Seuss Lovin'

M and I were talking about Dr. Seuss the other day, and he mentioned Green Eggs and Ham, but I don't think he's read the others that much. My favourite one: Oh the Places You'll Go!
It's basically a graduation speech. Just about the best ever graduation speech because it says everything that needs to be said about jumping into something new and being confident and then being scared and then making it work out and all the guck in between. Also awesome, Horton Hears a Who. And check out this site if you're a general Seuss fan.

Just spreading the joy:

Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You’re on your own.
And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.
You’ll look up and down streets.
Look ‘em over with care.
About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.”
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you’re too smart to go down any not-so-good street.
And you may not find any
you’ll want to go down.
In that case, of course,
you’ll head straight out of town.
It’s opener therein the wide open air.
Out there things can happenand frequently do
to people as brainyand footsy as you.
And when things start to happen,
don’t worry. Don’t stew.
Just go right along.
You’ll start happening too.
OH!THE PLACES YOU’LL GO!
You’ll be on your way up!
You’ll be seeing great sights!
You’ll join the high fliers
who soar to high heights.
You won’t lag behind, because you’ll have the speed.
You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead.
Wherever you fly, you’ll be the best of the best.
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.
Except when you don’t
Because, sometimes, you won’t.
I’m sorry to say so
but, sadly, it’s true
and hang-ups
can happen to you.
You can get all hung up
in a prickle-ly perch.
And your gang will fly on.
You’ll be left in a Lurch.
You’ll come down from the Lurch
with an unpleasant bump.
And the chances are, then,
that you’ll be in a Slump.
And when you’re in a Slump,
you’re not in for much fun.
Un-slumping yourself
is not easily done.
You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.
A place you could sprain both you elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?
And IF you go in, should you turn left or right…
or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?
Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find,
for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.
You can get so confused
that you’ll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place……
for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or a No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jakeo
r a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a sting of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting.
NO!
That’s not for you!
Somehow you’ll escape
all that waiting and staying.
You’ll find the bright places
where Boom Bands are playing.
With banner flip-flapping,
once more you’ll ride high!
Ready for anything under the sky.
Ready because you’re that kind of a guy!
Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done!
There are points to be scored. There are games to be won.
And the magical things you can do with that ball
will make you the winning-est winner of all.
Fame! You’ll be famous as famous can be,
with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.
Except when they don’t.
Because, sometimes, they won’t.
I’m afraid that some times
you’ll play lonely games too.
Games you can’t win’cause you’ll play against you.
All Alone!
Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something
you’ll be quite a lot.
And when you’re alone, there’s a very good chance
you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants.
There are some, down the road between hither and yon,
that can scare you so much you won’t want to go on.
But on you will go
though the weather be foul
On you will go
though your enemies prowl
On you will go
though the Hakken-Kraks howl
Onward up many
a frightening creek,
though your arms may get sore
and your sneakers may leak.
On and on you will hike
and I know you’ll hike far
and face up to your problems
whatever they are.
You’ll get mixed up, of course,
as you already know.
You’ll get mixed up
with many strange birds as you go.
So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life’s
a Great Balancing Act.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left.
And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)
KID, YOU’LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!
So…be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray
or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O’Shea,
you’re off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So…get on your way!

-Dr. Seuss

Random Other-Post Follow-ups

Some unrelated-to-each other ideas that may each be related to older posts:

• They say the proof is in the pudding... well, I say the proof is in the brownies. As promised, I bought cocoa, and on a whim, made some wheat-free, cane sugar brownies a half hour ago. The difference between these and the carob ones is astounding. I am truly a chocoholic, and it's not to be cured.
• Because I complained about the lack of hijabi-friendly clothing this season: 1)For any hijabi-Montrealers, there is a booth inside the Eaton's centre near the Metro McGill entrance that sells scarves, long tunics, and other hijabi stuff for reasonable prices. I went last Monday and have a new tunic to show for my efforts. 2) My mum-in-law is way too sweet: after listening to me complain during our last outing about the lack of long sleeved items available, she apparently found one of the very very few things on the market the other day and picked it up for me.... 3) There's a new hijabi clothing store in Montreal called "Inty" (cool play on words because this is how to say the feminine "you" in Arabic). I haven't been there, but I hear from a friend that the stuff is good quality and affordable. If you know the city, it's located where the old Multi-vision store was.
• I finished Bel Canto, the first book from Jen's suggested list, and in an effort not to spoil it, all I can say is GO READ THIS BOOK. Sooooooooooooooooooooo good. Meets all my super-picky criteria: good characters, good writing, good plot. As for Jen's request that I tell her what I thought of the controversial ending, I'll just say that it's crushing, but marvelous, and totally plausible. This book leaves your heart-aching. You love the characters that much. Next, I'm starting The Namesake, which is supposed to also be great. I hope it's as great. Keep your suggestions coming. I'm planning on reading a lot, as I'm hoping to write a lot and for me, the best way to do that is through reading.

What it Takes

Do you love wordplay? If so, listen to this song by Jason Mraz. Just delightful and poetic in that light, fun way. Some of the lines are so simple, and yet very very true. Youtube video's pretty silly, but just try to enjoy the song.

Curiosity

Shhh...
Open your eyes. Look.
Each person who passes you
on these city streets
is an atom
of life
a leaf from a Maple tree shading
the small flowers below.

Do you wish
in some moments
to know all their stories?
To marvel at their miracles
big and small
to meet
the criers and the liars
the givers
the needers
the huge dilemmas
and the small paradoxes

Do you wish to meet
the Pandoras
to watch them untangling
the worms from the earth
shaking out the swirls and swoops
making straight lines
of everything?

For instance:
This boy who walks by
with a toque on his head
in mid-July
floppy red hair emerging
from the sides
(falling into his eyes)
what is his story?

How about that girl
on the curb at the bookstore
sorting through cards of
identical photographs
is this her life?
Does she go home at night?

I should keep walking.
The air changes angles
blows up instead of
sideways.
I need to look down
to continue
to move through time and
and space and experience
If I look longer
they will paralyze me
with my questions
too many to count

and everything will stop.

Things that make me cry

A few posts back I said I was crying a lot, and that's okay... and then I thought, these people are going to think I'm miserable, and now I'm back to explain:

I'm someone who wears my heart on my sleeve. I know, I know, so cliche, but it really is true and I can't think of another way to say it. While I do cry when I'm sad, I cry when I'm overcome with almost any other kind of emotion too: joy, pride, love, for example. I also cry - or at least feel the lump rise in my throat - when I'm moved, and I'm very often moved. Some examples:

1. M and I were watching Mulan the other day. Caution, spoilers approaching! At the end, when the emperor thanks her for saving all of them and she finds the whole country appreciating her, I got a lump in my throat. Yeah, for a Disney movie... sooooo....
2. Sports championships: I cry EVERY year when I see the captain of the winning team pick up the Stanley Cup, hold it over his head and skate around the rink with it. I cry more when he passes it to his anxious teammates. I cry when they take pictures with their family and friends. I cry (or get choked up) in tennis when the players shake hands at the end of a match. Same during Euro or the World Cup or the Olympics when the trophies and medals are handed out, but especially when the anthem of the winner(s) is played. It doesn't even have to be my country or my anthem. Just that moment, and all the hard work these athletes put in, and hearing their song, I feel a surge of pride for them and it chokes me up.
3. Beautiful words: If I read a great line of poetry, or something in a book, or a song, and it touches me, it can bring tears to my eyes. Some recent examples. From Journey Mama's blog, the following line: "You search with eyes open wide and sometimes full of tears".
   And another amazing line, this one from Bel Canto, the book I'm reading thanks to Jen's suggestions: "People love each other for all sorts of reasons... Most of the time, we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do."
4. Quran: Quran is the most beautiful poetry, especially if you can read it in Arabic, and not just an interpretation. There are lines that give me chills for their beauty, and on some days, when I read and the words are as though they were written just for me, speaking to something I have just experienced or felt, I get teary. Sometimes, too, I read a verse and it happens to be a verse my dad often reads in prayer, and I'm transported back to one of our old living rooms, standing with my mother and sisters and listening and worshipping in a row, my dad reciting softly but strongly, and I feel a surge of love mixed with sadness, and this also makes me cry.
5. Art, or the thought of it: I got home on Thursday, and M showed me the easel he had set up for the painting he is hoping to do, and the thought of him getting to paint when he'd been wanting to for so long and hadn't had a chance made me cry of happiness. I suppose it's less the art and more the seeing him do the thing he loves that moved me. Visual art is to M what writing is to me. Although art itself can make me cry. A painting, or a photograph, can stir me and move me to that point.
6. Reunions and departures: On our trip to Egypt in February, I would cry when I saw family as we were arriving, upon hugging my and M's aunts and uncles and cousins, and again when we were leaving. I think the reunion and the departure is the epitomizing point of being with those you love, and I rarely manage to keep a dry eye if I know it'll be a long time before I see them again. Along these lines, I cry every time my sister comes and goes from and to California. I expect to cry A LOT when my other sister leaves for Dubai.
7. Movies: I am the crazy sap who can turn on the TV at the end of a cheesy movie for the wedding scene, or the funeral scene, and not know the characters or the plot, and then hear the moving music crescendo and start to bawl my eyes out. This one I can't explain very well, and though I'm the worst at it, almost all of my sisters are also guilty as charged. Example: the first movie my poor uncle's wife watched with us when she moved to Ottawa many many years ago was Little Women. At the end, she looked around, and there we were, four sisters sobbing away, struggling up off the couch to hug each other to death and say how much we loved each other. My uncle's wife grew up with two brothers. Needless to say, this was a first-time experience for her. Don't worry though, she's gotten over it.

