so most of you probably know about the move towards new regulation towards defining birth control as abortion. (if you don't - here's an article on the subject - thank you steph for bringing this to my notice!)

so. yes. like any child of the so-called information age, i went to see what i could do about it (single-handedly changing the world being my oeuvre) and naral and planned parenthood both have emails you can send to various decision-makers. so you can check out naral's form here, and planned parenthood's here.

slang. preferably the weirder the better. which words/phrases do you particularly like? which get on your nerves?

(my cousin hates "hella" - so i try to use it around him all the time. i can try to not do that to you, though...)

i have to admit, i'm particularly looking for substitutes for "totally absolutely awesome-rific" - i have a character in my head that i'm playing with, so this does have a work side of it. but i also really like slang. in general. possibly because i like playing with language, and slang is usually exactly that!

i just found this and am ecstatic. here's my city, folks, in all her glory....

for extra credit, locate chartered accountants' avenue, the glass tower, defence men's college (i live across the street from it, which means our house is inaccessible around 8 a.m. every morning and 2 p.m. every afternoon, when everyone's cars come to drop them off/pick them up), the saudi embassy (believe it or not, an actual landmark), and aunty park (thereby named after all the 'aunty's or middle-aged women who go there for their daily walks), and khadda market (where my brother and his friend got mugged at 1 a.m. one night when they insisted on walking home despite everyone telling them not to. it's called khadda market because it's in a huge depression in the ground, and khadda is like... exactly that).

ooh, i just found jheel park, haunt of my childhood. it was like a 5 minute walk from my grandparents' house when i was... oh, between 2 and 8 years old.

wow, this is SO cool.

1. i have a niece as of 12 a.m. last night. well, sort of a niece.

i feel old.

2. i have a sudden sense of purpose in my life. i'm not saying more than that because i want to see if this lasts. if it does, either things have clicked and my subconscious has figured things out without having informed me, or i'm a delusional psychopath with illusions of control and fate.

song for you, because i heard it this morning and it took my breath away:

brothers in arms (live) - dire straits

also a video. apparently when doing the video for "shores of california," the dresden dolls essentially spoofed david lee roth's video for "california girls," which in turn was spoofing the beach boys. which all led me to one conclusion, namely: amanda palmer is hot. but check it out - there are cameos by kelly (of "shoes" fame) and margaret cho. don't you want to see kelly and amanda make out? no, really, don't let it scare you - it's really very funny. not to mention the exceedingly catchy song.

as lucy said, everyone's doing it!

What we have below are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread*" by LibraryThing’s users--as in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.

bold the ones you've read,
underline the ones you read for classes (at least once),
italicize the ones you started but didn't finish,
* if it's actually on your bookcase and you haven't read it.
+ for the ones that you really want to read but haven't gotten to yet

I've been meaning to put these links up for ages:

When Abstinence Educators Attack - this article links to a really interesting (albeit lengthy) report on all the different ways in which abstinence-only education is actually harming women in particular and people in general.

An Earthquake That Shifted the World Around Us - i really liked this article just because it did show a side of the middle east that doesn't often make the news.

What Kids Can Do - ok, i just think this is cool. it's so nice hearing positives.

iGive.com and Maatiam - i also think this is cool. these are both sites that are affiliated with online stores so that if you shop through them, the store donates part of the money you spend to the nonprofit you specify. (iGive has horton's kids on it, and maatiam has the prince george's county casa on it, which is how i know about these). another seriously awesome site is donorschoose.org, where teachers in public schools put up requests for help with funding various projects (like getting books for their classroom) and you can donate as much as you want towards the materials they need. i kind of wish i could give more to these guys than i can.

there was also an article somewhere about how people have finally started oral history project type things recording the atrocities of the partition of india and pakistan in 1947. FINALLY. i've been meaning to get a tape recorder and get my grandmother to talk about this for ages. it'll have to wait til i get home and i probably still won't get the full story (i'm fairly sure it'll be censored) but i want to do it. i want to record what her childhood was like in a village near delhi in the 20s and 30s and what the journey was like and all of it. because there isn't much of that happening in pakistan (the article i read was about a group going around doing this in india) and it's important that both sides of the story be preserved.

