Category Archives: Salaam Namaste

‘Cause if you’re not trying to make something better/then as far as I can tell you are just in the way

Links to love, Salaam Namaste

Hey, kids, how goes it? I’m still around, just trying to find things to do with myself besides chase the sunshine around the house. Somedays, it’s just so much easier to uploads photos to Flickr and deal with brusque titles/captions (or none at all) than it is to compose coherent pieces of writing for this joint. But I’m getting to it, don’t worry.

Meanwhile, for your personal amusement, I’ve found an index of mp3s of old TV theme songs [via Kottke]. I haven’t listened to them yet – I’ve just been scrolling through and giggling at the list – but Knight Rider and He-Man are on there, so what more can I say? Let me know how it goes.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’ve got two important things I need you to pay attention to (and I know you will, because you are rockstars):

ONE.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005 is Blog Quake Day [via Baraka at Truth & Beauty]. DesiPundit explains:

We request each of you to make a small post about the earthquake, and direct your readers to a suitable avenue for donating to the relief efforts.

Every single dollar contributed, multiplied by the vast numbers of bloggers, will go a long way in helping these people rebuild their lives. Our experience of the last few weeks showed us that, no matter how small our blogs, and no matter how few our readers, the words we write and the way we use our blogs can have far-reaching consequences. We learnt not to underestimate our powers. Let’s now use our powers for good.

A small list of relief organizations is available in DesiPundit’s post. You can also directly help relief efforts by buying hella slick tshirts through Chapati Mystery.

Please, please contribute, whether through weblog posts or direct donations or whatever you can do. It would be gorgeously rockstarish of you.

TWO.
A business associate of my father’s sent me the following email a couple days ago:

Your father gave me your email address. I spoke with him earlier today about an idea that my women friends & I have been kicking around. We’ve been noticing and discussing how pervasive fear and hatred (especially of other ethnic groups) have become in our society again in the last few years, and how many of the politicians have fed this fear to promote their own agendas. We’d like to do something at least on a local level in our community to stem this tide & help people of all ethnicities to relate to each other as people. Our thought is to start with a group of women in Sacramento. We’d like to invite women from most of the major ethnic groups represented in this area to start a multi-ethnic women’s group. Would you be interested in helping us form such a group?

I know you graduated recently (congratulations, by the way!) and are not up here on a regular basis, but if you’re in the area for other things we can arrange a time to get together that fits your schedule.

I am humbled by the ladies’ compassion and decision to engage in some form of active change, and am honored to have been asked to help in any way I can. I replied back with some thoughts, but I’m feeling a distinctive lack of ideas at the moment, mainly because I haven’t really sat down and brainstormed yet. I’ve had plenty of experience with women of color discussion circles and intercultural dialogue and alliance in college, but it’s been a few months and I’m worried I may have lost so much of what I learned through such experiences over the past few years.

So I need your help in brainstorming concrete thoughts and ideas regarding mission statement/goals/problem areas or issues that you feel a group such as this must focus on addressing. Anything and everything regarding intercommunity/intercultural relations and dialogue and safe spaces and women and diversity and all that fun stuff. I’m looking at all of you: Guys and girls, Muslims and non-Muslims, and whether or not you identify as “ethnic.” Apparently my comment box is seriously on crack, so drop me an email whenever you have any ideas. Help a kid out. I promise I’ll write back.

p.s. Once more, don’t forget: Blog Quake Day! on the 26th!

EDIT: Looks like my comments work again. I think. Otherwise, try the email. Thanks much.

The foundations are canyoning

Loss and laments and letting go, Rhymes and unrhymed lines, Salaam Namaste

Nightly, I dream of rain and hail and snow-covered mountains, when in reality my local mountains are gorgeously goldenbrown and I daily chase patches of sunshine all over the house so I can gleefully warm up my fuzzy-socked feet.

The past few days, I’ve been reading countless news articles about rescue workers tentatively forging into mountainous areas, into villages that have been cut off from any sort of relief for days following the earthquake, hoping to ease the suffering of those who have survived but being confronted only with devastating destruction and the sickly sweet stench of rotting corpses. I’ve read about villages that are eerily empty of children, about feeble elderly people who – in a cruel twist of fate – outlived the earthquake even as their children and grandchildren perished, about angry survivors who feel betrayed by the lack of aid in their areas. Survivors who’ve been sleeping outdoors for days, who can already see the snow on their mountains as winter begins to set in. I obsessively hit refresh on news websites throughout the day, checking for updates about the aftermath of the earthquake. I’ve watched dozens of sobering video clips. The photographs just get worse.

Every afternoon, my mother asks me, “Is there any news?” and I know instinctively what she is referring to, because, let’s face it, most of the time we don’t really care about the news unless it affects us directly, unless it is about people from our motherland, unless the reporters interview and the photographs depict people who look like us. Yesterday, I went to the grocery store, and, just before I walked in, I made a sudden beeline for the shopping carts by the newstands, even though I needed only a few items and a basket procured from inside would have been enough. What I really wanted to see was if there were any above-the-fold articles about the South Asian earthquake at the newstands. Of course there were, enough headlines to get me sufficiently teary-eyed before I continued indoors to finish shopping for groceries and supplies I’ve never had to beg for.

While Pakistan childishly bickers over whether or not India has really been crossing over the Line of Control in disputed Kashmir to provide relief and aid (God forbid that the two nations should even think of helping one another), there are still remote mountainous areas that are cut off from aid, forgotten villages whose remaining inhabitants have been left to fend for themselves, and survivors who “take their quota of relief rice to a wet rocky patch wondering where to cook it” because they have no fire or utensils at their disposal.

I am reminded of part of a piece I wrote in January, in response to the Asian tsunami:

.
.
.
Like you, I watched the aftermath of
That tsunami thing on television.
Like you, I watched the faces of the people
Left behind,
Dazed and broken,
Shell-shocked and shattered.
What do you do when your world
Literally falls down in ruins
Around you?

What you do is this:
You scrabble in the cold, hard ground
And lift out chunks of dirt
To dig graves with your hands
To bury your children.
You pray that the vast world beyond your boundaries
Will be watchful and compassionate enough
To ensure that you receive
Clean water and medicine.
And food, too, yes, food.
But you can’t help but weep
In irony, in frustration,
When they send you endless bags of rice
And you have no clean water with which
To wash and boil the rice in.

And what you do is this:
You close the gaping eyes of your loved ones
And cover their faces with shrouds
And step back to watch as they
Fill the mass graves of victims of
That tsunami thing.
And you whisper fervent prayers over the bodies
Because you so desperately want to believe
That there was a reason for all this,
That God was not absent
From the world the day
The waters rose up in walls,
Only to leave behind the horror and stench of decaying bodies
And vestiges of colorful rags
And empty, flattened villages
In the wake of that tsunami thing.
.
.
.