Lightning

The husband of one of the women I met at the hijab potluck last month died this week. He was struck by lightning while sheltering himself from the rain under a tree in a storm. They are not old. My heart aches for her and I'm praying for them right now.
The suddenness of it is quite shocking. We like to think of death as something that happens to those who are sick, or old, or living in a war torn country. But death is anywhere and everywhere. It's real, and it doesn't announce itself. Every day, every hour, every minute we should be thanking God for the fact our hearts are still beating.

The Candy Conundrum

My work group in Ottawa in pretty tight knit, and most of us have been working together for a fairly long time (at 2 years, I'm a relative newbie.) One thing about us, we LOVE candy, and we're waaaaaaaaaaaaay too generous with each other. The proof? By the printer and photocopiers, there is almost always a bowl full of something yummy: werthers originals, chocolates, gummies, you name it. If not, it's those fabulous Danish butter cookies. When we're feeling "healthy" it's salted, roasted peanuts, or worse yet, BBQ flavour.

Yesterday, it was jujubes.

Now, I just finished telling you about my allergies, so you'd think I'd lay off the sauce, so to speak, right? Well, my self-control system basically revolves around a "don't buy it, don't eat it approach". The problem is when I'm not the one buying it but it's magically turning up anyway. When the yummies are in front of me every time I get up to print or photocopy, I have great difficulty resisting. And that other concept of moderation? Non-existent. With me, "I'll only have one" becomes two becomes three four seventeen. Basically, it's cold turkey or a full-fledged candy attack. I don't even LIKE jujubes, but having them there makes me think I SHOULD like them. And appreciate them. By eating them. Sigh.

The funniest part of this is that lately no one will confess to bringing in the candy. Someone's doing it, but she/he is maintaining anonymity. Meanwhile, we all walk by, shove another piece of whatever's there into our mouths, and mumble how we have to stop.

I'm proud to announce that I had NO jujubes yesterday, and none of the toffee that was in the bowl the day before. I can't even remember if there was anything there on Tuesday, but if there was, I held off. Maybe I'm getting the hang of this self-control thing after all?

New Blogs on the Side

Hey Folks,
I've been doing a little explorin' on the world wide web and cyber-visiting on some new sites, and it's time to add them to the blogroll. Drumroll...
XUP: In Ottawa. Fun, thoughtful, astute writing.
Mooselim: The title alone says it. So corny, so hilarious. I've talked about these guys before. It's basically the conversations these Canadian Muslims would have at Timmy's, but online.
Fly Fish Fly and Journey Mama: These folks just moved to India from the American West Coast. Follow their adventures. Both blogs belong to this fabulous couple. Beautiful writing. Definite must-read.
Viotet Sky: Fun, musings. Somewhere in Ontario.

and a new "cool site": Altmuslim. Great site with news, reviews, editorials, discussion forums, about all things Muslim or affecting Muslims.

Celiac Heads Up (Or "the great big food allergy post")

I saw this article from the Globe and Mail, a primer about the basic symptoms of celiac and what to do if you have it, and thought I should share.
I don't have celiac, but end up buying a lot of products for those with celiac because I do have a serious sensitivity to wheat, and gluten-free products automatically mean they're wheat-free. I can relate to a lot of what's in the article:

"According to a 2007 survey of the Canadian Celiac Association's more than 5,000 members, the average time it took to get diagnosed was 12 years. Many respondents had consulted three or more doctors before getting their diagnosis"

and

"Symptoms such as fatigue, weakness, joint pain and migraines - ones typically not recognized as gut-related - are commonly reported, and the diagnosis is often anemia, stress, irritable bowel syndrome or chronic fatigue syndrome."

I spent about 10 years feeling constantly sick, cutting out different foods and food products from my diet to no avail. I lost close to 20 pounds at my worst point, mostly because it was easier to feel hungry then to deal with the constant nausea and irritation after eating. I went to 3 different doctors and took 3 different tests, the last one being the endoscopy mentioned in the article. When that one was done, the gastroenterologist (aka, Mr. Specialist) asked me if I was a people-pleaser, told me I should relax, and concluded that "it was all in my head".
It was a visit to a naturopath and taking a Vega test suggested by a friend 3 months later that turned up the cause for all my problems: I have serious sensitivities to:

• all cow dairy (milk, butter, cheese, yogurt, etc.)
• wheat and some grains from the wheat family (bulgur, semolina)
• all processed sugar
• aspartame
• msg
• cola

I have milder sensitivities to a whole list of fruits, veggies, and nuts:

• bananas
• tomatoes
• peanuts
• oranges, clementines, grapefruits
• grapes

At first, walking out of that clinic after the test, I was trying to figure out what was left to eat. That was close to 3 years ago. Now, I've gotten it fairly under control. I've found a lot of alternatives to my formerly favourite foods, and I know when I'm "cheating" and having stuff that'll upset me, so I can decide whether it's worth it or not. I don't always make the best decision: sometimes that chocolate bar looks completely irresistible in the checkout line and then feels like the worst decision ever once consumed, but at least I'm the one in control of the stupid decision I decide to make.

Moral of the story? Trust your body if your doctor isn't making any sense. You're your own best judge. If you're sick and someone tells you you're fine, find someone else to talk to. Your body will thank you.

Getting Ready

Last night, we spent 3-4 hours moving disassembled furniture and boxes in my sister's quickly emptying house. We got in bed at midnight. I had maybe 4 separate crying bouts, all within a few minutes of seeing my Little Angela and having her leap up into my arms for a very very very prolonged hug.
Here's the story from the beginning for those who don't know. My sister is moving across the world next week, to Dubai. My sister is my best friend. When we were little, we would dress in matching clothes and tell everyone we were twins and think they actually believed us (extremely gullible, as there were 2.5 years and a whole head's height difference between us.) My sister is the person I talk to, cry to, think to. We don't even need to keep talking half the time, we just finish each other's sentences. I've fed her babies, changed their diapers, gotten them to sleep, spent countless hours playing with them, carrying them, teaching them how to talk, dragging them away from the TV / computer / whatever they weren't supposed to be touching. When the diapers were extra stinky, I wore a swimming "nose-plug" and changed them anyway.
My family is beyond tight knit. We're Mediterranean. We're Arab. Get it? When we were little, my sisters and I would abandon our beds, leave two bedrooms empty in the house and gather for nightly sleepovers in one room. We were four girls, no boys, constant whispering through the night. My mom's footsteps would inch up the hallway and we'd fall silent, close our eyes and pretend we were asleep. If she opened the door, it was much more difficult to maintain the illusion. Sometimes one of us would cough. Even if we didn't, she knew anyway. We had lots of other friends, but it was never a question of who our best friends were. We were each other's best friends.
My sister wrote before I did, and I first started writing because I wanted to be like her, not realizing that we both got it from Baba, maybe because his poems were almost always in Arabic. In high school, I would fall asleep on her floor while she studied for a chemistry test, or math test, or history test, or French or German test, and when she was finished memorizing everything to the meticulous level of detail she insisted on, always around 2 in the morning, she would wake me up and we would spend another hour where I quizzed her. My 9th grade science teacher hated this, because I asked him too much too soon about electrons thanks to her grade 11 chemistry quizzes, and messed up his lesson plans. "Noha, I'll answer all your questions after class if you want. Now, where were we?"
In university, we joked that I should get an honourary psychology degree because I tested her on everything using the same method, reviewed and edited her papers, became familiar with "confirmation bias" and "fundamental attribution error", with Gestalt and Rogers and other less famous ones, not only the Freud's and the Jung's.
I think I scared my brother in law when they first got married, but now he is a great, great friend.
I cry a lot lately but I always have. It's not sadness as such, it's raw emotion. It's normal when you love someone as much as I do and know they will stop being as constant a presence in your life as before. We will have to work harder to be in touch, but we will, we will touch with all the miles between us. Souls touch when they know each other that well, they can't help it.

