The Glittering Caves

new blog!

2008-11-29T22:57:00.002-05:00

well, i haven't blogged in ages and ages, here at least, but the main reason is i've been working and working on my wedding photography business stuff, and i have a blog up on my new site... the site is still under construction - doing it myself, haven't got any templates, but i'm considering it - but you can keep up with my photo life at theBeauty is Truth Blog (i promise, baraka, that i thought of your old blog only after i agonized over this name for my business! :) ) but do check it out... i spelled out my agony in one of the pages...

hope to see some visitors and comments over there! i'm still keeping this site but once i'm all settled there i'll have more time to blog here... maybe... :)

from wordsworth: the prelude, book first. the story of me, now.

2008-09-27T23:54:00.000-04:00

...Thus my days are past
In contradiction; with no skill to part
Vague longing, haply bred by want of power,
From paramount impulse not to be withstood, 240
A timorous capacity, from prudence,
From circumspection, infinite delay.
Humility and modest awe, themselves
Betray me, serving often for a cloak
To a more subtle selfishness; that now
Locks every function up in blank reserve,
Now dupes me, trusting to an anxious eye
That with intrusive restlessness beats off
Simplicity and self-presented truth.
Ah! better far than this, to stray about 250
Voluptuously through fields and rural walks,
And ask no record of the hours, resigned
To vacant musing, unreproved neglect
Of all things, and deliberate holiday.
Far better never to have heard the name
Of zeal and just ambition, than to live
Baffled and plagued by a mind that every hour
Turns recreant to her task; takes heart again,
Then feels immediately some hollow thought
Hang like an interdict upon her hopes. 260
This is my lot; for either still I find
Some imperfection in the chosen theme,
Or see of absolute accomplishment
Much wanting, so much wanting, in myself,
That I recoil and droop, and seek repose
In listlessness from vain perplexity,
Unprofitably travelling toward the grave,
Like a false steward who hath much received
And renders nothing back.
...

how musa tells me he needs a diaper change

2008-08-18T15:12:00.001-04:00

"oh no! somebody stinky!"

some recent musa gems

2008-07-23T11:00:00.004-04:00

1. "put ammi time out!" (ammi is my mom)
2. "usman, can you do me favor?" (usman is baba)
3. "hey, ayesha! that's a nectarine!"
4. (in response to being told that my dad was in raleigh and couldn't come) "somebody go get him!"
5. "squirrel doing poo-poo" (seeing squirrel in backyard)
6. (to cashier in costco when i was buying, um, feminine hygiene products) "it's mama's diaper!"
7. (upon being caught messing with laptop while people were praying and not watching him) "lemme check my email!"
8. "mama! I'm silly!" (just now. random!)
9. "i want a tattoo." (yes, he said that. knowing that a tattoo is a design on the skin.)
10. "stop the car. gimme kissy."

hijab rant

2008-06-24T00:15:00.004-04:00

For anyone who ever wanted to understand why Muslim women wear hijab... here is the only thing you need to know about it:

BECAUSE
WE
WANT
TO!!!
!

okay, so i'm talking about in America.
i'm just soooooooooooooooo sick of it, so i had to say this. in all caps. bold.
i don't wear it because some men in my family told me to. (actually it was my momma, initially). (and if you think she's weak, oppressed or brainwashed... well, just try saying it to her face. i DARE you. i'll videotape it and put in on youtube. before i'm arrested for complicity).
i don't wear it because i don't want people to look at me. they look at me. more. i know this. i grew up in the south.
i don't wear it because i think it will protect me from unwanted sexual attention. i've gotten that anyway. from muslims, actually. in a muslim country. we brown women know all about this.
i don't wear it because i think all men are dogs and need to be protected from the sight of my breathtakingly gloriously stunning tresses. which they are. (my hair i mean).
i wear it because I WANT TO!! it's between me and my Lord! this is AMERICA people. what else do you need to know?

honestly, a more useful question is to actually examine the commandment for hijab in the qur'an and try to understand its place in islamic belief AND muslim society. (and yes, i know that many people interpret that particular verse in such a way that they conclude it is NOT a commandment for hijab. but, many other people conclude that it is. they haven't convinced me, so this is where i'm writing from.) it being 12:30 a.m., i ain't about to touch this in any other way.

for cryin out loud, isn't there enough hate out there??????????????????????
forget about my headscarf. praise God for children instead!

why i love trader joe's

2008-06-09T17:31:00.002-04:00

apart from the unique food items and high-inducing, rather than high, prices... oh, and the taste of The Best Orange-Peach-Mango Juice Ever Cartoned, which is why i just refer to it as OPM (say that fast...):

"The first thing you may notice about this cheese snack is the absence of a brilliant, yet artificial, orange color... We're selling each seven ounce bag of Trader Joe's Baked Jalapeno Cheese Crunchies for just $1.79. They won't glow in the dark, but neither will you if you eat them."

"This dessert is such a tart, we almost called it Lemon Hester Prynnes. But then we'd have to put an 'A' on it..."

"While a gorgonzola or an Emmenthaler can be polarizing, Cheddar is sort of the Switzerland in the cheese lineup. Yes, these are the conversations we have at Trader Joe's."

- Trader Joe's Summer Guide 2008

please pray for my friends ali and shafaq

2008-05-11T13:59:00.006-04:00

when i want to check my favorite blogs, i usually start off here so i can just click links to those blogs instead of typing in the address bar. but it's been so long i get a shock seeing the "happy birthday musa!" post up!
well, anyway, so since i last posted, we've moved into a new house and gone to england and come back. and it all seems like a lifetime ago since my little brother ali went into the hospital last sunday. it has been such a heartwrenching week that the shock of what actually happened - a heart attack in a 25-year-old - has been sort of numbed into the past, and the fact that he got so much worse while in the hospital has eclipsed it, too. it wasn't a heart attack per se - he's more healthy than most 25 year olds - but as far as we can tell, it's something called fulminant myocarditis, which translates to a raging viral infection of the heart muscle. nobody knows how he got sick or how the virus got into his heart, but it did, and he actually went into cardiac arrest while being airlifted to the heart center at inova fairfax. and that was just the beginning...! then the virus got worse, and his fever spiked, and his heart function went down to like 20 percent, and his kidneys and liver began failing because of lack of oxygen, and he couldn't breathe and was in constant severe pain and his only sister shafaq, my dearest friend, was falling apart and breaking down left and right.
so on wednesday night they took him into surgery and attached to him a biventricular assist device - a six-hour surgery, after which he was sedated for two days and only yesterday had the intubator taken out. the VADs pump the blood for him, leaving his heart to heal on its own, and helping to keep the rest of his body supplied with the oxygen it needs. and his organ functions and heart functions seem to be improving but it's very tentative progress, he's still swollen from head to toe from surgery and very weak, still sick, still in pain. but we know now that that surgery literally saved his life, through the grace of God.
it was so inexpressibly good to see him awake yesterday, able to talk even if weakly, even to see some of his sense of humor coming back. but i am also still worried about shafaq, who is of course committing all her energy to her baby brother and none for herself.
so... if you read this post, please include shafaq and ali and their family in your prayers! i'm off now and will post more later... must do a musa update! my boy is talking now, sentences and everything, it's so much fun :)

happy birthday musa!!!

2008-04-02T23:40:00.002-04:00

my son is two today! there's only 20 minutes left for his birthday so i figured i would get in a blog post while it's still the day of.
danggit. got phone calls and then he woke up and i had to nurse him back to sleep (and he didn't nurse at all today otherwise, so don't worry, we're getting there!). and now it's not his birthday anymore. oh well!
i am so tired. been moving the last few days and it is soooooo exhausting. but we are going to england next week inshallah and that's keeping me going - i can't WAIT!!!
more later... i'm going to play a round of zuma and then lay me down and read something.

various updates

2008-03-05T12:26:00.002-05:00

first, musa: since he is now in a phase where he will attempt to repeat absolutely anything you say (including "baba has a big butt!") (said entirely jokingly of course), but usually only syllable by syllable, we had started to have him repeat "i love you", word by word. usually, if you tried to get him to say all three words, he would blur them together as "wuuh wuuh". but just a couple of days ago, he finally began saying each word separately, by himself, with a nice long pause between each word: "i... wuv... you... mama/baba/lala/ammi/abbu/whoever"
i noticed this most strongly two days ago, in the "quiet zone" study section of the public library, where i happened to be browsing the stacks for books. for several months now, musa has been calling himself "fasha". he CAN say moo, and sa, and occasionally he has said "musa", but if you ask him who he is or ask him to identify himself in the mirror or a picture of himself, he always says "fasha."
so i'm pushing him along down the stacks in the stroller, out of the blue he starts to say loudly, "i... wuv... you... fasha! i... wuv... you... fasha!"

alhamdulillah since we go through the alphabet and numbers with him, now he also repeats random combinations of those throughout the day: q, r, s, 8 (et!), 9, (nine), 10 (tin!). if you go through the alphabet with him, having him repeat each letter, he'll do so with great concentration, until you get to W, then he gets a big goofy grin because he can't quite say it and apparently thinks it sounds funny.

he's gotten some colors and shapes down in the last couple of weeks, and now will mention "green cars" on the road, or "seesees" (circles) when he passes by a bicycle, etc etc. still very excited about pointing out things he knows and naming them - perhaps his favorite these days is "school bus", which he seems to "notice" even when there are none around! and there's a lot of "bye bye" this and that - "bye bye trees! bye bye cars" when we left the masjid on monday after his play group, and "bye bye pancake!" when i took his plate away this morning after breakfast (there was no more pancake in it)...

other updates? well, from the library i got a great stash of books, but haven't time to list them there: several about homeschooling, though, and a couple of jane austen for pure pleasure to re-read, a stephen king, and dune: messiah.

other than that, cousin koonj didn't like the meme i tagged her with in the previous post, and i looked for more but couldn't find one easy to "do" in one's own blog post that i thought she would like, so i'm making one up (well, pulling it from the recesses of my middle-school journal writing class memories):

1) Predict what, about this time of your life, you are most likely to remember 10 years from now.

2) Predict what you are most likely to not have any memory of 10 years from now.

perhaps these were better questions for middle schoolers... actually we answered the question for 5 years, which is such a long time to a middle schooler! but anyway, cuz, and anyone else who likes, give it a shot!!

book meme

2008-02-12T14:15:00.000-05:00

tagged by suroor! yay!
i sort of cheated and didn't do this meme when i first had the chance, because the nearest book was one that my dad had been reading, postmodernism and the other by ziauddin sardar, and i thought it would have been pretentious to use that one... but maybe i'm being pretentious just by saying that. but who cares? there are only about 10 people who read this blog and i'm assuming y'all don't kerr.

so here goes:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).

2. Open the book to page 123.

3. Find the 5th Sentence.

4. Post the next 3 sentences.

5. Tag 5 people.

"So I got out my Swiss Army knife and opened the saw blade so that I could defend myself. Then I went out of my bedroom really quietly and listened. I couldn't hear anything, so I started going downstairs really quietly and really slowly."

interestingly enough, this book the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by mark haddon, has only the even page numbers, not the odd ones. it's brilliant, by the way. murder mystery and family drama and heartbreak and beauty and cold logic and mathematics problems, all from the point of view of an autistic boy.

anyway, i dunno if i can tag five other people... most people whose blogs i read have already been tagged... here goes anyway:

koonj
taiyyaba
hassan
nura
sheeza

there! well nura hasn't blogged since november and hassan since well before that, but, hey, y'all are tagged.
must go...

i am among the greatest people of all time!!

2008-02-08T23:50:00.000-05:00

You're Watership Down!

by Richard Adams

Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you're
actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their
assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they
build their houses. You might be one of the greatest people of all time. You'd
be recognized as such if you weren't always talking about talking rabbits.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

well... i don't talk about talking rabbits very much, but i'm glad at least i'm a book that i've read and enjoyed! don't forget this, folks. i might be one of the greatest people of all time!! (what on earth can that mean...?)

thanks to achelois for putting the link out there...

my baby is talking to me!!

2008-01-31T09:44:00.000-05:00

yesterday i had dumped all his clean laundry onto his bed and was putting it away, and he sat himself in the middle of the pile and started handing me things and saying, "here you go!" (of course it comes out like, "heee-yo"). and just now, after i told him the scissors in the drawer were dangerous and i put them back, he sat and played with something else for a bit, then stood up and pointed into the drawer and told me, "dangerous! no no no!" (comes out like "deh-jeh! no-no-no!")
yesterday he said two words that nobody ever taught him, "wall" and "watch". i love how earnest he is about pointing things out and naming them, these days!
i need to go write my article, but i just had to mention these things...

books!!!

2008-01-19T17:01:00.000-05:00

FINALLY i have emerged from my reader's block and returned from a trip to the library with a stack of treasures! here are the latest -
pushed: the painful truth about childbirth and modern maternity care by jennifer block
the genesis code by christopher forrest
in the woods by tana french
the endurance: shackleton's legendary antarctic expedition by caroline alexander
how children learn by john holt
the beginner's guide to homeschooling by patrick farenga

AND, after i finished a couple of the library books, i happened to pick up a book from my own shelf that i've never read completely, because musa had thrown it on the floor, and for some reason i found i couldn't put it down and ended up finishing it: secret gardens: a study of the golden age of children's literature by humphrey carpenter.

first: i read pushed, which was a very, very interesting read although it did not really tell me anything i didn't already know, in terms of the general attitudes in the medical community toward "natural" or as block terms it "physiological" childbirth. there were certainly stories, situations and statistics i was unaware of. but i was sort of the choir she was preaching to, so to speak. this book basically details the history (which i did NOT know) of attitudes toward childbirth in america over the last century and a half or so, and the differences in development of that attitude between europe and america (which if you look at the differences now, they are rather infuriating!!). (there's a scene in michael moore's "sicko", in which a new mother living in france is explaining to moore how the government sends a "helper" a couple of times a week just to help with the baby, make sure everything's going okay, and even help with housework and laundry. compare that to how medical residents here in america are forced to choose between raising their child and often going back to work full-time as little as two weeks after giving birth!)

the genesis code... well, it kinda sucked. it was like someone took the formula for the da vinci code, introduced a different puzzle, plot twist and just sort of marginally tweaked the characters, and then hoped the puzzle would be interesting enough to make it as explosive as dan brown's book. blah. i knew the "kind" of book it would be as soon as, during the opening scene, the boy was introduced just as a boy, but his teenage sister was described in sensual detail, with her long black hair and tropical green eyes... argh!! anyway, i read it during one nursing session and nap. i finished it just to find out what would happen... i mean, easy read. as mysteries go... comparing it with the tana french book afterward... just reading the first paragraph of "in the woods" 1) made me go back and read it again, because i realized i actually had to read it, not just skim the surface to find out what happens, and 2) immediately took me into the man character's mind, and into the world of that fateful 80's summer the book keeps returning to.

SORT OF SPOILER AHEAD. french's book is a new kind of mystery, in which the main puzzle DOESN'T GET SOLVED. AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH! i actually reread the last few pages a couple of times because i couldn't believe it. this book tells the story of a police detective near (in?) dublin who grew up in a small town nearby, where as a child one summer he disappeared in the woods with two of his friends - only he was found, and his friends were never found, and he had blood on his shoes that wasn't his, and he never remembered what happened to him. as a detective, he finds himself on a murder case in teh same woods that MIGHT be related to his own case. it's a fascinating set up, and apart from french's powerful characterizations (bar the one flaw of the the detective not being able to recognize a classic psychopath right in front of his face) and suspenseful storytelling, her writing is what drew me in. absolutely gorgeous, almost literary. didn't even feel like i was reading a "mystery" novel, until i really got into the story, and then it was sort of on and off...

that was the last of my fiction finds, this time. i'm still waiting for morgan llywelyn's "1999" to come out. alexander's "shackleton" book had perhaps its greatest impact on me from its photographs - all originals from the incredible photographer, frank hurley, who joined shackleton's crew for their historic adventure. i was sort of surprised to learn how much of their time was spent literally just bored, sitting around, stuck in the ice. still, the truly "adventurous" encounters this crew had with antarctic nature were breathtaking, and the fact that every man survived is equally breathtaking. the fact that months after the whole ordeal ended, shackleton and many of the others plunged right back into the business, even in the same places, says much about character and human nature.. at least theirs! but the photographs... these are marvels of clarity and composition, testaments to hurley's capacity AND willingness to go to any lengths to get the best shot - don't forget he had about 40 pounds of equipment to lug around! i recommend even just browsing through this book in the library or bookstore, to take a gander at these images and read briefly what went into them.

on homeschooling... just finished the holt book today, and the farenga book, more of a guide, was a quick read after that. holt's primary postulate is that children approaching the world for the first time have the best ability to learn themselves, without interference from anxious, testing adults - they learn to walk, and speak, for two examples, not by being taught, but by doing it, making mistakes without fear, trying out their own hunches until they are satisfied themselves they are doing it right, and then moving on. he argues that learning should continue to take this form all their - our - lives, and that children should be trusted to handle this on their own as much as possible. after reading on homeschooling, as well, i'd say "how children learn" is a bit of an argument for "unschooling," which i find an attractive idea in many ways, but a little weird in others. i suspect, inshallah, homeschooling in our house will develop with some structure, but probably more flexibility and freedom than not, me being the anti-organizer that i am. i like the idea of starting with subjects, or even a curriculum, but being flexible enough to follow where it leads...
anyway... the most powerful message i get from holt's book - and i plan on reading more of his work, inshallah - is to at all costs avoid stifling a child's innate love of learning and innate abilities to learn. i didn't really need to be told that... but holt's book is a great source for examples, from his own studies and experiences, of ways to let a child be and become in the best ways...

musa is up, i must go, before he starts demanding tigger videos!!!

blahg

2008-01-12T23:44:00.000-05:00

okay, i know that's not an original title. whoever's blog i read it on and remembered the word and forgot the blog name, credit to you!!
anyway. not much to blog about. well, i keep thinking about blogging about musa's expanding communication abilities, so here are a few examples: he says pictures (pichuz), vaseline (yaah-yeen), table (bay-buh), chairs (chuz, often mistaken for shoes (shuz) and cereal (also shuz)), button (also baybuh), and one of my favorites, "open it", rendered "ah-pu-tih-tih-tih!" always with three "tih"'s. sooo funny! he says "lulu" for both yogurt and lotion, and i don't know if it's because the words sound the same or the things in question look and smell similar? he finally, just in the past couple of days, said "nani" and "dadi" for his grandmothers, although he still refers to them as we do - "ammi" and "ma". he says "lala" for khala, but usually will use it to any picture of a youngish-looking woman with longish dark hair, too. he says a few names - kamran (kami) and akram (akwwm), and tonight he finally called one of usman's friend's "uncle" (with great glee!) after having been afraid of the poor guy for months.
he will grab at his butt and say "pee pee" when he has done either that or the other one. yesterday i was looking for something under a table and i turned to him and asked him repeatedly, "where is it?" and he started going, "wehzah? wehzah?" and looking under the table, then at me. big help huh :)
his experience having cousin raihana stay with him for several days in december was a huge blessing mashallah! random things remind him of her - he says her name, too, "ah-na-na" - and randomly he will bring up her name or her dad's, akram's. (he says lala, too, cousin, but i never know which lala he is referring to!) i think raihana taught him how to dance, because after her visit he really starts to bust a move when the music comes on.

other than that. i've had some work to do recently for my wedding photography stuff, which really got me into exploring photoshop in-depth, and i am having SO much fun with it. my latest obsession (by which i mean i will actually stay up into the wee hours trying different things with random pictures) is with the infrared effect you can implement by converting a color photograph into black and white. then there are filters, and i'm just learning to use layers, too. i've known the very basic stuff - the photojournalism stuff, like adjusting levels and clone-stamping out scratches and dust - for years, but i never really let myself play with it as much as i am now. i'll throw out some recent examples here - actually this first one, of musa, it all started with this one - i just did it randomly one day, and was surprised how much i loved it - i haven't been inspired by something artistically creative in so long.

this was a picture of musa out on the deck of one of our B&B's in nova scotia. just a standard "torn edges" sketch filter.

