1) I'm always the same and I don't need to be reminded.

2) Nothing ever happens. 

3) If anything does happen, nobody has to know. 

4) When I put words together they sound stupid.

5) It was good but it's not anymore.

Good juju to all. 

Why do I keep counting?

Mariah Carey on her latest album, E=MC²:

"So, I guess, it's like 'Emancipation = Mariah Carey times two'".

No, Mariah. It's really, really not.

When I just want you to love me back.

I’ve tried. Really I have. But it all comes out wrong. So, here it is. My life, point by point. Just in case you were wondering.

1. My mom may or may not have cancer. We will know more on Tuesday.
2. She also may or may not be extremely bad ass: She’s having her uterus scraped sans anaesthesia to minimize recovery time.*
3. My brother is in the hospital after having his appendix removed the day after his first day at school in months (he cracked his spine after falling down at least half a dozen times whilst ice-skating). He is being more difficult than usual, which is saying a lot. Which reminds me
4. My dad is amazing.
5. Me, not so much “amazing” as “a mean, impatient, ungrateful spoilt bitch”.
6. My finals start tomorrow. If I do not make the Dean’s List this semester, I will renege one of my resolutions. I refuse to say which one.
7. I am insane and hormonal and it makes everything I write sound trite as hell, so
8. Voila! I’ve stopped writing. Which means
9. I have a lot of time to simply think and what I have come up with so far with is this: I do not miss my friends as much or as often as I think I do, but I do need them more than I imagined possible.
10. I am tired. Constantly. I have consulted with noted physicians Drs. Wiki and Pedia and come up with the rare and unforeseen diagnosis of YNTGOYFFAAJUYCSYFA,RN.A.S.**

*Note to self: May or mayn’t Mom be Chuck Norris??? Further investigation urgently required.

**“You Need To Get Off Your Fat Fucking Ass And Jog Until You Can See Your Feet Again, RIGHT NOW. Asshole. Syndrome.” You might also know it as ‘morbid obesity’.

Someone is watching all of the outsiders.

I'm not one to jump on the bandwagon, especially when it's in danger of breaking already, but it seems as though any blogger worth her salt has been weighing in on the Natasha "McGough" Hudson issue. Also, frankly, I don't think I talk nearly enough about my country's shame here. So, despite not having thoroughly thought out what to do with the 200 plus pounds of seasoning I'm apparently entitled to after this post is published, I've decided to share my take on the matter. First of all, some background for readers not in the know - that is to say, everyone who isn't Alif or Syar, which actually amounts to far less than you might think. Hudson is a local model-cum-actress-turned-published-plagiarist-translator-author-person who is currently at the center of a blog-driven debate over the legitimacy of several of her poems.

I take plagiarism very seriously (more on this scintillating topic later). However, having seen the alleged evidence of Hudson's transgressions, I must admit that I am far from convinced of her guilt. You will have noticed that this post is rife with links, which you are of course meant to click on for further information, but for those of you who, like myself, find the extra effort much too strenuous and would prefer to simply scroll your way towards carpal tunnel syndrome, the following is one of the poems at the heart of the furore:

Kek Coklat by Natasha Hudson

Saya mahu satu kehidupan,
Kamu mahu sesuatu yang lain,
Kita tidak dapat makan kek coklat,
Jadi kita makan sesama diri.

Now, those of you fortunate enough to be bilingual, please compare the previous poem with this next one:

Cake by Roger McGough

i wanted one life
you wanted another
we couldn't have our cake
so we ate each other.

As different as day and siang, yes?

I know most of my readers don't speak Malay (Syar), so here's my own version of Hudson's poem written in a way that I think best replicates the impact the "original" would have on a Malay-speaker familiar with McGough's writings:

Ocolate-chay Ake-cay y-bay Adia-Nay Asidi-Ray

i-yay anted-way one-way ife-lay
ou-yay anted-way another-yay
e-way ouldn't-cay ave-hay our-yay ocolate-chay ake-cay
o-say e-way ate-yay each-yay other-yay.

See what I mean? Obviously, it's a completely different poem than McGough's. For one thing, it's not in the same language (although by some bizarre and indefinable coincidence it is almost a word-for-word translation). As though that weren't enough, I would like to direct your attention to the startlingly brilliant piece of innovation in the third line, whereby Hudson takes an achingly sweet and simple metaphor for loss and not only turns it into something far more astonishing, a shockingly literal interpretation of a classic adage, but pushes the limits of taste even further by imbuing it with delicious cocoa-based flavor, which I'm sure we can all agree is the mark of any worthy dessert/piece of writing. I applaud this bold move, because personally I've always felt that that's what makes a good poem great: the inclusion of some sort of insulin-inducing baked good, preferably one best served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Some might argue that in doing so Hudson totally misses the point of McGough's clever wordplay, that her version is nothing more than a grotesquely rendered translation which severely diminishes the poem's wit and only serves to open its appreciation to similarly single digit IQ possessors. I might be inclined to agree...

...IF I saw any similarity whatsoever between the two works. But I don't. So there.

Still, for the sake of argument, I will concede that perhaps Hudson really is vapid narcissist whose talents are limited to an extreme ignorance of basic grammar and punctuation and to inventing horrifying new ways to butcher the language under the guise of art. Well, dammit, what's wrong with that? I mean, isn't that precisely what the literary world is all about - pandering to the lowest common denominator? Seriously, folks. If I'm looking for intelligent discourse, the last place I'm going to turn to is within the covers of books. You know where it's at? TV. TV is where it's at. You try watching in sick fascination as Debbie Matenopoulos verbally assaults Ricky Gervais to his face on the SAG red carpet* and NOT ponder the fallaciousness of turning to celebrity worship as a global form of escapism that unites an increasingly embittered society marked by external and internal culture-based division.