For the Homesick

Or possibly just for me?
Here are a list of similar places in Ottawa and Montreal, if you're looking for similarities, which I often am:

• The bike paths on the Lachine Canal = The bike paths on the Ottawa River Parkway
• The Park at Mont Royal, and Parc LaFontaine = Andrew Haydon Park, and Mooney's Bay
• The Old Port = Sparks Street
• The Lookout from Mont Royal
• The Lookout from Parliament Hill
• Eaton's Centre = Rideau Centre
• Bugs in Montreal that love to bite = Bugs in Ottawa that love to bite

Happy summer. Keep Enjoying.

What does it mean to be well-educated

I stumbled upon this post on Mud Mama's blog (via XUP's blogroll) and found this article fascinating. It discusses the "definition" of education and the different criteria we consider to define whether someone is or isn't well-educated. I am the result traditional school systems in Ottawa, but I would argue that a lot of my education came informally from my parents and my community, and that has done a lot to make me who I am. For the teachers out there (I'm thinking specifically of my sister and Sajda


PRINCIPAL LEADERSHIP
March 2003
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated?
By Alfie Kohn
No one should offer pronouncements about what it means to be well-educated without meeting my wife. When I met Alisa, she was at Harvard, putting the finishing touches on her doctoral dissertation in anthropology. A year later, having spent her entire life in school, she decided to do the only logical thing . . . and apply to medical school. Today she is a practicing physician -- and an excellent one at that, judging by feedback from her patients and colleagues.

She will, however, freeze up if you ask her what 8 times 7 is, because she never learned the multiplication table. And forget about grammar (“Me and him went over her house today” is fairly typical) or literature (“Who’s Faulkner?”). After a dozen years, I continue to be impressed on a regular basis by the agility of her mind as well as by how much she doesn’t know. (I’m also bowled over by what a wonderful person she is, but that’s beside the point.

So what do you make of this paradox with whom I live? Is she a walking indictment of the system that let her get so far -- 29 years of schooling, not counting medical residency -- without acquiring the basics of English and math? Or does she offer an invitation to rethink what it means to be well-educated since what she lacks hasn’t prevented her from being a deep-thinking, high-functioning, multiply credentialed, professionally successful individual?

Of course, if those features describe what it means to be well-educated, then there is no dilemma to be resolved. She fits the bill. The problem arises only if your definition includes a list of facts and skills that one must have but that she lacks. In that case, though, my wife is not alone. Thanks to the internet, which allows writers and researchers to circulate rough drafts of their manuscripts, I’ve come to realize just how many truly brilliant people cannot spell or punctuate. Their insights and discoveries may be changing the shape of their respective fields, but they can’t use an apostrophe correctly to save their lives.

Or what about me (he suddenly inquired, relinquishing his comfortable perch from which issue all those judgments of other people)? I could embarrass myself pretty quickly by listing the number of classic works of literature I’ve never read. And I can multiply reasonably well, but everything mathematical I was taught after first-year algebra (and even some of that) is completely gone. How well-educated am I?
*
The issue is sufficiently complex that questions are easier to formulate than answers. So let’s at least be sure we’re asking the right questions and framing them well.

1. The Point of Schooling: Rather than attempting to define what it means to be well-educated, should we instead be asking about the purposes of education? The latter formulation invites us to look beyond academic goals. For example, Nel Noddings, professor emerita at Stanford University, urges us to reject “the deadly notion that the schools’ first priority should be intellectual development” and contends that “the main aim of education should be to produce competent, caring, loving, and lovable people.” Alternatively, we might wade into the dispute between those who see education as a means to creating or sustaining a democratic society and those who believe its primary role is economic, amounting to an “investment” in future workers and, ultimately, corporate profits. In short, perhaps the question “How do we know if education has been successful?” shouldn’t be posed until we have asked what it’s supposed to be successful at.

2. Evaluating People vs. Their Education: Does the phrase well-educated refer to a quality of the schooling you received, or to something about you? Does it denote what you were taught, or what you learned (and remember)? If the term applies to what you now know and can do, you could be poorly educated despite having received a top-notch education. However, if the term refers to the quality of your schooling, then we’d have to conclude that a lot of “well-educated” people sat through lessons that barely registered, or at least are hazy to the point of irrelevance a few years later.

3. An Absence of Consensus: Is it even possible to agree on a single definition of what every high school student should know or be able to do in order to be considered well-educated? Is such a definition expected to remain invariant across cultures (with a single standard for the U.S. and Somalia, for example), or even across subcultures (South-Central Los Angeles and Scarsdale; a Louisiana fishing community, the upper East side of Manhattan, and Pennsylvania Dutch country)? How about across historical eras: would anyone seriously argue that our criteria for “well-educated” today are exactly the same as those used a century ago – or that they should be?

To cast a skeptical eye on such claims is not necessarily to suggest that the term is purely relativistic: you like vanilla, I like chocolate; you favor knowledge about poetry, I prefer familiarity with the Gettysburg Address. Some criteria are more defensible than others. Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge a striking absence of consensus about what the term ought to mean. Furthermore, any consensus that does develop is ineluctably rooted in time and place. It is misleading and even dangerous to justify our own pedagogical values by pretending they are grounded in some objective, transcendent Truth, as though the quality of being well-educated is a Platonic form waiting to be discovered.

4. Some Poor Definitions: Should we instead try to stipulate which answers don’t make sense? I’d argue that certain attributes are either insufficient (possessing them isn’t enough to make one well-educated) or unnecessary (one can be well-educated without possessing them) -- or both. Let us therefore consider ruling out:

Seat time. Merely sitting in classrooms for x hours doesn’t make one well-educated.

Job skills. It would be a mistake to reduce schooling to vocational preparation, if only because we can easily imagine graduates who are well-prepared for the workplace (or at least for some workplaces) but whom we would not regard as well-educated. In any case, pressure to redesign secondary education so as to suit the demands of employers reflects little more than the financial interests -- and the political power -- of these corporations.

Test scores. To a disconcerting extent, high scores on standardized tests signify a facility with taking standardized tests. Most teachers can instantly name students who are talented thinkers but who just don’t do well on these exams – as well as students whose scores seem to overestimate their intellectual gifts. Indeed, researchers have found a statistically significant correlation between high scores on a range of standardized tests and a shallow approach to learning. In any case, no single test is sufficiently valid, reliable, or meaningful that it can be treated as a marker for academic success.

Memorization of a bunch o’ facts. Familiarity with a list of words, names, books, and ideas is a uniquely poor way to judge who is well-educated. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed long ago, “A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth. . . . Scraps of information” are only worth something if they are put to use, or at least “thrown into fresh combinations.”

Look more carefully at the superficially plausible claim that you must be familiar with, say, King Lear in order to be considered well-educated. To be sure, it’s a classic meditation on mortality, greed, belated understanding, and other important themes. But how familiar with it must you be? Is it enough that you can name its author, or that you know it’s a play? Do you have to be able to recite the basic plot? What if you read it once but barely remember it now?

If you don’t like that example, pick another one. How much do you have to know about neutrinos, or the Boxer rebellion, or the side-angle-side theorem? If deep understanding is required, then (a) very few people could be considered well-educated (which raises serious doubts about the reasonableness of such a definition), and (b) the number of items about which anyone could have that level of knowledge is sharply limited because time is finite. On the other hand, how can we justify a cocktail-party level of familiarity with all these items – reminiscent of Woody Allen’s summary of War and Peace after taking a speed-reading course: “It’s about Russia.” What sense does it make to say that one person is well-educated for having a single sentence’s worth of knowledge about the Progressive Era or photosynthesis, while someone who has to look it up is not?