maybe i can convince my brother's friend to find me a video camera and come with me and do this properly with more people. i'll have to see. someone has to start recording this stuff. might as well be me.

happy belated international women's day! (march 8, for those who don't know). it's a pretty big holiday in russia (women get flowers and things). i honestly considered sending flowers to my former russian profs, but didn't in the end...

this weekend, i cooked like 4 separate meals (3 of them today, in fact), vacuumed the entire house, did 3 loads of laundry (also today), printed out the tax forms i have to fill, called like a billion people, missed seeing my casa kid because of my own idiocy and absentmindedness (how COULD i? honestly, i missed seeing him because i stood on the wrong side of the street and watched my bus go by without registering it was my bus. it was raining, too. i deserved that, for being that stupid.)

i got meds for faraz (who has had a raging cold all week), declined to have dinner with a coworker and her husband and probably came off as phenomenally ungracious when in fact i had cramps, finished the moscow rough guide for ocs and sent it to the lovely leslie, watched the irony of fate with faraz - fabulous movie, by the way, albeit a bit long. but really funny and very russian.

i have a feeling the weekend was actually quite good, but i'm too exhausted to figure it out. today was insane. i could never, ever do the housewife thing. oh my god. i am SO glad my mom is going to be back in a couple of weeks. i can't wait to have food i have not actually cooked. not because i don't like cooking, but i really like cooking on my own terms, rather than trying to cook enough food every sunday so that i don't have to cook again till wednesday. (since i work all day mondays and tuesdays).

yesterday faraz and i made our way through a load of old music videos and cds and i came to the realization that u2 in their early videos now seem impossibly young to me. (so cute, though, in that young and idealistic kind of way.) i feel ancient. i had to laugh, though, when faraz decided that the video for "i will follow" was in fact brilliant (bono's dancing in particular - he feels that if he were in a band and his lead vocalist were dancing like that, he would be highly impressed. so would i, i suppose; it would take a lot of guts to go on film as that ridiculous).

lately, i've ended up spending a lot of time with faraz, since he's sick and home all the time, and i have no social life. (no, really, i don't. i never have the energy these days...) it's been interesting... we've watched a few movies/parts of, and just generally ended up talking about things. it's kind of interesting. we watched secondhand lions, which was a good movie, though problematic in its portrayal of north africa/arabs. ( spoiler... ) although it still wasn't as bad as the wind and the lion (notice how there are always lions?) where sean connery played (i kid you not) an arab outlaw type, complete with scottish accent and ludicrous similies ("ignorance is a steep hill with perilous rocks at the bottom" - who the hell speaks like that?!)

anyway.

here is a song for you, because it came up on my ipod and i burst out laughing. this is, in case you don't know, by a russian 80s group, chaif. this is supposed to be a rock song, and listening to it, you can understand just how different russian and american rock music was in the 80s (and to a certain extent, still is). the song is about the argentina-jamaica match in the soccer world cup of 1998, where argentina won 5-0 (no, i didn't know this. i looked it up). the commanding voice in the beginning is saying, "wave your hands in the air!" and at the end, they say something along the lines of, "someone asked me, surprised, do people in our country love rock? i said, they love it. our band, happy birthday chaif!" (clearly this was an anniversary concert). lyrics are here, although i haven't checked how accurate they are. enjoy...

argentina-jamaica 5:0 - chaif

it honestly took me about four times as long to put this mix together than i expected. i'm not sure why. perhaps because i wanted a mix that captured a range of emotions, from "oh my god, you love me!" to "oh my god, i love you!" to "the world is dark and depressing, for you do not love me" to... the more complicated kinds ("i love you but really that's probably a hideously bad idea," for example). i'm still not quite satisfied with it, but i've reached the point where i just won't be satisfied with it, because i can only put up so many songs before it gets ridiculous, and really, it's impossible to get every emotion (and beautiful song) on there. anyway, so here's the mix, for whoever wants it. I've listed the songs separately, and you can download the album (zipped!) if it seems like something you might like. i was going to link to each song individually, but to be completely honest, i am very lazy.

