Hello? God? Could you please induce Chicago?

It’s the end of April – May starts this week – and I’m still walking around with my poofy North Face jacket on. I still lean into the 30mph wind gusts and try to ignore the biting 40 degree weather, telling myself that I’ve made it through worse weather in this city. I tell myself that I only need to hang on for another few days, and surely things will warm up then. Except that I’ve been telling myself this for the last month – a month where the rest of the world long ago decided to usher in Spring. While elsewhere flowers bloom, birds sing, babies laugh, and people sing Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” to each other – in Chicago I still wipe away my tears of frustration and soldier on.

What makes things worse is Chicago’s schizophrenic insistence on sprinkling balmy warm days between the regular arctic blasts. This continues until one day it will be summer and 90 degrees out. Chicago plays sick mind games with its population, and for the longest time I struggled to find the proper analogy for what the city goes through, until it finally hit me – every year Chicago gets pregnant in September, and tries to give birth to Summer nine months later.

Think about it – the city starts out happy and giddy with possibilities in September. The first trimester is not too bad – sure there is morning sickness here and there as the mercury drops occasionally, but there’s the bigger picture to keep in mind. The second trimester the hormones go out of whack, and things get dicey. You can’t do anything to please the city, and even if you take one wrong step you get hit with freezing -20 weather, with snowstorms that make you wonder about this whole global warming nonsense. You eventually round the corner into the third trimester, which is when you begin praying for the pregnancy to conclude. This is the most frustrating part, especially the last few weeks.

Here is where the false contractions begin. One day it’ll be cold and blustery, and then suddenly it’ll be 65 and perfect. Is this it? Do you rush to pack away your winter clothes and bust out the flip-flops? Haha – no. Just kidding. False contraction – the next day it’s back to 30 degrees and depressing. Then the contractions start coming closer and closer together – two warm days here and there separated by only four or five cold ones. But your patience is being tested, because it is May now, and you really, really want to feel the sun on your face.

Now the contractions are close enough together that Chicago has to be taken to the hospital, where you as the useless significant other wait around, twiddling your thumbs, leafing through old magazines and drinking bad coffee from the cafeteria. And you wait. And wait. And then suddenly it begins. The city is ready to give birth! You rush to its side and hold its hand and ice its brow while it flings obscenities at you that make you blush. “C’mon honey, c’mon, you can do it” you gently encourage.

Suddenly Summer starts to crown, and the city tries to push, and you hold your breath in anticipation, and time slows down. And then it’s there – with a wet plop Summer arrives into the world. Temperatures immediately soar into the 90s, you are dazed and confused, but weirdly happy. You’re a new person now, with new responsibilities. You have to wear lighter clothes now, and purchase things like running shoes and bikes and roller blades. You wonder what life was like before Summer, but can’t quite remember, and anyway you don’t really care anymore. The city has blessed you with warm weather, and that’s all that matters.

Personally, I’d rather we just induce pregnancy or have a C-section every year and get Summer here on time in April – so what if Chicago thinks that’ll result in a premature baby? I don’t care. It saves me from the agonizing depression that I’m currently going through. Unfortunately I know I’m not in control. It’ll be warm when Chicago is ready to let it be warm. Until then, I’ll have to suck it up, and continue to wear my poofy North Face jacket.

Guilty pleasures

My work productivity has been creeping up during business hours. Whether this is because my nascent coffee habit is turning me into twitchy yet efficient worker bee, or whether I’ve reduced the frequency with which I browse www.cakewrecks.com, I don’t know. But I’m happy with this development, especially since it means that I have less work to do over the weekend, and can actually tackle those pesky projects that have been sitting on my to-do list, collecting the proverbial dust.

This weekend’s project entailed taking my calcifying CD collection and ripping the songs onto my computer's hard-drive so that, you know, I too could act like today’s cool youth and listen to music on something called an “i-Pod” (you should check these devices out, seriously). My ulterior motive, however, was to do away with damning evidence that I have no taste in music – it’s easier for me to secretly store my Michael Bolton collection as mp3s in a folder cryptically titled “Bichael Molton”, than to have my daughter accidentally discover the “Best Of” collection years from now, and go crying to her mother because she doesn’t understand why daddy is this way.

Along the ripping process I discovered that at one time I enjoyed listening to all things Jackson (several Michael CD’s, as well as multiple Janet compilations), that at one time I had an affinity for Celtic music (go ahead, laugh – I’m proud of being the only Pakistani who enjoys jamming to a rollicking Irish bagpipe number), and that I have a fetish for Backstreet Boys songs. There, I said it. It feels good to let that out. I can finally move on now.

And don’t you dare judge me. I know you have secret song crushes too, even though you hate to admit it. Act nonchalant if you want. Flaunt your love for indy music and that obscure band from Turkey that no one else has heard, as evidence that you’re a music cognoscenti. But at the end of the day, I *know* that when you’re cruising down the highway with no one in the car, you’ll roll up the windows and secretly blast “Quit Playing Games With My Heart”. And that you’ll sing along. Loudly. And cry, because you don’t want others to play games with your heart.

Anecdotally I know this to be true. But I obtained evidence this weekend as well. I was ripping songs from a mix collection that a special someone gave to me while I was a freshman in college [special someone shall remain unnamed but this was well before I met my wife, my true special someone (I love you honey!)], when Saeeda brought Nuha into the room and started playing with the baby. It just so happened that I was burning a Backstreet Boys song from this CD at the time, and I couldn’t mute the computer volume fast enough. I don’t know why, but I felt flustered and dirty almost, like I was browsing an adult website and was trying to Alt-Tab my way out of the screen or something. Still, a 3 second clip managed to escape before I could mute the speaker. That’s when Saeeda turned around and casually asked why I was listening to “As Long as You Love Me.” From the Backstreet Boys.

Let me repeat – she identified the song from a three second clip. I’m not the only one people …

Making It

Yesterday I had to go to one of our team members to give him a heads up on a new project that was coming down the pipe, and which would need a pretty quick turnaround on his part. This team member has been with Abbott for a lot longer than I have, and his grasp of things is impressive. So we started our conversation and he began to ask me specific questions. I started merrily answering away, until he suddenly interrupted me.

"Wait ... hold on Faisal. You ... actually ... sound like you know what you're talking about dude!"

And I paused. Not because I was offended, but because he was right. I DID know what I was talking about. Heck yeah! It only took me eight months in my current rotation to get to this point, but I had made it!

See, I prescribe to the Infinite Monkey Theorem - if you give a monkey sitting at a keyboard enough time, it will eventually type out the complete works of William Shakespeare. And I sometimes think of myself as that monkey - stringing together random jargon endlessly in the hopes that one day it will make sense to someone. And today it did.

Now, if only I can game the system so that this guy writes my performance review, I'll be set.