Totally Basmatic Bares All!

Laboring on Labor Day

2007-09-03T18:01:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning feeling mildly productive, which is new for me, so I decided to take a hold of the zeitgeist and actually do something with myself. I've had some scrap fabric lying around for a while, and I've been itching to use my new/old sewing machine, so I whipped out my measuring tape and my straight pins and went to town:

And then I took a t-shirt that was huge on me and did this:

Too bad I haven't even started re-reading Sense and Sensibility for class.

Tagged, I'm it!

2007-06-28T17:07:00.001-07:00

T-hype tagged me! Shucks. Oh, those crazy internets and their memes.

Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
If you fail to do this within eight hours, you will not reach Third Series or attain your most precious goals for at least two more lifetimes.

I'm going to pretend that it says "World Series" instead of "Third Series," because making it a baseball analogy makes much more sense to me. Also please to change "lifetimes" to "innings."

So let's start with the 8 random facts about myself.

I can fly.

I can turn invisible.

I have opposable toes and a prehensile tail.

I was raised in a foreign country by wild animals.

Shucks, I've run out of fake facts about myself, so I'll move on to some real ones. Let's see...

My addiction? Public transportation. Currently I don't have air conditioning in my apartment. Buses are air conditioned. Problem solved. I ride the bus for the sake of riding the bus - which is why I have an unlimited monthly pass.

The last book I finished was Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House, and I'm in the middle of Salman Rushdie's East, West. I'm passionate about short stories.

I can't wait until the next Harry Potter book comes out.

I love thunderstorms.

I can fly.

For real.

2006-12-10T14:47:00.000-08:00

2006-10-20T03:45:00.000-07:00

The Mets lost?

The Mets lost?!?

The Mets LOST?!?!?

This is going to be a sad, sad day for all of us.

True Confessions Time

2006-10-15T23:39:00.000-07:00

I know this is probably completely awkward, but I'm so happy and pleased and excited that I have to tell everyone this.

Hi, I'm 21 years old and I've finally been kissed.

For the first time. Ever.

I know it's kind of ridiculous. You're probably like, "What? People wait? For kissing? Why?"
In my case, it was a one-two punch of firstly dating boys that I realized I didn't like halfway through the first date and then going on a dating hiatus for almost two years ("Dating hiatus? People do that, too?"). Most of my friends either: a) think I'm some sort of prude; b) applaud me for waiting because they're afraid I'll get pregnant (I come from a line of very fertile women, and I'm not about to tempt fate); or c) think I'm joking. Anyway, I guess my planets never aligned until tonight, when a friend I've totally been crushing on asked if he could bring a movie over. To "watch." It was 1963's The Great Escape, which is nearly three hours long.

We did a lot of "watching."

It was so sneaky and kind of Bollywood-esque how he surprised me. I was completely engrossed in the film and to get my attention he said, "I have something in my eye." I was all "Let me see" when he slid his hand to the back of my head and pressed his lips to mine.

And it was totally worth waiting, in case anyone was wondering. Totally.

You know what, Bridgid? You turned on the CD player so now dance.

2006-10-10T20:48:00.000-07:00

I was just looking through a notebook from last semester and someone had written that message on the last page. Yes, for all of you who thought that my last name was Basmatic and my first name was Totally, the secret is out. (Totally is actually my middle name).

It's that time of the semester again - midterms. Not only does that mean that I have stopped wearing makeup and doing my hair and otherwise caring about my appearance, it means that I have tests to take.

Oh no! you say.

Oh yes! I reply.

Namely, I have a Latin midterm tomorrow, and while I've been studying for a few hours I don't feel any more prepared than I did a few hours ago. So I'm going to try out that theory that the best way to learn is to teach, and all of you are going to get a lesson in Latin!

Since my test is only going to be translating sentences from Latin into English, that's what we're going to focus on in this lesson. The most important thing to look at when translating from Latin to English is the main verb of the sentence, which is typically at the end. For example:

Magister numquam errat.