It’s all heartbreaking, but, really, the earthquake survivors don’t need my tears. Lord knows they must have more than enough of their own. What they do need is food and shelter and medical supplies, and money to ensure that they get all those things. News sources talk about compassion fatigue and donor fatigue. I hope this is not true of all you people reading this, because we don’t have jack to be fatigued about. So scroll down and check the links below. As Hemlock said, “For those of us who can turn to our beds and sleep in comfort, I want to know how we can look ourselves in the eye.”

Again, RESOURCES & things to read:

Quake survivors answer BBC readers’ questions

Hemlock has posted a list of supplies that the NGOs are specifically asking for.

Baji has the following post for October 12, 2005 [The donations through APPNA are indeed tax deductible]:

The Association of Pakistani Physicians of North America, APPNA, has set up an emergency disaster relief fund for the victims of the earthquake. You can call in your donation by credit card or send in your checks to their office. If you want to fax, you can use this donation form. APPNA is 501 C3 organizations. All donations may be tax deductible as permitted by law.

A P P N A
6414 S. Cass Avenue
Westmont, IL 60559
Phone: 630-968-8585 or 630-968-8606
Fax: 630-968-8677
Email: appna@appna.org

Danial, a reader of this weblog, emailed me with the following info [Thank you]:

“I just wanted to bring to your attention the need for tents in the earthquake hit areas. We are not able to purchase tents here in Lahore anymore and there is still a dire need for them. So please get people to ship tents over to Pakistan. Apparently, PIA is willing to ship donated goods over to Pakistan free of cost.”

The document Danial attached explains that “3-5 million people have been left homeless and at least 200,000 tents are required, there ARE NO MORE TENTS IN PAKISTAN, ALL THAT WERE AVAILABLE HAVE BEEN SHIPPED TO NORTH. Please send as many tents (preferably waterproof, winterized) as you can. People abroad don’t even know that Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) has decided to carry all donations from any of its stations wordwide for free.”

I know you like the word “free.” Find your nearest PIA station on the list of PIA’s worldwide Stations by Countries, and here is the list of PIA’s booking offices around the world, alphabetized by cities (see N for New York, C for Chicago, F for Frankfurt, D for Dusseldorf etc.). For more info, please contact Waqas Usman: waqasusman AT gmail DOT com, (Mobile) 92-321-4060186.

avari/nameh has also posted several links for relief and aid.

And, again, Chai is collecting donations for blankets and tents. Every little bit counts, especially considering that one American dollar is worth so many Pakistani rupees.

Blogistan’s very own lovely GrouchyOwl is in Pakistan, covering the aftermath of the earthquake for her newspaper. Wishing her much strength, steadiness, and safety.

[I know I’ve been going massively link-crazy lately, but this is the only way I can remind myself, and make it personal for myself. Add thoughts and ideas and links to the comment box if I’m missing anything. Thanks much.]

When the earth is shaken to her (utmost) convulsion/and the earth throws up her burdens (from within)

Loss and laments and letting go, Salaam Namaste

My eyes, and my heart, ache from three days of reading about the earthquake in South Asia. For most of Saturday, I sat at my father’s computer, alternately updating Excel/QuickBooks spreadsheets, downloading mp3s of Quran chapters for my father (I prefer Sa’ad al-Ghamidi; he wanted Abdul Rahman al-Sudais), and compulsively hitting “refresh” on news websites for the latest coverage of the earthquake. With a sobering magnitude of 7.6, the earthquake’s estimated death toll has climbed from a few hundred to over 30,000 in the course of three days. The ever-increasing numbers, and especially the stories of people digging through rubble with their bare hands, bring back the heartbreak of the Asian tsunami last December.

Early Saturday morning, when we woke up for the pre-sunrise breakfast to prepare for our fast, my father mentioned in passing, “There’s been an earthquake in Kashmir. A whole village was wiped out.”
At noon, Somayya’s father called, inquiring, “Have you called Rawalpindi?”
“Yes, last week,” I said.
“You haven’t called today? There’s been an earthquake near Islamabad.”
“What? I thought it was in Kashmir.”

Every news website we skimmed mentioned Kashmir and Islamabad. We panicked, thinking of my mother’s family in Rawalpindi, not too far from Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. I hunted for every map I could find; most did not list smaller towns and villages.

“Ummy, you need to call ‘Pindi.”
“It’s one a.m. there right now. They’ll be sleeping” she said uncertainly.
I almost snapped back, “Maybe you should be worried about whether or not they’re still alive,” before considering that that was the last thing she needed to hear at a time like this. But my father was home a few minutes later, and his urging did the trick. They managed to get through to Rawalpindi, and alhamdulillah, everyone is fine, although the aftershocks continued even while my relatives were on the phone with my parents. Some, I read later, were up to 6.3 in intensity.

I read temors reached as far as Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India, my friend D’s hometown. I called her. “D, I was just reading about the earthquake. Is your family in India safe?”
There was a long pause. “I thought that was in Pakistan.”
“Well, mainly Kashmir. But I read they felt it in Ahmedabad, too.”
“Hold on, let me check with my mother.”
She called me back a minute later, with news that everyone was okay.

Mansehra is near Abbottabad, which is near Attock and Hazro, which are part of the same district as my own village in Pakistan. In 1995, we stopped for ice cream in Abbottabad, and I was wide-eyed at the wide orderly town, having been a village girl for a year by then. Mansehra is not far; it’s painful to read stories of the hundreds of children who died there (as well as the 400 schoolchildren in Balakot) when their school buildings collapsed on top of them. They’re already being referred to as the “lost generation.” Every place is connected somehow to yet another place; the world feels smaller every day, everything hits a bit closer to home every time I turn on the radio or surf news websites. This was never more apparent to us than now.

Disaster coverage tends to focus on urban areas, and I felt selfish for resenting it on Saturday when all we heard was “Islamabad and the upscale residential Margalla Towers” nonstop and kept asking our friends and family, “But what about the village? Hazro? Attock?” But it’s natural to think of our own homes at a time like this, and necessary to remember that those who were poor and lacking before the earthquake are even more so now. If the earthquake had shattered District Attock, we would have been devastated. It is unsettling to read Chai’s notes about lack of proper rescue efforts in Islamabad, and I think of how much more complicated such attempts must be in rural areas, in villages similar to my own, where streets and alleyways were so narrow that even taxis had difficulty maneuvering through, much less emergency vehicles and equipment. The logistical problems of getting food and medical supplies to villages in the mountains must be especially difficult. And winter is already setting in, in some areas.

Our television is limited to about two (static-prone) local channels, so most of the news we’ve been receiving has been through family and online news sources. This has been especially difficult for my mother, who wishes we had cable channels so she could see and understand the effects of the earthquake with her own eyes. Photographs, though distressing, have been more helpful in conveying the impact.

