Three beautiful things: The transportation edition

(3)BeautifulThings, Hit the Road

Overhead Heading home
Originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

[From October 11, 2006]

– It takes me two hours to get to work in the morning, because two big rigs collided on the Sunol Grade on Interstate 880 and spilled oil across the freeway. Impatiently listening to the AM radio to pick up on any traffic updates, I hear the newscasters discussing their colleague’s fascination with my favorite cookies: “Every week, he bursts into a new realm of snickerdoodledom.”

– In the afternoon, I stop by Macy’s for a quick errand, opt for street parking rather than the garage, and discover, to my delight, that there are still 42 minutes left on my parking meter. (This, of course, means I spend way too much time doing extra girly things like checking out earrings, spritzing on perfume, and buying my favorite lipgloss.)

– GMail IM from Z: “Yesterday on BART, a little 4 year old girl said, ‘I have pigtails and you don’t!'”

(More than three) beautiful things: The semi-work edition

(3)BeautifulThings, NineToFive outside the 925


Originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

Okay, kids, so remember that part where I said I was going to post “three beautiful things” everyday? Well, clearly, it didn’t work so well, because – once again! – I haven’t really updated in nearly three weeks. The good news is, I’ve been scribbling down beautiful things in my lovely little Moleskine notebook, as I am wont to do with all potential weblog posts. The part where it backfired is the part where I neglected to type things out. But I guess the fact that all you all still stop by means you don’t mind reading about things three weeks later. Long live our communal procrastination tactics, rockstars!

Meanwhile, I’m drowning in project plans at work (three of them, kids, THREE!), so I apologize for what’ll be continued sporadic posting. But here’s some short stuff for you to read:

– Regarding the photo above, I recently posted it to flickr with the following title: “My fax cover-sheet got printed looking like this and I was so tempted to append a note saying, ‘Thank you kindly, clearly we appreciate your business/enjoy working with you,’ and just send it off like this.” I make myself laugh so much, you don’t even know.

– Funny subject line on email spam at work: “Hey, our boss got fired?”

– Funny spam subject line #2: “Offices have been closed permanently.”

– We received a shipment of new envelopes and brochures at the office, and I couldn’t stop going into the back room and lifting the flaps off the boxes and sniffing inside. I have decided I love the smell of new paper.

– Also, there was this work-related event where I had to do quite a bit of talking, and the Board has decided I am a “fantastic speaker,” as well as “articulate” and “personable.” Who knew? However (in somehow related news, just take my word for it), some Muslims apparently can’t handle headwraps, though. Muslims are so annoying sometimes. They needa stop with that drama.

Akhtar de mubarak sha!

Rockstar and Crescent

Akhtar de mubarak sha!

Eid mubarak, crackstars! Can you believe it’s over? Yeah, me either. Have a beautiful day, lovely people – may it be a blessed time for you and yours.

(PS: I don’t even get a real Eid – seminar all day Monday, projects on Tuesday, regardless of whatever day I would have chosen to celebrate. The good news: I’m taking Friday off to attend jummah at my favorite masjid [Oakland] and bum around in Berkeley and perhaps San Francisco as well. The promise of jummah in Oakland, after months away, is enough to make my week. Rocking good times.)

Akhtar de mubarak sha!

Rockstar and Crescent

Akhtar de mubarak sha!

Eid mubarak, crackstars! Can you believe it’s over? Yeah, me either. Have a beautiful day, lovely people – may it be a blessed time for you and yours.

(PS: I don’t even get a real Eid – seminar all day Monday, projects on Tuesday, regardless of whatever day I would have chosen to celebrate. The good news: I’m taking Friday off to attend jummah at my favorite masjid [Oakland] and bum around in Berkeley and perhaps San Francisco as well. The promise of jummah in Oakland, after months away, is enough to make my week. Rocking good times.)

