Here's a little update on my life. I've finally come to another city, and now I am no longer in the comfort zone, where I had my friends and family taking care of me. Where they don't have to bear my idiocy and my childishness, even my scolding and bickering.

I took my first plane ride alone - the last one I had was when I was 8 and I barely remember anything about it. It was bumpy, and Lahore's "tears" delayed my flight by more than an hour. I still stand that Lahore was sad to see me off. Haha.

So now, I'm here, in Karachi. It feels like a really really big city. I got this really really interesting job, and now I am getting trained for it... Looking forward for Monday to see what it can throw at me. I'm completely cool with the arrangements that the organization has done for me and other out of station fellows. And to all those who think that it isn't safe here, more on that later. :P

Signing off...
Vicky Zhuang Yi-Yin

I just did something really stupid last week. I thought of moving all my poetry and stories into my external hard disk, which I thought was a safer place to put them. As it turns out, I pulled the USB cable before the transfer could be completed, and so, I lost everything. EVERYTHING!

I spent half of today trying to figure out how to fix the mess I got myself into.

For the stories I could restore most of the work, but for all my poetry, let us just say I was lucky to have made back ups of my completed poems, and unlucky for not doing the same for the poems that I had typed down so I could work on them a little more...

I feel like I just killed my own kids. I feel horrible, not to mention I had a major panic attack because of the idiotic stunt that I pulled on my own work. URGH!

Note: I wrote this a really really long time ago... in 2005 for a class assignment... so excuse the immaturity if any

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1. A woman with really strong moral character (my dad revealed this to me only recently)

2. Dew drops on baby grass at dawn (my dad told me that when I was younger)

I'm Chinese, but born in Pakistan, but my family is still very traditional, and insisted on giving me a Chinese name, and thus Yi-Yin, from Vicky (Victoria) Zhuang Yi-Yin. It is also the most difficult to write characters in the Chinese writing, and rare names, apparently my dad told me it was a name only royalty used in ancient times. I chose this user name because it was unique and just me and I liked the name. The Chinese characters of this name is also very interesting. It consists of two characters. Yi's character contains the heart and human characters in it. While Yin is written in such a way that at the heart of the character, there's a character symbolizing 'big', and I call it big heart. So, I kind of feel special about this name, and am proud to be named that. I wish I could show you the characters but it's impossible because I can't find the characters anywhere online.

1. Shakir picked me up at 10 from Main Boulevard, and then we went to Hamza’s place
2. Made a detour, and went to Aitchison to pick a kid up
3. Went to 14 Tollington
4. Went to Multan Road to pick Awais
5. Went to NCA’s hostels to pick Samara, Fatima, Mathour and Sunny
6. Went to Badshahi Mosque for breakfast of Halwa Puri and Lassi (Shakir drank two glasses! And for some reason Fatima was competing with him on who could drink the fastest.)
7. Said goodbye to Amin, Umer, Sarah and Hamza, apparently Hamza’s stomach was upset, and Sarah and Amin had to go home
8. Went to Mariam Zaman’s mosque, where we took pictures, while Shakir was praying
9. Shalimar Gardens! Epic funniness, and realization that 10 year old kids are way too advance than we were, when we were 10
10. On the way to drop Arham, the Aitchisonian, and Shakir randomly, purely randomly, stopped the car and said, wait a minute, and then jumped out of the car, walked across the road, and took off his kameez and jumped into the canal, which by the way, according to Awais, is filled with sewage water from the near north. Oh and Mathour followed
11. Dropped Arham at Aitchison
12. Lawrence Garden’s tour, and the quest to find the epic-est gol gappas, and that’s where Fatima and Samara ditched, when we climbed up the hill to see the TREE!
13. Then Hashim and Sunny had this weird urge to eat Chinese food, and after discussing what to do, and whether or not to give Amel a Daewoo surprise, we went to Tao Yuan Chinese Restaurant, or as bhaiya puts it Humayun Restaurant
14. Went to Readings after sending Awais and Aamna in the rickshaws to their preferred destinations
15. Went to Daewoo for the epic surprise which turned out to be an epic fail, because we were 10 minutes late
16. Went to Amel’s place
17. Home
18. Chatted for almost another hour with Shakir and Amel on Facebook

• Making awesome since 1989 – Shakir
• Right! (while pointing left) – Awais
• They could be land rich bankrupt aristocracy without a penny to their name! Just like you… and me (while walking down the steps, spoofing Hamza) – Hashim

Alright guys, so the previous entry "Flipside of Friendship" was just a thought about friendship. I was thinking about the dark side of friendship, following the recent themes of this Harbinger's Diaries.

If vampires were real, what would our world be like? Would we be cowering in the shadows, masking our scent and donning religious symbols all over us? Would they look like what they have been designed to look like: colorless, faint, beautiful but dead?

For all we know maybe they really do exist. They're already in our systems. They're already sucking on the life blood of our economies. And the major blame of this so called "recession".

It's us.

We're the vampires of this so called fantasy. We've been sucking away the blood of the economy, hoarding it and not allowing it to flow. Our collective logical thinking brought about one big problem, the paradox of thrift! And still we won't start to let the blood flow unless we see others do so. No one will start the move. We all want to save it for ourselves. That's what we are. We are vampires in this world economy.