My New Armenian Friend, Ashot

If you scroll down below, my new Armenian friend Ashot has been making trash comments on the posts. It is in the manner similar to basketball players' trash talk before a big game. So I know it’s all in good fun.

Ashot is from Armenia; his family moved her e to escape a war between Armenia and Azerbhaijan in the late 1980s. He has a movie of the week-worthy survival story of being granted political asylum. He doesn't think anyone is foreign though.

However, I think that being foreign is a state of mind, and much like Kareem in Hanif Kureishi’s, The Buddha of Suburbia, I am considered foreign by the American system in which I live. For example, I live in the rural South, and my dad’s office manager told me a few months ago I had “an accent like [my] parents.” At the hospital, once, a nurse asked me how I liked America (well, it’s exploitive foreign policy and inherent conservatavism are super annoying). Anyways, the point is society treats me like a foreigner, so I am one; as much as we like to think identity is self-fashioned, it’s not – the identity we create competes with the one that society places us in.

The final point I’d like to make is that Ashot is making a competing blog so he can beat us. I think that healthy competition is okay, and I do wish him the best of luck in his future blogging endeavors.

Studying is Serious Business

“Liking boys is haram,” my mom said to me as she drove me home from elementary school.

Even as a seven year-old kid, I was told to “focus on my studies” and to avoid thinking about boys, marriage, or anything pertaining to the opposite gender because it would inevitably lead one down a path of sin and homelessness. My parents believed that boy-crazy girls would end up jobless with an equally useless husband who would be the tragic male equivalent of a “welfare queen.” Whenever I got tired of studying and wanted to watch Beverly Hills, 90210, my dad would say, “Do you want to make a career out of working at fast food restaurants?” Such terror tactics were effective, and I thought that any distractions would result in me being barefoot, pregnant, and abandoned at a Wal-Mart in some small, redneck town in Alabama.

In the Qureshi household, liking a boy was not only seen as a fundamental waste of time but something only worthy of cheap, tacky girls with no family values.

My mom began telling me stories about her college life with the “cheap” girls at the Home Economics College in Lahore very early on. The Home Economics College would not allow any men to come into the campus, and so one can only imagine the sexual tension that existed within the confines of the college walls.

And so, there would be vignettes about girls named Nilofer or Ruksanna or Arfa, All these girls would sneak outside college walls to go drink chai with their boyfriends. At this juncture of the story, Mom would inflect such horror and disgust in her voice that I would think that Lali was just short of being a two-bit hooker turning tricks for a rupee for her pimp. I always expected that Arfa and Ruksanna would meet a tragic end as a victim of an honor killing as a punishment for their sins; instead, when I asked about the fates of these girls, my mom would merely reply, “Oh, well she married her boyfriend ….” Despite the unromantic ending to such a sinful affair, I think I was still supposed to think these girls were as shady as a one-night stand in a motel called the Camelot.

In conclusion, one can gleam a very important message from the above – that foreign parents will do anything, just short of building you a cage inside the basement and feeding you only peanuts, to get you to study hard and get on the honor roll.

-- By Mariam, still an MS1 student

Deep Thoughts

I don't believe in love at first sight. I believe in love at first laugh. When you've made him laugh and he's made you laugh, that's when you know you've got something good going on.

In conclusion, this is why I should marry George Clooney. He told a magazine once that he likes funny women, and I'm hilarious. He also told Barbara Walters he would never marry again, but I still think he'll marry me, because everybody lies to that bitch. I would lie to her too. Stupid lisp.

--By Farrah R., A Fan of George Clooney and South Park

It’s Hard Being Foreign: A True Story of Embarrassment

It’s super hard being foreign. The daily taunts from Chase Stone, “Why don’t you go back to your country on your camel?” or Betsy Jean Clay (a fat girl with issues of her own) and Ginny Bryson trying to get you to date Amol Patel, a tall Indian Gujrati guy who you couldn’t have married even if you had wanted to because Muslim and Hindu fraternization was total honor killing material.

Then one day, it got worse. Nathan, a Jewish kid whose father was a surgeon and general golden boy of the 6th grade asked me, “Do you sacrifice goats?” I said “no” because I didn’t think I did (we actually do on a holiday called baqra eid…oops). What had tragically happened was that mom and dad had decided that fresh goat was where it’s at so they killed a goat on our garage on Deerwood Lane. My neighbor Chelsea, a girl whose hair was as bright and flaming as a June morning, had found a goat’s head that my parents had disposed of in the trash. Her cocker spaniel, which had a habit of leaving its business in our backyard, had brought the neighbors a “surprise” so to speak. And so, a haunting and disturbing myth followed me throughout my time at Carlisle School.

--By Mariam, Also MS1 at UTCOM

Story 1: An Emo Story

Preston had never truly been happy. His parents got divorced early on and never stopped arguing. His mother’s tears only lead to drinking, then while the kids played in the yard, Chloe got too close to the well…she fell in and died on impact. She was 2. Preston was 5. Things were never the same again. But life went on as it always does.

He felt he didn’t know how to love, but managed to make strong attachments – anything that gave him the idea of some normalcy. They always left though, they pitied him, stayed for a while feeling sorry for him, but left when they couldn’t understand the intensity of his life. Then he met Jenny. She managed to channel his distress into music. With the smooth synthesized sounds of her keyboard played under the acoustic riffs of his guitar – they could let out all their sorrows. Together they even found some success. Playing at their local bar, their band “The Teardrops” had a small following.

Then, on an April morning, tragedy hit. Preston bought a ring to propose to Jenny. He pictured the movie script ending of the proposal, but he never could have imagined the accident that followed. He planned everything out. He waited for a rainy day – they loved rainy days. He found a vintage boom box and found an old cassette of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” He told her to meet him in the middle of the park. When she saw him there in the rain, she welled up with tears and enjoyed the scene. She ran up to him and he started to put down the boom box so he could get down on one knee. The boombox slipped out of his hand and hit her on the head, and then she was struck by lightning. Preston died right then and there of a broken heart.

People still listen to the haunting sounds of their music, and their “indie” album went double platinum.

--By Farrah R., MS1 at UTCOM

First Post hotness

Hello,

Welcome to Stories from Left Side of the Room. Blogs were supercool a couple of months ago, but I'm not sure about their "in" status nowadays. I'm thinking that they are on their way out much like the leggings trend of yesteryear. However, blogging is not as completely "out" as Instant Messenger has become, but not as super trendy as cell phone texting. It resides in a comfortable happy intermediate place.

As a nonconformist individual with slight indie vibe going, I don't think that I care because blogging will be a wonderful way in which the back row can write bodice rippers about girls with derivative Jane Austen names (me), emo stories and trashy romance with lovemaking scenes that are slightly implausable (Farrah), and general snarky remarks (Abby and Sarah).

Mainly, this is blog is to counteract 2 things:
1) the daily monotony of our lives that otherwise can drive people like dentists to suicide.
2) the crushing squelching of creativity and artsiness that medical school thrives with making poor students learn weird things about dorsal root ganglia (although the abbreviations are fun).

Peace out homies.

XOXO,

Mariam