Just trying out the new flickr slideshow-embedding feature. This is my favorite building in the world, so far - the Commodore Stockton School (Chinatown, San Francisco) - which I serendipitously stumbled across one day.

In case you didn’t know, I’m obsessed with yellow, and with arches.

Enjoy!

Waiting, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

Sometimes, I run away and lie around in the park all afternoon, reading books and listening to music and taking photographs. Sometimes, I even skip around on my jump-rope (but I discovered early on that that works better on concrete than on grass), and my new goal in life is to buy hula-hoops. Somehow, I’ve convinced myself that if I could get back into hula-hooping - as I did when I was a kid - I’d be much more coordinated and comfortable in moving my body, and then I’d even learn how to dance. It’d be amazing!

Last week, I did cartwheels in the park for the first time since childhood. Needless to say, I completely sucked (that part about extending your legs in the air is kinda tricky), but I couldn’t stop laughing along with Princess Pretty Pants and Beanay, and I didn’t even feel ridiculous for attempting something at which I knew I would fail. That’s progress.

(PPP captured all the laughter and cheering and my attempted cartwheels on camera, and they just might be coming your way soon via facebook-video, if we’re friends over there on that addictive, timesuck of a social-networking site. Also, via wikipedia, I found a nice little tutorial on cartwheeling. You didn’t doubt me, did you, when I mentioned “reading something on wikipedia once”? I look up everything.)

Speaking of parks and lounging around and reading on the grass, I just posted this on flickr, and then I remember how much you Blogistan folks love books, too, so I’m sharing this here as well:

I’m currently almost done reading Jason Elliot’s An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan, quite possibly one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. It’s nonfiction (as are most of the books I like).

An Unexpected Light is poignant, and unexpectedly funny, and perceptive. There are lots of references to chapli kabob and chai and Pathans and Sufi parables and open-armed unconditional hospitality, for those of you who are fans of such things. (As well as an equal number of references to guns and landmines and destruction and the mujahideen and Taliban and meddling/useless foreign nations, for that matter.)

What struck me most as I was reading this was Elliot’s respect and compassion for the Afghans. "He just has so much love and compassion for the people," I told [K] recently. "I love how he writes about them. Everyone is handsome or beautiful to him, I noticed. He never mentions people being ugly." Yet the Afghans are never exoticized or Other-ized here. Elliot sees them as dignified and beautiful, inside and out, because, for him, they are first and foremost profoundly human.

I don’t often make book recommendations (to each his own, eh?), and I’m too lazy to write books reviews.

But you should read this one.

That is all.

[+]

K and I had a lovely conversation about this book weeks (months?) ago, and it made me so happy to know someone else had read it. You can check out an excerpt of the Prologue on amazon.

(Also, don’t give me drama about those folded-over pages. I always dog-ear book pages while reading! Sacrilegious, I know.)

Carefree at the fake beach in Emeryville, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

and i wonder if everything i do
i do instead
of something i want to do more
the question fills my head
i know that there’s no grand plan here
this is just the way it goes
and when everything else seems unclear
i guess at least i know

i do it for the joy it brings…
- Joyful Girl (Ani DiFranco)

[+]

Last Friday through Sunday, I did the following (in no particular order):

1. Made new friends to love

2. Tried to calmly answer some rude man’s antagonistic question wherein he asked me for “statistics regarding Muslim women who are subjugated” while I was innocuously standing in line to order a grilled cheese sandwich with a side of french fries. One of the new friends asked me later, “Do you get that a lot?”

3. Went to Baker Beach with the new friends, and walked in the waves and the sand

4. Realized that one end of Baker Beach has nudists - and not just any end, but the end closest to the most gorgeous views of the Golden Gate bridge, dammit!

5. Remembered that this is the year I was supposed to learn how to swim. (There are still a few months left to summer! I can do it!)

6. Moderated the opening plenary at a conference in San Francisco, and realized how much I missed the work I used to do (although not the workplace itself)

7. Magically, did not trip in my high heels at said conference

8. Unleashed The Yasmine vocabulary (”Stalking, stabbing, & crack”) on a few unsuspecting conference-goers

9. Referenced biking-related videos in conversation, and made folks laugh: 1 - 2 - 3

10. Took photos of San Francisco’s gorgeous St. Ignatius Church. Then, my camera battery suddenly died on me, and I decided it was a sign to sit down and meditate and converse with God for a bit

11. Scraped a few layers of skin off the sides of my thumbs, and now I can’t bend them enough to text-message properly. This is blasphemy.