i took this shot of raihana in december at our dinner table, watching musa. it was a dark shot - i wanted to use the lamplight, not flash, but i had to set the shutter speed too fast, to avoid blur. so i adjusted the levels, color curves and removed the color cast, and then applied the "dry brush" artistic filter.

this one is from shenandoah valley, one of our favorite haunts, this past october. the brightest trees in this shot were the yellow ones. this is just converted to B&W with the infrared effect, diffuse glow filter applied, lighting adjusted.

also shenandoah, and same photoshop effects applied, but this was taken back in summer 2007.

turmoil

2007-12-29T13:07:00.000-05:00

so everyone is blogging about pakistan and benazir. i have my sadness about the whole thing, and this sense of disorientation - like what IS pakistan, then? but i am really no one to blog about it as a pakistani-american or anything... i only have this, my selfish concern: my dad flew to pakistan just the day before christmas, so he is there now, and i won't breathe easy till he comes back inshallah...

golden compass spoiler

2007-12-18T21:26:00.000-05:00

although i haven't seen the movie! but i have the trilogy at home, and read it once a few years ago. on a whim i picked up the first book a couple of weeks ago - northern lights, the british version - and after two or three times picking it up and reading randomly i suddenly found myself utterly unable to put it down, once again. yes, even with baby. i'll say more about the series later - old thoughts, and new ones this time around - but my blog-need right now is just to note that having a baby - i mean raising one - is a bit like having a daemon. because you hold them, love them, cuddle them, and the further away they get from you, physically, the more restless and painful your heart feels. and then one day you cross the water, or more accurately, your child does... and then (hopefully) you learn that you can live away from each other, you can live without your child's constant presence in your life, and you can each be whole in a way you couldn't be so closely attached.
but the daemon, of course, is your soul, not your child...

anyway, a strange and unproductive day. i had some of the worst abdominal pain i've had since, well, the morning my labor started. don't worry, i know what it was and i've worked it... um... out. and my poor husband had to come home from work early for such a reason, because as silly as it sounds it was practically debilitating and i couldn't take care of musa - that was a revelation, and a serious one - but he brought me nice things and made a nice fiber-ous and delicious dinner and now i'm all better and trying to put a very tired, very hyper baby to sleep.
well, not a baby anymore...

long time no nailpolish

2007-11-28T15:05:00.000-05:00

musa is asleep and i have put away the laundry and i have painted all 20 of my nails for the first time since my wedding in august 2003! well, first coat. i forgot about the necessity of second coats. i mean, this is the first time since then i have even cracked open a bottle of nailpolish! i figured that deserved a blog entry. hope nobody needs a diaper change in the next 20 minutes or so. hope nobody new comes to my blog, reads this top post, and decides i'm a worthless ditz for dedicating an entire blog entry to nailpolish. i don't even like it that much; i just figured, what the heck...

musa's growing vocabulary

2007-11-26T11:36:00.000-05:00

if i don't make this list here, i never will, so here goes. not a complete list, i'll add to it as i remember...:

cereal (shuh) (since he's saying it right now)
mee (milk)
dudhu (urdu for milk, means my milk)
juice (joo)
orange (reej)
kiwi (kee)
apple (appuh)
pear (peah)
anda (urdu for egg)
bread (beh)
fish
peas
please (peas)
banana (aba)
grapes (pess)
waffle (aafoh)
shoes
pants(paa)
shirt (shrrr)
socks (saah)
hat (ha ha)
knee
toes (toe)
teeth
wee wee (yes, it's what you think)
car
elmo
spider man (ah-man)
tigger (ahkaa) (sounds just like when he says "our car", must use context clues to distinguish)
read (ree)
ammi (what i call my mom)
abbu (what i call my dad)
ma (waht we call my MIL)
dada (paternal grandfather)
kaka (paternal uncle)
mamoo (amoo or moomoo) (maternal uncle)
baji (beej) (his older girl cousin)
umbrella (aba)
flower (faa)
water (wa wa)
upstairs (uhtuz) (this generally refers to either up- or down-stairs, and means he wants to go that way)
nurse (nuh)
bath
pee pee

and last week he starting copying my mom in saying my name - either "ayesha" - pretty clearly! - or "aashoo" - and he says something similar (asha) for his cousin, issa.
and he says this thing, that sounds like "aau pa tuh", randomly, over and over again, like he's trying to tell you something serious. no clue what it is.
at times he actually does pretty well communicating - a couple of weeks ago, he was in the living room, walking around without his pants (i had taken them off for some reason, i think he had spilled something on them) and i was just outside the gates, and he says, "mama! mama!," and i said "yes musa?" and he said "upstairs!" and then "pants!"... translation, "mama, i want to go upstairs because i need to put on some pants!"
and it's sooo funny even while it frustrates me to no end, when i am trying to chastise him about something, he looks guilty, looks away, then he changes his whole expression and tries to change the subject, usually by mentioning a grandparent's name...

ijtehad on the Constitution, and TDay prep

2007-11-21T01:22:00.000-05:00

so i was listening to NPR quite a lot today, because i was in the car quite a lot today, and i heard a couple of news broadcasts regarding that fact that the supreme court has decided to revisit the DC law banning handguns to see whether or not it is actually constitutional.
and one of the broadcasts talked about how any conclusion would hinge on deciding exactly what is meant by "the right to bear arms" - here, i'll post the second amendment -

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

... or more specifically, does this sentence mean that the People have individual rights to bear arms, or that state militias have the right to assemble and arm themselves?
and it just struck me how familiar this conundrum felt: interpreting words set down as, well, gospel, for lack of a better word at 1:27 a.m. when i ought to be sleeping; interpreting such words decades or centuries after their writing, with no recourse to their original authors or interpreters, but only a body of previous interpretations to refer to... it's not such an alien idea for americans, then, is it?
okay, i know, totally different from interpreting qur'an and hadith and perhaps inappropriate as a comparison. but, i'm just saying, it struck me.

that said, i will add that i baked a pumpkin cheesecake today, but i can't taste it till thursday, although i did taste the cranberry conserve i made today and it rocks the house! tomorrow (or rather, later today), i'm making the butternut squash soup, parts of the stuffing, an apple pie, and the roasted garlic-herb butter i'm using to rub the turkey with. and my parents are coming up too inshallah! yay!

okay off to bathroom, pray, sleep...

nerdy pleasures

2007-11-15T17:09:00.000-05:00

i did not know that "garde-robe" is french for closet, but it makes sense considering we also have the word "wardrobe" which is related of course. i just saw "garde-robe" on the side of the closet shelf organizer box i bought today and thought about medieval toilets...

a long-expected party

2007-11-02T16:56:00.000-04:00

well not really, but it's more memorable than a blog post entitled "a long-awaited day". today trader joe's opened in columbia, about 10 minutes from my house!!!! no more loooong treks to silver spring or asking DH to stop by rockville on his way home from work... okay so silver spring isn't that far but since my MIL lives there i usually ended up taking her along and then staying at her house for as long as she wanted to play with musa, so it ended up being a long trek anyway...

note to antonio gramsci and camilla gibb

2007-10-31T13:44:00.001-04:00

the application of the "hegemony" concept to mass media involves the "negotiation" of a particular idea, usually one supported or promoted by the power class, all the way to the top of the "truth" pile - everyone keeps saying it until everyone starts believing it, whatever relation it has to actual Truth.
and the whole "good muslim, bad muslim" thing has pretty much made it up there, i'd say. spew enough about fundamentalists vs moderates and beards and hijabs are more unwelcome than ever before (what about bearded hijabis? they tend to flourish in/from the indian subcontinent, you know... :) ). everyone knows what a good muslim is - they take the labels progressive, or moderate, or liberal (and i'm not directing any sarcasm or vitriol at such muslims, why, some of my best friends are moderates :), i'm simply discussing the labelling of us all from the outside) and the bad ones are politically radical, by-the-book religious practitioners, visually Other, etc etc... i mean, i feel like i'm beating the dead horse just by describing the labels.
so camilla gibb writes this book, sweetness in the belly, from the perspective of a white woman raised muslim, sufi-ish, in ethiopia, and her adventures in saving poor black children by teaching them qur'an, falling in love with a doctor who opens up the world of liberal islam to her, and then moves to england where she saves other refugees too. despite my tone, i actually did enjoy this book very much - gibb's fictional creation is based in anthropological research she conducted and lived, and even though she makes a sufi "saint" out of bilal al habash, it's still a rather fascinating story and reads pretty convincingly, indeed as the blurbs gush, opens windows onto understanding islam in ways most westerners have never done before.
but i got to this passage at the very end of the book and it almost ruined the whole thing for me (bold added, the killer words):

This is what happens in the West. Muslims from Pakistan pray alongside Muslims from Nigeria and Ethiopia and Malaysia and Iran, and because the only thing they share in common is the holy book, that becomes the sole basis of the new community; not culture, not tradition, not place... traditions are discarded as if they are filthy third-world clothes. "We were ignorant before," people say, as if it is only in te West that they have learned the true way of Islam.
Even our own imam, at the mosque we've been attending for years, reinforces this, calling for the importance of uniformity of practice and dress in the face of a hostile world...
Perhaps I am very fashion qadim, but to become as orthodox as this imam demands, I would have to abandon the religion I know. He's asking for nothing less than conversion. Why would I do such a thing? My religion is full of color and possibility and choice; it's a moderate interpretation, one that Aziz showed me was possible, one that allows you to use whatever means allow you to feel closer to God, be it saints, prayer beads or qat, one that allows you to have the occasional drink, work alongside men, go without a veil when you choose, sit alone with an unrelated man in a room, even hold his hand or even, dare I say it, to feel love for a Hindu.

okay sooo... even if we ignore the BLARING GLARING use of that icky phrase that i bolded... reading this just felt like such an emotional letdown. i don't intend any racism or whatever, but speaking as a brown woman, here's this white anthropologist(gibb) telling us what the most beautiful way to be Muslim is. i know, i know, it's just an opinion and she's certainly entitled to it and i won't tell anyone how to practice their faith... but i can't avoid getting this message, you know? i mean, come on!!
so i believe that not only the occasional drink, but even eating food that has been cooked with alcohol (no it does not burn off) is a disobedience of God and a sin; i never even held hands with a boy until i exchanged vows with DH and i think that was the right way to do it; i love some hindus myself, just not any guys in any romantic way... the question that is pulled from my innards while reading this is why is it so bad to be a practicing, devout muslim? that's the perspective that has hegemonized itself up to being a cultural aspect of american society. i could get on CNN tonight and deliver the most eloquent refutation, and it wouldn't make a smidgen of difference. this is what "people out there" think of islam now. maybe we just did too little, too late? i'm not saying it's not our fault. i'm just sort of futilely complaining about it. sorry, it's just a blog...
anyway, just to end on a brighter note, here is my boo-boo laughing on his baba's shoulders in shenandoah a coupla weeks ago...

vocabulary

2007-10-22T16:41:00.000-04:00

not mine, musa's! he has one!
so i thought i'd share some of it. i have counted about 50ish words so far, including animal noises - is that cheating? :)

apooo or abooo - spoon
psss! - please
ahdo - aajo (come here)
dudhu - doodh (milk) (this is the one i hear most often)
joo - juice
ree - read
appoh - apple
akhi - makhee (fly) (that's aspirated "k", not "kha")
daah - dog (that was his first word!)
aukaa - our car, but i think he uses it just to mean "car"
anda - anda (egg)
buh - bird
ba - bath
wawa - water
nuh - nurse
uh oh - uh oh
beh - bread or bed, use of context clues necessary to determine which

there's a few more but that's some of it... i think he says laptop too but i can't figure out exactly how to transcribe his version.
more later...

bloggable moment

2007-10-03T15:44:00.001-04:00

so i just had a bloggable moment - meaning one after which i tried calling all my verizon in people to share with but nobody was available so i have to blog about it instead.
here's a nutshell of it - note to would-be christian proselytizers: if you run into someone of another faith who is very obviously practicing, i.e., a hijabi muslim, don't tell them your son had a koran but you threw it away because you don't want to be an expert on that. and try not to tell them about their own religion, particularly when you don't actually know much about it.

so she was very nice - i approached her about a quote for a story and she very kindly gave it. and then, as part of her answer had to do with the fact that she was part of a bible study group, she invited me to talk for a few minutes about faith - which stemmed from, as she told me right before i left, the feeling she had when i approached the table that i had come into her life at that moment for a particular reason. which, i suppose, is always true to some extent... and you know, i really do appreciate religious people of all stripes (by which i mean people who think about and study their faith, for whom their faith means something.) and i can even appreciate the christian folks who earnestly want you to accept jesus christ as the son of God, however wrong that is, depending on how they approach it. but there's a line between admirable conviction and a brick wall, and she was just a tad over that line on the brick side. if you approach a person by pretty much informing them you're not interested in what they have to say - my first comment to her was going to be how interesting it was that i encountered her at such a spiritual time in my own faith, and she actually interrupted me to tell me, "oh it's not spiritual, it's challenging, because you guys have got it all down pat" and no i don't know what that means - challenging not spiritual - anyone wanna take a swing at it please do - if you approach them like that, then you're really not going to get anywhere, you're just going to be scary. and she was scary! nice but scary. i am happy to dialogue, but i'm not going to debate someone who threw the qur'an away, because they're obviously not going to hear what i'm saying. anyway, so i gave her one of my real email addresses, we'll see what happens.
just weird man. i mean, i'm not going to pretend i know everything about christianity, why are you going to say you KNOW the qur'an says you should chop off people's heads if they oppose you, when you threw the book away? how do you know what it says, if you just listen to what someone else tells you?

anyway, musa calling, gotta go. we have totally screwed up his sleep schedule once again, so i'm trying to have him go all day without a nap, which means keeping him up but not tiring him out, just at least for the next four to four.5 hours!!

ramadan mubarak

2007-09-16T13:00:00.001-04:00

a view of a lighthouse on the bay of fundy from the cape d'or lookoff in northwestern nova scotia

alright so i'm a little late, but you know, baby and all... but anyway, ramadan mubarak to everyone! i'm fasting and nursing, and just leaving the results to Allah. i mean, he's almost 18 months. still trying to get him to eat more at each meal (this morning, 7/8 of a waffle and half a large peach. i had to shove the 7th waffle piece in his mouth and i gave up on the eighth. does that sound like a decent breakfast for a 1.5 year old? oh, and also a sippy cup with milk, but he had maybe one ounce of it. and yes, i did nurse him at night, and in the morning while he was still sleeping (meaning he woke and came crawling and clawing up to me trying to get at his milk then dozed back off). but i fed him breakfast because he was trying to nurse again, so he WAS hungry.)
anyway! alhamdulillah so far so good. it feels so good to be fasting again - i couldn't imagine not fasting a third ramadan in a row.
got work to do, and this is the only time i can do it, sinc eit's sunday and hubby is upstairs with musa, so off i go...

update

2007-09-06T10:08:00.000-04:00

so i haven't been blogging, apologies to my legions of readers for keeping you all hanging :) we left aug. 26 for a road trip to nova scotia, and came back this past sunday night (left portland, me at 11 a.m. and got home just before 11 p.m.). stayed in kittery me, port greville ns, antigonish ns (home of the highland games!), two nights in baddeck ns (in the lovely cape breton island), then mahone bay ns, then portland me, then home. got errands to run today or i'd sit and compose a nice creative detailed blog about it, but i will tell more i promise inshallah! got to run for now... have a wedding to shoot this weekend too and got to get ready...

night nursing

2007-08-16T22:46:00.000-04:00

okay so reading these stories makes me feel SO much better about night nursing at this stage! i've been looking everywhere for information on nursing at night, etc, and so much of it has to do with babies who are one year or younger. it's different with a toddler. and it's so good to know there are people out there who night nurse and co sleep even up to 20 months - i felt like such a reject, or such a lazy mom (like i couldn't be doing this for his sake, it must be for mine...) (yeah, i just grew to love not sleeping through the night myself anymore!). best of all, it is good to read that it is POSSIBLE, and not only that, but not too awful in the end, to wean at night, keep co-sleeping, keep nursing in the day, etc. of course this all depends on musa and how he takes it, but i think it's getting to be time to night wean at least. maybe in a month or two? i think it'll help his sleep schedule and his daytime eating habits, or at least i hope so inshallah. well, i'm going to bookmark that page and return to it again and again. thank Allah for la leche league, even though i've never actually called them...

can i just add - sweet berry salad dressings pair absolutely PERFECTLY with red onion in the salad! oh how lovely. only walnuts could make it better...

yaum-e-azadi mubarak

2007-08-16T09:00:00.000-04:00

actually i would have forgotten (until i saw the date maybe?) if i hadn't seen my dad's blog this morning, which is really a remarkable story as i commented...

but my head is occupied with other things - the dryer that is on the fritz (now where did that expression come from? i mean originate?) my broken toe (right foot, fourth proximal phalanx) which i still have to tape back up again, although i'm going to see an orthopedist in about an hour so maybe i shouldn't bother?, and waking musa up and getting him ready in time to go with me - which means in about 20 minutes. so i really should go get him ready now. only i have to wait for the washing machine to finish.

blah blah. going to NC this weekend for my bro's friend's walima inshallah. it's going to be a task getting down there - hubby not going, so i'm going with bro and bhabhi, and i've got to meet them in DC (capitol hill, where bhabhi works) by like 9:30 in the morning (bachcha samayd) so we can pile the babies together for the (at least) five-hour drive down. inshallah! it will be nice to see everyone, and especially to visit my parents with both babies - my nephew is now walking too mashallah! - but it is such a short visit for all that! coming back on sunday inshallah.

thisssss is such a pointless blog. let me make it pointful. so i finally tore myself away from rereading deathly hallows, and oddly enough it was a nonfiction book that got me to do so - george tenet's autobio piece, at the center of the storm: my years at the CIA... and i will tell you more about that later because musa is awake himself now (good boy!) and i must go get him!

updates?

2007-08-08T16:52:00.000-04:00

1) i think my toe is broken. getting x-ray tomorrow to find out. meanwhile i am limping around taking care of baby while preparing for a dinner party tonight. i am superwoman. rah!

2) baby can, on command, if he's not otherwise distracted and feels like cooperating, identify by grabbing, hitting or poking, his nose, ear, hair, eye, bellybutton, foot, hand, and wee wee. working on mouth, chin and knee. he climbs up onto the coffee table, walks back and forth, and gives lectures about various things in his own language, with a lot of gesturing and pointing.

