Started in March, when on the 17th of March, my poor brain suffered a hemmorrhagic ischemic attack. In other words, I had a massive stroke. The plumbing in my brains went kaboom! What transpired next was epic – hospitals and the whole shebang of suffering a stroke – came to death’s door a couple of times, was even put on a respirator for a few days, because my brain had decided breathing was too much effort.

In all likelihood, the stroke itself should warrant a separate entry, but I will not indulge it. Praise to God, I survived. And I want to express my most sincere apology for making my loved ones sick with worry.. Here’s a pic of the bleed in my brain, which, by the way, is still there, since we opted to not go for surgery. Thank you, my darling Giraffe, for keeping my faculties intact.
( the white bit is the bleed )

To cut the story short, came home after two weeks of hospitalization, doped out of myself. To this day, I remember nothing of the hospital, other than the incredibly vivid hallucinations I had while high on morphine… Alhamdulillah, God is kind in making me forget.

Moving on, 8 months down the road, I am doing well, in fact better than ever before… I’ve lost a substantial bulk of my fat arse… I eat better and take better care of myself, have a positive outlook on life, and have regained almost all my motor functions. Just a little jittery sometimes, but it will get better in time, I suppose…With that positive note, I will stop here, and continue the story when the writing bug bites again.. Off to lunch!

Loving the air I breathe – Jasmine.

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it’s the only thing you are sure to keep for the rest of your life.

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called “Life on Planet Earth”. Every person or incident is the Universal Teacher.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of experimentation. “Failures” are as much a part of the process as “success.”

4. A lesson is repeated until learned. It is presented to you in various forms until you learn it: then you can go on to the next lesson.

5. If you don’t learn easy lessons, they get harder. External problems are a precise reflection of your internal state. When you clear inner obstructions, your outside world changes. Pain is how the universe gets your attention.

6. You will know you’ve learned a lesson when your actions change. Wisdom is practice. A little of something is better than a lot of nothing.

7. “There” is no better than “here”. When your “there” becomes a “here” you will simply obtain another “there” that again looks better than “here.”

8. Others Ach Lockbox are only mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another unless it reflects something you love or hate in yourself.

9. Your life is up to you. Life provides the canvas; you do the painting. Take charge of your life, or someone else will.

10. You always get what you want. Your subconscious rightfully determines what energies, experiences, and people you attract; therefore, the only foolproof way to know what you want is to see what you have. There are no victims, only students.

11. There is no right or wrong, but there are consequences. Moralizing doesn’t help. Judgments only hold the patterns in place. Just do your best.

12. Your answers lie inside you. Children need guidance from others; as we mature, we trust our hearts, where the Laws of Spirit are written. You know more than you have heard or read or been told. All you need to do is to look, listen, and trust.

13. You will forget all this.

14. You can remember any time you wish.

To being human,

Chiao Kee

Take note and learn something – Jasmine.

I just wanted to take this time to wish you a happy 21^st birthday. It’s hard to believe that you are 21 years old! I would like to congratulate you for making your life so complete, and I’m proud of your accomplishments – you’ve come a long way from the quiet little girl that use to stare at the world passing by from behind my skirts. All of your life, I’ve made a conscious effort to teach you the difference between right and wrong, as that is the measure of a complete person. I’ve also tried to diligently teach you how to think on your feet, and how to think on your own terms. You’ve embraced my high standards, then decided to exceed my wildest dreams and expectations.

One of my greatest joys with you has been your affability, and genuine interest in making and keeping friends. You are one of the nicest, friendliest young women I have ever known, and have more friends than I can count. You are obviously doing something right. Still, it would serve you well in the future to only associate with people of the highest integrity. After all, the old cliche, “You are known by the friends you keep,” certainly holds true. So far, you have done a reasonably good job in making and keeping friends. However, you need to not always think that every one of your friends will do the right thing. If you choose your friends wisely, life will be so much easier. One strong characteristic that you have that causes me admiration is your loyalty. Loyalty, combined with your word being your bond will get you far in life.

In two years, or ten, depending on how long you study, someday the real world of mundane things like getting a job, paying bills, and buying a house will be a priority. Remember to always think everything through and not do things on a whim. That sharp salesman is not your friend, despite his affable nature. People will try to look for an advantage, and some might take you for being an easy mark. The easiest word to say is No.

