Blog

Uh oh, guess which techno-twit has been messing with the gorgeous template that someone else made them…(raises hand.)

Shame on me. All I can say in my defense is:

As a rule

Man is fool

When it’s hot

He wants it cool

When it’s cool

He wants is hot

Always wanting

What is not.

So I’m ready for a change in my blog, mostly because I haven’t been able to get any of the pics, textures, or buttons on my page to load for about a month. All I see when I open it is the bare-bones structure, and a few empty boxes with red X’s in them where buttons or pictures failed to load. I’m thinking of getting rid of all the buttons that no longer load and leaving text-links instead.

It occurred to me that perhaps the problem was with my computer, not my blog. So I wandered down to Aniraz’s office, where they have DSL, and nothing loaded there either.

One might ask, why not just figure out how to get the things to load? To this I would refer one to the first sentence of this blog. You see where it says ‘techno-twit’? I raised my hand.

I just wanted to warn y’all that I might be causing some chaos soon. I won’t have meant to, but there’s a good chance that I’ll mess things up rather foolishly before reverting back to my old template. :::teeth:::

____

“If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every corner of the world, that America’s global interventions have come to an end, and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the USA but now — oddly enough — a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims. There would be more than enough money. One year’s military budget of 330 billion dollars is equal to more than $18,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born. That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.”

-William Blum from Propagandhi, lifted from Uzer’s blog.

All praise is due to Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Gracious.

I now have TWO, count em, TWO nephews, MWAHAAAAA! Lookit what I got in my mail box! Alhamdulillah!

To All,

It is with the blessings from God Almighty that I am able to make this wonderful announcement. On 9/28/03 about 7:00am weighing in at 8lbs 14oz (2oz short of 9lbs) and 21″ tall Faris-Ur-Rehman Khan (Faris=Knight; Rehman=compassionate, merciful) was born to F****** and Z****** Khan. Baby and mother are in good health. Pictures to be coming soon.

Thank You,

Z****

La la la! It’s Saturday and I’m excited about what possibilities the weekend may hold.

First of all, there’s a can of blueberry pie-filling in the fridge, which is beauteous in and of itself. Second, the car is clean and has a full tank of gas. Third, I’m wearing a pink shalwar qameez. This is also exciting, though slightly gaudy.

I figure that a combination of all three of these factors should make for an interesting weekend. All I have to do is figure out which combination will get the maximum entertainment value. I could eat pie filling while driving around town in my pink shalwar qameez, but methinks that would be way too blasé. It would be more exciting to:

* Tie the can of pie filling to the end of my pink dupatta and fashion (or the lack thereof) a make-shift flail/mace/weapon thingie. I could then test my weapons skills on the goats who invade our front lawn, though I think it might be a waste of blueberries.

* Spill pie filling on my pink qameez, drive down to Shifa hospital and fake a ‘death by blueberries’ death scene. I do have connections (one of the ER doctors is married to a friend of mine) so I might not get in TOO much trouble. But still. Hmmm.

* Tie one end of the dupatta around my head and the other to the bumper of my car. It would be interesting to see how far I could pull it (very Punjabi of me, no?). It’s a Mehran, a miniature car with less CC than the average American lawnmower. I bet I could get as far as Blue Area with nothing to sustain me but the blueberry pie filling.

* Remove all the removable bits from the engine of my car, ingeniously fit them instead into the empty can (having eaten the pie filling) and then drive the can-cum-car down the street and wave to my adoring public. While wearing the pink shalwar qameez of course.

* Knot the ends of the dupatta together to form a small pocket. Fill the pocket with pie-filling and then, giving it a mighty swing, slap it down onto the hood of the car. *SPLAT* Give it a name and call it modern art. Publicize, schedule an exhibition at the Pakistan National Council for the Arts and make millions.

Like I said here people, the possibilities are endless. Any suggestions?

Happy Friday everybody. 🙂 Happy indeed. Today is the day when men congregate around masjids with their sleeves and pant legs rolled up and their faces dripping. Makes me happy. So happy that instead of blogging I’m going to go run off and bake something. Here, have a few laughs. They’re on the house.

Frivolous Lawsuits By Inmates (Only in America, eh Crayon?)

A Virginia inmate tried to sue himself for $5 million on the grounds that he had gotten drunk and caused himself to violate his religious beliefs by committing a crime. Because he had no money, he wanted the state to pay the $5 million.

A convicted New York rapist sued the state, claiming he lost sleep and suffered headaches and chest pains after being given a “defective haircut” by an unqualified barber.

A Nevada inmate sued when he ordered two jars of chunky peanut butter at the Nevada State Prison canteen and received one chunky and one creamy.

A San Quentin death row inmate sued California, claiming his civil rights were violated because his packages were sent via UPS rather than the U.S. Postal Service.

An Oklahoma inmate alleged his religious freedoms were violated but could not say just how, because the main tenet of his faith was that all its practices were secret.

An Arizona inmate sued when he was not invited to a pizza party that prison employees held for a guard leaving his job.

An Indiana prisoner sued because he wanted to obtain Rogaine for his baldness.

An Ohio inmate sued for being denied possession of soap on a rope.

An Oklahoma inmate sued because he was forced to listen to country music.

A Colorado con sued for early release because “everyone knows a con only serves about three years of a 10-year sentence.”

***

And guess who’s been taking silly internet quizzes? :p

Cor blimey, I taste like Tea. I am a subtle flavour, quiet and polite, gentle, almost ambient. My presence in crowds will often go unnoticed. Best not to spill me on your clothes though, I can leave a nasty stain. What Flavour Are You?

***

Who are you?MaleFemale

Fill this form out people. You know you want to. Come on, you can trust me. :::teeth:::

Well, I’m getting slovenly again. I’ve just had breakfast at noon after watching an hour of morning cartoons. It’s all part of the ceremony of enjoying Sunday properly. But now even my brain is on hiatus and now I don’t know what to type. Errrr…maybe some Turkish coffee will help. Turkish delight would be better though. Yum.

Speaking of all things Turkish, all of my Turkish students depress me. Obviously as employees of the foreign office (I teach English to embassy staff) they are the pro-government, secular type, and with me being a flaming, scarfified FUNdu, we have some interesting discussions.

First we start talking about hijab, and then it inevitably moves on to enforced religiousness, Taliban-style, stuff like that. And once we conclude that forced religiousness is a bad thing, I point out that enforced secularism is just as bad or worse (I think it’s worse, but to be polite I give the ‘just as bad’ option as well). Here I’m making an indirect reference to the ban on hijab in public places in Turkey, which they usually catch, and respond with, “Well, there have to be laws, to protect us from terrorism.”

Modesty is a terrorist tendency, I’m sure. It’s important that women be forbidden from covering their heads because otherwise all those scarves might be a fire hazard or something. You never know when all that religious fervor and polyester might ignite. Naturally.

The hijab ban in Turkey is so ludicrously severe that hijab is forbidden in public universities, and so the hijabis have to take their scarves off at the gates and replace them with wigs. Good grief, what does that achieve? The way I see it, banning hijab is more likely to create unhappy sentiment (unhappy sentiment being a precursor to terrorism, no one bombs a government they like) and is therefore more, and not less, likely to cause terrorism. Yes? (losers)

Anyway. At least their coffee’s still good.

I’m trying to type a new blog. I’ve sat down at the computer table, but I keep getting distracted. See, I finally clean off the computer table, and without the usual piles of junk, I feel disoriented. Is this really my computer? (Where am I?) But here we go, FREE SHEEP FOR EVERYONE! YAY!

Unhealthy sheep may be given to Pakistan

KARACHI, Sept 17: The acting high commissioner of Australia, wanting the government to accept 57,000 sheep stranded at sea for weeks after being rejected by Saudi Arabia , will discuss the issue with Agriculture Minister Sardar Yar Mohammad Rind on Thursday, an official said.

“The minister will discuss the issue with Australia’s (acting) high commissioner” the agriculture, food and livestock ministry official told Reuters on Wednesday.

Saudi Arabia rejected the sheep on Aug 28 on the grounds that six per cent of them had scabby mouth disease, more than an agreed five per cent maximum. The Australian government said only 0.35 per cent were infected with the low grade disease.