3) nothing else really. i'm still rereading deathly hallows instead of delving into anna karenina.

order of the phoenix, and books

2007-08-03T12:07:00.001-04:00

*book five spoilers ahead, for losers who haven't read that book yet* *but no book 7 spoilers don't worry!*

last night, thanks to my dearest little sister raheela, i finally got to see a movie in the theater for the first time since before musa was born! if you can believe it, it's been long enough that i was shocked by the price ($9.50 adult)... i remember paying 2 pounds 50 p at the odeon on nicholson st in edinburgh in 1997... (which at the time was a little less than $5). okay so it hasn't been THAT long, but still!
i had forgotten the size of the faces onscreen, the occasional flickering (i get a better picture on my widescreen TV at home... in fact that's a big reason i haven't tried to get to the theater sooner, b/c we have blockbuster.com membership and such a great screen at home). and i had forgotten the crowd - when sirius was killed, the soundtrack suddenly dwindled to a few moments of silence, in which we heard a woman actually begin to sob out loud in the audience. the last time i heard that was actually in the nicholson street odeon, while watching titanic, in the scene where rose wakes up all frosted on the floating door in the wide cold atlantic under the stars, and tries to wake jack up where he is floating frozen to death in the water - actually more than one girl in the audience was sobbing. that scene actually has always haunted me - not the jack and rose scene, at all - but at one point the camera pans out from the gigantic carcass of the boat and the struggling, screaming blue people in the water so that they are all just specks in a tremendous nightbound ocean, and just the thought of all those lives, those tiny brightnesses, lost in such a mass of black water underneath such a mass of black sky...)
BUT i digress, tangents and tangents away.

so of course i enjoyed the movie and the cast - particularly radcliffe, rickman and bonham-carter. OOTP was the longest book so of course they could not include everything... but i still felt like aside from harry, we didn't really get to see much character in any of the other characters, even ron and hermione. they were sort of flat or shallow support on the side. little things helped - like just showing the look on ginny's face whenever harry seemed to prefer cho - but then there wasn't much of harry and cho, just that one kiss, then the betrayal of the D.A.... and ron was basically just there for a few one-liners, maybe a good idea here and there. i thought harry and sirius's relationship was very well done. i'm looking forward to the sixth movie precisely because it explores voldemort's character in depth - why he is who he is - and through the process we end up understanding harry and dumbledore better, too. of course, best of all is how we finally come to understand snape in book 7, but i won't say anything more about that!!

anyway. i've been so consumed by knowing at last how harry's story ends, particularly the snape-related bits, that it's been difficult for me to get into other books. i couldn't even get into kiran desai's inheritance of loss, and ended up having to return it without reading it (i couldn't renew it because it was on request). i do still want to read it, though. well, when i returned my books i got a new batch, including anna karenina (which i've tried unsuccessfully to read before but am determined to complete because i once had a colleague, when i worked at borders in 1999, whom i respected very much, named stephen becker, who told me if he could recommend one book in the whole store to read above all others, it was anna karenina. becker - we all called him that - was a 40 or 50-something man who biked 8 miles to work every day, lean and mustachioed, who once told me how he dropped out of school and went to australia with no more than $20 left, and never went to college, yet his knowledge of the english literary canon and much more beyond was better and deeper than mine, and i had just completed my master's) and a children's story by tolkien i never knew existed, roverandom, and of course morgan llywelyn's 1972. this last one was just as "unputdownable" as the other irish century books, but i didn't find all the characters as compelling. well, to be specific, barbara kavanagh, who was a ditzy brat who was even anti-republican, without even really understanding what it was all about. i don't find it believable that barry could have truly loved her - i can't see true love existing between people who can't meet on a mental level - she would be something like his solace, the fire he turns to in order to escape the cold realities of the violence in his life, but that means he can never share his true passion, for a unified ireland, with her. but, people get married for different reasons... other than that, i found it fascinating as usual. i sometimes get lost in the politics and names - the IRA first split into three, then it was two (the provisionals and the officials?) - and somewhere along the line i lost the connection of religion to the whole affair (why is it that catholics are nationalists and the protestants are unionists? or do i have that wrong?) if abu sinan ever finds his way to this blog entry maybe he can explain it for me :)
anyway, i'm assuming that llywelyn is presenting a certain vision of history in these books, although i think she tries to maintain a sort of objective view by not blanketing anyone as "the badguys" (except for maybe the english), even though she's most definitely sympathetic with the idea of a unified ireland. can't say i blame her :) and can't wait to read the last one 1999 which i didn't realize until i went to the library to find it that it's not coming out till next february :(

i am so excited because in the last few days i've noticed musa (now 16 months old) is starting to bring me books to read to him, and actually staying long enough to hear one or two pages, sometimes more, and point at pictures on the page and babble. he's showing interest in books! mashallah! i've been waiting for this since the day he was born... i just hope it lasts inshallah. they say to help instill a love of reading, parents should let their children see them reading a lot - well that's pretty much all i do at home for leisure, other than websurf. for musa's education, for all my children, what i want more than anything else is to instill a love of reading, because i feel like that's the foundation for every other part of education - the willingness and ability to seek, find and understand information. for now, i already know he has the determination... just have to focus it on this other than climbing the sofa to reach that plant or squirming and screaming until you take him out of the high chair to let him run around... inshallah! :)
oh btw, we found three more teeth coming out in the recesses of his mouth! in the process of finding them i got bitten on the cuticle hard enough to draw blood... ah well, stick your hand in a shark's mouth, expect to see blood! MUSA!
anyhoo. now he finds his nose, and ears, and occasionally hair, on request, and he goes to pick up the green ball when you ask for it, and goes "wuhwuhwuh" when you ask what the dog says, if he feels like it... such fun! mashallah. love this age, can't wait for more communication though. inshallah.
okay must go "accomplish something" today...

homebirthing - unassisted?

2007-07-31T10:47:00.000-04:00

this article from today's wpost discusses "free birth," meaning giving birth at home without the assistance of any trained professionals - just you and your hubby and other kids.
my first reaction is - hey, even in days of yore they had midwives...
(musa is standing on the ottoman which he has just recently learned to climb and giving nobody in particular a lecture, which involves a lot of gesturing toward the plant i told him he couldn't touch)(ha! i've outsmarted him(for now) by turning the ottoman on its short side so it's too tall for him to climb... now he's gone off to climb the windowsill instead)
anyway! so, i have two friends who had midwife-assisted homebirths, which seemed to have been the successful and empowering experiences they were hoping for. i am thinking of using a midwife instead of a doctor next time (no, i'm not pregnant) inshallah - at a birthing center though, at least! - even though my experience with doctor and hospital last time was not such a bad thing. sure, i got the attitude that i was crazy for not getting an epidural, etc., but i also got a lot of support from the nurses through pushing, etc., which i did while squatting. i did have an episiotomy, which i don't regret (thankfully it healed well) but i think it was a medical decision that was probably not entirely necessary (the doc was basically like, you should have delivered by now... and i probably would have torn otherwise... but there is a perspective that would answer - why is that? is there a specific time bracket in which any given woman "should have delivered"? again - not that i am upset i didn't have to push any longer...)
i can completely understand the sentiment behind free birth - it's the same that makes me shy away from the medicalization of most childbirth, the quickness to induce, the pressure for epidurals, the overuse of c-section, and then the intrusive, restraining monitoring during labor, etc... but... to me the hospital, or at least the proximity of a medical professional, is a precaution at least. sure, it's not necessary most of the time, especially for healthy young mothers, and sure babies and mothers die in hospitals, too, but generally that's because the docs have done whatever they can and nothing else can be done... why risk not even having that option? yes, women have done it by themselves - often with the herblore and experience of midwives - for centuries, but mother and infant mortality was also sky-high for those centuries. the absorption of childbirth into the medical world helped to drastically reduce those mortality rates. perhaps it went too far, in making childbirth a medical procedure when it is in fact a completely natural physical process, but that's no reason to turn your back on it completely at the risk of endangering yourself or your baby. i'd prefer to use it as much as i need to, and claim the rest of the experience for my own...

hp hype (no spoilers, don't fret)

2007-07-27T22:18:00.000-04:00

you know... there's so much of it (the hype that is), that i feel like even after two reads i can't truly say whether or not it was a "good book." i mean, i HAD to read it and find out what happened to the characters, there were parts that made me chuckle aloud and others where i teared up, etc... but it's like the plot and explanations were so important (because millions of people were waiting to find out how the story ends) that the storytelling itself seems almost marginalized... of course, i've said from book 4 on that her writing has improved and developed tremendously since book one - this is no LOTR, it's not meant to be, but it's the very best kind of child fantasy (who wouldn't like to wake up one day and find something utterly magical has transformed your miserable existence into something fraught with high adventure and uplifted by truest friendship?) AND it's what they call a rollicking good read... i felt the same way about the chronicles of narnia, despite its flaws - that scene with lucy walking into the wardrobe and coming out of the wardrobe, ha ha, into this magical, snow-covered, spellbound land - what kid doesn't want to discover a magical country with a secret entrance? (i dunno, maybe a kid who would rather have dinner to eat every day and shoes on their feet. i realize even as i write that i'm speaking from the midst of privilege and comfort, and the luxury to escape the mundane into imagination, although i would argue that frances hodgson burnett's sara crewe might beg to differ, but then, she was one of a kind, wasn't she?)...
my leg, on which rests my sleeping, nursing baby, is asleep too, though not nursing...

on books i'm reading

2007-07-26T11:30:00.000-04:00

*** HARRY POTTER SPOILERS AT THE END OF THE POST!!!!***

not quite here, but toward the end of the post. i'll put another warning banner in before i type them, i promise!
anyway, out of my last batch of books, the ones i most enjoyed were morgan llywelyn's 1921 and 1949. i have not read all of her ancient ireland books, and have yet to read the ones about brian boru, etc., but i've read a few and enjoyed them greatly, and the irish century novels top them all. even i didn't think i'd be more captivated by recent irish history than ancient, yet these were practically spellbinding, for someone with a totally irrational love of ireland. placing her fictional characters into history and telling their story so well is one thing, but the passion and detail with which she portrays the irish yearning and fight for freedom - for the right to be fully who they are or who they could become - is even more compelling. and it's just the icing on the cake to follow the character of henry mooney, a journalist bent on truth-telling and objectivity despite his own desires for freedom...

what else... oh, i finally got a copy of pamela dean's tam lin, part of terri windling's fairy tale series (of old fairy-tales retold in various ways). this is the second pamela dean book i've read, and i'm trying oh i really truly am, and i do think she writes beautifully, but... maybe i'm just too stupid for her? i was halfway through tam lin before i realized i was still waiting for the story to really start, for the fairy tale, really, and then i realized it wasn't like that at all, it's a beautifully told story of a bunch of slightly strange artsy college students out in the midwest... and that's all, even though the cover painting of a tall, russet-haired, otherworldly woman draped in flowing folds indicates something else entirely... i enjoy the occasionally oblique references to literature but many of them just leave me feeling dumb, like i ought to redo my english major (and master's!), though the tolkien references are liberally sprinkled in too... btw, i started this after i finished HP on sunday morning, but i stopped 3/4 of the way through to reread HP a second time, which i am almost finished doing...

i read john mcwhorter's doing our own thing: the degradation of language and music and why we should, like, care, because i am interested in the english language and i do respect it, but it was a little disappointing. the first third of the book or so i was moderately amused - he's certainly a witty writer - but i got tired of the repeated idea that if one were to use truly proper, eloquent english in, say, an email, one would be disowned by one's friends, or deported to a psychiatric facility, or taken for a martian, by way of attempting to describe just how outlandish the use of written-style, articulate english has become, in favor of conversational. i mean, i know i'm an oddity, but i wrote those kinds of emails all the time in college... and i actually did admire a couple of professors of mine for just how beautifully they used the english language... sure, i've been joshed (can that word be used that way?) for using big or archaic words here and there, but to be honest, it's been a while, and if you go and read my brother's blog (even though he's a lame-o loser and barely ever blogs) you'll see that i can't even match his articulation anymore, as my hubby so kindly pointed out to me last night :) even i remember, in middle school, the thrill of using freestyle versus formal, particularly in poetry classes, where i wrote unbridled nonsensical and very poetic free verse in lieu of bound because i didn't like strictures on my writing... wish i could do it now! so, i guess i can sort of see what he means by the change in americans' perception of authority (and by extension or association, formality) in the late 60's, what with the truths about vietnam being revealed, and other cultural changes going on, etc., but it doesn't resound like epiphany or anything. one thing i do completely agree with, however - if you don't use it, you lose it. i'm a living, languishing example...

and finally, ***ON TO THE HARRY POTTER SPOILERS!!!***
well, to my thoughts, which will include some spoilers.

so don't look below this if you haven't finished yet!

you have been warned!!

i like that snape's undying love for lily proves what dumbledore said from day one: that love is stronger than any other power. i like that harry's ultimate test of courage is one of allowing something to happen, rather than doing something. on my second reading, i almost couldn't wait to get to reread snape's ending, and harry going forth to meet voldemort, and then his final conversation with dumbledore...
i did think the whole dursley situation in the beginning was sort of abrupt - particularly dudley's "change of heart" - and especially with the tantalizing bits we hear about petunia later, in snape's memory, i would have liked for something more to be resolved with her, though i guess it wasn't that important to the story.
i felt like the trio's apparating treks through the countryside dragged on a little - never sure where they were or why - and it was a little disorienting to be shifting so much between episodes of great detail (godric's hollow, for instance) and sections in which entire weeks passed by within a paragraph or two. but i felt this less the second time around.
i think this will make a great movie... but i imagine they would like to show a little more of what is happening in hogwarts during the story, rather than only at the end. i did miss hogwarts while reading this book, though i didn't realize it until neville tottered out of that painting in the hog's head.
i am almost finished with my second reading, but i am still confused as to how harry was still alive after V hit him with the killing curse for the second time - unless it was just that he volunteered for the sacrifice? did voldemort only succeed in killing that part of himself that was inside harry - was that the snivelling, maimed child-figure that harry saw? i'm thinking that the prophecy meant harry had to "die" in order for voldemort to be able to die...
other things... i was sort of surprised that harry used two of the unforgivable curses - obviously not avada kedavra - though i realize the stakes were high and it probably saved the lives of the people around him as well as his own. i could understand his trying to use the cruciatus curse on bellatrix right after she killed sirius, but when he used it on alecto in the ravenclaw common room and mcgonagall said it was "gallant" of him... anyone else think that was a little weird? not a message i would want any kids reading it to take lightly...
anyway, i have other things to do, like write an article and change a poopy diaper, so, more on HP later!!! (yes, when i see or type HP, i do think of brown sauce before i think of harry...)

update: okay, finished second reread. two things: one, that child-being harry saw after he "died" was not the part of V that was inside him - it WAS voldemort, who also sort of temporarily "died" - when harry came to minutes later, he became aware of voldemort being tended to be his death eaters, and then getting up from the ground. and later he tells V - "i've seen what you'll become". remember the creature wormtail used to return V to a body at the end of Goblet of Fire? that raw-skinned, snake-faced, helpless, child-like creature? that is voldemort. and that is how he would - will - spend eternity, in what they're calling the Potterverse...
the other thing: anyone else out there feel like they wanted to know what harry would "be" when he grew up? he had wanted to be an auror, but i guess that field died out. i always thought he might end up taking dumbledore's place, but that didn't seem to happen either. i suppose it's enough to know he's happily married into the weasley family, but still... he's got to do SOMETHING with the rest of his life, and why not hogwarts?

musa is sleeping, my article was due two hours ago and i still haven't interviewed anyone (i tried starting tuesday and people kept telling me they would be there the next day and they weren't), i have to leave for dinner at someone's house at 4:30, which is just over two hours away, and before i do that i have to make potato salad and a dessert, and before i do THAT i have to go get some groceries... or maybe i'll just make do with what i've got??

deathly hallows

2007-07-22T10:44:00.000-04:00

finished at 3:22 a.m. today! just a couple of things i must mention - i KNEW that for some reason, dumbledore had wanted snape to kill him, and i was right! and i figured snape's ultimate secret had something to do with some twist with harry's family, though i didn't have it exactly figured out.
i can't tell you if it was really a good book, because i read it so fast just to figure out what happened, so i'll have to go back to it.
anyway!

sippy cups, etc

2007-07-10T18:45:00.000-04:00

is it possible at all for someone to develop a sippy cup or straw cup for learning toddlers that 1) actually does not leak, 2) has a valve that is easily removable AND cleanable and easily put-back-in-able, 3) will not develop unremovable gunk if a drink stays in there as long as it actually takes for the child to finish the drink?
like all of those things, not just one of them.
argh!

just got the "nuby" straw cup, and the whole valve combination thingy is so irritating to take out and put in - i need extra tools just to get it right, because if i don't get it just right it leaks. it's great when it's put together just right though, but i gotta get this kid on a proper cup fast, because i only started using the nuby yesterday and i am already sick of cleaning it... meanwhile i had to throw out one of the gerber handled sippy cups i had, and yes folks, i did clean it regularly, but the milk he drank left this weird hard, rash-like residue in the inside corners of the soft sippy spout part which are literally impossible to clean...

random stuff

2007-07-09T14:16:00.000-04:00

reading snow by orhan pamuk. last of the most recent list, for which, scroll down somewhat. enjoying it! oh what a terrible word. enjoy. i ought to erase it from my vocabulary. but... as a novel it breaks some rules: lots of narrator intrusion in the first person, lots of telling instead of showing, but still it's good. i'm not too far along yet... eager to see how this treatment of "the battle within" islam (as a recent CNN segment on those fulminating mullahs and rows of swaying boys in madrassas titled it) plays out... i love the snow of it. but. i'm not so sure about the main character, ka, yet. i feel like i don't know him well enough to believe he can meet up with terrorists and let friends (whom he doesn't like) get pummeled by police with such equanimity (or maybe i don't know him well enough to sense his non-equanimity). blarg blarg.

interesting (another word to erase from the vocab) argument brought up by one of the characters: i'm used to the argument - if God really exists, then how can he allow all this poverty and suffering in the world? well, this character asks the opposite: if God doesn't exist, how do you explain all the poverty and suffering in the world? if there's no God, there's no heaven, and what's the point of all this suffering if it's not going to be eased in a next life?

in some sections i get the strange feeling that pamuk is trying to make some characters look stupid and i'm not getting it, for some reason.... maybe me stoopid too!

what else. just got back from a semi-relaxing (minus a wedding) trip to the parents' place in NC. so happy to see the grandparents happy with the grandchildren. so much fun to see my son and nephew together! good to see old friends again. nice to not have to clean my house.

cousin koonj is back from pakistan!! my dear friend taiyyaba is back from syria and pakistan all married and everything. i got to see tibs but i dunno when i'll see koonj :(

must go get things done...

futility

2007-06-22T22:04:00.000-04:00

i have the lights on brightly, my son in his high chair right in the doorway of the kitchen where he can watch everything. a turkey-bolognese sauce bubbling on the back burner, fusilli-with-flax and multi-grain alphabet pasta boiling under frothy white surfaces in their respective pans on the front burners. i have "the best of cat stevens" thrumming and soaring from the living room CD player. upbeat, hopeful, "moonshadow", then "peace train". i sing the songs using a pastry brush as a microphone, dancing in the tiny kitchen making smiles and giggles blossom on musa's dear little face. i start to sway side to side with him as he "dances" in the high chair.

how many ways are there to chase off loneliness?

...

later: and why does it hurt so to watch musa tonight, as he slides off my lap after nursing, watching his reflection in the dark window, squatting down to play with his drum, looking at the window again and smiling? why is it so melancholy to realize his world is so small, this is it - me, the living room - and he does not feel the loneliness of it, only the comfort and security?
oh lordy, he's started throwing things...

beauty and the beast

2007-06-22T12:30:00.000-04:00

not really, but you remember that scene in the disney movie where the beast takes belle into the library and uncovers her eyes, and the "camera" pans over this fantastic, towering room lined on every wall with thousands of books, up to the ceiling, and these gorgeous full-wall windows just pouring sunlight onto everything?

okay, so the howard county public library system isn't quite like that. but it feels that way, prowling through the stacks and knowing i can pick up any book i like, as many as i like... it's treasure, gold, delicious, anticipation!

i went yesterday, and last night finished the first of the books: kim edwards' the memory keeper's daughter. read the first few chapters very closely, as it had to do with labor and delivery, moments still very close in my own memory, and i read or listen to anyone's experience this way: remembering my own, comparing. and the rest of the book opened further into experiences i cannot yet compare: the children as they grow, up and away and apart, and it all made me think (between lines, between pages) of what i may have already done to cement musa's memories of his childhood in a certain light, or what i may do unwittingly in the future, for him to look back and reflect and say, man, i wish things had been different... but that was my childhood and this is my life and this is who i am now...
one thing (of many things) edwards does so beautifully is to paint so clear a picture of the wall that rises in her characters' family, the secret that they grow up around without even knowing it, like trees twisting around a stone, she writes somewhere. ... it's very satisfying to read a novel that carries you through decades of the characters' lives, so you see how things begin and how things end, but i wonder how it is written... i wonder how difficult it is to write about someone in their 40s, 50s, 60s, without having been there oneself?

anyway. very excited about the rest of the books in my bag:

Snow by Orhan Pamuk
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (one of my favorite movies, never read the book)
Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam
1916 by Morgan Llywellyn
The Optimists by Andrew Miller
Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending Against Poverty by Muhammad Yunus
Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America by John McWhorter

lots to keep me busy and away from the TV!!
laptop battery is dying, so i must go...

muslim country music singer!

2007-06-15T10:55:00.000-04:00

impressive voice mashallah! i might just get this CD. soo nice to see an example of a muslim with real talent following his heart like this, and producing something that can reach out to people...

success!

