All posts by Yasmine

About Yasmine

I like orange sunshine and blue slurpees.

Change views, not channels

Casa420 and Familia, Hit the Road


When they said ‘palm trees,’ they really weren’t kidding, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

[The “Change views, not channels” post title is inspired by those smug little San Diego-advertising billboards that I used to pass on my way to Sacramento everyday.]

Like everything else I’ve ever written, this is long overdue, so I figured I might as well get this Thanksgiving-roadtrip-to-San-Diego update out of the way so I can write about other things. However, I can’t conceive of this being really interesting to anyone, so if you get bored you might as well skip the words and jump right to the whole entire set of pictures. And that was only some of them. Yeah, I know.

Alright, here goes my (probably unsuccessful, I can tell you that already) attempt at conciseness…

First of all, why San Diego?

I talk about my father a lot on this weblog – mainly about his obsessions with gardening, shopping at Costco, and trying to convince me to go to law suckool so we can finally have a lawyer in the family. I believe I may have neglected to mention the fact that my father is also an avid cook, “avid” being keyword for “experimental.” His favorite phrase to use while cooking is, “Special recipe.” His style of cooking can best be described as “everything but the kitchen sink.” He’s lucky that everything he cooks tastes wonderful.

One of my father’s other obsessions revolves around someday owning and running a restaurant. In this fantasy, he will be the main gourmet chef, and I have a feeling the rest of us will be relegated to lowly kitchen help, like chopping the vegetables. Much like what happens when he decides to take over the kitchen on some weekends.

My father scrutinizes food daily at the table, whether it’s breakfast, lunch, or dinner: “This,” he’ll pronounce, “will be a great addition to our restaurant, don’t you think so?” As if there is no doubt that there will indeed be a restaurant. “When we open our restaurant, we’ll call this…aloo omelette…and people will line up at the door to get a taste of our food.”

In typical Yasminay-style, I’m making a short story too long. Let’s wrap this up:

So, one evening about a month ago, the daddy-o was cooking dinner and raving about the latest edible masterpiece he had whipped up. “We need to move to a college town,” he decided. “The college students will never be able to get enough of this kind of food! That way, we can make sure we always stay in business.”

“Mm-hmm,” I said noncommittally. I decided not to point out the fact that there was no way in hell any of us were moving anywhere again for a while. Whenever the daddy-o is feeling high-spirited and exuberant, he is just as easily brought down by comments he finds deliberately antagonizing from those who refuse to share his enthusiasm. This usually, all too easily, escalates into bad temper at both ends. It is best to be silent sometimes, even at the risk of being labeled indifferent.

“Houston,” continued my father. “I think we should move to Houston. There’s a good college town!”

I decided silence was not an option any longer, even though I knew this was a theoretical conversation. “Houston?!” I said. “Who wants to move to Houston? Dude, if you’re looking for college towns, we might as well move to San Diego. They have a bajillion colleges there. Plus, they have nice weather, too.”

“San Diego! That’s an idea! And,” he added mockingly, “they have plenty of warm weather and you won’t have to wear your sweaters all the time.” The daddy-o finds my obsession with sweaters slightly amusing and mostly mentally unstable. Much like everyone else I know. Shut up.

The conversation petered out eventually, but later when we were throwing around ideas of what sort of roadtrip to take for this year’s Thanksgiving break (roadtrips are becoming tradition now), the daddy-o brought up San Diego, and that was that.

Alright, so here’s how it went:

Day 1: Thursday, 24 November 2005

Driving down to Los Angeles, where we would spend the first night. All I really remember is, lots of stops for gas. Also, being shocked at gas prices near Bakersfield: $2.85/gallon? Good Lord. The sister and I were slightly annoyed because the Daddy-o thought it was a terrible idea for us to even consider buying an ice cream bar at one of the gas station convenience stores. FINE! we fumed in true little-kids fashion, and decided to gorge ourselves on all the leftover Halloween candy that my sister had wisely brought along. Good lookin’ out, buddy. This is my favorite photo from that gas station.

