Category Archives: Suckool

join the club Two flyers I noticed the other da…

Rockstar and Crescent, Suckool

join the club

Two flyers I noticed the other day while taking a psychology midterm I most likely failed but that’s okay:

“MAKE BEARDS NOT BOMBS”

– and –

“All the COOL guys have beards.

WHY DON’T YOU?”

In a seeming reference to the Campus Crusade for Christ (a student organization on our university campus), the bottom of each flyer states:

“Brought to you by the Beard Liberation Front.

(Which, of course, has nothing to do with the Campus Crusade for Chaos & Confusion, nope, nope, no connection whatsoever.)”

I’ve been having mentally slow days lately, so the irony is all lost on me and I can’t tell whether the Campus Crusade (while being coy and protesting a bit too much) actually did design the flyers, or whether some other group posted them in a deliberate dig at the Crusade. Why would the Campus Crusade be talking about beards anyway? Then again, the prophet Jesus (peace and blessings of God be upon him) is commonly depicted by non-Muslims as bearded.

But whatever. All I know is that the Muslim Students Association couldn’t have come up with the flyers, because, quite frankly, my MSA just isn’t that funny, and they’re a bit too prim and proper to be engaging in such bizarre, comical antics. But it’s okay, my MSA is cool for the most part, kinda sorta sometimes. Now the MSA at UC Berkeley, on the other hand… I can just see them doing something like this. Huh, Bean? You know it.

But I go to school with weird people, too. Who woulda thought.

and words can never really help you say/what you want them to anyway

Conversations and Encounters, NineToFive outside the 925, Rockstar and Crescent, Suckool

I had an idea for a Women of Color Conference workshop that involves a film, followed by discussion. The film is entitled The Way Home, and I saw it over a year ago, so the details are somewhat fuzzy, but I think it just might work.

All I actually wanted was to hear feedback on my workshop design, but the program coordinator considered our circle of a dozen and said, “Some of you haven’t had to deal with a difficult workshop participant before. How would you handle a situation where someone was extremely vocal about his or her perspectives and beliefs, and didn’t want to listen to anyone else’s thoughts?”

We decided to try it out.

C, a Latina female, was designated “Maria,” the difficult workshop participant, while two others were assigned to be facilitators. The rest of us were to play regular workshop participants.

Having forgotten much of the film’s detailed dialogue, I made an unsteady attempt to start off the discussion by vaguely remarking that, as a Muslim, I felt I could identify with some of the experiences and stereotypes discussed by the Arab American women in the video. “Maria” raised her eyebrows disdainfully and said, “What stereotypes? I’ve never heard of any Arab or Muslim stereotypes.”

“Just because you’re ignorant of them doesn’t mean the stereotypes don’t exist,” I retorted.

She waved her hand dismissively and changed tactics. “I don’t feel my ethnic group was properly represented in this film. After all, the stereotypes and experiences of my people are harsher and much more hurtful than anything experienced by any of you. Any of you!” She tossed her head and stared around the circle defiantly.

I narrowed my eyes. “What makes you think you have the right to validate your experiences at the expense of negating mine?” I shot back hotly, and it all went downhill from there. For nearly two hours.

C slipped into her role so effortlessly that it was almost too easy to forget this was a practice session, that each of us was supposed to be playing a role, that each scornful remark C made in her role as “Maria” does not reflect any view she personally holds. It sounds ludicrous, but I felt betrayed, sitting across from this girl I thought I knew well enough, hearing her dismiss my experiences, thoughts, and feelings as irrelevant, imaginary, unimportant. She may have been playing a role, but the resentment I felt was very real.

I’ve been intensively trained in workshop facilitation, cross-cultural communication, leadership skills, diversity issues, all that fun stuff. I think I’m good at it, and I know I’m getting better. But for once, I was in the position of a participant and not a facilitator. It was almost exhilarating, ignoring the ground rules – especially: This is a dialogue, not a debate and Listen to others with respect – and forging ahead, making my sarcastic retorts in response to “Maria’s” sneering generalizations. I wanted to wipe that smirk off her face oh so badly, to hurt her just as much as I was feeling hurt by her sweeping statements and cold indifference, to attack her just as I was personally feeling attacked.