2007-06-11T08:36:00.000-04:00

i have successfully left musa for seven and a half hours with his daddy! and he was sick too. actually we're all sick :(.
anyway i had to shoot a wedding last night. and i am beat, in the truest sense of the word: i feel like my shoulders and my lower back have been battered, and the tendons in my left forearm are aching, my wrist and fingers even. that is how out-of-shape i am... just using a flash frame (for the first time), holding it up constantly, and firmly enough to shift the camera sideways and back again within the frame, has wrecked my arm.
i'm looking at the pics now, to see how they've come out... very nerve-wracking, the whole thing. brides are already stressed out, by events and their dreams for their wedding, and by family members, that having a photographer with unreliable equipment is almost unforgivable. and my equipment was being very unreliable last night! but, that's the fun of having a 6 GB memory card - at least i had room to play, and the fun of digital - at least i know i did get some really good shots, alhamdulillah. and thank God for photoshop!

but my musa was sick, and last night i didn't sleep very well either... waking up for coughing fits and then finding it hard to go back to sleep. musa did cough in the night, but at least it didn't wake him up. still sleeping right now this morning...

100th post

2007-06-05T18:14:00.001-04:00

vah vah!!
so musa is 14 months old, 14 months and 3 days to be exact. hubby just took him to drop him off at MIL's for the evening, because i have not been feeling well (sore throat for two days, threw up last night, coughing today, weakness, etc) so he said i should have a break.
but everything in me rebels against such a break... it was such a difficult journey to get to the point where musa WAS my entire life, and now - to have a whole evening, even if it's just 2.5 hours, to myself... i don't even know what to do! (so, i blog). well, i have plenty of options: cleaning (there's a mess on every floor), halaqa (short, 7-8:30), writing (i have this book in my head that i'm afraid to write out because i think when i stop and read it back it's going to seem inordinately stupid), watching TV (a definite no...).. or just forget it all and lie down and read since i am not feeling well to begin with. all of this of course worrying about musa the whole time... it is nervewracking leaving a breastfeeding-only baby anywhere for any length of time!! but i have to this friday (mehndi clients at the salon to decorate, that will be at least three hours) and sunday again (at least 5.5 hours, likely 6, for a wedding i'm photographing). so i figured it was best to give musa a head-start with some practice beforehand.

people are sooo taken aback when they hear how much musa is still nursing (3-4 times a day, at least, plus 3-5 times a night, though the night nursing is more just comfort to go back to sleep, he doesn't get much nutrition out of it). i think i need to find some other people to talk to... it's going to be like this pretty much until i start weaning him, and i have no reason to start weaning now (and i'm not planning on ferberizing). i'm sure i will have better perspective with the next baby inshallah but right now i can only read books, take advice and go with my gut...

anyway. so, i'm thinking, if i actually stop blogging now, i could do a little cleaning (maybe part of one floor?) then go to the halaqa, come back and still have time to write a little bit? that sounds so exhausting... well, i'll figure it out.

o, the house is so quiet and i'm so alone...
not a sound can be discerned, not even a phone;
just the hum of computers; a sneeze from next door;
and the sound of my own thoughts, which i can't ignore:

o, he's all by himself, and without me he'll cry!
and o, why did i let him go, please tell me why?
well, because, my mind answers me, someday you must,
and it's no bad thing leaving him with one you trust.

so let go with your hands and hold on with your heart,
and then all will be fine, even when you're apart!

hahaha. see this is why i don't write poems regularly. they're more ditties than poems, really... more about the rhyme than saying anything important. if koonj wrote about the same thing, it would be some searing, wrenching free verse that touches even people who don't have kids. but hey... maybe i can write a kids' book or something? :)

okay well i'm running out of time to make any decisions so off i go... meanwhile, want a picture? a non musa pic. here is a shot of a flower i took in may with my macro lens...

update:
so, i didn't do much cleaning - just picked up musa's toys, and put away some laundry and am washing some more now - tested out my lights for the formal portraits i'm shooting at the wedding sunday, they are a go - skipped the halaqa.
more importantly - musa was fine alhamdulillah, he went to sleep maybe 45 minutes ago and hubby is on his way to pick him up now, so they should be home by 10ish. so glad. this is the problem with early breastfeeding motherhood... nothing is ever quite alright until baby is in your arms, nursing and fully comforted. how am i going to get past this? argh...

musa update

2007-05-23T18:12:00.000-04:00

did i mention that musa is "saying namaaz" now? it's only whenever the mood strikes him, and in his own way, but he stands up, and then bends over all the way so his head is on the floor, then comes back up but squatting and bends his head back, moving his lips mysteriously, then bends forward into sajda again. today he did it with me when i started my dhuhr prayer, and on occasion he will do it when i ask him, "do you want to say namaaz?"
i never intended to teach it to him in such half urdu half english. i meant to teach him "make salaah" or something like that. but something about babies brings out the urdu in me, for some reason...

still not really any identifiable words, except for "baa baa" for byebye (accompanied by a miss-universe wave) and "DAAA!!" for dog, and apparently for other things as well but definitely for dog. but his understanding is clearly miles ahead of his speaking language... pointing at things he wants and reacting to certain words and phrases. he's getting to be a confident walker mashallah. and his eating is getting a little better alhamdulillah, though he's still waking up like a newborn through the night and will only nurse back to sleep. but i've resigned myself to that for the time being, though i'm starting to think about how on earth i will ever wean him if he doesn't wean himself...

hijabi fashion

2007-05-23T11:34:00.000-04:00

found this interesting to see. a rare instance of a hijabi presented as an ordinary american girl. the subject is "on being fashionable" so don't get discouraged that all she's talking about is hijab and being fashionable with it. still nice to see.

baby is stinky poopy and clients have not come yet, so i'm going to go wash him up...

correction and recommendation

2007-05-22T22:06:00.000-04:00

interesting how history melts into conflicting stories when you look more closely. i picked up a book called Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol by nell irvin painter, only to find out that the speech normally attributed to sojourner truth - "and ar'n't i a woman?" - is actually NOT an exact quote (big deal with journalists like me). there were actually two main sources for the speech Truth did give, in akron, ohio in 1851, and in any case it was certainly an important and powerful speech. one report was written immediately after the fact by a man who knew Truth already, and was therefore familiar with her style, and the other - the one that went down in history - was written by a woman named francis dana gage, about twelve years after the fact - she was in attendance at the speech in question, but only came to know Truth after that speech. so apparently painter's interpretation that gage "invented" the phrase "and ar'n't i a woman?" is pretty controversial, though it seems pretty convincing to me (that if she had said the phrase at all, let alone four times, the writer of the first report probably wouldn't have missed it). also, she was known to have had only five or so children.

this is gage's report of the speech as presented in Wikipedia, though i think gage used the word "ar'n't" instead of "ain't":

Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me any best place!" And raising herself to her full height, and her voice to a pitch like rolling thunder, she asked. 'And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! (and she bared her right arm to the shoulder, showing her tremendous muscular power). I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man--when I could get it--and bear de lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern, and seen 'em mos' all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

truth was a preacher, and often described as having an innate, witty intelligence, though she was unlettered. i had had no idea that she had actually worked at selling herself as a speaker and symbol, had written her narrative and sold it well during her lifetime, or that her children went on to live and die in relative poverty and obscurity... painter's book was fascinating to read and makes me want to read more biographies.

one other recommendation i must make: just finished reading freedom and necessity by stephen brust and emma bull. never read either of them, fantasy writers, but this book was not exactly fantasy, though i kept expecting it to be from reading the cover blurbs (i wonder if there is much money to be had in writing cover blurbs? how do i get that job?). i really enjoyed this book, even though since my style is to read fiction very fast, and this is a densely written (think austen) book with much reference to hegel, marx and engels, of whose philosophies i have only vague ideas, and some social revolutionary concepts in mid-19th century england, i have to say i did not understand everything and may have to read it again. BUT. the characterizations are brilliant, some of the best i've read actually, as is the love story (with all its questioning of what actually constitutes love between two characters who are so unwilling to let their guards down). definitely recommend - abu sinan, if you're reading this, i thought of you in particular, even though this isn't technically "celtic" (though of course celticness pops up quite often).

so the house is clean and i'm sitting here waiting for the clients to show up and come see, keeping musa confined in the playpen behind me so he can't make a mess i have to scramble to clean up as soon as i hear the door open upstairs. not working though...

"sandwiched" by wendy's

2007-05-09T23:58:00.000-04:00

i can't find the video, but has anyone seen that recent wendy's ad for its double-melt burger (cheese and jalapenos and other stuff stuck between two burgers)? basically it's this guy in a window-side airplane row, in the middle seat, while the plane is boarding. then these two hot chicks - for that is all they are supposed to be - come and sit on either side of him and they're all smiling as he eats his wendy's burger. and the voice-over says something along the lines of being stuck in the middle isn't always bad... wendy's new burger has melted pepper jack cheese, cheddar sauce, bacon and sliced jalapenos between "two juicy fresh never frozen beef patties", and you see this guy sitting between the two smiling beautiful women. like, wth??? and nobody is saying anything about this ad? i mean, if they are, tell me about it, coz i'd like to see it. but a brief googling hasn't shown me anything. yikes. anyway i did find this article about another promotion for that particular burger, including free $1 gift cards for middle-seat passengers over thanksgiving weekend.

man, those fast-food burgers are nasty enough - i just watched fast food nation a few nights ago so i'm really feeling that - but then to see women compared to them... isn't this what everybody got in a stink over for that imam in australia, comparing women to "uncovered meat"? well, here in america, we just use the analogy of the ultimate man-food, a burger, instead...

on "feminism" (or one book at least)

2007-04-27T16:53:00.001-04:00

... in "quotes" because the word is so loaded and means so many different things to so many different people.
anyway. my last batch of books from the library include these:
- operating instructions: a journal of my son's first year by anne lamott
- etruscans by morgan llywelyn and micheal scott
- white as snow by tanith lee
- on beauty by zadie smith
- war talk by arundhati roy
- who cooked the last supper? the women's history of the world by rosalind miles

it's this last book i want to blog about. briefly, though: "etruscans" was sort of disappointing, compared with the other ML books i have read so far; "white as snow" was lyrical and disturbing, a great read; "operating instructions" was certainly relevant, although AL was a single mother/freelancer at the time so her situation was rather different; i had already read some of the essays in "war talk" before but was struck anew by roy's passion for what she writes about - want to post in here a passage from one essay i particularly liked; and honestly i have to look at "on beauty" again - maybe i was just sleepy at the end and read it in too many sittings, but i got to the end and was totally surprised it was the end, it just didn't seem to resolve much or give much meaning to what was a mostly engaging (dare i say occasionally boring?) read... i got more out of "white teeth" which is why i say i should look at "on beauty" again coz i don't trust my reaction quite yet.

ANYWAY. so, the women's history of the world. my first thought when i picked it up to read was to wonder if it was really the women's history of the world or the women's history of the western world, since that's what "history" tends to be. but miles did a good job of being inclusive, even if she wasn't quite objective. still, it's a short book, not heavy on primary sources, definitely heavy on the author's perspective.

here's the gist: in the beginning, there was the goddess, and people worshipped her because women possessed the miracle of life and the mystery of menstruation, and nobody knew that men had anything to do with it. then, humans started figuring out cause and effect, and men figured out they had something to do with life too, so everything swung in the opposite direction and woman was just the vessel, not the originator. then monotheism came along and with its power structure (one God, one truth) and God-the-father being at the head of it, women, being not male like God (astaghfirullah, etc) were even further subdued. now, in order to truly free themselves, women must free their bodies - "if she could rescue herself from the endless cycle of sexual activity, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, pregnancy, then personal growth and social identity were possible."

so this book was not hugely informative or radical reading or anything like that, but it helped to sort of gauge my own position with regard to one kind of feminism at least. though i don't claim that miles defines feminism for anyone else. i find her argument as i understood it sort of inherently problematic - that early female-centered societies were based on ignorance of science, that the advent of greater human understanding fueled the repression of women, and that in order to break that repression women have to free themselves from the way their bodies naturally work (i.e., you have sex, you get pregnant). it's kind of like she's saying that science and truth and nature indicate or lead to the dominance of men, and we (women) have to shake off that science and truth and nature to be truly free. i might be wrong, but that's what i'm getting out of the book. i admit, i'm biased toward motherhood right now... not saying it's the epitome of womanhood necessarily (for if so, what is the epitome of manhood?) but i do believe it allows a completely new level of self to develop, if you can do it without erasing yourself, which is not always easy... funny, one of my pregnancy books described pregnant women as "the ultimate expression of female sexuality... the goddess incarnate"... which takes us right back to the matriarchal beginning, according to miles. so does sticking with the natural cycle hobble you from becoming all you can be, or make you into all you can be, or at least open a new path for you, if it closes other ones?

(hehe... i have musa cooped up in the playpen behind me so i can get at least part of this typed up without having to get up and pry his hands off of something every two seconds, and he is fussing, but just now he got quiet, so i turned around, and he was standing waving his hand over the edge, watching his shadow wave its hand on the ground... so cute!)

anyway, on the issue of freeing women from that cycle (which means unlimited contraception and abortion, practically) - i don't think complete sexual freedom for women leads to the best society we can hope for - i understand the impulse behind the idea, that men have always had such freedom because they have no consequences for their actions (in this world, lads, in this world!). let me amend - i don't think complete sexual freedom for everyone leads to the best society we can hope for. why not finally hold men accountable for their actions, rather than simply try to be as stringless as men?
but i realize her argument is a little more complex than that - it has to do with ownership of one's body, which she describes by the ability to CHOOSE whom one has sex with and CHOOSE to have a baby or not, but also includes defying the idea that a woman is the property of her family and is then transferred to the property of her husband, never really being her OWN person in anyone's eyes, which was something i railed much against in my youth...

so i get the fact that women have been treated as inferior to men for centuries in just about every culture, in varying degrees. no doubt, and no doubt we have suffered tremendously for it. i'm not going to delve here into solutions or my thoughts on why, etc... have neither the guts for the questions or the knowledge for the answers, right now ... but i do think this book is a good read, if for nothing else simply because i like reading about women's issues, and that it does a decent job of describing women's situations in historical contexts that otherwise don't consider them (how working women suffered during the western world's industrialization period, for example). plus, more importantly perhaps, miles names or gives a face to a number of women from "the beginning" who succeeded (in fulfilling their own potential) despite the odds against them, which is always refreshing to learn. but, it doesn't exactly do for women what howard zinn did for "the people" in the people's history of the united states, which is one of the best books i have ever read...

i was interested to see what miles made of the advent of islam. basically, she noted that all three monotheistic religions made women inferior beings, subject to fathers' and husbands' rules, though she also noted that the founders of those religions made efforts to alleviate the position of women (just adding that it didn't work because of the hierarchical power structure inherent in the faith systems). the problem is, she quotes and references the Qur'an by taking quotes from other scholarly works, not directly from the Qur'an. like in one place, she claims that the Prophet Muhammad was barricaded in his house surrounded by pagan goddess-worshipers, when he "conveniently" received a revelation that the trifold goddesses (al-lat, al-uzza, al-manat) were actually still around, a revelation that he canceled later... like where the heck is that from?
another example: on p. 95, she says, "The Koran makes it clear that the only virtuous woman was a mother: 'When a woman conceives by her husband, she is called in PAradise a martyr, and her labor in child-bed and her care of her children protect her from hellfire.'" (tried to find an ayah like this, not able to yet, but if you know which one she is trying to refer to please let me know!). i recognize the idea behind this "verse" though i always thought it was that a woman who died in childbirth was considered a martyr... but anyway. her reference for this quotation is a 1965 book, "The Jewel in the Lotus: a historical survey of the sexual culture of the East," by one Allen Edwardes. apart from my distaste at such a title, how does a verse rewarding what almost every woman has to go through get twisted around to be saying that they are the ONLY women who will be rewarded and therefore this is a sexist reductionist idea?

and she talks about the creation story as though it is the same for all three religions, never indicating that in the qur'anic story, it was not Eve who took the first bite and then seduced Adam - the source of centuries of female repression under the christian church - but both who disobeyed God together. aaand.. what else... oh, apparently islam "hijacked" the crescent moon symbol from the goddess religions and the Black Stone supposedly has a mark of aphrodite somewhere on it indicating it originally belonged to the goddess, etc etc. this is according to "one eyewitness," she says.

so these issues sort of invalidate some of the book for me, though i should say 1) she DOES use some primary sources, e.g. she does quote the qur'an directly a couple of times, and 2) she chronicles very well the cultural changes throughout history that affected women one way or another. though she never does tackle the question, "who cooked the last supper?"...

so i don't know what i'm getting from the library next, except i definitely want to find a biography of sojourner truth. aside from the fact that she had such a cool name, i read her famous quote again in miles' book and just would be very interested in learning more. she had thirteen children and saw most of them sold off into slavery... imagine the strength of spirit that took to survive emotionally and psychologically. for her and every other woman who has suffered like that...

random thoughts

2007-04-25T17:56:00.000-04:00

i went to the mall today and noticed some things.
first of all, is it just me or are leggings back in? saw them in ads, saw them on women in the mall. i mean, leggings as in 80s. with long tops and wide belts. leggings.

second of all... it is so (i can't think of a word) to see the contrast between the advertisements plastered larger-than-life across the mall and the oh-so-ordinary people walking by them, trying to look like them. like the leggy cindy crawford in a dress for new york and company, or a smoky-smiling clive owen over a bottle of cologne, or ines sastre looking sultry and slender in a lancome ad, and facing these pictures is a short, bony, hunched-over asian woman with pockmarked skin and glasses, or a

haha i never finished this post but it got published anyway. probably my sneaky husband using my computer!!!

anyway. so i was saying, it just bothers me how far from reality advertising is. people are not like that, and why should we all feel awful and ugly and keep trying to make ourselves look like an airbrushed picture of an abnormal person (okay so maybe clive owen's not abnormal, just a particularly good specimen of normal)... except to spend money? why do we all fall for it? i wish i could raise musa away from advertising entirely... have you ever watched kids' commercials, for toys and such? especially boys' toys? sometimes they actually look angry as they fire their robots at each other... what's that supposed to do, encourage boys to "act like boys" and is that what boys "act like?"

God, i just want to go buy a splotch of land somewhere far away and grow my own sheep and chickens and crops and herbs and stay away from everything. i really wish it were possible... i mean, i wish i were capable of doing it, i know it's a lot more work than i'm used to and i'd probably give up and pine for my comforts. but anyway, i guess it wouldn't constitute being a good Muslim... you know, leaving the world behind and not doing any good for anyone...

anyway, my third thought was that Godiva chocolates are THE BEST boxed chocolates out there, at least in america. try their new roasted almond butter truffle. i mean, at $1.67 for one little ball of chocolate, it's extravagant, but it TASTES extravagant. WOW. oh my. indulge, indulge.

and another thing i wanted to share. went to a restaurant recently for an article. wonderful food, actually, and friendly staff, great place, but they SO need an editor for their menu!!
okay, so i'm being a nerd snob. but i can't help it, it's what my mommy made me :) here are some of the choice errors i found, typed exactly as they were in the menu (some more than once):

Gram cracker crust
Broccoli A gratin
Beur Blanc Sauce
Fillet Mignon
whole main lobster
Red skin potatoes
corn on the cobb
Andouli sausage
Caribbean style Jerked Chicken

okay, on to next post...

at the park with nani and nana

2007-04-19T21:52:00.000-04:00

here is a picture of musa (being held in place on the side by my dad) at pullen park in raleigh - he had so much fun mashallah! (we all did)

"The "Good" Muslims: U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Pakistan"

2007-04-16T22:41:00.000-04:00

just publicizing this study - haven't read through it yet, only this one summarizing page, but the summary at least makes some familiar points (you know, the kind where you're like DUH I'VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL YOU THAT FOR YEARS!!) about u.s. media coverage of islam/the muslim world, in this case specifically pakistan, and even more specifically things like correlating the "freedom" of muslim women with how uncovered they are, conflating all "terrorists" with each other and with militants and extremists and all those dirty violent bearded brown heathen men till they're all the same and political, social, ideological and cultural contexts play no role, etc etc. so this is a study that actually examines the coverage of these issues itself and concludes that it "may still be contributing to public confusion over the need for a global “War on Terror” and the public’s perception of the global terrorist risk." go figure...

virginia tech

2007-04-16T20:36:00.000-04:00

yes, it took me this long to find out what happened. may their families, classmates, teachers and community keep strong. one shooting is always bad enough, but this magnitude leaves me choking and wordless...
in case you didn't hear, here is the temporary web site of the collegiate times, their student newspaper, and if you scroll down to the bottom and read up you get a sense of how the students got their information, and reacted. i worked for maryland's student paper but i can only imagine what the Va tech student newsroom (banished off campus) might have been like today...

in between

2007-04-10T11:40:00.000-04:00

i was so close to my friends in college, that when we began graduating and not being able to meet with each other for months at a time, i began to feel like life was just something that happened in between the time we spent together, which was REAL life.
o how life changes!
this is just an in-between blog, nothing really happening, nothing to really blog about. i'm going to visit my parents for a week inshallah this coming weekend. since i'll be gone next week i have to do my dining review a week early. musa's one year checkup is tomorrow; i have an appointment with the ophthalmologist on friday.
i finished finn mac cool, and since it was the last book in my batch and i haven't had the chance to go to the library again yet, i've been re-reading parts of it here and there... it wasn't profound in any way, no deeper meanings the way white teeth probably had, but it was so deeply evocative of ancient ireland that the images still linger in my mind - the hill and bog of almhain where finn built his home, but in the winter (and who ever thinks of ireland in winter?) with bare branches and tangled berryless vines, the golds and browns of the sleeping land under winter sunlight - i admire how she paints a picture of an entire culture by telling the story of one man who was unlike any other in that culture.

anyway, so i have to go to the library, maybe today? and run a few other errands. musa has taken up to four steps at a time now, but still prefers crawling - much faster, more efficient, i suppose! he's putting my hairbrush or his comb to his head and trying to brush his hair now (this is what the AAP calls a cognitive milestone, using objects as they are meant to be used instead of eating them) although he still eats them too. and occasionally with toys that are beyond his physical skill to use, after i show him how to use them, he will handle them for a minute then hand them back to me, clearly wanting me to do it again (like this little whirlygig launcher he got in a favor bag from a b-day party). still waiting for some more words, though!

alright off we go...

books!