Also: Stopping for lunch and prayer at Fort Tejon State Historic Park. A nice young man apologetically approached us in the middle of our lunch to say that their Pathfinder had a flat tire but the tow truck guy was unable to unlock the tire. He noticed we were driving a QX4; perhaps our tire-lock rod would work, and could they please borrow it for a few minutes? “Sure,” said the Daddy-o, adding in amusement, “As long as you know where it would be, because I don’t know.” Apparently we have all these tools and things attached to the bottom of the passenger seat. Amazing.

The tire-lock worked, the flat was replaced with a spare tire, and not only did the guy and his family thank us about ten thousand times, they also gifted us with tin of cookies and waved a lot as they were driving away. Rocking!

What else… Made it to our hotel in Los Angeles, and I was in pain because my ears were popping from driving through the mountains, so I took a nap on the couch after unsuccessful, frustrating attempts to hook my dad’s laptop up to the hotel’s wireless network. I woke up to find him playing Solitaire/FreeCell on his laptop, an addiction I thought he had kicked, years back when he used to stay up ’til late, late at night, engrossed in the game on his computer.

Later in the evening, we had dinner at a desi [South Asian] restaurant called Bismillah in Buena Park. Eating out with the parents is always tricky, because my father doesn’t believe in ordering whatever one can cook at home (he once refused to let me order spaghetti at an Italian restaurant), which also does away with the desi food option most of the time, whereas my mother is wary of eating anything other than what we eat at home. What a process.

Day 2: Friday, 25 November 2005

Woke up to this in LA. Yes, I was hella annoyed. But the fog (and some of the smog) started to clear away as we hit the road and the day got warmer, which cheered me up.

We were aiming to make it to Jummah [Friday congregational prayers] at the Islamic Center of San Diego (ICSD), and stressing it a bit because we thought we were running a bit late. But we turned out to be early. The ICSD is absolutely gorgeous. I wandered around stealthily taking pictures for a few minutes while waiting for the prayer to begin; this was my favorite, because it made me smile: warm fuzzy feelings!

We settled down for prayer, and I got sidetracked making funny faces at the little boy next to me, who couldn’t have been more than two years old. He reminded me of Matteo, the toddler I used to work with as part of my Human Development lab practicum back at university. If my weekly Jummahs in Oakland have taught me anything, it’s that I’m all too easily distracted by adorable little babies at the masjid. But I managed to drag my attention away from the Matteo-lookalike to listen carefully for once, and I’m glad I did, because the imam gave a beautiful khutbah [sermon] on gratitude. I sat there remembering my friend S’s Thanksgiving voicemessage from the day before: “I don’t know if you celebrate Thanksgiving but, hey, we have things to be thankful for: We’re alive and kicking!” It was a lovely reminder, and I’m blessed to have the friends that I do.

Here was the funniest and most random (as far as I’m concerned) part of my Jummah:

Walking out of the masjid, dawdling a bit behind my mother and sister, squinting at the sun in my eyes, and hearing someone call out from my right: “Can’t say salaam?”

The world always comes full-circle, doesn’t it? It’s extremely fitting that after almost exactly a year to the day that we missed meeting up with 2Scoops while he was at Jummah in the East Bay and we were Thanksgiving-roadtripping it to Santa Barbara, we instead run into him at Jummah prayers in San Diego. Very slick indeed. I always had a suspicion my life goes around in circles, but this just confirmed it.

Apparently the way to make my father’s eyes light up and to get him to like you enough to give you his business card is to mention two words: BUSINESS and LAW. Preferably in the same sentence. Way to go, buddy.

Next up: Trying to figure out what to eat, and where to eat, for lunch. [My dad still laughs, remembering the words of one of the San Diego guys (a friend of 2Scoops’, I believe): “If you’re looking for good Afghan food, you’ll have to eat it at someone’s house.”] Finally, we gave up and settled on french fries. Yay! Then we hit up Balboa Park. Those San Diego people are so smart: they put all their tourist attractions in one single location, so confused people like us don’t have to waste time wondering what the hell to do with ourselves. We checked out pretty buildings, the Japanese Friendship Garden [did you seriously think we could go anywhere without my parents checking out the gardens somewhere?], various other places, and, finally, the San Diego Museum of Art, which was totally drool-worthy.