Some of the sheep are dying after almost six weeks at sea in up to 40 degrees Celsius and, as the concern of animal welfare groups mounts, Canberra has been trying hard to find an alternative destination for the animals.

A spokesman for the Australian high commission confirmed that his country’s acting ambassador would meet the minister this week but did not give details.

The official said the ministry had suggested that the government should “politely refuse” the Australian envoy’s likely offer of “free sheep”. “But diplomacy has now been involved, so I just cannot say what will be the outcome of the meeting,” the official said and added: “The Australians are pursuing this issue at very high level…it will be a tough decision for us to refuse them.”

A spokesman for the ministry, Mohammad Hanif, earlier said the sheep would probably not be allowed to land in Pakistan.

“We have well-defined regulations and rules on imports of livestock and any cargo which is contagious or infected cannot be released,” he said.

The official said the ministry had told the government that any proposal to transport diseased sheep to Afghanistan through Pakistan would also pose a threat to the country’s livestock.

“We are very sure that the sheep are unhealthy so we should not take any risk,” the official said.-Reuters



(good thing I don’t like mutton anyway.)

I finally did it. I finally fulfilled a life-long dream and caught one of the lizards that runs around the ceiling. Please, sit down, no need for applause. Ok, maybe a little applause, and you may lavish me with your credit card numbers as well. 😉

Future Lizard-Wranglers of tomorrow may wonder how I managed to trap and then photograph a reptile that normally runs on the 10-foot ceiling or somewhere near it. I am a kind Lizard-Wrangling man, I will give them instructions.

Step One: Walk into your bedroom and turn on the lights.

Step Two: Notice an unusually large lizard at roughly eye-level very near to the light switch you just flipped.

Step Three: Shriek and run out of the room.

But wait, there’s more!

Step Four: Return to your room with a fish bowl and a vengeance.

Step Five: Chase the lizard all over the room, willy-nilly, being careful not to drop the glass fishbowl, or yourself as you leap from bed to bed to chair. (lizards prefer the higher latitudes you know)

Step Six: Carefully creep up to the lizard (once you’ve tuckered the poor thing out by chasing it all over creation and into a corner) and put the glass bowl neatly over it.

Step Seven: Rejoice.

Ha ha! Captured lizard photo HERE!

no lizards were hurt in the making of this blog.

Sensei Presents: The Freeware Review!

A short, inconclusive and highly subjective list of freeware games that you should download if you’re bored. Or cheap like me. (he he)

Now, before we being, you might ask, “Why on Earth are you playing freeware?” Well the answer is two-fold. First fold: Freeware is FREE! Second fold: Sensei believes strongly in intellectual property rights and will not buy bootleg/pirated software. Since there is nearly nothing in Pakistan other than pirated software, Sensei has resorted to freeware. Some of them are actually quite good. For example:

Fracas: (strategy) Fracas is my hero. The graphics are hideous, and I don’t think there’s any sound, but the game is great! It’s a fairly straight-forward strategy game that allows up to six human or AI players, and the rules can be customized. Two burnt thumbs up! (I’ve been baking again.) LINK! (you’ll have to scroll through the list to find the download link, it’s on this page.)

Diabolika: (puzzle) Contrary to its name, this game has nothing to do with THE Devil so much as it has to do with many little-bitty ones. The object is to blow them up using a chain-reaction that you must set up using a limited number of turns. It’s actually rather entertaining, and harder than it sounds, and since it’s less than 1 mb to download, I recommend it for some quick, mindless fun. One and a half burnt thumbs up. LINK! (you’ll have to scroll through the list to find the download link, it’s on this page.)

Scorched Earth: (strategy) A classic. No graphics to speak of and absurd sound effects, but you do get to buy a teeny-tiny tank and drive around blowing up other teeny-tiny tanks in a turn-based strategy game. Plus, the tanks sass each other. (“Your mother was a hamster!”) They also swear, but you can turn that off. One and a half burnt thumbs up. Great for playing against your siblings. (bombs away!) LINK!

Nethack, Falcon’s Eye: (RPG/strategy) This game would get three thumbs if I had that many. And they would all be happy thumbs with little smiley faces drawn on them. This game has decent graphics, and very complex gameplay (you have to read the manual before you start, there’s no way around it). It’s more than your basic ‘dude-in-a-dungeon’ game, it’s potentially addictive, and every time you play the rounds are randomly generated. It’s never the same twice. I would be addicted to it if I could get it to download. 🙁 I had it once and then lost it when I had to reboot my computer. Since then every time I download it the ZIP file somehow comes out corrupt. Woe is me. LINK!

Well, that’s today’s substandard blog. I’m going to try and download Nethack again…

(he he)

Multilingual Madness.

You never know when you’re going to need pre-fab phrases in other languages, things you memorize phonetically and keep in your mental list of important things to know. Like, “I need a doctor,” “Please call the police,” and “Please call my embassy.” I can say all of these phrases in English and Urdu easily enough, though if I ever traveled through the Middle East I suppose I would have to learn them in Arabic. Otherwise, in the event of an emergency I’d just have to pull the sleeves of passers-by and plaintively ask, “Anta Tabib?”* (Tabibi, Tabibi, Tabibi ya nurul ain…)

You know, one of my students got into an accident just two weeks after coming to Pakistan, and he injured his head rather badly. (driving on the wrong side of the road. It happens to all the foreigners in the beginning.) He tried to ask people passing by for directions to the hospital, but he couldn’t make himself understood, on top of that, the driver of the other car that he had collided with was hopping mad and also injured. It was turning into a nasty situation, and it was just by chance that one of his coworkers from his embassy drove by and saw him and then rushed him to the hospital. He was ok, Alhamdulillah, after they stitched his forehead back in place. And that was when he decided that learning a language other than Turkish might be helpful.

So, in an attempt to enrich my life through the enrichment of my language skills, I am collecting useful phrases in other languages. For example:



relacher mon chameau (release my camel)

jamais (never!)

I tried to get this useful dialogue in Russian, but I don’t know how reliable my source was. I don’t have it in German, (Yaz, a little help here?). I do, however, have the following:

Du bist ein aufrichten shlingel. (you are a mealy-mouthed scoundrel)

Of course, I had to look up ‘mealy-mouth’ first, because I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant if your mouth was full of meal. Incidentally, a mealy-mouthed person is one who does not state facts in simple, direct words, who speaks insincerely. Right. Ok, I feel smarter now, and more likely to use that phrase at the appropriate time. I’ll keep it handy if I ever find myself conversing with any badly-behaved and insincere Germans in the future. All of the Germans I know are very nice people though. How disappointing.

Anyway, feel free to fill my comments box with useful phrases. Usman, I’m relying on you to release my camel in Turkish. Yaz, you can do the German. Anyone out there speak Russian, Hyderabadi or Japanese? Colloquial Arabic?

-Tamma-

* You doctor?

Well, today was the anniversary of September the 11th. I vowed not to turn on the TV because I knew all I would find would be all WTC, all the time. Yes, it’s a tragedy and an inexcusable crime what happened at the World Trade Center, but ten times more Iraqis and Afghanis have died since then, and no one on TV gives a hoot. And CNN and the US gov’t just won’t let go of it, they’re trying to keep the emotion fresh. They keep reopening the same wound just so they can use the perpetual fear and anger to justify continuing the war (pick either one, Afghanistan or Iraq).

I’m reminded of one sentence I saw written in the corner of a Bizarro comic. The focus of the one-panel cartoon had nothing to do with war, but one of the cartoon characters was wearing a t-shirt that said, “They need your fear.” Smart guy, that Dan Piraro.

I wonder, how long will they continue to dredge up the terror and hatred that the WTC created? How much longer will they use it as carte blanche to retaliate on the Muslim world? If the undying attention paid to the Holocaust (Holo-kitsch) is any example, then fifty years later we’ll still be getting coverage of Sept. 11 like it was yesterday. Yes, the Holocaust was a human tragedy, an example of simply evil and unjustifiable malice towards innocent people, but it doesn’t justify what’s going on in Israel. Every time someone points the finger towards Israel for human-rights abuses, extra-judicial killings, political assassinations and their dodgy (at best) claim to someone else’s land, they point a finger back fifty years ago to the Holocaust and go, “But look what happened to us!”