Finally, please realize that I will always be there for you. If I’m down to my last three cents, I will gladly give you two of them. Never be afraid to ask anything of me, and never be afraid to challenge me….but do realize that you better have all your ducks in a row if you challenge me. I know it’s cliche, but a good way to look at life is to always do the right thing, even if someone isn’t looking.

I’ve never told you this before, but your greatest characteristic that I admire is your strong desire to do things on your own and not ask for assistance. Boo, as you become an adult, I just want to reiterate on just how proud of you I am. The main thing I want for you to do is be happy. Despite all my [mis]fortunes over the past years, I still have remained relatively happy. I might have my moments, but you know what I mean. Life has its ups and downs and you just have to roll with the punches, no matter what they throw at you. Our family is a resilient breed, and you, clearly are the best of breed.

I know I promised that I actually ‘write’ a 21^st letter for you, but  I hope that you will forgive me for settling for an ‘electronic’ version instead

Love always,

Jasmine

And then every now and then, there are bits of wisdom that truly shake my soul out of the stupor of everyday life. Today’s earth-shattering bits of advice comes from Eve Ensler…

It’s perfect timing – as I’ve been very insecure lately about being abandoned, on my own, growing old, dying – variations of the same theme – of being alone. Eve Ensler has reminded me that it takes strength and courage to be able to face challenges of life on my own. To stop being afraid of being alone in all its permutations…

Eventually, we will all grow old and die, and spend almost an eternity alone, before being united with our loved ones. Till then, learning to cherish the time that I have with myself – Jasmine.

It’s about a beautiful short piece by Rebecca Barry, on the joys of being pregnant… Enjoy…

One day you wake up stupid and sick. You can’t remember what you were saying in your last sentence. You pour hot water through the tea strainer and down the drain without putting a cup underneath it. You want to throw up all day, but you also want to eat Campbell’s chicken and dumpling soup. Vegetables make you sick. Milk makes you sick. Your husband sleeping too close to you makes you sick. “Congratulations,” says your doctor. “You’re six weeks pregnant.” You have a thesis to finish and two classes to teach. You turn to your husband and say, “You’ve ruined my life.”

You always thought you’d love being pregnant — that your body would take to it happily, the way it did to bourbon. But you only feel good when you are eating, which then makes you sick. “It will pass,” says your mother, your doctor, your friends. “It probably won’t,” says your mother-in-law. “I had my head in the toilet the whole nine months when I was pregnant. Didn’t I, Tony? I only gained nine pounds, and six of them were the baby.” You have already gained ten pounds. You wonder if you should go on a diet. Instead, you eat an entire pizza.

You get stupider. You can’t remember your students’ names, and one day you can’t think of the word “voyeuristic.” You stand in front of 22 young writers trying to act it out. “The desire to look into other people’s lives,” you say. “You know, what we all like to do as writers. What’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Sad?” says a student, who will later turn in a journal with an entry that starts, “Today was my first day of writing class. The professor’s boots scared me.” You consider giving that student an F.

“You lose 40 IQ points when you get pregnant,” says your friend Sheila, who sometimes sees ghosts. She’s been calling you weekly to ask how you are, even though she gave up a baby a year before she got married. She and the baby’s father, who is now her husband, weren’t ready. They didn’t have the money. They weren’t married. She took some abortion pills, and after they slid down her throat she cried for two hours. Now sometimes, when she passes a mirror, she sees a small shadow hovering near her head.

“You lose 40 IQ points when you get pregnant,” says your friend.By your third month, according to the update from babycenter.com, which e-mails you every week, your baby’s eyes are finally on the front of its face and its ears are in the right place. It still has gills and is smaller than an avocado. You, however, are huge. “You might be beginning to show,” babycenter.com says. You’ve been showing for a month. You get mad at babycenter.com. Also Gwyneth Paltrow, who has the same due date as you and looks like a reed. You resent all the movie stars who are getting pregnant like they’re buying a new pair of shoes. Now you can’t even do this without the pressure to look like them. You are still nauseated and very pale. You tell your thesis adviser you’re pregnant. “Hooray!” she says. “Have you thought of a name yet? Bucephalus is widely underused.”

