Yesterday morning, my dad decided we’re “looking too white,” so he hauled us outside to supposedly take a walk in the yard and freshen up on our tan (what tan? I was born white. LOL) so we can look ethnic again. Haha. Now, “taking a walk in the yard” is a phrase that seriously fills us with fear, because we never end up just walking. You gotta understand, we have a half-acre lot, and our house is only a little part of it. The rest is occupied with a courtyard and a lawn and fruit trees and walkways and gardens and eucalyptus trees and things. It’s beautiful though, masha’Allah, but tons of work to maintain. When I was really little, I figured heaven must look kinda like our yard. lol. So anywayz, when my dad actually succeeds in getting us outside, he puts us to work in the yard. Yesterday, for example, i pulled weeds for ever. :-p It’s kinda like how Sana despises cleaning bathrooms: THAT’S how much I hate working in the yard. Last year, I went through this whole, hilarious phase where I absolutely LOVED pulling weeds. hehe. The way I figured it, if I had to do something outside, it might as well be pulling weeds, which is such a mindless, mind-numbing task. :-p And my dad sure does take the opportunity to remind me as often as he can about how much i “loooove pulling weeds, remember??” So yesterday, my job was to pull weeds in the front garden. And i did a mighty nice job, if i do say so myself. Actually, i don’t have to say it anywayz, cuz my dad stopped by when i was almost done and exclaimed, “Yasminay, you just made my day! That looks so beautiful, and you know how much i love beautiful things! I could just lay a bed out here now and sleep right in this garden!” LOL. My daddy is a silly man, what can i say. But it kinda sucks, cuz today my hands and wrists are aching, and i kept running into the thorny rose bushes yesterday while pulling weeds, so my hands are covered with nicks and cuts. Any action involving clenching and unclenching my hands makes them hurt, so it’s hard to grasp stuff; plus, my wrists hurt hecka bad too. Sheesh. My dad gave me a sympathetic look this morning when i kept wincing at the pain, but then remarked, “Maybe you should work outside more often; then your hands would be used to it.” Ehhhh, riiiiiiiight, Daddy. :-p

I had a hilarious conversation with a friend earlier about how no one ever says anything to his dad for NOT dressing up cuz they’re all afraid of him. haha. Sounds kinda like my dad right there. lol. All my little cousins love him, but the older ones are hecka intimidated. Not to mention the adults. It’s soooo funny! And then you see him at home, and he’s all wandering around alternately singing Beatles and Pukhto songs at the top of his lungs, and it’s just crazy…then I’m always wondering, People are scared of someone this silly?? lol. But my dad actually dresses up pretty often. Not too dressy, but still all stylin’. haha. He’s always wearing nice dress slacks and some shirt or other that Shereen and I always help him pick out, cuz if we didn’t, he’d be wearing white dress shirts all the damn time. And I’m like, no no no, white is BORING! lol. So I always make him go with something else. Like, blue. (ok yeah, blue has its moments. lol) There are times though, like the weekends especially, when he just looks like a BUM. Like, we’ll all have breakfast together, and after that he’ll take his cup of coffee and go outside to “take a walk in the yard and sing to all his little babies” (the flowers, not us. Usually he means the geraniums. My daddy-o has an OBSESSION with geraniums, I swear. It’s getting out of control! haha). So this’ll be like 10 o’clock in the morning or something, and he’ll be all wandering around outside in his pajamas with his cup of coffee, and then he ends up spending nearly the whole day out there (I’m serious!), planting flowers and doing all this pruning and all kinds of random stuff. All the while still wearing his pajamas. It’s hilarious. lol. And once in a while I’ll look outside, and he’ll be standing there in his freakin’ pajamas with his 4970934750th cup of coffee, talking to the neighbors, and I’m like, ohhh my God! lol. The funniest thing is, neither he nor the neighbors ever seem to care about the pajamas. It’s all normal, I guess. lol. So yeah, that’s my dad. Maybe that’s where I get the weirdness from. lol. Not that he would ever admit it. lol.