Well yeah, the Holocaust was horrible. No one should have to go through such evil, but the only lesson that we seem to have learned from this is that it is better to give than it is to receive. In order to prevent another Holocaust from ever happening, it’s important to herd Palestinians into slums that could easily be called ghettos and prison camps that differ only slightly from concentration camps. You could say that at least they’re not shoving them into gas-chambers, but that’s just one method of killing. There are other ways, like preventing seriously ill people from reaching hospitals and just letting them die on their own, or firing rocket launchers into traffic to pass execution on people without a trial, or running down refugees with tanks, or just firing into groups of civilians as usual. Occasionally you could pick off pedestrians and school-children with a sniper rifle. Gas is boring anyway.

Pro-Israeli Jews (and there are anti-Israeli Jews, in case you’re wondering. They’re good people) will continue to use what happened to them over fifty years ago so we’re shocked/guilted/horrified into letting them do whatever they deem necessary to prevent something like that from ever happening again. And here is where we’ve come full circle. To prevent crime they are committing crime. They prevent killing they are killing. To prevent oppression they are oppressing, and they have succeeded in doing this for so long because they keep the emotions raw. That’s what the US is trying to do, keeping us all in a state of anger so that they can continue to act (seemingly) out of anger. The US is always in ‘crisis’ mode, and that way they can continue to take (seemingly) spur of the moment, aggressive action. They’re always retaliating.

-grrr-

“Every soul with taste of death. You will be paid on the Day of Resurrection only that which you have fairly earned. Whoever is removed from the Fire and is made to enter Paradise, he is indeed triumphant. The life of this world is but the comfort of illusion.” – The Holy Qur’an, 3:185

-sigh-

And verily in remembering Allah do hearts find rest.

I’ve decided that communication is important. Exceedingly so. Proper communication prevents problems and reduces the possibility of unnecessary weirdness. For example, this morning, if my father had communicated with me, if he just had said, “Beta, before you go to work, please take the bag of beef out of the trunk,” then we wouldn’t be in this situation. I wouldn’t have driven around all day with a bag of beef in my car, and it wouldn’t have fermented and my car wouldn’t smell like…like…something died in the hatch. (I drive a hatch-back, so the back is called a hatch, right?)

The bag of beef managed to stay hidden in the trunk all day, from seven this morning to eight o’clock this evening, so it’s had plenty of time to decompose. The smell is appalling. I don’t know how to describe it. TO get the full effect I recommend that you leave a bag of beef in your own trunk in the summer heat for at least twelve hours and see what happens.

(Da Momma sez: sprinkle offensively rank things {fermented beef juice stains, the inside of your cousin’s shoes} liberally with baking soda and leave overnight for best results.)

This isn’t the first time that something really stinky has happened due to a lapse in family communication. A few years back, my brother got married and we decided to throw a Valima. (day-after-wedding party) My father, who is an avid cook, decided to do some of the catering himself, so he spent ALL day cooking Qorma (beef in savory sauce, yum) for 200 people. It was a massive pot of Qorma, you could’ve stood in it up to your knees. Time came to distribute all the food into the family’s various cars and drive to the wedding hall, and then it was time to leave.

I got dressed and got into my car, and sped off towards the party. Ok, I may not have sped, but let me say, I don’t drive like an old lady. I like taking corners at a tilt. I take genuine pleasure in peeling out from stoplights. I believe that speed-bumps are a constant source of excitement and puddles are meant to be driven through. I don’t drive like this all the time though, and I certainly wouldn’t have driven this way if someone had just told me there was a huge pot of Qorma in my back seat. But incidentally, no one told me, and I didn’t get father than a block from the house before there was a huge crash and a beefy-smelly splash in the back seat of my car.

*dies*

You can imagine the effect this had on my dad when I drove back and told him what had happened. His reaction registered at least a 6 on the Richter scale. See, it takes hours and hours to cook Qorma properly, and now the whole thing was ruined with just an hour to go before the party.

I think what followed afterwards would’ve made it into the Guinness World Book of Records if there had been anyone there to see it. My dad actually re-made the entire pot of Qorma in under two hours, and thus went down as a hero in family culinary history, though we didn’t think it to be too historically exciting then, because at the time it was a crisis, not an adventure.

I cleaned my car out as best as I could, but the smell was still powerfully strong. Qorma smells really good though, so we didn’t mind, except that you always left the car feeling hungry and fiending for Pakistani food. That was just the first few days though, after that everything went downhill. The Qorma started to ferment, and the smell was vile. Really. Like driving around in the garbage bin of a Pakistani restaurant on Devon. (beep beep! *gag*)

I tried washing the seats and carpets, but the oil was just too much. The floor mats had soaked up enough ghee to butter a hundred Qorma-flavored parathas, and on top of that, riding in the back seat always left the soles of your shoes greasy. After that my car became known as the Qorma-mobile, or the curry-car, and I had to keep a bag of baking soda in the trunk to re-sprinkle the backseat whenever the smell got to be too much. I don’t know whether or not the car still smells. I sold it and moved to Pakistan about six months after the Qorma incident, and it was still stinking then. For all I know it probably smells as bad. .

And the moral of this story is: communication is an essential tool in the maintenance of peaceful families and pleasant-smelling vehicles. Thank you, good night.

PS: Various new things on the Fotolog. Click here!

It’s the (takes a deep breath) WEEEEEEEEEEK EEEENNNNNNNNNNND! (dances around chair, hugs refrigerator, rejoices)

Well, I’m well on my way to completing everything that’s on my weekend to-do list. So far I’ve already slept in, had a leisurely breakfast and managed to not change out of my pajamas, so I’m off to a good start! Now all I have to do is catch up with my email and sally forth into blogistan.

(Later today I will clean the house and go swimming, and later this evening I will groan about tomorrow being Monday. Then my weekend ritual will have reached completion.)

I have bits and pieces for today’s blog. Just bits and pieces.

Bit Number One: Words that should be words, but aren’t words, but should be, so there.

Anemies -any of an order (Actinarea) of flower-like Anthozoan sea polyps having a firm, often large, gelatinous body as well as a hostile disposition and a tendency towards enmity.

Calcurat- any of numerous long-tailed rodents of various families (esp. Muridae and Circetidae) with exceptional mathematical skills or the innate ability to do long division. See also Ratador.

Canamel- a camel that practices cannibalism. – vt.- to canamelize.

Ratador- any of numerous long-tailed rodents of various families (esp. Muridae and Circetidae) whose specialty is killing the bull with a sword thrust at the end of a bullfight after performing a series of formalized actions with a cape to anger and tire the animal.

(what, me cheat at Scrabble? He he…)



Bit Number 2: The ISI and I

Oh yeah, and I was tailed by the ISI. I can’t remember what ISI stands for, but it’s the Pakistani CIA, or M-16 or whatever gov’t bureau is supposed to play spy games and do sneaky stuff in really sneaky ways. I left one of the embassies after teaching a class one day and a man walked up to the car window just I was buckling up. He knocked on the glass and I cautiously opened it an inch and said “What?”

He very politely (and even simperingly) asked me what my name was and what I was doing at the Embassy of (insert name of former Soviet-Bloc nation). I told him it was none of his business, since my coming and going at the embassy was already cleared and he (for all I knew) wasn’t connected to the embassy. He wasn’t wearing any uniform, he was just some guy who, up until two minutes ago, had been sitting on the curb outside the embassy gate.

He mumbled something that sounded like “ghar ki” (the house’s) and I was like “ghar ki what?.” He said it again and the phrase turned out to be “sekur-ti” (as in, “a matter of SECURITY”). I told him I was an English teacher and then I drove off.

I didn’t hear anything from him, or see him for a few weeks, but then one evening, as I’m getting ready to go to a reception hosted by the very same embassy, Aniraz comes into the room and says with the weirdest look on her face, “Hey Abez, there’s someone here to see you.”