Too bad I couldn’t take photos inside the museum, because the galleries and exhibitions were gorgeous. We spent almost two hours in there, finally dragging ourselves away past sunset, and still only managed to get through Galleries #1-5. Out of twenty. Yeah, you read that right. The “Selected Masterworks of Indian Painting” was enough to keep the parents occupied, while I was mesmerized by the “Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self” exhibit. Right up my alley.

We spent the night in San Diego, and not only did the manager lady, Annie, 1) have a rocking Scottish accent [I especially loved the way she pronounced “laptop,” and couldn’t stop mentally repeating it to myself for days afterward], and 2) advise us to eat dinner at an awesome Italian place down the road, but she also 3) helped us connect the daddy-o’s laptop to the wireless network, thereby earning our never-ending gratitude forever and ever, amen. It was to be the only internet connection we’d have for the three days we were on the road, and we were all twitching to fulfill our various online addictions: weblogs (me), Facebook (the sister), email (everyone).

Day 3: Saturday, 26 November 2005

We checked out of our hotel, stalked the ICSD for some more pictures, picked up lunch from Jamillah Garden, and hit the road back north.

The daddy-o, regarding San Diego’s maze of well-connected freeways: “These people just won’t let you get lost. It’s terrible!” He broke it down easily for me, the navigational amateur-rapidly-turning-pro: “They call all their big roads freeways,” citing Balboa Avenue – which is apparently also called 274 – as an example.

He didn’t like Interstate-8 though. Somewhere around there, he started singing, to the tune of “‘Tis the Season to be Jolly”: “8 is a screwed-up freeway, la la la la la la la…” Good times.

Leaving San Diego:

Sister: “Daddy, are you going eighty?!”
Dad, unrepentantly: “Yes, is that a problem?”
Sister: “Yeah.”
Dad: Why does that bother you? You’re the one who said you wanted to get home in at least an hour.” [Laughter at the exaggeration.]

Driving north, I decided Southern Californians put a lot of creativity into their street names. Some of them are really beautiful. Check:

Via de la Valle
Street of Copper Lanterns
Ava Magdalena
Bluebird Canyon
Boat Canyon Drive
Morning Canyon

And there was a town with the lovely name of Lemon Grove. Oh, and there’s bougainvillaea everywhere! Absolutely gorgeous. The daddy-o and his inner gardener couldn’t stop marveling at it.

The parents especially liked the Cardiff and Solana Beach areas of San Diego. “Let’s retire and move somewhere around here,” suggested my father.

“Yes,” said my mother, “but maybe closer to where that masjid was.” My ummy was really liking the masjid.

Around Carlsbad, my father started getting antsy: “Southern California is so boring. All you see is palm trees and U-Haul trucks.”

But then we stopped for coffee, milkshakes, and smoothies at Orange Inn in Laguna Beach, which made for some cool pictures and refreshed tummies, and all was well.

We made it home late Saturday night. I fumbled my way out of the backseat blankets and the daddy-o’s sports coat and tumbled out of the car onto the driveway, where it was so cold that my ears almost froze and fell off my head and I decided this was unacceptable and I’d have to move to sunny Southern California after all.

The end.

Sense of style

Links to love

Okay, I promise I’ll stop with the links soon and actually give all y’all a real deal post to read, but, for now, lemme just say I’m having way too much fun browsing this website called HEL LOOKS, which has photographs of street fashion from Helsinki, the capital of Finland [via Oh My That’s Awesome!]. Shut up, I know I have too much time on my hands.

Umm, no, I don’t follow fashion, really [I just do my own weirdly-randomcool thing], but this site is fascinating. Go see! Oh, and the only reason I thought to share this is because there’s a hijabi on there, too! And she’s a neo-con! In terms of fashion, apparently. She’s got too much black goin’ on, but I’m ’bout to steal her bag, seriously. And her jacket. Oh wait, I have too much black in my wardrobe, too. Damn.

p.s. I like this kid. And this one. Orange! Oh, and there’s one dude who’s wearing a sweatshirt with a fat hole in it because he cut out the logo. Right up my alley. I love it. Here’s to logo-free clothing. There’s one girl who says, “Hair has to be backcombed.” That’s right! (Or, if you’re me, never combed at all.) Also, who wants these boots? And computer keyboard cables as belts! Check the red and black, but all the pink is killing me. Here’s a strangely normal kid. And a girl and a guy and another girl rocking a kaffiyeh. Wow, just vow.