12. Listened to the rockstar T tease me about my lack of timeliness in replying to emails, and laughed when he added, “If I had sent a text message, you probably would have replied immediately!”

13. Explained approximately 4,975,332 times how I do the headwrap

14. Realized while looking in the mirror that I inadvertently give the wrong answer when asked about the length of my hair. It’s not almost to my elbows; it’s actually just past my shoulders.

15. Watched one of my new friends shuffle through the CDs in my car and pronounce them quite an eclectic mix

16. Had gelato in Berkeley with My Favorite & Most Rockstarish Married Couple ever, Ayesha and Faraz (okay, actually, they totally tie with Baji and TP), and discovered my new favorite flavor: Lemon Creme. And my other new favorite flavor: Milk & Honey. (”Look, Ayesha!” I crowed. “We can get a free preview of heaven!”) The latter flavor is in honor of the upcoming San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

17. Reunited with several friends; one of them, much to my amusement, acted as “my one-man cheering squad” whenever I walked into a room - “Yaz-MEEEEEEEN!” - which totally made me feel like a rockstar. (I have a feeling we need to work on his pronunciation, though.)

18. Took photos at a tiny beach I randomly stumbled upon in Emeryville:

19. Also unleashed my fake Desi [South Asian] accent on unsuspecting non-Desi folks who weren’t sure quite what hit ‘em - and who then asked me to explain the intricacies of Desi accents and give a few examples (which I did later in the afternoon when one man mentioned he’d be flying back out of the Bay that evening for work, and I queried, “Vat is dis vork of vich you esspeak?! Ve are ROCKSTARS!”, resulting in much laughter from the rest of the group)

20. Smiled when a friend slung his arm across my shoulders and said to me, “I am so glad that you’re here.”

21. Highfived a rabbi

Melody, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten how to blog - or, at least, how to write in general. This is a sad state of affairs. And if that’s not bad enough, Adnan has gone and deleted all RSS feeds from his GoogleReader.

“But how you vill follow veblogs now?!” I exclaimed [mentally, it came out in a Desi accent]. “Back to the pre-googlereader days of opening a page and hoping the blogger has updated?”

“You guys rarely update anyway!” came the rejoinder. Can’t argue with that one. Besides, maybe Adnan’s right in attempting to simplify his blog-reading habits through un-following feeds. After all, I just spent an entire afternoon+evening whittling down my GoogleReader unread-posts count from 1,000+ to 689. Also, I’ve just realized I subscribe to 263 feeds. This is slightly ridiculous. Just slightly.

Anyway, in lieu of a real post, I present to you my latest “fake update” (highfive to Ayan!), a recently rediscovered .txt file on my harddrive. I’m not sure anymore what the context was behind half of these, but it’s all bullet points (from the last few months) that were meant to be GMail or facebook status messages, I think, and were used as such in many cases.

Lists and bullet points! We haven’t done those in a while.

Onward, then.

[+]

“The precise location of my camera is undetermined.” - original z-lo flava

crackfiendserene: Don’t come to California unless you know how to SPELL! Because CALIFORNIA is a BIG WORD, I know. (What kinda Desi are you? I need spelling-bee champs!)

ich bin zurueck

“Art always tastes better when it’s brought to you live!” - Pacific Art Collective

“And what is there to life besides highfives and kickass gelato?” - Z (again)

“Just gotta stab your way to success.” - Anjum

I am out of chapstick, and have now resorted to applying lipgloss as part of my bedtime ritual. As Somayya would say, “Dubyoo tee EFF!”

“Are you updating your address book? You are more of a (a) nerd and (b) uncle than I am.” - Z

Goroo ba means Daika jay ga/”We will see”

Hey, Jude

Holy hell, there are eyelash enhancement techniques now! Whaaaat?!

“Hijabis should come with an instruction manual or something.” - A in Toronto

We must let go of the life we have planned,
so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
- Joseph Campbell

“Nobody stabs my bus!” - Enchanted

“Apply the quadratic equation to your life.” - Conversation with the halaqafools

Favorite words today:
1. Doppelgaenger
2. Zeitgeist

It’s settled. I need to have CUPCAKES at my wedding.

