apropos of anything

Last night, when I cut my nails, I removed the last bit of henna from my hands. Back in December, when my cousin’s daughter Saba first did them, my hands looked like this: (click on the image for the larger, uncropped photo that is less artistic because at the bottom you can see my shoes and unpedicured feet, but you can also see the complete mehndi design, so it’s kind of a trade-off)

Aasif took this photo at the wedding, one day after the henna was first applied.

I love henna. I love it so much that I can’t stand to have it done badly, which means I often go without since I can’t bear to shove the kids out of the way to get to the mehndi-walis who do it well. It’s okay, though, because again, I would rather not have it if I can’t have it well, and I love seeing the children so happy with their designs.

Whenever I go to India, Saba makes a point of doing my henna. Traffic in Mumbai is horrible, and my cousin’s family lives in the suburbs, but Saba always comes, first to visit, and then to do my henna. I am her youngest khala (mother’s sister), only a few years older than her, actually, and she knows good mehndhi is hard to find in America. This is something she does for me, without fail, and look at how beautifully she does it.

The trip before this one, over three years ago, she was seventeen years old, and as she did my hands, she said, “Khala, when you get married, I’m going to come to America to do your mehndi.”

She’s older now, and she knows better what that would entail, so she doesn’t say it anymore. Also, my Saba has grown up. She’s graduated from college and works a full-time job. I can see the changes in her so clearly, but then, it’s easy to notice changes when you only see a person once every few years.

As long as I had some of the henna on my hands, I was still “just returned” from India. I would see that bit of orange on my nails (because your nails never get any darker than deep orange), and it would remind me of Saba doing them, of Khalid talking to me while she did so I wouldn’t fall asleep (we landed in Mumbai two days before the wedding, one day before the women all had their henna done, so I was still a little jet-lagged), of Shakira hiding behind Khalid because she was too shy to talk to me herself, of the general chaos involved in making sure seven women and two girls got both their hands done, front and back. We’d hired two mehndi-walis, but neither had Saba’s speed, and Saba herself had committed to doing mine. And then there were my other cousin’s girls, who had to go to school the day after the wedding and couldn’t get their hands done because the school didn’t allow henna. They sat and watched and pretended they didn’t mind that they couldn’t do it as well.

Three months later, though, my henna is gone (and the parasites are DEAD), and I am one hundred percent home. It’s good to be home. It was also good to be in Mumbai, and I can’t wait until I get to go back.

Do you go to a small, intimate party where there is a tiny chance somebody you excessively dislike will be in attendance, or do you go to a large, open gala where there is a slightly greater chance somebody you excessively dislike will be in attendance, given that both parties are on the same day, at the same time, and in two different cities?

Does it matter that the small party is in your city of residence, but the large party you technically committed to first? That the small party is in celebration of the upcoming wedding of two people you’re very fond of, and the large party is in celebration of the newborn son of somebody you love? Or that as of yet, you’re the only person who actually knows about the large party?

I know. I suck.

And with that, I’m taking my mucus-filled self off to bed, somewhere I should have been the very second Veronica Mars ended, in the hope that I’ll suck less in the morning.

I do. I love her. And if/when the Meredith/McDreamy/Addison triangle resolves itself on Grey’s Anatomy, I’m going to be very disappointed if they find a way to dispose of Addison despite the hospital contract she signed early in the season.

It’s not fashionable to like Addison. The anti-Addison fanbase is rabid, and even Shonda Rhimes is all about Mer/McDreamy, which makes me marvel all the more at how complicated and well-rounded a character Addison is. She’s the unfaithful wife, yes, but there’s more to her. Much of the credit there goes to Kate Walsh, who does a fabulous job making Addison vulnerable personally while keeping her strong and capable professionally.

As much as I like Addison, I think Izzie’s got a point about the salmon-colored scrubs.

What I like best about Addison is not only does she never deny making an enormous mistake, she also accepts full responsibility for it. She doesn’t try to pin the blame on McDreamy for being distant in New York. She never tells him he drove her to it. He’s realized recently that maybe he was a contributing factor, but Addison is not the one who makes that clear to him.