Living in California, and especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, we’ve gotten used to the idea of earthquakes. After all, we’re sitting right on top of the fault lines. Friends in other areas shake their heads at the thought of us living right smack in the earthquake zones, but we laugh back and continue on. In the aftermath of this recent South Asian earthquake, local news stations have been emphasizing that the Bay Area has a 62% chance of experiencing a catastrophic quake like the 1989 Loma Prieta temblor. I still remember the 7.1 magnitude earthquake in 1989, which memorably collapsed the upper level of portions of the Bay Bridge and the 880 freeway, crushing cars on the lower levels. My father was working in San Francisco at the time, in one of those tall clusters of skyscrapers you see as you cross the Bay Bridge into the City, even though I could never figure out which one was his. When the earthquake hit, his building shook madly from side to side. Somehow he made it down several flights of stairs and twenty miles south to his friend Mr. R’s home in Belmont, where he stayed overnight. We at home in the East Bay, having felt minor tremors ourselves, watched television footage of flames and smashed concrete for hours, waiting to hear he was safe.

The Gujarat earthquake of 2001 hit close, too. I remember we had just walked out of chemistry lecture and were standing on the lawn outside, Somayya and D and our friend A and I, when someone absently questioned D about whether her family was safe in the aftermath of the Gujarat earthquake that had occurred a day or two before. She paled. “What earthquake?”
We mumbled something about 20,000 people dead. A thrust his cell phone at her. “Here, use this.”
D was dazed with worry, yet protested, “It’s long distance.”
He almost shouted at her: “I don’t care if you call India. Take the damn phone and call your parents.”

And then there was the minor earthquake back when I was living in Pakistan. Drowsy with my afternoon nap, I thought my mother was sitting at the edge of my bed, shaking it with her laughter. I’ve always liked telling this story. But what was only minor tremors at my end must have been more forceful somewhere else.

The stories of grief and loss coming out of the earthquake are heartbreaking. As Hemlock commented the other day on Monologist’s weblog, “Everyone is somebody’s someone.”

To those from Kashmir, Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan – I hope you and your loved ones are safe and well inshaAllah. Much strength and peace and ease. And relief, especially relief.

RESOURCES

Knicq has an extremely well-written and thought provoking post, as does avari/nameh. Go read.

BBC reporters’ logs are here.

South Asia Quake Help contains “news and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts” [via Sister-Scorpion].

Karrvakarela also has a list of several organizations we can donate to for relief work.

Chai’s family is collecting donations for blankets and tents (about Rs. 270/$5 and Rs. 7000/$120, respectively) for those who have lost their homes. Please contact her for more information.

hamsafar

All-Star Crackstar Squad, Casa420 and Familia, Hit the Road, Salaam Namaste

After picking my mother up from our relatives’ in Sacramento last week, she and I settled into my car for the hour-long drive home. After the usual impatient verbal tussles (“Why is the seatbelt always messed up in your passenger seat?” “It’s because you always twist it the wrong way whenever you use it, Ummy.” “I don’t twist it. I just pull it in the direction I need to fasten it.” “Ummy, you’re pulling it too much.”), I glanced out the window and noticed the moon, hanging unusually low in the sky like a large orange-red globe.

“Look at the moon, Ummy!” We both ducked our heads and peered at the moon through the side windows.

Long after I had pulled away from the curb in front of my relatives’ house and we continued home along the freeways, I would periodically glance at the moon out of the corner of my eye and exclaim, “Look at the moon, Ummy!”

“Very pretty,” she would agree with a smile. “It looks like it’s traveling right along with us.”

If my father were there, he would have predictably followed my mother’s comment with a reference to “hamsafar,” an Urdu word meaning “fellow traveler” or “traveling companion.” I was reminded of the PIA (Pakistan Internation Airlines) inflight magazine entitled Humsafar, which I had first noticed on our trip to Pakistan when I was eight and which had resulted in my father’s etymological explanations.

Appropriately enough, my mother and I spent the drive home listening to songs by a woman named Mahjabeen (literally: moon-face moon-forehead, beautiful forehead; basically: having a face as beautiful as the moon), a name that strikes a deeply personal, emotional chord with this family. The songs were performed in what seemed to be a mixture of both Pukhtu and Hindku, helpfully translated line-by-line by my mother, who would repeat each line after the singer, then turn to me and translate. My initial exasperation soon gave way to amusement at hearing my mother continually translate the Hindku lines into…Hindku, the dialect I speak fluently and use to communicate with her.

In a gorgeously fitting end to the day, I received, just a few minutes after arriving home, a text message from a friend exhorting me to “Look at da moon tonight it looks hella beautiful.”

Shiny smooth automotive goodness, and goodness of another nature

All-Star Crackstar Squad, Rockstar and Crescent, Salaam Namaste

Let me tell you about my friend S. My friend S is one of the most selfless people I know, the kind of person who, I’ve realized recently, is always putting everyone else before himself. Somayya is another one of those kind of people. They know it and I know it and everyone else knows it and they keep doing it, sometimes to their own detriment, but that’s what makes them so tight, dintcha know. It’s a vicious cycle sometimes, but we need more people like that in the world.

S is tight. Actually, he’s the self-proclaimed tightest person in the whole wide world. He used to send out emails to the listserve, signing off as, “S____ a.k.a. Tight One.” Most of the time, though, he’d email us one-liners stating simply, “I am so tight” or “I am hecka tight,” prompting me to fire back responses along the lines of, “Umm, no, the world does not revolve around you, buddy.”

I have to be careful about how I respond to S’s comments half the time though. Most of my conversations with friends and acquaintances revolve around sarcasm and wry remarks that may come off as disconcertingly harsh and are thus somewhat misconstrued by overly sensitive people like S. Recently, for example, in response to something he had said, I told S he was “hella rude and obnoxious.”

He reminded me that he is a fob, chiding me for using “big complicated words he can’t spell or say.” I didn’t realize until the next day that he was dismayed by my comment because he thought he had genuinely hurt my feelings or offended me. So he apologized profusely. Taken aback, I burst out laughing, until I realized he was serious, so I apologized in turn. And then I had to do a step-by-step explanation of the role of sarcasm in my daily conversations. What drama.

“Besides,” I explained later, “it’s not about me. You know I can take it. But you made that comment to someone you don’t know, and who doesn’t know you, and I think it comes off as a hella rude first impression.”

Then I told him how tight he was, to soften the criticism.
“I know,” he said, as if that were obvious. “People tell me all the time, ‘S___, you are so tight.’ I’m like, ‘I know I’m tight. Watch out, people, tight stuff walkin’ through.’ “
I rolled my eyes, as he continued muttering, “Man, I can’t believe I’m so tight.”