Duaiyaan ne thyaareh shuruuh ho gaey

“I don’t know what ‘melodramatic’ means… but you’ll be removed.” - Enchanted, again

My eating habits are best described as,
“Yes, please.”

I lowve Juno, because she’s OBSESSED with blue slurpees. Why did you all fail to tell me that THIS was the one reason why I should watch the filum?!

“Have your stabbing pen ready. You’re gonna hide it in the headwrap, right?” - Z

I am not aloof. I am aloo, without an F. [Epiphany resulting from a conversation with a smart friend, who came up with that statement. Aloo=potatoes, the single food item, in any form, with which I am highly obsessed.]

“It would be lovely if what we loved to do also made enough money for us.
It would be lovelier if we knew what we loved to do.” - N bhaiyya

reeshtiya

Somayya: “Yazzo, you get addicted to things too easily. I don’t think you should ever try drugs.”
“What about crack?”
“You won’t really get addicted to crack. Now, HEROIN, on the other hand…!”

“Super salad?” [This will never get old.]

I want a vespa the color of tangerines. [Like maybe this one that Hashim pointed me towards.]

“I love when you stay people need to be stabbed. I can just hear you saying, ‘I will cut youuuuu.’ ” - Dina

I keep dreaming I’m taking photos.

“Yes, I think I read that on wikipedia once.”

“You go, cracker! The daily waffles make it work.” - A, trying to wheedle me into being productive.

I wear glasses. My eyes are great.

Dishoom! Ka-pow! Zabardast!

Who the hell pays $4 for a salad with no tomatoes? - @ Library cafe
Holy hell, who pays over $7 for a salad!? - @ Hipster cafe
Shit, I just did. And it’s a Mediterranean one with tomatoes and avocado and capers and olives and pepperoncini and artichoke and cucumbers. And it comes with bread and butter.

In love with crinkly-eyed smiles. Bas.

You know what I hate?
When I fall in love with a weblog, and then it unexpectedly disappears, and I have no way of contacting the blogger.
Seeklight, where did you go? Drop me an email, buddy. Better yet, resurrect the weblog, will ya?

Update: I love the internetS. And emails in response to weblog-SOSs!

The better to stab you with, originally uploaded to flickr by yaznotjaz.

Last night, I joined ZMan and my sister and our friend F in Berkeley for dinner and dessert (gelato!) and a catching-up session. I’d not seen Z since our South Bay dinner back in November, and we decided it must have been a year (or even two) since I’d crossed paths with F.

The sister hadn’t been able to resist & refuse the Half Price Books down the street, so she came armed to dinner with a bunch of rocking books (including much poetry! and headwrap photos!) for us to flip through. Z was the mastermind (I mean, muthafuckle) behind this gathering, and celebrated his temporary return to Berkeley by calling us together on good ol’ Shattuck. Thanks to GChat, it didn’t even feel like it’d been so long since we last met. And F - well, F is by turns caustic, sarcastic, and hilariously inappropriate. Some people just never change, even though he would defensively retort, “No, I’m not!” whenever we groaned at his jokes and said, “Oh, F, you’re still exactly the same.”

Midway through the evening, after he had figured out I’m 27 years old, his response was basically along the lines of Whoa, you really need to get married. I just rolled my eyes and laughed, and F added with a wink and suggestive glance, “May you should just marry me.”

“Umm, you’re younger than I am.”

“But I’m taller!”

End of the evening: “Yasmine, let’s make a pact. If you’re not married in a year, I’ll let you be my second wife.”

“Dude,” I said, “what makes YOU think you’ll even have a FIRST wife in one month…err, I mean, one year?”

F: “I can get a wife in one month!”

I came home and changed my GMail status to:

still laughing about F telling me i need to marry a “rich man with a big army.”

As always, I love it when friends chime in with their own commentary:

Here’s HijabMan:

HMan: you do :)
BIG army.
china big.
not guam big.
me: hahahaha
WHY do i need an army?!
HMan: stabbing lessons.
me: ahhh, that’s right
so i can train the army, and then they can conduct the stabbing sessions for me, wherever necessary

Here’s fathima:

so when you say something that belies your height and someone demands “yeah, you and whose army,” you can be all, “my husband’s! that’s whose!”
and then make feminists cry

Here’s Adnan:

but then he’ll go out and marry a richer man, with a bigger army.
let him marry first, so you can get the last laugh.