Three Things: The Home Edition

(3)BeautifulThings, Bibliothek, Casa420 and Familia

Chukairiyaan
Chukairiyaan, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

1. Waking up at 8am, realizing it’s a Saturday, and burrowing back under the warm covers to sleep in until 10:30. Washing my face, and then promptly sitting down at the computer. I check emails and weblogs while my mother pulls up a chair beside me and flips through catalogues and coupon books. We discuss an impending visit to IKEA (she’s never been!), and she tells me The Sister is on a newfound campaign to add a cat to our household. A cat would be nice, says my mother wistfully. She fondly recalls our previous next-door neighbor’s cat, Daisy, who used to keep my mother company in the garden.

2. I wash and condition my hair, then actually take the time to comb it out, too – albeit abruptly, top to bottom rather than the other way around, so that my impatient tugs result in lots of gnarled hair in the wastebasket. Still, it got combed. Since I’m a firm adherent of the “I don’t believe in combing my hair” philosophy, today’s effort is highly newsworthy and must be mentioned, especially considering I have conversations about hair quite rarely anyway (my favorite conversation is still that latter one, with a four-year-old, no less). I then sit in a pool of sunshine on the living room floor, willing my hair to dry while reading the last few chapters of John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, a book I love but have never reread since finishing it in one evening for my tenth-grade English class, eight years ago. In one passage that makes me smile, Gene says:

After the lights went out the special quality of my silence let [Phineas] know I was saying [prayers], and he kept quiet for approximately three minutes. Then he began to talk; he never went to sleep without talking first and he seemed to feel that prayers lasting more than three minutes were showing off. God was always unoccupied in Finny’s universe, ready to lend an ear any time at all. Anyone who failed to get his message through in three minutes, as I sometimes failed to do when trying to impress him, Phineas, with my sanctity, wasn’t trying.

3. Lazily sitting around the dining room table after we’ve just finished dinner, The Sister looks around at each of us individually and asks, wide-eyed, “Anyone want chocolate cake?” I laugh at her excitement, and she adds, “I’ve been looking forward to this all day!” Our mother, ever the practical one, advises that we save the dessert-consumption for after taraweeh [the nightly congregational prayers held during Ramadan], but the daddy-o – never one to refuse dessert – overrules that suggestion with an authoritative, “Well, in that case, we can have two! – one dessert now, and another one when we get back from taraweeh.” A quick peek into the refrigerator makes me laugh at all the choices available to us: apple-caramel-pecan cake, chocolate ganache torte, apple pie, chocolate-orange sticks, and, in the freezer, two pints of ice cream, one of which (my new favorite: Ben&Jerry’s American Pie) merited an excited email from me to fellow ice cream fan 2Scoops months ago, raving about how it was “basically exactly what it sounds like – apple pie with ice cream!” Just for 2Scoops, I would like to add that the American Pie ice cream is still SPECTACULARICIOUS.

Three Things (plus three more)

(3)BeautifulThings, Blogistan and the Wide World of Webs, NineToFive outside the 925

Sunlight shadows on the sidewalk, Friday afternoon
Sunlight shadows on the sidewalk, Friday afternoon, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

This afternoon, after clicking over to Blogger.com and pausing before signing in (believe it or not, this is something I do often: I decide I want to update this weblog, I click over to Blogger, and then I just stop, overcome by a feeling of overwhelming helplessness: Where do I even begin? – too many stories to share, and, clearly, I think too much and thus end up writing and sharing nothing)…so, anyway, in the few moments today as my fingers hovered restlessly over the mouse and I debated yet again whether or not to sign into Blogger, I discovered my new favorite weblog: it’s one in the list of current Blogs of Note, and entitled Three Beautiful Things. Someone named Spitfire left a lovely comment there that summed up the entire premise of the Three Beautiful Things weblog:

The natural, simple happiness of the commonplace things is subtle and beautiful, and yet it requires a well-trained eye to appreciate it.
Those who find in the small details the true reason for being alive are to be praised. The search for sources of authentic smiles is a difficult, but noble and delightful activity.

And as Clare herself of Three Beautiful Things notes:

The thing about 3BT is, it’s not that my life is particularly beautiful (although I know as a single woman living in England in 2007, I have a lot to be thankful for) but that I find myself constantly on the look-out for beautiful things.

