good things

– L buying me a Carribean Passion fruit smoothie from Jamba Juice

– Sarah McLachlan’s Afterglow album

– The expression on Seher’s face when she walked into her “surprise birthday party,” held about a month-and-a-half before her real birthday

– Wandering down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, watching Seher pick out her bajillionth pair of dangly earrings. “Stop being a hater!” she kept snapping at her brother’s disparaging comments.

– The sidewalk vendor who told us, “Keep laughing!” Shivering in the Berkeley cold, I responded, “Seriously, it keeps you warm, you know.”

– Another sidewalk vendor who unexpectedly greeted us with “Assalamu alaikum.”

– Gifts from Somayya: (red!) pants, multi-colored knitted scarf, (red!) bag, dangly earrings

– Somayya’s huge, unselfish heart, and her untiring capacity for giving

– Celebratory dinner in honor of N’s new job, and my “greedy bastard” frozen mocha photograph

– Halaqa and cupcakes at the Border’s café

– L’s sexay new shoes

– Shopping with selective people (you know who you are)

– Discovering the StoryPeople. Brian Andreas is a rockstar and a beautiful genius, and if I could afford to buy a print for each and every single one of you, I most definitely would

– Discovering that shopping is a lot more fun when I don’t have any money, because I can then wander around downtown unencumbered by shopping bags and without giving in to my impetuous decisions to invest in yet more pants and flip-flops, my two weaknesses.

– Spending an hour at the public library for the first time in months; being wide-eyed over the fact that I have access to all these books, like, oh my God

– L playing Irfan Makki’s When the Leaves Begin to Fall on repeat while we were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way up to Sacramento

– Wearing my red shoes today