Voices.

This is what I look like:

This is what you would assume I looked like if you never saw me and only heard my voice:

This is 3-year-old me. And yes, I have maintained my hairstyle since then.

Believe me, it's true. Whenever I answer the phone at home, people always assume I'm a little girl and ask me in their slow "I'm-the-adult-here" way of speaking to hand over the phone to either my "MUMMY" or "GRANDMUMMY". No one believes by just hearing my voice that I'm an adult myself (or very close to being one anyway). 

It makes me wonder, how different can people actually look from the visions you have in your mind whenever you hear their voice? 

This usually happens to me whenever I listen to the radio. I keep on trying to imagine what the radio jockey looks like just by their voice, and I almost always end up wrong. I regularly have to face sore disappointment if I ever come across an RJ's photo, because seriously, they look absolutely NOTHING like their voices make them seem.

An example of what happened to me:

I heard an RJ's voice on the radio, and found it immensely attractive. The guy sounded hot, funny, and cute. But when I googled him, I was disappointed. He wasn't ugly at all, but he was just... average. It's funny how your perceptions of someone become nearly other-worldy when you get attracted to something of theirs. I got attracted to his voice, and forgot that he's a completely normal person, like you and I. An RJ's job requires them to be heard but not seen, and since you need to apply your own imagination to visualize something your hear, it's almost never the same.

This hasn't just happened with me. When I used to live in Dubai, I had Russian neighbors. Whenever I was bored, I would just walk across to their villa and hang out with them. They were always very welcoming, and were so comfortable with me around that they didn't mind me tagging along with them as they went about doing their chores. One of the members in that Russian household, a lady in her late twenties, was ironing her clothes and telling me about her work. It involved talking to a lot of clients via phone call. She told me that one of the clients of the company she worked in had a very lovely voice. He sounded so charming, so warm, so lively, so sexy that she couldn't help but start obsessing over how he must look like. Only using his voice to work on, she constructed an image of him as a good-looking young gentleman who probably wore his suit everywhere and had a crush-worthy face and a powerful presence. When she heard that he would be visiting her office building soon, she was naturally extremely excited. 

Alas, she said, when he entered the office, her entire vision of him collapsed. He was a short, portly man with a large moustache and a beer gut, and looked like he was somewhere around his 50s. He didn't even have a powerful aura! My neighbor told me that he looked somewhat like a hobo. She was understandably very disappointed.

It was like this for her, and I can totally relate.

My neighbor also confided in me that she was almost in love with his voice. I told her about my radio incident, and we agreed that we both had extremely bad luck (haha).

The above incidents make me totally terrified about finding out who really dubs the voice of Behlul (actor Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ) in Urdu for the Turkish drama Aski Memnu that has been airing in Pakistan these days (under the name of Ishq-e-Mamnoon). 

(HOPEFULLY NOT!!!!!)

I have never loved a guy speaking Urdu so much, and I fear that my vision of the dubbing artist as Behlul himself is at risk to be shattered completely. :(

This brings me to a question I wanted to ask you guys: Do you think YOU could ever fall in love with a voice? And if you ever have, then how was the experience? Were you disappointed when you discovered who owned that voice and how they looked like? Or was it like you found the perfect match to your imagination?

(If you answer in the affirmative to the last question, then I swear I'm positively GREEN with envy. Haha.)

My First Rejection

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

Today, I have decided to share one of my deepest, darkest secrets that I had been planning to take to the grave with me. But since I now find humour in this situation, I'm so totally writing a blog post about it!

This is the story of how I got rejected by one of the strongest crushes I have ever had.

I was only 13 when this incident happened. To this day, I'm still unsure about his age, though I'd probably say he was 15 when I first saw him.

To me, he looked like:

But in reality, he looked like:

I think puppy love does that to a person. It totally muddles up the brain and makes everything look wonderful when it's actually quite... average. I was a victim of this brain-mess-up! My friends had no idea what I saw in him (five years later, neither do I).

This epic crush-story began in the...

SCHOOL BUS.

Unlike the conventional bright yellow school buses the entire universe is accustomed to, my school bus was a strange shade of GREEN. (I think the colour contributed a whole lot to the 'strange' feelings felt in its confines.) 

Here's an incredibly detailed drawing I made to give all of you a crystal clear idea of the bus:

my drawings are just too vivid! :')

It all started during the middle of the first week of school. I got on the bus in the morning, made my way to the back where most of the girls usually sat. In the hour-long bus ride, we picked many students from their respective homes. Every time the bus stopped, a casual glance was directed towards the bus door in mild interest to see who was coming in.

