This is my first post this year, and my first in over a year. Life changes, doesn't it? You get busy and sometimes, it feels like time is dragging by, and at other times, it feels like it's rushing by. That's what life is supposed to be. I don't experience that anymore. Everything is rushing by in a blur. Minutes feel like seconds. The last few hours and weeks have gone by too fast. How do you stop to enjoy life? Gravity hasn't changed, so the theory of relativity doesn't apply here. Time hasn't changed. My life has, but that shouldn't change how time goes by. Einstein said "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity." Maybe getting married means that hours really feel like minutes. I wonder if taking the pretty girl to a hot stove and standing there for a minute cancels out the theory of relativity. I'll ask my wife to try that with me. She's my pretty girl, Alhamdullilah. Yes, I got married in August last year, Alhamdullilah. Haven't had a chance to write a blog post. Minutes did turn into seconds, after all. And just to make sure that I've made it clear-getting married was a blessing. I'm not complaining about life speeding up. I want to enjoy every second of it.
That leads to me to two thoughts. Firstly, I've changed. It has been a year, after all. I'm never depressed or sad anymore, Alhamdullilah. I can thank my wife for that. And secondly, there's not enough time in the world to do everything I want to do. I want to go backpacking across South America, Europe, maybe even go to Australia again. I have a list of places I'd like to visit. And I'd absolutely love to go back to Karachi, too. I thought I wouldn't be able to go back, but life is short. I'd like to go base jumping, skydiving, scuba diving, whatever else you can do for fun too. I want to go to Mars once they figure that out and probably come back, too.
Speaking of Karachi, I've been feeling nostalgic. I'm not a sentimental person. Well.. I used to be a sentimental person. I'm not a sentimental person anymore. But I do feel nostalgic for my birthplace. The food. Driving under the late night lights. Sitting in the shade while reading a book. The humidity, the feeling of going to an air conditioned room from the heat outside. I don't normally even feel nostalgic. But I was thinking of food and now I've been thinking of places like Hanifia, Red Apple, Hot n Spicy, Nandos, Jeddah Biryani, and none of those are 'fancy' restaurants or anything like that. They're my favorite food in my favorite place. I even miss Nimco and the parathas I got from the small tea shop in the mornings on the way to school. There's the potato burgers from the Aga Khan University Hospital gift shop, not the cafeteria-tells you how often I went there, the kebab paratha place that I only remember how to drive to, not the name, the pani puri in Bahadurabad, the katakat from Delhi Colony, the kebab rolls from Lyceum, I could go on forever. Of course, food isn't everything that there is in the world. I have enough friends and family there that I'd be busy seeing them all again. It's the feeling of being home that I really miss. Sometimes I feel homesick enough to be nauseous.
I've talked a lot about the food. It's not the food that I miss the most. Food is just what reminds me of home. I can't move back. That's not realistic. I can visit, and though a week or two won't be enough, I'll do that someday. Or maybe I'll use my mechanical engineering degree to build a place or space shuttle that can get me to Karachi for a weekend... every week. Nothing is impossible, right?
Let's see. What else have I missed? I have five cats. They're smarter than normal cats, they're not boring. I work as an engineer now. If you'd have told me ten years ago, when I was graduating high school, that I'd be living in America, that I'd be an engineer and not an environmentalist, and I'd have five cats, I'd have asked if you were mental. I grew up with German Shepherds, after all. But hey, anything can happen. Including loving dogs and cats. And moving to America. I was looking at my old blog posts and how I had written about saying Dua that whoever I married would love Allah more and I'd be able to pray namaz beside her. And that we'd help each other become better Muslims, and Alhamdullilah, Allah made that happen. Life is a blessing, Alhamdullilah. Oh, and... Plan B to visiting Karachi every weekend is moving to West Virginia. That's where my wife is from, and it's home away from home.
I'll be back on this blog in a few weeks.