I’ve come to realize though that, like many of us, S uses his seeming arrogance, sarcasm, and blunt commentary as a front for masking deeper insecurities and somber life experiences. Once in a while, he’ll remain serious long enough to share unexpected, heartbreaking stories, like the one about the girl in high school who used to treat him like crap for wearing the same jeans every single day, because he could only afford one pair. Last summer, he told me I was wise, and I said, No, I’m just complacent, because life’s always been too good to me. How could I be wise, when I can’t even begin to fathom experiences such as his: “I’ve slept in the airport, on park benches and streets, collected cans at night… I have done all that, and I don’t take it for granted.”

“I remember where I come from,” he always tells me, “and I’m proud of it. Whatever I have now can be gone in a heartbeat, and I’ll give up everything I have, cuz I ain’t taking it to heaven.”

Two Fridays ago, I checked my phone and found the following text message from S, whose house I had left my car parked in front of that morning before hanging out with Somayya the rest of the day: I washed ur car n took most of da scratches 4rm da right door. I couldnt clean da rims.

I called him straightaway to convey my massive gratitude. “No problem,” he kept saying, with a note of genuine surprise in his voice, as if he couldn’t understand why I would be calling to thank him. “I was washing my car, so I thought I’d go ahead and wash yours, too.”

Last Monday, he called to ask, “Hey, are we still on for lunch tomorrow?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Okay, cool.” He reminded me that he was heading out of town in two days, and that he would be back in Sacramento in a couple of weeks. “So hey, just drop your car off tomorrow when we go to lunch, and I’ll clean the inside of it, too.”
“Are you serious?!”
“Sure. For free. I love cleaning cars.”
“Will do, then. Awesome, dude. Thanks so much!”
“No problem. It’ll be ready by the time you get off work. Oh, hey, when’s the last time you got your oil changed?”
“I dunno. It’s been a while, I think.”
“How long a while?”
“A few months?”
“How many months?”
“I dunno, man,” I said absently, sitting down on the floor of my room and warming up my hands at the heater. “Maybe, like…last summer or something?”
“Ohhh my God… Do you know, you’re supposed to change your oil every three thousand miles? Okay, I’ll have to change your oil, too. The hell is wrong with you?”

He was supposed to tell me the lengthy, convoluted story about how he made it to the United States, a story he said would take him anywhere from two to five hours to relate. Instead, he spent our entire lunch berating me for not remembering the last time I got the oil changed in my car.
“I don’t remember, okay?” I said, throwing up my hands in impatience. “So get over it. I just take it to Jiffy Lube every few months, and they take care of all that drama.”
“Every few months? You said last summer. Your car doesn’t deserve you. By the time I’m done with it, it won’t even want to go home with you at the end of the day.”
“Well, I check my oil regularly, even if I don’t know how to change it. And the coolant, too. Doesn’t that count for something?”
He was not impressed.

We finished lunch, complete with much eye-rolling on my part, and then S dropped me off at work. He then called me twice that afternoon. The first time: “Hey, do you want Armor All on your car?”
I squinted. “Almond oil?”
“Armor All.”
“What’s that?”
“Say ‘yes,’ ” mouthed Somayya. “It makes your car all shiny.”
“Oh, yeah, definitely then.”

The second call: “When’s the last time you got your transmission fluid changed?”
“Umm…”
“Okay, I’ll change that, too.”
“Thanks, buddy.”

Preoccupied with work and pseudo-studying, I didn’t make it back to S’s house to pick up my car until almost 9pm that evening, but even in the darkness I could see how clean and shiny my car looked. S and I spent fifteen minutes walking around his driveway, checking out my car from every angle as he relayed everything he had done: washed/polished/waxed the outside, scrubbed the rims, vacuumed and cleaned every inch of the inside, changed my oil and transmission fluid… Thorough detail.

“Oh, and I replaced your air filter, too. Took out your old one and put a new one in.” He fished my old air filter out of the garbage can and held it under the garage door light. “See this?”

I peered at it.
“See how black this is?” he said, pointing out the obvious. “It’s supposed to be all white.”

“Dang.” I skipped around my car again, repeatedly rubbing my index finger against the surface, feeling like a gleeful little kid. “It feels so slick. You musta used hella wax and polish on this.” I laughed. “Dude, it looks so freakin’ clean, I can’t believe it!”

“It wasn’t that dirty,” he shrugged.

I looked at him in disbelief. “Man, are you kidding me? Did you somehow miss the black rims and the inch-thick layers of dust on the dashboard?”

“I’ve seen dirtier cars than that, okay. Make sure you get your oil changed every three thousand miles,” he reminded me. “With all your driving, you have to do this regularly. Wait, how many miles do you drive a week?”

“Umm. Six hundred a week between home and school. Oh, and I work three days a week in Sacramento, too.”

“Dayamm. So that makes how many?”

“Another ninety or so. So let’s make it an even seven hundred.”

“Seven hundred miles a week?!” he yelped. “For the love of God! What are you, insane?”

He handed me a plastic grocery bag. “What’s this?” I asked, peering inside.

“An extra bottle of oil, and one of transmission fluid, left over from what I put in your car.”

“Dude, just keep them for your own car,” I insisted, but he refused to take them. “Okay, just tell me how much all this stuff cost, so I can pay you back.”

“No,” he said obstinately, opening my car door. “Go home.”

“Fine then. I owe you a couple of lunches and ice cream, whenever you get back.”

“Okay, okay. Oh, and wear sunglasses in the morning,” he warned. “The car might blind you.”

I laughed, eyeing the car in the dark. “Buddy, I’m loving the shininess, whatever I can see of it. There’s no way it’s going to blind me.”

The next morning, however, I had to concede he was right, as the sunshine bounced off the interior of my car – especially the shiny dashboard and steering wheel – and attacked my eyes, which were already strained after a late-night study session. Yellow-orange-tinted sunglasses to the rescue!

I called S when I got to campus. “The car looks awesome, dude. Thanks so much!”
“If you thank me one more time,” he snapped, “I’m going to throw up.”
“Please restrain yourself. And get over it.”

In the afternoon, he left me a voicemessage: “Hey, what’s crackin’? I just listened to your message from last night, too. Stop thanking me. I just washed your car, it’s not like I saved your life or something. Have a beautiful day with your 10am to 9pm back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back classes. Oh, and make sure you don’t get stepped on, okay?”

I’ve been more in touch with S over the past week than I have over the past six months before that. This is mainly because I stalk him everyday by calling to tell him how shiny clean my car is, and how much I love it, and so he feels obligated to return all my rambling phone calls. Now that he’s got me all mushy about my car, S is working on two things:

1) Constantly reminding me about how short I am [I’m 5’1″, and, yes, I’m perfectly okay with this]
(Sample voicemessages: “Did I ever tell you that you’re so short? I noticed it today and was like, ‘Dang, Yasmine is hella short! I didn’t want to step on you.’ ” and
“To me, you will always be thirteen years old. Be careful and make sure you don’t get stepped on, okay?” and
“Why are you so short? And your brother is a giant. Why? Genetics can’t explain that.” and
“I’m taller than you. Taller means everything.”); and

2) Harassing me about my lack of study habits
(He called me a couple of evenings ago to check up on how my studying was going.
“Um, actually, I just finished dinner.”
“Dinner?” he said incredulously. “You got home at 7:30. That was three hours ago. It took you three hours to eat dinner?”
“Well, no, but there’s nothing wrong with prolonging a good thing.”
“Unless you’re taking 24 units,” he pointed out. “And your problem is, half the time, you’re driving. And the other half, you’re napping. What’s wrong with you? You’re always taking naps everywhere. You need to stop sleeping so damn much.”
And last night:
“Are you studying?”
“No! It’s Friday!”
“Every day is a Friday for you, isn’t it? How are you planning on passing those 24 units?”
“Shut up.”)

