blueness personified

Now that I am done with the whole kleptomania story(scroll down),here's some whining coming your way.Things have been quite a mess here at my end.There were some family issues which I was managing to block out but you know how they say "when it rains, it pours"....well it did pour. I have been stressed about those family issues...stressed about my studies which went down the drain and if that wasn't enough little S accidentally threw away a precious notebook of mine which had a LOT of material that I needed to prepare for the exam.I don't know if I am getting the magnitude of this situation across right.I had worked so hard in making all those notes...spent hours listening to lectures...transcribing them,looking up extra information and adding it all in just so my life would be easier close to the exam...and it just gets thrown into the garbage!I hate to admit it but its sort of my fault...I shoudn't have left that notebook on S's study table.Oh well...whats done is done....but I have been depressed like anything. I am having to literally dig myself out of this depression. I think its just too many things hapening all at once.....or may be I am just not as tough as I'd like to think I am.I cried so much that day...I seriously felt robbed!
I am trying to bring some form of order to life and the studying now. I went to the library today for a few hours and came back because it was too cold...yes, I had a sweat shirt on...and yes, people were staring at me like I was crazy...but it was still too cold.Tomorrow,I am taking the thickest sweat shirt I own and some hot chocolate just so I can sit there and make up for the lost studying time.I don't think I'll be posting in for a while after this...hmmm...I just might if I feel extra whiny and want you all to go endure the torture....so keep checking in on me..:)...and prayyyyyyyyy!!

Kleptomania (?) ctd.....

V called T the next day. T was in Islamabad . Then, V asked her if she had heard anything new about my bag. T said she hadn’t and explained how she had looked for it everywhere that day too. V listened to her go on for a while and then interrupted her. She told T that it was really weird but someone had come up to us and told us that it was her who had taken the bag.T asked her who had said it and how can we be so sure. V decided to call her bluff. She told T that we know for sure because that person saw her leave with my bag from the museum.There was silence at T’s end . V felt encouraged and went on saying that the dean at the college had told us to report the matter to the police. This did the trick. T suddenly blurted out an apology and confessed to taking my bag!! She now wanted to know what we wanted her to do. V told her that I wanted my bag back. She said she’d come back to Lahore the next day and meet us at the college. I was very relieved.

V and I went to meet T at the college the next day. We saw her standing in the parking lot and went up to her. I didn’t see her holding my bag! I thought maybe she had it in her car or something. I was wrong. I asked her where my bag was and she said that she didn’t have it! She said after she’d taken it, she got scared and she threw it in one of the labs upstairs. I felt like killing her for not telling us about this the day before! She said she thought one of the lab attendants may have picked it up. V didn’t agree with this because we had gone upstairs within ten minutes of realizing that the bag was missing to check the labs. We had told all the lab attendants to be on the look out too. I didn’t know whether to trust T anymore.

T said she wanted to look for the bag in the labs once more….which was plain stupid because if she had indeed thrown it there it really wouldn’t be sitting there waiting for us to find it! I told her she was pushing my buttons now and that she should honestly let me know what she’d done with my stuff. She, then took out a cell phone from her bag and handed it over to me. Apparently, she had stolen that cell phone from another girl the day before she took my bag. She said if she had my bag with her she would have brought it just like she brought that girl’s cell phone. I was really confused…I had no idea what to do. T was willing to pay me for the damage done but begged me not to tell anyone about this. I wasn’t going to do that… I told her I won’t advertise this to the rest of our class but I had to let the dean know about it because we had reported the matter to him. It would be his decision then.

I still wasn’t sure about whether I should take the money for my stuff from T. I wanted her to pay but not with the precondition of me forgiving her and forgetting all about it. The matter had to be reported to the college authorities. What bothered me the most was that she seemed so unperturbed….it almost seemed as if paying what was a considerable amount of money was no big deal to her. V and I were deliberating over this when she interrupted us saying that she had lots of family issues and needed psychiatric help. She then went on to say how she had been to a couple of psychiatrists before and they had all…check this…sexually harassed her!!! She said she was willing to get help this time round only if V and I  went with her. We weren’t surprised when she brought this up because A (the girl who had originally suspected her) had told us how she had concocted such stories when she was caught stealing from her room. We told her that even if she was telling the truth about all this.....she had lost all credibility and it just wasn’t possible for us to believe her. She needed to get her family involved if this had really happened to her.

I decided on asking her to pay me back for my cell phone, stethoscope and torch. We took her to the respective shops to check on the prices and get an estimate. These were all expensive things and amounted to over 25,000 rupees. T ended up paying me 15,000 rupees because I decided on settling for a cheaper cell phone model than the one that was stolen. The stethoscope I had was too state of the art and so I ended up getting a simpler cheaper version for that too. Of course I got the same torch that I had because that was the absolute best. I sincerely hoped this would shame T into never stealing again. I met with the dean and told him about everything. He said he would set up a meeting with T and decide what to do with her now. T wasn’t kicked out of college. She was given a warning and all the hostel wardens were notified about this. About 3 months after this incident I got my national I.d card back in the mail. It had been in my wallet and someone had probably dropped it in a post box. I remembered telling T that whoever took it should at least have the decency to return my I.ds. I didn’t confront T about this because it would have been an exercise in futility. Since we were in the same class and I still had a year left, I ran into her often. We didn’t talk but what struck me as odd was that she would look me straight in the eye….it was always a cold ,stony look with no remorse whatsoever.

