.ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

Naz is stupid. I'm NEVER gonna be a rapper, even if I'm writing rhymes and I'd really, really like to go out on a romantic dinner date with Sarah Shahi and JenRO. But whatever. On with Naz's stupid questions and my answers.

NAZ: What inspired you to start rapping/rhyming? Was there a particular influence like a friend or family member?

ME: Uh... Yeah, I guess. Vanessa listens to hip-hop a lot and when she stayed with us, she used to listen to Tupac, so naturally, I did, too. Keep Ya Head up is still my favourite. And I do listen to music. I never wanted to be a rapper, actually. I'm just messing around. Don't expect an album to drop any time soon.

NAZ: Who are your role models?

ME: Ooh, I LOVE these questions! I like Mz Fontaine. And JenRO's awesome, too. Miss Money. God_Des and SHE. That's just in hip-hop, though. They've made a huge impact on the HomoHop scene and I respect that.

NAZ: What would you consider your career highlight so far?

ME: Um, what career?

NAZ: Who do you want to work with in the future?

ME: Um, Sarah Shahi and JenRO. Man, they're fine, too! And maybe go out on a romantic dinner date with Sarah and Jen, but not together...

NAZ: Tell me a bit about your experience being both a woman and a lesbian in the hip hop scene. And does being Indian make your art harder or easier?

ME: Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Get this straight, bitch, I am not a leabian. I'm not into labels. And since nobody's listening to my rhymes except my the people around me who have to listen when I get the urge to do so, the most crticism I've had is funny looks from the old Chinese aunties.

NAZ: What are your opportunities in Kuala Lumpur? Will you have to move to another area and where would that be?

ME: I love KL, I've grown up here and I know it like the back of my hands, but I don't think it's gonna be easy for me to get many opportunities here, so I'm out ASAP.

NAZ: What are your immediate future plans after your album is released, any big collaborations or appearances you'd like to share?

ME: There will be no album. At least not now and if there is, it won't be a hip-hop album. I'd like to release one with my band, Queercore, with your girlfriend and Nick, and it'll probably be a queercore album.

NAZ: What do you do when you aren’t out on gigs?

ME: Hang out with you, loser. I like PlayStation games. And watching the Ellen Show. I eat, shit and sleep. I'm just another bored feminist teenager.

Damn funny, don't you think? And for those of you who don't know who the hell JenRO is, she's a superfine Latina rapper. Jennifer Robles. So sue me, I have a thing for Latinas.

Sarah Shahi...

<3

.stolen.

The music video to one of my fave songs. Helen, I said I'd post this.

.TheAdventuresofStephanie&Helen:pt2.

Okay. I only have one thing to say. Viva Kenny Rogers chicken! Oh, oh, and the font is red. Like Carin's face/Sulekha's nail polish.