AND THEN.

I SAW.

HIM.

It was exactly like this, minus the yellow background and floating hearts.

So began the stupidest and longest crush I ever had.

It went on for around nearly the entire school year, of which I spent 75% of the time staring at the back of his head with all my concentration, waiting for him to feel the telepathic waves I was sending him across the school bus. Since I was 13 at that time, I was way less gutsy and confident than I am now, hence "making the first move" was so totally not what I was ready to do.

During the first few months of this crush, he never even noticed my existence! Every time in the afternoon when I had to walk from the back of the bus to the front to exit it once my stop came, I passed him with my breath held and my heart jammed in my throat. AND HE NEVER NOTICED. Granted, I was going through my awkward stage that time and was, to put it kindly, not much of a looker, but it was pretty disappointing that I was a completely invisible person to him. I could have been one of the many pieces of used gum stuck under the bus seats for all he cared.

Anyway, doing what any unnoticed socially awkward teen does best, I stalked him on Facebook. I found his profile, and since his privacy settings weren't so strict, I could see one of his photo albums.

Ladies and gentlemen, that album was called:

"BODYBUILDER."

Now, if back then I were the way I am right now, I would have laughed my butt off and given up instantly. After all, what scrawny teen with no muscles posing in his tiled bathroom (with his t-shirt sleeves rolled up to show what were clearly not biceps but STICKS) would call himself a 'BODYBUILDER"? And what intelligent girl would fall for someone who thought the epitome of high-school success was to look like a complete douchebag?

Alas, I was a dumb fool, because at that time, my 13 year old mind processed this:

I added the duckface purely because i think he was quite capable of making it.

as this:

Image credit: http://favim.com/image/524055/

Yeah. I was an idiot.

Moving on, even though I stalked his Facebook profile a zillion times, I didn't have the courage to add him up for atleast a few months. One day, I mustered up all my courage and sent him a friend request. To my dismay, the next day he declined it and then BLOCKED ME. After being emo about it for a while, I trusted a good friend of mine to add him through her account, become friendly with him and then find out what he thought about me (because at that time, I was a persistent girl). After much convincing, my friend agreed to do my dirty work (and she was so lazy it took her like a couple of weeks just to add him). She became his Facebook friend and began Operation: Become My Friend's Crush's Friend.

FINALLY, after an agonizing month and a half, she came to me with news. But to my utmost horror, instead of just asking my crush what he thought about me, she TOLD HIM THAT I HAD A MASSIVE CRUSH ON HIM!!! That was so not my plan. I didn't want him to think that I liked him, let alone the fact that I obsessed over him every moment of everyday. I was so mad at my friend, but the feeling of anxiety and anticipation for his reply trumped that. 

AND DO YOU GUYS WANT TO KNOW WHAT HE REPLIED?????

me:

My dismay was also partially due to realizing that both my arms were sticking out from the left side of my body.

TOTALLY NOT HIS TYPE?! That was something I had never heard before regarding myself. I mean, what made me "totally not his type"? He didn't even know me!

The rage and sadness that ensued for the rest of the school year was pretty awful. I had to share the school bus with that evil cow, the guy who judged me before even knowing me. Here I was, holding the largest crush I had ever had in my heart, being all "omg-he's-so-cute" whenever the topic of him arose, and there he was being all "omg-she's-not-my-type-lolz"!

Obviously, the crush faded away very quickly after the rejection of my feelings. What I felt, though not being a 'heartbreak' (I was too young for that, seriously), was enough for me to realize that the idiot was not worth it. That, and the fact that another guy started taking interest in me so my attention was diverted to him (trust me, my middle and high school life involved a lot of better looking guys).

Today, around 5+ years later, this incident may not have played a role in changing the way I am as a person, but it has made me thankful about how I left middle and high school puppy love behind. And of course, when that idiot friend-requested me a couple of days ago (I guess he unblocked me somewhere along the line), I declined his request and blocked him with a smile on my face.

The reason why I suddenly stopped blogging

HI! 

Remember me?

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who has stuck with me even though I've totally betrayed all of you by not fulfilling my promises of posting regularly. 

I would like to apologize for my hiatus, and I am writing this post to inform all of you guys about the reason why I stopped blogging these past few months.

Without further ado:

(the rest of this post is password protected. if you want to read it, email me at furreekatt@hotmail.com and i will send you the password. OR, if you have me on facebook, just send me a message!)