Here’s Anjum:

Anjum: dude
you do not need a big army for that.
you need a ninja army for that!!
c’mon yaara
for ultra secret stabbing
this is why you should listen to me always
not HMan
well, let me know when you get an army
cuz i am a ninja in training.
me: you are SO my first recruit!
Anjum: success!

[+]

And one last, hilarious memory of last night’s dinner, a disapproving comment from F, who refuses to engage in physical contact and only gives me “air highfives” (and that, too, only after I harassed him): “If you’re going to go around highfiving guys, you might as well move on to dating them.”

This, coming from a guy whose conversation is peppered with double entendres. I was so flabbergasted, I really had no response.

I’ve been doing a lot of listening to Sam Cooke lately, thanks to Suheir Hammad’s reference to him in her poem, Daddy’s Song. It took me a few years, but I finally decided to check out who exactly he was, and, whaddaya know, he sang beautifully. I would have just shared this on tumblr, but I’m not sure just how many of you actually click around over there [add it to your RSS feeds, crackstars!]. So, here’s some music and poetry for you:

1. Sam Cooke: A Change is Gonna Come

2. Suheir Hammad: Daddy’s Song

That part at the end, where her father blows her a kiss? The best.

More of my Suheir Hammad favorites (via a comment I left on Maddie’s photo a few weeks ago):

- We Spent the 4th of July in Bed

- Not Your Erotic, Not Your Exotic

- Brooklyn

- First Writing Since (my absolute favorite poem of hers)

Street parking, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

One of my favorite cafes has a slightly fancy-schmancy name. I am generally anti-fancyschmancyness, but some things must be forgiven in favor of redeeming qualities like, well, food. And the internet. Let us not forget the internetS.

I discovered the place one morning in early January, after I had hand-written a letter to Maddie on green paper. There is yummy food here, and free wifi and late hours and a multitude of power outlets, amenities lacking at big-name places like Starbucks and Borders.

My only complaint is that it’s too damn cold in here. Under my purple nailpolish, my fingernails are blue, I am sure of it.

My first morning here, fascinated by the colors and textures, I knelt on the sidewalk outside the cafe and took several photos of the numbers and letters etched into the concrete. Later, Somayya would remark dryly, “I’m so glad you can now remember where you parked, Yazzo.” Usually, though, I park in the public garage over half a mile away, and meander through the streets, smiling to myself at the sights.

Every morning, walking down the street, I pass a woman playing the piano in the window of a music store, her back to the passersby.

A man in a waiter’s white apron dashes out of the Persian rug store and over to the French restaurant half a block down, arriving, not in the least bit out of breath, to take the lunch order of a smiling woman seated in the outdoor patio.

Once, I walked all the way down to the cafe, then doubled back to sit for a few minutes on a bench in the sunshine and read a few pages of The Alchemist, sent to me as a gift from a friend in Toronto. I finished it sometime in February, I think. It’s May now, and I feel I need to re-read it again. Perhaps it will provide me some clarity and a sense of purpose; I am lacking in both these days.

At the cafe, I try to decide between the dozen flavors of Italian soda. Decision-making has never been one of my strong suits, much less food-related decision-making. In case you didn’t know yet, I am nothing if not the most indecisive food-decision-maker in the world. I have proclaimed this on facebook. Therefore, it is true.

“It’s a crazy world, isn’t it?” laughs the guy at the counter as I stare at the options, completely baffled.

“It really is.” I smile back. “Especially when it comes to food.”

In the end, I decide on a chocolate-covered macaroon and cherry-flavored Italian soda, then make my way over to a table against the back window, where I fold a few post-it notes and place them under the errant table-leg, in order to steady the wobbly table. I can’t help but think MacGyver would have been so proud.

Two teenagers the next table over are collaborating on a powerpoint presentation. The current slide reads, “How Can Stoichiometry Be Used?” I remember all those college chemistry classes I took; the only enjoyable parts were the stoichiometry conversions and the math involved in calculating acid-base titrations.

The woman at table in front of mine is using the same distractions I am: GMail, GoogleReader, and news websites. I’ve also got flickr, so that complicates matters.