I’m easily amused and impressed by simple things, and so the ways to my heart are many. But because I am also the Commuter Child Extraordinaire, two things will earn you my massive, never-ending gratitude: Washing my car for me (which no one has ever willingly volunteered to do before S tackled the job), and filling up my gas tank to the max (which my dad always does on the rare occasions he borrows my car).

S called me late Thursday night to share a “pretty tight” verse from the Quran. Why do people always assume I’ll be awake at 12:30am?

Oh, wait, because I usually am.

To continue… I was actually asleep for once in my life, so he left a voicemessage with the verse, and the related footnote/commentary. I listened to it early yesterday morning, on my way to school, grateful for the timely reminder in these weeks of ungodly, uncharitable thoughts on my part:

And call not, besides God, on another god. There is no god but He. Everything (that exists) will perish except His own Face. To Him belongs the Command, and to Him will ye (all) be brought back. (Quran, 28:88)

Later in the day, while I was at work, he IMed me with, “Hey, I found another pretty tight verse.”
“What is it?”
“2:255. But I don’t know how to say it in Arabic.”
“Oh!” I said. “That’s called Ayat al-Kursi. It’s one of my favorites. I can recite the Arabic for you, if you want to hear it. Lemme call you when I get off work, okay?”

I finally got around to calling him that evening, while I was on the road, about ten minutes from home.
“For the love of God!” he exclaimed. “What took you so damn long? I’ve had the crappiest day ever, and I was looking forward to the Arabic version of that verse all day long.”
“Sorry. Alright, buddy, here goes…” So I recited Ayat al-Kursi and the two verses that follow it.
There was empty silence for a few moments after I finished. Then he said, “Wow.”
“Yeah, it’s good stuff, huh?”
“That just made you the tightest person in my book.”
“I already knew that, but thanks anyway.”

How can you not love being friends with a kid who sends text messages like the following, a la Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech:
i had a dream and i woke up and wrote about it, that one day we will find a place to eat, i have a dream today that we will eat good food and chill, i have a dream today that my stomach will be full of good food, i have a dream today.

Today’s text message states:
u are tight cause u have a friend like me who is the #1 TIGHTEST. ME. i’m Tight. thus making u guys tight cause u guys are my friends.

Indeed.

There’s a reason why we have supervisors

NineToFive outside the 925, Salaam Namaste

Okay, so I’m back.

I’m sure you’d like me to elaborate on that, seeing as how you enjoy living vicariously through me, but my life over the past month has been filled with nothing more exciting than four classes, two jobs, and drinking more hot chocolate this quarter than I must have in the past two years combined. Oh yeah, and I’m currently sick, and my tastebuds are down. There’s no worse way to torture me than to ensure I can’t taste my food. Yeah, life is grand, what can I say.

What else have I been doing? I spend my days jaywalking through downtown Sacramento, and my nights…*gasp!*…sleeping, for the most part. I’ve also been grudgingly learning to (kinda sorta maybe, but not really) like shoes. I’ve even worn socks with shoes a few times. This is a big step, as I’m sure you realize.

Don’t worry, all is not lost. I’m still as crackheaded as ever. I’d still rather cut through the muddy grass rather than walk all the way around, “because the only useful thing I ever learned in calculus was about minimizing distance.” [The fact that I was a calculus tutor for two years in college is beside the point.] I had french fries for lunch yesterday. Other than that, I’ve been surviving mainly on chips and candy. And I still gobble down my food faster than anyone in my vicinity. I’m not sure this is quite a good thing.

Why am I trying to justify myself anyway? You know I’m a strange child. We’ve established this numerous times already, because I like being repetitive.

And my lack of updates doesn’t mean I’ve been neglecting Blogistan. I’ve been reading weblogs just as much as usual, but in my lurker mode, that’s all. Also, the vacuum cleaner completely ate the cord off my headphones a few weeks ago, so all you people who’ve been posting audioblogs over the past month, I haven’t gotten a chance to listen to them, so STOP IT ALREADY. The end.

Speaking of jaywalking and Sacramento and crackheaded people, let me tell you stories about the people I work with. Please excuse me if I’m not as funny as I think I am. Happens sometimes.

Let’s begin the rundown on some of my crazy co-workers –

H#3 [This is H#1 and this is H#2, for your information] stops by my desk close to lunchtime one day and mutters a question. After asking him to repeat his request twice, I throw up my hands. “Why are you such a mumbler?”
He asks one more time, louder: “Do you have any ketchup and/or mustard around here?”
I roll my eyes. “Dude, what would I be doing with random packets of ketchup and mustard? What do you think, I keep it in my desk drawer?”
And who uses the term “and/or” in real-life conversations, anyway?

AZ thinks Persians are the best and everyone else is the worst. He periodically threatens to leave the company because “he doesn’t want to work with India and its neighboring countries.”
“India” would be G, whom I’ll get to in a second; “neighboring countries” is a reference to the three of us who are Pakistani.
AZ also likes warning, “I’ll do a hit-and-run on you with my Persian rug.”
“I’ll stab you first,” I respond, which is AZ’s cue to saunter around the office, showing off his biceps. This is his favorite activity in the whole wide world, second only to talking about how great Persians are.

H#3 IMed me early one morning: “Please come to work today!”
“I know,” I responded, “life is just so empty and sad when I’m not there, huh?”
H#3: “I need you here to donate to my orange juice fund.”

G is Indian, with the accent to go along with it. Somayya and I recently spent over an hour trying to explain to him the plotline of The Princess Bride which happens to be Somayya’s favorite film. We are the perfect audience for it, since we’re so easily amused.

“INCONTHIEVABLE!”
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
“I do not mean to pry, but you don’t by any chance happen to have six fingers on your right hand?”
“Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. Now, offer me money.”
[I love the quotes from this movie, okay. It’s that entertaining.]

It’s the cheesiest movie in the whole world!” Somayya explained.
“What’s ‘cheesy’ mean?” asked G.
“Bollywood films,” I deadpanned.
At the end of it all, he nodded in mock understanding and asked, “Oh, okay. So she is a princess, and she has a bride?”

ZA stopped by my cubicle one morning to gasp, “Have you heard about Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston breaking up?”
G, standing nearby, rolled his eyes and feigned pulling out his hair in a paroxysm of grief, as I watched, laughing.