Simply put, I was pissed off. It’s a good thing she was sitting across the circle, otherwise I was so angry that I felt like, in the words of a colleague, “reaching over and strangling her with her own hair.”

I’m still wondering why I was so impatient at her attitude and annoyed with her comments, why it was so difficult for me to sit back and let her finish so much as a sentence without making aggressive statements of my own. Perhaps I expect my own generation, especially the university students I interact with on a daily basis, to be more open-minded and knowledgeable than other strangers I’ve come across, and this exercise made it frighteningly obvious that I can’t always trust myself to be calm and coherent in situations where others are ignorant about who I am and what I stand for.

by default S: Yeah, so you two sorta look alike…

Suckool

by default

S: Yeah, so you two sorta look alike, you know?

Somayya: :sarcastic: Yeah, I wonder why.

Yasmine: No way.

S: Yeah, isn’t that funny?

Yasmine: Very.

A: :to S: You do know they’re cousins, right?

S: Oh my God, are you serious?

Somayya: Wait, you really didn’t know?

Yasmine: You’ve known us for a year. How could you not know this?

S: Why didn’t someone tell me?!

Yasmine: :dies laughing:

[Later] –

S2: Hey, so I saw your cousin’s article in Awaaz!

Yasmine: Yeah, she had a poem in there.

S2: No, no, it was an article.

Yasmine: Umm, I submitted an article. And, yeah, we both have poems printed in there.

S2: I thought she wrote an article.

Yasmine: :raises eyebrow: Please don’t tell me you’ve gotten our names confused.

S2: No! I know you’re Yasmine!

Yasmine: Mm-hmm.

S2: Right?

(This is the same girl who, at our initial meeting a year ago, told me I was “the first un-fake Muslim she had met on this campus.” Flattering, but I’m not quite sure how to accept compliments from the ditziest Muslim I’ve ever met, complete with the annoying Valley-girl speech patterns. Can someone, like, please press the “mute” button already? And now I’m being mean and I should shut up. Okay, bye.)

bits and pieces

Glorious mundanity, Suckool

So the only reason I’ve been neglecting this place is because when it comes down to a choice between sleeping and updating my weblog, trust me, I would much rather sleep.

Anyway, I was informed by various unreliable sources last weekend that my writing style is intimidating, that I’m “detached” from my weblog, that I’m giving everyone a complex about writing and standards and heavy words, and that I need to sit back and chill out and discuss my non-existent soap-opera-drama life in more detail. Seeing as how I have neither hilarious nor profound stories to share at the moment, this sort of criticism is gratifying, because it means I don’t need to have any coherent structure for the following post.

As our friend explained his weblog, “My life is as dry as bath soap in its packet. But I pretend like it’s the ending sequence of some Bollywood flick.”

Good enough for me. So here’s my recent drama-queen life, in all its boredom-inducing glory:

– I don’t like raw red bell peppers. I definitely don’t like yams. And I promise I will stop talking about vegetables for now.

– My friend N dragged me to the drugstore yesterday so she could pick out some hair dye. Her hair is dark brown, and she wanted to dye it deep black. She asked for my opinion, and I said, Whatever. So she browsed the aisles while I grimaced at the cover of Ladies Home Journal and People magazine and whined, “Are you done yet?” I personally recommended the orange or purple hair colors, but she didn’t take my advice into account. Then again, would you trust the opinion of a girl whose hair you’ve never seen? Besides, the short, seldom-brushed wannabe-rocker hair I’m sporting these days isn’t exactly a favorable model of the perfect girly hairstyle anyway.

– I need to turn in my application for this year’s Women of Color Conference. I’m thinking of designing a workshop for it, too, but we’ll see how that works out.

– Yesterday morning’s Philosophy 15 (Bioethics) lecture was torture. I ended up sitting next to a guy who wouldn’t stop biting his nails for the entire ninety minutes, and in front of another guy who didn’t think anything of subjecting the entire class to his perpetual nose-blowing. I’m surprised he didn’t rupture his eardrums with that amount of pressure. And the professor was magically sporting a golden tan she didn’t have the day before. I bet you anything it came out of a bottle. I sat there thinking, Someone get me out of here already!

– My Psychology 130 professor is cool. He’s young, Indian, with a Ph.D. and no accent. This makes communication so much easier. He tells us cute stories about his daughter, a toddler who falls asleep every night listening to techno music.