2007-04-05T12:29:00.000-04:00

my article was due half an hour ago and i am still struggling over the lede, and here i am blogging instead!
but i wanted to thank y'all for the book suggestions - last week i checked out two morgan llywelyn books - grania and finn maccool, white teeth by zadie smith and the forest by edward rutherfurd. i started with grania and then the forest, both of which i enjoyed immensely. both historical fiction dealing with the british isles in some way, and both included the defeat of the spanish armada from different perspectives, neither of them really spanish or english. grania tells the story of grace o'malley, a fifteenth-century irishwoman who grew up with her father's love of the sea and became a sea trader and pirate in her own right and once even went to england to face elizabeth herself. and the forest like any good rutherfurd book is a tale of a thousand years, of the new forest in southern england from 1000-something until 2000, tracing the lines and stories of some fictional and some partly fictionalized families as they weave in and out of british history. it's funny, taking such a wide perspective on these individual stories seems to give each of them less weight... the story of one woman's life and trial is captivating on its own but leaves only a family memory of blood feud. and little physical things last - the ancient wooden cross that was brought from the holy land at the start of the last millennium, puckle's old, fantastically carved bed, the seagull family's chinless profile. and people forget things that seem important to their ancestors. ...it's not riveting reading, but it's very good and satisfying on a storytelling level and all.
just finished white teeth today (which, btw, baraka, i picked up instead of on beauty just because it was paperback which is easier to read lying in bed with a sleeping baby and sleeping husband)... honestly it took me the first third or so of the book to get into it, and then it began striking me as brilliant - she was so young, younger than i am now, when she wrote it, and yet she had such vision, to see between classes, between generations, between boys and girls. okay, so it's just one view, and it's what blurbs like to call "irreverent" - she mocks gently, sometimes fiercely, all of her characters and their respective religious or otherwise ideologies (like a whole section where she quotes from islamic leaflets on the nine acts that invalidate fasting, for example, which is the sort of thing i've taken very seriously in my time, i mean, one does like to know what the scholars say could break their fast, haina?), their cultures, their personal yearnings, and yet somehow makes their humanity (well, for some of them) beautiful, maybe even respectable. a very postmodern sort of novel. it struck me, reading, that it wouldn't be possible to write such an interesting story about the muslim community in america, or at least the one that i know. it's such a different ballgame, different stadium altogether, in britain. i have had a story i've tried to write about, well, being a young practicing muslim woman in america between two cultures, and reading white teeth just made the whole story sort of slither away in shame... smith writes between like twenty cultures, and touches on things i would never touch on, adeptly, with humor. humoUr, sorry. again i wonder if it's even possible for me to write from my own experience in any way and produce something the masses might find enjoyable reading. i'm afraid it's all rather boring... but i have to try, because if i can't write, i can't do anything, i'm nobody, just hubby's wife, musa's mother, ammi and abbu's daughter, and it's not nothing to be something to somebody else but isn't it what all us womenfolk of a particular ilk are fighting for, the ability to be somebody in and of ourselves...

wow, random. so, next and last of this batch is finn maccool which i am sure i'll enjoy greatly. want to read more of the irish historical fiction. but i will also pick up on beauty and maybe some other more "literary" or "contemporary" shtuff. a suitable boy, that's one i've wanted to read for a while. i still welcome any more suggestions any of y'all might have...

now i have to get upstairs, because i have some roasting vegetables (taters, onions and carrots in garlic and butter and rosemary oil) in the oven, and hubby is making some sort of jerk chicken, and i am hungry! oh, and i finished my article somewhere in the paragraph where i was writing about the forest. yay. mo money mo money.

one year ago today...

2007-04-02T09:57:00.000-04:00

...at this exact time, i was... probably sleeping? i dunno. probably still reeling from the relief of not experiencing contractions anymore. musa was born at 5:25 a.m., thoughtful young man that he is, having been beaten to the world by cousin raihana only five hours or so before (it looks like six hours but the time changed that morning so it's only fivish).
we went to our favorite thai restaurant amina thai with the inlaws last night and i took this funny picture of him:

WOW! close call. subhanallah. i just literally caught musa in the middle of a headfirst tumble from the seventh or eighth step up the stairs. that kid is fast!! no there's no gate at the bottom of the stairs here in our basement, there's only a wall on one side at the bottom so it wouldn't work. sheesh, my heart is pounding!

he has had a good morning otherwise alhamdulillah! i haven't blogged in a while so let me catch you up (in the few seconds i get in between pulling musa out from under the computer desk): my parents came up on march 21 and it was wonderful to see them, mashallah, and to see them with musa especially, whom they had not seen since december. the aqiqa was on march 24; way more men came than women, but we were at a masjid so we were able to leave plenty of food for the community alhamdulillah. it was good to see everyone and interesting to see very different kinds of friends together.
saturday night right about midnight musa threw up his entire dinner plus milk while in his sleep.... it woke him up of course but otherwise didn't seem to bother him much at all. i didn't note his fever then because i had given him tylenol for teething pain, but by morning he was quite warm. it just ended up being that stupid stomach virus - raise your hand if you got it, too! - that is going around the DC area like crazy. i got it after musa, on thursday night, and had a miserable friday trying to get us both out of the house and ready, then running errands (including renewing my driver's license) with nothing in my stomach and a fever of 101 or so. finally made it to my inlaws where my MIL most kindly made me khichdee (sp?) with chicken and my bro-in-law ran out to get me gatorade and musa and i both slept a few hours in the afternoon.

much better the next day! this past weekend was the DC MIST youth competition (i believe it's Muslim Inter-Scholastic Tournament) and i had volunteered to judge the short story category (they tried to draft me this weekend last year but i was in labor and all). so i spent from 12:30 to 9:30 p.m. there doing so (not easy while watching baby, even though i had a lot of help the second half of the day!). but subhanallah, i had so much fun! doing something i enjoy and know i can be useful at - reading and critiquing stories - while hanging out with friends, meeting new sisters, and recalling high school days (i went to the bathroom to throw away a diaper and wash my hands, and these two girls were talking: "So, M.K. said... and she said to A.G., go back to your G.F.! Oh my God, I said ..."). i only really got glimpses of the kids, didn't really get to interact with them, but from what i did catch and from what i heard from the other volunteers, there were two things that struck me: one, how much incredible potential that generation might have, with all their talent and their desire to do something within their muslim community, and two, how much of a sense of self-entitlement there is among this crowd. i'm making a generalization - i know there are plenty of great kids out there mashallah - but i know the volunteers experienced a lot of rudeness from the kids, some of it very in-your-face, because the kids wanted this or that or didn't feel like things were going right or whatever... i tried to remember back to my MYNA days and whether or not we acted like that. probably...

anyway, i think i would do it again!
so i've been worried about musa this past week because he barely eats right anyway, but after being sick he has hardly eaten anything all week - like maybe a yobaby one day, half a slice of toast the next, aside from nursing. but this morning he had toast, swiss cheese, scrambled eggs AND cereal WITH cow's milk. ALHAMDULILLAH! not like full servings of each but plenty of food mashallah. i feel like anything can happen, i feel like it's a new day altogether, when he eats right. subhanallah.

anyway. i should be nice and post a not-embarrassing-in-the-future picture of him too, so here is musa being smiley-shy with a friendly woman at the restaurant last night:

and here is musa one year ago today, for memories' sake!

alright, well, my one-year-old is very stinky so i have to go clean him up...
happiest of birthdays to cousin raihana!! we hate having missed so much of your development - in some of cousin koonj's pictures i can see the little girl you are becoming. we miss you so very much and pray that it is not too long before we can see you again...

oh! and thank you to everyone who wished me a happy birthday!

good news, bad news

2007-03-23T16:33:00.000-04:00

the bad news first?
well, it's not news, but right now i have a million things to do yet i am on hold - on my cell phone, coz the home line is not working - with the hoover company, waiting to find out where the hell i can buy a replacement belt for my TurboPower 2000 because apparetnly target and giant and best buy do not carry this particular belt (how different can different vacuum cleaner belts BE?? this is SO STUPID!!) and of course while i am on hold musa is yelling at me ("maaa maaa maaa ma!") because i have to keep him confined in some way while i get this done.

but the good news? he really is walking!! well, starting to take steps without support. now he has done like two or three before going down to his hands and knees again. mashallah, it is soooo cute to watch his little skinny minny legs try to balance!! and those tiny feet! :)

*sigh* still on hold....

several beautiful things wednesday

2007-03-21T13:16:00.000-04:00

can't wait till tomorrow, i don't know if i'll have time to post. so here they are:

1) my parents are coming today and i haven't seen them since mid-december and i am so excited for them to see how much musa has grown and changed, and to sit down and talk to my dad again because i can't talk to him on the phone because of his hearing troubles!

2) i THINK musa took a step or two yesterday. i actually saw him take one and go crashing down, but there were a couple of other moments where it was more out of the corner of my eye. this is, of course, unsupported steps i am talking about. he is also saying "mama", although it often spreads out into "mamamamamama" or morphs into "manana da TA dda da" or something but he is definitely saying "mama" and something like "dada" now. yay for babies!!!!

3) the house is clean!

4) the weather is turning warm!

5) i ended up getting five extra freelance stories from my old paper - they're very short, advertisements basically, so they are very easy to put together and it's more money than i had before!

6) i don't have too many blog readers but the ones i have are awesome and they have given me at least several weeks of good reading to look forward to!

7) i actually have a novel in my head, like an actual BOOK. but i haven't started writing it yet. no, i'm not going to tell you what it's about. it is sort of fantasy though. which is why i'm not going to tell you because i'm afraid it's silly. but i will write it. so i'm in that beautiful stage of possibility, where i'm carrying around this potential in my head and it could be anything, anything at all...

8) musa's aqiqa is this weekend inshallah and i'm going to see all kinds of people i haven't seen in ages and it will be fun!

book recommendations?

2007-03-19T17:10:00.000-04:00

i'm desperate for good reads that i can't put down. last two books i picked up from the library when i had to run in and run out: appetite for profit, about "big food" and how they want to keep us eating unhealthy, and the view from castle rock by alice munro, a sort of collection of semi-fictionalized stories from her family's history, which just happened to arise in scotland and included scenes in edinburgh.
they were good, but not all-engrossing. i also recently read life of pi. beautifully written, something about the storytelling reminded me of the little prince, but still not quite what i had hoped for. i don't know why, but i want REALLY GOOD escape. stories i don't want to leave. i need books i can't put down. i read while i'm nursing and before i go to sleep. please please, anything you can recommend?

another pic

2007-03-16T17:06:00.000-04:00

since i'm a lame blogger here's another picture... my little monkey in his first swing! although afterwards i saw the swingset was for children ages 2 and up. oops. well, he loved it! and look at dem chompers mashallah...

picture and update

2007-03-13T12:58:00.000-04:00

experimenting with my macro lens last night!

and i finally published that other blog post i've been trying to finish for ages, about jon krakauer's books, but it published by date so you have to scroll down to see it...

funny...

2007-03-12T11:40:00.000-04:00

we went to visit one of my husband's friends yesterday whom we haven't seen in a year or maybe two. in that time we had musa and he got married and bought a house. so it was a great reunion for my hubby and it was nice to meet his friend's wife, too.
we got to talking about how she wanted to have a baby too but her husband said he wasn't ready. so i was telling her about what it was like, and at one point i said, but that first month postpartum, you know, is really very difficult, as much fun as it might get to be later.
and she was like, "really? but i thought as newborns they just sleep all day!"
.
.
.
.
.
i'll just let that one stand on its own... :)

busyness

2007-03-09T13:05:00.000-05:00

no not trying to be smart like "happyness". just busy-ness. alhamdulillah!

well, so i photographed a wedding a couple of weekends ago, and had to put CDs together for the couple. then i signed up for a photography project for CAIR and that has been keeping me very busy, plus we are getting ready to make a move so i have been cleaning the house (like for real, not like the fake cleaning i do most of the time). plus i'm still doing those dining reviews. and all of that is on top of full-time parenting.

(funny, i just googled CAIR so i could get their proper address to link above, and the second google entry is actually www.anti-cair-net.org... crazy people...)
(wow, you can actually get anti-CAIR t-shirts and hats!)

anyway! i have also accepted some more freelance stuff from my old newspaper, and i have three stories waiting to be finished, so i need to get cracking on that too. so every time i think i will sit down and write that blog post i've been waiting to do, i feel guilty because i should be doing something else instead.

but guilt never lasts with me... somewhere in my youth or childhood (ha ha), i developed a mechanism to push away thoughts that make me feel bad about myself, because they're so bad to feel :). so, right now i actually have a break, and i am blogging... will go finish off that other post!

oh, and my dad is soooo cool mashallah!

the post i have been trying to finish for ages

2007-03-02T14:49:00.000-05:00

so i haven't blogged in a while. really, you should just take that as a sign that i have had other things to do which is a VERY good thing for me (but doesn't make my prolific cousin koonj look too good, ha ha.)

i've been reading, though... a few weeks ago i picked up jon krakauer's into thin air because i kept seeing it everywhere and i remember soon after it came out - i was working at borders in 1999, a year afterward, and it was still huge - and once upon a time i remember reading or seeing an account of shackleton's polar disaster and found it fascinating so i thought i might find this fascinating too. and i did! all the reviews say "riveting," and i'm no exception, but i won't actually SAY the word myself for fear of sounding like a cover blurb. if one gets too caught up in the aftermath of the book itself - the bitter back-and-forth about accuracy with one of the other climbers in the may 1996 storm - it can detract from the power of the story, but on the other hand it sort of adds an element. i can't read books like this as "adventure stories" - to me the impact comes from realizing this actually happened.
and i like the first-person perspective coupled with rigorous reporting after the fact, so you get as much of what actually happened - and a sense of what you will never know - as possible. (krakauer was a journalist for outside magazine, and is now an editor-at-large there). since i blog here just for the sake of reaction, here is a nutshell - JK has been a climbing nut most of his life, but never made it to everest, then he was sent to write a journalistic account of climbing everest in may 1996, which turned out to be the deadliest climbing season in its history because of a terrible storm, and many of his friends were either found in the next couple of weeks frozen to death or simply never found at all. but he survived, came back and wrote his article, then went on to write the book, as he said, as an attempt at coming to terms with what happened and his responsibility in it.

i enjoyed the book enough that i went and picked up two other books by him - into the wild, which was written before the everest disaster, and under the banner of heaven which is i think his most recent book. the recent one is a departure - instead of an "adventure" story, it's a look at fundamentalist mormonism and two men who killed their sister-in-law and her 15-month-old baby girl because "God told them to". that's for another post... want to focus here on krakauer's exploration of man vs. nature.

into the wild is about a young man (chris mccandless) who walked off into the alaskan wilderness completely alone in april 1992, determined to live unencumbered by any trappings of civilization, to the hilt of his resources, and almost made it, but he was found by other hikers two and a half weeks after his death, in september.

okay writing this post is taking way too long and it's not even saying much of worth. so what i'm going to do is just copy in the parts of the book that really struck me:

From a letter to a friend before he headed out into Alaska:
"I'd like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people lieve within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation becaues they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mine, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty...
...You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living..."

that letter was written before he went into alaska. the following two notes were found in books that he had been reading in the abandoned bus where he ended up taking shelter out in the wilderness:

noted in "walden" next to a passage about controlling appetite:
"Deliberate Living: Conscious attention to the basics of life, and a constant attention to your immediate environment and its concerns... (circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you).
The Great Holiness of FOOD, the Vital Heat.
Positivism, the Insurpassable Joy of the Life Aesthetic.
Absolute Truth and Honesty.
Reality.
Independence.
Finality - Stability - Consistency."

noted in dr. zhivago "happiness only real when shared"

before dying - "i have had a happy life and thank the lord. goodbye and may god bless all"

krakauer speculates that some of those final notations may have indicated mccandless was ready to unrenounce the world, so to speak... though we will never know. to me, both of these books tell the story of man underestimating nature, overestimating his own place in a realm he cannot subdue. i don't want to call it arrogance - i don't think even climbing mt. everest is a matter of "conquering" so much as experiencing and pushing one's body to its limits and all that - but there is still an element of misunderstanding, maybe. even thoreau lived in a cabin, not utterly bared to the elements. reading these books i get a sense that as much as anyone can desire to shed civilization and live as one with nature, it is just not our place to do so as humans.

and anyway, i'm not sure mccandless reached despair at his end, no matter how desperate his situation - look at that final note. i think maybe he understood exactly what he had done... i don't think, however, he understood what he had done to his parents, and although this was a son in his mid-twenties i read this book as a parent, too, and could not fathom his parents' anguish at not only losing their son this way, but just not even knowing where he was, because he didn't care to tell them.

happiness is only real when shared? i can see that... i don't know if one is pursuing happiness, exactly, when one tramps alone into the wilderness - perhaps the exaltation of one's soul, communion with God, etc, but not comfort, laughter, happiness... i think there is a middle ground, a little removed from what mccandless described in his letter above - room maybe for living with simplicity and a few good friends, shelter but not extravagance, integrity, truthfulness to self instead of conformity, etc...
i find it fascinating the way he described - and capitalized - the concept of "Joy" - i could write a whole thesis on that - oh wait, i did :) back in 1998 in edinburgh - but this idea of Joy being all around you, in anything you might experience. that is how i used to live - just walking to class in college i might sense Joy (as CS Lewis would define it, as a reminder of God) in the play of sunlight through leaves or the sense of boundless possibility one has going to a favorite class. i haven't experienced quite the same thing through human relationships - it's a different kind of joy, one of emotional comfort and security and release... hard to define.

i'm trying to finish this post but musa is having a fit. and if i don't publish it now i never will. so i will publish it now. even though i have so much more to say. one of these days i will actually organize my thoughts into essay form so they will not blather on so confusedly next time. i promise. argh. read the books, though, they are very COMPELLING (what a blurb word)....

memories, already!

