Happy for Thursday,
I just finished The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. It was a really good book. I have been reading alot, but I haven't liked anything as much as this lately.

Happy for Wednesday,
My really cool friend from Idaho called me. Then she called again just to hear my voicemail. =)

Happy for Tuesday,
I am getting a promotion at work, Alhamdulillah.

Happy for Monday,
I had a decent parking spot, Alhamdulillah.

Happy for Sunday:

It took me some time to come up with today's happy. Not because it was a sad day, but rather it was rather slow and unproductive. There wasn't much of an up or down to it. Alhamdulillah. I guess it would be that I got to relax at home.

Happy for Saturday:

A good friend called me today for the first time and made me laugh. This day has been marked. =) Alhamdulillah.

Happy for Friday:

My scholarship posted. Alhamdulillah. =D

Happy for today:

My dad's surgery went fine. =) Alhamdulillah.

Happy for today:
My brother took me out for lunch and we got to hang out for a little while. Alhamdulillah.

It's been a long day. The commute gets tiresome and boring. The TESL class is interesting. Definately a diverse group of people. I am looking forward to it. Although... everyone is a graduate student in there with a few years of experience - a little intimidating. I found out I am not eligible for the Mississippi Teacher Corp or Teach for America (the upside to the programs being they pay for a masters if you decide to teach with them for two years), however I'll look into the teacher fellowship program. They require a three year committment...=S I don't want to be here another three years, but inshaAllah I'll keep the option open. I'm polishing up my teaching resume and freely distributing it from atop tall buildings in major cities across north america and especially near islamic schools. Allahu alam if I'll get any serious offers, but I could focus all my efforts on a year of TESL and learning arabic in Egypt. They say you can't learn a language very well as you grow older. (they=linguists) **sigh** May seems to be coming so quickly...Alhamdulillah.

"Happy" for today:
The Dean brought a tray of cookies and brownies for the staff. I helped myself to a brownie. Alhamdulillah.

tempered, seething, seering, condemned, tranquil, familiar.
emotion, sadness, pain, joy, anger, pain, love.
constant, abrupt, sharp, mournfully, cathartic, enveloped
death, disease, corruption, immorality, horror, experience
purity, innocence, lillies, sunrays, chai, a mushaf...

I've inherited my mother's sneezing sensibilities. Never letting a sneeze be alone I always sneeze in multiples- usually in the mornings or because of some dust or something. Recently I developed allergies though. In fits of 20-25 at a time. The mystery is what it is caused by. While making some daal, I sniffed various little jars of spices to find the garam masala, yet... not a single sneeze. I can walk through the detergent aisle at Wal-Mart and break sneezing records. I sneeze while I'm in the house, in the shower, outside, while driving, and I think I'm just allergic to air and life. Alhamdulillah.

I think my allergies are okay now...not because they've stopped, but because they help me to thank Allah... nearly hundreds of times a day. Thank Allah that my worries consist of sneezes, not bombs or starvation, death or poverty, imprisonment or prosecution.

May He grant patience to the Muslimeen all over the world facing trials and hardships which most of us cannot begin to understand the implications of. May the oppressed be liberated, the jailed and imprisoned be freed, may those tested with trials succeed, and may those facing hardships have more patience than they will ever need. May He reward them, expiate their sins, and grant them lofty abodes in Jannatul-Firdaws. Ameen, thooma ameen.

• "Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose vis-a-vis an introduction, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V." -- V's introduction to Evey

I confess I am petrified... petrified of losing everything I once had, or had the delusion of "having." I am deluded enough to think that what I am blessed with & is a loan to me - is "mine." To face sickness after health, betrayal and abandonment after love and friendship are struggles, however, the scariest aspect of this is to fail these tests miserably. Will I be pushed to the point of my absolute threshold and tolerance? will my limited supply of patience end before the trial does?

There is a girl who is a little attention hungry. well, that's an understatement, but anyway I want her to not behave that way, because its not making her cool and she's giving some people around her a hard time. But at the same time I know how it feels to want attention. in fact, I want plenty of attention , I just have to tell my nafs shushuppa.

i'm drowning in work and school now, but inshaAllah will update at some point. um, sharissa dear... I <3 you and I'll fix that link at some point, inshaAllah. I hope you're doing good.

