What I will write about

After the why comes the what.

There will be rants about the state of international cricket. Post-1996, I became anti-one-day-cricket. 20/20 has really pushed me over the edge. Stop pimping and bring back test cricket is my battle cry.

I will talk a lot about football, the kind played with feet. I grew up in Pakistan, and have been in the U.S. since I was nineteen. Neither place is much of a football enclave. I am absolutely starved for friends who like watching football as much as I do. I have no one to really share this particular interest with, so I'll share it with the ether that is the blogsphere. 

I will write about the books I read. These won't be literary critiques, but rather discussions of my reaction to the books, whether I liked or disliked them, do I recommend them, how I can related to Harry Potter, etc. 

I will express my opinions about politics and world affairs. These will be decidedly more humble than my opinions about cricket and football. At some point I'll get into gory detail about my ambivalence towards Benazir Bhutto, why I want Imran Khan to be supreme commander of the universe, why the media's response to Hillary Clinton's presidential run awoke the very, very angry female inside me, why certain partnerships in coalition governments make no sense and the fact that no one points out that they make no sense makes even less sense. I am constantly astounded by how short public memories are when it comes to political leaders' peccadilloes (or felonies), and I seem to have quite a good memory for them, so I will express my outrage here. 

The blog is called parrot chatter, so there will be lots of parrot stories: happy ones, sad ones, funny ones. Before I got my first parrot, and before I started volunteering at the parrot shelter, I was very emotionally immature. Emotions constituted of being stressed about a test at school, being happy at doing well, unhappy at doing poorly. Working with parrots has taught me about love, second chances, joy, heartbreak. The hardest thing has been to open my home and heart to a parrot I know is going to die in a matter of weeks or months, loving it like I have never before been hurt by the death of another parrot. But the parrot stories are not going to be all gloom and doom. There are happy ones, like those of my current babies Chingu and Beerbal, and funny ones, like those of Houdini, a Moluccan cockatoo at the shelter who earned his moniker based on his habit of letting himself, and all other birds, out of their cages at night, and who bats his eyelids, blows kisses and raspberries, and says "Hi, Baby" in a little girl voice to everyone.