Category: My Past

My Past, Myself, Preeti, Writing

My Writing Sucks: A Blog Post

Sanjay Sabarwal
Janss Steps, Royce Hall in background, UCLA
Image via Wikipedia

For the first time since I started on my UCLA extension classes, I am wondering what made me think I could actually write.  This is the first time also I took only one class, and yet it feels as if my entire certificate for creative non fiction depends on it.  The class is for personal essays, how to write one and get published.  We have only written 5 essays but it feels as if I have written 50.  The worse part: my writing absolutely, without any doubt in my mind, sucks.  I mean it’s awful.  Instead of showing, I am telling. Instead of describing people, I am using stock characters.  And grammar? Forget about it, it looks like I stopped around 8th grade.

At first, it was easy to blame the class (teacher sucks, essays too general, no lectures, etc) and then I realized that the issue really was me.  My first topic was about my grandfather, the second about my mom and sisters opening up Ziba, the third about my difficult writing, and the fourth and fifth about cancer.  Each topic emotionally loaded for me, but more importantly not really dealt with at the time so as I began writing, I lose myself into that time period so the writing resembles that of a child.

Writing about Ziba and my dad;s drinking is just plain hard mainly because I have such mixed emotions about it.  When Ziba started, I was at UCLA and then Law school and I was 13 when my dad drank and it has had a powerful effect on me.  The main reason its hard because Ziba is in my lifeblood and I love my dad so much now, more so because he is one of the few people I know in my life who did a 180 turn in life to save his family.  I have so much respect, pride and love for him that it’s hard to look at a time when I felt nothing for him.  As for Ziba, it;s just hard to write about it because I have the guilt that I could have done so much more and that perhaps I didn’t have much to do with it for it to be successful.  In a way, maybe I am riding it coattails, but then I see my family and they just don’t see it like that and won’t let me either.

Finally, my love and cancer. This part’s the hardest just because it was so recent but more importantly it involved someone I love so completely that it’s hard to imagine being without her.  So here I am, in a personal essay class where all the essays are so personal that they don’t mean much to others because I havent dealt with my own issues, and thus the writings are full of meandering thoughts and emotions that frankly aren’t very fun to read if I was totally honest with myself.  Let’s hope I figure it out soon before I truly feel like a failure.  I am open to suggestions 🙂

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Journal, My Past, Myself, Writing

Fraud: A Blog Post

Sanjay Sabarwal
The Secret Life of Words
Image via Wikipedia

I have a need to be read so I know I exist.  These are my words, and I need to share them.  Too long, they have gone silent, and worst of all ignored by me.  I had convinced myself that writing was enough, just like breathing.  But after a while, you need more than air to live.  Life isn’t just a series of breathing exercises yet for a while that’s how I treated my life.  Something I just had to do.  No vision. No motivation.  Just passing of the day and really just being lucky enough to be around people who loved me for existing and providing me with everything.

So why am I whining because I know I am a fraud.  I know that the words coming here now are just so simple and don’t even come close to the poetry in my head.  It used to be so easy and now I am lazy and dull.  I stopped listening and hearing what the words were trying to tell.  So now I just sit here, listening to amazing religious songs with a cold cup of coffee trying to convince myself at 38 that this is what I want to be.   Yet every moment feels forced, made up just so I can say I wrote. 

I am a writer.  It’s what I tell myself when I wake up every morning, and the first strokes of the words comes easy.  Yet after a minutes, I find myself tweeting/emailing/posting/reading/searching/paying bills all throughout the precious time I have managed to find to write.  It’s as if my body is telling me to get real and go back to my superficial life. And I oblige.  That’s the sad part.  I know I am failing myself and yet somehow I still continue on the path. 

I am a fraud, but at least I know it.  And knowing is half the battle, Gi Joe reminds me.  But wait, I feel like a fraud but does that really make me one?  It’s the question that nags at me.  Who am I, really?  Am I the thoughts in my head or am I to be defined by actions?  What is it about slamming these letters down that makes me feel like a light weight heavy lifter?  Is it the guilt that the joy I felt when I first learned to transform my thoughts into reality seems buried, muffled underneath the chorus of doubt and guilt? Or is it just not meant to be? 