1. as the Decemberists would say, a cautionary song... (Mika - Lollipop)
2. love songs are rather irresistible, aren't they... (Until We Burn In The Sun - Bedouin Soundclash)
3. sometimes one settles for rather less than one perhaps deserves... (Corner of Your Heart - Ingrid Michaelson)
4. ah, reminiscences... so bitter, no? (You Love Me - DeVotchKa, damn them for their pseudo-russian name)
5. i agree, people should come with warning labels. (Handle With Care - Traveling Wilburys)
6. so should kisses; or love is a many spendored thing. (Heart & Soul - Hoagy Carmichael)
7. how can people stand other people anyway? (Anyone Else But You - Moldy Peaches)
8. love and neuroses, oh my! (I Think I Need A New Heart - Magnetic Fields)
9. "ah, what i'd do for you...!" (For Your Love - The Yardbirds)
10. "how could you NOT love me?!" (Do You Love Me - Dave Clark Five)
11. everybody else can eat their heart out (My Baby Just Cares For Me - Sophie Milman)
12. damn these crushes, i say... (Alice In Wonderland - Emma Wallace)
13. to think of what could have been... (Some Journey - Suzanne Vega)
14. honestly, this is one of the most romantic songs i know, despite all the cliches. (Tanglewood Tree - Dave Carter & Tracy Grammar)
15. direct and to the point. (I Want You - Elvis Costello)
16. regrets, regrets, regrets. doesn't love suck sometimes? (Tangled Up In Blue (NY sessions) - Bob Dylan)
17. revisitation, or "you've changed some." (Peach, Plum, Pear - Final Fantasy)
18. i want you not to go, but you should. (Stay or Leave (Radio City Hall) - Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds)
19. distilled longing. (To Be Alone With You - Sufjan Stevens)
20. this song is for you. thank you for being my friends. (Kind and Generous - Natalie Merchant).

And here's the album itself. enjoy!

i was talking to divya like, a week or more ago, and we both agreed that when we came to carleton, we were sort of overwhelmed by the amount of stuff other people already knew. as in, stuff that was considered part of a regular education in some high-schools/countries but not in others. and i remember, i spent most of freshman year trying to cover for that sort of stuff, in part because i spent time with jessie, who, for those of you who haven't met her, had a pretty thorough knowledge of major european philosophers, art (and art history), music, and theater.

i appreciated all of this stuff, but - i still don't know anything of philosophy, my knowledge of art is confined to the russian and does not extend at all into the practical (art classes in pakistan did not involve any theory at all, even the most basic composition related stuff), what i know of music theory and my musical ear is partly what i ended up with naturally and partly due to the 1.5 years i spent in canada as a 7th grader... and my knowledge of theater is pretty much what i got from reading a few plays and my own completely random opinions.

it's just interesting, the different places we come from. and i wish now, i really do - that i hadn't felt like i needed to know more than i did. i should have had the sense to realize there were things in my experience that were still valuable and that were different from what everyone else knew; things in my repertoire that were not in others'. and it's weird because if anyone else had said they were feeling the way i'd been feeling then, i would have said exactly that to them.

anyway. i'm glad i've realized that and moved on from there, but i wish it was something i'd known to watch out for.

moving on, fun quotes from the sairapartment:

quote for the moment:
faraz, watching tv - oh, look, tony bennett, sinatra jr. (pause). it would suck to be tony bennett.
saira - yeah...
faraz - other than
saira - all the pluses.
(pause)
faraz - yeah... (we both start laughing). so we understand each other.

other stupid conversation with faraz, on "kartography" by kamila shamsie:
faraz - yeah, man, i was reading it and i realized, those are the people i hated in school... like, with the anagrams and all. they were so pretentious
saira - but
faraz - and i know she says that and all, but i hated kids like that!
(pause)
saira - well, i guess, i was one of those kids so...
(pause. we both start laughing)
faraz - yeah, i KNOW.

faraz watching ad with some woman singing "time is on my side" by the rolling stones: what do these people do, roll out of bed in the morning and go, "oh, let's ruin my favorite rolling stones song today!"