Errat is the verb, and it tells you a few important things: firstly it tells you the number and person of the subject, and secondly it tells you the tense. The number and person of the subject is important, because it's not always clear in the sentence. Here we know that the -t on errat tells us that the subject is singular and third-person (he/she/it). We also know that it's in present tense, because there's no fancy -ba- or -bi- in the verb (and I'm a really bad teacher, because I'm haven't touched on the principle parts of verbs or the different conjugations and I'm just assuming everyone already knows them).

Anyways, once you've got the verb figured out, the rest of the sentence is easy. Magister is in the nominative case, so it's probably the subject, and numquam is an adverb. All set!

Magister numquam errat = The teacher never errs.

Okay, so now I think I've been going about this lesson all wrong. I haven't talked about declensions or conjugations, I've just jumped right into translations.

OH WELL.

2006-09-24T16:28:00.000-07:00

When I grow up, I'm gonna be a cat lady. You know, those octogenerians on the end of the street who have an infinite number of cats? Yep, that's going to be me. Here's why:

World's cutest kitten, right? SO CUTE. And he looks just like Buttons. They are brothers from other mothers.

He needs a name, though. Any suggestions are welcome!

2006-09-23T21:47:00.000-07:00

Everyone in my apartment is suffering from pretty intense colds right now - it's funtimes for all. We've barely gotten off the couch all day. Fatigue, stuffed sinuses, runny noses, itchy throats, horrible coughs - but my favorite symptom of all so far is that I've lost my voice. Not only have I lost it, I seem to have found another that unfortunately sounds like a 50-year-old chainsmoking man.

Does the saying go starve a fever, feed a cold or feed a cold and starve a fever? Either way, it's time to get some vitamin C in my system. Ice cream and pizza is high in vitamin C, right? Good.

2006-09-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

It's been only a few weeks and already the semester is kicking my ass.

Meanwhile, I think Wycherley's The Country Wife would be a really great play to adapt to Bollywood. Someone please forward this as a memo to Indra Kumar or David Dhawan.

2006-09-10T22:27:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that, although I try to write academically, even in mediums such as blogs where it isn't entirely necessary, I speak very dialectically. I may have just invented that word - what I mean to say is that I don't speak the way I write. My speech has become a sort-of mashup of different dialects.

Earlier today I was showing my friend how to use her new coffee-maker, and towards the end of the demonstration I said, "Now we just have to wait for it done drip." I laughed when I heard myself - "That was good English," I remarked.

"It was," my friend replied. "You sound Trini."

I realized then how much my speech has been informed by my surroundings. I've clung to some of the midwestern turns of phrase I was raised with, such as the pronunciations of words such as "caramel" (three syllables, not two!) or "pecan" (it's pe-cahn). But some other words and varying grammatical usage has snuck in there, too. Some of it is very obvious to me - for example, I noticed firsthand how native Trinis don't use the words "her" or "him" - "She eating she food," they'll say. Interestingly enough, Jamaicans are the same with the words "she" and "he."

So into my speech have crept words in different languages or different yet still acceptable ways of speaking, and I think it's a direct result of living in New York City. I mean, I live in the most diverse area of the western hemisphere, which is not only expressed in the demographics of my neighborhood and university, but also in the demographics of my apartment - among myself and my two flatmates we speak three languages fluently. Because of this, I've begun "adopting" some of their words without even realizing it (the word in particular I've started using more often is que, although I usually use it with English adjectives - "que nice!").

I used to mentor at an elementary school in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and for a while all of the kids gravitated towards me more so than all the other tutors. I asked them why, and one of them said, "You don't talk white, like the others." I didn't quite understand their meaning until they began mimicking the other tutors in exaggerated ways - it was not only a difference in language, but a difference in tone.

Anyway, what it all boils down to is this - I really need to cut back on the coffee. I can't be up at all hours during the semester.

That's not really what it all boils down to, but since I can't quite figure it out for myself yet, I'm going to have to leave this post with a cliffhanger ending.

2006-09-10T14:43:00.000-07:00

Besides Bollywood movies, I watch an inordinate amount of documentaries. Yesterday I woke up to some sort of "prehistoric beasts" marathon on the Discovery Channel, and I was overjoyed. Hours and hours of dinosaurs and mammoths and other ginormous monsters? Wonderful.