2007-02-28T13:09:00.000-05:00

just looking back through some old pics... this was one of my favorites, of raihana and musa back in august when they were a little over 4 months old...

an "endless nightmare"

2007-02-19T11:13:00.000-05:00

this just breaks my heart. i didn't know he was on a hunger strike... i didn't even know he had struck a plea. have sort of lost touch with the case (you know, baby and all). last i remember he was acquitted of all, or at least most, charges, but they were finding some ridiculous pretexts to keep him imprisoned and the feds were trying to retry him on some of the counts. i guess that was a while ago. i have some memories of this mild-mannered man from when i was a reporter for islamonline, back when he was in DC fighting for his brother-in-law's release from detention on "secret evidence." and memories of the frustrated admiration i felt for his tenacity in making use of the system that, as his daughter says in the article below, is now "failing him." and more admiration yet for his family - for his kids, struggling and achieving the way they did despite the hell they were going through.
what does it take to push a man to this point?
i can't even begin to imagine. may Allah help him and his family find justice and peace. may Allah have mercy on them and bring him home to them at last.

Al-Arian transferred to prison hospital amid 24-day hunger strike

MATTHEW BARAKAT Associated Press Writer

(AP) - McLEAN, Virginia

A former university professor who pleaded guilty last year to supporting a Palestinian terror group was transferred to a medical prison Wednesday as he entered the fourth week of a hunger strike.

Sami al-Arian, 49, began the hunger strike Jan. 22 to protest efforts to force him to testify in front of a grand jury investigating a group of Muslim charities in Virginia. He said a plea bargain with U.S. prosecutors last year frees him from any obligation to cooperate with the government.

Nikki Credic, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Marshals Service, said prison officials have been monitoring his health daily.

Prosecutors obtained a court order late last week approving the transfer, al-Arian’s lawyer said, adding that the real motivation may have been to move al-Arian to a more isolated location.

Al-Arian’s daughter Laila said her father fainted and hit his head Tuesday, and that he has lost 30 pounds (13.5 kilograms) since beginning the hunger strike, during which he is only drinking four glasses of water a day.

“We’re definitely worried about him, but we respect why he chose to go on a hunger strike,” she said. “You understand it when you sort of feel like you’re cornered and you feel like the legal system is failing you.”

Al-Arian was a prominent Palestinian activist who met with U.S. President George W. Bush and other political leaders in the years before he was charged.

Al-Arian has said he believes the effort to bring him in front of the grand jury is merely a trap by an overzealous U.S. prosecutor.

“I think it’s just a pretext to hold me either in contempt or charge me with perjury, because whatever I’m going to say, they’re going to say, ‘You lied,’” al-Arian said in a jailhouse interview earlier this month with Democracy Now!, an independent media outlet.

But two U.S. judges have sided with prosecutors and said al-Arian must testify.

Because a judge has found al-Arian in contempt, every day he serves on the contempt charge extends his release date on a 57-month prison term handed down as part the plea for providing support to members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Prosecutors had sought to prove al-Arian was a leader of PIJ, a terrorist group that has carried out suicide bombings against Israel. The trial ended with acquittal on some charges and a hung jury on the rest.

Al-Arian’s lawyer, Peter Erlinder, said his client’s fear of a perjury trap is valid given the aggressive tactics employed by federal prosecutors in Alexandria, who have handled numerous high-profile terrorism cases in recent years.

Just two weeks ago, prosecutors won a perjury conviction against Sabri Benkahla, 31.

Benkahla had been one of just two defendants to win acquittal among more than a dozen who faced terror-related charges at the Alexandria courthouse since Sept. 11, 2001. Shortly after his acquittal in 2004, prosecutors said he lied in grand jury testimony about his training with a Pakistani militant group and charged him with perjury. He now faces up to 25 years in prison.

The civil contempt sentence al-Arian is now serving could run through June, or until the judge decides that further incarceration is unlikely to coerce al-Arian’s testimony. But even then, prosecutors can seek another six-month term if they extend the grand jury and subpoena al-Arian again.

“It just feels like an endless nightmare,” Laila al-Arian said. “It feels like purgatory.”

everything in bytes?

2007-02-16T13:53:00.000-05:00

found this comment posted on a live book discussion at washpost very intriguing:

"The "hooking up" approach is showing up at work -- think of all the contracting out and job insecurity. And housing. How absurd to see a house only in resale terms, and not as a place to live and put down roots. "Hooking up" is a symptom of our destructive, capitalist culture. It is not liberating for women or men. But we can't go back to the 1950s either. We need new models of mutual, loving relationships."

the discussion was about this book, "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both," by laura sessions stepp, who happens to be the wife of one of my favorite journalism professors from college park, carl sessions stepp.

so the discussion is interesting, the book sounds like it might have some good insights too - might check it out at the bookstore - but i am interested in how this commenter extended the issue to the rest of life in our fast-paced culture. i blogged about this before, but it reminds me of the idea that after decades of mass mediation (i.e. television mostly) we are a society of people who need instantaneous gratification and grow quickly bored with what we have, wanting to move on to see if we can get something better or easier.

is "hooking up" - the practice of having short flings, usually sexual, in place of meaningful relationships - the symptom of this kind of culture? i think it's more than that - also the devaluation of hard work and commitment (i mean on a mass cultural level, i know there are plenty of hard working committed people out there). but young people, the vibrant future of the country, with each generation are focused on getting, achieving, finding satisfaction (usually materially and sexually). why is it always the older community that is wise enough to realize what is truly meaningful in life? i know plenty of young people who have the same awareness, but on a societal level it's just not there.
i can't help but feel it's the absence of God in the outlook of the youner generation. i'm not arguing for the merging of church and state or anything... i just feel like having Something else to yearn for makes life so much more meaningful. and i'm sure plenty of other people do too... i guess that's where capitalism comes in though, because the projection of the image of american youth - beautiful, thin, virile or sexy, loaded, etc, and all for the purpose of convincing people to buy things - erases the possibility of that meaningfulness on a cultural level. maybe.

i'm just babbling. musa is sleeping on my lap and my leg has completely fallen asleep, i must move...

a winter walk

2007-02-13T14:52:00.000-05:00

so another thing i wanted to write about was the walk i took with musa a coupla days ago, out at centennial lake.
i wanted to take him out because it was 44 degrees and the sun was shining, but by the time we actually got out it was significantly colder and the sky was clouded. still off we went! the salt-bleached roads and the stillness in the air - every withered leaf frozen in place - made it feel even more wintry. there were no more than four or five cars at the park - a man with his dog, a couple of middle-aged women running. one of them balanced herself against a tree trunk in sitting-chair position - i thought at first she was sitting, but then i saw there was nothing under her.

so i took musa by the lake (face-forward in the baby bjorn, which i had to stuff him into, with fleece hat and mittens and oshkosh boots on) and pointed out to him the frozen surface, with blurred cracks on the underside and puke-green spots of frozen algae. there were arced patterns on the ice, like the water had frozen while the wind had been swirling it forward, and dustings of snow here and there, and thin puddles where the water sat still as the ice. we walked along the fence in the central part of the park, then right up to the lake in some of the fishing spots. musa gets so quiet when we go outside on walks like this - he turns into a little sponge, just soaking up everything. i love this; i am so happy he's an observer, watching and learning like that! and at one point i walked up to a mass of tangled vines - hanging from the bare trees like so much messy hair - and took off his mitten so he could touch one of the twigs wrapped in wiry tendrils: tiny crisp-orange leaves curled around the twig like a dead spider. he grasped it and shook it like babies do, smiling a little. pink nose and cheeks!!! i loved how he twisted his neck to look up at me every now and then, like he was making sure i was still there. when it's warmer i want to take him all around the lake inshallah. but he might be too big for the bjorn then... but he might be walking by then too inshallah!!

i'm going to go have a trader joe's almond croissant with a cup of honeybush and look out at the snow...

a fine balance

2007-02-13T14:39:00.000-05:00

just finished this book a couple of nights ago, up until 2 a.m. coz i couldn't put it down in the end, which surprised me because it took me a little while to get into it.
reading suroor's most recent post reminded me of the story: a woman hires two tailors to work for her in her home, and she tries very hard to maintain a distance from them, to make sure they don't take advantage of her, but slowly she discovers some of their painful histories, and walls come down and her heart is moved...
mistry's book is about friendship, but it also paints a picture of a world we never really delve into because it's so uncomfortable in our comfortable lives - the vast world of india's poor, in the mid-1970's. living in illegal huts in a field by a railroad, taking craps in the morning in the tracks and having to jump up when the train comes, being subject like so many leaves in the wind to the heartless corruption of even the most petty officials - everyone open to a bribe no matter what suffering is caused by the injustice, yet almost all are victims of the same system.
mistry is a master at making you care about his characters though! that was what i came out of the book with - their stories and their fates lingered on after i closed the covers. one of the cover blurbs said something about how you won't look at the poor with the same eyes after reading this... oh, all of this sounds so trite, really, what i'm saying, what this blurb says. i know i live in a bubble, i know i've been sheltered all my life, time and again i feel guilty for it... but it's what my parents struggled so hard to make possible for me, so i wouldn't have to know such suffering. then why is it so hard for me to reach a hand out of this bubble and make what's in my heart sprout into something useful? when i give it's like droplets, pinches from my fingers. really, when i do anything it's like that. i'm almost 30, my whole life is passing this way. i don't know how to move myself... i'm too comfortable with being comfortable...

honeybush

2007-02-09T22:50:00.000-05:00

i have discovered the answer to my chai prayers.
well, it's like this - i love chai, but i can't have it because i'm nursing. and decaf most of the time just doesn't do the trick.
a friend of mine has just introduced me to rooibos teas - a different leaf entirely from black, green or white teas, so it has no caffeine naturally. honeybush is a type of rooibos.

have you tried it? have you smelled it? it smells like ... imagine what samwise hamfast smelled when he woke in sweet ithilien after falling asleep in the nightmare destruction of orodruin. only sweet instead of herby.
and the taste... i have never ever tasted anything like it. it's like silk going down your throat, warm, touched with honey. so unbelievably smooth. it's not chai... but it's something entirely different. go, go, go try it! teavana has a version, honeybush vanilla, that is just divine. if i can say that. i mean, the first thing i said was "heaven in a cup." oh, thank you God...

the countdown is on!!!

2007-02-05T19:56:00.000-05:00

Final Harry Potter Book Due Out in July
Feb 1, 8:19 AM EST

The Associated Press

LONDON -- "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the last of seven installments of the boy wizard's adventures, will be published July 21, author J.K. Rowling said Thursday.

musa let go!!

2007-02-05T19:42:00.000-05:00

he was holding on to the ottoman, standing, then in between holding on and deciding to crawl away, he let go for a minute and just stood there, quite steady, before he slowly sat down - no hands! - and crawled away.
he's "stood" a couple of times before when we held him up and let him go, but this is the first time i've seen him let go himself. yay! mashallah...

my husband...

2007-02-03T10:23:00.000-05:00

wants me to blog that he is making breakfast for us right now. woo hoo.... well, it DOES smell good!!!
but, just to be fair to me, while he was making breakfast, i was changing musa's diaper and putting a load of laundry in the washer!

we are going to see cousin koonj today, yayayayayay!!!

update: okay, so it was VERY worthy: french toast, spread with melted chocolate, sprinkled with chopped walnuts and topped with strawberry preserves. plus some VERY godo home fries with cheese and veggie sausage. and we are about to have mint tea!
but the REAL good deed is that he promised to clean the kitchen before we leave!!! i have the BEST hubby in the world :)

on obama being "articulate"

2007-02-02T10:12:00.000-05:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/01/AR2007020101495.html

(this is eugene robinson on joe biden making a remarkably ignorant comment about how obama doesn't speak ebonics like other black people do and isn't hopelessly dumb or dirty like them either)

i feel him (robinson that is). it kind of reminds me of an experience i had out in luray, WV - stopped at a 7-11 to run in and get some tylenol, and the girl at the counter seemed so weirdly happy to see me, and she asked where i was from (i was wearing hijab, but also a sweatshirt and athletic pants), and indicated that because of what was on my head she thought i was foreign, and she thought that would have been cool. so after this brief conversation, she told me, "you speak good american!" um, yes, she was white american.
she was sweet, so nice i almost feel bad telling this story. she was the epitome of southern hospitality despite utter ignorance, and i know that well because i was born and raised in fayetteville, nc.

anyway, so, yes, a brown girl with a foreign-looking thing on her head speaks good american, and a black man running for president is "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," according to joe biden. it's funny how we buck tradition like that!! standing out from the colored masses like we do.

another family member joins the blogosphere!

2007-01-31T11:05:00.000-05:00

my brother's blog will probably be sarcastically amusing most of the time, but i'm sure we will also catch plenty of cute issa anecdotes (hint hint). and even though he tries not to act like it, he's even more of a nerd than koonj and i so it will surely be stimulating! (what an awful word).
oh! and i'm going to tell everyone why it's called The Jag!!! not to be confused with that stupid TV show. it's because hassan's nickname growing up was JUGNOO - HAHAHAHAHAHAHA - and a lot of our friends called him that because there was another hassan in the community who didn't have a nickname, so when he got older he tried to make it cooler. HAHAHAHAHA!!! well, at least he didn't call it by his AIM handle (which is hukkaking).

will it jinx the situation if i say that i've gotten musa to sleep two nights in a row now without nursing? and he's only woken up three times each night? and he just ate a full breakfast with no trouble at all (except for the trader joe's o's i had to pick up from the truly-in-need-of-vacuuming-and-maybe-steam-cleaning carpet afterwards)? i know babies have their good and bad days, but i want so bad to believe that the tide is turning AT LEAST for the sleeping and eating problems!

inshallah inshallah.

anything else to blog about? emmmm... don't think so. well i haven't read anything else yet so maybe i'll be back...

legalizing the world's oldest profession... in syria?

2007-01-30T17:24:00.000-05:00

I
LOVE
SNOW!!!!!
it is so gorgeous. i can't wait till musa realizes how much fun it is :)

anyway on to the topic at hand. in light of all the discussions on chastity in the muslim world at various blogs i mentioned a couple of posts ago, i was very interested to read this editorial on sexual repression in syria at washingtonpost.com, in which the author notes that prostitution was once legalized in syria and argues that it should be again, in order to better control it. i was especially intrigued to see some of the comments echoing what we have been discussing - that in the arab (or muslim) world what needs to change is the attitude toward female chastity AND male lack thereof.

some of what this man says:
"For years, many in the Arab World have been sexually deprived... Some would argue that Islam is the reason for sexual deprivation, but I stand against such an argument. True, Islam limits interaction between sexes and calls for modesty in dress and conduct, but so does Christianity and Judaism. The other factors -- mainly seclusion, lack of education education, and poverty -- lead to a permanent psychological disorder. In many cases, people become obsessed with sex in its most primitive form.
...
One case that comes to mind is a taxi driver in Damascus who I rode with many years ago as a young child. Every single unveiled woman he saw on the street, he would describe as a prostitute... The problem is that with the absence of proper gender interaction, such a mentality will not only flourish but will also distort the balance of normal and healthy sexual activity.
...
Moral prudes and Islamists might argue against what I just wrote, but it is like trying to brush a problem under the rug instead of exposing it in a civilized manner, with the intention of resolving and humanizing it. Legalizing prostitution will certainly not lessen it, but rather, only make it controllable."

well, i don't know if i qualify as a moral prude or islamist, but something about legalization just doesn't sit right with me. i'm going to think out "loud" for a minute. if a government takes the stance that moral standards are part of the personal realm, and cannot be regulated by the government, then it can't criminalize any kind of interaction between "consenting adults" (which is the phrase of choice here in america) except by the people's choice, which i'm assuming is why most of the U.S. states criminalize prostitution.
but ASIDE from the huge, heinous and growing problem of human trafficking, prostitution to my understanding is a profession that functions by demand. poor women tossed around by other social cruelties need to make money to support themselves, kids born out of wedlock, etc., and there are always - have always been - men who will pay for it. (i knowwww there are exceptions to the rule, and women who do this b/c they want to, yada yada)
i think that if you limit the supply, the customer will go elsewhere and find it (hence the argument to legalize, so that where the customer goes is not to some underage albanian captive). BUT, if you limit the demand, then the supply will necessary dwindle, because those women will have to look elsewhere for ways to make money.

i know that is not an economically sound argument at all. but i think legalization is a band-aid solution - it's saying, we can't ever stop people from doing this, so let's at least bring it out into the open so we know how it's being done and can reduce the number of people hurt by it. but even with legalization, how will you EVER stop a black market trade in slaves? it's not going to disappear just because federal agents can walk into your house of ill repute. it's going to go deeper underground, where sick b******s will pay more for illegal, younger girls. i agree with the commenters on the article who said that legalizing will only keep poor women and girls in that awful status.

i say target the men. and i say, once again, that we raise moral standards for men instead of lowering them for women. tackle the economic factors, too - when my hubby came back from studying in syria, he mentioned surprise that so many of the men there married so late - 30 or after - because they were expected to have a certain amount of assets before even offering to marry a girl. how many guys do you know that can wait until 30?? and until the state and social norms makes it easier for women to get an education and develop the ability to support themselves, there will always be women with nowhere else to turn.

i guess i am concluding that maybe prostitution is a symptom of a sick society, not an illness in itself that can be "controlled". i'd like to know others' thoughts on this.

and if you haven't seen the lifetime movie human trafficking with mira sorvino, robert carlyle and donald sutherland, go find a way to see it!!! it will stay with you forever.

today i accomplished...