There is a little boy sitting closeby; he has a loud, high-pitched voice. As I return to my table with the Italian soda, his voice escalates in volume if not clarity, and, out of the corner of my eye, I notice him looking over and gesturing excitedly. I turn my head just in time to catch his mother replying back in a calm voice; our eyes meet, and she explains, “He was saying how your eyeglasses and mine are almost the same.”

“Oh, yeah!” I realize. Red and black frames; my favorite color combination. I look at the boy. “Quite spiffy, aren’t they?” He nods back gravely.

My iTunes is now playing Beth Orton’s Central Reservation, the Ben Watt remix. Nearly five years later, I still remember reading a post about that song on a weblog I used to follow regularly at the time. I specifically remember the bit about her driving over the Bay Bridge while listening to the song, and because is it still one of my favorite posts anyone has ever written about music, I had to go hunt through Sarah Hatter’s archives to find it just now. Is that highly stalkerish? And is it scary and/or ridiculous that I still remember that post five years later? I’d even used a line from the song as a post-title during those heady last days of my fourth (but not final) year of undergrad, the glorious June when everything seemed to finally click and I realized the beauty of work and studies and conversations that I enjoyed and felt inspired by.

I log out of GMail and flickr, close the BBC and NPR and tumblr websites. I tell myself I need to stop with the self-destructive distractions, remind myself of how, just a few months ago, the feeling in my heart towards deadlines and everything else I had to do was a succinct, “Oh, fuck it”; how I kept putting off working on that fellowship application until, one morning, inexplicably in the middle of washing my hands at the sink, I found myself stringing together phrases and sentences in my mind, felt the mental excitement of formulating paragraphs for my statement; how that moment made realize with surprise and a re-discovered sense of urgency, This IS what I want to do and I couldn’t dry my hands and get back to my laptop fast enough.

I need to have that feeling, that moment back, so I can re-motivate myself. That This is what I want to do insistence that will see me through whatever the hell I’ve started. Meanwhile, someone in the UK found my weblog through a Google search for “lack of direction in life,” which makes me sigh, and smile with wry self-recognition, too, because if that’s not me as well, then I don’t know what is. But I’ve gotten myself to this spot, this situation, this temporary parking meter of sorts, and now - if you’ll forgive the horrible analogy - it’s a matter of making sure I’ve got enough pocket change to get through the limited time I have, the days or months I’ve allotted myself, this temporary reprieve - already overextended - I’ve been granted from the “real world.” Time is not on my side here. It never is, and if I’m honest, that’s my own fault; I’ve no one to blame but myself.

The clock on the wall says it’s time to go, Sam Cooke sings through my headphones. Walking out of the cafe that night, I see two men greeting one another exuberantly with that quintessentially male half-hug-and-slap-on-the-back. “How’ve you been, man?” one asks the other, except he says it so quickly, as if in a rush to sidestep the small talk and get down to more exciting things, that it instead sounds more like, “Hey been?” I like this, and I think I will steal it.

I want a vespa the color of tangerines, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

Missed you much, Blogistan. Going through my Drafts folder now, and finishing up old, half-written posts I had never got around to publishing. Here’s one from last month; excuse the slightly disjointed nature of it. More are coming. I promise.

[+]

13 April 2008

We returned from sunny San Diego yesterday, only to find more than enough warmth in the Bay Area as well. I’ve been waking up these last couple of weeks to the scent of orange blossoms pouring through my open bedroom windows (from the tree in the courtyard outside my room), and I’d be hard-pressed to name a scent I love more than that of citrus. Lotions, perfumes, candles, leaves, even furniture polish and air freshener - always citrus.

It’s quiet without my mother puttering around the house. For now, I prefer it this way. She gets to spend a few weeks with family in the motherland, and I will have extra time to focus on, and actually do, the multitude of things I need to get done - or so I tell myself. I think back to the tense discussions - and silences - that preceded her departure. My father arguing that a country with now-regular suicide bombings and militant attacks was no place for her to be. My mother pointing out that her brother was sick, perhaps dying, even, and asking her to come.

“Do you understand how poor they are?” said my father. “They don’t need you there. They need money; that would be far more helpful to them right now.”