G refuses to speak English with me. He addresses me in Punjabi and pretends not to understand me when I respond in English, so I have no choice but to reply in my Pakistani dialect, Hindku. So at work, I’m either speaking to G with my usual unaccented fluent English, or in Hindku, or in English with a fobby desi accent. I think the new temporary workers at the office probably think I have multiple personalities, what with my switching between languages and dialects and accents all day long. G once admitted that Hindku is a meetthi [sweet] language, whereas Punjabi sounds more like a siray vich vattha [a rock to the head]. Needless to say, I gloatingly remind him about this every chance I get. But it’s difficult to gloat when he agrees so readily and good-humoredly.

Then there’s B, who showed up to work one day with a whole red bell pepper. I don’t like uncooked red bell peppers, and find the thought of scrubbing one and presenting it at work with a flourish before digging into it with a stainless steel fork slightly disturbing. I mean, there’s VEIRD and then there’s weird, and weird just doesn’t cut it, buddy.

Another day, B wandered by when a few of us were standing around talking about hair. B laughed. “That’s funny,” he said to me, “I’ve never even thought about how long your hair is.”
“Oh, good,” I said, dryly, “I guess that’s the point, isn’t it, buddy.”

G has recently picked up this habit of copying Somayya by calling me “Apaji,” which is ludicrous, considering he’s several years older than me. And then there’s his Master’s thesis, due in mid-February, which is supposed to be about 300 pages total. He took two weeks off from work to tackle the project, and only completed two pages. “I will start it two weeks before the due date,” he always reassures me, waving his hand in that quintessentially unperturbed South Asian gesture of nonchalance. “It’s just a matter of cutting and pasting.”

Conversations between G and me usually always involve sarcasm on my part, so his favorite activity these days is to poke his head over my cubicle during his rounds through the office, fix me with a glare, and mutter darkly, “I don’t like you. You are mean.” If you repeat this in an Indian accent, you’ll understand why I laugh every time. This is especially funny if you think about the fact that I’m 5’1″ compared to his 6’5″, that he towers over me (and everyone else at the office), and that a companionable slap on the back from him is enough to send one practically flying across the room. One morning, he kindly explained the intricacies of turban-wrapping to me, remaining patient even when I sputtered in my ignorant non-metric-system American-ness, “So exactly how long is five meters of fabric again?”

Last week, the company ordered in pizza, so we all lazily at around in the conference room and took a two-hour lunch break. G downed seven pieces of pizza, two slices of cake, and two sodas. I sat next to him and made fun of his eating habits. G tried to stare me down. “How about we finish eating first, then we fight.”
“Okay, fine,” I said grudgingly, trying not to laugh.
A few minutes later, he said reflectively, “You know, usually I am always pissed off. But lately, I don’t know why, I have been in a good mood.”
I smirked knowingly. “When’s your wife coming to the U.S. again?”
“Eleven and a half days,” he said proudly.
“I knew it, that’s why!”

K – who is Persian, like almost every other person there – is one of my favorite co-workers, even though I keep thinking he’s about 12 years old. He’s like one of those annoying little brothers, although K and I get along better than my own little brother and I ever did as kids. When I first started working at this place, K was going through a phase where his favorite activity was to go around and slash his pen across the back of every girl’s hand. I don’t appreciate juvenile activities that involve people scribbling on my hands, so once he annoyed me so much that I picked up my stapler and brandished it threateningly at him, all the while doing my trademark Evil Death Glare with the one raised eyebrow. And, in case he didn’t get it, I tried stabbing him with my own pen (there’s a reason why I consistently invest in 0.2mm micro-point pens; they come in handy as weapons, ya know), but he moved out of harm’s way just in time. Ever since then he’s backed off with the pen marking.

Overall, he’s a good kid, even though his favorite nickname for me is “Troublemaker.”
I IMed him one afternoon after he had left work to go home with the desperate question, “K, where’s the white paper for the printer?!” and he’s graciously forgotten all about the incident, even though I bring it up myself whenever I want to remind people about what a crackhead I am.

K is always sporting headphones, so I have to repeat every question to him twice. Lately, the new extension cord he attached to his beloved headphones allows him to step across the hallway to the communal printer without abandoning his music for a single second. He once recommended I check out the website for some Persian dude called DJ Aligator, which I did, only after grumbling for ten minutes about people who don’t know how to spell “alligator” with two Ls. And after that, I spent another ten minutes grumbling about why the hell the guy had to go and wear freaky contact lenses like that.

I have a sneaking suspicion that K is obsessive-compulsive. A while back, he went on some major desk-cleaning frenzies. Once, he dusted and sprayed off the top of his desk, printed and pinned black-and-white photos of himself and his friends all over the cubicle, arranged every pen and post-it pad just so, and then tackled the desk drawers. He unearthed old, moldy candy; smelly, sweat-stained t-shirts; dozens of ballpoint pens; at least three staple removers [“Dammit, so that’s where they all were!” I exclaimed]; an extra pair of headphones; an empty cookie tin; and endless other odds and ends. I sat as spectator and commenter extraordinaire, laughing nonstop.

I remember the day K chowed down a huge burger for lunch. The rest of the day, he walked around clutching his chest and moaning. Me, being the “heartless bastard” I am, all I did was laugh. “Is it okay if I’m finding this whole thing amusing?”
K: “What’s amusing?”
Me: “Your whole situation.”
K: “What whole situation?”
Me: “Your heart-attack-at-age-20 situation.”
Being a good sport, he burst into laughter, which only aggravated his chest pains further. He clutched his chest and moaned some more. “If I die,” he hasped, “you get my desk.”
“Thanks, buddy,” I said, “but what I really want is your staple remover.”
H#2 was passing by, and I called out, “H, you’re my witness. K is giving me his desk and staple remover when he dies.”
Staple removers are hella difficult to find at our office, and thus in terribly high demand, you see. Anything related to staple removers is fighting words. We are so ready to inflict physical harm on one another, merely for the purpose of safeguarding or salvaging our precious staple removers.

And then there’s the tall, skinny guy in the perpetual showercap, who plays basketball in the courts at the downtown park all day every day and likes pointing out potential parking spots to me whenever I walk past to move my car out of one 2hour zone to another: “There’s a spot right there! If you park there, you can leave your car there all day!” I have no idea what he’s talking about, because all the parking spots in that downtown area are either 45minute metered parking or 2hour zones. But hey, if having the showercap guy save you parking spaces isn’t the height of first-class, preferential treatment, then I don’t know what is. I’m sure you’ll agree.

one drop of rain that’s me and all the rest is you…

Salaam Namaste

one drop of rain that’s me and all the rest is you


Zulkifli Mohamad Nor, 42, cries in his home in Penang after describing how tsunami waves killed five of his seven children in Pasir Panjang, a popular vacation spot in Penang.