You want to like being pregnant more, especially since everyone is happy for you. But you feel like you have too quickly become a vessel for everyone else’s happiness: your husband’s, your mother’s, your mother-in-law’s. Jerry Fallwell’s. Your brother who loves golf sends you a card that says, “Congratulations! What a magical year you have ahead!” and this makes you feel like everything else you’ve done in your life doesn’t matter now that you’re going to be a mother. “It’s not magical,” you say. “It’s biological. A monkey can do it.” You are already tired of babies. Babies, babies, babies! The polar ice cap is melting and songbirds are dying. “Do you know what human beings do?” you say to your husband. “They kill everything. What would be magical is if I gave birth to a penguin. They’re endangered.” Luckily, according to babycenter.com, Bucephalus, who has just lost his or her tail, can’t hear yet. Your husband tells you not to worry, you will probably give birth to a liberal, and they will soon be endangered too.

You notice that every time you say you don’t feel good in your pregnant body, people say, “You’re not fat, you’re pregnant,” as if being pregnant should solve everything. But you loved your pre-pregnant body, and this new one has changed into a factory that has nothing to do with you. Your legs have thickened, you’ve begun to blush easily, and your breasts are so busy you wouldn’t be surprised if they got up in the middle of the night and set up a cafeteria. It amazes you that no one talks about this, that the only rhetoric you hear is that pregnancy is beautiful. When you say you feel huge, people tell you you’re gorgeous. Glowing. Beautiful. But to you, it’s not beautiful. It’s powerful. You have double the normal amount of blood coursing through your veins. Two hearts beat inside you. You have never felt more ferocious. When your Pilates teacher tells you not to walk alone at night, you tell her not to worry: You could walk into a war zone and say, Bring it on. Point a gun at me. I will break you with my bare hands, because I am pregnant, and you couldn’t handle the nausea alone.

You’re pretty sure you used to be more conciliatory.You miss getting drunk.

By the fifth month, babycenter.com tells you that the baby has begun to drink its amniotic fluid. You assume this means that not only is it swimming around in its own toilet, it’s now drinking the water. “Which means it has a dirty mouth,” your husband says. “Just like its mother.” Then he falls asleep.

You stay up late reading about birth defects and the vitamins you should be taking. You are still nauseated. You look at your husband, who is sound asleep. You think about how all he had to do was have sex with you, and how you have to deal with everything — how much this is going to hurt, the breast pump, the sagging boobs when you’re done nursing. You think about how much money you’ve spent in your life on tampons, birth control, ibuprofen, bikini waxes — about $32,560. You think about what men get away with in the world and you can’t believe they have so much political, social and economic power.

You miss getting drunk.

One day, the baby stops kicking you. For 14 hours you feel nothing — no nausea, no fluttering, no slow, rolling motion in the pit of your abdomen. You are lost and unmoored, the way you felt when you put your parents on the train to the airport after they visited you in France, and their sweet, familiar faces got smaller and smaller until they were gone. But then there is movement again. A blip, a ripple. Unbelievably relieved, you tell your mother-in-law, who is visiting. “That’s the thing about birth,” she says. “You’re that much closer to death.”

Then she tells you a story about the time she saw the husband of a woman who had cut a pregnant woman’s stomach open and took her baby.

You get that sharp surge of joy and sadness you always get when you see something beautiful.Instinctively, you put your hands on your belly to cover Bucephalus’s little ears, which now work, according to babycenter.com.

“That’s a terrible story,” you say. “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I know!” says your mother-in-law happily. “She met her at Wal-Mart.”

You worry that you aren’t connecting to the baby. You worry that you aren’t connecting to anyone else because you keep saying what you think. “I hate being pregnant,” you say to a group of people you barely know (and then the whole way home you apologize to the baby: “It’s not you I hate, Bucephalus, it’s the pregnancy”). When one of your colleagues says the main character in a story is pathetic because she’s promiscuous, you put your head in your hands and say, “Your argument is hurting my brain.” No, you tell your students, who want to know if they can e-mail you another draft of their essay, if they can make an appointment outside of your office hours, if they can make up the four classes they missed because they work in a nightclub and don’t get out of bed before three in the afternoon. “That’s bullshit,” you say, when one of them cites a study about women abusing men more than men abuse women. You haul your pregnant self out of your chair and say, “Show me that shit-for-brains study.” (Miraculously, your evaluations that quarter are the best they’ve ever been.) “Yes,” you say when people offer you a bite of whatever they’re eating. Then you take three times more than they offered you. “Go bother the dog,” you say when a friend asks you how you can be pro-choice when you’re growing a baby yourself, when you can’t even kill a lobster and looking at a tank of them waiting to die makes you impossibly, inconsolably sad.