And my mother, sticking her ground for once, replying sharply, “Maybe if you had brothers or sisters, you would know what it’s like to want to be with them when they are so ill.” I can’t even conceive of how painful it must be, to lose one’s mother, brother, and sister, all within the span of just a few years. She wasn’t in Pakistan when her sister died, and regrets it still, I know.

And so, the battle raged for weeks - the daddy-o stubbornly declaring he was looking out for the ummy’s health and safety. The ummy being fierce about her intention to go one minute, then meekly backing down the next. And I, angry at having to be the inadvertent go-between for two people who just couldn’t seem to communicate properly, but mainly angry at my father for always professing to use arguments of logic and practicality yet failing to understand that some things are beyond logic.

“She hasn’t been back in six years; at least let her go and spend a proper amount of time with her family.”

“What are you, her lawyer?” the daddy-o tossed at me one day.

“Yes,” I said. “Since you don’t seem to think she can make independent decisions, I’m going to keep arguing for her.”

“Why do you always make me out to be the bad guy?”

If it had been my parents or my siblings, I would have gone in a heartbeat. I told him so. Why couldn’t he see that? Of all people, he was the one who taught me that family comes before everything, that whenever something happens concerning my family - whether happiness or sorrow - I’m supposed to drop everything else and GO.

He and I were not on speaking terms for much of the last few weeks. He thought I was being impertinent and illogical, not properly thinking through the logistics and safety of ummy’s visit to the motherland. I thought he would being his usual “My way or the highway” damn stubborn self. “Fucking ridiculous,” I raged to the sister and Somayya. Meanwhile, the ummy teetered between hope and despair for weeks, wondering if she would make it to Pakistan, and even if she did, would her brother still be alive?

Even after her passport photos were taken and the application submitted for renewal, even after the new passport was sent back via express delivery and arrived on our front porch less than two weeks later, there was no guarantee she was actually going until the daddy-o sent me a casual, concise email saying her roundtrip flight (he insisted it had to be roundtrip, not open-ended; this was another thing we fought about) was booked, and could I drive down to Fremont to pick up the tickets sometime that week?

I was more than happy to.

And I was happy for her when she finally left from SFO a few days ago. “Thay un sharaab dewun ne, tha thu akkhi, ‘Nay!’ ” called out the brother in Hindko. And if they give you alcohol, just say NO! It was his advice on how to respond to solicitous flight attendants. It was also the last thing she heard before walking away, and the timing was impeccable; he managed to turn her tears to laughter.

So, the ummy is finally gone. And the tension, too, is gone from the house. The daddy-o is outside in the yard right now, probably humming Pukhto songs as he fixes the sprinkler system.
[CONTINUE READING the rest of this entry →]

Originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

Last Wednesday, I went to a Mohja Kahf poetry reading at Mudraker’s in Berkeley (it was rocking, by the way!), and ended up seeing some old buddies and making a couple of new friends. One guy I shook hands with towards the end of the evening exclaimed, “You have a really firm handshake!”

I laughed. “I get that a lot.”

His friend said, surprised, “Oh, yeah?”

“Here, I’ll shake your hand, too, so you can see.” So, I did.

“Really strong!”

“I have to compensate for my short height in some way, you know,” I joked. “At least I have strong handshakes.”

A few minutes later, the first hand-shaker asked curiously, “How old are you?”

“How old do you think I am?”

He thought about it for a minute, then confessed, “I can’t really tell. You’re short.”

SIGH. As my friend, Hashim, says of my photography, “You seem to be looking up a lot (trees towards sky) - or down (at grates or odd pink cemented things). This implies you are short…”

Someday, I will grow up to be tall, and Hashim will stop making basketball-related jokes at my expense, bastid. One can only hope. Meanwhile, I’m content with lots of fist-shaking.

From an IM conversation with a friend:

M: bas yaara, sorry for boring you

Yasmine: dude, not at all, hope i helped in some way

M: I need some crack

Yasmine: crack is always good
just stay away from the real deal crazy estuff
i don’t want to have to tell your ummy i introduced you to that

M: No way, I already know that and tried that
Kidding
Actually, I didn’t know that and I was a shareef bacha
And you introduced crack to me through your weblog
I will sue you now

[+]

Dude, who knew I’d have to deal with liability issues related to “the Yasmine Vocabulary,” i.e. stalking, stabbing, and crack? If this continues, I just might wake up one morning wishing I had gone to law suckool after all. Vat drama!