The waiter swaggered over to the table, totally giving Stephanie the eye, and set the two plates of steaming, sauce-covered chicken down in front of Stephanie and Sulekha respectively.
Sulekha eyed his butt appreciatively as he walked away from their table. “Not bad,” she murmured. “Not bad at all. Steph?”
Steph lifted her head, her mouth full of vanilla muffin. “Whhapffh?”
Helen rolled her eyes. “Never mind. Just…cut the chicken.”
Steph stared dismally down at the plate in front of her. Sulekha had already started on hers, sawing it in half with the perseverance of Einstein. Carin was looking doubtfully at the half of Sulu’s massacred chicken that was soon to be hers and swallowing nervously. Helen was watching Stephanie with a hawk’s eye that reminded Steph eerily of her mother.
Steph prepared herself for a full-blown pout. Why did she always have to cut? Because I said so. She could almost hear Helen’s crisp voice in her head. But Stephanie knew the real reason.
Because she was the only one of them who was any good with a knife.
Steph rolled the wooden-handled steak knife in her hand, gazing at it dreamily. Gripping the handle in her left hand, she lovingly stroked the blade with her index finger, in a reverie despite Carin’s grunts as she and Sulekha shrieked their way through carving the chicken.
Helen, growing slightly - okay, VERY - impatient, tore her attention away from Sulekha’s and Carin’s Amazon Massacre in time to catch the almost loving glint in Steph’s eyes as she caressed the gleaming blade of the steak knife.
“Steph! If you don’t mind, I’d rather we have this chicken before it oxidizes!”
Stephanie came to attention with a swiftness born of years of practice. “Uh, right. The chicken. Yeah, I was, uh, just doing that.” Helen ‘hhhmmmnnd’ loudly but said nothing more, to Stephanie’s relief.
Fifteen minutes later, replete with food, drink, and laughter, the girls leaned back in the plush red seats, giggling. Stephanie was hyper, not an uncommon occurrence; Sulekha was completely at ease with the other two girls by now; Helen was relaxed, a TRULY uncommon occurrence, and Carin was…
… MURDEROUS.
“God, you guys should come sleepover or something sometime,” Helen gasped, raising her arm high above her head and letting it fall on the table with a bang that made Carin jump, a motion usually made by those who are extremely drunk.
This gesture wasn’t missed by Steph, who wondered if perhaps someone had spiked Helen’s orange juice.
“So. The bill?” Steph started to say, surprised to find herself giggling too. This was wrong. Steph didn’t giggle. She guffawed, and chuckled, and chortled, and grinned and snickered. But she didn’t giggle.
For heavens sake, giggling was for…
…well, you know…
… GIRLS.
Stephanie looked the three, giggling, girly baboons she called her best friends. Carin was actually wearing pink.
PINK.
Ah, screw it. Steph giggled just as hard as the rest of them.
“Waiter,” she choked out, flagging him down as he passed. Her hand brushed his and Sulekha promptly went down with another fit of giggles. The waiter looked down his nose at Steph - in a way that reminded both Helen and Carin of an old, much-hated schoolteacher of theirs - apparently having lost any and all interest in her once he saw her cackling like a hyena.
“Bill,” Steph managed. Then, “Thank you,” showing that all her mother’s best efforts to teach her some manners hadn’t been a TOTAL waste of time.
“I don’t feel like paying the bill,” Sulekha said unexpectedly.
“Lets not, Helen chimed in drunkenly.
“Tell you what,” Steph said. “Helen, you grab your throat, fake an allergic attack, go into anaphylactic shock, and fall on the floor like you’re dead. We’ll scream and carry you out - and we won’t have to pay the bill.”
All four girls giggled harder. Helen’s numerous allergies were a source of great amusement to all of them, seeing as an allergic attack would result in her airways closing and her choking to death. Stephanie had more than once considered slipping her a peanut just to see what happened, but had been stopped at the idea of a cold jail cell and a death sentence for murder in the first degree.
“No,” Carin gasped, “We don’t have to do that! We’ll just tell them we have eczema and don’t remember eating here.”
Helen fell suspiciously silent suddenly, the well-oiled cogs in her head suddenly starting to spin again. Eczema? She decided not to say anything, considering Carin’s feelings, which were considerably easier to hurt than the others’.“Uh, Carin,” Steph interjected, breaking the silence. “I think you mean Alzheimers.”
Taking a moment as if to process this new possibility, Sulekha and Helen burst into hysterical laughter as one, as if on cue. Helen cogs ceased their spinning and Carin blushed a red to rival Sulekha’s nail polish.
A feat a lot easier said than done, seeing as Sulekha was wearing L’Oreal Paris in Lady Luck Red.

.TheAdventuresofStephanie&Helen:pt1.

Okay, so Helen wrote this. For the record, I did NOT use anyone's nail-polish for anything. And if I spilt anything on my mom's new plush rug, she wouldn't hesitate to kill me. And the font is purple. Like Helen's face.

