Roads

Everything has a price.

Opportunity cost. For every choice you make you are sacrificing something else. The thing you didn't choose, the road you didn't take.

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood..."

It's all I can do not to dwell on the choices I didn't take, for better or for worse. There's no-one to help me choose, no-one to show me the way if I get lost down the wrong path. My life is defined by the sacrifices I make, by the roads I take.

Dolls and love and dullness

Lately I can’t seem to find the words to say what I think, and I think too much. I can’t express what I feel anymore. I find myself stuttering, restarting, searching. Has my mind despaired of how inefficiently I convey its magnificent thoughts? For words could never do it justice. But one more injustice isn’t going to make a difference in the world. Except to me, of course.

What am I to you? Just a broken doll.

There are a lot of things that scientists haven't discovered yet, things they don't know everything about, maybe never will. I see now that humans don't know love. Not completely. Maybe they never will. What made me come to this revelation? My overworked mind, but not just that. A book. A book so amazingly written that it puts other books to shame. A book I don't want to have read because it seems so wrong, to us. But it's so right in its own sense. A book that makes no sense at all but has taught me so much, confused me so much.

Ever read Lolita?

"Because you took advantage of a sinner
because you took advantage
because you took
because you took advantage of my disadvantage

when i stood adam-naked
before a federal law and all its singing stars
Because you took advantage of a sin
when I was helpless moulting moist and tender
hoping for the best
dreaming of a marriage in a mountain state
aye of a litter of Lolitas

Because you took advantage of my inner
essential innocence
because you cheated me-
Because you cheated me of my redemption
because you took
her at the age when lads
play with erector sets

a little downy girl still wearing poppies
still eating popcorn in the coloured gloam
where tawny Indians took paid croppers
because you stole her
from her wax-browed and dignified protector
spitting into his heavy-lidded eye
ripping his flavid toga and at dawn
leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort
the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
beacuse of all you did
becasue of all I did not
you have to die"

Don't. Don't tell me that isn't love.

Here's a thought...if you're willing to listen

"He only wants you when you're seventeen....

When you're twenty-one, you're no fun"

Ladytron - 17

I'm 18 in the morning.

My childhood is over.

I have this tape from when I was small. A cartoon. A poor little boy has a donkey, who is his best friend. It's all he has and he loves it so dearly. Then one day his family has absolutely no money left, and they have to sell the donkey. The donkey was called Small One. It used to make the tears stream down my face. If anybody mentions it to this day my eyes well up.

How do you explain to a little boy the unfairness of the world? Why do the donkeys suffer for mans stupidity?

I saw this man, we stopped to ask directions, and I thought to myself, it's Small One and the little boy grown up - they were never seperated. It made me so happy, I almost cried.

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The streets of Tehran

Cheetah footprints in the snow

Icicles

Small one

am i wrong?

Sometimes, I hear myself speak and I have no control over what I am saying.
It happens too often.

am i wrong for not trusting you when you have never betrayed me before?
am i wrong for not being satisfied with the little i have when no-one has the whole?
am i wrong for not baring my soul when yours is naked before my eyes?
am i wrong for not telling you my secret when you have told me yours?

will I find you, and when? should i still be waiting?

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I would have liked to upload some more pictures, but Blogger was being such a pest, god bless him!

*

The first pic is on its side, (it's a tree). I am loathe to re-upload it as it would take me an eternity!

Both the pics are in a little village in Iran, in Hamadan province.

EDIT: Silly me, most of the words were in black! (And hence invisible)

Holiday photos episode 2

I could drive forever but when I stopped I still wouldn't be home

Oh take me somewhere else

somewhere i can breathe

Take me where i can see the stars dance

I don't belong here

I wish you wouldn't

Tell me where to lay my head at night
Or where to fall asleep

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The first two are taken from the car window

1) A train, just outside of Tehran

2) The city of Qom

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3) Zagros mountain range

My first set of holiday photos...

It saddens me to see beauty fallen. It saddens me to see beauty in the ruins.

Every morning the sun rises, and every day it sets on the same misery. Why do we see hope in the sun? It leaves us every night, and yet we forgive it each morning. We are only foolish mortals, every single one of us. More fool he who thinks he is better. Better than what?

And see how the mighty have fallen. How the mighty have been destroyed. What once stood so proud shattered into complacency. Not knowing what life was like before. Not knowing.

It's amazing one can see the mountains from here. For the smog is so thick it takes considerable effort to keep breathing. Remembering to breathe when it stings one's nostrils.

I think I love you

Home

Last year when I wrote my Australian finals (exams that we wrote instead of our mocks that we could have used/can use to get into Australian/British universities), we had an English writing paper. An essay for 70 marks, and transactional writing (ie. a letter) for 30. I'm all for essay writing, I love it. But letter writing isn't really my cup of tea. But that's getting off-track a little.

So anyway, what I was (eventually) getting around to was my essay. They gave us a load of different topics, some pictures, some words. I chose one that was something about home. Home is where the heart is. No, it wasn't that. Something like that. But it kinda got me thinking.

Take a girl like me. I don't have a home. I don't mean I'm homeless. Or a nomad or anything like that. I have a house, well, my parents do at least.Let me try explain myself. I was born in the UK. My mother is British, my father Persian. I always thought England was home. But then I got old enough to know better.

I'm a foreigner in England. I'm not British, I don't look British. Sure I speak English, I even have a British accent (it's fading away now). But my culture isn't British. I don't think people in England accept me as British, and I don't want to be British.

Okay, the younger me thought. So, you're not British. No big deal, it's pretty simple - you're Persian. If only it were that simple. It works both ways. I'm a foreigner in the UK, I'm a foreigner in Iran. So I speak a little Farsi. I can't even read it. Or write it. To the Persians, I'm as much of a foreigner as I am to the British.

To complicate matters even further, I've lived in Egypt. And now I live in South Africa. Egypt was home, South Africa is home but none are home.

So nowhere and everywhere seems like home. There's no one place that I feel intimately connected to, more than any other. To put it simply - I haven't really got a place that I insist my gravestone goes, or my ashes are sprinkled. I love England, I love Iran, I love the Middle East. Egypt, South Africa, and all the rest of the countries I've ever visited.

So after I got back from this last trip abroad, I found myself sitting opposite my mum and saying to her - "What the hell are we doing here?" Probably just the after-effects of a holiday that was too good to be true, huh? Or the side-effects of something bigger.

I got full marks for the essay by the way...