Someone
someone is dressing up for death today, a change of skirt or tie
eating a final feast of buttered sliced pan, tea
scarcely having noticed the erection that was his last
shaving his face to marble for the icy laying out
spraying with deodorant her coarse armpit grass
someone today is leaving home on business
saluting, terminally, the neighbours who will join in the cortege
someone is paring his nails for the last time, a precious moment
someone's waist will not be marked with elastic in the future
someone is putting out milkbottles for a day that will not come
someone's fresh breath is about to be taken clean away
someone is writing a cheque that will be rejected as 'drawer deceased'
someone is circling posthumous dates on a calendar
someone is listening to an irrelevant weather forecast
someone is making rash promises to friends
someone's coffin is being sanded, laminated, shined
who feels this morning quite as well as ever
someone if asked would find nothing remarkable in today's date
perfume and goodbyes her final will and testament
someone today is seeing the world for the last time
as innocently as he had seen it first
-DO'D

I don't need another kind of green to know I'm on the right side with you
So go and drift away from me
adopt some new philosophy
that doesn't hold the two of us in mind
move into someone else's place
stare into some other's eyes
and slowly only come to realize
that you didn't need another kind of green to know
that I'm on the right side
that you're on the right side
you don't need to lose it to know that you
had it good.
-JM

I have my cal final at 1030 am tommorrow. Keep me in your du'as. I hope you're not drowning anymore.

Living in a place where muslims are a minority has its own set of emotional and social baggage. For one, you always represent Islam. While doning hijab, you are identified as a muslim, and all of your actions and words become those of a "muslim woman." People may not conciously, or actively understand that they think this way, but they do. You carry Islam with you wherever you are. Your frustrations, anger, joy, sadness, and laughter are not simply yours, but of every muslim.

How do I know this? I am often the first (and only) muslim these people will meet. They have no other personal experience with a muslim. When they talk about muslims, I am the person they are thinking about (along with OBL).

Sometimes the weight of this, makes me sad. I know I suck. I don't want my suckiness to reflect on Islam or leave them with an impression that all muslims suck like me.

I feel guilty because I bhangra-ed without you.

I'll never tell you
I love you
you'll be on top and
you'll have me right
where you want me
I'll reek of you, your power
some exerting others absorbing
the shocks.
I feel the vibrations of your voice
and the echoes of your thoughts
on park benches. I gasp as you
exhale. Breathing in,
what you breathe out.
I'll never tell you
I love you (again).

I have never met a man who didn't want to be loved. But I have seldom met a man who didn't fear marriage. Something about the closure seems constricting, not enabling. Marriage seems easier to understand for what it cuts out of our lives than for what it makes possible within our lives. When I was younger this fear immobilized me.

I did not want to make a mistake. I saw my friends get married for reasons of social acceptability, or sexual fever, or just because they thought it was the logical thing to do. Then I watched, as they and their partners became embittered and petty in their dealings with each other. I looked at older couples and saw, at best, mutual toleration of each other. I imagined a lifetime of loveless nights and bickering days and could not imagine subjecting myself or someone else to such a fate.

And yet, on rare occasions, I would see old couples who somehow seemed to glow in each other's presence. They seemed really in love, not just dependent upon each other and tolerant of each other's foibles.




It was an astounding sight, and it seemed impossible. How, I asked myself, can they have survived so many years of sameness, so much irritation at the others habits? What keeps love alive in them, when most of us seem unable to even stay together, much less love each other?




The central secret seems to be in choosing well. There is something to the claim of fundamental compatibility. Good people can create a bad relationship, even though they both dearly want the relationship to succeed. It is important to find someone with whom you can create a good relationship from the outset. Unfortunately, it is hard to see clearly in the early stages.




Sexual hunger draws you to each other and colors the way you see yourselves together. It blinds you to the thousands of little things by which relationships eventually survive or fail. You need to find a way to see beyond this initial overwhelming sexual fascination.




Some people choose to involve themselves sexually and ride out the most heated period of sexual attraction in order to see what is on the other side. This can work, but it can also leave a trail of wounded hearts. Others deny the sexual side altogether in an attempt to get to know each other apart from their sexuality. But they cannot see clearly, because the presence of unfulfilled sexual desire looms so large that it keeps them from having any normal perception of what life would be like together.




The truly lucky people are the ones who manage to become long-time friends before they realize they are attracted to each other. They get to know each other's laughs, passions, sadness, and fears. They see each other at their worst and at their best. They share time together before they get swept up into the entangling intimacy of their sexuality. This is the ideal, but not often possible. If you fall under the spell of your sexual attraction immediately, you need to look beyond it for other keys to compatibility.


One of these is laughter. Laughter tells you how much you will enjoy each other's company over the long term. If your laughter together is good and healthy, and not at the expense of others, then you have a healthy relationship to the world. Laughter is the child of surprise. If you can make each other laugh, you can always surprise each other. And if you can always surprise each other, you can always keep the world around you new.