Helen shivered and pulled her coat more tightly against her body. The biting wind still managed to slip icy fingers beneath the perfectly good, long coat that she was wearing, making her frown and wonder whether or not it had been a good buy in the first place. Her fingers were stiff around the once-hot, now cold Starbucks coffee cup she held in her right hand, careful not to spill. Thoughts of hot chocolate and a good romance novel flashed across her mind involuntarily. She mumbled something under her breath about killing Stephanie, her flatmate, for suggesting that she get them both a hot coffee. (Decaf, less sugar, more cream.) She stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk, causing her to mutter a colorful curse that made an old lady gasp.
Helen responded with a sheepish smile and kept up her hurried pace, anxious to get home to throttle Stephanie, too preoccupied to worry about the opinions of senior citizens. She turned the corner. An extra-cold blast of wind hit her in the face, whipping dark, shaggy curls into her line of vision. Helen slapped them away with an impatient hand, angry at them, angry at the wind, angry at herself for finishing her own coffee in Starbucks when she could’ve been drinking it now, now, when she desperately needed some warmth in her icy veins.
At long last, the tall shadow of the apartment fell into her path. Ahh. Home sweet home. Helen ran up the stairs and into the elevator, spurred by a sudden burst of energy. At the apartment door, she knocked over an antique umbrella stand that had once belonged to her ancestor and fumbled to fit the key into the lock. Now this was Helen, fumbling, stumbling, clumsy as hell, yet extraordinarily efficient. She was this close to her hot chocolate and nothing short of a pinstriped hippopotamus was going to stand in her way.
Well, nothing short of a really dumb pinstriped hippopotamus would stand in her way if they knew her well enough, as Stephanie would’ve put it.
The door burst open with a resounding crash - Helen’s personalized way of saying she was home - but this time, her dramatics failed to have the desired effect. Stephanie didn’t let out an ear-splitting shriek, jump out of her skin, or cower behind a pillow. No, this time she kept right on painting on the huge easel set up in the middle of the room…
… with Helen’s best, $19.90 nail polish.
Helen checked her outraged yell just in time.
No she didn’t.
Helen shrieked loudly, dropping the coffee cup to the hall table - narrowly missing spilling it - and clapped her hands to her cheek, her chapped lips forming a perfect ‘O’ in her distress.
“Stephanie…..!”
Stephanie turned around just as the door slammed shut behind Helen. “What?”
Her best friend looked blue with cold… or was it red with fury? Stephanie cocked her head to one side and wondered what to call this new color. Winter blue? Fire-truck red?
Helen was positively purple with rage. “That’s my best nail polish!” she wailed, albeit loudly.
Stephanie turned to look at the canvas, and then at the bottle in her hand. Oopsie daisie. She paused to study her artwork. “Why, so it is,” she remarked thoughtfully, staring at her masterpiece. She swiveled around and met Helen’s gaze levelly, then shrugged.
“I ran out of red.”
Helen marched over and snatched the little bottle out of Stephanie’s hand, taking deep, swooping breaths to calm herself, but without much success. Stephanie sighed patiently, more than familiar with Helen’s breathing exercises. Her green artist’s beret slipped over one eye. This surprised her. She didn’t even remember putting it on. Besides. What was Helen doing keeping a beret in the apartment anyway? The woman never failed to surprise her, even after ten years of fast friendship.
Helen stomped around the room like a demented Godzilla*, knocking into furniture as she marched heavily around the tiny apartment. The brush in the bottle of nail polish shook, teetered, threatened to fall out of the bottle and stain Stephanie’s mother’s plush rug. Helen was too preoccupied to notice, muttering curses and calling upon medieval forms of punishment that, to Stephanie’s ears, were excruciatingly painful.
Stephanie shifted nervously on the wooden stool. She hadn’t read as many medieval novels as Helen had, still the words “murder,” “stake” and “pickaxe” meant something to her.
Sure and sudden death.
Squirming on the stool, Stephanie eyed the cup of coffee on the table. If only she could reach it - she just might die with caffeine in her bloodstream. God knows she needed some fortifying. He watched Helen stamp around the room, cracking a Chinese vase and scratching the chrome decorations, preparing the inevitable lecture.
If only she could escape. Steph stared at the kitchen door like a hamster in a cage. She had just summoned up the courage to move when a shadow fell over her. She looked up. Helen was obviously enjoying the sensation of being taller than her for once. Obviously, for that could be the only reason behind the glint in her eyes.
The MURDEROUS glint in her eyes?
Steph made a desperate scrabble to escape, but it was too late. Helen had her good and cornered between her body and the easel. Steph’s eyes filled with terror, memories of her childhood and her short, brief life flashing before her eyes as Helen rasied the sharpest paintbrush from the rack high above her head…