I was like, who? I never get visitors. She said, “It’s the ISI.” I was like oh come on, don’t be silly. Who’s downstairs? “Really, it’s the ISI,” she said, “What have you been up to?” We had a nervous laugh over that and I went downstairs where I saw…the same guy. It turns out that he traced my license plate number and was here to get my passport number and my ID and stuff like that, and to ask me what I was doing, coming and going from the embassy all the time.

To make a long story short, he couldn’t show me any ID, so I wouldn’t show him mine. (not to be snooty, but American passports sell for around a million (ten lakh) rupees here. I would know, we’ve had offers.) I don’t care where the guy said he was from, a weirdo at my gate with no ID does NOT get my passport number. He confessed that he didn’t know I was a foreign national, if he had known, he would’ve come with ID. (Officer Friendly says: never open your door unless the police office shows his badge, kids.)

Finally, he gave me his name and phone number at the ISI office to verify that he worked there, and once I was satisfied, I was supposed to give my passport number. Before leaving he swore me to secrecy, and told me that no one at the embassy was supposed to know that the embassy was being watched, because he was an undercover operative. (oooh, aaah) After he left I called the American Embassy instead and they sorted it all out for me.

I guarded my ISI secret very carefully and a little nervously, I was good too, I never told anyone, until one day, I was on the phone with another English teacher who worked at the embassy before I did. She was telling me how glad she was to no longer be working there.

“So many times my student would be out of the country but he wouldn’t even have told me so I would show up for class and he wouldn’t be there,” she said, “And on top of that, that silly ISI man followed me around until he figured out where I lived.”

I laughed out loud and said, “Oh no, you too!”

“Yes, and of course I complained to the ambassador,” she said, “And he apologized but what can you do?”

Once I realized that the embassy knew it was being watched by the ISI, I told my student, not about myself, but about the other English teacher being followed by the ISI. “Oh that guy,” he laughed, “We know about him. He’s always sitting outside the gate.”

And that is the end of my adventures in the sneaky and *cough cough* dangerous world of diplomacy and political intrigue.

Bit Number 3: More bits.

Let the newts have a proper education! –Karel Copek., War With The Newts

But I was thinking of a plan

To dye one’s whisker’s green

And always use so large a fan

That they could not be seen. –Lewis Carrol, The White Knight’s Song

“Ale man, ale’s the stuff to drink

For fellows whom it hurts to think..” -A.E.Houseman. From “Terrence, This is Stupid Stuff.”

Tell me, O Octopus, I begs,

Is those things arms, or is they legs?

I marvel at thee, Octopus:

If I were thou, I’d call me Us.” –Ogden Nash, The Octopus.

Bit Number 4: Links

Mysterious link number 1. oooohhh

Mysterious link number 2, scary…

Ok, before I post nonsense as usual, I would like to make mention of something related to how much corruption there is in Pakistan, something that my Mother Dearest (da momma) mentioned in the comments of my last blog.

On paper, police officers earn 3,000 rupees a month, which is roughly 45 dollars. Additionally, on paper, anyone who earns only 3,000 rupees a month is eligible to receive zakat (charity/state support). You see how little police officers earn? And you see how hard it would be for them NOT to start taking bribes. 3,000 rupees won’t even rent you a small apartment, for that much money you’d be renting a single room in someone else’s apartment, and still you’d have zero money left over for food, utilities, medical bills, and God forbid you should have children (whose school fees would be 1,500 a month minimum) or a wife, and God forbid they should want to EAT or anything… 3,000 rupees is only enough money for a bachelor to live in a closet and eat lentils (20 rupees a plate) once a day, every third day and wear absolutely nothing. I’m not joking. It’s a ridiculously small amount of money. Government school teachers earn about the same, sometimes more, sometimes less. Low-level clerks, the ones who do most of the bribe-demanding (second to cops anyway) earn 2,500 rupees.

That’s like trying to live on a hundred dollars a month in the US in a big city. Maybe if you lived in a log cabin in the middle nowhere and grew your own food and had no electricity or utilities, you could get by on a hundred dollars, the same way you could live in a village here in a mud building on your family land and work on the family farm.

Although the pathetically low pay of policemen doesn’t relieve them of accountability, it sure shifts much of its weight onto the government’s shoulders. You see why it’s so common here? Most government employees, when faced with the choice of starving honestly or surviving dishonestly, choose the latter and not the former.

But anyway, back to nonsense. I brought half of the swimming pool home with me the other day. I was keeping it in my left ear. It’s all part of a devious plan to steal the swimming pool, one earful at a time, not unlike Radar and the jeep he was sending home in pieces. There was a difficulty with the plan though, I didn’t realize that having an earful of water would affect my hearing so badly, or that I would be unable to get the water out when I got it home. So I spent half of my day with my hand cupped around my ear and the other half of it going, Wha?

There are two morals to this story. The first one is, Thank Allah for your health, well-bring, and senses. Don’t take them for granted, you’ll never know what you had till they’re gone. The second moral is, Don’t steal swimming pools. They’re too much trouble. Steal the lifeguard instead.

What was the other nonsense I wanted to mention? I know there was something…nuts. Can’t remember. Wait, how silly of me to forget. Here we go.

It is said that all good things come to an end. I suppose this is the reason why our phone line (being a good thing and all) has once again come to an end. I feel like a broken record saying this, but the phone line is down. How long was it functioning? Two days, two hectic days in which I typed replies to the backlog of emails in my box that was a mile deep. I just sent the last of them off this morning, and this afternoon the phone line is gone again. Wow. Excuse me one moment.

(solemnly dons camo jacket, hunting hat and boots. picks up turkey rifle and resumes place in front of keyboard.)

Oh great, it’s back again now. But it’s too late. Phone line or no, I’ve made up my mind.

-ahem- Open season is hereby announced on all PTCL turkeys. Gentleman, happy hunting.

No more phone line. On top of that I have a dentist appointment cuz wisdom tooth #4 is disturbing the peace. Damn rabble-rouser.

Have a joke instead.

Life (www.funnycleanjokes.com)

Multilingual

A Swiss guy visiting Sydney, Australia, pulls up at a bus stop where two locals are waiting.

“Entschuldigung, koennen Sie Deutsch sprechen?” he asks.

The two Aussies just stare at him.

“Excusez-moi, parlez vous Francais?” he tries. The two continue to stare.

“Parlare Italiano?”

No response.

“Hablan ustedes Espanol?”

Still nothing.

The Swiss guy drives off, extremely disgusted. The first Aussie turns to the second and says, “Y’know, maybe we should learn a foreign language.”

“Why?” says the other. “That guy knew four languages, and it didn’t do him any good.”

the phone line is BACK!!!!!!!!!and I have a whole file of backed-up blogs to post. Here’s number one. 🙂

It’s 1:32 am and I’m supposed to be doing my class work for tomorrow, but I’m blogging instead. Don’t ask me why I’m blogging when I don’t even have a phone line. I don’t know why. All I can say is there’s no one else awake to make me do my homework, so nya.

I could’ve fallen down and killed myself today. It would’ve been totally self-infected though not entirely my fault. I blame the giant cockroach. At work this morning, I was sitting in the chair next to one of my Irani students, helping him out with the class work, when a cockroach deemed it fit to interrupt by climbing up my student’s foot. At this point, I went, Aak! Cockroach!

In response to this outburst, my student gave me the same uncertain look that all elementary ESL students have when you use a word they don’t understand, and he began opening his dictionary to the ‘C’ section. I stood up (and here’s where I nearly fell and died) way too fast and took a step backward and pointed to his foot. “By your foot!” I said, and he looked down and realized what I was talking about.

“Ah,” he said, with the imaginary light bulb over his head turning on. He then smiled and very casually put his foot down on top of the roach, and left it there. When the class ended an hour later, and the principal/headmaster/owner of the language institute came in to speak to me, the Irani got his attention and then very politely passed him the squashed roach that he had been storing under his foot the whole time. The headmaster sheepishly accepted it and then kicked it out the door. Such is life in Pakistan.

The other way I nearly wounded myself was slightly more serious. I say slightly because I mean slightly, it wasn’t so very dangerous, but it was scary, ok? I put my fingers on the line in the dramatic life-or-death rescue of…an ornamental pigeon.