And she doesn’t really complain when all the chips don’t fall her way. Early this season, Addison asks McDreamy if he’s “done hurting her back.” It’s a line that could easily go the poor-me route, which would have been irritatingly soap-operaish, but then she continues, “If not, I need to special order a thicker skin.” It’s painful, but she’s going to stand up and take it because she realizes to a certain extent she deserves it.

Addison came out to Seattle, she put her heart on the line, and if McDreamy had kicked her to the curb, I doubt she would have whined and moaned about it the way Meredith has been doing.

That being said, I know it is fashionable to dislike Meredith, but I’m not entirely on that train either, thanks to the writer’s blog. I get why Meredith makes the choices she does. She’s lonely too, and she’s carrying more than Addison is. She feels like she’s doing it all by herself. That doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t mean I approve, but I do understand. I want to see her pull herself out of it and start making good choices, something I think she’s never really been good at doing. Most of all, though, I want her to move past McDreamy before she goes back to him because otherwise I’m going to feel like her character is still in the same place it was in the first season finale, right before McDreamy tells her he’s so sorry.

The key to Grey’s Anatomy is characterization, not the triangle. The writers have created people who have layers and gray areas, who mess up and then have to deal with the resulting fallout. They are charmingly imperfect, sometimes so much, it’s harrowing to watch them. That’s what makes them great characters.

Cartoon courtesy of Time.com

I sped through In Cold Blood pretty quickly, usually reading a little during my lunch or after work while I waited for traffic to die down or for files to deploy. I had a hard and fast rule, though: No reading In Cold Blood after 8 p.m., as Capote writes so well I easily became involved with the story, and the characters and events all feel very real. In fact, I usually read something light, like The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants right before bed so I wouldn’t, as my project manager predicted, wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the Clutter family.

Saturday night, though, I had only thirty-some pages left to go, and I thought since all that was left was the execution, I’d be okay. I finished the book, worked on the tagline post, lost my Internet connection before I could post it (that has been happening far too often for my liking, and I’m torn between blaming BellSouth or pinning it on my decrepit old router and modem), and went to sleep.

I woke up suddenly at 5:30 a.m. because I was sure I’d heard somebody knocking on the front door. Then I started to wonder if maybe what I’d heard wasn’t knocking but opening of the front door. And then, because I wasn’t about to just sit in my bedroom wondering if there was in fact somebody downstairs, I went on down to check, turning on every light in my path.

The front door was locked. The back door was locked. There was nobody there. I know. I checked every nook and cranny, including the hall closet, the downstairs bathroom, and the pantry. Oh, and Mansoor’s room and bathroom. If you’re going to be obsessive, you might as well do a thing right.

As I finished up fajr, I realized what I’d heard was most likely somebody knocking on my neighbor’s door, as the trio that just moved in next door is still a little young and in the “party all night” phase of their lives. I realized this because I heard them running up and down the stairs leading to their front door, driving away, and then coming back.

Dan says I’m not allowed to read any more creepy books, which I think is highly unfair. You have ONE “episode,” and suddenly people start creating banned books lists for you…

In the last book of Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quartet, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Charles Wallace takes a trip through time to right a series of Might-Have-Beens in the hope of preventing a nuclear holocaust in his present. As I finished In Cold Blood this afternoon, the end of which dabbles in the murderers’ childhoods, I kept saying to myself, oh, if only child-Perry had had someone to take care of him and love him and give him attention, what Might Have Been.

I suppose that makes me a bleeding-heart liberal, focusing on the murderers like that, ostensibly to the disregard of the victims. Except that I don’t forget the victims. They were the Clutter family, Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon, and they were each shot in the head for pretty much no reason at all. Nancy and Kenyon were children. The death penalty was exactly the right punishment for both Perry and Dick; their crime was heinous, premeditated, and, if you’ll forgive me, in cold blood. They deserved to hang, but that doesn’t mean I don’t read certain paragraphs and think, if only.

In high school, I read a short story about a woman who thought about what she would do if she were attacked by a rapist, how she would talk to him and get to know him because then he wouldn’t rape her because they would be friends. Of course that’s not true. The majority of rapes in this country are date rapes, perpetrated entirely by people who know and claim friendship with the victim, because rape is not about familiarity so much as control. I don’t remember the exercise behind reading the story, but I do clearly recall my teacher discussing the narrator’s naivete and lack of understanding.