Then one day you’re sitting alone on your porch with your baby inside you and you look up at the birch tree in your front yard. It is autumn, and the leaves are so bright yellow against the white bark, against the blue sky, that you get that sharp surge of joy and sadness you always get when you see something beautiful, especially in the fall when the natural world tells us that death — like birth, like hope, like love — is an inevitable, glorious, soaring thing. “That,” you say to your baby, “is what beauty feels like. You’ll see when you get out.

“You’ll love it here,” you say, and your heart fills the way it once did when you saw your husband across the room and you knew he was the man you would marry.

How beautifully Rebecca has described, perfectly for me anyways, how it feels to experience the extremes of joy and, oddly enough, at the same to be able to experience a stab of sadness right after. I have always tried to express these emotions in words, but somehow I always come out short. I usually try to preserve the memory by taking a photo of the breathtaking scene, or to remember the scents associated with it, or even try to commit to memory the specific emotion experienced, but somehow or rather when they are replayed the experience is much diminished – like faded sepia photos of a lively party. I guess it is very true that to experience one emotion with depth, one must be ‘touched’ by its diametric – joy and sadness, pain and pleasure…

Until the day I shout and scream and tweet my own happy news – Jasmine.

Anywho, found this little blurb that cheered me right up

Off to grab a super late lunch now, while wasting brain cells on the idiot box – Jasmine.

On the home front, it’s been frustrating on so many levels – the housework, the housemates (this one not too bad of a stress though) and the usual frustration of seeing Aunt Flo again after trying to conceive in every conceivable way… *sigh* Perhaps it is not yet my ‘rezeki’, or time to receive our bundle of joy… We will keep trying, not that my dearest Giraffe is complaining

I keep telling myself, when the grumbling grumbler within me awakes, that I must and I should be thankful for all that I have – a good husband who loves me with all his heart and is doing his darnest best, a roof over my head and food on the table, a family who loves me unconditionally, more clothes than I could possibly wear in a lifetime, relatively good health and the knowledge that I am still learning the wisdom of life, and that as a Muslim salvation for my soul can be found, and that God is always listening. Putting the words down is driving home the point even deeper, that I am indeed fortunate to have this life and not another (that sometimes we all envy, even if it’s just once in a lifetime)…

Harder for me to learn though, is that there is truly a difference between what we want, and what we need. More material possessions, more holidays away from home to fritter away whatever hard-earned money that we make with blood, sweat and tears – is it truly what we need? It is a realization of epic proportions – what we want is not necessarily what we need. Finding reconciliation between the two has always been difficult for me, simply because as a child nothing was ever denied to me… Instant gratification was equated with love, and it is very very hard to learn otherwise because it’s been ingrained…

This Ramadhan though, has been good and kind to me – the usual ‘gastric’ pains have kept away, and I have been fasting with joy. As the experts say, during the holy month of Ramadhan, the channels of communications to the heavens above are open and clear, and one should be making their wishes during this time of the year… Taking this opportunity to make my wishes as well, I do hope that someone out there is listening…

And to that note, indeed someone is listening – I have gotten a job, life and love have been good to me, and things are on the mend… Alhamdulillah… Stumbling across the mad chasm that is the net, I found this interesting piece of art, which describes perfectly the state of mind I am trying to achieve.

I hope that it would be as enlightening to you, as it has been for me

Good night, and may your wishes come true tonight – Jasmine.

Dreaming of blissful sleep, as I count sheep, cows, dogs and cats to catch the elusive calm tonight – Jasmine.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did

Off to document my day – Jasmine.

Hope you enjoy it, as much as I do…

Thinking of those 32 flavours and then some – Jasmine.