I had just done wudu and I was about to hop on the prayer rug for some Muslim Macarena (oops, I mean Maghrib) when the doorbell rang. I went to check who was at the gate. On my way there, I noticed that the guard-dog seemed pretty interested in something, but I had to check the door first. I peeked through the gate and saw one of the villagers from across the street standing there. I said, Ji? (what/yes/hunh?) And the guy said, Baji, my pigeon…

It took a few seconds for it to click. My first thought was, What about your pigeon? The second thought was, I wonder what the dog’s up to, and my third thought was, Oh my God! Save the pigeon!

I ran over to where the dog was so happily employed in gnawing on an ornamental white pigeon, and I tried to take the pigeon out of the dog’s mouth. People, let me tell you this, never try to take food from an animal, even if it’s your animal, boy does it make them mad. The dog took the pigeon back from me (just jumped up and snapped it back) and started to make off with it. I had to chase the dog and wrestle the bird back, and by that time the dog had succeeded in worrying off a bunch of its feathers…It was still alive though. I held the pigeon over my head (height is one of my few pathetic advantages over the dog) and went back to the gate with the dog following me and doing her best impersonation of a snarling kangaroo, trying to leap up and steal the bird back. And of course, the dog was furious and the man was very grateful to have his lovely white pigeon back, even without some feathers.

I’m glad that the pigeon’s story had a happy ending. Unfortunately our guard dog, being the ferocious man-eating beastie that she is, regularly catches birds and eats them in the driveway, leaving nothing but feathers. (cue rousing musical score) Where dozens of bul-bul have perished, THE PIGEON SURVIVED! Ooooh, aaah. Gripping. Dramatic. An emotional tour-de-force. I expect that Paramount Pictures will be along shortly to buy the rights to the pigeon’s harrowing tale. The End.

The phone line hasn’t worked for days, and there’s no guarantee that it will work tomorrow, and yet, I cling to hope, futile though it may be, that mayhap one day there SHALL be a phone line, whose clarion dial tone shall be to mine ear as water is to the throat of one who is parched for long and many days. (Sensei is reading Ivanhoe, can ye tell?)

But yeah, so there’s no phone line. There may not be one tomorrow, so I’m actually typing this at an internet cafe. Here I go. Pardon the typos, there will probably be thousands.

I have a new student, which, in accordance to tradition, makes me nervous and causes me to dread every day that bring me closer to the first class. Sense confesses, Sensei isn’t really an adult, she’s just a kid who’s infiltrated their world and is afeared of being found out. Really, it’s intimidating trying to teach someone double your age and twice as important as you’ll ever be.

“Uh, look here, Mr. Diplomat, sir…” Sensei sez, trying to be respectful and stern at the same time, “This is the third time this week you’ve neglected your homework. What’s the point of moving on to next week’s lesson if you haven’t bothered to learn this weeks, sir.”

At this point I’m worried that Mr.Diplomat will thunder back, “Silence, Upstart American!” I’ve been busy with a delegation all this week and I have better things to do than your insipid vocabulary lessons!”

*screams*

*dies*

I know, I know, none of my students would ever say anything like that. They’re all very nice, in fact, all of the diplomatic-type people I’ve met have seemed like very nice guys. Of course, I’m sure it’s part of the job to seem like a nice guy, it’s only when you turn your back that they bust out all the devious spy vs. spy stuff, he he. I like to imagine that at least one of the students I teach from one of the embassies I teach at is a spy. It makes my life more interesting. Aniraz thinks it might be the security officer, based on the fact that he seems the least likely, and that’s probably his cover. I think it’s the third secretary, anyone who smiles that much must be hiding something…

And speaking of sneaky things, I was tailed by the ISI once. The ISI is the Pakistani CIA or FBI or M-16, or whatever gov’t department it is whose job involves doing really sneaky things in really sneaky ways. But that, dear blogistanis, is a story for another day. My net cafe time is up. Read my momma’s blog instead. 🙂

A thousand pardons fellow blogistanis, we haven’t had a phone line for the last week, and though I’ve typed numerous blogs since then, I can’t really post them. 🙁 I so sorry. (sniff sniff)

But don’t worry, my Mother Dearest is back to blogging again! Also known as Da Momma or, the Rockingest Momma in all Worlds, here she is, click here to visit my momma’s blog

Enjoy

Oh, and if her comments aren’t working, just meander back this way and leave one here. 🙂

I don’t know that my question about hijab yielded any useful answers, just wild theories about aerodynamics and tea cozies. Not that tea cozies are a bad thing. I’m sure that if I had a tea pot (that we actually used) I’d want it to be stylishly dressed. Yes. Of course. Excuse me while I tie a ribbon around the saucepan we boil chai in…

Well, I have about fifteen minutes to blog before I’m off to the swimming pool. Ah, quick, type something!

Oops, I wasted all my time munching dinosaur cake. And a sandwich pickle. Quite delicious. I’ve heard you’re not supposed to swim on a full stomach, but it’s ok. If I drown Aniraz can rescue me. Or if she doesn’t, I’ll take her down with me! Mwahahaaa! (splash)

****

I return, largely undrowned but very waterlogged. You know, I have one of those silly nose-clips, but that doesn’t stop me from inhaling water through my mouth. This often happens when I’m pretending to be the man from Atlantis, trying to see how long I can swim underneath the water, and I push myself to stay under as long as I can. Inevitably I panic at the last moment and start breathing before I even reach the surface. Needless to say, I am NOT a good swimmer. I’m not even a decent swimmer. To be honest, I don’t know whether you could call what I do ‘swimming’. It’s more like aquatic thrashing.

I know I need swimming lessons, maybe I need goggles too. At least then I could see underwater, and that might give my ‘Man from Atlantis’ act some credibility, or at least visibility. Goggles wouldn’t stop me from inhaling water though. What I really need is scuba gear. Or gills.

Aniraz just scolded me and told me to quit slacking off and write a decent blog. Oooohhh…(whine whine whine)…I’m sore from swimming, there’s a ketchup stain on my lap (don’t ask) and I just got home. I don’t know that I’ve done anything in like, a week that I could write a decent blog about, though I have seen four other taxis with TV antennae. (he he) I also saw a taxi with the word ‘JESUS’ stenciled on it in big, red capitals. This is compared to other taxis, which usually say things like ‘N+S,’ ‘Prince’ or ‘Game of Death.’ I have a few theories about the JESUS taxi. They are as follows.

Theory Number One: The taxi driver is a Christian. This theory is unlikely because unfortunately, Christians here face quite a bit of discrimination. A Christian would never advertise, not unless they were looking to run their taxi at a loss. I feel sorry that this kind of discrimination exists in Pakistan, holding someone’s religion against them isn’t kosher. It’s bad when people do that to Muslims, it’s worse when we pass it on to other people.



Theory Number Two: The taxi itself is Christian. Not possible. Everything Allah created submits to His will without question (except men and jinns, what losers we are), and though man may have ASSEMBLED the taxi, it is Allah who created the basic materials and they obey Him and the laws of nature that He’s laid out for them. Based on this theory, I would say that taxis are better Muslims than humans are, but I think this might get me in trouble with someone, somewhere. Somehow. I don’t know. Next theory please.

Theory Number Three: The taxi driver is angling for the Messiah’s business when the Messiah returns (the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him and all of Allah’s apostles.) What better way to get Prophet Jesus’ attention than to write the name in big red letters? Everyone’s attention is piqued when they see their own name in print, yes? Hey man, I know if I saw a taxi that said ‘ABEZ’ I’d hail it sooner than one that said ‘BUTT’S TAXI.’ (actual taxi, BUTT is a last name. It would more properly be spelled as BHATT, but since most people aren’t Gora Saabs like me, they don’t care what the name spells in Angraizi)

And the last theory is, the taxi driver is suffering from delusions and thinks that he IS the Messiah. Shame on him. I’m going to tattle on him to someone, somewhere. Somehow. So there.