Knowing a lot of stuff may seem harmless, albeit insufficient, but the problem is that efforts to shape schooling around this goal, dressed up with pretentious labels like “cultural literacy,” have the effect of taking time away from more meaningful objectives, such as knowing how to think. If the Bunch o’ Facts model proves a poor foundation on which to decide who is properly educated, it makes no sense to peel off items from such a list and assign clusters of them to students at each grade level. It is as poor a basis for designing curriculum as it is for judging the success of schooling.

The number of people who do, in fact, confuse the possession of a storehouse of knowledge with being “smart” – the latter being a disconcertingly common designation for those who fare well on quiz shows -- is testament to the naïve appeal that such a model holds. But there are also political implications to be considered here. To emphasize the importance of absorbing a pile of information is to support a larger worldview that sees the primary purpose of education as reproducing our current culture. It is probably not a coincidence that a Core Knowledge model wins rave reviews from Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum (and other conservative Christian groups) as well as from the likes of Investor’s Business Daily. To be sure, not every individual who favors this approach is a right-winger, but defining the notion of educational mastery in terms of the number of facts one can recall is well-suited to the task of preserving the status quo. By contrast, consider Dewey’s suggestion that an educated person is one who has “gained the power of reflective attention, the power to hold problems, questions, before the mind.” Without this capability, he added, “the mind remains at the mercy of custom and external suggestions.”

5. Mandating a Single Definition: Who gets to decide what it means to be well-educated? Even assuming that you and I agree to include one criterion and exclude another, that doesn’t mean our definition should be imposed with the force of law – taking the form, for example, of requirements for a high school diploma. There are other considerations, such as the real suffering imposed on individuals who aren’t permitted to graduate from high school, the egregious disparities in resources and opportunities available in different neighborhoods, and so on.

More to the point, the fact that so many of us don’t agree suggests that a national (or, better yet, international) conversation should continue, that one definition may never fit all, and, therefore, that we should leave it up to local communities to decide who gets to graduate. But that is not what has happened. In about half the states, people sitting atop Mount Olympus have decreed that anyone who doesn’t pass a certain standardized test will be denied a diploma and, by implication, classified as inadequately educated. This example of accountability gone haywire violates not only common sense but the consensus of educational measurement specialists. And the consequences are entirely predictable: no high school graduation for a disproportionate number of students of color, from low-income neighborhoods, with learning disabilities, attending vocational schools, or not yet fluent in English.

Less obviously, the idea of making diplomas contingent on passing an exam answers by default the question of what it means to be well- (or sufficiently) educated: Rather than grappling with the messy issues involved, we simply declare that standardized tests will tell us the answer. This is disturbing not merely because of the inherent limits of the tests, but also because teaching becomes distorted when passing those tests becomes the paramount goal. Students arguably receive an inferior education when pressure is applied to raise their test scores, which means that high school exit exams may actually lower standards.

Beyond proclaiming “Pass this standardized test or you don’t graduate,” most states now issue long lists of curriculum standards, containing hundreds of facts, skills, and subskills that all students are expected to master at a given grade level and for a given subject. These standards are not guidelines but mandates (to which teachers are supposed to “align” their instruction). In effect, a Core Knowledge model, with its implication of students as interchangeable receptacles into which knowledge is poured, has become the law of the land in many places. Surely even defenders of this approach can appreciate the difference between arguing in its behalf and requiring that every school adopt it.

6. The Good School: Finally, instead of asking what it means to be well-educated, perhaps we should inquire into the qualities of a school likely to offer a good education. I’ve offered my own answer to that question at book length, as have other contributors to this issue. As I see it, the best sort of schooling is organized around problems, projects, and questions – as opposed to facts, skills, and disciplines. Knowledge is acquired, of course, but in a context and for a purpose. The emphasis is not only on depth rather than breadth, but also on discovering ideas rather than on covering a prescribed curriculum. Teachers are generalists first and specialists (in a given subject matter) second; they commonly collaborate to offer interdisciplinary courses that students play an active role in designing. All of this happens in small, democratic schools that are experienced as caring communities.

Notwithstanding the claims of traditionalists eager to offer – and then dismiss -- a touchy-feely caricature of progressive education, a substantial body of evidence exists to support the effectiveness of each of these components as well as the benefits of using them in combination. By contrast, it isn’t easy to find any data to justify the traditional (and still dominant) model of secondary education: large schools, short classes, huge student loads for each teacher, a fact-transmission kind of instruction that is the very antithesis of “student-centered,” the virtual absence of any attempt to integrate diverse areas of study, the rating and ranking of students, and so on. Such a system acts as a powerful obstacle to good teaching, and it thwarts the best efforts of many talented educators on a daily basis.

Low-quality instruction can be assessed with low-quality tests, including homegrown quizzes and standardized exams designed to measure (with faux objectivity) the number of facts and skills crammed into short-term memory. The effects of high-quality instruction are trickier, but not impossible, to assess. The most promising model turns on the notion of “exhibitions” of learning, in which students reveal their understanding by means of in-depth projects, portfolios of assignments, and other demonstrations – a model pioneered by Ted Sizer, Deborah Meier, and others affiliated with the Coalition of Essential Schools. By now we’re fortunate to have access not only to essays about how this might be done (such as Sizer’s invaluable Horace series) but to books about schools that are actually doing it: The Power of Their Ideas by Meier, about Central Park East Secondary School in New York City; Rethinking High School by Harvey Daniels and his colleagues, about Best Practice High School in Chicago; and One Kid at a Time by Eliot Levine, about the Met in Providence, RI.

The assessments in such schools are based on meaningful standards of excellence, standards that may collectively offer the best answer to our original question simply because to meet those criteria is as good a way as any to show that one is well-educated. The Met School focuses on social reasoning, empirical reasoning, quantitative reasoning, communication, and personal qualities (such as responsibility, capacity for leadership, and self-awareness). Meier has emphasized the importance of developing five “habits of mind”: the value of raising questions about evidence (“How do we know what we know?”), point of view (“Whose perspective does this represent?”), connections (“How is this related to that?”), supposition (“How might things have been otherwise?”), and relevance (“Why is this important?”).

It’s not only the ability to raise and answer those questions that matters, though, but also the disposition to do so. For that matter, any set of intellectual objectives, any description of what it means to think deeply and critically, should be accompanied by a reference to one’s interest or intrinsic motivation to do such thinking. Dewey reminded us that the goal of education is more education. To be well-educated, then, is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright © 2003 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author's name). Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact Us page.www.alfiekohn.org -- © Alfie Kohn

Wedding Season

One Saturday - One wedding.
Next Saturday - Another wedding....

Just a sweet thought for all the romantics out there. Congrats to the two beautiful couples.
See ya: I'm off to witness love :)

Seeking Book Suggestions

I've always been a book worm. As far as I remember, my first encounter with novels was the Babysitters Club series around the age of 8. When I was done checking out and consuming every one of these from the school library, I graduated to Gordon Korman (the 'Bruno and Boots' series is utter genius), Roald Dahl, and Farley Mowat. In between, I read a variety of other authors, but these were the mainstays of my childhood.
In high school, while in the Lit program at Canterbury, our teachers thoroughly spoiled us by picking out the most amazing books and authors for our study. Here, I met E. Annie Proulx and the Shipping News, as well as Timothy Findlay, and completely fell in love with both of their writing styles and tones. I wanted so badly to write in the same beautiful, lyrical way they did, alternating between spare and laden with emotion, and I knew that the best way (for me anyway) to write well was to read well. By the time I graduated from high school, I was a book snob. I would pick up a book after watching a stranger read it on the bus, get through 50 pages, max, and get horribly disappointed or bored and put it down. I wanted books of the same quality as the ones I had been reading in Lit, aka amazing writing, amazing characterization, and amazing plot. It's hard to find all three in the same book, but I couldn't be bothered to read anything else. I came to using my friend Katherine as my personal book critic. I'd ask her once every couple of months what she'd just finished reading, see if she'd found it worthy, and then read it if she had. It was so that I came upon Life of Pi, the Empire Falls, and Clara Callan.
My problem now: Katherine's in Japan teaching English, and it's a lot harder to keep up with what she's reading. I tried applying her mom's system (get the award winners of the year and read them all: they're usually the best books), but it was hit and miss for me. For every Late Nights on Air, there is a The Golden Notebook (and I'm sure that book was iconic for the feminist movement and for some women at a particular point, but for me, I'm just getting bored with it, and I don't enjoy her writing style).
So what I'd like is a list of books to read from you avid readers. No Nora Roberts or Danielle Steele please.
Thank you.