One last thing: Finnish people are seriously obsessed with Japan. And tight jeans. What’s up with that?

Alright, I’ll stop now. I’ve already gone through fourteen of the twenty pages. Seriously on crack. Which pics are you liking?

The sunshine, it’s everywhere! Well, almost

All-Star Crackstar Squad, Blogistan and the Wide World of Webs


and nothing is more powerful than beauty in a wicked world, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

[Random small update on last week: Went roller skating last Wednesday with my sister, and the Princess of the Pretty Pants, and another friend who, in our initial meeting, made it amply clear that she is just as crackheaded as we are. Anyway, Princess Pretty Pants and I have come to the conclusion that roller skating and ice skating and skating of any kind is stupid and girly and we are not wussy girls, except for the fact that we can’t handle skating. So next time we have an outing, we’re going to go with the boy activities. Like those mini racecar things, which I’m already gleeful about. Forget this stupid sissy skating. Besides, I fell during skating and hurt my left wrist for the next several days, and I’m quite fond of my left hand, you know. So skating is disgracious. And disgraceful. And ungraceful, if you’re me.]

I spent much of the Thanksgiving weekend (Thursday through Saturday) roadtripping it down to San Diego via Los Angeles (and back) with my family, and I can assure you that the above photograph was not taken in Southern California, because I did not see a single speck of red-orange-yellow foliage in SoCal. They were totally right; SoCal doesn’t have fall colors, kids.

[The above photo is actually of a tree in a bank parking lot in my hometown, in case you’re really interested. Yes, it probably looked weird, some random girl taking fifteen photographs of a quite normal (for NorCal) tree, but I’m infatuated with sunshine colors. And I’m used to weird looks by now.]

In case you didn’t already hate me for living in California and obsessively talking about sunshine all the time, you’re about to dislike me even more intensely once I update for reals, because all I really want to write about it how much I freakin’ love Southern California weather. At least seventy degrees Fahrenheit all day, every day (and even at night in LA), in late November? That’s right! Better than this NorCal gloominess we’ve got going on.

Lengthier SoCal-related update later, and pictures will be uploaded to Flickr when I get around to it. Also, guess which rockstar I randomly ran into at jummah [Friday congregational prayers] at the Islamic Center of San Diego?! (Interro-goodtimes!)

On this road to somewhere we have never been before

Loss and laments and letting go

A recurring theme in my conversations over the past two weeks has been how much sadness this year has contained. And, again, we never really stop to think about it long enough until it hits close to home. These days, when we ask each other, “Has there been any news?”, we’re talking about Dr. Zehra Attari, mother of my sister’s best friend, who practices pediatrics in Oakland and has been missing for two weeks now, somewhere between her International Blvd. clinic and a meeting in Alameda. A five-mile drive that they say should have taken her twenty minutes maximum, even in the rainy, stormy weather of that evening.

Five freakin’ miles.

The Sunday before last, my father and sister and I joined a few hundred people in Oakland for a community walk to pass out missing-person flyers, something that Dr. Attari’s friends and family and others had been engaged in all through the previous week as well. The three of us ended up in Alameda with a stack of flyers, and all my father had on his mind was an exchange with a man in Oakland: “I handed a flyer to one couple, and the man looked at it and said, ‘It’s been a week. There’s been no news at all?’ I said no. And he said, ‘That’s bad. What kind of car was she driving?’ When I said Honda, he just shook his head and said, ‘Hondas are popular cars around here.’ “

Five hours of flyering in Alameda, and it didn’t feel like nearly enough. But what’s enough, anyway? “Enough” will be when she walks through the door, when she safely comes home to her family [requires login; punch the link into bugmenot.com to obtain a quick login].

