putting my laundry in and doing research for my project. Then doing some reading for my Business Plan class and going from there.