Should I remain a fraud or for once be the man I said I wanted to be?

And then there was silence…

Brownness, My Past, Myself, Writing

Swirling Thoughts

Sanjay Sabarwal
i hope they serve beer in hell
Image by kangarootone via Flickr

1) Remember grabbing KFC in Iran as a weekly ritual and going to the park (5ys)
2) first day in boarding school in India, I had peed the bed and was ashamed (8yrs old)
3) arriving in london to stay with relatives with my oldest sister (10 years old)
4) driving from the airport towards my parents after not seeing them (12 years old)
5) Being humiliated in my 7th grade english class because the teacher felt my English speaking skills werent up to par, and her being unsure if I would pass the class.
6) Getting on the volleyball team and realizing I was a bench player, getting subbed in and my only shot was tipping the ball in and scoring for the team (14 years old)
7) remembering that I followed Sumita (my middle sister) into almost everything she signed up for writing class, student congress, human relations camp, india boarding school
8) Returning to india after receiving green card, and seeing my grandfather for the last time before he passed away (18 years)
9) my first published story “Rain Fire” edited by a dear family friend who recently passed
10) Winning the National Conference of Teachers of English award (included a recommendation from the English teacher who didn’t think I would pass.

I remember being empty. Time ticking away, coffee getting cold and me just empty. It’s as if I had no memories, no past. And then I remembered the no. Mrs. Maruna didn’t think I would ever pass 8th grade English class. I looked up into her unsmiling face, looking for understanding. Nothing. The redness of my shame circled around my cheeks but hidden by the browness of my skin, it just squeezed my heart and soul.

I was single, young, and horny. We chatted online for a few minutes, and after a few sexual innuendos, decided to take our activities offline and meet up. I am ashamed now at my sluttiness, and willingness to meet a complete stranger just to satisfy myself but really not that ashamed to be zooming down on the freeway to meet her at 3am. She had left the door open as we had discussed. In hindsight, it made sense why she did. I shoved the door open, immediately banged my leg on the bed, and to hide the pain told her I needed to take a shower. Perhaps my only concern for safety was to be hygienic. She was already in bed when I walked out. I climbed right in, but couldn’t quite get comfortable. I kept moving around until she asked if her leg was bothering me? Huh? “I said, is my leg bothering you?” removing the blanket to reveal a steel leg. Holy shit, I was about to fuck the terminator. My penis tried to hide inside of me. The meanness in me proved my immaturity and explained why I never again tried to hook up online.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max

That was the inspiration for my post about my online adventure gone wrong, and while I wasnt as bad as Tucker is in his many “misadventures” with women in college, I think I came quite close to being Tucker with my comment that I was about to fuck the terminator. The sad part is that I had done a much longer graphic post mocking the girl and myself, and really made it my “Zinger” story. I usually told it to a group of new people, and usually it would draw huge laughter, but then I realized it didn’t make me look very good to my girlfriend to be. In fact, she was disgusted not at the fact that the girl had 1 leg, but the fact that others laughed so hard. That was probably the first time I realized what an asshole I came off to be. Sure, once people got to know me, they knew different. However, my choice to share this story as a starting off point really just made me another Max Tucker. And that’s not something I wished my legacy to be standing on. Especially on one leg. Yea, I havent matured much.

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My Past, Myself

I Remember

Sanjay Sabarwal
A mathematics lecture, apparently about linear...
Image via Wikipedia

I remember knowing that I would be a success one day. I remember that success coming from writing and also from reading. I remember the confidence I had that the words coming out of my made absolute sense and were contributing to the welfare of society The sense that what I wrote mattered, that I would a writer of consequence. Instead of small burst of letters and barely thought of words, I would produce stories of vivid imagination and longing.

