Today, Tuesday the 8th, is the one-month anniversary of the South Asian earthquake. Please join the global community in a worldwide vigil. It’s too soon to start forgetting - it’s practically winter, and people need our help now more than ever.
The purpose of the vigil is to:
- Donate money- Press world leaders into action- […]

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The sky knows no bounds Originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.
Today is Blog Quake Day.
It is also the day that the UN is holding an international donor conference in Geneva to dicuss relief operations and aid the victims of the earthquake before a “winter without pity” sets […]

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Hey, kids, how goes it? I’m still around, just trying to find things to do with myself besides chase the sunshine around the house. Somedays, it’s just so much easier to uploads photos to Flickr and deal with brusque titles/captions (or none at all) than it is to compose coherent pieces of writing for this […]

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"With every difficulty, there is relief" Originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.
Nightly, I dream of rain and hail and snow-covered mountains, when in reality my local mountains are gorgeously goldenbrown and I daily chase patches of sunshine all over the house so I can gleefully warm up my […]

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My eyes, and my heart, ache from three days of reading about the earthquake in South Asia. For most of Saturday, I sat at my father’s computer, alternately updating Excel/QuickBooks spreadsheets, downloading mp3s of Quran chapters for my father (I prefer Sa’ad al-Ghamidi; he wanted Abdul Rahman al-Sudais), and compulsively hitting “refresh” on news websites […]

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shiny smooth automotive goodness, and goodness of another nature.
Let me tell you about my friend S. My friend S is one of the most selfless people I know, the kind of person who, I’ve realized recently, is always putting everyone else before himself. Somayya is another one of those kind of people. They know it […]

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Okay, so I’m back.
I’m sure you’d like me to elaborate on that, seeing as how you enjoy living vicariously through me, but my life over the past month has been filled with nothing more exciting than four classes, two jobs, and drinking more hot chocolate this quarter than I must have in the past two […]

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one drop of rain that’s me and all the rest is you
Zulkifli Mohamad Nor, 42, cries in his home in Penang after describing how tsunami waves killed five of his seven children in Pasir Panjang, a popular vacation spot in Penang.
There are now literally millions of stories like this one.
Several weblogs have listed links you […]

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the eye of the storm meets the eye of the mind, sending it spinning
At the gas station late this afternoon, I swiped my debit card at the gas pump and shoved the nozzle into my car to fill up the tank. I was in the process of unlocking the doors to wait inside my car, […]

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i’ve been sailing around so long
Okay.
So the final exams are over.
And the term papers are over, too.
(The last of the latter was supposed to be 4-5 pages and turned out to be 9 or so; skillful use of 1.5-spacing instead of double-spacing, and lots of pseudo-subtle margin adjustment, did the trick, I think. Shhh, don’t […]

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we don’t talk about the little things that we do without/when that whole mad season comes around
Just in case you were wondering – which you probably weren’t, but I’m telling you anyway, so pay attention – this weblog may now also be accessed though www.ramblingmonologues.com.
And I am not at liberty to further elaborate on this. […]

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borders, boundaries, blockades
and it’s the way that we will forgive ourselves
and it’s the way that we will for no one else
- Josh Kelly, Amen
I call my friend Z one morning to tell her that I am skipping all my classes and instead studying at the cafe of her favorite Borders Bookstore here in the East […]

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sanctuary speak-outs.
One of the courses I’m enrolled in this quarter is a Community & Regional Development class entitled “Ethnicity and American Communities.” If I had to pick one single class I were absolutely in love with during my entire university experience, this would most likely be it. Interestingly enough, the other likely contenders fall into […]

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Last Saturday, while I was volunteering at a painting competition at the art center and drawing henna designs on little kids’ hands, the father of one of the children leaned over and asked curiously, “Where were you born?” I smiled sweetly and answered, “Berkeley.” And while it was the truth, it was quite obvious that […]

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It’s 9 a.m. on Wednesday morning and the brother and I are sitting in his dentist’s office. I’m poring through National Geographic and Sports Illustrated, shivering from time to time because I’m sitting right beneath the air-conditioning vent. (Who in their right freakin’ mind turns on the AC at 9 a.m.?) He’s sitting next to […]

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