Whoa has it been hectic 'round hyah! I don't think I've spent more than three days in any one place for the past two weeks. I've been at my dad's, my brother's, my gramma's, with odd snatches of hours at various friends' homes. I got to do Eid with one part of my odd-ball family, and Christmas with another. On Eid, I gifted myself the most shocking NEON, pink and orange, shalwar kameeze concoction ever dreamt up and was thereby dubbed Eid Barbie. And on Christmas I got gifted crazy socks so that I will no longer, as my landlady said, be "the lone person in New England walking around home barefoot."

On top of that, I just got in, at midnight, after seeing one of my grrrrls off before she flies back to the UK tomorrow, took another one shopping in the afternoon, and will be chauffering my mom around tomorrow. Did I mention, I did all that wearing a crazy jester hat? Yep. Found one at the thrift shop today (one of my favorite places to buy insane things), and it's been on my head ever since. A crazy hat makes EVERYTHING more exciting.

And along the way, I've been awarded a mission for when I get back to Beantown. Its a SECRET mission. *NudgenudgewinkwinkknowwhatImeanknowwhatImean* I look forward to it. I've been stagnating in my comfort zone for too long, and it's time to challenge myself again. Or die trying. Haha, or not, but I definitely run the risk of seriously embarass myself. And I've decided to stop getting fat and go crazy fit again. Now I just need to get my damned appetite to agree to quit raging and let me live on air alone.

What else? Bhutto got blowed up. I didn't like her much, but I wouldn't have wished such a violent death on her all the same. May Allah have mercy on her soul, and give guidance, protection and direction to the people of Pakistan. It's gonna be hella explosive there in the days to come.

And ya'll, do me a favor. Stop worrying, hating, griping, and stressing for a minute and just be happy. You are alive. You are loved. You are safe. It could all be so much worse. Thank God. That's an order.

Last night, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse. After a dull day spent cleaning, packing and watching the snow pile up outside, an email popped up in my inbox inviting the few, the proud, the insane, to come down and play midnight snow football at the uni. That it was, oh, 11 pm, was not an issue. That there had been a Nor’easterly snow storm all day, who cares? That there were 10 inches to 2 ft of snow mounded on the roads and sidewalks outside, and more falling, a mere formality. I had to go. I hadn’t played snow football in YEARS, and it is one of the most fun forms of halal entertainment I know of.

So I waited for my lovely and protective landlady to go to bed, before I pulled on three layers of pants, and four layers of shirts, and snuck out. As I lifted my trusty Huffy over the near foot-deep drift between me and the snowy, slushy roads, I passed a neighbor. “Funny way to use a bike!” he called, as he dug out his buried car. I laughed in answer, while quietly praying he didn’t call the landlady to tell on me, and that I’d make it the 5 miles to campus in one piece.

Beyond my nerves, the ride was amazing. It was just me and the snowplows on the roads. And understandably so. Even though most of the snow had been steadily packed down by the constant passage of traffic throughout the day, it was still damned hard to ride on. If I wasn’t slipping in slush, my thin tires were falling through the packed snow and knocking me over. And good thing there were few cars out there, cuz I couldn’t have stopped at most of the lights even if I tried. My brakes were shot.

Slowly, I got the confidence and the balance to maintain a good clip. I zoomed by, (relatively anyways), shoppers and partiers plodding to homes and T-stations. Pump it, by Outkast, began to spin in my head, and I was soaring. Take that, safe and responsible people! Desert-dwelling, asthmatic me, was biking through snow to play football. “If I make it there without a serious fall, I’ll be LEGEND!”

Oh yeah, I was awesome – biking in a blizzard. Ok, it wasn’t a blizzard, but hey, cut me some slack for the sake of assonance. And just when my head was about ready to explode with conceit, I passed a man on a tall-bike. A tall-bike, for the uninitiated, is a double-decker bicycle, normal sized wheels, but two bike bodies welded together, so the rider is a good 6 feet off the ground. They’re tricky things in the best of circumstances. A friend of mine broke his femur falling from one, and that’s a hard bone to break. So, to take a tippy, unwieldy, and insane vehicular concoction of that sort on to the frosted Beantown roads was not only cool, but also adorably suicidal. So I was no longer awesome. Just silly, on my normal-height and fairly safe little 16-speed.

Ah well. Ego slightly (and needfully) deflated, I rode up to the field. Afterall, I still had my football. And what a game it was. Slowly the studying-addled genius kids began to trickle in and soon (after the formality of a brief snowball fight and some tackle battles) we had enough for two full-on teams. We divided up, allotting equal amounts of girls to both sides, and set the rules. Same sex tackle, opposite sex two-hand tag. With that, we were off.

It was sooooooo fun. I forwent the niceties of the gender-specific tackle rule, and knocked a couple guys flat. Sure, they were too shocked to put up a fight, but hey, it was still a victory for me and embarrassing for them. With a touchdown and a few completions under my belt, I was beginning to resemble a puffed up pigeon, strutting about. Aw yeah, I aint dead yet. I aint old. I’m holding my own on a university football field! Take that, conventions!