Leaving work at 5.30pm today, I swung the front door shut behind me, and something about the late afternoon light made me stop dead in my tracks. Seconds later, my bag hit the ground and I was kneeling on the walkway, camera in hand, snapping photos of the sunlight on the grass. When I’d decided a dozen photos was more than enough, I stood up, brushed off my knees, and, before turning away to head back to my car, I stopped and aimed one final, level glance at the shadows, thinking, I have to remember this moment so I can write about it later.

So, because I am nothing if not a proponent of celebrating the mundane (and a lover of the word beautiful), I’ve decided I’m going to try this three beautiful things exercise myself, in order to get myself back into the swing of writing regularly. Perhaps (I’m pretty sure) I’ll end up recording more than three things at a time, but the point – for me – is to just write. Simple, seemingly mundane things would be a good start, because in the last few months I’ve become so overwhelmed by what I haven’t written that it’s been difficult to get myself out of this blogging backlog and actually write.

I’m aiming to try this everyday. Ambitious, I know, but I’ve got to start somewhere. And because I’ve missed Blogistan comment-box conversations with my fellow bloggers and blurkers [blog+lurkers] so much, you are more than welcome to add your own three-things to the comments.

So, here’s my Friday: Things that made me smile, in numerical form. One, two, three, GO.

1. The way the late afternoon sunlight and shadows slant across the sidewalk. [See photo above. It took me far too long to decide which photo to post; they’re all so sunshine-y beautiful and make me especially happy because this past week has been all about the rain.]

2. Organizing a conference call for work – and having it go off without a hitch – and crossing everything off Page One of my four-page project plan. (I love the strikethrough function! Pages 2-4 must be completed during this upcoming week, though. Gross.)

3. GMail chat conversation with HijabMan about how he’s planning on flying notes around his office. The mental image made me laugh, and what’s even funnier is that I can imagine my co-worker/buddy B and I doing the same.

4. Phone conversations spent remembering karaoke with old co-workers, back in the good ol’ downtown Sacramento days.

5. Accolades –
HijabMan: “Wow, how did you get so lucky…? Dude, you are so a rockstar.”
Yasmine: “Because they love me!”
HijabMan: “I’ve never heard you say something so…self-centered.”

6. Quick GMail chat conversation with the buddy Z about how, as children, we used to light things on fire, which inexplicably ends with him exclaiming, “You, sire, are a DILETTANTE.”

Three Things (plus three more)

(3)BeautifulThings, Blogistan and the Wide World of Webs, NineToFive outside the 925

Sunlight shadows on the sidewalk, Friday afternoon
Sunlight shadows on the sidewalk, Friday afternoon, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

This afternoon, after clicking over to Blogger.com and pausing before signing in (believe it or not, this is something I do often: I decide I want to update this weblog, I click over to Blogger, and then I just stop, overcome by a feeling of overwhelming helplessness: Where do I even begin? – too many stories to share, and, clearly, I think too much and thus end up writing and sharing nothing)…so, anyway, in the few moments today as my fingers hovered restlessly over the mouse and I debated yet again whether or not to sign into Blogger, I discovered my new favorite weblog: it’s one in the list of current Blogs of Note, and entitled Three Beautiful Things. Someone named Spitfire left a lovely comment there that summed up the entire premise of the Three Beautiful Things weblog:

The natural, simple happiness of the commonplace things is subtle and beautiful, and yet it requires a well-trained eye to appreciate it.
Those who find in the small details the true reason for being alive are to be praised. The search for sources of authentic smiles is a difficult, but noble and delightful activity.

And as Clare herself of Three Beautiful Things notes:

The thing about 3BT is, it’s not that my life is particularly beautiful (although I know as a single woman living in England in 2007, I have a lot to be thankful for) but that I find myself constantly on the look-out for beautiful things.

