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In summer, I packed my things into my small Civic that still had the new car smell. I packed my Harry Potter books and all of my dresses with cardigans. I packed my favorite hairbrush, my toothbrush, my five pairs of shoes. They were my only tools for the year to come.
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For orientation I laid out an outfit the night before and woke up early to straighten my hair.
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In September, I found out my grandmother was ill back in Chicago. I hiked the Claremont loop by myself to be in the mountains because I thought it was what the Prophet would have done if he was in my situation.
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One chilly night in October, Omrana and I texted an entire conversation in Urdu all night while working on papers. “We should use this to gossip about people,” we texted. But we never used it. We never said anything that we needed to hide.
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I wrote an essay about silence, and about being quiet.
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Around Halloween, Alana came to visit and we took a bunch of blankets to Will Rogers State Beach to watch the sunset.
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We went out for dinner after class once and Michael, Karen, and I bonded over our mutual disgust of the general misogyny that we had overhead in a conversation.
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My sister came to see me over winter break, and we went to Downtown Disney just to eat beignets.
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Beth, Michael, and I went to the LACMA before classes started in the spring and I took a picture of the streetlight exhibit that replaced Chicago’s skyline as my phone background.
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Around the time we started school again, I wrote an essay about my parents. I wrote it at a time when I thought my parents cared less for me than they did my siblings.
For my first Engendering Islam class presentation, I titled a PowerPoint slide, “Mo’ Sunna, Mo’ Problems?”
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I found a website that sells Japanese pens and it has improved my quality of life immensely.
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Beth, Michael, and I drove to Phoenix for AAR’s Western conference and Michael made me talk to Amina Wadud after her keynote. I told her I had cited her work in nearly every paper I had written in the past six months. To this, she smiled and patted me on the shoulder.
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In March, my sister set a date for her wedding.
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I listened to Joy Division all the way to and leaving a party in Los Angeles, and it inexplicably made miss all of my friends in Chicago.
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I packed up my things in May, covered my furniture with sheets, and left for the airport. I said goodbye to the mountains as the plane took off.
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omg hilarious.
(Source: unnamedpsycho3, via faineemae)
“I really wanted to write a legitimate modern tragedy — I wanted to write a play that would affect an audience so deeply they would then walk away being forced to ask all kinds of questions the play could not answer for them.” — Ayad Akhtar, Pakistani-American writer, wins the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in the Drama category.
Iran quake leaves scores dead -
A magnitude 7.8 earthquake strikes southeastern Iran near border with Pakistan, killing at least 45 people.Casualties on both sides of the borders in mostly rural areas.
(Source: divorcedreality)
Well it’s all a competition, I say, It’s all a competition whether I’d like for it to be or not, you know.
That last part is more true, because I’d much rather it not be a competition at all - that we could all be honored and decorated - but honor and decoration seldom work that way.
Competition against who, though? He asks me.
Against whom.
Yeah, yeah, against whom. He stresses that last word sarcastically.
Well, I think for a moment in my head, the competition is against everybody. It’s all the time, isn’t it?
Instead I say, Oh you know how it is.
“Forever Alone” translated to Punjabi/Hindi is “Hamesha Akela”. But when translated back to English it could become “Forever a Banana”
(via desi-problems)
People who make fun of desi accents and call desi men “smelly” but wear bindis and parandis on Instagram.
HUNGARY IS NO LONGER A DEMOCRACY -
Hungary is now a totalitarian state largely run by neo-Nazis.
Rromani & Jews have been screaming their lungs out over the last two years.
Canada & W. European countries have been repatriating Rromani refugees back to Hungary over the last several years.
They said it’s “not that bad”. They said our lives weren’t in any “real danger”.
We saw this coming.. now, it’s too late.
No one ever listens until it’s too late..reblogging from the source on this one, also I just went hunting for articles about this and it is both scary and unsurprising:
human rights watch on the new constitution (the specific bits of it that this article points out are FUCKED UP); the wiki article on it; another overview of the constitution thing; wiki article on the fidesz party itself
i’d known a little bit about how fucked up hungary’s been getting lately but i hadn’t known it was this bad. shit. :(
As anti-Semitism, anti-Rromani sentiments, and Islamophobia overlap GREATLY in Europe, we should all be watching out for this. This is major news.
(Source: big-gadje-world, via muslim-unicorn)