How uncharacteristic...

I'm going to be the MC at my university's Marhaba dinner tomorrow. I've decided not to prepare a speech and to just wing it. Although I was specifically told to try and not be as mean as I usually am...which will be quite difficult for me. I'll report on this tomorrow if I don't die of embarrassment.

Shopping carts: a bitter diatribe

I live near a great big Loblaws (for those of you fobs who don't know - it's a grocery store). So, what tends to happen is that most people in my building go shopping to buy all their lovely food items at ridiculously expensive prices and they don't realize that they won't be able to carry all their stuff home. So I come home today, and there's this Loblaws shopping cart in my hall. It's annoying because you know Loblaws' shopping carts - they're freaking huge. Like, what the heck? Please, have the common decency to return the shopping cart! So the security guards in our building have to wheel the carts back to the store. Hahaha sucks to be them. And I have never done this, I swear.

Autumn

The last day of Summer was Wednesday, September 21. Then yesterday night was windy and cold, which is a wonderful combination. Autumn has to be my favourite season. Followed by winter. Why does it feel like a Sunday afternoon?

I no longer see falafel in the same light...

My sis found this. Someone was passing this napkin around during a Eid party once. How corrupt, although it did make me laugh at that moment in time. In other news: my first week of school is over. As of yet, I have only bought the books for one of my courses. I find the best way to go about getting an education is to try to get as many things as possible for as cheap as possible. Therefore, I have exhausted my research skills trying to find books in every possible library in existence. The result: many hours of photocopying at an undisclosed location at the university (at which they tend to ignore the illegal photocopying of entire textbooks). But university isn't so bad. I mean, there are those breaks in between classes when you can go buy a hot and fresh falafel sandwich.

First day of school

Patch of green on the highway grows yellow flowers delicate in my open palm bashful smooth discarded after moments, after a few tender strokes against my lips.

Nerd? Geek? Help!

Okay, something shocking has happened, my nerd ground has been shaken. This is all due to my reading an article in The Toronto Star last night. According to The Toronto Star, a geek follows "a single-minded pursuit of a particular passion to the exclusion of all other social norms." Now, with this in mind, I could certainly be a geek, since following social norms is not my forte. And I do pursue things in a single-minded way...I'm just thinking about all my bouncy ball posts. Oh my God, I am a geek. Because of this newly discovered evidence, I was having a hard time deciding whether to define myself as a nerd or a geek, so I resorted to checking dictionary.com for my answer... Nerd n. Slang: A foolish, inept, or unattractive person. Geek n. Slang: A person regarded as foolish, inept, or clumsy. I just asked my little sister which I should choose. She then promptly replied "nerd, because you're unattractive." Nerd it is. Just for kicks: the word nerd, undefined but illustrated, first appeared in 1950 in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo: "And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!"

this is to be

I can't sleep so I've decided to post one of my very favourite poems: this is to be by Peggy Dragisic ahhh... this is to be pregnant with sun every limb fruit-full satisfied heavy this is to be golden, not Midas metal but apricot taut and tender stuffed with light I have harvest babies apricot burnished babies russet apple gleaming chestnut babies winter-sown summer-grown harvest babies optimistic babies in disregard of brunette genes to come out so copper coloured as if to say Mom mind's gloom's quite absent in body's womb there, Mom, it's all sun four eyes across the picnic table all blue two round bad and merry two long in tangled shadows two noses, mouths, four ears, legs, arms, twenty fingers! twenty toes! beyond all arithmetic love-stuffed cells of aweful life uncountable I had to do a presentation on this in my poetry course last year. So of course, I have read this poem hundreds upon hundreds of times, liking it more after each reading.

All Pink

Alhamdulillah my oldest brother got married yesterday (finally)! Here's a picture of his wedding cake: Before: After: Edit: I felt strongly that I should post the "after" picture of the cake too. There were a lot of comments on how my brother is totally whipped. I mean, the entire wedding was pink - flowers, balloons, cake, napkins, confetti. Hahaha, I feel for my brother. But, Alhamdulillah it's good to know that he's married and he's happy. Two siblings in one summer is more than I had hoped for. I went out for a walk today...I was sitting under this tree and it was really windy. Other than the fact that a ladybug crawled up my shirt and I freaked out, it was actually quite lovely. Just being alone, sitting under a random tree for no reason. I just sat there thinking. I'm not sure how long I was there, but four buses went by (buses only come around every 25 minutes on Sundays). Tried to write in my grey notebook that I take everywhere. I wrote some jibberish and was satisfied. In other news, one of my dad's suitcases was recovered. Lets just say he brought some weird weird things in it. Sugar cane sitting on my counter! It tastes...like sugar. Liquid sugar. How odd. That's definitely something my dad loves about Egypt. One of the few few things :)

It's September

My sisters and dad got home last night from Egypt, tired and without luggage. Yeah, Air Canada lost their luggage. That would be pretty funny except they bought me some stuff which also got lost. Bummer. But my sister did show me some pictures of her wedding, which were amazing. They were joking about how my extended family was like an army (they bought the food for the wedding, set everything up, and took pictures). So, after fajr today, I wanted to go back to sleep, but those three humans kept bothering me: "Asmaa, where are my keys?" "Asmaa, who called me when I wasn't here?" "Asmaa wake up!" - and the like. Damn jet lag. On top of all this, my sister is watching Sesame Street now. I have the sudden urge to mangle something. But this feeling is overridden by my desire to eat cookies. In other news, it's September...