Pages from My Diary

I am not sure if any such challenge exists. I guess I just made it up. Hey all, sorry for not updating my blog for such a long time. Well, I have been busy doing nothing. You know how I am! So, the other day I thought of pushing myself to see if I can reach a certain word-count limit. My writing has been the epitome of sloth in the past few weeks, and I could barely squeeze out more than 2,000 words per day (that too, if I sat in front of the computer for at least about 7-8 hours at a stretch). I have also been meaning to write a short story lately because I had kind of started to miss writing the words 'The End'. Writing a #shortstory . Target: 10k words. Deadline, TONIGHT. 12:27PM here. I will live-tweet progress. This should be fun. #amwriting — Mehnaz Tabassum (@mztabassum) July 20, 2015

I have wasted around 1000 precious hours of my small life looking at the blue-white pages of Facebook. But the sad truth is that  there is essentially nothing to watch. 

Homemade pasta is a delight, and when it comes to creamy pasta, I can never resist the urge. After spending plenty of money at restaurants, I finally decided to give this one a try at home. Although most of my cooking experiments fail first, this one turned to be quite successful; so, sharing my experience with you all here. Here is what it looks like.

"So, what do you want to do in life?" this was the common question people used to asked me when I was about to take my HSC exams. My answers used to be definite. I was younger, immature, but I had a set plan for my life. I knew what I was doing, what I was aiming for. Today I am that same girl, albeit a bit older; but when someone asks me the same question, my answer is: Error 404: Answer Not Found. Image Credit: Danilo Rizzuti at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

[A post on good and bad memories of 2014 and resolutions for 2015.] Another year is gone from my life. Time truly flies. This time it was literally gone with the blink of an eye. It still feels like January 2014, except I am twelve months late. Wishing you all a very happy new year, and hope that you will live your life to the fullest, achieve whatever you dream of (or at least get one step closer to achieving it) and stay healthy all through 2015. Image Credit: Freedigitalphotos.net

To say I am disappointed with my life in this country would be the understatement of the century. I believe most of you had read my post about my phone  getting stolen with utmost pity (written in February, 2013). Well, get ready to summon all of those condolence once again, because the same incident has happened to me once again! I am not short of a celeb, because this time the thief took her time to come to my house and steal it from right under my nose!

I went to visit my grandma today, and found my 3-years-and-something-months old cousin playing GTA: San Andreas on his father's computer. "What's the big deal? He was probably just running a car around the streets." "One of his sisters must have turned it on for him.  Wasn't she just playing a game like Candy Crush Saga?" No! He did all of that himself!

Well, I am not really sure if I should call it madness, because I am certain that many readers out there do the same. If you are the type of reader who has more books on his/her to-read shelf than he/she can finish in this lifetime then I believe you already understand the immense pain that we have to go through right after finishing a book. The single question that jolts us awake in the middle of the night is: What to read next? Okay I might have made it a little too melodramatic. But I wouldn't deny that I don't spend an awful lot of time worrying about the next book I want to read. I had read a blog post a few days back (sorry I couldn't find it for you) where it said that you could make these small chits with the names of books you want to read next, and when you finish one, you simply pick up another and whatever the chit says, you read that book. This makes it a lot easier and cuts the agony we have to face every time. There was this Facebook post that sugge...

Eid comes with lots of shopping, yummy foods and lots and lots of TV shows and telefilms. I usually remain busy with my cousins all day long, and barely have time to watch those. Plus recently a lot of new TV channels are popping in the scenario, so you actually lose count of all the TV serials that they air on fifty or so different channels. I remember that on one Eid I had actually made a list (a schedule, to be more appropriate) of all the shows that I wanted to watch, and had ended up watching none. The sponsor list of these TV shows is so long that there are actually more commercials than the length of the actual show, which is irritating at times (read 'always'). The schedule shows that the show will start at eight-thirty, which actually means that their will be about a hundred commercials, starting at eight-thirty, and the show will start whenever the last commercial of that particular session has been aired! I had lost my appetite in these shows before Airtel decid...

A moment ago, I was checking my diary in which I keep my transactions recorded- something I have been doing for quite a long time now. The diary has transactions of the past few years stored in it, filled in with black, blue and green pens. I don't know why, but I decided to check the past transactions, and what I saw almost brought me on the verge of tears. I still remember the day when mom declared that we would be getting pocket-money from the next month, and the amount was lucrative too. 1,000 taka was really a lot for us at that age. We were only leaving school then. Although kids of that age pretty much lay hands on more money, we never saw the face of those fresh notes before that age. If we needed something, anything , we would only name it, and dad would bring those to us in next to no time. It was that simple, and we never had to ask for money! I don't smoke or do drugs, and nor does my brother. Hence everything we ever did was acceptable to our ever-affectionate ...

I was surfing Facebook just now and came across a post that referred to a website called Employ Adam . It was built by someone called Adam Pacitti , and currently, he is looking for a job. He has set up his website with a hope to finding a job sooner, and I found this idea very intriguing and creative. Not just the website, he says to have spent his remaining few bucks to book a billboard and put an ad so that he can get hired. Below is an image of the billboard that I downloaded from the website with the owner's consent for sharing it here on my blog:  This guy has a first-class degree, and yet far from getting any job! I have three more years till I graduate and I can already see myself in there-a girl with an average CGPA sitting in a room full of applicants for her interview, only to find out at the end of the day that she has not made it. Disappointed, fatigued, defeated, she returns home but makes up her mind to go to the next interview in the dead darkness of the night...

I am freaking out, I mean seriously freaking out! On a sunny day of April I woke up to read a horrible post on Facebook that turned my whole world upside down. It said the end was near. It had a lot of statistical data to back the claim, as well as a lot of religion stuff that compelled me to believe that I was actually going to die soon. The post said something about the 3rd of August (the date was converted from Hijri calender) and I waited eagerly for death to arrive, but I was surprised when I woke up on the 4th of August. The previous day had been forgotten because of my workload and I hadn't even noticed! But this time it's not the same. Apparently some Mayan smart-pants had predicted this ages ago, and although the statistical data does not say anything about the world coming to an end on the 21st of December, it is said that a terrible debacle will take place (probably an earthquake) which will kill as many as 90% people of the earth, leaving the rest to carry ...