Beware of a relationship in which there is no laughter. Even the most intimate relationships based only on seriousness, have a tendency to turn sour. Over time, sharing a common serious viewpoint on the world tends to turn you against those who do not share the same viewpoint, and your relationship can become based on being critical together.




After laughter, look for a partner who deals with the world in a way you respect. When two people first get together, they tend to see their relationship as existing only in the space between the two of them. They find each other endlessly fascinating, and the overwhelming power of the emotions they are sharing obscures the outside world. As the relationship ages and grows, the outside world becomes important again. If your partner treats people or circumstances in a way you can't accept, you will inevitably come to grief.

Look at the way she cares for others and deals with the daily affairs of life. If that makes you love her more, your love will grow. If it does not, be careful. If you do not respect the way you each deal with the world around you, eventually the two of you will not respect each other.




Look also at how your partner confronts the mysteries of life. We live on the cusp of poetry and practicality, and the real life of the heart resides in the poetic. If one of you is deeply affected by the mystery of the unseen in life and relationships, while the other is drawn only to the literal and the practical, you must take care that the distance does not become an unbridgeable gap that leaves you each feeling isolated and misunderstood.

There are many other keys, but you must find them by yourself. We all have unchangeable parts of our hearts that we will not betray and private commitments to a vision of life that we will not deny. If you fall in love with someone who cannot nourish those inviolable parts of you, or if you cannot nourish them in her, you will find yourselves growing further apart until you live in separate worlds where you share the business of life, but never touch each other where the heart lives and dreams.

From there, it is only a small leap to the cataloguing of petty hurts and daily failures that leaves so many couples bitter and unsatisfied with their mates.




So, choose carefully and well. If you do, you will have chosen a partner with whom you can grow, and then the real miracle of marriage can take place in your hearts. I pick my words carefully when I speak of a miracle. But I think it is not too strong a word.

There is a miracle in marriage. It is called transformation. Transformation is one of the most common events of nature. The seed becomes the flower. The cocoon becomes the butterfly. Winter becomes spring and love becomes a child. We never question these, because we see them around us every day. To us they are not miracles, though if we did not know them they would be impossible to believe.




Marriage is a transformation we choose to make. Our love is planted like a seed, and in time it begins to flower. We cannot know the flower that will blossom, but we can be sure that a bloom will come. If you have chosen carefully and wisely, the bloom will be good. If you have chosen poorly or for the wrong reason, the bloom will be flawed.

We are quite willing to accept the reality of negative transformation in a marriage. It was negative transformation that always had me terrified of the bitter marriages that I feared when I was younger. It never occurred to me to question the dark miracle that transformed love into harshness and bitterness. Yet I was unable to accept the possibility that the first heat of love could be transformed into something positive that was actually deeper and more meaningful than the heat of fresh passion. All I could believe in was the power of this passion and the fear that when it cooled I would be left with something lesser and bitter.




But there is positive transformation as well. Like negative transformation, it results from a slow accretion of little things. But instead of death by a thousand blows, it is growth by a thousand touches of love. Two histories intermingle. Two separate beings, two separate presences, two separate consciousness come together and share a view of life that passes before them. They remain separate, but they also become one.

There is an expansion of awareness, not a closure and a constriction, as I had once feared. This is not to say that there is no tension and there are no traps. Tension and traps are part of every choice of life, from celibate to monogamous to having multiple lovers.

Each choice contains within it the lingering doubt that the road not taken somehow is more fruitful and exciting, and each becomes dulled to the richness that it alone contains. But only marriage allows life to deepen and expand and be leavened by the knowledge that two have chosen, against all odds, to become one.




Those who live together without marriage can know the pleasure of shared company, but there is a specific gravity in the marriage commitment that deepens that experience into something richer and more complex.

So do not fear marriage, just as you should not rush into it for the wrong reasons. It is an act of faith and it contains within it the power of transformation. If you believe in your heart that you have found someone with whom you are able to grow, if you have sufficient faith that you can resist the endless attraction of the road not taken and the partner not chosen, if you have the strength of heart to embrace the cycles and seasons that your love will experience, then you may be ready to seek the miracle that marriage offers. If not, then wait. The easy grace of a marriage well made is worth your patience. When the time comes, a thousand flowers will bloom… endlessly.



by Kent Nerburn
From the book
"Letters to My Son, A Father's Wisdom on Manhood, Women, Life, and Love."
Published in New York by the New World Library, 1994

ASalaam alaikum

So im off to canada...

forgive me for my transgressions against you, please.

Ma'salaam