And now, here I am, talking about kindness and familiarty, moments and might-have-beens, and how they affect crime… I wonder if that makes me naive. Is that what we bleeding-hearts are, naive? Do I not understand the way things truly are, am I over-simplifying the problem? Perhaps I am, but that doesn’t mean that I’m entirely wrong, either.

And serve Allah. Ascribe no thing as partner unto Him. (Show) kindness unto parents, and unto near kindred, and orphans, and the needy, and unto the neighbour who is of kin (unto you) and the neighbour who is not of kin, and the fellow-traveller and the wayfarer and whom your right hands possess. Lo! Allah loveth not such as are proud and boastful; [4.36]

Unto the neighbor who is of your kin and unto the neighbor who is not of your kin, show kindness. Unto everyone, show kindness. It is a command from God Himself.

I think Dick would have ended up executed or in prison for life regardless of his childhood, especially since Dick’s childhood was decent. Not great, but decent. He certainly had everything Perry lacked and wanted. It’s funny how he didn’t actually kill any of the Clutters but I still didn’t care one bit about his thieving, lying, animal-abusing, pedophilic ass ending up in The Corner. With Perry, I am glad he was caught, glad he was sentenced, glad that justice was served, and at the same time just a little sad that somebody couldn’t have saved him as a child.

And you see, the thing is, I have to be a bleeding-heart liberal. I can’t be anything else. I can’t relegate the poor to poverty, the starving to famine, the uneducated to illteracy. I can’t. I have to believe that for the most part, people aren’t born wanting to hurt others, that they didn’t just come that way, that kindness and attention can make real differences. I have to believe in the good ripples. It’s simply the way I’m built.

Tonight I am attending a benefit to raise money and awareness for the famine in Niger and Mali. The snotty part of me wants to snark on how maybe this fundraiser should have been a few months earlier, say in June or July when news of the crisis first reached mainstream media (and even then aid workers were saying it might be too late for many), but the rest of me is just grateful somebody is paying attention to the poor in Africa.

The event has been coordinated by the Georgia Tech MSA, and nothing makes that so obvious as the time they chose to begin. 6:30 on a Friday afternoon. On race weekend. It’s like they want their guests to have stress and anxiety and bad hair days.

I get that students don’t typically think about things like rush hour and when people get off work, but if you’re organizing a fundraiser that depends on the generosity of the employed… perhaps you should take that into consideration. And race weekend? Race weekend? We’re all going to have to make a special du’a before we venture out onto the road.

Race weekend reduces Tara Blvd. to a veritable parking lot. Technically, the big race isn’t until Sunday, but today and tomorrow there are practices and qualifiers. The Busch series practice starts in fifteen minutes, and then the action down at Atlanta Motor Speedway doesn’t cease until after the Truck race, which begins at 9:15 p.m.

Alhumdulillah, the benefit is down by Hartsfield Airport, which means I-85 S instead of I-75 S, so things should ease up considerably after we make it through the Connector. It’s the making it through the Connector part that’s going to have me shaking in my churidar.

(If, in fact, the churidar is what I decide to go with. Six-thirty means I have to get dressed at work, and I couldn’t decide between two outfits all week, so I’ve brought them both and plan to make a decision on the fly. Or, to let Diane decide for me.)

But. Despite the traffic and the time and general inconvenience, if you’re in the Atlanta area tonight, please try to attend. It’s an important, important cause, and if that’s not enough for you, there’s also renowned keynote speaker Siraj Wahhaj. Try to make it out.

Aww, Nic. Blue-shirted as always.

Nic Robertson reports on the U.S. airstrike on Samarra

The frustrating thing about watching the news is that sometimes you see Nic Robertson reporting from the front, providing actual relevant information, interviewing people who have some clue as to what they’re talking about, or Frank Sesno discussing alternative fuel sources… and then immediately following, you see Scott McClellan in front of the White House press corps, spinning for all he’s worth. Which apparently isn’t much.

There’s some redemption in watching McClellan get outfoxed by the classy, intelligent, and supremely well-informed 86-year-old Helen Thomas, who has probably been covering the White House since before McClellan was born. Definitely since before I was born. She asked the press secretary whether the President was aware that pre-emptive war violates international law as defined by the Geneva convention.