Every time I read about kleptomania, I am forced to think about T. Her defense was that she had kleptomania and I think that amongst her promises of never to do it again saved her from being kicked out of college. A couple of my close friends who knew about this thought the dean shouldn’t have let her go like that….they said she didn’t deserve to become a doctor. I think she may have changed for the better…at least I hope she did.

Kleptomania (?)

I’ve been reviewing Psychiatry these past three days and have come to the realization that  it just depresses me. I don’t know what it is about the subject but it happens every time I go through it. Thankfully, I am almost done with it and am not so miserable any more. I was reading through kleptomania which is an impulse control disorder. People with this disorder steal things which are really of no use to them….be it for personal use or for monetary gain. This reminded me of an incident back at college. I was in my fourth year at that time and it was right before our mock exams. My batch of about  twenty five students had gathered in the pathology department’s basement where the museum was. We were all busy looking at specimens….making sure we knew how to identify each one because this was to be the last time we’d get to see them. After this they were to be sealed and kept safe (as if anyone was going to steal them!) till our finals.

There were set days on which each batch was to come and look at the slides and the specimens. I heard a couple of girls complain out loud about people from other batches coming in on “our” day….they did have a point because it was extremely stuffy with just the twenty five of us. Also, it was July and the sweltering heat made people even more intolerant. I wanted to leave as soon as I could because all the noise and the stuffiness was getting to me but there was still quite a few specimens that I needed to look at. It was then that the electricity went out! There was more complaining and groaning . I heard V call out to me. Some one had a torch with them and a group was huddled over the specimens in the dark. It was obviously a lost cause to make way into them and actually get to see something but I went over anyways. Much to my relief, the electricity came back on in about twenty minutes. V and I hurriedly looked over the remaining specimens and were all set to leave when I realized my bag wasn’t where I had left it! I looked around on the other chairs, under the table to no avail. I asked people around me but no one had seen anything because there had been no electricity.

I was flabbergasted. My bag had my cell phone, my check book, my wallet with about 3000 rupees and all my i.d cards, an expensive and much cherished stethoscope and torch light, amongst other things. I looked every where in the museum and even checked the laboratories upstairs.....but didn’t find it! I resigned myself to the thought that someone had stolen it. But I was frustrated because whoever it was, had to be one of my class fellows who were there in the museum at that time. Almost all of them were well known to me and I was good friends with them. V and I decided to leave then and probably report the matter to the head of the department …not that it would have made a difference. We were just about to leave when a girl A came to us. She said she might have a hunch as to who may have stolen my bag. She named a girl T who she claimed had stolen things from her room in the hostel .A however said that T had been dealt with  firmly by the hostel authorites but had begged to keep it all hushed. I was shocked because I had been with T in the same batch through the first two years and got along great with her. Our batches changed when we got to third year. She was one of the few people who were there out of turn on that day. I was confused. Then V suggested that we go and look for her and just ask her if  she has seen my bag. She thought we just may be able to judge if she had taken my bag by her facial expressions. We went upstairs and found her sitting on one of the benches in the corridor. I went up to her told her how I couldn’t find my bag. She asked me what I had in the bag  and said that she even looked for it herself in the labs once she heard about it. She kept a straight face through all this. We really had no evidence on the basis of which we could blame her other than that other girl A’s suspicion. "A" had also told us that "T" had claimed that she was just really upset because of family problems and would never do soemthing like this again A had forgiven her and had thought T had turned a new leaf .

V  took me back to her house. We tried calling on my cell phone but it had been switched off. I was worried because that was the only way by which my parents could reach me. I just sulked the whole day. “A” called me at V’s house and asked if we came up with something or not. When I told her I hadn’t she insisted on how she really thought it was “T”. She had asked a few more girls in the hostel about “ T” and there were two more people who had suspected her when things started disappearing from their rooms but didn’t have any concrete evidence against her. I decided to let it go and got down to calling my parents to let them know about all this. V wasn’t giving up on this though. She had a strong feeling that it was "T" and told me she was going to give her a call. More on this later.

Another Note to Self

What you feel subjectively is not important…what’s important is that you make progress everyday.

Rain!

I think this is probably my umpteenth post about how I love it when it rains…but I so do and I love to blog about it too (that kinda rhymed, didn’t it?)!I had the blinds to my window down and my study lamp on because… well….I like to pretend its all nice and cloudy outside on especially sunny days (like today). So ,I hear this rumble of thunder and am all smiles…I pull up the blinds and the sky is a gorgeous gray….. It continues to darken and then there is a flash of lightning, more thunder and glorious, glorious rain! :)

vitamins + water = all you need

From the label on a bottle of this fancy nutrient enhanced water called “vitamin water”.

“focus : kiwi-strawberry (a+lutein)

now that everyone is glued to their cell phones ,no one really pays attention to what’s going on around them. With all that walking and talking, you never know what you could be missing: birds chirping, flowers blooming, shoe sales, really good-looking people, celebrities without make-up, telephone poles ,or piles of poo (and we don’t mean Winnie) that’s why this stuff has vitamin a and lutein to give you all the focus you need. So, keep your eyes peeled or that smell could be your shoe.”

I don’t know if its me sick of studying or whatever but this has amused me enough to not only blog about it but also to save the label!!!

S's Graduation

It was S's fifth grade recognition day today....somewhat of a graduation ceremony for promotion from elementary school to middle school.He looked so cute!He's the one in the blue shirt and the khakis...the only boy amongst all the GIRLS in the second row ...ha ha ha!!