Calling all Clothing Designers

My mom in law and I were out shopping on Saturday (shout out to my parents in law for an awesome weekend visit) and we had the most frustrating kind of "bad" shopping trip in that we didn't "not find anything we liked", no, that would have been easy enough to deal with. No, we had one of those trips where a lot of what we saw was nice, but it was all two-third sleeves, thus making it not wearable for hijabis without those little "sleeve" thingies we can wear under our shirts when the sleeves aren't the right lengths. (My sister's friend (who is a convert), her mother refers to them hilariously enough as 'socks for your arms'). I don't mind wearing them once in a while, but they're really not that comfortable and I'm not enamoured with the way they look, so I'm not about to buy a whole load of shirts that require sleeves for me to wear them.
So here's my call out to clothing designers: if it's short sleeved, do it short sleeved. But if it's long sleeved, just make it the whole length and I predict you will find more hijabis buying your shirts. We like your stuff, it's just not convenient to wear in its current format, and all you need is a teeny-tiny bit of material for us to start buying it in droves.
There are plenty of Muslim women in this country who don't all feel like wearing jilbabs every day and really like your styles. A savvy fashion designer with great business sense would start making stuff for us and be the one to reap the benefits, so if any of you are reading this, that's my great idea for you...

Happy Birthday Canada

This is my country, the one my parents chose over 33 years ago, the one I was born in, the one I think about when I'm somewhere else and homesick. This is where I huddled in bed as a child with my sisters, having impromptu sleepovers when our parents had asked us long ago to go to sleep; where I learned to ride a bike in the yard of the Catholic school on our street, my dad holding on to the back, holding, holding and then letting go and leaving me pedal off; where I met my first best friend and felt the rush of little girl secrets exchanged, of exclusivity, then had my first fight, spoke my first bold insult, felt my blood rush to my head with anger and shame as I stood alone in yard with the minutes of recess dwindling away and the wind whipping at my face, wanting to go back inside and do addition and subtraction; where I memorized Quran while sitting on a mossy rockface near Perth Ontario, reciting verses of Yaseen and looking at the trees and the lake in front of me; where I decided I loved hockey after Mr. Falls took us down to the library to watch the Olympics, where I watched Peter Forsberg score that goal and win the medal for someone else and felt my first of many sports heartbreaks; where I wrote my first rhyming poem and had it shown to the principal and got an extra sticker and decided I always wanted to write; where I stayed up nights finishing my writing portfolio for arts school in eighth grade, reading and re-reading the character profiles, the poems, the short story and agonizing over words, replacing "white" with "ivory" and switching back to "white" before finally printing; where I spent 4 years sleeping and reading and writing on the 90 minute bus ride to arts school instead of going to the school 10 blocks away; where Mr. Fitzpatrick gave us books to read and told us to study their tone and their voices, and I fell in love with "The Shipping News" and "The Wars" and wanted to write like Timothy Findlay; where I met Katherine and May and Brenda, whom I don't see for months or sometimes years but still fall back into easy conversation with when I do, and love like sisters, and hope and pray for regularly; where I met M at my sisters Katb Kitab; where I fell into easy conversation with him and knew, and waited some more and still knew; where I watched my other sister become a mom and carried my niece and nephew for the first time and learned to bottle feed and change diapers and pj's and hush a crying baby and tiptoe like I'd never tiptoed before.

Where I grew up and became who I am, and am still trying to become who I want to be.

It's not perfect here, and we make mistakes and maybe don't treat each other as well as we'd hoped we would, but at least we have that hope, have that intention to be fair and good with anyone who wants to come live here.

Happy Birthday.

Your Corny Joke Installment

Shout out to my dear father for this hilarity:
Did you hear the one about the Energizer Bunny getting arrested? He was up on Battery Charges.

Why July First is so Important

The other reason, because the first reason is that it's Canada's birthday, of course:
NHL Free Agency begins July 1st. Everyone knows its the most interesting time in hockey after the playoffs. Bob Gainey has some interesting things brewing. Will he be able to sign the always-hated-but-boy-would-he-look-good-in-one-of-our-jerseys-Maple-Leafs-Captain Mats Sundin?
Will he go after Marian Hossa if he can't?
Will he let Streit walk?
Will he manage to sign AK 46 (as we Habistanis fondly refer to Andrei Kostitsyn)?

The insanity begins tomorrow. Stay tuned...

I feel for these people

Think back to the last time you went to vote. For me, it was in the Catholic school's gym a few blocks from my parents' house in Ottawa. It was for the last Ontario government election. It was quiet; we walked the few blocks to the building and in talking about completely different and possibly random things, with very few worries about the actual election; we went in; we showed our id; we voted; we left.
How do you think the people of Zimbabwe will remember their last vote? Being forced to the polls to select the only name on the ballot of a crazy man who's gone around threatening and killing anyone who tries to claim back their dignity and the dignity of his country from his power-crazed hands. It may not be an official civil war yet, but that's likely where it's going.
We are so, so, so lucky in this country. But this shouldn't be considered lucky. This should be considered a basic right.

Ode to CBC

I wanted to share my specific CBC favourites since I'm always going on and on about them on here. So maybe some of you would like to check them out. It's just an effort to spread the joy:

1- GO - this is the Saturday morning radio show run by Brent Bambry about, well, about whatever they decide to talk about. They're funny and unassuming, and it's more talk and less news and usually has a live audience. They're on hiatus for the summer, but I'm pretty sure you can listen to old shows at their website.
2- DNTO - More radio. Stands for Definitely Not the Opera, and the host is Sook-Yin Lee and the show's slogan is: "We put the U into Pop Culture - both of them - because there are two u's". Usually follows a theme for the entire episode and explores it from different angles. Some of this year's themes of the top of my head: Meat, water, camping, outsourcing... Really just a lot of fun.
3 - Q - Radio again: hosted by Jian Ghomeshi on weekday afternoons and evenings. An intelligent look at arts and entertainment. Apparently, these guys also have a youtube channel, which I have yet to check out...
4- Everything on cbc.ca/arts: Looking for critical, entertaining movie and book reviews, or just an arts section that actually talks more about arts and less about celebrities that are famous for being famous. Look no further. Also, they usually approach this from a Canadian angle, which works just fine for me.
5- the CBC sports page: I was able to watch my Canadiens in the play-offs online. 'Nuff said.

Is this an omen?

So last Friday, I had a little accident on my bike which resulted in me landing on my face and elbow in the middle of the street right before the light turned green for the oncoming traffic. It sounds soooooooooooo much worse than it actually was when I re-read that sentence, because of course the cars waited until I could get myself up and out of their way, and I wasn't bleeding except for a small scratch on my elbow, and my face, surprisingly, did not swell up to the size of a balloon. In fact, other than some general soreness, the only serious result was that my ear was killing me, (which turned out to be because my jaw was thrown out of its spot - not to worry, my chiropractor fixed that a few days later).
I took a few minutes to get un-disoriented (I'm getting kicked out of any writers club that might ever accept me for that word) and then I got back on the bike and went about my several errands, and then went to a soccer game that night with M (Canada beat St. Vincent and Grenadines 4-1 --Yay!) M and I went biking again the next day.
I told my colleagues the story on Tuesday, and they almost all pointed out the same thing: First, my bike is stolen on only its second day in Montreal. Then, I have a little accident on my new bike the very next week... Should I maybe NOT be riding a bike?
But I've decided to keep biking. Accidents happen to everyone, and apparently bikes getting stolen in Montreal also happen to everyone, and the bottom line is, I really like biking. If I can do it instead of taking the bus for some of my shorter trips, why not?