Also, I have recently expanded my Pukhto vocabulary to include crack references as well. (My father will be so proud, I know.) I’ve learned that charsi means “crackhead.” And charsi janan means the beloved who is on crack (welcome to Pukhto songs and literature).

I’ve also learned that there is a restaurant in Peshawar called Charsi Tikka Shop. In deference to my love for food and crack, I must eat there. Someday. Soon.

Not mitthai, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

I’ve spent the last month or so on what we flickr rockstars have all, in regards to our respective deadlines and dramas and to-do lists, been referring to as Getting Important Things DONE. What this means, of course, is that I’ve been distracting myself by spending far too much time browsing the internetS and overburdening my firefox browser with the number of tabs I keep open at one time. (The other day, I had 86 tabs open in one window. It was slightly ridiculous.)

I would share all those links and things with you here on the weblog - as I do once in a while - except I’m half-afraid Ayan will come along and call it “fake updates,” as he is wont to do. Plus, I don’t like cluttering the main column with links (that’s what the writing’s for), and I can’t figure out a way to properly share it all on the sidebar without jacking up the careful placement of everything else that’s already there.

SO. I’ve created an account for sweepthesunshine on tumblr, which shall be my repository for rockstar links&things. Go check it out! It’s linked right at the top of this website, so you can find it again. There’s an RSS feed for it, too, so you can keep track of the mish-mash I’m keeping track of. So far, there are lots of images and quotes and music, and things that intrigue me and make me happy. It’s all shiny and glittery and colorful. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. This thing is quite addictive, dude.

[+]

(Post title is a line from Leslie Harpold’s piece on California, some of my most favorite writing. Check out more about that here.)

Evening at the Berkeley Marina, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

Back in mid-January, my friend A sent me a very short, simple note with the subject line reading, Salaam, crackstar, telling me his father had recently died.

Doomed to be forever affiliated with my disgruntled, fist-shaking references to “that poetry slam we never went to,” A is one of my favorite people in the world - one of the very few whom I always felt comfortable picking up the phone and calling at any hour of the day or night - time difference be damned - laughing at all his voicemails and text messages that started off with some variation of, Salaam, cracker!

It made me sad to think of my friend being sad. And - although this should not have been about me - it made me feel like a shitty friend to think that, nearly five months later, the item he had requested I buy for him in Chicago still leaned against the side of my bed, the side I’ve usually looked at only when shoving my suitcase against it to pack for trips in the past few months - Chicago again, Ottawa, Toronto. I think nothing of paying exhorbitant fees for last-minute flights, picking up and jet-setting cross-country, but I could not, for the life of me, package A’s gift and get my sorry ass to the post office.
[CONTINUE READING the rest of this entry →]

TARGET dressing rooms have rocking red walls, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

Last June, my buddy A left me a voicemessage late one night after having watched the film, Paris je t’aime, which actually consists of eighteen short films by 21 directors, each of the stories taking place in different arrondissements (municipal boroughs) of Paris. Walking home through downtown San Jose, he talked into the phone about the short film with the Muslim girl - she trips and falls, her headscarf flies off, and a nice young guy runs over to assist her. “He tries to help her put her hijab back on, but he wraps it around her head like a bandanna.” Retelling the story, A started laughing. “Yaz, if your hijab fell off, I don’t think I would ever be able to help you. Probably, no one would.”

Listening to A’s voicemessage later, I laughed, too. And replayed the message a few times. And retold the story to several friends. My coworker-in-crime, B, pointed out, “Yasmine, your hijab’s pinned so tightly, I don’t think that thing could EVER fall off.” I ending up watching Paris je t’aime three times - once with A, the second time with N and AyeshaZ and B, and finally just last week with my sister, who had heard me mention this film often over the past year. Every single time, I have laughed my way through the short film about the Muslim girl and her hijab.

B is right - my hijab is its own free-standing structure. It has stayed put through running and rain storms and lecture-hall naps while slumped in my seat and roller-coaster rides at amusement parks and hiking (and hitchhikes) and skipping down the street and crackstar nieces crawling all over me while bombarding me with their botanical carnage.