Go on, I dare you.

Yeah, I thought as much.

NaTasHa yOu roxXor my soXxoR!!11!!!

*On a somewhat related note**: For future reference - you know, when we finally stop fighting these feelings and give in to our wild monkey lust like the savage beasts we are - I HATE CHEWING GUM, CASEY (AFFLECK). I HATE IT.***
**Not really.
***But I still love you, Casey (Affleck).****
****Just so we're clear, Casey (Affleck) - LOVE, chewing gum- HATE WITH A FIERY VENGEANCE.*****
*****Casey (Affleck) chewing gum****** - a deeply complex amalgamation of conflicting feelings that have been known to result in spontaneous human combustion.
******On-blog revelation: If this was an actual flavor I probably wouldn't hate the stuff so much.

We'll pray, all damn day, every day.

Say what you want about the film's predispositions, the intensely graphic scene in Redacted in which 15-year-old Farah is raped is the most shocking thing I have ever witnessed. The terror in her eyes, the savagely groping hands of the soldiers, the complete and utter ineffectualness of those who saw and did nothing. If ever anything could drive home the scope and urgency of war, it would be these images of the last few moments of this girl's private horror. I am not from the United States, so I can't begin to guess what the reaction of a typical American viewer from either camp might be. All I saw was the immense daily suffering of brothers and sisters in Iraq, brought on by the presence of a foreign invasion. I understand that this movie is a dramatization with fairly clear political leanings and that sweeping generalizations of the troops cannot and should not be made. Still, there are a couple of things that have been on my mind.

Reno, one of the rapists, is an obvious "bad apple" from the start. He likens the killing of the Iraqis - or the "sand niggers" as he fondly calls them - to stepping on cockroaches, and claims to feel no remorse after fatally shooting a pregnant woman. Through his own narrative, we are told about his background, which includes a gambling father and a hired hitman for a brother. So, is he pushed to seek vengeance on a child because of psychological toll of war, or would he have led a similar life of crime had he never left home soil? According to the critic Kyle Smith, the movie illustrates "how any war puts men in impossible situations". The thing is, he - and the real-life soldier his character is based on - made the conscious decision to rape a young girl and murder her family. They were wasted and pissed off and decided to do a terrible thing. Who "put" them in that situation?

Spc. James Barker, one of the accused in the Mahmudiyah killings who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 90 years in prison, claimed that the violence he encountered in the line of duty left him feeling "angry and mean" towards the Iraqis. But he wasn't alone in his misery and anger over the futility of war, what pushed him and his comrades to do the unthinkable? Was it already part of their mental circuit board, this capacity for violence, and war simply acted as a catalyst? Or were they "normal" guys who were driven to extremes because they didn't know how to cope?

Reno also delivers a telling line in the film, something to the effect of "we don't expect thank yous, but we'd like them to stop trying to kill us". I'm not sure why, but I immediately thought of Catch-22 when I heard this; of Yossarian, who for the life of him could not understand why thousands of people he had never met were trying to kill him. The (mangled) cliche is that while everybody else lives in the world, Americans live in America. Another stereotype, true, but sometimes it's hard not to see a grain of truth in it. I don't think that Americans are ignorant of or cut off from the rest of civilization. I do think, however, that for a lot of people very few international actions of the American government make any sense at all, such as invading on dubious basis a country whose people as a whole have done you no harm, and then turning a blind eye to the mountains of collateral damage amassed.

The Vietnam War bred strong opposition amongst the American public, which contributed to its end. It took 10 years for that to happen, 10 years of mounting visceral outrage and 4 million civilian deaths. According to that timeline, we are only halfway through the Iraq War, which seems almost impossible to consider. Media coverage of the battlefield in the 60s and 70s was prolific for its time, but is nothing compared to the 24-hour news feeds we now receive daily, hourly, by the minute. Bloodied photos of death and destruction pile up, vitriolic pieces lambasting the war exponentially so, yet there seems to be no end in sight. I guess after watching Redacted, I'm just wondering why public opinion seems to have ceased to matter in a country that prides itself on its democratic nature, and if I'm alone in thinking that.

I'm the first to admit that I don't have all the facts, far from it, but my emotional investment in the goings-on of Iraq is great, and that makes me a good representative of most people I know. We have an undeniable bias in this situation. Without detracting from the loss and turmoil of the survivors, it must be said that each civilian death in Iraq feels like the death of a loved one, a sibling in Islam. They are being persecuted for who they are, not what they have done, and when I realize that I can't help but think "There but for the grace of God". Though similar in their desire to end the carnage, the helplessness felt by a Muslim is quite different from that of a non-Muslim American. For a Muslim, each loss - of life, of property, of faith - is not merely symbolic. It is not only an indicator of the depths to which civilization has plunged, or an illustration of the revolting effects of moral compromise, nor is it just something that, once ended, can be molded into peace-advocating textbook lessons for future generations extolling the brutality of combat. For us, every death is a failure on our part to protect our family. Every death merits tears and a silent apology, and a vow to make it stop or die trying. Every death destroys a small part of us and hacks away at our cumulative identity as a people.

Every death is personal.

Al-Fatihah.