this is why i like living with faraz.

oh, and yesterday i came the closest i have ever been to actual frostbite. i never experienced that much pain in my entire time in minnesota. i feel this is important to record.

i just watched "dirty dancing." i was in a warm squishy mood today, therefore my analytical sensors were off (somehow - i can usually never turn them off). but i did wonder why the hell anyone watches these movies. i know they have "feel good" endings in theory, but as ever, the movie left me feeling very single and wishing i had the grace and the abandon to look like that when i dance. and not only am i feeling all forlorn and graceless, i also have 80s soft rock stuck in my head.

luckily i made potato soup today (to get rid of potatoes that were probably not quite fit to be eaten but i felt bad about throwing them away; it wasn't bad, so i assume the potatoes were less horrible than i had been expecting). so the comfort food is just waiting for me. when i get out of this funk enough to eat it.

why is this making the news? particularly, why is this making news on the grounds of religion?

when people confuse politicians with their supporters.

anyway, check this out: i haven't been through the website yet, but i received a very good sell today. they have an amazing set of blogs, podcasts and vlogs dealing principally with social entrepreneurs. it's the vlogs that i like most though; very short interviews with various social entrepreneurs from all over the world. a good place to find out what's going on that's actually good in this world.

so, dear friends, it is time for another divya-at-the-sairapartment post. we are here, and we have made couscous. AND moroccan chicken stew. well, somewhat moroccan. mostly chicken stew a la whatever we found in saira's spice cabinet. divya says "ha ha!" in a somewhat menacing tone.

and, as usual, we needed to brag. hence, the recipe which follows. there is a picture, but i am too lazy to put it up here so you can go check it out at the blog.

but, the recipe. it is great. wonderous. that sort of stuff. and it begins with onions.

well, one onion.
1 green pepper
1 chicken breast
14 oz.  can diced tomatoes, with juice.
half a cup water
clove of garlic
1/4 buillion cube (it's enough to make 1/2 cup broth)
our brilliant curry powder (see above cabinet reference): 1/2 tsp. red chili powder, ground cumin, turmeric, coriander, salt, a few cloves, cardamom pods, random dried pepper thing and we have no idea what it's called, 1/4 tsp ground black pepper and cinnamon.
lemon juice (1/2 tsp, not that we actually measured. it was SUPPOSED to be 1/2 tsp)
parsley (again, we didn't measure, but it was supposed to be 1/16 of a cup. figure it out).

dice onion and green pepper and chicken and in fact everything that you can dice. remember, the tomatoes are already diced. cook peppers and onions in oil about 10 minutes until they soften and the onions are, in divya's expert words, "sauted and greasy." then add the spice mix and garlic and stir around until fragrant (about a minute).

then you add the buillion cube and the water and the tomatoes (with juice. divya is insistent on this). then divya added extra water because she was paranoid, but the recipe didn't call for it. let it boil, then add the chicken (which should be "bite sized," whatever that means). once the chicken is mostly cooked, you add the lemon juice and parsley and simmer until done.

voila! serve with couscous and you have moroccan chicken a la saira's cupboard. and divya's machinations.

no, honestly, it was rather good.

so yesterday faraz and i arrived in ottawa (after a much-delayed flight with, thankfully, a lack of what faraz termed "crying infants and exuberant youths." and then we watched "the tenth kingdom," which my cousins assure me is so terrible it's great. and today we celebrated a sort of combination eid/christmas/hanukah (basically eid, but with presents, as far as i could tell). a few brave people ate the raspberry chocolate truffles i'd made, but most people just made fun of me. hence, i have great love for the aunt and cousins i am staying with. they had the truffles and were amply rewarded because, though i do say so myself, they were pretty good. a bit on the overly soft side (i think i'd cut down on the amount of cream next time) but still fabulous.

and i got more presents than i have in... absolutely years, really. which was interesting. why do certain people always give me journals? i don't do journals anymore, at least not handwritten. i do angst-filled text documents every few months or so.

