apropos of anything

Ken: Have you ever met anyone who said they were going to college to get married? Because this girl I met yesterday, I asked her, so what are you going to focus on in law school, and she said, I’m looking for a husband.

Huda: Well, I’ve never met anyone who actually admitted to it, but yeah, I think there were several people at Tech who were in it for their MRS degree. You could always tell which ones—

Ken: What’s an MRS degree?

Huda: (dumbfounded) Ivan, please tell Ken what the MRS degree is.

Ivan: …

Ken: Muscular… retraction… disorder…?

Ivan: Mechanical regeneration doctorate?

Huda: M-R-S! M-R-S!

Ken and Ivan: We don’t know!

Huda: (semi-hysterical) Spell it out! M-R-S!

Ken: Well, it has to have something to do with marriage… Mars?

Huda: (finally breaking down) Mrs! It’s the Mrs. degree! M-R-S for Mrs!

Ivan: What?

Huda: I give up.

How beautiful is this?

Discovery takes off from Kennedy Space Center

Growing up in the backyard of Johnson Space Center in Houston, I wanted to be an astronaut… until I realized my crippling fear of heights might be problematic. Then I wanted to be an aerospace engineer because if I couldn’t fly the shuttle, I was going to design it… before the guidance counselors discouraged that idea because of the limited jobs in the aerospace industry. Plus, I was going to be a doctor, right?

And yet, every time the shuttle goes up, it takes part of me with it, soaring into space, exploring new reaches, pushing what we know to its limits. It is so amazingly, breathtakingly pure and wonderful.

I will never understand the people who think we ought to scrap the space program.

The combination of the great gift show at the America’s Mart and three consecutive nights of Kenny Chesney concerts have resulted in traffic being hopelessly snarled at the exact hours that I might be leaving my office, which means I sometimes sit downtown for thirty minutes waiting for a charter bus to stop blocking all five lanes of Spring Street. And we won’t even get into the lovely characters who drive their enormous Ford F-150s or Chevy Suburbans into our parking deck, set up their UGA fold-up chairs, haul out the beer, and begin their tailgate party.

I mean, who tailgates a concert?

Yesterday I had to run to Publix on my way home from work because I wasn’t in the mood to go the day before and I now have to worry about dinner, or at least making sure there is something edible in the refrigerator that isn’t mint chocolate chip ice cream. (The white kind, not the green, as I loathe the idea that you need to dye something green for it to be minty.) The seafood guy told me to come back soon as he wrapped up my tilapia, which just goes to prove that he’s new because otherwise he’d know that I am at Publix all the time.

I attempted to make kaukni-style fish last night, complete with coconut. I think I may have gone slightly overboard with the coconut, which not only veered the dish more into Thai territory, but also means I am going to spend the rest of the week fretting about mine and Mansoor’s cholesterol intake. Even knowing the broccoli, the rice, and the tomato chutney (what AM fondly refers to as “Indian salsa”) were completely cholesterol-free isn’t helping my paranoia.

I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last night as well, reading into the wee hours of the morning because I’d forgotten how hard it is to put down the last hundred or so pages of Rowling’s books. Also, I got started late, what with the getting home late and going to the store and making dinner. I liked it, but I think I may need to re-read it before forming a definitive opinion. Or maybe I’m just not ready to write about the book yet. Soon, though.

And that’s it. Things have been pretty quiet since I came back from Augusta on Saturday night… but that’s mostly because I’ve wanted them to be.

We are from Allah, and unto Him we return.

Or, in Biblical terms, the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

For our Augusta boys that we lost tonight: Inna lillahi wa inna illahi raji’oon. May Allah (SWT) forgive you and have mercy upon you.

I don’t know what else to say that doesn’t sound callow or self-righteous about these boys, who were a part of our extended family, who were over at our house all the time.

Allahum-maghfir lihayyina wa mayyitina, wa shaahidina, wa ghaa’ibina, wa sagheerina wa kabeerina, wa dhakarina wa onthana. Allahuma man ahyaitahu minna fa ahyihi alal Islami, wa man tawaf-fitahu minna fatawaffahu’alal imani. Allahuma la tahrimna ajrahu wa la tudillana ba’dahu.

My heart goes out to your families.

There will never be any real progress in ending this terror war, until we realize that we have all become collateral damage, unacceptable collateral damage. That being the case, there is no they or we in this affair. We are they and they are we. When a child in New York never sees his mother again because she was crushed in a collapsed tower at the World Trade Center, we all have suffered an irreplaceable loss. When an impoverished family in Afghanistan is bombed from the face of the Earth by a misguided missile, something of our collective humanity is destroyed by the blast. When a child in Iraq is born with gross birth defects due to his mother’s exposure to depleted uranium, we have all been deformed. When London commuters fear ever again entering the underground, because of the ill-advised actions of a handful of desperate fanatics, their insecurity touches us all.

For the whole of Imam Zaid Shakir’s statement, follow the link.

Our prayers and thoughts are with you.

A few weeks ago, I saw this:

And today, there’s this:

Dear God in heaven, where do we even begin?

Happy anniversary to Dan and AM, Aisha and Kashif, Mukhlis and Megan.

Who knew the July 4 weekend was such a popular wedding date?