HijabMan has harassed me for a long time about collaborating on a headwrap-how-to video. We briefly talked about it over IM during the last year or two, and in Philadelphia and DC in July, and in Chicago in August. I just kind of nodded along vaguely. “Yeah, okay, sounds like a plan.” But when I was stranded in Philadelphia for the night last December, on the way to DC after Ottawa, HMan and I hung out with his friends, then pulled J into being my model for a headwrapping session.

I was drunk off boulani and gelato and the incredibly rich drinking-chocolate from Naked Chocolate Cafe, apparently the best dessert place in Philly, J off her bowlful of chocolate chip cookies & milk; HMan was his usual hyperactive self. It made perfect sense to create videos past midnight. I was groggy and tired from what had been a sh*tty day of travel involving many expletives, but when rockstars come along and pick you up from the airport and take you out to dinner and made you laugh and open up their homes to you, you too would do whatever they want you to.

So, the headwrapping video that came out of that night is sort of a thank-you to HMan and Philadelphia for their rockstar hospitality and open-hearted lowve. It’s also a thank-you to every single person who ever stopped me and asked with genuine curiosity, “How do you do your hijab like that?” I’m honored they took the time to ask. The question came up at an ice cream shop in Washington, DC, last summer; at a conference in Chicago last October and at December hanging-out sessions in Ottawa and Toronto; and at a friend’s wedding just last week. Not to mention the grocery store, the sidewalk outside my workplace, places I stop by for lunch, and all kinds of events and gatherings I attend, as well as questions on flickr and facebook. Since I’m pretty ridiculous about properly responding to compliments or any sort of warm comments regarding the way I dress, I usually just laugh a bit and shuffle my feet a little and toss off my twenty-second explanation of how the headwrap stays in place. Then, I smile brightly and run away, usually to find food.

This, in contrast, is a much better explanation. HMan has posted the video HERE. Check it out:

I’ve already watched it about three times because:

1. I’m surprised I managed a pretty smooth explanation while doing J’s headwrap. Multitasking is usually not my forte, and the fact that I spent six minutes explaining headwrapping techniques while actually implementing them on someone else is slightly mind-boggling.

2. All the references to “stabbing” amuse me. J was so patient with me. I would have been freaked out if someone kept wielding safety pins near my head and cackling gleefully about stabbing.

3. My laugh makes me laugh.

4. My favorite part is my verbal smackdown of HMan.

Highfive to HMan’s camerawork!
Let us know what you think.

PS: If my hijab ever fell off, I now hope you would know how to help me with it, if necessary.

Rockstar & sunshine & scribbles, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

The past couple of months, I kept getting emails reminding me that the sweepthesunshine.com domain needed to be renewed by February 17. So, I took care of that - on Valentine’s Day, no less, because I really do lowve you, internetS, and especially Blogistan - and we’re covered all through 2009 now. So, I guess this would be a good time to update, yes?

I’ve missed you, Blogistan, but I’m a fickle one and have been spending too much time hitting “refresh” on flickr. (I really should stop with that. It’s killing off my productivity.)

I’m back now, though, and will get started on publishing all those posts sitting around in my Drafts folder. I should tell you about Ottawa (and Philadelphia and DC, and those blue slurpees I found at the airport in Dallas), and Toronto, and why I hated January, and what I’m doing with my life these days. So much to catch you up on, Blogistan. Seriously, you’re totally outta the loop.

First, a couple of things to get out of the way:

1. For the person who found my weblog through a Google search for jussmeen, you make me upset. Why’d you have to go and spell it with a J? Only one beautiful person was ever allowed to pronounce my name like that. She’s not around anymore, and I miss her dearly, but that doesn’t mean you can step into her shoes. Stop it. (Also, it’s pronounced like this: yahss-MEEN. With a Y. I won’t mind too much if you mess up the rest of it, as long as you start it off with a Y. The J is blasphemous. I’m just sayin’.)

2. For the person who found this weblog through a Google search for utilizing nap time, you made me laugh. You might appreciate this old post about my undergrad days. I would have graduated with a degree in napping, if I could have. If you want to get all technical about it, I followed that Google search and found an article entitled, How To Design The Perfect Nap. The author takes six well-timed naps per day, can you believe it?

There were a bunch of other things I was going to discuss with you, but it takes a lot of effort to get back into the swing of updating a weblog after two months of being away. This is tiring stuff, Blogistan. I think I need a nap now.