Change of plans: On a plane to Spain, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.
Months ago, when Maryam headed off to Egypt to study Arabic for a year at the AUC, we promised her we’d go stalk her in Cairo. She taunted us with “Maryam is in Cairo” gstatus messages (this screenshot is from late September), and finally, […]

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Blurry San Francisco, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.
Beautiful things:Bumper stickers I’ve noticed lately, which have made me laugh -
OUTTA MY WAY. I GOTTA PEE.
EAT BEEF. The West wasn’t won on salad.
I LOVE AIRPLANE NOISE.
And my personal favorite - NIRWANA - which reminded me of when my favorite crackhead, Somayya, first moved from Pakistan to the U.S. […]

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Originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.
[From October 11, 2006]
- It takes me two hours to get to work in the morning, because two big rigs collided on the Sunol Grade on Interstate 880 and spilled oil across the freeway. Impatiently listening to the AM radio to pick up on any traffic updates, I hear the newscasters […]

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In light of my recent post on personalized license plates, these plates, which I saw on my way to work this morning, are the best ones ever:
RAADHEY.
Raa dhey. Get it? For those who don’t, raa dhey, in various South Asian languages, translates to something like, Make way. And the driver - Desi, of course - […]

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Originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.
License plates I’ve recently seen and enjoyed while commuting:
- YWEH8N- I[HEART]GHEE- OH B 1- SOMONEY [on quite a dilapidated-looking Honda Civic]- WISEHAG- HARD2BHV
Also, I saw a freeway exit sign for a street called “Pasatiempo” on the way back from Santa Cruz a couple of weekends ago. […]

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Driving home, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.
Generally, I will be the first to admit I’m a horrible friend. I rarely manage to pick up my phone when it’s ringing, and then it takes me a week (or two?) to return calls. I don’t respond to emails in a timely manner. I’m always right, and you’re always […]

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When they said ‘palm trees,’ they really weren’t kidding, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.
[The “Change views, not channels” post title is inspired by those smug little San Diego-advertising billboards that I used to pass on my way to Sacramento everyday.]
Like everything else I’ve ever written, this is long overdue, so I figured I might as […]

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The week before last, my mother and I spent two separate days visiting various relatives and family friends, which is a lot of time considering the fact that, since we kids have grown up, we’ve fallen out of our weekly visiting-the-relatives habit. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I do start missing all […]

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Driving back to my corner of the Bay Area this afternoon after dropping HijabMan off at the Oakland Airport, I merged onto the familiar Hwy-24 from 880, and, as the road curved down and then up again, the fog and gloom suddenly gave way to sunshine, and I couldn’t help but laugh out loud in […]

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After picking my mother up from our relatives’ in Sacramento last week, she and I settled into my car for the hour-long drive home. After the usual impatient verbal tussles (“Why is the seatbelt always messed up in your passenger seat?” “It’s because you always twist it the wrong way whenever you use it, Ummy.” […]

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i guess it’s possible that i have been a bit distracted/and the directions for me are a lot less in demand.
Hi, is this thing still on?
Okay, so while I was drag-racing down the freeway in my car this morning [I mean, really, where else would you find me?], I was listening to that Barenaked Ladies […]

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i got a fast car.
It’s never a good idea to leave the house just a split second before your father does in the morning, because that means you’re on the road together for the first fifteen minutes of your daily commute, and you can see the yellow fog lamps of his SUV shining disapprovingly behind […]

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and who is he, mr. rand mcnally?
About a week after we returned from our Thanksgiving break roadtrip to Santa Barbara, my father remarked, “You know, I think we should go on a trip again soon.”
“Oh?” I said. “Are the nomadic tendencies kicking in again?”
“Not really,” he admitted sheepishly, “It’s just that I kinda liked your […]

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the open road for the travelers’ souls
I fell asleep last Wednesday night to the sound of my father asking, “Who wants to go to Santa Barbara tomorrow?” When we woke up the next morning, it was Thanksgiving Day and Santa Barbara was almost four hundred miles to the south. We showered, dressed, and packed in […]

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something about the open road
While I was driving home on Thursday night, my rear passenger tire gave out. Thank God I was close to home and already in the far right lane in preparation for exiting. Twenty more feet, and I could have even been off the freeway, although, in hindsight, it would have been […]

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