I don’t know what to think of the past two weeks: On the one hand, I’ve been amazed at people’s compassion, like the girl at Peet’s Coffee who said, “Go right ahead and tape the flyer in the window. I’d rather get in trouble for it later.” And the crowd at one bar in Alameda: A man and a woman talking so loudly and gesturing so emphatically out on the sidewalk that I thought they were quarrelling – except, no, they were just talking animatedly, and glanced curiously at me and my sister while our father entered to speak with the owner. As soon as they saw the flyers in our hands, the woman’s face drooped, and she took one while the man read it over her shoulder. While my sister and I spoke with them, the bar owner came bursting out with a missing-person flyer in his hands, tore down some random flyer that was right-smack in the middle of their door and held the missing-person one in its place, saying, “Here, tape it right here!” Walking away, we looked back over our shoulders to see people spilled out from the bar onto the sidewalk, one group gathered around the flyer at the door, another around the man and woman with the loud voices. “That was just like Cheers,” remarked my dad.

Not to mention the crazybeautiful coincidence of wandering into another cafe and having the proprietor ask, “Have you met Alice?” and introducing us to Alice Lai-Bitker of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, whose district includes both Alameda as well as the Fruitvale area of Oakland where Dr. Attari’s clinic is located. “I’ve been thinking of the Attari family,” she said, “but I didn’t know how to reach them to help.” Phone numbers and business cards were exchanged, and the next day I received a call from her office with a request for Mr. Attari’s number.

But then there were also people like those at some cafes, salons, sports clubs, and other places who downright refused to let us mess up the pristine expanse of their storefront windows with our flyers, and others who merely glanced at our flyers and brushed off our offers of “We have tape” with a cold “No, we’ll put it up ourselves,” and then put the flyers aside as soon as we politely turned away to leave. And even the moderators of the Muslim Students Association listserve at my alma mater, who refused to approve and post any emails I sent out (three in 2 weeks does not constitute spamming, kids, if that’s what you’re thinking), which resulted in me sending them an articulate but suitably bitchy email requesting an explanation. All I ever really needed to know about grace and compassion, I did not learn from the MSA. [Edit: I got a nice, explanatory little reply back from the MSA, so I can’t be pissed anymore. Much.]

My father has wryly repeated throughout the week: “The first question all the white people at work ask about Dr. Attari is, Was she upset with her husband? Was she having trouble with her family? The first question all the ethnic people ask is, What kind of car was she driving?“

I think about how easily it could have been my father. My well-dressed father with his Infiniti SUV with the personalized license plates, who bought real estate in East Oakland about a year ago and has realized first-hand, since then, how harsh and cold a city Oakland is. We in our safe little bubble of suburbia often forget how the rest of the world lives. My father now calls Oakland “a vicious place.” Until a year ago, he thought such things existed only in the movies: gang wars and auto thefts; people exchanging money for drugs on street corners in broad daylight; rampant, blatant crime and destruction and acts of violence. Oakland opened his eyes. Oakland has further opened our eyes in the past two weeks: such things are not supposed to happen to those we love and know.

A week ago, I remarked to my sister, “I’d be really excited about how good I’m getting at using Adobe Illustrator again, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s for such a sad thing.” That was the night that, while I redesigned missing-person flyers, she had to stand in front of the crowds at the UC Berkeley MSA’s Eid banquet and deliver the statement her friend, Dr. Attari’s daughter, had asked her to read in her place. I know how difficult and emotionally taxing this was, since my sister relayed it all to me first-hand. One of the most difficult things, for her, was to see her classmates walk around laughing, dressed to the nines in their Eid finery, even though they all know H and know her mother is missing.

“But it doesn’t hit some people as hard,” I tried to explain to her. “If H weren’t your best friend and you weren’t so involved in this, it probably wouldn’t hit me and Ummy and Daddy as hard either.”

“Not even if it were someone you knew as an acquaintance? Or any of the Muslim people you went to school with?”

“No,” I said bluntly. “Not even then. I wouldn’t spend so much time on it. Probably just forward out a few emails, and feel bad for a couple days, and… yeah, that’s it.” My friend D doesn’t call me a heartless bastard for nothing.