Beautiful People, Shallow People

Yes, we have come to this... A site called beautifulpeople.net is opening in Canada. Beautiful People is different from other dating sites because, well, it only lets beautiful people in. The goal is to ween out the "uglies", see? Before anyone can register, they send a picture and are judged by the existing members, who decide if they're goodlooking enough to get it... This is where Karma kicks in, see? Because if you find your significant other on this site, well, you're finding someone as shallow as you for signing up, and you can make each other unhappy for as long as you both shall live. Heaven forbid anyone end up getting a pimple and falling out of love...

Cocoa > Carob

A word of advice for those who have heard that carob powder is a good cocoa replacement: maybe in small quantities, but if you're really truly a chocolate lover like me, it just isn't gonna cut it. I used carob powder to make brownies yesterday (I had some from when I first found out about my allergies and found out it was a good chocolate replacement, possibly healthier, and I had gone on an "all alternatives" buying craze) and while I know have a brownie-like cake thingy that tastes kinda fruity, I do not have brownies... Next grocery run, cocoa is being bought...
Thought you'd wanna know.

Quietly Dumping Garbage in our Lakes (or "Save the Fishies")

I found this frightening. I found it even more frightening that it was happening so quietly. This should be a huge deal...
Please don't let the Conservative party run the country for too much longer, or stuff like this will become common place...

Officially Ridiculous

Have you heard about the 12 year old girl in Gatineau who took her father to court for grounding her? This child's parents are divorced, and when her dad decided she couldn't go a field trip as punishment for bad behaviour, she went back to stay with her mom, but also took him to court. More ridiculous than this is that the judge ruled against him. Please please do not let this set a precedent for kids being able to take their parents to court. This is a matter of discipline, and whether you agree or not with the dad's disciplinary measures, it's not something that needs, or should have, the interference of courts. I wish the judge had just I'm not an expert in legalese by any means, but I seem to remember hearing that there are so many things that don't make it to court for ages because the system is backed up like crazy. The last thing we need is this kind of thing slowing stuff down even more...
I posted this about the law a few weeks ago. Please, let's not make a complete mockery of the beautiful system we have in this country to hold people to account.

Hijabi Swimwear Hullabaloo

First, to set the tone, I wear something that looks like this when I go swimming:

I bought it from a swimsuit store. You can buy it online. You can buy it around the world. It's made from the same material as any other swimsuits. My sister has one just like it, but don't worry, they're different colours and different patterns. We're not trying to look like twins.
So, today we went for a swim in our condo's pool. It was pretty quiet and uneventful, until 3 minutes before we were planning on leaving anyway, a custodian approached us and told us we weren't allowed to swim here anymore.
Excuse me? Sorry? What's that? I pay condo fees like anyone else. I hurt no one by wearing my fabulous hijabi swimsuit.
The bottom line is that apparently, someone complained about our attire and she came to tell us we had to go. Sorry but no... We stayed, we discussed, we explained, we had her call a member of the condo board, and before it was time to go, we were told we could swim in our hijabi swimsuits without any problem (which we already knew, but now they knew too).
So, the sweetness of victory, or the bitterness of feeling the sting of ignorance? Well, a bit of both... I have to admit that it hurts when I find someone out there is still determined to limit my abilities to enjoy my basic rights just because I'm a Muslim woman who chooses to demonstrate my faith. Live and let live. We're in a pluralistic society, which means we all have the right to go on and act on our beliefs, so long as they don't hurt other members of that society. Hopefully, everyone comes to that conclusion soon.

Useful Information (or "Not to be an alarmist, but...")

I heard about this website on CBC Radio called "ToxicNation.ca", which is run by an environmental defence group. From it, I found some great links for information. Check out the following if you're concerned about different products you use and are looking for alternatives with less chemicals and toxins.
I don't think we read labels very much anymore. I think we've just gotten used to assuming if it's on the shelves, it's okay for us, but that's unfortunately not true. I've tried following those emails in the past that say "avoid products with ingredients xyz in it" but the names are so confusing and the products so many that it's easy to get confused.
That's what makes this site so helpful. You can actually search for the specific skin care, health care, and beauty products that you use and get their ratings for toxins that they have, instead of looking for complicated sounding ingredients.
The other helpful site is this one, which shows you a list of less toxic products to use in your home by category (cleaners, dishwashing, etc).
Happy reading!

I Spoke too Soon - Part II

Lesson of the weekend: don't let the bad guys spoil your fun.
M and I went down to a bike shop this afternoon, and I now have a great new ride, used, so hopefully not as tempting, a better lock, and a more cautious outlook on where and how to lock it up.
We went out to the Old Port and the Lachine Canal and rode around a whole lot, and I am now slightly stiff, but very very happy.
Happy Sunday all...

I Spoke Too Soon

Well, I suppose at least now I can call myself a true Montrealer. Within three hours of writing my bike post this morning, I walked out of the last store on my errand run and found myself bike-less.
That's right Ladies and Gents. My bike was stolen. Apparently, this is extremely common, and one can't expect to have a bike in Montreal without it being stolen every so often. And before you ask, I did have it locked, but I suppose in hindsight, it wasn't tight enough. Not to worry though, I plan on getting another one soon, although I think I'll buy a used one, so that it's not so appealing to a thief.

High Rise Fire Alarm

We live a LONG way up from the ground, like WAY WAY up, and last summer, before I moved here, I made M promise that any time the fire alarm went off, he'd take those stairs down and not just ignore it. Even if it was 3 a.m. Even if it was 30 below outside.
Well, it was 25 above this morning, and it was 8 a.m., but it was Saturday morning when the alarm went off and after going down the many floors, eyes still half closed in the stairwell, and waiting downstairs for 20 minutes for a fire truck to show up and say all was clear, I cannot get any more sleep. I've essentially given up on more sleep this morning.
We have a gorgeous view of downtown Montreal from our living room window, but these are the true perks of living in a high rise.

Let the Biking Begin

On the third try, my bike has now arrived from Ottawa in my parent's van (the first two tries were mine...) and I couldn't be happier about it. Last night after work, I biked down to the grocery store for some salad and ice cream. Today, I'm still debating whether to take the bike or bus to the store to pick some stuff up. The advantage of not having a car is that you're forced to find another mode of transportation. If you have one, it's always more convenient to take it. Well, I don't have one and I'm very happy about it. The summer is the perfect time to use that bike, and I'm hoping my enthusiasm doesn't wear off too quickly.
Hold me to it. Check back in a few weeks from now and ask me if I'm still using that bike...

This is Old but HILARIOUS

Does anyone remember a couple of years ago when Stephen Colbert spoke at the White House Correspondents Dinner?
This is the greatest video! You've probably already seen it, but it's worth watching again.

Egypt Air Brings People Together

We were at the P.E. Trudeau airport last night waiting for my aunt to arrive on Egypt Air's first summer flight, and wouldn't you know it, so was half the population of Montreal! In the hour we stood at the arrivals section, my sister was approached by 3 different people she knew who were waiting for relatives, and in a bizarre domino-effect, a couple of those people were approached by other people they knew. It was like a fabulous meet-and-greet and the airport. Everyone kept commenting on how the last time they'd run into each other was also when picking people up the summer before. It speaks to the beauty of this country, that so many of come from so many other places, and that then our families, who come here to visit us, can find out just how great this place is.
So far, my aunt is impressed.

Are You an Aquavore? (Or "I'm all talk")

I got this in my work newsletter today. It's a water-use calculator that helps you figure out how many litres you use a day on average. I filled out the questionnaire to find my numbers and it's embarrassing how much I use... Changes must be made. Low-flow taps must be sought out. Dishes and glasses that don't need to fill the dishwasher must be rinsed quickly and set aside, taps must be turned off while toothbrushing, and shower times must be limited...
The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, has a hadeeth (saying) that says to conserve water, even if you're doing your wudu (ablution) in a river. Conservation is important, and that's not just a theory.
Check it out yourself. There's nothing like finding out how much water you waste to shake you into action.

What Will Don Cherry Say Now?