– Speaking of South Asian, I’m only one of two or three in my Asian American studies class. I have never before been so aware of my Pakistani-ness.

– Muslim misfits at the MSA meeting. Love the alliteration. ‘Nuff said.

– Last night, I was IM’ed by someone I had almost forgotten about and whom I haven’t spoken to in two and a half years. Interesting conversation. I was chided for being rude, though I prefer to think of it as straightforwardness. If nothing else, the conversation reinforced the fact that I’m just as stubborn and hard-headed now as I was when I was twenty. Good for me and my Pukhtun genes.

– I love Berkeley.

– Parking at Berkeley is not so cool though. I’m talking about university parking lots. At my university, students can often be found speeding down to end of parking lots, hopefully asking the people passing by, “Are you leaving?”, cutting each other off for spaces. At Cal, the students wait patiently in a line for parking. Berkeley, of all places! Holy freakin’ smoley, what is that all about? I’m so disappointed in Cal. I couldn’t understand why everyone was parked in a line, why the people in front of me weren’t moving their cars, so finally I maneuvered out of the line and prepared to make my way through the lot in search of potential spaces. Two seconds later, the parking lot attendant stopped me and pointedly asked, “Are you leaving the parking lot?” I guess the kindergarten rule still holds true: Cutting in line is cheating.

– I love it when people I barely know, who were introduced to me months ago, remember my name and shout it from far away. What’s even more awesome is when they pronounce it correctly, too. Automatic rockstar status right there, I say.

– Chocolate milkshakes from In ‘N’ Out make my evenings beautiful.

– This morning, I sat next to a girl who had once spoken of me to someone else as having “the most fucked up attitude she had ever seen.” [Not while I was there, of course.]

Hearing of it later, I remember laughing, “But I love my fucked up attitude!”

She acts like we’re still great friends, and I act nice to her, because that’s just me. Such is life, and that’s the way this wheel keeps working now.

– This post is making me sound like I have issues with everyone and their momma. I promise, my life is really not this dramatic.

– I grew up watching mainly He-Man and G.I. Joe. What’s up with all the boy cartoons? And I wanted to be MacGuyver, but then decided marrying him when I grew up would be the next best thing.

– I think my family is making a hobby out of changing wireless phone plans every few months. This time, we’ve switched from Cingular to T-Mobile. According to T-Mobile, they’ll ensure we keep the same cell phone numbers, reimburse us for any expenses incurred with Cingular until our account with the latter is completely cancelled, and we can even buy the unlock codes for our phones off eBay and keep using the same phones with T-Mobile. Anyone know anything about that unlock code business? I need to return my ugly trial-period Nokia phone to T-Mobile and request another one anyway, since Nokias don’t do jack for me. All I can say is, if this turns into a repeat of last September’s experience, I’m going to laugh hysterically and thrown my phone away. Please, no cell phone is worth that much hassle.

– Speaking of phones, I received a call this morning from a girl with a San Francisco area code, asking, “Is Andy there?”

“Sorry, you have the wrong number,” I answered.

“Oh. Is this 925-___-____?”

Funny thing is, that is my number. Andy, whoever you are, you missed out, buddy boy. The next time you write down your phone number for a girl, try to make it legible. Or enunciate when you speak. Whatever works.

– I’m registered for twenty units this quarter. Man, oh man.

– I’m so behind in replying to emails, it’s not even funny. Actually, it never was funny, but that’s besides the point. If I owe you an email, I’m sorry. You’re a rockstar, and I’m just a lazy girl with no excuse.

– It’s probably a good thing that I’m taking a psychology course on human memory, because my memory just plain sucks these days. I used to be so good at remembering faces and names. This especially came in handy during my high school work on the journalism and yearbook staffs. Once I started college, however, it all went downhill – faces were easy to remember, but not names. I’ve been trying to make a conscious effort to improve recently. The result: I now remember names, and not faces. Wonderful. For example, I’ve had the following names stuck in my head all week: Claudia, Bessy, Aaron, Mena. The problem is, I keep forgetting who these people are. Clearly, I have issues.

– Gas prices are currently at $2.17/gallon. It cost me $30 to fill up my tank yesterday. Good Lord.

– Because I am so easily amused, I couldn’t stop laughing yesterday when L accidentally answered a question with the word “coronary” instead of “coroner.”