The phone line at home is flooded again, and here I am at my favorite net cafe, poking away on the ghetto keyboard and maliciously deleting all the porn that someone has taken the trouble to download. (MWAHAHAAAAA!) Just kidding. There isn’t any on my computer, but Aniraz is on the computer next to me deleting such things with righteous indignation.

So I’m counting down the days and weeks till I get to go to Umrah (InshaAllah, InshaAllah) and I’m all excited. EEEeeeeEEE! (bounces up and down in chair) I’m really looking foward to getting the nearest thing to a clean slate. If I perform Umrah correctly (InshaAllah, InshaAllah) then I get a whole mess of sins forgiven. 😀

Je sui beaucoup happy!

It’s hard to think what to type while sitting in the internet cafe. Time is money, money is time, etc. And it usually takes me a long time to type a blog. Therefore this one is short, and I will end it with a joke. 🙂

Ready for Society?

A man who had been in a mental institution for some years finally improved to the point where it was thought he might be released. The psychiatrist that ran the institution decided it was better to proceed with caution, and chose to interview him first.

“Tell me,” said the doctor, “if we release you, as we are considering, what do you plan to do with your life?”

The inmate said, “It would be wonderful to get back to real life, and if I do, I will certainly refrain from making my former mistake. I was a nuclear physicist, you see, and it was the stress of my work in weapons research that helped to put me here. If I am released, I shall limit myself to work in pure theory, where I believe the situation will be less difficult and stressful.”

“Wonderful,” said the psychiatrist.

“Or else,” continued the patient, “I might teach. There is something to be said for dedicating your life to expanding the knowledge of young people.”

“Definitely,” said the psychiatrist.

“Then again, I might write. There is always a need for books on science, or I may even write a novel based on my experiences in the psychiatric institution.”

“Another interesting possibility,” agreed the doctor.

“And finally, if none of these things works out, I can always be a fire engine.”

Yay! Alhamdulillah, I finally managed to post the supremely beautiful layout that Excalibur made me. Excalibur rules!

-ahem- But I’ve made a boo-boo, and I can’t find the comments box anymore. Somebody…help?

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog…

At least three or four times a week I kick myself for not taking the digital camera with me everywhere I go. Today alone I kicked myself twice.

The first time was for the photo opportunity I missed at the intersection of Margalla Road and uh…I forget the name of the other street. But right in the middle of the intersection was an accident. A Honda Civic broadsided a Pajero (luxury SUV) and you know what? The front end of the Civic (called an Accord in the States I think) was crumpled, and the Pajero wasn’t even dented! The driver of the civic was crouching down and trying to extricate his bumper from inside of the Pajero’s wheel casing but the Pajero was unscathed. That’s what I wanted to show in the picture. It was really amazing. (No, I’m not totally callus, Alhamdulillah, both parties from the accident were ok. They were all standing around and glaring at each other in the presence of a cop when I got there.)

When I told Aniraz of what I saw, she laughed and said, ‘Are you sure that wasn’t (name censored)’s SUV? Mr.Name Censored, we will call him Joe, is a friend of the family who works for the Embassy of (Name of country withheld). Oh wait, Joe is from uh…Transylvania. Yes. Anyway, Transylvanian Joe’s SUV is armor-plated and the glass is bullet proof. When we saw it for the first time we were like, Hey Joe, nice SUV! And Joe said, “Yeah, it’s nice to look at, but hell to drive. It weighs over a ton with the armor plating and it’s got no pick-up. And once it gets started, I have to floor the brakes half a kilometer in advance if I want it to stop. It’s like driving a semi.”

Transylvanian Joe is a healthy guy, and he says even he can barely pull the door open, and woe to whoever leaves a finger or hand in the way when it slams shut! An armor-plated SUV is not a family vehicle, not unless your family has fingers to spare. I’m content with my silly pop-can-on-wheels compact car. It zips! It zooms! It out-maneuvers Pajeros! (It has a superiority complex! It thinks it’s a formula one racer! Mwahaha!!!)

What was I saying? Oh yeah, I pity the fool who crashes into Transylvanian Joe’s car. They should aim for something softer, like a brick wall.

What was the other photo I missed? Oh yeah, an old chawkidar (security guard) in uniform, with a white beard, praying barefoot in the grass beneath a red hibiscus tree with his shotgun laying neatly at the head of his prayer rug. I love that about Pakistan, when it’s time for prayer (Maghrib especially) you see people praying all over the place, on the side of the road, in cricket fields, in small groups outside of shopping plazas…It’s nice.

You know back in the States, one semester I had an evening class in college that started ten minutes after Maghrib began. So I would sneak around the halls looking for an empty room to pray in before class. Once I was praying in an empty room (the Qiblah faced the door) and just as I said Takbeer, a Sudani man from my class (who I didn’t even know to be Muslim) walked in with a prayer rug on his arm, saw me, made a nervous squeaky noise, and then walked out of the room backwards.

He always gave me salaams after that. 🙂 A nice brother, MashaAllah. And now, an informal poll: What’s the weirdest place you ever prayed in? Or the weirdest experience you’ve had with praying in a public place?

When I think of every path

Where I’ve ever trod

I laugh at all the crazy spots

I stopped to worship God…

-Dawud Wharnsby Ali

Elf Ears and Evil-Eyed Safety Pins

In case you’ve ever wondered whether elf-ears (cute little pointy ones) are ever naturally occurring in the human race, then I am pleased to inform you that they do. One of my new students, a woman, has the epitome of elf-ish ears. They form a definite point, they’re not at all rounded at the top, they’re sloped and pointy. Very cute, and very interesting. It’s a pity that I can’t take a picture. She really just has the most interesting ears. She also has very interesting safety pins.

I confess, I failed to live up to my duties as a hijabi and be in possession of at least three safety pins and two straight pins at any given point in time (in the event of just such an emergency), so when I lost a straight pin the other day, I was in trouble. I made it to my class with my scarf slipping backwards and asked my student if she had a straight pin. She did a little searching around her house, and came back and handed me…a tiny blue eyeball. It was attached to a tiny gold safety pin, to ward off evil I suppose.

I’ve noticed that all of my Turkish students have blue eye-balls hanging on things, in all their cars, above their front doors, hundreds of tiny ones in a bowl on the dining table. It’s not such a leap to suppose they’d have one on a safety pin, though I’m not sure whether the eye was there to protect the pin or whether the pin was there to secure the eye.

In either case, I had to use the tiny safety pin with its glaring blue eye-ball to pin the main fold of my scarf down. The safety pin laid flat, but being round, the eyeball didn’t and it sat primly and conspicuously on the very top of my head. I thanked her and then went off to pick Aniraz up from her office, from where we were supposed to go off and run some errands after work.

“Don’t worry about the eyeball,” Aniraz told me, “It’s not like anyone we meet can even see over the top of your head.”

Good point. A funny point though, considering that in the US, Aniraz and I are just average height, but here we’re the first and second tallest women (respectively) in our entire Khandaan. (extended family) It’s really a kick, going from being an almost-short person to an almost tall one. The average height in the US for women is about 5’6 I think. Here it’s 5 foot one or two. The younger generation is coming out taller though, but without hormone-enhanced food (like they have in the US) they have a long way to grow…err…go.

There’s a new pic on the fotolog, but it’s not the one I wanted to post. I wanted to post a picture of the evil-eye safety pin, but I forgot, and posted a pic of…of…well go see the pic and try to guess what it is before you read the caption.

I’m posting from an internet cafe with a sticky keyboard (ewwww) so I gotta be brief. Life is good, the weather is humind, and I have a question.

Q: Do I seem like the type of person that you would gift with a bottle of wine?

No? Does it seem to go against the very grain of my (attempted) Islamicness? Could you ever see me (hijabi) swirling liquor around in a fluted wineglass? No? That’s what I thought too. But then a lunch guest brought me a bottle of wine and was very surprised that I would refuse it.

“And your father doesn’t drink either?” they asked incredulously.

“No, my father doesn’t drink.”

“Then keep it for your mother,” they say, holding the bottle out towards me, “Isn’t she a Christian?”

“Yes,” I sez, stepping back and trying not to look to terribly repulsed, “But she’s the really strict kind. She doesn’t drink or smoke, she won’t even drink coffee.”