Now that the Detroit Redwings have won the Stanley Cup with Nicklas Lidstrom, a European captain, Don Cherry has lost his favourite, and hopefully last, ridiculous justification for racism. Cherry will have you think only North Americans know how to play play-off hockey. Europeans are soft, wimpy, lack "heart". North Americans, specifically his "good Canadian boys", have all of that in spades.
Listen to Cherry long enough and he'd have you believing that every NHLer born on this side of the pond has played entire seasons on two broken legs and block shots with their face every game. He'd have you believe that there's no such thing as a tough European player, that Danny Markov and Darius Kasparaitis don't actually exist. Most importantly, he'd have you believe that unless you fight regularly, you don't care, and you can't win.
This year's Conn Smythe trophy winner, Henrik Zetterberg, is Swedish. So much for one of Don Cherry's favourite racist insults - "Chicken Swede". The Red Wings not only have a European captain, but have 13 European players on their roster, many of them key. As Cherry himself often says, you can't win the Stanley cup without "Heart". Someone should let Cherry know that "heart" has nothing to do with genes.

Happy Birthday to Her

I've always known that my mother is a very special woman, but in the last few years, watching some of my sisters become mothers themselves, and all that that entails, I have come to a much better understanding of what it takes to be a good mother.
Mothers feed and change and hug and teach and comfort and protect their children. Mothers wake up a million times a night when the baby won't sleep, or the toddler's sick, or the pre-schooler's wet his bed, or the kindergartner's afraid to go to school, or the kiddo's worried about a test, or the teenager's gotten into a fight with her best friend, or the grown child is calling from far away and just needs to talk. Mothers take care of everyone else before they even dare to think about themselves. Mothers have an endless tap of love that just keeps gushing out the life that everyone else drinks from. Mothers are beautiful, fierce creatures. My mother is my hero.
Have a perfect day Mama.

Once it's gone, is it gone forever?

All my life, I've had very strong vocal chords. I would get a cold, get a flu, whatever, and even with a sore or scratchy throat, I would still have a very strong voice (which, if you know me, you know I've always put to good use by talking!) Until the ripe old age of 23, I never lost my voice. And then came my trip to Egypt for my baby sister's wedding. and sleeping with the AC cranked WAY up in the hotel the night before in a room I was sharing with my cousin and her adorable 4 year old. I woke up in the morning with the equivalent of a mid-February head and chest cold in late June. By the next morning, I had officially lost my voice from talking over the music / singing along with the music at the wedding the night before. And when it was gone, it was gone!
For close to three weeks, I coughed and hacked, and could barely whisper. When my voice came back, it came back in some other form, and for a while, I sounded like a stuffy old man and worried I would never hear myself as I sounded again.
Well, my voice came back at long last, but I think I can safely say that it never came back as strong and stubborn as it used to be. Oh, don't get me wrong: when things are good, I still sound like the "old me". But the difference is that now, I'm much more prone to losing my voice, and by much more prone, I mean that before, it happened "never" and now it's come very close to happening twice.
Last July, before M and I's Katb Kitab, I was on the verge of losing it, and this week, in recovering from that nasty Seattle cold that came back with M from the conference last Thursday, I've been hacking and coughing ALL the time. This despite the fact that I'm otherwise significantly improved, and that I drink ginger tea like it's water, and consume honey like it's air...
One of my best friends, Katherine, loses her voice all the time when she gets a cold, and I remember always finding it funny. Well, Katherine, I ain't laughing anymore. I believe you now, and I know what you mean.
Pass the ginger tea!

How Barack beat Hillary

If, like me, you've been following the Democratic race in the US, but not closely enough to understand every last detail, this is a great article that helps analyze how Barack got to where he is right now, essentially the Democratic nominee, while Hillary went from the assumed winner to second place. Enjoy.

Hijab Potluck Day

Everyone should do this, (well, ladies, anyway. I don't know many guys who trade clothing) and not just with hijabs, but with whatever you have in your closet that you haven't worn in a year, or bought once and just never actually got around to wearing... Dig it out, pack it up, make a nice treat of any sort and cart it, along with your no-longer-used clothing to a friend's house - and TRADE!
This is exactly what we did today with a group of sisters I just met in Montreal and it was a total blast. It truly is amazing how one person's trash is another's treasure, and how things go in and out of style, and suit one person, and then then next, and so on.

Anywhere and Everywhere

Saw this vid on Saj's blog and the ending brought tears to my eyes. Quite beautiful:

10 Things I've Learned from my Weekly Commute

1. Greyhound / Voyageur has more than one model of bus. Some are perfect for sleeping - i.e. the headrests are at the right height for a shorty like myself and the chairs lean back a good amount - and have the better overhead compartments where it's easy to put your bags, and others, well, really aren't. Best to pray for the "good for sleeping" buses and to keep a good book on you for the "bad for sleeping" ones.
2. My laptop battery really does have a 2 hour lifespan.
3. You can get good reception of CBC Radio 1 in Montreal until about halfway to Ottawa, but the reverse is not true.
4. If you're planning to sleep on the bus, don't act friendly to the person sitting next to you. Any act of friendliness, no matter how mild, may be misconstrued as an invitation to talk for the entire trip, at which point you will have lost valuable sleep time.
5. The Ottawa bus station (on Catherine ave.) has a horrible selection of potato chips. They're too salty, too flavoured, and too greasy. If you really want chips, pick them up before you get to the bus station.
6. The Montreal bus station's store is not open at 5:30 a.m., so bring your own breakfast/snacks if you want to eat before 8 a.m.
7. More people take the bus as the weather gets nicer. Summer will be packed.
8. If you sleep without bringing a travel pillow, expect a terrible crink in your neck.
9. Buy the round trip Ottawa-Montreal ten-pack from Ottawa, not Montreal, and save about $35 because Quebec applies an extra tax to your tickets. and last,
10. People in a state of travel are all slightly anxious, and usually eager to smile or talk. Somehow, while we're in between homes, we all want one more friend, one more conversation, one more connection, even if that distance is a minor or routine one.

This is a joke, right?

So Rachael Ray wears a scarf that sort of resembles a Kaffiyeh in a Dunkin Donuts web ad, and the US conservative commentators go crazy!
Michelle Malkin, one such commentator, tells us that the Kaffiyeh "has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad".
Oh, really? So only Palestinians who kill people wear these extremely popular scarves? Umm, no. It's just a part of the Arab culture, and saying it's akin with terrorism essentially means you think everything Arab = Terrorism, which is just so, so wrong.
The silliest part is that Dunkin Donuts pulled the ad. A little too apologist, non?

Canada's First Climate Exchange Now in Business

Check this out. Today is the opening day of the Montreal Climate Exchange, which allows companies to buy and sell carbon credits.
It'd be nice if the government would actually set emission caps to make this more effective, but kudos to these guys for not waiting for Harper et al to actually do something, and making it happen themselves. If nothing else, it's a start, and might have some impact to at least push action on climate change forward.
A scary quote from the article above:

Since 1990, Canada's emissions have risen faster than all of the other Group of Eight industrialized nations -- the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Britain and Italy.

Pass the Purell

M went to Seattle last week, and along with bringing back a really cool travel mug with a pic of the space needle on it, and a nice little bag from the conference he went to, he brought back the fiercest cold I've had in years. Everywhere I go, I leave garbage cans full of used tissue. In light of this situation, I'd like to bring your attention back to the home remedies I posted last summer about great home remedies for colds.
I wanted to add one last remedy to the list:

• Onion cores. This stuff is absolutely fantastic, if a little hard to swallow. Chop up the core of the onion, drench it in vinegar, and a little salt and pepper, and then eat it raw with some bread. This really helps with the sinus congestion.

Good luck with any colds you might all be suffering. The weather really is not helping.

Musical Warfare

I found this fascinating: an article in The New Yorker about how music is being used by the U.S. army as a breakdown tactic during interrogations. Though the rest of the article is serious, I couldn't help being amused by the fact that country music seemed to be the most effective - more than hip hop, even - at getting people to talk, effectively making it a tool of torture (so everyone really does hate country then, eh?)

Heartbreaking

Have you heard about this family's death in Calgary? There were children involved, and one has survived. I'm not even sure what to say, really, just that I'm upset and shocked by it.

I can't imagine why anyone would want to take another life, add to that taking a child's life, and now add to that the possibility of taking the life of a family member, a loved one. Police aren't looking for suspects and have called it a "domestic homicide" so doesn't that essentially mean they think one of the parents did it before taking their own life?

I'm reminded by a verse in the Quran which says something to the meaning of "anyone who kills a soul, it is as if he has killed the whole of humanity, and anyone who has saved a soul, it is as if he has saved the whole of humanity."

Life is precious.