Leaving work at 5.30pm today, I swung the front door shut behind me, and something about the late afternoon light made me stop dead in my tracks. Seconds later, my bag hit the ground and I was kneeling on the walkway, camera in hand, snapping photos of the sunlight on the grass. When I’d decided a dozen photos was more than enough, I stood up, brushed off my knees, and, before turning away to head back to my car, I stopped and aimed one final, level glance at the shadows, thinking, I have to remember this moment so I can write about it later.

So, because I am nothing if not a proponent of celebrating the mundane (and a lover of the word beautiful), I’ve decided I’m going to try this three beautiful things exercise myself, in order to get myself back into the swing of writing regularly. Perhaps (I’m pretty sure) I’ll end up recording more than three things at a time, but the point – for me – is to just write. Simple, seemingly mundane things would be a good start, because in the last few months I’ve become so overwhelmed by what I haven’t written that it’s been difficult to get myself out of this blogging backlog and actually write.

I’m aiming to try this everyday. Ambitious, I know, but I’ve got to start somewhere. And because I’ve missed Blogistan comment-box conversations with my fellow bloggers and blurkers [blog+lurkers] so much, you are more than welcome to add your own three-things to the comments.

So, here’s my Friday: Things that made me smile, in numerical form. One, two, three, GO.

1. The way the late afternoon sunlight and shadows slant across the sidewalk. [See photo above. It took me far too long to decide which photo to post; they’re all so sunshine-y beautiful and make me especially happy because this past week has been all about the rain.]

2. Organizing a conference call for work – and having it go off without a hitch – and crossing everything off Page One of my four-page project plan. (I love the strikethrough function! Pages 2-4 must be completed during this upcoming week, though. Gross.)

3. GMail chat conversation with HijabMan about how he’s planning on flying notes around his office. The mental image made me laugh, and what’s even funnier is that I can imagine my co-worker/buddy B and I doing the same.

4. Phone conversations spent remembering karaoke with old co-workers, back in the good ol’ downtown Sacramento days.

5. Accolades –
HijabMan: “Wow, how did you get so lucky…? Dude, you are so a rockstar.”
Yasmine: “Because they love me!”
HijabMan: “I’ve never heard you say something so…self-centered.”

6. Quick GMail chat conversation with the buddy Z about how, as children, we used to light things on fire, which inexplicably ends with him exclaiming, “You, sire, are a DILETTANTE.”

Can I get your hand to write on

Rhymes and unrhymed lines, Salaam Namaste

Year-round shoes of choice
Year-round shoes of choice, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

A couple of weeks ago, I went out to dinner with the very few friends from high school whom I like enough to engage in such activities with. Remind me to tell you stories about why I disliked high school, and why my fifth-year reunion last December was a ludicrous waste of time.

At the end of our dinner, as we stepped outside the restaurant and began saying our goodbyes before heading in our individual directions, the topic of shoes somehow came up in conversation. I, of course, had to add my two cents to this discussion, so I remarked that I can’t stand to wear real shoes, even during winter.

N looked down at the requisite flip-flops on my feet, and said understandingly, “Yeah, but, see, it’s part of your culture.”

I wonder if my face betrayed the disgust I felt. A lifetime spent combating ignorance and explaining who I am and why I do the things I do, and yet it still came down to such inane observations from people I thought knew me. “My culture? You think I wear flip-flops because of my culture?”

“Well, yeah, don’t you?”

I laughed, because the whole exchange was so ridiculous I couldn’t even believe I was making this clarification: “Buddy, I wear flip-flops because my feet feel freakin’ claustrophobic in real shoes, alright?”

“Oh.”

I came home and shook my head a few more times over the absurdity. The next day, after a morning spent shaking off nagging feelings of deja vu, I remembered bits of a poem I had written last year, and the part that comes back to haunt me is this:

Someday,
You will stop laughing at me
For wearing flip-flops almost
Year-round
When you understand that
My ancestors wore sandals
Across all seasons
Because they couldn’t afford real shoes to cover
Their brown feet
As they toiled in the fields.

And you will nod in understanding and slip off
Your name-brand
Logo’d sneakers
And we’ll sit on a sunny plot of grass,
Barefoot together,
Squinting at the sky.