Show encrypted text

FURREE KATT IS BACK, DAWGSSSSS!

The Truth About FWD Mails

How many times have we been explicitly annoyed with the constant flow of the much dreaded 'forward mail' in our email inbox? These forward (or more commonly known by their 'FWD' abbreviation) mails have made emailing a pain in the butt with their often uselessness. According to me, the evil FWD mail can be broken down into four main forms:

That's right, kids. there's the Quiz mail, with a link to a website that often requires you to answer useless questions and find out even more useless (and often untrue) things about yourself.

There's the ever popular 'Chain' mail, which threatens you with impossible things like death by an exploding purple cellphone charger or a fatal wound inflicted by the mythical Chupacabra if you do not pass it on. These often require you to count backwards from 100 and then make a wish while spitting in your hand.

Then there's the 'funny pictures' mail, which isn't so bad. It mostly contains pictures of women drivers getting into accidents or someone's baby being cute by peeing in a soup bowl. The novelty wears off when the same pictures are sent to you over and over again by fifty-million different people. That's when you feel happy about all those accidents and you hope that the baby actually drank the soup.

Finally, there's the 'emotional, tear-jerking true story' email containing a totally fake and made-up account of people doing stupid things in the name of love/loyalty/cows.

BUT (yes, there's a but), there is a fifth form of the FWD mail, and that's the one containing valuable information. These forward mails have been a great help to me from time to time, and I shall give you the most recent examples as to why.

- The Day My iPod Stopped Working

It was like the end of the world for me. My iPod had been one of my most prized possessions ever since my parents had gifted it to me on my fifteenth birthday. I had spilled water all over it, and it wasn't switching on or charging. In the midst of my panic, I miraculously remembered an email I had received a couple of months prior to the incident about fixing iPods at home at zero cost. In a hurry, I opened my email, and after a couple of minutes I found what I was looking for. Someone had forwarded me an email about covering the wet iPod in dry rice and leaving it that way for 24 hours. The rice would absorb the water and the iPod would work again. I tried it, and it worked.

i hope the fact that i have a purple ipod nano is understandable through this picture.

- The Day My Grandfather Had A Stroke

We were all eating dinner when he collapsed in his chair. In twenty seconds he regained consciousness but his speech was slurred. Everyone was in a frenzy. A week and a half before it happened, I had read something in my email about certain things a person must do to figure out if another person has had a stroke or not. They were to. a. Ask the person to repeat any sentence after you. b. Ask the person to smile. c. Ask the person to raise their hands. If they are unable to do one or more of these things, they have most probably had a stroke and should be taken to a hospital within an hour. My grandfather was able to raise his hands, but his smile was lopsided and he couldn't coherently repeat what we were asking him to say. Identifying what had happened to him cleared our minds off of the confusion, and we were able to act and react fast to whatever was happening. My grandfather was taken to the hospital super quick, and in a few days he made a full recovery.

- The Day I Burnt My Hand

I blame my own stupidity for getting into that mess in the first place. The kettle was boiling, and like an idiot I put my hand over the steam emitting from the spout to see how hot it was. 

Let me tell you folks, it was SO BLOODY HOT. My hand got burnt. Luckily I had a small packet of flour inside the fridge. I had read in a FWD email that cold flour heals burns instantly and does not leave a single mark or a trace of pain. I applied the cold flour on the place where I had scalded myself, and when I washed it off (I had kept it on for ten minutes) there was absolutely no sign of any burning except a slight pinkish tinge to my skin (which faded within an hour). No blisters or puckering or peeling or any sort of pain at all. It was miraculous. One of my cousins had burnt her finger a bit while handling a hot pan, and her dad had forced her to apply ice to it. I was there at that time, and I told her to put flour on it instead. She settled for applying flour on one half of her finger and ice on the other. The place where the flour was applied had absolutely no marks and it had stopped hurting. The place where she applied ice however, turned into a blister.

x

So you see, after these incidents, whenever I receive a FWD email with a promising title (e.g. 'this is good for your health' or 'how to do so-and-so' etc), I never fail to go through it. Such information is great to be read and passed around. It could really help someone in their time of need.

But if someone ever forwards me a picture of a happy pooping cow and expects me to find it funny, I will find them. And then cut them up into a million pieces and then find that happy pooping cow and STUFF THE PIECES IN ITS MOUTH!!!!!!!!

Goodnight.