2007-01-29T21:47:00.000-05:00

1) took a bath
2) partially cleaned bedroom
3) changed musa X times, including washing his squirmy stinky butt over a sink
4) went out to blockbuster, returned three movies and got "water" - will blog when i watch it
5) went to target and bought toilet paper and baby wipes, among other things!
6) fed musa pancakes and fruit in the morning, pizza and yogurt for lunch, a bit of fruity baby cereal in between, and cereal in chicken broth, baby carrots, pieces of chicken and trader joes os for dinner. VERY MINUTE amounts of the solid stuff, but, he ate! thats three meals!!
7) put the trash out
8) cleaned the kitchen, including running the dishwasher
9) and this is only the third time i have gotten online today!! (not including when i checked the weather just before going out)

it is almost 10 so i am going to try to wear musa out so i can put him to bed... last night we tried for about 20 minutes to get him to go to sleep without nursing - even in bed with us, he screamed like he was being abandoned or tortured.
anyone know whether it is possible to get a baby to sleep without nursing if you have a family bed?

firefox is not letting me type apostrophes or slashes, so i canNOT hyperlink or abbreviate my words!

the science of virginity

2007-01-29T12:16:00.000-05:00

i apologize in advance for the graphic (but scientific) nature of what i'm about to cut and paste... especially if my dad sees this!! :O but i think it's important because there really seem to be a LOT of people out there with misconceptions about being able to "identify" virginity.
i've been reading many posts on various blogs, including suroor's, peaceful muslimah's and aliya's on the subject of the virginity of muslim women, vs the non-issue of male virginity, etc etc, and why is it culturally so focused on the women when the qur'an is abundantly clear in its emphasis on chastity for both men and women, and spells out clearly all the outlets and responsibilities that each have with regard to this issue.

so i just wanted to post some information from wikipedia - not linking coz they have some pictures that might shock those of delicate sensibilities :) - about the hymen and why enough blood to stain the sheets your first time is NOT an indication of having been a virgin ten minutes ago (emphases are added by me):

"The hymen... is a fold of mucous membrane which surrounds or partially covers the external vaginal opening. It forms part of the vulva, or external genitalia. [3][4] Some girls are born without a hymen. [5] [6]... A woman's hymen is destroyed when she gives birth; she may be left with remnants called carunculae mytriformes or the hymen may be completely absent.[8]
...The hymen is not normally damaged by playing sports, using tampons, pelvic examinations or even straddle injuries.[21] Once a girl reaches puberty, the hymen tends to become quite elastic. It is not possible to determine whether a woman uses tampons or not by examining her hymen: only 43% of women report bleeding the first time they had sex; which means that in the other 57% of women the hymen likely stretched enough that it didn't tear. "

i still remember from a class on human sexuality in middle school the different illustrations of various possible formations of the hymen. it was THEN that i learned that depending on the shape, opening width and natural elasticity of the hymen, it will not necessarily "break" or tear or bleed with first penetration.
but how do you educate millions of people, men AND women, about this, against the power of centuries of cultural obsession?
it seems so strange to me that this one tiny, low piece of flesh can determine the course - or the end - of a girl's entire life, even if it hasn't been touched! watched an indian movie, pinjar, at a dear friend's house the other night. in a nutshell, a girl who is about to get married (in 1946 india) is kidnapped for one night by a family who just wants to ruin her family. nothing is done to her, but the fact that she has spent one night out of her family's home, in the home of a strange man, even though she was kidnapped, means she can NEVER go home again, NEVER get married to anyone else, and her family's honor is ruined. and of course although it doesn't get into such gritty details, it's all because of that piece of flesh that has become synonymous with honor!

when in truth, today, having that flesh in place means nothing with regards to one's chastity - a different word entirely, that to me encompasses your entire approach to dealing with the opposite sex, not just never having had sex before. and on both levels, it is a quality that is meant to apply to both men and women. who was more chaste than the beloved prophet? do we say his wives were chaste but not him? and if men want to emulate the prophet, why do they not emphasize his chastity as one of the qualities they want to emulate?

i feel like i'm beating a dead horse... now that i have written all this i feel like i don't want to get sucked into a whirlwind around this one tiny issue... but the issue becomes so huge when ignorance ignites it into a method of oppression and discrimination. if we want to make a change in the muslim world with regard to how women are treated - as the bastions of "honor" for their men, with all the attached UNISLAMIC woes like FGM and honor killings, while the men have no "honor" themselves with no attached social consequences - then we need to approach it from within islam itself. and men themselves - male scholars? - need to take up that mission as well. but, i don't see that happening... (i know that some male scholars, last year i think? put out a fatwa about FGM, but i'm not sure how much power it had, especially because it comes after such prodding from the west...) can't we come to our senses about these things ourselves???

blog plugs

2007-01-28T10:58:00.000-05:00

not that i have a readership of legions or anything, but more people should read samra's blog... she has many moving insights that are well worth sharing and i'm glad she's blogging!

also, my dad has added more posts about his recent amazing trip to england, india and pakistan, during which he visited his birthplace and childhood home (in sagar) after more than 60 years, and traveled to these three countries by himself at the age of 73 despite his hearing problems, and then came home and started BLOGGING about it! think about it - to blog, you have to know 1) how to type, 2) how to use a computer in general, 3) how to use windows, 4) how to browse the internet, 5) and all the other technical thingies... he has taught himself all of this pretty much post-retirement (well, i taught him some of it). to me it is an incredible blessing to be sharing the internet with my father :) and to have his stories available to read online like this. please visit when you get a chance!

today is a hohum cold day. musa had yogurt for breakfast (he almost never says no to yogurt and i didn't feel like fighting a battle this morning - yesterday he had no solid food at all other than yogurt and a couple of bites of this and that). i mean yobaby by the way.

i have this fantasy - i don't know why it excites me so! - of taking musa to the beach this summer. i don't know, maybe it will make me really feel like a parent, or make us feel like a real family of our own - taking the kids to the beach. but i can't WAIT for the summer inshallah to do that! i have this picture in my head of my son - by that time walking inshallah - sitting in the sand wearing only shorts, with his hair wet, playing or making faces or something. it will be so much fun! he is subhanallah the greatest blessing in my life, more than i could have ever imagined. i have small dreams where he is concerned - no great ambitions for his future, although of course i hope he will love learning and do well out of his own desire. just this happy-family picture - just happiness, safety and health, and good character - constant awareness of his Lord. better than me inshallah. ameen.

paradise now

2007-01-26T19:08:00.000-05:00

watched this film last night. my first reaction was how delightful it was to watch a movie about muslims, by muslims, even in arabic, so that there was no fakeness to their method of prayer or the islamic words dropped into their speech - and islam is NOT the subject of the movie. i was amazed to think this is actually my first such movie... there have got to be others out there!

at the end i thought maybe "paradise now" wasn't the best title for the movie, because it really wasn't about would-be suicide bombers wanting to go to heaven... but a short discussion with my fellow viewers made me see it more as these two young men wanting to get out of the hell they endured each day. and that is a nuance those who accuse the militants of hankering after immortal virgins would do well to understand...

i remember, back in my days as an islamonline reporter, a panel discussion in the national press club on suicide bombing, pre-9/11 (i don't think such a panel would have worked afterwards!). actually, i wrote an article about it, lemme see if i can find it... found it! okay, it's not a very good article as articles go, and it's sort of editorializing, but oh well. this movie echoed the points of one of the panelists there, who said that that trying to understand suicide bombing in terms of anything other than its "human dimension" is to completely misunderstand it. that is what "paradise now" provides, a human dimension to this side of the conflict.

a friend of mine once told me how she thought it was difficult for non-muslims to understand what it means to die for the sake of Allah - look, she said, at the eagerness of the companions of the Prophet to go into battle next to him, and to risk their very lives for His sake. it's part of our tradition - indeed, i remember it well from all those islamic books i read growing up, stories of the companions, young men who led armies at an age when most of us are high school whiners.
and i agree with her - i could only hope for the kind of iman, the level of desire for closeness to Him, that would allow me to meet death freely if it was for His sake. (now i am going to get a visit from some Men in Black!!! FBI man (or woman), please read on before you get all excited.) and certainly a willingness to die for one's beliefs is not an islamic tradition alone - give me liberty or give me death? BUT. what i cannot wrap my head around is for someone to decide that fate THEMSELVES. doesn't that sort of take the glory out of it? like, hey Allah, i want to die for You, so, i'm going to do it, whether you want me to or not... it just can't be right. and yes, i'm sensitive to the human dimension and the lack of alternatives to palestinians fighting the illegal occupation. but - aside from the fact that it does perpetuate the violence, aside from the fact that targeting innocent civilians with such acts only makes it even more heinous - in itself, i don't see how strapping a bomb to yourself to blow up some other people can be put in the same category as fighting in a battle for the sake of Allah and being killed by somebody else. it's not martyrdom... just suicide and murder.

so the film tackles some of these points, though - with two of the main characters being the son of an executed "collaborator" and the daughter of a famous "martyr" - it focuses less on the islamic legitimacy of suicide bombing and more on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of this method in stopping the occupation. it is a moving story, well acted, well paced, suspenseful. and one of the best aspects - there is no violence in it!!! well, meaning, you don't see any. hope i haven't spoiled it for you.

baby is fussy. he will not eat his mashed peas and not-mashed rice. i know he wants to nurse but i want him to eat something solid...

oh, totally off-topic, i did some online shopping at old navy for him earlier today... so exciting for me because i never do shopping - and i got all this stuff to last him the next couple of months of winter coz it was allll on sale, like half off!! i am more excited to see him in new clothes than to see myself in new clothes...

finger wagging

2007-01-26T17:37:00.000-05:00

yes, i am a finger-wagger. not to say "no", although i'm starting to do that with musa sometimes, and then immediately feel like a child playing old-fashioned adult, but i mean during namaaz - holding it up only to recite the shahada - then start wagging again.
i never did this growing up, but i went through a slightly hardcore phase while in edinburgh, (not that this is a hardcore thing to do), and i recall learning during a halaqa over "the prophet's prayer explained" that he would sometimes do this. so, not that it is required, but i got into the habit.

however, when you are praying in the same room as a crawling, exploring baby, there is very little more enticing to said baby than a wagging finger within crawling reach. so i will be in the second raka'ah and he comes dashing toward me and grabs my wagging finger and tries to wag it himself, occasionally to eat it. it's so sad when i have to stand up again and push him away! and sometimes difficult to control the laughter :)

it is so irritating

2007-01-26T12:30:00.000-05:00

that the washington post and new york times travel section articles almost always feature accomodations and trips that are waaaaaaaaaay way way way WAAAAAAAAY out of the budgets of anyone i know. and i'm not homeless or anything. alhamdulillah.

but i love reading these sections to find out about places to visit, and then i come to the end and it's like - the dinner here is $50 per person, or you can get two nights at $200 each. hello, if i want to spend that much money, i'll spend it on a plane ticket!! i'm not looking for youth hostel prices (though i'll take them if i find them!) but come on - isn't there any place out there that like, normal people can afford? at least if you're talking about a certain location, fine, mention the $200 B&Bs, but also mention there are some holiday inns or la quintas nearby or something.

or am i mistaken in assuming that i am normal? (no comments from hassan please)

playing ball!

2007-01-23T15:21:00.000-05:00

musa gets sooooo excited when i sit down on the floor with him to roll a little basketball to him and try to get him to roll it back.
well, he loses interest after about three minutes but while it lasts he has fun! the funny thing is, i never actually got a ball... some visiting kids accidentally left it here and we've just been playing with it. terrible, terrible...
but he is so funny with it! at first, when i rolled the ball to him, then would hold out my hands to tell him to roll it back, he thought it meant for HIM to come to me, so he would put the ball aside and start crawling to me. then, when he got around to playing with it he thought my rolling it to him meant for him to pick it up and start trying to eat it. but a few times he has sort of swatted it in my general direction.

so much fun!! but, must go give him a bath...

it's snowing!!!

2007-01-21T14:40:00.001-05:00

musa's first snow!!!! isn't the first snowfall of the season so thrilling?? not sure how much he can enjoy it, but, at least he can look :)

funerals

2007-01-20T18:57:00.000-05:00

two weeks ago i attended a funeral at which i saw my friend N's family, her mother and father, though N, who was visiting from out of town, had already left. the funeral was for one of my hubby's friends with whom he had first really started learning about islam; the guy's father had been one of the founding members of the masjid where the funeral was held. the young man was only 28, and killed in a single-car accident.
then sister mariam funches passed not a week later - i didn't know her, but one of her sons was a good friend of my hubby's. hubby said this was the first time in his life he had been to two funerals in one week.

then just last night i heard that N's father had suddenly passed away. so out of the blue! his janazah was held this morning at the same masjid where he had prayed for the soul of my hubby's friend just two weeks ago.
i have so much sorrow for my friend - her family is large and tight knit and her father was the loving patriarch, with sons and daughters and grandchildren galore all around him.

so please, please make duaa for these three, and all others who remind us that our time on this earth is set, that we can plan but Allah may have a different Plan for us, that we should always be aware of our mortality and therefore understand how precious a gift this life is. may Allah grant all of them peace and closeness to Him without reckoning in their new life...

mind control?

2007-01-16T15:48:00.000-05:00

did anyone read this article from the post's sunday magazine? absolutely fascinating, and i give kudos to weinberger and the post for actually covering this issue seriously - the issue being the fact that there are people who firmly believe that the government has been beaming voices into their head or otherwise targeting them. this discussion is equally fascinating. i am not convinced of the TIs' beliefs, though i am convinced of their experiences. but i do not believe they are all "crazy" by any means, particularly because the reporter indicates in her article that government bodies have in fact done research on such technologies. to those who are so sure it is all a crock - doesn't this fact, coupled with our government's proven ability to lie to its people administration after administration, at least make it possible?
well, at least it makes one think... i do believe it is possible, but i can't imagine the why - why target random innocent people?

stitches and wars

2007-01-16T14:22:00.000-05:00

we had our first trip to the emergency room with musa a few nights ago! alhamdulillah he is fine now. but he tried to eat a piece of broken crockery (yes, i was stupid enough to leave it in a place where he could get at it) and had to get a couple of stitches in his lip. thank God it wasn't a swallowable piece. please make duaa for my baby!!!

i promised to write more about why we fight, which hubby and i watched a couple of nights ago. this is about american involvement in military actions pretty much from eisenhower on... one interesting tidbit is that it was eisenhower who created the term "military-industrial complex" in his farewell speech, only in his first draft he had called it the "military-industrial-congressional complex", but edited that out in order to avoid ruffling too many feathers. his speech was remarkably prescient - don't so many past presidents' words seem so these days? - and this film does a great job of contextualizing today's conflicts, with footage from eisenhower and interviews with his son and granddaughter, as well as interviews with everyone from richard perle and william kristol to pilots who flew in the march 19 2003 bombings of baghdad to a vietnam vet cop who lost his son in 9/11 and later became disillusioned by bush's lies... the film is paced by segmenting it with footage from and interviews about the invasion of iraq, but there's plenty of history in between. it also discusses the project for the new american century... basically you get the sense that our government has involved us in conflicts over the last 50 years for quite its own reasons, which generally center on establishing american dominance worldwide, and the people of this country have pretty much bought every lie and keep falling for it again and again... it sounds like such a conspiracy theory, but the proof is right in front of us, if we only open our eyes! why is it so hard for us as a nation to do so?

oh and another interesting bit... one of the interviewees posited another take on eisenhower's term - calling it the "military-industrial-congressional-think tank complex". well, maybe he didn't actually call it that, but he said that think tanks were sort of a fourth party to this complex that determines our military involvement. and this is a scary thought - that some or even much of our foreign policy decision-making is determined by private parties not at all accountable to voters. and then it seems like congress rolls over to whoever's decisions are influenced by them and voila - you have presidents declaring war instead of congress...

i remember in a media theory class i took back in, oh, must have been 2001 or 2, one issue we looked at was the effect of mass media - television in particular - on the way people think and receive and process information. i don't recall any specific theories, but one general idea i remember is that people get used to receiving quick information, simplified and reduced into bytes, and it basically comes and goes, in one ear and out the other so to speak... the speed and the instantaneous nature of information make it easy to forget and move on to the next byte, and people seem to lose a sense of history and context (hence when saddam invades kuwait it's easy to demonize him, and forget that just a few years earlier we were supporting him against the evil shi'a regime next door). and that's only a matter of a couple of years... not even the decades it took to forget vietnam.
actually i don't know if this is a theory we read or just a thought that i had had in the class :) but oh well!! still. this is just one of many reasons i feel like too much TV is a problem, especially TV news. if you stay away from it for a month or two, getting what you need from the internet, then watch an hour of CNN - guaranteed you'll be brimming with scorn :)

musa is fussy fussy so must go... but do rent this film. oh God he has pooped AGAIN!!! it's like every diaper change! it's like a newborn again! only it's stinky watery diarrhea instead of nice thick yellow breastmilk poop.
is it possible to have an intestinal virus or something that would not make him sick per se (no fever or vomiting or even crankiness) but would give him diarrhea? the doctor told me it was just because his congestion was causing him to turn away from solids and favor liquids (water and nursing) so the excess liquid intake was causing diarrhea. but i'm not so sure now...

a meme because i am bored :)

2007-01-14T13:22:00.000-05:00

something to do while i am waiting to find out where my hubby is...

1. Elaborate on your default icon.
it is a picture of a staircase from the ruined inchcolm abbey, on a wee island in the middle of the firth of forth, from a visit i took in the summer of 1998 while i was living in edinburgh.

2. What's your current relationship status?
Married for about 3.5 years

3. Ever have a near-death experience?
can't say i have

4. Name an obvious quality you have.
easy to get along with

5. What's the name of the song that's stuck in your head right now?
amazingly, for once, i dont' have one, but musa is playing right now with his little "elmo's world" phone and it keeps singing, "lalalala, lalalala, elmo's world, hahahahaha!" and now that is going to be in my head

6. Name a celebrity you would marry.
eh, i don't think i would marry a celebrity. if the question were simpler, like, name a celebrity you think is hot, that would be easier... :)

7. Who will cut and paste this first?
i don't know, i don't really know who reads this blog

8. Has anyone ever said you look like a celebrity?
no, but i have been told COUNTLESS times that i look like someone somebody knows. once at someone's house these girls actually asked if they could take a picture of me because i looked exactly like their cousin in canada. another time at a stranger's house (i was visiting with a friend) these girls said i looked just like their friend who was in the other room, so they took me to meet her, and she DID look like me. weird!! but no celebrities.

9. Do you wear a watch? What kind?
used to all the time - the big black gadgety kind - but now i rely on my cell phone for the time.

10. Do you have anything pierced?
ears since i was like 5 (just one each) and my nose since sophomore year of college.

11. Do you have any tattoos?
nope! but i loooooooooove doing mehndi (which i never thought of as tattooing until it got big in the west and people started calling it "temporary henna tattoos")

12. Do you like pain?
uhh. no. and i always thought i was a wimp when it came to handling it, too, but then i made it through an unmedicated labor and delivery and i plan on trying it again inshallah.

13. Do you like to shop?
I
HATE
SHOPPING
at least in the way it's usually done by shoppers... like my hubby! go to one place, then another, then another, not a good deal here, try somewhere else, walk forever, blah blah blah. if i need something, i go find it and buy it and go home!
the only exception is, of course, a bookstore... oh, and grocery shopping!!! and one clothing exception - new york and company. more than half my wardrobe is from there. but my favorite place to go shopping is trader joe's.

14. What was the last thing you paid for with cash?
lunch at franklin's restaurant for a review i was writing for my newspaper.

15. What was the last thing you paid for with your credit card?
i don't have one... but i use my hubby's occasionally... can't remember what last for.

16. Who was the last person you spoke to on the phone?
my mother-in-law called because she missed musa!

17. What is on your desktop background?
musa!

18. What is the background on your cell phone?
musa!

19. What was the last movie you watched?
last night watched the documentary why we fight. more on this in a later blog post. it was riveting, fascinating, i HIGHLY recommend it!

20. What was the last book you read?
emmmm... well, reading LOTR right now. last one i read from the library? i think it was orson scott card's "lost boys" (too lazy to link)

babysitting

2007-01-11T16:36:00.000-05:00

my own and my brother's! there were some bad moments but otherwise it was fun! i still don't see how people with twins do it. and with what cousin koonj is saying about the daycare situation with six or seven toddlers/infants to one teacher, i am flabbermagasted. couldn't do it! can barely handle two, can't even manage my life properly with one. ah well...

first words? and other baby stuff

2007-01-10T18:57:00.000-05:00

i always thought these "firsts" were clear cut milestones - you know, i'd be able to tell musa in five or six years - your first word was "X" and you first sat up on "X" day and took your first steps on "X" day. but it's all so much more "sort of" than i thought. i've picked some arbitrary days - i took a photo with my cellphone on oct 14 when i first saw him really sitting up straight with no hand support, but he had been sort of almost doing it for a few days before that. and he started crawling within the next three days or so. so i say oct. 17.

so two evenings ago - that would be jan . 8!!! - my hubby was playing one of musa's favorite games with him - holding him on his lap standing and letting him bounce, but helping him turn them into great big jumps, and saying "jumpy jumpy jumpy!!" musa loves this. so he was going on with his bayyoo bayyoo babble, when all of a sudden he says, "jumpy!" we both heard it, i am not making this up. but it might have been a fluke. so hubby keeps playing the game, and tries to get him to say it again.
and he does! like three more times!
but, he hasn't said it again since then. he has, however, been saying mamamama, but it's only sometimes, not every time he wants me.

so, is musa's first word, "jumpy"? or is he saying mama?? i would think it's way too early for a word like jumpy. maybe he just sort of accidentally repeated it, like the sound and our reaction, did it a few more times, then forgot how. but he did say it... i can't tell you how cute that sounded...mashallah!!!

poor baby has another sniffle. it wouldn't be so bad if cleaning out his nose wasn't such a battle of screams. butu alhamdulillah.
i am looking for winter clothes for him - now that it's actually getting cold - well, i have warm clothes but i need outerwear, a bunting or snowsuit, coat, booties - and i am monstrously irritated to discover that they are coming out with spring clothes already and if i can't find the right clothing in the right size on the clearance rack, i'm not going to find it at all. i want something that has built in mittens because otherwise there's no way i'm keeping his hands covered. any suggestions?

in other news, i haven't been able to make it to the library again yet, so i'm rereading LOTR again. love it love it love it!!
this time, i have been focusing on the descriptions of middle-earth's lands and regions, and i am awed again at how meticulously tolkien imagined this entire world - did he close his eyes and see the hidden topographies of the Old Forest, the distance between the anduin and the rolling grasslands of rohan as covered by the "three hunters," the magnificent approach to minas tirith? could he stand on any spot in middle eart and look north, east, west, south, and tell what he saw there under the growing Shadow? such a yearning place, the realm of faerie...

life...