There are now literally millions of stories like this one.

Several weblogs have listed links you may use to send relief to the victims of the earthquake and tsunami in South and Southeast Asia. Below are just a few of them. Please click on the following links to access the posts in question, and donate generously.

As Sister Scorpion pointed out, if you have a computer, and access to an internet connection, then you can well afford to contribute to relief efforts.

Tsunami Help Blog

Karrva Karela

ProPoor Blog

Procrastination

Waiter Rant

Al-Muhajabah

Run like the Wind

the eye of the storm meets the eye of the mind, se…

Conversations and Encounters, Salaam Namaste

the eye of the storm meets the eye of the mind, sending it spinning

At the gas station late this afternoon, I swiped my debit card at the gas pump and shoved the nozzle into my car to fill up the tank. I was in the process of unlocking the doors to wait inside my car, out of the rain, while the gas finished pumping, when I heard a tentative voice behind me say, “Ma’am?”

I turned, already amused. Recent conversations with my co-workers have enlightened me to the fact that I get mistaken for seventeen more often than not, and no one calls me “Ma’am,” except sometimes the boy around my own age who bags my groceries at the local Safeway, something that never fails to make me laugh. Perhaps its the hijab, or the fact that too much of my wardrobe consists of black.

I looked expectantly at the boys in the small, shabby car parked on the other side of my gas pump, stepping across the divider as they leaned out their windows towards me. They couldn’t have been much older than me. “We were wondering if you could help us out with gas,” they said. “We’ve been waiting here for a long time.”

I had just driven over from the post office, where I had made out a money order for $165 and mailed it out. Yes, it had put a big, fat dent in my paycheck, but the very fact I could afford to do so spoke volumes about the difference between me and these boys.

“Our car got stolen on Christmas, and we just got it back.” They pointed out the cracks in the windshield, now covered with pieces of tape, tracing the lines with their fingers. I nodded, reminded of the Ray Bradbury short story I had lain in bed reading until late last night, entitled “The Beggar on O’Connell Bridge,” which everyone should read, by the way.

“Hang on a sec,” I said, and stepped back to my own car, where I flipped through my wallet for cash. Returning to their car, I handed the bills through the window. “Is that going to be enough? Are you traveling to somewhere?”

“Chico,” said one of them. “We’re supposed to meet family there.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, wincing slightly. I remember Chico from when I was little: Butte County, cliffs, red rocks and bluffs. Just past a small town called Paradise.

They peered at me anxiously. “Is that far?”

“It’s up north,” I replied. “I’m not sure exactly how far, but it’s a few hours away, I think.”

They glanced at each other, and their faces fell.

“Okay,” they said. “Thank you.”

“Drive carefully,” I said. “Be safe.” The mantra my friends have unanimously adopted from one another, words they always say to me when they know I’m about to hit the road.

My pump clicked, releasing the automatic catch on the nozzle, the gas tank now full. It was my cue to go. I didn’t notice until I had almost turned back to my own pump that there was a young woman also in the car with them, wrapped in blankets in the backseat, staring expressionlessly out the window.

I ended up spending $31.57 on just over fifteen gallons of gas for my car. The guys in the next car smiled and raised their hands in thanks as I drove away from the pump.

I furiously calculated it in my head while driving away: My car does about 25 miles/gallon so, if I used that as a standard and gas was selling at $2.01/gallon today, I had given them enough for several gallons, but was it enough to get them to where they needed to go? Halfway to the grocery store (yes, again), I realized Chico was about 150 miles north, and they would have needed at least half a tank to get there. I cursed myself for not having given them more. In my rush to be helpful, to give them something, anything, I hadn’t given them nearly enough.

For godssake, I’ve been driving around town with my gas needle pointing to “Empty” for an entire week, the orange light flashing in warning every few minutes. It’s been my own personal form of amusement, since I’ve been on break from school for a week now, to see how long I could go without filling my car up with gas. With all the gas I saved on my own car during the week, I could have just used my debit card to fill up their tank instead.

I wandered through the produce section of my local grocery store, bantering with the young clerk who asked me, by name, how I was doing that day. “I love how everyone knows my name around here!” I laughed, and he joked, “Yes, well, you’ve made VIP status, you know.” They know me because they know my brother, who works there as well, but his comment was a startling, sobering reminder of the Zaytuna dinner I attended in the South Bay last week, where one of the speakers asked us to re-think the weight of material possessions and social hierarchies in our daily lives. Do we work only so that one day we, too, can achieve VIP status? So that we, too, can buy luxury cars and large houses and be photographed in the company of rich and powerful people?

Who do we want to be, and who are the people we are standing next to? And are we standing next to the right people?

There was a feeling of déjà vu as I walked out of the grocery store with my $35 worth of purchases, sighing inwardly at the nonstop torrents of rain. Only as I was placing the bags of groceries in the trunk of my car did I remember the Salvation Army man from this time last year.

“We’ve been waiting here for a long time.”

I wondered how long exactly they had been waiting, the desperately polite boys and the silent girl with the blanket in their dilapidated car in a gas station where I had been parked in front of a Mercedes SUV and right across from a freakin’ Jaguar. Down the street from the post office where I had had to outmaneuver Porsches and Hummers in a cutthroat search for a parking spot. A few blocks down again from the bustling downtown area that boasts a Tiffany&Co. jewelry store. For godssake, there’s a freakin’ Tiffany store in my hometown now (the height of ostentation, if you ask me), and yet, if you make the effort to look, you can still find homeless people that talk to themselves on the street corners here, and boys that beg for gas money because the gas-guzzling SUV and sports car owners are too preoccupied with their own VIP status and shiny automobiles.

But only if you make the effort to look.

Would it have hurt the people in this city to have looked? They could well afford to.

But what am I doing, how much am I doing, am I myself doing enough?

I drove slowly through the curving, winding roads to my home on the hill, in a quiet, beautiful neighborhood where it is not uncommon to find houses selling for anywhere from $700,000 to $1 million. I often fail to notice the affluence in the neighborhood itself because I spent the naive years of my childhood here, in our comparatively modest house, and then returned to the same neighborhood after several years away. Six years later, my eyes are still clouded by my childhood memories here. It’s difficult for me to understand how these simple ranch houses, built in the 1950s, are worth so much now, and even harder yet to acknowledge that I’ve learned to accept the wealth in this city, even if I do roll my eyes at it continually.

I may be annoyed at the people of my hometown right now, but I’ve always tried to be harsher with myself, because at least I know the context and blessings of my own life, even if I can only speculate at other peoples’. This evening, my father bought me an absolutely gorgeous desk for my room because he feels I spend too many late nights studying on campus and driving home exhausted. I came home again and ate a hot dinner with my family, people I am blessed to have in my life even though they drive me insane. Tomorrow I go back to work in downtown Sacramento, earning a relatively competitive paycheck for a college student, filling up my gas tank whenever I need.