I remember my first computer, and being the first among many junior high schoolers to get one, and promising them I would make them a spanish book for $20 a piece and getting $200 from 10 of the honor students and then realizing that I wouldn’t have the time to make or print out individual copies, I went to Kinkos and made 9 copies then submitted the folders.

Mrs. Cano liked what she saw. Neatly printed out, well put together and everything in Spanish, this was what she expected from her best students A great template for others and so the first folder received an A. She then moved onto the next one, and marked it down for missing pages and lack of imagination, then after several others she saw something familiar, almost like a template and it struck her that this was the same folder as the first. Perhaps, it was a reprint by the same student. A quick look confirmed that the notebook had different names, so she pulled it out of the stack and put it aside to deal with later. But then the next folder was the same, and Mrs Cano knew this couldn’t be a coincidence, and did a quick scan through and found 7 more identical folders, but the surprising part was the fact all the names belonged to honor students. What was going on?

I couldn’t decide what to do with the $200 that was cradled under my mattress, It was the most money I had ever earned, and although I was proud of my accomplishment, I knew I couldn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t believe how easy it had been but I had small flutter in my conscience that I would get caught but I ignored that small voice, convincing myself that nothing would go wrong.

My Past, Myself

Leaving

Sanjay Sabarwal
Aerial view of Niagara Falls, showing parts of...
Image via Wikipedia

The idea seemed simple enough. Got a new BMW, Drive to New York. Got a map, and my eyes glanced over the country and I wondered why just New York…

A Recently broken up fake marriage, lied to for almost 4 years, I wanted to get away from LA fast but no so fast that I didn’t experience anything. Why drive? Simple enough answer: Why not? Nothing was stopping me but honestly I wasn’t sure myself. It just seemed to fit and make sense since not much else in my life really did I think I just wanted an adventure. I felt locked up and had been indoors too long. Behind bars of a loveless and sexless marriage, I no longer wanted to do the normal thing of travel by flying. Truth be told, I didn’t even know what normal was.

I met her when I had just turned a quarter of a century, felt like my gas tank was quarter full of experience, and it would be good to share 75% of my life with the company of another. She was, pretty, Punjabi and in school. She filled out the mold I had set in my head and so we began dating. No sex of course, but we are indian and we don’t do those sort of things. Some sexual foreplay and plenty of time with each others’ families well actually more with hers because she lived an hour away and me being a gentleman, I didn’t want to make her drive so I would go visit her and since she lived at home with he parents (as I did), I thought it appropriate to be the designated driver to her life. A mistake I would pay for the rest of my life.

San Francisco was added for obvious reasons since it hovered about us, and it made sense to pass it as a launch point also because we wanted to touch Utah (for skiing), glance over Wyoming, set up briefly for some steaks in Nebraska (had heard they were famous for them), and then plunge through Iowa to finally get to a city and state where we actually had friends: Chicago, Illinois. After getting our breath back by shoving it with Crown Royal for 3 days, we would then stumble onwards to Cleveland (for a Bhangra competition) and then finally make it to our original destination of New York. However, the thought of going back the same way we came smacked too much like my demolished nuptials so we planned to forge ahead to see the Niagara Falls on the side of Michigan (something I wasn’t aware of until we opened the map and talk to the Triple A agent), gently stop in Michigan and then open ourselves to Lexington Kentucky, a town I called Blue Balls instead of Blue Grass because thats exactly what I had for the year that I spent there. The pattern of our visitations become as vague as our reasonings for going there, we just wanted to keep going, my cousin never questioning or wondering why the hell we want to go anywhere really. The next states happened in a successiong, Atlanta and then Florida (the first place where I was to meet a girl and perhaps no longer be blue balled, and then for some fine dining in New Orleans, Louisana. Finally, we would hit the biggest state in the nation and it would take us 2 full days to cross it so our stops became Houston and San Antonia, and we hop onwards to Phoenix and Tuscon and finally return to Los Angeles, a mere 3 weeks after we began.

The plan seemed sane enough. To be continued…