Hockey Night in Canada now available in your native language

I love this country. I always tell any visitor to Canada that there are two things that they'll find quintessentially Canadian: Hockey and Timmy's. Well, Hockey Night in Canada (that great Canadian institution, if you forget about the whole "Don Cherry" part) is now being broadcast in both Mandarin and Punjabi. Check it out here.
I hope one day there's an Arabic broadcast. I would watch out of curiosity, just to see how certain phrases like "faceoff" and "he shoots, he scores!" got translated, but in the end, I know I'd switch back to the hockey broadcast I grew up on, or at least the RDS one that shows me the Habs games when CBC insists on airing the Leafs.

The Typo Eradication Advancement League

I heard about this on the radio today (CBC of course!)
I loved it, although I'm curious, who has time to travel a country looking for typos??

Baby Ikea

A couple of things I'd consider picking up for my little angels if they weren't up and moving across the world soon.
Have you ever seen the "baby poang" chair from Ikea?? Too cute.



p.s. Shopping in downtown Montreal with a stroller is quite the disaster. Can I call out the Eaton's Centre and the Les Ailes De La Mode complex on their lack of ramps?? What's up with that? Honestly, at least my sisters and I had the option of picking up my little angel's stroller and carrying it up/down stairs when we needed too, but what does a person in a wheel chair do? How many different entrances do you have to walk by before you find one with a ramp? Loving my new town and all, but for a big city? Come on, really disappointing.

Bouchard-Taylor Get it Right

The report is in, and the Bouchard-Taylor commission agrees: My hijab is not a threat to anyone. Barring me from wearing it anywhere but home or in public places in Quebec would be contrary to the values of freedom and integration. Way to go Bouchard-Taylor! Read the full article here.

Little Angel Laundry

Today my little angel was walking around with his Teddy in one hand and his sister's Teddy in the other. Now, we make a point to keep the bathroom doors closed because little angel loves the toilet, but today we accidentally left the door open for about 2 seconds, which was long enough for him to toss not his - but the Little Angela's Teddy - head first into the toilet bowl.
The scene that followed was out of a sitcom - first my short shriek, followed by silence, followed by a complete breakdown from Little Angela. Of course, my sister had fished the Teddy from the toilet almost immediately, but this didn't matter to my niece.
The bottom line is that the Teddy has now been washed and dried and gone through a full laundry cycle, so all is once again well...

Silver Lining?

Well, I guess I'll have to settle for Markov winning gold. Russia beat Canada in OT, 5-4 to take the world title. We were close, but not close enough.
Congrats on a tournament well-played. Losing in the end is bitter, but at least I can comfort myself with the fact that, since we didn't lose to the US, my american brother-in-law won't be calling to rub it in as he did so many years ago.

One more title? and wedding season continues

Canada is one win away from another world title today, although they do face the mighty Russia, so it won't be easy. One of Les Boys, Andrei Markov, is playing for team Russia, and although there are no Habs on Team Canada, my alleigance definitely lies with my country.
Go Canada Go!

On a separate note, M and I seem to have beat the rush when we had the wedding in February. Last night we were at our second wedding in three weeks, and there are at least two more to come in the next month and a half. A quick shout out to all the lovely couples: May Allah swt Bless you with long and happy lives together (and for those to come, if you need anyone to vent to about how stressful or time consuming wedding planning is, you know where to reach me - that's you Suad!)

Heeeeee's Back!!!

Check it out! M's posting his lovely pics again (I think it has something to do with the excitement over his brand new SLR, and also no longer having to dedicate long hours to wedding planning - heheh)...
Go take a look. I may be biased, but he could quit his PhD and make this a full-time job/hobby, non?

Coffee Snob?

I've been drinking the good stuff on a regular basis since I was about 15 - the nearly three hour commute to get to and from my fabulous high school five days a week, plus my lack of self control, really cemented any chance I had of sticking to orange juice to just wake me up.
For years, I kept it to myself and only drank the coffee out of the house. The reason: my mother, who is the most health conscious person I know, abhorred (and abhors) caffeine.
I remember a funny coffee related incident the summer after I finished high school, on my way to a trip to Egypt with my kid sister for a few weeks. We were in the car, on our way to Montreal to catch our flight with my mom and dad, and I suddenly felt the urge to confess.
"Mama," I said, "I have to tell you something terrible."
"Yes?" she asked.
"I drink coffee. I drink it EVERYDAY."
My mom laughed and nodded and said something like "I figured".
I've always preferred a "real" coffee - Second Cup, Timothy's, Starbucks - to a Timmy's or the instant stuff, but the bottom line is that I just have to get my fix, and I'll take it however I can get it (see my trying to quit posts from last Ramadan for further proof). I also like the real cappuccinos from Second Cup WAY more than the sugar-filled stuff at Timmy's.

The reason I'm even thinking about any of this is that this morning on CBC radio (my favourite station ever!), they were doing blind taste tests in TO, having people sample instant vs. really brewed coffee in the streets and seeing which they preferred. Most seem to prefer the real brew, but it seems there are more than expected who like their coffee with "three crystals of Folgers, Half a cup of cream and five tablespoons of sugar" as the radio host said - Yuck!

When I'd first started going into "Proper" coffee stores, I would try not to laugh or roll my eyes as I heard people order the complex sounding names. You know, the "I'll have a non-fat, extra foam, double shot, extra hot soy latte" order? Well, when I first discovered my allergies to milk, my ability to drink Lattes was shot in the foot. I also had to avoid the sugar, but I loved my fancy coffee drinks so much that I HAD to find a way to solve the "milk free, sugar free" coffee crisis. I scoured the various coffee shops until I discovered Timothy's "sugar free vanilla syrup", which they could use with soy milk to produce my "small soy vanilla sugar free latte". I suddenly felt like just as much of a coffee snob as those I was laughing about...
I've since eased up, I only treat myself to a soy latte about once every two months now, and most days I just get a regular coffee and allow myself a little bit of milk or cream in my coffee. I don't avoid all milk or sugar products any more, I just make sure to keep it to a minimum and that seems to keep me ok.

Keith Olbermann says it so well

He really couldn't have said it any better. Watch this video if you are as sick and tired of Dubya destroying lives, countries, economies, and just about everything else he gets his hands on. It's beyond true, and it reminds me just how angry I am about this stuff, and how, sadly, I've become hopeless and apathetic and often forget just how angry I am.

A week in the making

It was pointed out to me by a friend today that I haven't posted in about a week - over which I was already feeling somewhat guilty. I've been wanting to post - honestly! really! but there was just a lot else going on that was taking my time up...
I'm now "slightly" more free, so here goes...

On the bus ride home to Montreal today, I was thinking about how much I want to write, and not just posts to this lovely blog, which is only slightly edited and really not in the least refined, but write GOOD writing, write like I used to write in high school when I was in a writing program and the words were more creative and I had characters and all cliches were banished with a red pen if I dared scroll them onto the page to begin with. I want to write a novel, or a book of poetry, or something else fantastic like that, and I want it to be a best seller and I want LOTS of people to enjoy it. I basically want to write the book that I wanted "Does My Head Look Big in This" to be. I loved that book, I thought the author did a fantastic job, but I was hoping it would reflect what I considered to be a "typical" Western Muslim teenager's life (i.e. mine) more closely. And it didn't. Well, I want to write my version of that. And I should be able to, right? I mean, I'm qualified: I have the experience. I was once a Western Muslim teenager and am now a Western Muslim twenty-something, so it should be easy, shouldn't it?
Well, the short answer is no. The long answer is that it takes more discipline, more time, and probably more creativity, than I have to offer right now. It does, however, remain a long term dream. In the short term, I just want to start writing regularly again, even if it's bad and disconnected, it's a step towards good. Not a sufficient step, but definitely a necessary one.

Other Amazing "Speltisies"

That's my new word for "things made with spelt flour" - and the latest in this wonderful addition (you remember the Spelt Biscotti of last Toronto visit?) are little spelt pesto rolls... In T.O. this weekend for a good friend's wedding and a visit with my husbands family, and you cannot even begin to understand how truly delicious these things are. I opened the bag. I finished the bag. In one sitting. That's all there is to it.
My parents-in-law have also discovered spelt sesame sticks. For all you Egyptians out there, this is essentially "bo'somat" a.k.a. that totally fabulous thing you have with your tea. I'm seriously considering just up and moving to T.O.

The Habs Are Out

but we should look on the bright side...