Oh well then. The bottle went home with the guests. Silly me. And to think that all this time I was wearing my religious inclinations on my sleeve (or head) and no one would even notice. Sheesh.

And am I living in a Muslim country? Yes, but here the moronical gov’t has liquor legal for foreigners and non-Muslims, and of course, it filters into the general populace from that point.

Aniraz thinks I should’ve accepted the bottle just to be able to smash it against something, or maybe launched it off the roof. Our most popular way of disposing unwanted comestibles (things that are edible, not that alcohol is edible but you know what I mean) is to give them a running launch off of the roof-top. We disposed of about a hundred rotten hamburgers (the freezer quit on us) that way in the wee-hours of one morning, frisbeeing them at the wild dogs who were roaming the streets as usual. Boy were they some happy dogs…

But I digress, yeah, we shoulda taken the bottle and launched it off the roof and watched it smash into a million pieces in the street below. That would’ve been fun. Irresponsible (someone could’ve got cut on all the broken glass) but fun.

Fortunately, the guests brought a back-up gift, some imported coffee (YAY!)which more than made up for the wine fiasco.

Ok, I’m running out of time and this chair is REALLY uncomfortable. I’ve taken my computer into the shop, and it’ll be back soon, InshaAllah. Then I can go back to posting longer and more absurd things.

Peace! -Sensei

Sensei has written a new blog, but Sensei is out of internet hours at home so it’s stuck there till more can be purchased. In the mean time, Sensei has written a short story, her very first short story to be published (online or otherwise) and is eagerly awaiting your critique.

Nervously Yours-

Sensei

(New pic on the fotolog. 🙂 )

Another rarity: competent computer dudes. In my part of the city at least. A month ago I sent my computer in because it kept freezing and it was running slowly. It came back and ran ok for a day, and after that it’s been complete chaos. Not only does it freeze, but it no longer acknowledges either of the CD drives (reader or burner), won’t run certain programs without going into a frenzy of error messages, and files corrupt themselves on a daily basis. I’ve had to reinstall my anti-virus program three times because I get on and find it is no longer functioning. “McAfee’s files have been tampered with and the program can no longer run. Please reinstall…”

The obvious problem would be that I have a nasty virus, right? Well, apparently this is beyond my computer dude to fix. He’s even reformatted my PC, and the virus stayed. Well, I think the thing to do would be to scan DOS for viruses, right? But the computer guy thinks I’m nuts for suggesting this, and he won’t even tell me why the idea is so crazy! Sheesh! So maybe I’m not a computer whiz, but I can’t learn if no one will teach me!

:::huff huff huff:::

So yeah, does anyone know of a GOOD computer repair guy in Islamabad? Someone who won’t cheat me or try to steal the computer’s components when I’m not looking? Don’t laugh, I sent a laptop in for repair and it came back with the motherboard missing. (!!! I think that’s what my brother called it) I was an inexperienced non-techie then, because I didn’t have a complete mental list of everything that the laptop had to begin with to compare what it came back with. So I had no way of knowing or proving things had been taken except that my computer then took ten minutes to open a single screen. It got very, very, very frustrating, so I sent it back to the US where my big brother is a computer dude. He sent me an email basically laughing his head off. Hey man, it’s not my fault that the computer dude was crooked. (loser)

My new computer dudes aren’t crooked, I think they’re just incompetent. I sent the computer in with one problem and it came back with ten. I don’t think they’re trying to cheat me, because every time I bring the computer back they “fix” it for free, and I now know what my computer has in its guts (Pentium III, DVD Rom, CD Burner, Lucent Modem…) so they can’t really steal it. I even get to write my name on the print cartridge when I send my printer in so that I know I’m getting the same one back. Ok, they did fix the printer, and they also fixed the digital camera. You’d think that the digital camera would be more difficult to fix than a simple pc problem.

I complain to my brother via IM and he says to me, look, you can replace the modem yourself, just take the cover off and unscrew the… That’s when I run screaming away from the computer. I’m not sticking my hand into the computer’s guts. That way if it breaks they can’t blame me. I know that my brother was a self-taught techie before he went and got all his certifications, but I also know that he broke more computers than he fixed for a long time. I also know that he lost dozens of files I could never replace and caused me illimitable anguish for the same reason. I could sue him for emotional distress, but I’m not going to because he sends me video games 😀

Me and technology. We just don’t get along. This is another reason why you need brothers. Sometimes they pick useful jobs and then their services are free. Plus, they make excellent garbage disposal units. The cons of having brothers are overweighed by the pros they bring when they get older. Oh, and best of all, they beat people up for you. Once I had my brother pull a loser into the boys bathroom and pound some sense into him. And then there was the time my brother trashed a drunk guy who took a swing at my father. Ah, memories…

Sensei is melting. Semi-solid even under the best of circumstances, Sensei is now reduced to a gelatinous slime due to heat and sleep deprivation. There she goes. She’s trickled out of her chair and onto the floor. She went to bed at 5 am last night/morning after Fajr and woke up at 9 am and went to work. She’s just come home at 4 and can’t think of what to write as she lays collecting in a puddle on the floor. She would like to write something that is at least amusing. She could tell you guys about the taxi with tv antennas she saw today. She often kicks herself for not taking the digital camera with her everywhere she goes.

But wait, she’s not staying to type. The gooey puddle on the floor is oozing towards the sofa where it plans to spend the next week in stasis. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

1:45 am. Ok, I’m extremely awake now, which I don’t suppose is a good thing based on what time it is. (Work in the morning? What work? Where am I?) I feel like bouncing up and down in my chair and going YAY!!! But there’s no one to bounce with me because (duh) it’s almost two in the morning and everyone else is asleep. Hmmph.

Tomorrow/today is the last day of the semester at the school where I’m teaching English, and I think I’m giddier than my students are. I’m not going to give that away by losing control and racing around my desk in circles (as one of my more energetic students is apt to do both before and after class) but I do want to do something nice for my students. In my house, the family tradition has always been ice-cream on the first and last days of school. Not grocery-store ice cream from a bucket, but real ice-cream, as many scoops as you wanted on your waffle cone with one topping from Baskin Robbins. We weren’t loaded growing up, so Baskin Robbins was a big treat.

Ooops, I’ve been caught. My dad just got up and asked me if I was crazy, and now he’s told me to turn the computer off and go to bed. Nuts.

4:30 pm: Yay! Work was fun. I figured out what to get my students. I got them neat pens that each had a 3-D maze built inside of it. You turn the pen and try to get the little metal balls through the maze from one end of the pen to the other. I myself have several of these pens, lemme tell you it’s not easy. You have to work with all three of the little metal balls at once. Will wonders of modern technology never cease!

Oh yeah, yesterday I walked into my room and noticed that there was a shaft of light shining through the packing between the air conditioner and the wall. Did I say packing? I meant Styrofoam, there’s Styrofoam crammed into the space to close it off, and behind the Styrofoam is a bird’s nest. So yesterday I noticed that the birds, who had steadily been poking feathering into my room through the cracks, had finally pecked a large hole through the foam and forced a mess of feathers and straw through it. (Tweet tweet. Hey honey, did you know this nest had an attached bed and bath?)

So I went downstairs and grabbed a roll of duct tape (nothing a roll of duct tape can’t fix) and a cutting blade and came back up with the intention of closing the hole. I climbed the bookshelf (thank God for sturdy carpentry!) with tape in my hand and the blade between my teeth and was highly shocked to hear the top of the bookshelf chirping. Turns out a baby bird had climbed through the hole and fallen a foot to the top of the bookshelf. So I carefully scooped the bird up and nearly gave myself an aneurysm trying to put it back into the hole using only one hand without hurting it. (the other hand was holding me to the bookshelf!) What can I say? Baby birds are very uncooperative. I had to double the size of the hole before I could get the bird back in and then tape the hole over.

That was yesterday. Today the dirty laundry was chirping.