Anywayz, yesterday was fun cuz I woke up at noon. Had a yummyyyy lunch. Pulled lotsa weeds and made my Daddy’s day. lol. Nasser mowed the lawn, and it looks goooood. Three of Somayya’s brother came down (but she opted to stay at home, that freak of nature child. You suck!), and Daddy put 2 of them to work in the yard (muahahahaha!!) while the oldest one fiddled around with our computers. My dad now has Windows XP on his PC (i know, i know, we’re sooo behind the times), and the cousins are slowly convincing my dad to invest in DSL. Time to lose the dial-up connection, yo. Yeee-uuuhhh. :-D In the evening, Daddy waved Ummy out of the kitchen and set to work making chapli kabob (a weekly tradition with him), with the help of the same 2 assistants. LOL. Man, Shaker is a “burger-builder” extraordinaire. And Nazer is mighty handy with the spatula too. ;) Yaser just fixes computers and pretends he knows everything. And Zaker was at home, the silly boy. He always makes me laugh. Speaking of people who make me laugh, though, i’m having Somayya-withdrawals. My partner-in-crime is gone missing. hahahah. So anywayz, it was major fun. Shaker always wants to instigate a boxing match with me whenever i see him. And considering that this 14-year-old is about a foot taller than me and 50 pounds heavier, i’m like, ehhh stay away, yo! Actually, being the crazy child i am, i laugh and try to punch him back, but it’s like hitting a rock. haha. So that was my day. THE END.

p.s. Someone posted the link to a really interesting article on my tagboard earlier today. It’s called, “Iraq: Victims Without a Voice.” Go read. Oh, and i’ve been busy checking out more stuff on The Guardian website today. There’s some more speculation about the Iraqi blogger, Salam Pax. Read some of his blog entries as posted by The Guardian, or just go check out the blog itself.

Goo Goo Dolls

::Name::

And don’t it make you sad

Is more than who we are

YESSSS!! it works! masha’Allah. you can talk to me now, peoples! hahahaha :)

the comments thingie is jacked up! aaahhhhh… so bothersome, man. i wonder how i managed to do that, too. hmm… some people just shouldn’t be allowed anywhere in the vicinity of a computer. LOL. yes, i Do crack myself up. self-deprecation is an indispensable quality. ;) never forget that, peoples! laughing at yourself is good. otherwise you’ll become old and bitter. or YOUNG and bitter. which is even more inexcusable and worse. yupyupyup. meanwhile, i gotta teach myself how to fix this thing. *siiiigh*

just wanna see if the goshdarn comment box works now. dooodooodoodoodoodoodoodooo. yes, i’m singing. stop laughing!

so i’m sure y’all will be excited to know that the Yaz was sitting at her computer, eating yummy croissants at 5 a.m. Shut up, I KNOW you’re jealous! You know what, I just noticed that when i write emails and stuff, I start out a lot of my sentences with “ok” or “so,” which is really weird. I’m guess i talk so much that I start from the middle of the sentence. How crazy is THAT. It’s fun being a crazy child though. You know you wanna be like me.

In case you wanted to know, I’m on campus right now. I never realized before that leaving home only half an hour later than usual would mean having to deal with traffic. It wasn’t real traffic though…it’s just that, for me, “traffic” is a title given to any situation where I have to drive slower than 80 miles per hour. Hey, it’s a 60-mile commute, one way. I’m entitled to enjoy it. For your information, I always set my cruise control at 80 mph in the mornings on my way to school, and having to go even 78 is cause for major annoyance. Don’t worry though…I go 74 (yes, 74! NOT 75…yeah, i know i’m majorly obsessive-compulsive) on the way home in the evenings, cuz it’s just better for relaxation purposes. Plus, in 2001, I received TWO speeding tickets within a six month period, and needless to say, my daddy-o was not amused. Neither was I, because traffic school is not my idea of a fun coupla hours. So that’s when I decided to speed to my heart’s content in the mornings, and take my time in the evenings. Good idea, no? I haven’t gotten any more speeding tickets since then, so I must be doing something right. Alhamdulillah. :)

But yeah, I left home later than usual today, and then I got stuck behind hecka people who drove like grandmas (some of them looked like they WERE grandmas), so I got to campus at exactly 9 a.m., which is when my physics lecture started. And I had to park all the way across campus from the lecture hall where physics is at, cuz that’s the only convenient place where I could find parking. So that turned out to be the parking structure (parking garage…I wonder why people call it a “structure”? I mean, that’s kinda obvious and redundant, right? Shooot, my house could be called a structure…”Hi, my name is Yasmine and I live at that one structure with lots of brickwork and geraniums because my father is an obsessive gardener.” That works too, i think).