But when you’ve watched your sister and her best friend get to know one another and grow together during their university years, when you’ve photographed them with silly expressions in the moonlight outside Barrows Hall after leaving the UC Berkeley Fast-a-Thon during Ramadan and listened to all their anecdotes about one another and lunched with them at Julie’s and laughed at their being married to each other on Facebook, when you’ve been to the lovely, gracious older sister’s wedding and eaten their mother’s homecooked, delicious food and smiled at the image of their father serenely washing dishes at the kitchen sink, when you’ve attended community vigils in Oakland and San Jose and seen grown men cradle candles, symbols of hope, in their huge hands as gently as if they were holding fragile babies, then you can’t help but care a whole lot more.

“The worst thing must be to not know anything, one way or another,” I said helplessly to my brother a few days ago. “To not have -“
“Closure,” he finished.
“Yeah.”
“But at least, this way, they have hope, and that’s the most important thing they need right now.”

I can’t even begin to imagine the massive amounts of hope it must take to walk around and function and continue your daily life step-by-step, to return to school and work and concentrate on people’s words when in reality you’re just standing at the edge of the earth, longing for the one person who, as her older daughter put it, makes everything perfect, who puts everything in place, whose absence leaves a heartbreaking void.

I’ve never known two weeks to feel so long before.

All I can wish for the Attari family is:

Only good things
No in-betweens just
Peace and love.

And all the strength and hope they could ever need.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon

Blogistan and the Wide World of Webs, Loss and laments and letting go

Requesting your prayers and good vibes for one of my favorite Blogistanis, Binje the biryani-wala and ice cream-lover extraordinaire, whose father passed away on November 14th. All I’ve got going through my mind, in light of recent and cumulative events of the past year is, “This year is on crack and I hate it: why is there so much sadness?” Wishing much ease, peace, and strength for Binje and his family. Send him some love and ice cream. He’s one of the best people I know.

The open road for travelers’ souls/they once were lost but now they’re…found, please God

Loss and laments and letting go, Rockstar and Crescent

Leaving Berkeley at noon yesterday, I couldn’t help but smile at the blinding, brilliant red-orange trees I passed on my way to the freeway. Contrary to popular opinion, California does indeed have fall colors. The world was glowing gorgeously, and I thought about how blessed I was, to have spent the entire day before in San Francisco with beautiful friends, both old and new, and to have spent yesterday morning in Berkeley with the lovely L lady (a.k.a. Lamushay) and my favorite (only) sister, eating gelato and crowing over Arnold’s reforms having been terminated. [Yes, California is enjoying the puns.]

It all added up to a bunch of na lara gham sort of moments…except life is never that simple, and all happiness of the past few days has been enjoyed guiltily while the Bay Area community searches and prays for the return of a missing doctor who lives in San Jose and practices pediatrics in East Oakland.

This is a devastating time for her family and all those who know her. Her younger daughter is a very close friend of my sister’s, and my sister and I had attended her older daughter’s wedding just a few short months ago. When we left their home that evening, the girls were laughing and bhangra’ing it up with friends and family in the living room while their mother flew around the house high on the stress of planning and their father calmly washed dishes in the kitchen, smiling all the while. It is so unbelievably ironic to me that the photos my sister and I took at that happy occasion are now being used by Bay Area news stations and for news articles and missing-person flyers. I would not wish this sadness and uncertainty on anyone; I wish it even less on this beautiful family that deserves nothing but good.

If you live in the Bay Area or are affiliated with any Bay Area organizations and listserves, please email me for ways in which you can help.

Most importantly, please, please keep the family in your prayers. And if you don’t believe in prayer, then send good vibes, warm fuzzy feelings, good karma – whatever works – to ensure her safe and sound return to her family.

Tuesday, November 8th: Worldwide Vigils for Earthquake Victims

Salaam Namaste

Today, Tuesday the 8th, is the one-month anniversary of the South Asian earthquake. Please join the global community in a worldwide vigil. It’s too soon to start forgetting – it’s practically winter, and people need our help now more than ever.

The purpose of the vigil is to:

– Donate money
– Press world leaders into action
– Bring this story to the front page
– Lead or take part in grassroots efforts

Akhtar da mubarak sha

Rockstar and Crescent

Originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

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?