Back Online for 1429

January 10

Had a spot of computer trouble recently. Sometime during the in-flight hours between Seattle and Denver my laptop decided it wanted to be the fifth Beatle circa Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; when I turned it on in Boulder it displayed everything in bright, gobbled colors with blocky graphics. MS Word was a delightful turquoise blue. The welcome screen was red. It was impossible to work on the thing without thinking of Schedule I drugs, so I sent it off to the experts to fix. Turns out the LCD screen needed to be replaced. Now my laptop is back with a brand-new, wonderfully vivid, easy-on-the-eyes display, and I feel fully human again. For the past week and a half I’ve been working in longhand, and while I told myself that if paper was good enough for Shakespeare it must be good enough for me, I have to admit it was hard to go back to scribing instead of typing. If you type reasonably quickly--which I do--you can write almost as fast as you think, which is a huge boon when that’s what you do professionally.

While computer-less, I also ran out the battery on my iPod (it’s a Nano, which needs a computer to recharge) and discovered it’s not a good idea to run out the battery on your iPod. I figured it wouldn’t be any different from running out the battery on a CD player; ie it would just stop working, and then I would plug it in, and then it would work again. Nuh-uh. If you run out the battery on a Nano, it doesn’t have enough power to turn itself on to start recharging. So after I finally plugged it in, there were a few minutes when I watched with morbid fascination as this little machine struggled to wake itself up long enough to start draining the power it needed to keep itself awake. I actually felt bad for the thing. It was a bit bizarre.

The bright spot in my week was a call from Egyptian writer and activist Sohair Al Masry, who is so wonderful and kind and wise that it’s a great pleasure to talk with her. She’s the author of a book for children called ‘Ana’ (Me) that focuses on self-awareness, confidence and cultivating individual talents. This is bread-and-butter stuff for people who’ve grown up in the first world, but in North Africa, where schools tend to focus on rote learning and memorization rather than critical thinking and child development, it’s pretty unheard-of. Al Masry believes, and I agree, that the biggest obstacle to children (and the children who are now adults) in the developing world is not technology or wealth but these key skills. The most precious things we are taught in the US are not math and language, but the ability to recognize, cultivate and create opportunity. To network; to follow an idea to its conclusion; to move comfortably from theory to application; to convince others of the merit of our work. In the modern professional environment these skills are as crucial as the skills they are designed to showcase and promote. Though in the US “feel-good” education is sometimes taken to an unhealthy extreme, the opposite extreme results in intelligent, capable adults whose talents are wasted because they’ve never been taught how to use or market them. And that is a tragedy. Here’s hoping that people like Al Masry bring about much-needed change.

In closing, kul senna w’entu tayyibeen. It’s Muslim New Year. Happy 1429.

They Call the Wind Mariah

December 04

Yesterday the rain let up for perhaps an hour, and I went for a walk. Down Queen Anne Hill there is this tiny park--you only know it’s a park because of the sign posted in front of it; otherwise you might mistake it for a traffic median. It contains a single oak tree and a strip of grass that isn’t even wide enough for a bench. As I walked past it the damp scent of old leaves rose, leeched upward from the ground by a warm familiar wind, a Chinook. These winds are not like other winds; they’re like friends, kindly and full of the earth and blooming with oxygen, and they come down off of the mountains to ease the bouts of cold in the autumn and early winter. I first met them in Colorado, and was more than pleasantly surprised to find they visit the Puget Sound as well. I would know them anywhere; that scent and that warmth are unmistakable. They were immortalized under another name in the otherwise missable musical Paint Your Wagon: “Mariah blows the stars around and sets the clouds a-flyin’/Mariah makes the mountains sound like folks out there were dyin’/Mariah, Mariah, they call the wind Mariah.” (Cute as that is, no one called the wind Mariah before the Kingston Trio wrote the song.) When that scent hit my nose I felt, for the first time since I’ve been back, not home--I define home differently now--but I was reminded of what home is. My relationship with Egypt is a bit like an arranged marriage; I love it because to live there without loving it would be unbearable. There is a particular kind of truth to love that arises from necessity rather than spontaneity or impulse or something French--it’s a truth not often acknowledged in this part of the world, but it is no less real for going unrecognized. It is, however, a tremendous lot of work. It felt good, standing there in the warm and the damp and the dusk, to love something simply because it was familiar and forgiving, and because I wanted to. 

Skulking Around Queen Anne

November 16

Moving to Seattle has thus far been a bumpier experience than expected. First, our housing arrangements fell through, leaving us homeless hotel-bound vagabonds for several days while we walked (literally, walked) the length and breadth of the city looking for “For Rent” signs. Fortunately that bump had a silver lining: the place we ended up is much nicer than the place we originally intended to move. Queen Anne is a pretty neighborhood--blessedly quiet--and reminds me a little of a cleaned-up, less rowdy Allston, where I spent a lot of time during college.

The second bump was getting the news that my husband’s father passed away. Since then, we’ve both felt like we’re on the wrong continent--like we should have been there. Muslim funerals take place as soon as possible after death, so even if we got on a plane immediately after hearing the news, we would have missed the burial. Instead we’ve been on the phone more or less constantly with relatives and friends. Grief makes you reclusive. Neither of us wants to venture far, so we’ve been combing over Queen Anne, getting to know our immediate neighborhood. I’ve found used bookstores and piano bars and tiny movie theatres--a lot of the public bric-a-brac I missed in Egypt. The sun even came out today, a small mercy in a grey city.

Still, I’m pretty tired. When I get untired you may see more of the political world on this blog--originally I intended to keep the place pretty basic, but there have been things going on lately that I’d like to talk about.

Make sure to catch Talk of the Nation on NPR this Tuesday--I’ll try to make it worth your while.