My first fall to earth happened in the first quarter, when I twisted my right ankle. Eh, no worries. I still have another ankle, right? And the shin-deep snow would serve as the cold compress in the meantime. It’ll be fine. So I carried on, trying to lose my age-and-gender matched counterpart on the opposing team to get open. And just incase anyone thinks I’m something special for my age, the non-athletic, first time football playing aero-astro PhD student was on me like white on rice. She did a great job of getting in my way, tripping us both with fair regularity way before I could even get the ball.

But I got pushed back up again when the opposing team decided to switch off their person covering me, and threw a strapping 19-year-old, 6-foot dude to get me, and things got serious. With smack talking (he warned me to watch out for my legs, cuz he was going to snap them off and me asking the glove-wearing pansy if his manicure was safe or had he broke a nail) and attempted stare-downs, we both had our honor at stake. He, as a dude against a girl, and me, as a doddering has-been against kids.

All things considering – the six year age difference, my ankle and frozen gloveless fingers – I did ok. I think he was scared of (FOR more likely) me. He actually flinched when he was playing QB and I juked him, as if I could cross the line till I’d counted off anyways. Psh. I don’t know most of the rules, but I do know that one. And though I still wasn’t making good odds on catches, I could at least outrun him to get a fair chance at a completion.

I was having a blast until something in my left knee gave. I don’t know what caused it. I didn’t take any ugly tackles or falls, but all the same, it slowly went from a little twinging to a grinding and ended up with me limping. It was THAT all over again. So I got switched over to QB and linebacker. On offense, I’d let our star player call the plays and just throw the ball, and on defense, I’d rush the QB. Not a bad deal.

It was a close game and a long one. Finally, 3 hours after I set out that evening, ‘next touchdown wins’ got called. And everyone stepped it up a notch. There were snowballs thrown during huddles, and lots of extraneous tackles, way after play. Even the girls got in on the action, with the two fast and capable girls on either team looking like NFL players with their dives and tumbles. Possession went back and forth a few times, before it came to an end.

The winning touchdown was made, when yours truly, megalomaniac, domesticated tomboy and manic cyclist extraordinaire, spotted an open player, near enough for my weak arm, with eyes on me, ready for the rock. I threw it. He caught it. And ran. THE WRONG WAY. Err, turns out, he wasn’t on my team. I didn’t realize. And the excited kid – the first time he actually got the ball all game – made an exhilarating touchdown. For the other team.

TYPICAL OWL!

Ah well. It was as good a game as you could want – lots of fun, and a moral lesson at the end. Owl, you suck. :) Worth the price of a twisted ankle, screwed up knee, and STILL numb fingers.

A friend has accused me of keeping my blog on 'life support.' Just barely. An update materializes only when my 1.5 readers have exhausted all hope of another one coming. So it must be that time again.

I did it. I showed him. It's been two weeks and not a SINGLE cup of tea or non-decaf coffee has passed my lips! Haha!

A few weeks back, I went to the doctor for a cough and had the strange fortune of discovering that the attendant MD in urgent care was a sleep specialist. With my longstanding history of insomnia, sleep walking and dreamlessness, I laid in to him. Poor guy, he never saw it coming. Haggard old me, sitting there, daintily coughing into my hankie, suddenly busted out with a full on interrogation on hows and whys of sleep disorders.

When his turn to talk came, he did the needful with his own set of questions, and within two minutes told me it had to be my caffeine habit. But, I spluttered, I only have a cup or two of tea a day which I sometimes replace with a small mug of coffee. Surely those early morning indiscretions can't be enough to warrant my late-night perambulations. "Two cups is too much! It's a drug you know, you shouldn't have any!" he self-righteously chided.

After briefly turning the table on him on the human need for a personal poison (which the chubby but steely doctor admitted in his case was sweets), I conceded defeat. He, after all, was the one who went to a billion years of university to know what he was talking about. And force of habit wasn't worth continuing my as-of-yet life sentence to full-on fatigue. "Anyways, I'll recommend that you come in again and stay for a sleep study," he offered, before I left, dejected but determined.

And since then, I've done without. No morning mug of chai. No afternoon cup of coffee. No medicines with caffeine in them. Nothing besides the very odd cup of decaf sipped for formality's sake. And how am I sleeping? The same. I didn't get to bed till 3 am last night, woke up four times in the night, and called it quits on the attempt for rest by 9 the next morning. Boo to you, Dr Sweettooth. Boo I say!

So now what? I dunno. I'm feeling oddly liberated, despite the fact that I haven't cured my insomnia. I'm doing without caffeine - a drug previously so integral to my life that the rellies in Pakistan have a saying about me. "Owl ki machine chai pai chalti hai," or "Owl's engine runs on tea," which is muttered when I refuse to eat lovingly proffered brain curry or some such and ask instead for a few cups of tea and some bread.

And while I sleep just as poorly without caffeine, I'm happy to note that I stay awake just as badly in the day. It's the same random nodding off in the more monotonous of classes - helped along by the annoying convention of dimming the lights for PowerPoint presentations. So either way, I'm the same old Owl.

With that crutch cast off, I'm wondering what else I can do without. My cycling helmet? The belt on my pants? Oh, or salt perhaps? Now that would be one to try. Stay tuned, loyal 1.5 readers, for that superhuman undertaking - separating the Salt from the salt.

PS. I've finally succumed. I bought myself a university sweatshirt today. Now I just need to get myself a pair of ripped jeans and flip flops to have the ultimate student look down. Or just buy a penant to be wholly owned.