“You mean, like the artery?” I asked, before dissolving into laughter.

Later, out in the parking lot, as I was busy making fun of L, H said, “Oh, come on, if you spoke four languages…!”

“Oh, come on,” I mimicked, “I could speak four languages if I tried. You gotta admit, that was still hella funny.”

We walked to our cars, staggering under the weight of shared laughter. Good times.

– New philosophy: Good friends are those who let you make fun of them and don’t care.

– I don’t mind not knowing where I’m going, so much as I hate being lost. Those are two different things, somehow.

i’m waiting on the sunshine, the sunshine/i’m waiting for answers/i’m waiting to figure it out/i trip on my chances/i slip through my doubt

Hit the Road, Suckool

There is an edge of panic that one usually feels when familiar surroundings have changed, when safe boundary lines have shifted and blurred. It is akin to the feeling I used to have growing up when, waking up during the middle of the night in yet another new home, I’d attempt to blindly navigate my way around my bedroom, only to find unbroken walls where I anticipated doorways and wide windows where I expected walls.

On southbound Interstate-680, the beginning of the Benicia Bridge marks the fifteen miles remaining until I reach home. I think of it as the last leg of my 60-mile journey back to the East Bay every night from school. On rare occasions, I traverse the narrow southbound lanes during the daylight hours, but most of the time I drive at night, past the smoky glow of the oil refineries, over the sparkling lights dotting the edges of Suisan Bay and the Carquinez Strait, glancing down to the left at the famous “Mothball Fleet” just north of the bridge where the U.S. Navy stores almost a hundred various de-commissioned war ships and support craft at long-term anchor.

There is a nearly-one-mile-long stretch of freeway just before the bridge that used to curve towards the right. For over three years, day or night, I navigated it the same way: my left elbow casually propped against the bottom of the inside window frame, the fingers of my right hand loosely wrapped around the steering wheel, leaning back into my seat as I easily sped into the curve with my cruise control set at 80 mph.

For the past several months, the I-680 areas just preceding and following the bridge have become construction zones. Driving home one night, I found everything had changed. That mile-long portion of the freeway that once curved gently to the right now instead curves sharply to the left before veering into a right-hand curve, and these days I need both hands to navigate it. I am no longer secure in the knowledge that I know this freeway like the back of my hand.

Every night, approaching the curve, I automatically prop my left elbow against the window frame, loosely loop my right fingers around the top of the steering wheel, and prepare to gently turn the steering wheel to the right. And every night, just as unfailingly, I belatedly shift my right hand down and slap my left hand against the steering wheel as well, slamming on the brakes as I enter the sharp left curve, sometimes gripping the wheel so tightly my knuckles hurt.

It’s almost like a sense of betrayal, this faltering of my once-unwavering confidence in speeding through that particular curve, in knowing exactly where I was going without second-guessing myself.

Somewhere in here, in words I don’t know how to put together as well as I would like, is a perfect analogy for my indecisiveness and lack of direction, and the constantly, swiftly shifted plans that epitomize my life at the moment.

When I was eight, my goal in life was to become a professional frisbee player and marry MacGuyver when I grew up. At ten, I wanted to be a poet. When I was twelve, I wanted to write an autobiography and become an illustrator of children’s books. [I had such artistic talent. I still do, I think. I haven’t drawn or painted for years, and some days I regret having let those talents go to waste.] At sixteen, I had an epiphany: pediatric audiology! When I was nineteen, I was a pre-med university student studying neurobiology and dreaming of life as a pediatrician. I’ve spent the last four years mentally switching my major a dozen times, though only once on paper. My academic vacillations have been well-documented on this weblog, I think.

I’m just going with the flow these days, and the flow isn’t taking me anywhere, as far as I can tell. “Life’s damn complicated,” I said to Yas last week. He responded with what has to be the perfect summation of my dilemma at the moment:

“True, but what’s more complicated is having a million choices, each open for you to follow, some seem easier than the others, some ways more inviting, others seem difficult but so rewarding, some seem like the easy way out. Then you can make whatever choice you want. What do you do? If you do one thing, you might miss another opportunity.”