And the annoying thing about the parking structure are all the parking attendants there. They’re like beyond annoying. I can’t even think of a better word. That’s how infuriating they are. I’ve been parking at the parking structure on and off for the past 3 years of college, so they see me around there a lot. And one of the guys just bugs me because he always wants to strike up random conversations with me or comment about random things, and I’m just like, What the hell? This past fall, when my car broke down, we shuffled our cars around so that I was driving my sister’s car and she and my brother were sharing another car. And the first day that I came back to campus with my “new” car (it’s still my car even now, because my old one is still in the shop), the attendant guy made a point to walk over and ask, “Heyy, what happened to your car?” And no, he wasn’t questioning me in a concerned way either…More like nosy and none of his business. And it was annoying, cuz i was like, Duuuuude, why do you even care? And why are you even keeping track of what cars I drive? Kinda stalker-ish, i say. And then he went off on this tangent about how his father drives the same exact car and blah blah blah, and I’m standing there like, ok am I supposed to CARE? ok I KNOW i’m sounding all evil and mean about this whole deal. But you wouldn’t understand unless you were there. Yes, i talk to random people all the time and take great pride in my conversational skills, but this is just kinda creepy.

And another parking attendant TOTALLY creeps me out cuz one day during fall quarter, I walked by him to get to my car and he goes, “yo sista! lemme get all dressed up too and how ’bout we go clubbin together!” I swear, that’s exactly what he said. I was like, “Sorry, I’m not the clubbin type, ok?” and kept walking.

It’s just majorly weird though. Plus, it kinda pissed me off cuz I tried to analyze it too much, I guess, and I was like, What, why did he say ‘too’? I’m not overdressed. This is how i ALWAYS dress, and no, it’s not formal at ALL. And did he think the fact that I was wearing hijab actually made me more susceptible to his advances? I mean, come ON. It’s majorly bothersome and aggravating though, cuz i’m starting to think, What kind of world IS this if a Muslim woman wearing hijab still gets hit on and checked out by random guys? Maybe I should switch to niqaab, cuz the hijab doesn’t seem to be helping me out much these days. ehh.

But anyway, these days, I tend to stay away from the parking structure, only I didn’t have much of a choice this morning, since I got to campus all late. And then once i got here, I decided I didn’t feel like going to physics lecture after all. I’m a crazy child. Need to work on this discipline thing. But hey, this is only the first physics lecture I’ve missed. And i’ve gone to ALL my other classes this quarter! So maybe i’m doing ok after all. Alhamdulillah. :)

So much bida and fitnah in the world these days though. Crazy crazy stuff. I seriously think we’re getting close to the End of Time. So sad. On Sunday when I went to my halaqa at the masjid, there were all sorts of crazy tremors (sorta minor earthquakes). One of the sisters said that that morning there had been a little shaking, so I guess the ones during halaqa were aftershocks. But it was still kinda scary. We were sitting there going, Should we go outside? Huddle under the doorways? Or what? And then another sister pointed out, “Well this IS the masjid. So if there’s gonna be an earthquake, this is the safest place to be!” Subhanallah.

ok, i think that’s all I have to say for now. Plus, i wanna go take a nap on the comfy (majorly SQUISHY! haha) chairs on the first floor of the library. You don’t understand, i’ve been looking forward to this alll morning! :) Much love and peace to y’all…

i think sometimes we become desensitized to the bad things that happen everyday… I came across these lyrics and it made me think about our crazy modern world where we just walk around in a little bubble. So many of us have it a whole lot better than gazillions of people all over the world, but you know, complacency is not the way to go. It’s good to be thankful for all the things we have, subhan’Allah…but ignoring the bad stuff, or blatantly denying that bad things even occur, is just messed up and sad. And what’s sadder is that all of us, myself included, have been guilty at some point or another of ignoring the negatives just because they don’t fit in with the rest of our perfect little bubble-enclosed world.

Ignorance

Don’t wanna read the paper

I don’t like bad news

Last night a man got shot

Outside the house of blues

I’d like to ignore it

I’d like to just pretend

That the reason for it

Is something I can comprehend

We risk our lives

We hit our wives

We act like everything is funny

We hide our pain

While we go insane

We sell our souls for money

We curse our mums

We build our bombs

We make our children cry

We watch the band

While Vietnam

Just watch their children die

::Kasey Chambers::