and then we watched the second and third lotr movies, which, i realized, i hadn't really seen before. i know,sacrilege. so far, i remain in that apparent minority that thinks the books are better. but this is what the movie inspired in me:

1. none of the hobbits were actually straight. repressed, probably, but NOT straight. all sorts of fan fiction suddenly makes sense to me.
2. does anyone else see irony in the huge commercialization of a series essentially about the danger of attaching extreme value to objects?
3. i will never forgive them for what they did to faramir. never. the thirteen year old inside of me (who read all (ALL) four books on an average of once at least every six months) will never stop being outraged.
4. i will also never forgive them for having more chemistry between eowyn and aragorn than between aragorn and arwen. (this is where the rarely seen 'saira-the-hopeless-romantic' comes in).
5. they do a great job of capturing exactly what it's like to almost-faint. (all those moments with frodo? yeah, totally been there, and it was actually, oddly, very similar).
6. they also do a great job with scene changes. almost too good, at points, but still. points there.
7. i cannot help being glad they removed tom bombadil.
8. if i were in the movie, i would be an orc or one of those dudes on the elephants, because all the southerners were (surprise!) apparently modelled on asian peoples. i am totally sure the guys on elephants were modelled on saracens. i don't think this carries over from the books, going by my memory, and i'm not sure it was even deliberate on the part of the filmmakers, but it is RATHER unfortunate.
9. there is something about unreasoning evil that is pitiable.
10. legolas is, in fact, a vegan california dude.
11. faraz is right - they totally trivialize gimli and it's not fair.
12. liv tyler has her father's lips. this is unfortunate.
13. the movie is too self-consciously an epic, and could do with some toning down of the drama. it provides too many occasions for sarcasm.

by now i have probably offended all sorts of fans of the movies, so i will stop here (until something else occurs to me besides "gollum should have been shot at birth"). but...

i don't know. i want to re-read the books because, while the movies were better than i expected, the books lack the overly dramatic music AND i have a feeling that when i re-read them, they'll still be better. i think, in part, because they are just so GOOD at creating a world. the world becomes real, and tolkien develops a real sense of history. which is why the books are so big, and readers are so fanatic. i feel that, while j k rowlings (to take the biggest competitor) is very good at creating a world, she's not quite so good at creating that history, because her books are about individuals. tolkien writes about peoples, which strikes me as fascinating. think about it - he deals with peoples who have historical rivalries and hatreds, and have to overcome those as individuals. individuals in rowling's books don't have that sense of history, that sense of "your people killed my people two hundred years ago and we've hated each other since." (and they're not as well developed as characters; they tend to have one or two defining points and that's it). rowling's books, so to speak, deal with a recent civil war. and it's not really war, in some ways. strategy is sort of lacking. mostly battles "happen" - forced on the good guys by the bad guys. and to me, the bad guys seem to be less real than those in tolkien's writing and i can't figure out why. perhaps because tolkien is vague about a lot of things. my imagination can fill in the details of sauron's awfulness. (is sauron stalin? i'm just curious. i haven't ever researched the social basis for the book, in part because i prefer to leave it magical and disassociated from this world).

anyway. i'm getting into my harry potter rant (a long, long rant which cara and i once went into on the subway, where cara pointed out ALL these issues with the books that i hadn't even thought of, so now my rant is even longer than it used to be). it is reassuring to know that other people share my distrust of that particular franchise, but i'm sure nobody's up for that right after i've ranted about the lord of the rings, so i'll just go to bed.

ps. according to wikipedia, tolkien wanted the trilogy to be viewed as a romance. i agree.
pps. when i first read the series, i was particularly struck by gandalf being the grey wanderer and me being a wanderer (as per my name) and now i see that he was based on odin and i just thought of "american gods" and oh dear, i had better leave that to simmer a while.
ppps. the best part of "the tenth kingdom" is that when the trolls swear, they say "sucking elf!" anyway, right, bed.

faraz and i are having this conversation about how most americans he talks to seem to think pakistan is in the middle east. granted, we are bordered by iran and afghanistan, and the news always talks about the u.s. being in the middle east, and the u.s. is in afghanistan, so you can see that logic... but afghanistan isn't middle east either. and on the other side, we're bordered by china, but that's "asia." south asia, the indian subcontinent, just doesn't exist.

the other thing he told me was that he was talking to this guy who said: "yeah, i've been to cairo so i've been in the region."