Today, though, I'm watching much more somber fare - Paradise Lost: The Child Murders and Robin Hood Hills, a 1996 HBO documentary following the cases of three teenagers accused of murdering and mutilating three 8-year-old boys. The tagline - "It's frightening to think they did it. It's terrifying to think they didn't. " - is quite appropriate.

Regardless of how horrifying the crime is, the documentary primarily reveals how flimsy the cases against the teenage boys are. The police, the detectives, and the prosecution don't do a very good job - there's none of the neatness or precision that's shown on Law & Order or CSI. And the thing that makes me mad is that, in this rural, Southern, primarily Christian community, what gets reiterated the most is that these boys don't quite fit in. They like heavy metal, they wear black, they're interested in different religions - so what? In any city, no one would think twice about it. The strongest evidence against the oldest of the boys was testimony of two girls who supposedly overheard him talking about the murders at a softball game. One of the accused, the one who had initially confessed and implicated the others in the case, only has an IQ of 72.

Someone needed to be punished in this case as badly as the the community and the parents wanted (and the parents had some pretty vitriolic things to say) but I'm not certain at all that they got the killers. I'm not sure what sits worse with me - the crime that was committed or the trials that ensued.

I should have just read The Country Wife like I was supposed to today.

I can't be the only one

2006-09-07T16:04:00.000-07:00

So I just watched Selena for the fiftieth time and Selena died again. Can't they let her live just once? Just once?

On a related note, am I the only person who watches movies (or reads books, for that matter) and somehow hopes or expects the ending to be different, somehow?

Short lists

2006-08-31T07:01:00.000-07:00

I have a bit of an obsession with listing, I can't explain it, but I think it helps me learn a lot about myself.

The last five movies I saw in theaters:
1. Kabhi Alvidaa Na Kehna
2. Cars (saw it at the drive-in, which was pretty apropos)
3. Pirates of the Carribean 2 (actually, I saw it twice - once with friends and once with family)
4. Krrish
5. Over the Hedge

The last five movies I watched on DVD:
1. The Weatherman (disappointing)
2. Masti
3. Deewar (the new one, not the old one)
4. Mad Hot Ballroom (my ballroom dancing movie fetish rears its sparkly head once again)
5. Muppet Treasure Island

The last five books I've finished:
1. The Tenth Man by Graham Greene
2. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers
3. How We Are Hungry by David Eggers
4. Devdas by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay
5. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber

The last five books I've started but later set aside:
1. The Courage Consort by Michael Faber (I wanted more historical fiction, but alas, I was mistaken)
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I read Love in the Time of Cholera earlier this summer; I think Marquez needs to be read one book at a time)
3. The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger (It occurred to me that I really don't care what the devil is wearing)
4. The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown (I can never get past the list of "facts" he has in the beginning - I know this book will make me angry when I read it)
5. Lucky by Alice Sebold (borrowed it from a friend and had to return it, otherwise I would have finished it)

The last five things I ate or drank:
1. A donut
2. A cup of blueberry coffee
3. A donut (somebody fell off the diet bandwagon and hit the ground running...)
4. A glass of grape Kool-Aid
5. Homemade penne a la vodka (I need to work out some kinks in my cooking)

2006-08-29T16:36:00.000-07:00

If anyone needs me, for the next twelve hours I will be trying to decide what to wear to the first day of classes.

Also, I've established some goals for myself this semester:

1. Get all A's. A minuses are okay. B pluses are not.
2. Write a novel. It can be either good or complete, whichever comes first.
3. Bring the sideways ponytail back into style.

Of course they are listed in opposite-priority order.

2006-08-29T11:09:00.000-07:00

Even with the ridiculous blogging and emailing I've been doing all day, I ran out of things to do at work three hours ago. Maybe it's a good thing I'm being let go; I think I'd be bored out of my skull if I stayed.

Bad breath

2006-08-29T07:38:00.000-07:00

This morning when I woke up my roommate's parents were there - at 6 A.M. They had to drop off relatives at JFK for a flight at 5, and so instead of driving all the way back upstate, they decided to stop by our place to catch some shuteye.