The biggest topic of conversation amongst my friends, classmates, and acquaintances these days has to do with who is graduating in June, who is staying on for another year, who has applied to graduate school, who is moving back to his/her hometown this summer, who already has a job lined up after graduation, who has taken the GREs and MCATs, who is going to medical school or law school or business school. Basically, all conversations center around people who seem to have at least a vague idea of what they’re doing, which is more than I can say for myself.

It’s not that I don’t even know what I want to study. More like, it’s just that I want to study too many things, which is why decision-making is so problematic.

A friend asked me recently, “So where are you going for grad school once you’re done here?”

“I have no idea,” I said shortly.

He rephrased the question: “So where do you want to go?”

I rolled my eyes, having heard the same question far too many times already.

“It’s not about where I want to go,” I snapped, “it’s about what I want to study. That’s what I need to figure out first.”

He held up his hands in apology. “Okay, okay. So what do you want to study?”

I let out an impatient, long-suffering sigh, then relented. “Fine. I want to study a lot of things. Like child development and sociology and pediatric audiology and social and ethnic relations and comparative literature and cultural anthropology and identity formation and…”

I ran out of breath, stumbled to a halt, and raised an eyebrow in challenge, as if to say, “Whaddaya make of that, huh? You see my problems? Leave me alone already.”

He just stared. “Wow, masha’Allah,” he marveled. “You’re so ambitious.”

That, of all things, is not what I had expected to hear.

I’m not ambitious, really. I used to be, and I seem to have lost it somewhere along the way. If I were ambitious, I would have specific goals, wouldn’t I?

Me, I’m just b.s.’ing my way through life, one day at a time.

it’s all in a state of mind Yesterday afternoon…

Conversations and Encounters, Suckool

it’s all in a state of mind

Yesterday afternoon, Somayya and I both groaned as usual when we came in sight of the parking garage and the four long flights of stairs we’d have to climb in order to reach her car, which was parked on the uppermost level.

We had just finished a cross-campus-and-back-again trek that included walking from the chemistry building to our respective internship buildings to the office of the registrar to the human development advisor’s office to the student union, and the thought of climbing four flights of stairs was not appealing at all. To be honest, it’s never appealing, and although we’ve walked up and down those stairs multiple times a day for the past four years, we never fail to mutter complaints about the exertion that’s involved.

I squinted and looked up as we approached the bottom of the stairs.

“Oh, my God,” moaned Somayya, “here we go again.”

I was about to tiredly mumble some form of irritable assent when my eye was caught by a figure less than halfway up the first flight of stairs.

“Hey, at least we’re not on crutches,” I answered in a low voice.

“What?”

“Least we’re not on crutches,” I repeated a bit louder, and jerked my chin up towards the girl at a standstill just a few steps above us. She stood stock-still to the side, her head bowed, towel-wrapped crutches placed underneath both armpits, while students indifferently maneuvered their way around her.

“Yeah, true,” said Somayya with a half-laugh. “I guess I’ll stop complaining now.”

When we came abreast of the girl, we looked over worriedly. “Are you gonna make it okay?”

“Stuck,” she said shortly. Her face was sheened in perspiration, and she seemed short of breath.

I glanced up at the seemingly endless steps remaining until the next landing, and winced. “I’m sorry,” I said sympathetically, at a loss for words.

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” she retorted emphatically. “Feel sorry for people in wheelchairs.”

We silently nodded in agreement and continued on our way.

“Damn,” I said admiringly to Somayya when we reached the next landing, “that girl’s got some real perspective.”

The encounter reminds me of a saying I once read in relation to the Irish, and the ways in which their imagination and sense of humor come into play during times of great difficulty:

What happens is never the worst.

On the contrary, what’s worse never happens.

when it rains it pours and opens doors/and floods …

Suckool

when it rains it pours and opens doors/and floods the floors we thought would always keep us safe and dry

I’m quite obviously not a boy, but sometimes I really wouldn’t mind being one. Because, you know, I really think there are certain advantages to being a boy.

Take today, for example: If I were a boy, my keys, wallet, and cell phone would have been in my shirt/pants pockets instead of in my bag. The bag that was sitting merrily on my car’s back seat, where I had momentarily deposited it while shrugging into my coat. The bag that remained not-so-merrily on my back seat as a sudden gust of wind slammed the car door shut, locking my keys, wallet, and cell phone inside.