“Pre-emption is a long-standing principle of american foreign policy,” McClellan replied. I guess that’s true, as Sarah Vowell so recently reminded me. McKinley did do it first. And that makes it all so much better.

Thomas then asked if Iran was a “danger to the United States” in the same way that Iraq was a “danger to the United States” three years ago. Y’all can imagine how McClellan fumbled and mispronounced his way through that one.

Another member of the press corps asked if today’s massive air assault was part of the administration’s effort to reverse the President’s plummeting approval ratings. The President, Scott McClellan assured us, had absolutely nothing to do with the airstrike. In fact, he didn’t even know about it.

It’s comforting to see our commander-in-chief is always on top of things. Unless, of course, he is, in which case it’s comforting to see either our commander-in-chief or his peon is lying to us.

So I’ve done a bit of redesigning, some of which incorporated a bit of, well, “borrowing” of images. Specifically the rating stars. I figure it’s pretty obvious where they came from, and if I decide to keep them, I’ll probably add to the language at the bottom that already credits the cover thumbnails to Amazon.

The thing is, now that it’s done, I’m wondering if the stars are just a little too gimmicky. I am no longer sure they’re the way to go. I’m at a crossroads, desperately looking for some guidance.

Okay, it’s not quite that bad, but opinions would be helpful.

I suppose that should be B.E.D. Lemme ‘splain.

When the weather’s nice outside like it was today, I bully Ken and Ivan into leaving the building for lunch, usually down to Broad Street where I can get a zabiha chicken or lamb wrap at Ali Baba’s (although I typically get the falafels because they’re SO GOOD and the line at the meat counter is enormous) and where Ken and Ivan can get KFC or deli sandwiches or Rosa’s Pizza, arguably the closest thing to NY-style pizza Atlanta will ever have. I say “bully” because I literally have to call them names and threaten to kick their shins before they’ll agree to do it, and even then I have to sit through all the whining first: “It’s too hot!” “It’s too cold!” “It might possibly rain sometime in the next 72 hours!” “I forgot my long johns!” Y’all, I know you think I kid, but I promise you, I do not.

I do, however, digress. As Ivan and I were going to Broad St. today, we were discussing the newly completed Glenn Hotel, how swanky it looked, and how we were thrilled they’d finally cleaned up that dilapidated old building because even in its crumblier days, we could tell it would be gorgeous with a little bit of spit and polish.

The first level of the Glenn has a sign that reads, vertically, “Dine BED Drink.” I figured it was a bar because who would name a restaurant “Bed”? Ivan insisted it was a restaurant because the sign said “Dine.” To settle the argument, we did something we would normally never do without Ken, something we would normally make Ken do while we sat back and watched the fallout: We peeked in to see for ourselves.

Ivan went first and was far stealthier than I, who got caught by the manager and pulled back inside.

“I can’t stay. It’s called ‘Bed’, and I just wanted to see if it was a restaurant or a bar. I have a meeting!” said I.

“You can be late,” he replied.

(Where was Ivan during all of this abducting, you ask? OUTSIDE, TWIDDLING HIS THUMBS. I could have been forced into unpaid menial labor for all he knew!)

The manager showed me the extravagant bar. Even as a non-drinker I have to admit the space is gorgeous, if a little generic with the mirrors and lined up bottles. Then we went back across the foyer to the left side of the room, and I discovered why the restaurant is called Bed. (Or, technically, B.E.D.)

Half of the seating area is your standard issue tables and chairs. The other half is beds. Many beds, all pushed up against one another and stylishly decorated with an abundance of throw pillows.

“We serve your meal on the bed,” the manager said helpfully.

On the bed. On the bed! Let’s hope they splurged for those mattresses in the commercials, the ones where the lingerie-clad blonde is walking across the mattress and the glass of water perched on the other end never spills.

I did a little research, and it turns out that not only is B.E.D. a chain, it started in (where else) New York City. Miami has one as well, and Sydney (Australia) might too; they have a Bed restaurant, but I’m not sure it’s associated with the chain State-side.

The Web site has a decent-looking-if-pricey menu, and we’ve been joking about going for lunch one day. To sit at the tables. The tables, people.