Needless to say, Aunty would not let me leave for work until I had eaten something. Because none of the three of us in my apartment are breakfast eaters, there's very little in our kitchen that is not either Kool-Aid, frozen, or cake. So Aunty split up the lunch she had packed and we all sat around the kitchen table and ate.

Anyway, that was a really long explanation as to why my breath smells like fish curry this morning.

A post in which Basmatic ruminates on the many jobs she's had.

2006-08-28T09:21:00.000-07:00

It is my last week working at the job I currently have, and it's a mixed bag of emotions right now. On the plus side, I'll be relieved not to be working full-time anymore, and the hours are so early I won't miss them. However, it's also been one of the easier jobs I've had, and I like the people I work with, so it's going to be a little sad leaving.

It's occurred to me time and time again that, at 21 years old, I have had more work experience than anyone else my age that I know. I've been working since I was 14 years old; during high school I juggled three part-time jobs, and I haven't stopped working since.

The first job I ever had (and one of my all-time favorites, actually) was working as a janitor at the high school I attended. My twin sister and I went to a private school, and since the family finances couldn't cover the tuition, we worked out that if we worked full-time during the summer and part-time during the school year, that would cover a chunk of the cost. Don't pity us: the job came with a sort of authority, an unlimited power. We had access to every room in the school, especially the library. We had first-dibs on all the textbooks. We knew where everything was, we found ways into the vending machine stock supply, we slept in the teachers' lounge. It was great. And, actually, there wasn't a lot for us to do. They made the guys (there were other students working to pay tuition, mostly guys) do all the hard stuff. We just dusted and vacuumed and painted a lot.

Also during high school there were the ubiquitous baby-sitting jobs, as well as a job at a college football concession stand. These were not as fun.

Once I graduated I had to find a different summer job. I worked at McDonald's. Ugh. I also started working as a cashier at a grocery store, but that quickly got out of hand. I don't mean to brag, but I am a very good cashier - I'm friendly and nice and I bag quickly and I can count change. They had to revise the rewards policy on my account (they used to give out $5 gift certificates to employees everytime a customer mentioned them to a manager or, in my case, to the company hotline once or twice - I got $25 in one day one time). They also realized that I was willing to work long, hard, often, and late. First I began doing the closing shifts (open 'til 1 A.M.!) and then opening (6 A.M.! Way early!). Then they began lending me out to different departments - I was bounced from front end to floral to hot foods to video to deli to grocery and back again, until I was working over 60 hours a week and completely exhausted.

When I got to college, I was dismayed to learn that I didn't have work-study (my scholarship was too big. How can a scholarship be too big?). I was forced to look off-campus for a job, and I found one at a Cold Stone Creamery a block away. That was fun - for about a week. If you've ever been to a Cold Stone, then you know the primary gimmick: employees must sing for tips. Yes. We had to sing. And we had to be completely cheerful and pleasant 100% of the time, which is very hard to do at a Cold Stone in New York (New Yorkers are not the nicest people, I'll be the first to admit). Some would drop pennies into the tip jar, expecting us to sing for a cent at a time. On the coldest day of the year the heat failed, and for some reason it turned out to be the busiest night ever. Oftentimes I wouldn't get out of there until 1 or 2 a.m., and then I'd have to be at class at 8. Also, I think the free ice cream was solely responsible for the freshmen fifteen I gained that semester.

And then, somehow, I weaseled my way into a fiction writing class. I was the only freshmen in there, but my writing impressed the professor so much that he recommended me for a position in the campus writing center. I quit my ice cream job and since then I've been a writing tutor. Most of my work is done through the writing center, but I've also started tutoring privately - mostly professors' children (strangely enough, 11 out of the 13 kids I tutor are of South Asian descent), but also ESL adults (I tutor a Vietnamese gentleman named Vng - once he asked what my major was, and when I said English, he was aghast. "You don't know it either?" he asked, dismayed).

