I won’t even go into the usual moon-sighting and Eid-celebrating controversy. This drama goes on every year, who are we kidding? Suffice to quote my uncle the good sport, who shrugged and said to my father over the phone, “Well, it’s okay. You celebrated Eid yesterday [Thursday], we’re celebrating it today [Friday], and tomorrow, when you drive up to Sacramento, we’ll all celebrate it together.” Which we did.
As a result, I spent part of Saturday with some of my favorite crazy little kids. I would have eaten them up, since they’re so yummiliciously edible-looking, but then there wouldn’t have been any photos for you.
I also got a chance to see some crazy older kids, too, like my favorite cousin Somayya; her little brother who has suddenly grown several inches since I saw him a month ago; her brother the jock who kept gleefully showing off his tattered and muddy football uniform; her other brother who saw my camera and asked interestedly, “Oh, how much did that cost? Twenty dollars?” whereupon I laughed and Somayya retorted, “Try four hundred,” and we watched in amusement as he ran around the room and snapped stalker photos on his twenty-dollar digi-cam.
“Let me see!” I entreated.
“You can’t,” he said, laughing, “until you download it on a computer. This is a cheapass camera. I can’t even see anything on the screen here.” Oh, and there was Somayya’s other brother who teased, “You look just like Jasmin!” and then kept calling me that all day long. Freak of nature. The day was marred only by the hijab from hell [aka the horror of the voluminous matching dupatta], which gave me a headache and, today, what seems like an impending ear infection. To ease the annoyance, I amused myself by making various faces of discontent at the abovementioned disgraceful cousin, who unsympathetically rolled his eyes and suggested, “Why don’t you unpin it and make it a little less tight?”
“It’s not tight!” I whined, “I just can’t handle having all this fabric around my face!” There’s a reason why I normally stick to headwraps.
The highlight of the day was a longer-than-expected stop at my favorite crackhead trinket store, Wishing Well, in downtown Sacramento. Seriously, the best place ever for arts & crafts material, costumes, office supplies, fake flowers, candy, wigs, and other mass craziness. We had way too much fun trying on tiaras and pirate hats and masks and jester caps and feather boas and, oh!, those beanies with the spinning thingamajig at the top, youknowhatimean?
Umm, yeah. So how was your weekend?