memory

Raat youn dil mein teri khoi hui yaad aai
Jaise weeranay mein chupke se bahar aa jayee
Jaise sehraoon mein holay se chalay bad-e-naseem
Jaise beemar ko bewajah qarar ajayee

-Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Also at the cherry blossom festival...some flowers

magnolias, cherry blossoms and then some. spring is beautiful.

at the cherry blossom festival...

"Alright, smile..."
*smiles*
"Say I love youuuu..."
"bakwas na kerr.."
*Click*

:)

my crazy country

alzheimers

Today, my friend Tazeen (http://tazeen-tazeen.blogspot.com/)wrote:

"Just because najam sethi is not brimming with love and praise for the cross eyed CJ, the so called united students movement calls him 'master of yellow journalism'! What they forgot was that Najam Sethi was beaten up and paraded naked by the police when a certain mr nawaz sharif was PM with a very heavy mandate because The Friday Times was the only publication that published the pictures of Mr Saif ur Rehman (Nawaz Sharif's close confidante and head of NAB) running to Dubai with suitcases full of foreign currency when Mr Sharif froze all foreign currency accounts in Pakistan following the 'wada dhamaka'. The man who stole 11 billion dollars (biggest robbery to date) from the common people by freezing the foreign currency accounts is now whiter than white and Najam Sethi is the bad guy. Perhaps this is the best example of collective amnesia.
Even the united students movement is behaving like lawyers movement and the lame duck BUSH. You are either with us or against us, there is absolutely no room for dissent."
--
Collective Amnesia? Sounds more like Alzheimers. The day the people of Pakistan even entertained the thought that a man like Asif Zardari could be their leader, they moved into the final stages of the disease, when it only grows worse with time, and ultimately decays your brain into nothingness.

It's a horrible thing to give up hope on people who are supposed to be a part of you, to whom you surely owe more optimism than this. But I feel very traitorish right now. I just cannot get over that man sitting surrounded with fawning jialas, garlands decorating his proud chest, showing his finger to everyone in the world including his dead wife, who for some reason I refuse to believe ever imagined that he would take over her place in the fickle hearts and minds of her people

conversations with the sea

beach in the carribbean, courtesy travis brown

I've never been a beach-person, really. Water and I don't do well together; I can't swim, never tried to learn, and I've often had creepy dreams about drowning which, I think, imply sexual frustration according to Freud.

Anyway, that said, there is something to be said for a brief, quiet moment at the beach...as if you and the eerily calm sea were the only two people on earth and everything else around you had evaporated - as they should every once in a while

no other country

"I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible".

-Barack Obama on March 18, 2008 in Philadelphia

morning

this is a weird, sad morning. bad dreams just ruin your whole day don't they

the spy museum

so while it is good to catch up with the history of spying, the very movie-like real spy stories, see Bond's original Aston Martin in person, and the lipstick shotgun, and the implications of how out of control a monster KGB was but CIA wasn't during the cold war (they didn't say anything, they implied), the spy museum of DC plays a trick on its visitors not many will forgive. It makes them memorize details of random men and women to 'assume' their new identities as spies, hypes it up to be some exciting game in a closed room before letting them out, and then forgets all about it as the giggling crowd leaves. Hasina Mtumbe from Kenya and Assad Sharma from Columbo didn't really get to do anything more exciting than walk up and down the two floors of the museum and fervently wait for someone to quiz them on where they were headed (hasina was going to Munich, pretending it was for 'family' reasons). mmph, dumb

I love walking in DC (when it is 49 degrees).

half hearted correction

So Aisha says it wasn't a jack, but a spanner

I still think it was a jack...I mean, what does She know, it was Her car after all