This summer, though, I found a job that let me stay on campus during the break. The university I attend is one of the very few I know of that has a free-standing church on campus, and that's where I've been from 7 until 3 every weekday (and on weekends sometimes if there are weddings). The work isn't hard, and there isn't a lot of it, but the hours have been really cutting into my sleepytime. I do a ridiculous amount of ironing. There's a lot to iron - vestments, robes, linens. I answer phones, make copies, you know - everything that falls to the lowest rung of the ladder. Most of what I've been doing, though, is straight-up data entry, which I won't miss when the school year starts.

It's also a pretty nifty job because there's always free stuff. Bagels and donuts leftover from Sunday, an unlimited supply of coffee (which I have actually exhausted from time to time). Not only that, but since the church is run by Vincentians (an order of priests), I have a lot of St. Vincent DePaul gear. I have a St. Vincent DePaul t-shirt, a St. Vincent DePaul backpack, a St. Vincent DePaul blanket, a St. Vincent DePaul umbrella... it's like I work at a St. Vincent DePaul amusement park.

Anyway, since class begins on Wednesday my last day of work here at the church (I shouldn't be blogging at work, but I'm sure St. Vincent DePaul will forgive me) will be Thursday. After that it's back to tutoring all the time. I love the tutoring, but the atmosphere of the writing center will have definitely changed. Most of the other tutors have graduated, which means I have been the tutor who's been working there the longest. Aside from that, the center has moved from a two-room space in one building to a ridiculously huge space in the library - it's more than doubled in size and budget. The staff has more than tripled over the summer. The atmosphere has gone from "clubhouse" to "corporate,"and now that all freshmen are required to visit the writing center three times a semester.

I have been sitting here writing this post and completely ignoring my work! Time to get back on track.

It's my favorite time of year again

2006-08-26T15:49:00.000-07:00

I've always been one of those nerds who love school. I always will be one of those nerds. I love every facet of school - class, classmates, textbooks, homework, back to school sales...

So now that the semester begins on Wednesday, I'm ridiculously excited.

I've also gotten into this ridiculous habit of taking 18 credits every semester, even though I don't need all of them. I often can't make up my mind about which classes to take.

Let's see... my schedule this semester looks pretty crazy. First thing on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings I report to the Latin professor for independent study (I've run out of advanced Latin courses to take). Then it's off to honors logic, which will be tough since I am the opposite of logical. Let's see... then there's philosophy of literature, which should be a snap. The class is taught by a priest, so naturally his focus is on Catholic literature - I've been reading Graham Greene and Flannery O'Connor all summer to prepare. Finally on MWF, I have 17th and 18th century literature, and the professor's going to be tough.

On Thursday I'm taking a grad class - Postcolonial Lit. And I'm also taking an independent study in novel-writing (Shit! I have to write a novel! What the hell will I write about?).

So basically, my Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays will be busy, but I only have one class on Thursday (and that's at night) and Tuesdays off. Now I just need to worry about my work schedule.

Buttons!

2006-08-26T05:16:00.000-07:00

I have good news and I have bad news:

He's not mine.

He's my roommate's!

ALL THE FUN AND NONE OF THE RESPONSIBILITY.

Perfect!

First Post What!

2006-08-23T18:03:00.000-07:00

I love talking about myself, and I know that everyone is absolutely dying to learn more about me. So here we are. This blog has been established solely to facilitate discussion of my second-favorite subject - myself. And since I know you're all hanging on my every word, and that you are all dying to learn something biographical about me so you can make thousands of dollars of profit by revealing this information to The National Enquirer when you learn that I am really the mild-mannered secret identity of a kickass superhero, here are some tantalizing tidbits about myself:

I think I just wrote the longest sentence EVER.
I make the world's worst coffee, and I drink it black because it would be a shame to waste milk or sugar on the crap that I make. My favorite coffee, however, is Dunkin' Donut's blueberry flavor. Yummy hot or iced!
I can write with my feet. I cultivated this skill in high school, in physics class. That probably explains a lot about the grade I got.
While it is supposedly physically impossible to lick your elbows, I CAN DO IT. Clearly that is evidence of bigger and brighter things to come.
My pet gerbils are named after English faculty at my university. I had a hamster, too, but he died in July. I cried.

All right, I think that's enough for now. I have to save something for later, after all.