Well. Never let it be said that long-lost high school friends don’t know me. But just to clarify, I really wear flip-flops only because of the claustrophobia reason mentioned above.

One thing to add: Much love and gratitude and sunshine to Fathima and Ruqayyah for their beautiful emails. I will reply, but, meanwhile, thank you both for taking the time to check in – and, of course, thank you to everyone else who’s harassed me via the tagboard and comment box, too. I’m here, I’m alive, I’ve missed Blogistan. I told blurker N, who caught me on AIM the other afternoon, that you’d all stab me if you knew the number of half-written weblog entries that I’ve let sit on my computer instead of posting them as I should have been the last couple of months. So, stay tuned for stories about why I enjoy my job, about my first time at the recent ISNA convention in Chicago (and the rockstars I met!), and for musings on Lebanon and September 11th (I do nothing if not write on topics much too late, clearly).

Did I mention I missed you all? I really did, dammit, contrary to what you may think of my periodic, flaky-flake habit of abandoning you without explanation. The next round of cranberry juice is on me. Here’s to sunshine in September, rockstars.

HijabMan.com is back!

Blogistan and the Wide World of Webs, Links to love

Our favorite, funny balloon-maker and t-shirt seller is back, and better than ever. Check out the newly-relaunched HijabMan.com for all sorts of good stuff, including his gorgeous photos, of which he explains:

I’m not a photographer nor am I a journalist trained to seek out interesting subjects and present them neatly labeled and interpreted. My only explanations are that 1. I’ve been living my life in freeze frames since the age of 12, and 2. I love beautiful things. I am just a Muslim who travels, studies, and sells funky t-shirts along the way. When the opportunities presented themselves, I captured the faces that touched me. I love to witness the reflection of the Divine in all that I experience; I love to make you a witness by posting these photos.

I know HijabMan personally, so when he says he’s aiming to spread “a message of consciousness, of justice, of living a life free of people and institutions that exploit others,” you can be sure he is indeed working on those goals. Also, you should buy his t-shirts.

Meanwhile, I’m highly amused that, over at HijabMan.com, this little ol’ weblog of mine is linked right smack in between Khaled Abou El Fadl and Tariq Ramadan‘s respective websites. Wow, now I really gotta get all smart and intellectual.

The Soul Behind the Music: Enlightened, but still Outlandish

Links to love

The Danish group Outlandish is one of my favorite music bands, so I was delighted to recently find in my inbox a Divanee Magazine interview with Waqas Qadri. Qadri is ethnically Pakistani; the other two band members are ethnically Moroccan and Cuban/Honduran.

From the Outlandish website:

We live in times when political positions are becoming polarized and cultures are considered fenced-in entities that cannot be united. The world is often viewed through a faulty prism that divides “us” from “them.” That’s why it is such a tension-breaker when someone takes the time and uses their talent to remind us that we are all human beings. That the blood running through your veins is not significantly different from the blood that flows through your neighbor’s body, even though you may not share the same social status, political views, religious conviction or hail from the same latitude or longitude. This is where Outlandish enters the picture.

The story of Outlandish is an uplifting tale about three friends’ common adventure, which starts in the youth clubs and soccer fields of the western Copenhagen suburbs… At the same time, Outlandish is the story of a band that insists on the vantage point called “the world we live in,” and through subjective, grass-root musical narratives, tries make a difference.

In my favorite part of the Divanee interview, Qadri says:

The other artists would take a break beat and sample from Marvin Gaye or old jazz . The samples often came from records their parents used to listen to. So I went home and went through my parents’ record collection and I couldn’t find Marvin Gaye and other artists like that. All I could find was Mehdi Hassan or Lata Mangeshkar. I talked to Isam and Lenny, and Isam found some Arabic and Lenny had de Mercedes Sosa. So we said, ‘What the heck, let’s try this’ and decided to put it all together. We picked up a record and took it to the studio. The producer was like, ‘What the hell are you doing? You can’t mix hip hop with Asian music. Or Latin music. That won’t work; bring me some Stevie Wonder or something like that.’