I felt like kicking my car, except that would have been far more painful for my flip-flop-clad foot than for the damn car. So I instead trekked halfway across campus to call the university’s division of Transportation & Parking Services. God bless the friend who long ago gave me the top-secret authorization code that allows me to use campus telephones to make off-campus phone calls without cost.

They sent over a guy to help me, but his impressive, seemingly endless array of tools didn’t seem to be making a difference. Thin, shiny wires, rubber wedges – a dozen different sizes of each – were jammed into my door frames, but to no avail. I began to wonder if I should have contacted a locksmith instead.

A friendly, grizzled man in his 60s, the TAPS guy put forth his best effort as I thumbed through various campus publications and watched him out of the corner of my eye. “Oh, come on,” he pleaded good-naturedly with my car, “the lady needs to head home.” Actually, I had just gotten to campus, but, either way, my day seemed to be in limbo, my to-do lists shot, my organized plans all out the door. I had people to meet, TAs to make appointments with, term papers to finish, classes to attend, but the locked car pitilessly contained my phone, class syllabi, computer disks, and research material, and steadfastly refused to give it all up.

“Shoot!” exclaimed the TAPS guy repeatedly, at various intervals over the next hour, genuinely bewildered as to why his collection of tools had no effect. “Shoot, why won’t this work?” I wondered if he was toning down his language for my benefit.

“You know,” I ventured dryly at one point, “if you need to use some more explicit curses, go right ahead. Because, really, I wouldn’t mind using some myself right about now.”

He laughed, but I know he was just as frustrated as I by the end of the hour, when he finally, apologetically suggested I contact AAA, as they have better tools. So I walked back across campus to call AAA, then came back and sat cross-legged on the trunk of my car as I read the day’s newspaper. “Everything alright?” queried a nice boy passing by. And although it took the AAA guy almost 40 minutes to get there, would you believe it, he managed to open my car door in less than two minutes. “That was it?” I said in disbelief. I could have kicked myself for not just calling AAA right from the start.

And why was my rear tire flat when I returned to my car at the end of the day?

And there’s nothing quite so panic-inducing as being sixty miles from home, with a nearly-empty gas tank and absolutely no cash, and realizing you can’t remember your PIN when you swing by a gas station to fill up the tank.

And I wish this stupidass cough would go away already, so I can finally get a decent night’s sleep – and sit through an entire lecture at school – without nearly coughing up my lungs.

Speaking of sleep, I really need some of that. Soon.

And I hate driving during thunderstorms, especially when I’m having trouble staying awake.

Dear Lord God, supremely Merciful, infinitely Kind –

Not to be ungrateful or anything, but I really don’t like this week at all. If you could oblige me by fast-forwarding it (as in really fast), it would be greatly appreciated.

Much love and many thanks, always.

some conversation/no contemplation/hit the road …

Glorious mundanity, Hit the Road, Suckool

some conversation/no contemplation/hit the road

“My poor baby,” laughed Somayya last night, “you need sleep.”

This was after we had walked halfway across campus from the library at almost midnight and climbed four flights of stairs at the parking garage only to find the entire level empty, with nary a car in sight. I stared in alarm. “Oh shit shit shit,” said the voice in my head. Or maybe I did say it out loud, I don’t remember. Don’t be surprised if I did.

“Umm, Yazzo…?” said Somayya quizzically.

“I could swear I parked my car here,” I said, struggling not to panic.

She was on her cell phone with D at the time. “Hold on, I’ll call you back,” she said abruptly. “We gotta find Yazzo’s car.” I was tempted to laugh at that, regardless of my increasing alarm. She hung up and turned to me. “You sure it’s not over at the Life Sciences Addition?”

“No! I parked it right here this morning, dammit. I could swear…” I trailed off, looked around the empty level once more, and said sheepishly, “Uhh, you know what, maybe that was yesterday morning…”

So then we had to walk, no, trek, all the way over to the parking lot at the other end of campus. That was such fun. All bitterness and sarcasm aside, though, the stars were absolutely gorgeous. And I think I’ve finally figured out how to find the Big Dipper.