2007-01-08T17:12:00.000-05:00

...is what happens in between sessions of trying to feed the baby in the highchair.

update: i swear, if all i accomplish in one day is feeding musa two full meals, i can honestly say i've had a full, busy, productive day. well, it's almost 5:30 and he's had one meal. sort of.

unplanned post

2007-01-08T12:28:00.000-05:00

i wasn't going to post, but, i was logged in updating my links so i said what the heck. my good friend and writer NWS just joined the craziness with her own blog. mother of two as of eight weeks or so ago mashallah!
what else. musa pulled his first leaf off a houseplant a few minutes ago (it's a good thing i record all these things in the blog, because i certainly haven't written them in a journal or carefully penned them in his baby book). (i'm not sure "first leaf" will make it in anywhere else, to be honest).
have been thinking about doing a little baby update, though i wanted to do it in my journal. a digression here about journaling... i started when i was 11, and have written ever since - have a lovely collection of "blank books" of various sizes and patterns, filled with my musings and rants and streams of consciousness over 18 years (wow! never realized it was that long), but after i got married somehow it all went down the drain, and the journal which i started writing in on my honeymoon, is still barely halfway full (at least i remembered to pack it in my suitcase for the hospital before i went into labor).
but, it's easier to blog (unless you're doing it left-handed, single handed, while nursing, holding baby with your right arm, while he is kicking your typing arm with his right foot, like musa is now)... so, musa is nine months, mashallah, doubled his existence as i say. he is developing quite a temper, for having been such a chill baby in the early months. and he can still be by turns calmly curious, observant, playful, loving, silly. but by God, don't hold him down to clean his nose out, or change his diaper when he'd rather be climbing the dresser, or try to feed him when he's not interested. he's already actually throwing things (from the high chair at least) and making fists, sometimes even turning red in the face. soooo funny now, but i can see myself not laughing a year from now! mashallah. he is babbling voraciously, but the last few days he's picked one consonant - ba - and is making all sorts of variations on it, chiefly "bujoo bujoo" or "bayou bayou" - imagine a "shadda" on the middle consonant - and just keeps repeating it. often he sounds like he's saying "baby". we're trying to get him to say "mama", since the doctor said he's supposed to be saying mama and dada discriminately now, but i'm not so sure about this doctor anymore to be honest. he didn't even look at the new teeth, and thinks musa's waking at night is all down to hunger (just feed him more during the day, and feed him before nursing, he said,) and looked at me in shock when i said i was making all the baby food myself. i'm just not comfortable with any of that - and i KNOW musa's waking is not down to hunger. i would really like someone with a more holistic approach... he hasn't really told me anything that i haven't already read myself.

anyway. i had promised myself i would try to get some cleaning done today (oh, what a joyful promise!), so i am going to try to eat while musa is awake so i can clean when he goes down for a nap...

torture?

2007-01-07T11:48:00.000-05:00

in this article in the post today, scott adams says he's "tortured by doubt" as to the effectiveness of torture.

"If torture doesn't work better than the alternatives, not ever, then you don't need to discuss morality or world opinion because torture doesn't even pass the first filter. I'm not saying that morality and world opinion aren't important -- you just don't need to worry about them unless torture at least produces good results."

much of the article seems almost tongue in cheek, but i don't know mr. adams, and i don't know what his attitude toward torture really is or has been in the past. but something really bugs me about morality coming second to effectiveness.
i agree when he says that if torture does work sometimes in some occasions, it's going to be used. that doesn't mean it should be used. if something is inherently wrong (a moral issue), it's going to be wrong in any circumstances.

so if i could save my child's life by torturing someone, would i?

what a stupid question. not rhetorical. just stupid.

maps!

2007-01-05T13:55:00.000-05:00

got this idea from abu sinan's blog. it's at world66.com. had to try it. it's sort of disappointing, actually. i need to get OUT more...

create your own visited country map
or check our Venice travel guide

and this (just fixed this...)

create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide

i have tried...

2007-01-03T20:55:00.000-05:00

...to instill in myself a new sense of purpose. i determined that i do have a Calling, and know generally what i need to do to follow it, and i have a loving, patient husband and beautiful, happy, healthy son whom i love so much it breaks my heart. and still i cannot stave off this loneliness... not boredom, not even sadness, but loneliness...

studies, surveys and similitudes

2006-12-28T14:04:00.000-05:00

well, i meant to say "clones" instead of "similitudes" but i wanted something alliterative even though "similitudes" isn't quite the same as "clones". i think "similitude" is one of those words my cousin and i love to bash, like "supererogatory," a rarely-used english word that only seems to pop up in translations of arabic. i mean, i have NEVER heard the word "supererogatory" (it sounds dirty, doesn't it?) used for anything other than describing a certain type of muslim prayer. if you have, i'd love to know.

anyway, i digress. as usual. the point(s) i wanted to make have to do with a couple of articles i read this morning. this one talks about how the FDA has conducted "Scientific studies" on meat from cloned animals and concluded that it does not differ significantly from the meat we eat every day, so they do not feel it is necessary to place distinguishing labels on cloned meat in the grocery store. (i blogged about something similar back in june.) it also includes information on a "survey" that showed that 64 percent of people were "uncomfortable" with the thought of having that kind of meat on the shelves. and this one talks about a study that showed women who held their spouses' hands while being subjected to something stressful experienced less anxiety than when holding stranger's hands or no hands at all.

okay. i understand the benefits of having numbers to back you up when you're trying to make a point. especially because when you're writing an article, you can't just say, "It's obvious that most people with half a brain would not like to eat meat from an animal that wasn't produced the way animals are naturally produced," or, "Since it's common knowledge that people feel better with someone who loves them, and physical contact with that person feels good...". but something about it just seems silly, to fund a scientific study or survey for these kinds of things.

and i wish i could believe the FDA is as thorough and disinterested as possible when it comes to the impacts of its rulings. but i know the FDA's "recommended" levels of mercury intake are openly challenged by some (non-fringe) groups, and that is just one health issue. there is something beyond what a scientific study on the substance itself (the cloned meat) could possibly show - the something that causes so many people to recoil at the thought of consuming this meat. i don't think it's ignorance or fear of the unknown, but it's not scientific, so laugh at it if you want and don't use it in articles and journals (except in survey percentages, because the producers need to know if people will actually buy the stuff).

from the article: "FDA scientists said that by the time clones reached 6 to 18 months of age, they are virtually indistinguishable from conventionally bred animals."
"virtually indinstinguishable" is the kind of language that makes me shudder. what's in that space between "virtually" and "completely"? could it be the same thing that, a few paragraphs earlier, that causes "more deaths and deformed animals [among clones] than other reproductive technologies"? even if the meats are "virtually indistinguishable," are the risks worth it?

wow. for the first time in months (and since we're barely at nine months, we're talking a long time), musa just fell asleep while playing in his crib. i didn't do anything, nurse him or anything. i even had my back turned. all of a sudden i realized he was totally quiet, and i got up to check on him, and he was sort of keeled over with his head over his hands in a corner, like he had been sitting up and just kind of sank down and fell asleep. i moved him so he was lying down properly and his hair was all fuzzy from his position and i just wanted to eat him up. but i didn't. he seems so tiny sometimes, i can't believe he's a whole, real person. then sometimes i look at him and he's propping his chin and elbows up on the edge of the crib rail (granted, it's a stretch) and i can't believe how big he is. mashallah mashallah. as much as i love him, and it's sooooooo much, i love that Allah loves him even more... a line from little women (which, yes, i know because i read it a thousand times on the toilet) about God says He loves children "with a love stronger than that of any father, tenderer than that of any mother". i just want so much for him to grow to manhood safe and happy and healthy. i don't want him to know fear or pain until he can handle them with his own inner resources. these are my duaas... well some of them at least.

well have i fit enough topics into one blog post? i wanted to blog about no-fly lists too, and how ridiculous they are, but i should go take a shower while he is still sleeping...

here is a baby in a box!!!

more adventures in baby feeding

2006-12-26T14:29:00.000-05:00

so musa woke up around 10 something, and i tried to feed him breakfast a couple of times, but he is just finally finishing it now (pureed pears and oatmeal) at 2:30 in the afternoon. but "finishing" is a misleading word, when every bite stays in his mouth for a good five minutes before he gets around to swallowing it - that is, if he hasn't scooped some of it out with the other spoon he is playing with, or oozed it out with some spit, or sneezed it out all over the high chair straps and his clothes. okay, one bite left...
it is in his mouth, but so is the long end of his play spoon (without which he won't even open his mouth in the first place so yes he has to have one). alhamdulillah! breakfast is finished!

websurfing...

2006-12-22T12:19:00.000-05:00

...while nursing can take you strange places. while looking up recipes for welsh rabbit (yes, i was just eating breakfast), i found myself on this page in wikipedia, where i learned that "nemo" means "nobody" in latin. so why did pixar name its titular character "nobody" (in finding nemo)? isn't that a little strange? talk about crushing the little clowfish's self esteem, along with all the little kiddie fans who identify with him. "finding nobody." sheesh. i loved the movie, though...

we have another tooth!

2006-12-22T11:20:00.000-05:00

as of last night. mashallah. MAN those things are sharp! they feel like little knife points sticking out of his gums.

musa is sniffly, and i feel like such an abusive parent when i try to clean out his nose. i literally have to use my arm to pin both of his hands down, immobilize his head with some other part of my body, and stick the aspirator up his nose as carefully as possible while he is screaming his head off and trying to move his head away. but oh, the feeling of success when i get that snot out, and the peace in my heart when i can no longer hear it bubbling in his sinuses with every breath!

i can completely understand why non-parents get bored with parents always talking about their kids. but i am so glad to know there are people out there who understand just how important this tiny, gross victory is... :)

we have a tooth!

2006-12-19T16:52:00.000-05:00

well, just a tiny little hard point coming out of the gums, in the middle of his bottom jaw. i haven't been able to see it yet - he won't let me - but i first heard it about half an hour ago when i was giving him a drink of water from a glass, and heard the tiny click-click. apparently he liked the sound, coz he kept doing it :) and i could feel it with my fingertip, too. i wonder if he really knows?
i'm just SO glad. this whole teething thing has been so rough on him AND us. at least it's getting somewhere now alhamdulillah.
mashallah mashallah. pray for us. pray i can keep nursing through this, too...

cooking pans and books

2006-12-19T13:08:00.000-05:00

anyone out there a big user of cast iron cookware? we are thinking of throwing out all our teflon (finally)... have been "thinking" about it a while, but i like eggs and omelettes a lot. once i tried to cook tofu in a stainless steel pan and it all got stuck.

so, on books. i never did write about updike's "terrorist". but it went on pretty much as it began. unless he meant it as a satire of depictions of muslim-americans, which is not the impression i got, the book's main character, the 18-year-old egyptian-irish, american-born-and-raised ahmad, is just completely unbelievable. i read some amazon.com reviews while i was reading the book, and some of what other readers said i agree with - that ahmad's speech is more like a middle-aged immigrant arab than an american teenager of any religious persuasion (but i guess all militant muslims talk like that? like, "'I of course do not hate all Americans. But the American way is the way of infidels. It is headed for a terrible doom.'" and that is when he is talking to a guidance counselor at his high school). and then there is the weirdo sheikh (who is the only other muslim this kid seems to have any exposure to? in new york?) - Shaikh Rashid, who has probably the most unbelievable line in the whole book - when he is tutoring ahmad on surah al-fil, with the first ayah, in describing the pronunciation of "as-haabil fil", he sais, "'S, h: two distinct sounds, not "sh." Pronounce them as in, oh, "asshole." Forgive me, that is the sole word in the devils' language that comes to mind."
first of all, is he learning to read it from "roman" arabic, that there would be some possibility of pronouncing saad and ha together as "sh"? and second of all - asshole??? yeah, i can see ANY shaikh, even the craziest, saying something like that in a lesson.
*sigh* - i haven't read any other updike books, but i can see in this book why he is seen as a great american novelist - he has a way of writing, of description of certain scenes and individuals, that paints a sort of larger picture in your mind of the culture and society the people stem from, the land and nation in which those places figure. in much of this book you can SEE new york, the high school, a few of the characters... but in his attempt at portraying even one shy, solitary, misled muslim american kid, he is just so way off it kills the book. it just doesn't work. i don't believe that this kid turned into a "radical muslim" the way this book claims, i don't believe that radical muslims in america act like this, i don't believe that ahmad would go and carry out a terrorist attack based on what his beliefs in the book are (that if he dies and goes to heaven, God will nobt be so terribly alone anymore???).
maybe i'm just missing the whole point? i dunno. but this is my reaction.

so, after "terrorist" i started reading poul anderson's harvest of stars, which i got because a blurb at the back of ender's game said it was a book of incredible vision or something like that. i thought the "vision" illuminated something grand about humanity, but the "vision" is more about envisioning an amazingly complex spacefaring future for our race. it's also a very political book. but... i'm not done with it yet. i don't think i can finish it. it's just going on and on and on.... it's well written - the characters are memorable, and i even found myself lingering over some descriptive passages. but, either hardcore sci-fi is just not for me - this is one of the only ones i have ever read - or this book just doesn't do it for me...

i stopped at about 2/3 of the way through to read the last book i checked out, lost boys also by orson scott card, because i have enjoyed other books of his. i finished it in one night, and over the next day went back to reread the ending twice more. it's such a simple story, almost cliche - a young, struggling Mormon family moves to a small town in NC in the early 80s where young boys have been disappearing. but it's not so much a story about the crime, or the supernatural elements that creep into this family - it's about the family themselves - the father's struggle to make ends meet with a job he detests, the mother's struggle to keep house with three kids, a fourth on the way, and find meaning in her church work, the oldest child's struggle with loneliness in a hostile new school environment (in a sense, maybe this is more about jihad than "terrorist was?)... it's about good versus evil among very orinary people, but card has a way of drawing you into their lives so well that the end is heartwrenching to read - especially as a parent. and though i'm far from mormon myself, it's just nice to read something about people with strong faith, where the story is not about them losing faith or getting it back or anything like that. it's just a part of them, it helps them over all the hurdles they face...

any other recommendations for good escapist reading? i am starting to panic with nothing else new to read... minus all the books i have that i haven't read yet... hehheh...

six weird things meme

2006-12-18T12:10:00.000-05:00

people on blogs i read are doing this one, and now i feel like trying it out. so, six weird things about me.

1) i read novels on the toilet. all the time. i can't go to the bathroom without a book to read, even if it's just a page before i have to get up again. it's just so BORING otherwise. if i find myself in a bathroom without a book or magazine or anything, i will actually pick up a bottle of anything that happens to be nearby, like soap or Glade or toothpaste or 409, and read the back of it, every single word, including ingredients like "methylchloroisothiazolinone" (look it up, you will see i have even spelled it correctly). i don't remember how this all started, but one of my brother's favorite embarrassing things to tell people about me is that i once read all of stephen king's "christine" on the toilet. in one sitting. (in all fairness, i do read pretty fast... novels at least). and anyway, i can always retort that he read much of his collection of "encyclopedia brittanica" on the toilet. which is much more embarrassing than "christine". oh, if only he were in the blogosphere too...
oh, as an aside to this one, since i probably can't use it as a separate weirdity, some of my bathroom books i have used for that purpose for YEARS, reading them over and over again. (dont' worry, i keep them clean). these include "little women", which i have practically memorized because of it, and most of the harry potter books.

2) i also have to read recipes while i'm eating. this can be either in my own cookbooks, or online - two sites i visit every day are deliaonline.com, and allrecipes.com. at work i would have lunch at my desk every day and visit these sites. hubby says he has never met anyone so concerned with all aspects of food. i do love cooking, and the benefit is i try out lots of new recipes on him. but i just have to have recipes to read while i'm eating! it makes the eating so much more satisfying. i don't know why. it used to be that i had to either read (books) while i was eating (which my mom would get mad at me for) or have someone to eat with. but now, even when we sit down to dinner at home, i'll usually have a cookbook open.

3) in movies, when a character is trying to do something they shouldn't be, like sneaking around in someone's house in their absence, or cheating on a spouse, or .. whenever there is a chance that any moment somebody might get CAUGHT... i can't watch. i will actually turn away or hide my face in my hands and peek through my fingers. i can't stand that kind of suspense.

4) i once had a passing interest in wicca. before i get the chorus of astaghfirullahs, i didn't know at the time that it was a religion of its own and sort of required you to renounce your "old beliefs." i just thought the idea of magic was really cool, especially with all the old celtic, woman-centric connotations, as well as the fact that there were actually people who "practiced" it. i knew one at school who loaned me a book about it, in which i discovered that it was really not the sort of thing a muslim could be interested in. oh well.

5) i have a method of eating meals that a friend of mine once described very well as "a constant search for the perfect bite." generally this can also be described as "save the best bite for last." for example, how i eat a reese's: all around the edge first, and then finally savor the yummy bit in the middle with all the peanut butter. i eat sandwiches the same way, waffles, etc. crust first, then the middle. as for plates with rice and saalan, i will usually taste each kind of food in my plate, then in each bite i'll mix them up in different ways and proportions, always searching for the combination that tastes best. it's unconscious... i can talk to someone and read recipes while doing this, no problem. like, right now i am eating this leftover cheesecake from the CC factory, and every bite i am trying to get the best mix of the crust, the cheesecake part, the topping and the whipped cream. (it's a new one, by the way, mixed berry custard almond crunch cheesecake. if that doesn't make your mouth water, you are just not worthy).

6) i skipped three grades out of the 12, not including kindergarten which i also skipped, and repeated one, with the end result that i graduated three months after i turned 15. that was, however, the end of my illustrious whiz kid career, as my grades plummeted once i started college (and got a taste of having a social life, however pathetic it was). the grade i repeated was fourth, and that was only because we were moving from public school to this one, a private quaker school in durham, nc, and the Grownups deemed it was best for me to enter this school in what was the equivalent of the grade i had just completed.

that's it! here's a pic from a recent visit by by nephew, issa, with musa having decided he is finished with this conversation, but issa still excited to see him. i love these kiddies so much!!!

I CAN'T SLEEP!!!!

2006-12-13T04:49:00.000-05:00

but i'm not nearly as unhappy as the other night.
just BORED as hell. and hungry and thirsty. it's ten to five a.m., and i've been up since a little before 3. trying to get musa to go back to sleep without nursing in bed with me. it's just as i had feared, the reason i had put off trying this for so long - once i have gotten up to try to comfort him back to sleep without bringing him back to bed with me from the crib, i am too awake to go back to sleep.
so, although alhamdulillah musa has managed to make it since midnight without nursing, it was only because i stood and picked him up out of the crib, rocked him (counted to 100 rocks), and used the pacifier to give him something to suck on. it's frustrating - the AAP book says your baby will be waking up at night for the rest of his life, so what you need to do is train him to be able to go back to sleep by himself. is it too early for this? i have no idea. and is it any good for me to try these other methods of getting him to sleep - rocking, pacifier - aside from nursing? i'm still helping him, aren't i?
i wish i knew WHY he was waking up like this. it only started around 7 months; before this it was just twice a night and then only a little fussing. now, i put him down for the night, and within the first 45 minutes to two hours he begins wailing - not fussing, or crying, but wailing very loudly, like he's afraid or in pain, with his eyes still closed, and 90% of the time nothing will calm him down except for nursing. yes, i read duaas on him, yes, i give him mylicon, yes, i feed him during the day plenty. it's not hunger, it's not gas, i'm like 99% sure. and it happens even when he's in bed with us all night, so i don't think it's some latent separation anxiety. it MIGHT be teething pain, but why is it only happening at night then?

anyway, speculate, speculate. i was spending the time writing my next article in my head - you'd think that would be boring enough to get me to fall asleep, but no. wide awake. thirsty as anything. ya Allah - fajr doesn't come in for another hour!! what am i supposed to do?? i am feeling sulky toward everyone out there who has ever asked, "why don't you sleep when the baby sleeps?"

outside, the day's traffic is starting to build up already. every ten minutes or so, some very loud and annoying truck goes by. something just went "crack" close by. i always worry these sounds will wake musa up... the firetrucks from the station just around the corner sometimes do.
but, would you believe it, i am almost hoping he will wake up now, so i will have something to DO with these useless minutes?

hmm, i guess this is a good time to pray, innit...