It was another baby bird, buried under a towel. I don’t know whether it fell down yesterday, same time as the other, and had been overlooked by me, or whether it was the same brilliant bird trying to commandeer my bedroom one dirty towel at a time. This time, I had the foresight to bring the digital camera up and take a pic before putting the bird back. I just finished gently cramming the bird back into its nest and taping the hole up again. If anyone thinks baby birds are cute, I invite them to look at the one that fell into my part of the house. (the birds only own the outside, the inside is mine)

I also have pictures of the storm that’s coming up on us right now, and a few other things I’ve snapped around Islamabad. I’ll put them up if fotolog lets me, if not I’ll just have to post them one a day. CHEEZE!

Sensei Presents: THE FASTEST BLOG IN THE WORLD!

Current time 11:20 am. Time of departure for work: 11:40. Time in which to blog? TEN MINUTES TOTAL!



(cue William Tell Overture)

The phone line was down for two days because it’s been rainy. Two of my students are going back to Turkey in a month, which means I get a little change of pace with some new students, InshaAllah. I spilled hot coffee on my foot in a most novel way which I don’t have time to type up at the moment. I have two bruises on my right knee, a Fajr bruise and an Asr bruise. At Fajr I (sleepily) banged my knee while bringing my foot UP to the sink for wudu. At Asr I (sleepily again) banged it on the way OUT of the sink. North and South bruises. All I need is East and West to complete the look.

Aaack! Five minutes left! What DOES one type in under five minutes? A vignette. Here I sit in a pastel green shalwar qameez (it was a gift, the khandaan is always gifting me with pastels…hmmph) drinking non-Turkish coffee. There are oly two kinds of coffee you know, Turkish and non-Turkish. To the North of me is the ironing board, to the East, a pile of books and CD’s I pretend to use (only the video games really are). To the south, a dirty dining table covered in grammar books and flash cards and lessons. Apparently my briefcase has suffered some sort of local explosion and its contents were scattered all over the place. Or maybe I’m just a slob. The world will never know. Quiet, Aniraz. To the West is the refrigerator. Lotta good that does me, it still has the same stuff in it it had two months ago, just condiments and 60 pounds of restaurant grade mozzarella cheese. They ran out of storage space at Chez Daddy. Time up! Here’s Thursday’s blog too.

***Thursday’s Blog***

For the first time in a long time I sat down and watched afternoon cartoons today on K-World (South African kid TV). All I can say is, cartoons ain’t what they used to be. Case in point:

The Miss Mallard Mysteries: A bunch of ducks with shirts and no pants solving mysteries. Miss Mallard appears to be an indirect rip-off of Ms.Marple, the famous fluffy old British lady detective by Agatha Christie. In today’s episode, Ms.Mallard and her nephew go scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef. While scuba diving, Ms.Mallard notices that an entire section of the coral reef is dead, and warm to the touch. She swims back up the boat (after narrowly escaping a shark) and tells her nephew of her findings. Together they go off to find their friend who’s a marine biologist, the duck-version of Jacque Cousteau (sp?). He brings his boat and crew, and they all dive down together to check it out.

While down there, they find a metal gear (hehe..Metal Gear. Snake? Snake? Snake!) with a company name on it and at this point in the episode, it is assumed [by unassuming viewers like me] that Ms.Mallard is an environmentally conscientious duck and this cartoon has an environmentally-friendly theme, not unlike Captain Planet. (the dweeb)

They swim back up to the boat to share their discovery, but while Ms.Mallard is climbing into the boat the gear is dropped back into the water. So she dives in by herself to retrieve it, and then the same shark chases her again. She doesn’t get the gear, but one of the shark’s teeth does fall out and Ms.Mallard brings that up with her instead. She hands it to her nephew and says, What do you think of this? And the nephew of course goes, Why, it’s plastic! (Duh, a plastic shark. Why didn’t I think of that?)

So the nephew is told to get on the internet to find whatever company in Australia makes…plastic sharks. (Boy, you can find anything on the internet these days!) In the mean time, Ms.Mallard and Duck Cousteau go down to the reef yet again, and while there, inexplicably get sucked into a vortex, which leads into an underground city, Duckopolis. It is learned (after about thirty seconds of investigation) that Duckopolis is ruled …not by an evil industrialist whose company is killing the reef with pollution, nor a profiteer who’s selling off the reef to tourists, but the evil Dr.Decoy whose plan is… drum roll please… to take over the world by destroying all the barrier reefs.

One thing leads to another, and Duckopolis collapses, everyone swims to safety where the police boats are waiting. The evil Dr.Decoy is arrested and we all live happily ever after. Yay.

I know that cartoons are made for children, I just wasn’t aware that they were also written by children. Sheesh. Now you say, Abez, you non-genius, if you want intelligent programming, why are you watching kid shows? You know, there are shows for really young kids that are done well enough for me to watch. Like Little Bill, and Sesame Street. They’re both meant for six-year olds, but at least they’re not an insult to your intelligence. (unlike Barney, :::shudders:::)

You know, back in my day, the ThunderCats and the SilverHawks and GI Joe and the Transformers battled absolute evil to save the world/galaxy/universe/dimension. And if I remember correctly, they were decently written and animated according to the standards of the time. Even before animation was good, there were still well-written cartoons like George of the Jungle and SuperChicken, even Bugs Bunny, cartoons that had the cheeky sense to poke fun at themselves and throw in some jokes that kids weren’t meant to get. (Gotta love the Biker Mice from Mars, hehe)

There are still good cartoons now, like the CGI Transformers Series (can’t remember what it’s called), Batman, Superman, and for comedy the Angry Beavers do a pretty good job. And Tick! How could I forget Tick? Nuts, even Spongebob Squarepants has more crea

tive writing put into his porous, yellow toe than all the cartoons I watched today: Kong (as in Kong, King Kong), Billy the Cat, Ms.Mallard Mysteries.

Now I’ve aired a bit of my brain that perhaps shouldn’t be aired.

Yeah, I’m a grown-up and teacher, but I still like my cartoons! (and video games, and novelty toys from gumball machines and sugary breakfast cereals…)

Hmmph!

Ps: One new pic on the fotolog.

(ThunderCats, HoooOOOOooooOOO!)

It rained! Alhamdulillah! The weather is like ten degrees cooler, and it feels loverly. Simply loverly…sigh.

The weather is so cool that I actually feel like doing stuff! (when it’s too hot, all you feel like doing is drinking and sleeping). So far I’ve cleaned off the dining table and computer table, and if I’m still feeling productive after typing this blog, I may sew a pair of pants or something. But not bake. No more baking. The coffee fudge cake I made last week is STILL there. I told my father to take it to Chez Daddy and feed it to the staff, and he’s consistently forgotten to do so for the last three days. So yesterday I had to check if it was still good, which of course involved eating a piece…

You know, on Friday morning I was talking to a friend of mine on IM, and she was like, so, what are you going to for today? I said have breakfast, go to work, come home, have lunch, clean house, play video games. What else?

And she was like, hello, don’t you know what the date is? I said yeah, It’s Friday. July 4th. So what? She was like yes, the fourth of July. I said yes, and the day after that is the fifth.

Then it hit me, ah, the FOURTH OF JULY, American Independence Day. He he. So then I changed my answer to include eating a burger and singing that Lee Greenwood song, ‘I’m Proud To Be An American.’ I don’t think she realized I wasn’t serious. I may be speeching here well American and having a blue passport, but I’m just as allergic to American patriotism as I am to Pakistan patriotism. Nationalism too. Patriotism and nationalism are both psuedo-religions, in the name of which anything goes, however contrary to logic and morality. But I’m not going to go off on a tangent about that, first of all, because not everyone is interested in reading it, and second of all, because it makes me sound like an anarchist.

ANARCHY!!!! :::sets curtains on fire, gnaws on table leg, rages against the establishment…:::

I think I’m gonna go have cup of coffee 3# and pray Zuhr and then do some sewing. Y’all may have noticed that my blogs are getting shorter. I think it’s because without my momma around, Aniraz and I don’t get out as much as we used to and therefore have less to blog about. We did get out yesterday, and I could blog about the twenty minutes we spent in Chez Daddy listening to a bunch of losers call each other on their cell phones and talk to each other even though they were sitting in the same booth. But that would be pointless, however amusing. Gotta go. Coffee’s calling.