The days are all trickling together into one never-ending blur. Now that I’ve gotten two midterms out of the way this week, I have a paper due today, and another midterm exam; tomorrow I have a presentation to make, and another paper due. I need to renew next year’s application for one of my internships, and at least do something to contribute towards my second internship, and revise my cover letter and resume and send them out for this job I’ve found that seems absolutely perfect for me, if only I can overcome my laziness. It’s the week from hell, can you tell? Actually, scratch that—I cannot even begin to contemplate what hell on earth must be like, much less imagine the sheer horror of hell in the Afterlife. I’m blessed far more than I deserve. It’s just that I’m currently so overwhelmed and exhausted that I found myself telling numerous people to “have a beautiful weekend!” yesterday, which was only Wednesday, for goodness sake.

I think I keep doing this simply because so far my focus all week has been on driving out to Berkeley on Friday to spend some quality time with the birthday girl. Two days back at school, and I already need to get away. This past weekend’s three days of the MSA-West Conference at Cal spoiled me—I’m tired, as usual, of my college town and the bland flatness of the general Sacramento area; I need the hills, curves, and diversity of Berkeley the town. It’s my birthplace, though I’ve never lived there. That should explain it all.

I also need some crazy stories. The funniest thing to happen this week was when an acquaintance asked my friend F, “Is Yasmine half-Black?” I suppose her negative response wasn’t enough for him, which is why he asked Somayya last night, “You sure Yasmine isn’t 1/8th or 1/16th Black?” I find that highly amusing. I don’t even look Black—skin tone, features, or otherwise. My skin tone is lightish like my father’s—not pale but slightly tanned, several shades lighter than my mother’s—but I would think I appear quite obviously Pakistani. Yet I find myself consistently mistaken for Italian, Palestinian, or Kashmiri. I’m not quite sure where Black fits in though. Still, going along with Phathima‘s advice, I’ve decided to view this as versatility rather than symptoms of an identity crisis on my part.

Random: Favorite new album these days is Maroon 5‘s Songs About Jane. Great road trip music. I’m speaking from personal experience, of course, and I’m not even talking about my commute to/from school.

In other news, I’m suffering from lack of free time these days yet still seem to have the past three weeks worth of weblog entries floating around in my head—disjointed thoughts, half-formulated sentences, scrupulously-recalled snippets from conversations in passing, strings of words carefully placed next to one another and readjusted daily as I’m walking, driving, lying in bed half-asleep. Whether it is a blessing or a curse, I don’t know, that once I deliberately fashion such phrases and sentences I consider it wasteful to not use them, and so they remain, stubbornly refusing to leave, taking up valuable and much-needed space in my brain, until I write or type them out, constantly rearranging them into a precise order.

This is why, starting next week, you may find weblog updates with startling regularity. Until then, be patient, bear with me, have beautiful days, be at peace.

Stay tuned.

yeah, rochester plays mind games with jane eyre, b…

NineToFive outside the 925, Suckool

yeah, rochester plays mind games with jane eyre, but that’s a whole different story

So I now have a research internship with the M.I.N.D. Institute in Sacramento, and it happened so fast I’m still sort of reeling from the surprise. Not to mention the fact that I don’t know jack about research, and I don’t even know what exactly I’ll be doing. But whatever’s clever, Trevor, as Somayya always says. Anyway, it’s a gorgeous facility, lots of light wood and glass and a huge expanse of brick courtyard that my dad would fall right in love with if he saw it. And, last but not least, colleagues who are extremely professional, yet laid-back and chill. Dude, this is gonna be fun. I hope. Insha’Allah.

everything I ever took for granted/i want to see i…

NineToFive outside the 925, Suckool

everything I ever took for granted/i want to see it through

I am currently in the process of designing a flyer – based around a gorgeous painting/collage (the scanner doesn’t do it justice, and, of course it’s the machine’s fault, not mine) by my sister – for my internship workshop and I have finally metaphorically thrown up my hands in exasperation and decided that both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator can go straight to hell.

Why I even have the Adobe Illustrator file open in the first place, I don’t quite rightly know, since all I’ve done is stare at it wide-eyed for the past fifteen minutes. Clearly, my creative talents do not lie in the design area.

But I’m going to figure all this out, oh yes, I will.

After I finish eating the rest of my white cheddar cheez-it crackers and check my emails a few more times.

[p.s. The flyer is related to a workshop I’m putting together, regarding “Identity Formation & Self-Esteem.” I want to make that the subtitle, but I still need a short, catchy main title. Give me some ideas, please. Quick, quick! Much appreciated.]