I thought of yesterday, stopping for dinner in the wine country of Napa Valley, in Calistoga, CA, to be exact – home to mineral water, spas, mud baths, and, yes, lots of rich people – on the last leg of our roadtrip while heading back home to the Bay. I absently munched on french fries, absorbed in the flashing headlines on the television across the room as the grim-faced news anchors discussed the heartbreaking casualties as a result of the earthquake and tsunami in South and Southeast Asia. Someone working there saw the dismayed expressions on our faces and turned up the volume on the TV so that we could better hear the news. I translated for my mother (“Thousands of people died, Ummy. In Indonesia and Sri Lanka and India and Thailand and even Somalia and…”), giving her specific numbers as they flashed across the screen. “Ten thousand people, Ummy!”

The death toll is at over fifty thousand now.

I watched the faces of the people on the television screen. They looked dazed and broken, shell-shocked and shattered. What do you do when your world literally falls down in ruins around you?

And what am I doing, how much am I doing, am I myself doing enough?

i’ve been sailing around so long Okay. So th…

Salaam Namaste, Suckool

i’ve been sailing around so long

Okay.

So the final exams are over.

And the term papers are over, too.

(The last of the latter was supposed to be 4-5 pages and turned out to be 9 or so; skillful use of 1.5-spacing instead of double-spacing, and lots of pseudo-subtle margin adjustment, did the trick, I think. Shhh, don’t tell.)

I’M FINISHED WITH TERM PAPERS AND FINAL EXAMS!!!

(I can’t quite believe it just yet, so please excuse excessive use of the caps-lock key, and randomly embedded hyphens and parentheses, and the multiple exclamation points. I’ll be back to my grammatically-obsessive-compulsiveness after the requisite 14 or so hours of sleep.)

So far today, after finishing my last paper this afternoon, I’ve celebrated by eating ice cream and waffles and chocolate bars. I also stretched out on the living room couch and laughed at some Indian movie (there goes my two-desi-films-a-year quota) because, really, was the lead actress lounging in a bathtub in the middle of the ocean? What was that all about? People in the know (i.e. those of you whose desi-film-quota far exceeds mine), you are hereby instructed to explain.

Anyway, I’m done with napping on the floor, staying up all night every night, downing energy drinks like no other, exhaustedly slurring my words during the day, and procrastinating my life away. For now.

And now, I sleep.

p.s. A huge blue-slurpee-filled thank you! to all you rockstars who constantly checked up on me and asked how my work was going and nagged me about getting stuff done. Okay, so guilt trips do kinda sorta work. Maybe.

we don’t talk about the little things that we do w…

NineToFive outside the 925, Salaam Namaste, Suckool

we don’t talk about the little things that we do without/when that whole mad season comes around

Just in case you were wondering – which you probably weren’t, but I’m telling you anyway, so pay attention – this weblog may now also be accessed though www.ramblingmonologues.com.

And I am not at liberty to further elaborate on this. So, the end.

Meanwhile, how ’bout you wander around and practice saying “dotcom” in a fobby desi accent, because I could really use some laughs right about now.

And if you’re not amused at the prospect of repeatedly saying “dotcom” in a fobby desi accent, then you:

– are not desi/South Asian

– do not know any desi/South Asian people

– do not feel ridiculously claustrophobic in a roomful of desis

– do not appreciate the hilarity that ensues when desi people make fun of themselves

– do not have a cool cousin who bought you a large order of french fries yesterday without you even asking. To reiterate: a LARGE order of fries.

– did not consume an energy drink on an empty stomach on your way up to school early this morning on three hours of sleep

– did not curse said energy drink because you had to go pee every half hour or so once you got to the computer lab at the library

– don’t want to point out that this is the first time in two years of blogging that you have used the word “pee” in a post

– don’t find this ridiculously funny, for some reason

– don’t think I’m funny

– are not funny yourself, because I said so, so there, the end!

– don’t find it ironic that you’re constantly talking about endings when you’re such a procrastinator you barely start anything in the first place

– did not curse some more for downing that energy drink on empty stomach, since the result was panicky feelings, shortness of breath, and butterflies in your stomach for the whole entire rest of the day, mainly while you were trying to write your papers

– did not silently talk to yourself: “Take deep breaths, crazy child. What the hell is wrong with you? Get yourself together already.”

– did not decide that reminding yourself to breathe takes way too much effort

– did not jokingly call a (desi) co-worker “annoying” yesterday, whereupon he spitefully refused to help you with a question later that afternoon because “annoying people don’t know the answer to that.”

– did not laugh and roll your eyes and tell said co-worker to get over his self-pity already and go hang up photos of his new wife in his cubicle, whereupon he decided to speak to you only in Punjabi and ignore your attempts at steering the conversation back towards English

– did not hold a real actual conversation with said (desi) co-worker in which he spoke Punjabi and you responded in Hindku

– do not think that driving in the early morning fog is a beautiful experience

– did not write five papers of various lengths this week, with two more left to go

– did not realize until this morning that one of those research papers you had due today was supposed to be closer to ten pages rather than the five you thought

– did not almost change your entire research topic at the last minute because of that

– are clearly so not with it

– don’t think that being with it is overrated

– do not have a teaching assistant who smiled and offered you two pieces (to reiterate: TWO!) of homemade baklava when you rushed over to her office to turn in your other ten-page paper this afternoon

– did not smile at random people on the road today because you recognized their personal license plates and/or cars from other days of commuting and got all excited

– couldn’t find the barbecue beans at the market, only to finally realize they were sitting way up on the highest shelf

– joked, “I can never find things if they’re placed above my eye level,” and were disappointed when the girl at the register didn’t so much as crack a smile

– clearly are not funny, so get over it already

– did not attempt to sneak hot chocolate (with whipped cream!) into the library, and almost quite successfully, too, if your sorry nerdy bookworm self had not turned at the last minute to grab a newspaper off the stand while you were at it

– did not have the (desi) security guard tsk at you and take you aside to say, “Now, if you had just tried that in the evening, I would have let it go…”

– did not drink your hot chocolate (with whipped cream!) outside while standing in the rain, and enjoy every single minute of it

– did not miss H because of the fact that whenever he was stressed out during finals week, you used to go print out the list of Duas For Studying for him, and then print out a stack for everyone else while you were at it, which meant you yourself actually used to utilize the duas, too

– did not eat only…umm…three?…real meals this week

– did not gasp in wonder at hills that turned green overnight

– don’t have your arms and legs majorly aching because you’ve been taking one- to two-hour naps on the floor of your bedroom during the past week

– didn’t laugh out loud during the drive home while mentally composing this list

– would like to point out that this list really has nothing whatsoever to do with your inclination (or lack thereof) to repeatedly say “dotcom” in a fobby desi accent

– are clearly not easily amused enough for your own good

– are still a rockstar anyway, because I said so, so there, the end.