...

CAIRO IS IN AFRICA!!! DIFFERENT BLOODY CONTINENT!!!

faraz didn't say anything, which is more than i would have been able to do. or maybe i would have done the same. the problem is, you just CAN'T correct the other person in this situation without coming off as blunt and/or an asshole, or implying that the other person is an idiot. which is something i usually don't want to do...

anyway. so that was annoying. another thing that was annoying was listening to my (clearly VERY straight) co-workers today going on about how they just didn't understand gay women who use strap-ons. or gay relationships in general. on the plus side, i think it was just honest confusion on their part but it made me miss a world where i didn't have to deal with people that clueless.

and also on the plus side, today we had the christmas shop, where kids in our anacostia neighborhood could come in, pick out one new toy for themselves, take a beanie baby and as many books as they wanted, AND pick out as many toys and clothes as they wanted from the room filled with second hand stuff. my favorite moment: a seven year old boy who came with his three year old sister and their dad, who, after picking out his toys, looked up at his dad and asked, "do i get all of these?" he had like four toys. and his dad and i said that yes, he got all these toys. and he was OVERJOYED. and it totally broke my heart. but i am so glad he's getting stuff this christmas.

actually, the last few days have all been christmassy - saturday we took the moms to walmart to shop for their kids (so they can pick out presents for their own kids rather than relying on donations). sunday we had the christmas party (divya can testify as to the insanity... i invited her and felt bad immediately upon getting there because it was utter chaos and very overwhelming). monday we gave away the gifts people had donated for specific kids (people could basically adopt a kid or a family for christmas). there were garbage bags full of wrapped presents. it was problematic, though, because some families got, like, MOUNTAINS of stuff, and other families - not so much. and this one family who's new to the program got FOURTEEN GARBAGE BAGS OF STUFF for FOUR kids, and next year they'll be so disappointed because that's very unusual. but - oh well. and today was the christmas shop. and for the records, bratz dolls (which, apparently, are highly desired among little girls in anacostia) are the skankiest things i've ever seen.

and now i am officially on christmas break and i'd better go back to fixing dinner.

so, if you're curious where i work - it was just featured in the washington post!

AND, you should vote for anacostia (the neighborhood where our kids live) for this hgtv neighborhood revitalization project!

And lastly, if you want to find out more about anacostia as a place, check out this blog.

dear whoever the hell you are,

i have news for you.

it snows here.

i know you're in the south, so this could come as a complete surprise since you are clearly living in denial. snap out of it. it does.

that given, the following things are not acceptable:

1. that you ignore the icy roads and sidewalks. just because you prefer not to think of them does not mean they are not there. they are there. and they are covered with, like, a sheet of ice. and it is impossible to actually walk across them no matter how much traction one's shoes have. any moron could have predicted that the slush we got yesterday would be ice today. that given, i did not appreciate having to walk to work in tiny shuffles so that i did not fall and break my neck. which, if i had done, would have been followed by a lawsuit so fast it would make your head spin. not only because i would need the money (on a VISTA salary, i really wouldn't mind anything extra) but because it would go against my principles not to penalize you for your extreme stupidity and indifference to the safety of people in general.

2. that buses practically stop running because it is snowing. my brother had to walk 20 minutes in the snow and the cold last night; when i called him, his voice was shaking on the phone. And why? Because the buses couldn't make it up the hills in this area, so they dropped him off god knows where to walk his way home. switzerland has hills too, and they have a working bus system. if you're going to proclaim your country a global leader, FIX YOUR BLOODY TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM FIRST!!!

3. that a pile of leaves on the metro track delays the entire freaking metro. are you kidding me? you do go through seasonal changes every year right? figure something out!

please fix the above issues as soon as possible so i can start moving beyond my utter incredulity and begin to respect the south again.

sincerely,

saira

ps. three inches do not a snow day make. really.