Sunday, 31st December 2006
Adieu ‘006
It’s come to my attention that there are a few of you crazy bastids still checking this website from time to time, so I wanted to wish you a happy new year, and say, “why, you crazy buggers, why???” 
Maybe a brief explanation of my silence? To quote Tina, whom I saw recently at The Roots show in Shepherds Bush, “London sure is bland.” It sucks all life out of you, or rather, it sucks the part of me that can be bothered to comment on it. There’s just nothing worth saying anymore, nothing that can’t be said by someone else and better. As I said before, there is nothing of the marvellous in this town…
And I think too, seeing how completely fucked the Palestinians are silenced me a bit. What’s worth saying when you’ve seen lives like that? (Which reminds me to say that I’m finding Banksy more and more amusing as time goes on.) Go read what the Bethlehem Bloggers have to say, or shit, go read about Iraq, but me, I’ve got nothing much to say really, except that I’m just keepin’ on, keepin’ on…
And life’s great, don’t ya know? I have a nice home with nice neighbours, a job I like in a bicycle shop, a sweet, sweet, deranged loon of a boy and I’m still enjoying school, although it turns out that I am absolutely shite at Persian / Farsi. I’m planning escape routes by the dozen and have moved on from a PhD in Berkeley because I don’t think I want to go back to the US anymore. I’m now pretending I am doing an MA in Medieval Studies and I’m focusing on Islamic Spain and then I am moving to Andalucia and getting a job as a tour guide at the Alhambra Palace. Or something. Maybe then I’ll start talking again.
I guess I feel kinda pessimistic about the world. I think it was, for a million reasons, a really bad idea to kill Saddam Hussein and I am afraid of the repercussions. ETA have started up again and what’s going on in Thailand..? Yeah, I feel kinda pessimistic about the world, but optimistic for my life, because even in the darkness, I’m generally lucky. (I’m also generally cold, but that’s an entirely different matter.)
My boy bought me yellow tires for my yellow bike, and I like it when he rides behind me and pushes me up hills at night when we’ve had a bit to drink - it makes me go “weeeee!” and laugh a lot. Nimbus didn’t have cancer after all, Steph sent me a dope t-shirt, I’m utterly fucked financially, I spent Boxing Day in hospital (much better now though), and the boy was so nice to me that the nurses gave him tea and mince pies for his kindness. I also just re-read Suskind’s Perfume in anticipation for seeing the movie and my, is that a good book.
And just because I read this article today: the niqab is a statement of separation - that is its point, one of movable seclusion. Another point is, so what? We don’t have to join in, play the game, intermingle. And actually, another point of the many sided star that is our stupid world, is that we don’t intermingle, regardless of dress, even when we pretend we do. You’re just miffed that she rejects you and your stupid world, rejects the way you stream “freedom”, rejects your beady eye on her bare skin. Well check it, the flipside to “freedom” is not homogeneity, it is a whole bunch of things that scare you, threaten you and make you feel insecure. That’s the terrible, terrifying, beautiful truth to letting us be ourselves. We’re all ugly in our own little ways, we all stink that courier stank, we all offend one another to a greater and lesser degree. Get with it, get over it, and let her wear her stupid veil if she thinks it’s really that necessary - you can fix your gaze on one of the myriad young ladies that are screaming for the “pleasure” outside your front door…
And there she blows.
And that’s me, that’s all, that’s everything I guess. Happy new year children, happy days ladies and gents. I wish you all the best of everything and may the world smell to you like the boy does to Naima, which, for the record, is like some overly fragrant, intensely potent, XXX version of catnip. Kisses.
(PS: Yes, I do know half this site is broken, including the fauxtoe section. No, I don’t intend to fix it, sorry.)
(PPS: I got a new project - how i read the news…)
Wednesday, 26th July 2006
The varying shades of fantasticness that is life right about now
In order of ascending verboseness:
1) Rhome.
Just because. 
2) The Magnetic Fields
I am obsessed with 69 Love Songs. Buy it now, and if you want, you can buy me some of their other albums. Weeee!
3) 99
Ms. 99 is the hero of several of my personalities, and her latest project, “The Internet: A series of fallopian tubes” has many of my minds cackling in sheer glee.
4) Persian
I can now say that I have mastered the Persian/Farsi alphabet (nearly the same as Arabic, but with 4 extra letters) and my does that make me feel proud. I have all four forms of the letters down (full, beginning, middle and end of a word), although I do need to get a better understanding of the dots and dashes that delineate the vowels. Also, I want to have learnt the numbers by the time school starts which will be extremely easy since the numbers we use originate in Arabic.
Learning a new alphabet has seriously been one of the most enjoyable things I have ever done. It’s so intensely satisfying, especially since the Arabic script is one of the most beautiful things in the world to look at. See Hassan Massoudy for details. Even though I don’t understand what the words actually mean, that I can read the script and know how to say it (albeit in a butchered-by-the-English-accent type way) just gives me so much joy. I am so glad I decided to learn this and I really think I can keep at it long enough to be able to read that which motivated me to learn: Rumi and Hafiz.
August is dedicated to learning the Hebrew alphabet since I am also going to take extra classes in Biblical Hebrew come September. Weee!
5) My Inability to Say the Right Thing.
I needed to get a new saddle for Banana Baby since the one I had hurtied me in a way a woman should not be hurt. It squashed, mashed, mished and smooshed my lady bits in such a way that it felt like I had cystitis when peeing after a ride. That, my friends, is not good. Now, because I am, for want of a better word, an idiot, I endured this pain for years. However, a recent discussion with someone made me snap out of my “no pain, no gain” dementia and so I went off to buy a new one.
A little internet investigation revealed that some bike shops have a devise for measuring your arse to determine the correct size saddle. So I called the shop that recently gave Banana Baby a tune up, and they told me that whilst they didn’t have a magic measuring devise, their sister shop did. (In case anyone was wondering, the magic measuring devise was really boring. I was hoping for some spectacular piece of equipment with belts, buckles, slides and rules, perhaps electric, perhaps not, rather like the foot measuring ones they used on you as a kid. Alas no, it’s just a piece of foam that retains the impressions of your sit bones with a ruler to measure how wide your arse is. Boring!)
To get to the point of this all, which is that I am completely incompetent in matters that pertain to being appropriate, let me tell you that as I walked in the front door of that shop, the worker mannie looked at me and I looked at him, and I said, “I have paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain in my nether regions and I neeeeeeeeed you to make it stop.” *sigh* I don’t know why a simple “hi!” wouldn’t suffice. :/