A Moment of Happiness

Risk is essential. There is not growth of inspiration in staying within what is safe and comfortable. Once you find out what you do best, why not try something else?

-Alex Noble

Sinto impulsos covardes, assustadiços e escapistas de voltar. Também porque sinto saudade, muita, de tudo. Mas sei que não devo.

-Caio Fernando Abreu

This past weekend, I dragged a few friends of mine down to DC to watch a play that my older sister’s best friend, Andrew, was performing in. It was a beautiful post-modern piece that explored the ways in which we as humans wish for things to “stay.” My favorite word in any language is saudade, a longing for something so intangible that it is indefinable. People loved and lost, tragedies of life, moments to be treasured, a nostalgia of times past, the lost rhythm of life, people who left, people who stayed and changed – “all things born of the soul that can only be felt.” A word that means more to me than I could ever hope to explain, and it was the name of a scene in this play so needless to say I was extremely moved.

It was a beautiful production and I’ve encouraged basically everybody I know to go into DC to support it, cause the local arts always have gems such as this. It also gave me an avenue by which to attempt to understand all the emotions I am having about my impending graduation. There is everything to be excited about and everything to be terrified of. I want to tell high school seniors that this I am feeling what you are feeling, but it is a bit skewed. I know I want to go to medical school the year after next but having twelve months absolutely free for me to do as I will is almost overwhelming in its possibility. I want to do everything and nothing, I continuously freak out about how quickly this year is going (how is it that after tomorrow I will only have five days left of class for the fall semester?!) but I am thrilled about the options open to me.

I have moments of absolutely crystal clear reflection where I become hyperaware of the finality of my time at Hopkins. Reading for my Islamic literature moves me to tears because I know that this will be the last time I take a literature class as an undergraduate just cause I want to expand my mind, weekly lunches with Peter always make me realize how quickly the time will come where my friends and I will be scattered everywhere, every drop off at Tutorial is one less time that I get to hang out with my kids. I am excited about what comes next in my big picture, but for now I just want to yell at everything to “stay” just as it is, in this perfect moment where I am comfortable and familiar and content. That will probably not be my mindset during finals but the great thing about this feeling is that I give it absolute free reign to change based on the day, my mood, etc. For the first time in my life, I think I’m learning to go to with the flow.

Chocolatea is the perfect place to muse over all of this.

I have a very close friend who is entirely in love with Halloween, she plans her costume a month in advance, overbooks herself for parties and gatherings, and then spends two days recovering. I, however, have no such soft spot for the holiday. I didn’t go trick-or-treating as a child so I have no nostalgia, no need to go out or dress up or any of it (apologies to the Fell’s Point faithful, you guys keep on keeping on) – to be quite honest, I spend the last weeks of October willing Thanksgiving to get here faster and singing to Frank Sinatra holiday music.

But, for the last four years, on the Thursday before Halloween, I’ve been given a reason to care, a reason to get excited over the costumes, the candy, the fantasy of it all: the Tutorial Halloween party. I’ve spoken about this party for the last three years, my freshmen year when I was a tutor taking my kid around to trick-or-treat, as a sophomore as an organizer being in charge of my six pairs and dressing up as a cowgirl, as a junior as the Student Director running the whole shebang dressed up as a footballer and this year, for the last time, as Cruella de Vil while my orgs were dalmatians.

Please note how ridiculously adorable and perfect my staff is, and the fact that I am trying to keep a "mean" Cruella face on when I really was smiling the entire time.

Our Halloween party consists of ushering our many princesses, zombies, butterflies, and Scream-masked kids to the freshmen dorms where they filled bags with more candy then they could ever hope to trade during lunch. That was followed by a pizza party, viewing of the Goosbumps movie “The Blob That Ate Everything,” face painting and all the gross food that my boss Young decided to grace us with. There was “boogers” which was cheese dip with green food coloring, “worms” which was jello that was formed in straws, and “kitty litter” which was cake complete with “poop” aka tootsie rolls. I basically refused to try any of the gross foods until I saw somebody else eat and enjoy them, and two of my dalmatians, Hannah and Aaron, convinced me to eat the actually super delicious kitty litter. Plus, their dog ears were really just so cute I couldn’t say no.

Hannah and Aaron eating kitty litter.

Basically, it was a fantastic way to end this four year tradition. I could talk about it forever and how every day when we drop the last kids off at home, I have a quick quiet moment where I realize that the number of times I will do this is now becoming finite. While the three lovely SAABabies, Erica, Joseph, Kevin, are just beginning their adventure, I have my usual overwhelming sense of finality. I need to remind myself to enjoy these moments now and then, I’ll deal with the finality of it all next May!

Our one normal group shot!

I love these people.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

-Aesop

There are certain things that I have always been familiar to me. I know my dad is coming towards me in a store by the sound his keys make when he walks. The way my mother takes her tea is second nature to me, as is the times she calls me during the day. I know who is on the other side of the line when I call home, before they speak, just by how many times it rang before being picked up. I know what song of The Phantom of the Opera’s soundtrack is playing by the first few notes of music. With all due respect to Aesop, comfort and familiarity are things that I adore.

Roma winning is occasionally a familiar sight, other times they like to stomp on my stomach. Oh the life of a sports fan

By the time my fourth years at Hopkins rolled around, there were other things that started to become familiar. I know what times to avoid Cafe Q when I venture to the library for a Anarchy in the UK. I know what time to leave Levering to reach Mason Hall exactly in time for SAAB Meetings. I know how Neuroscience professors lecture and grade, what times my PI shouldn’t be bothered cause his mind is preoccupied with future experiments, I know that to unlock and open the library door at Tutorial takes a kick and a bit of unnatural gymnastics with my arms, and I have a methodology and rhythm to how I go about my studies.

I already miss the comfort of Pete's Grill and I'm going there this weekend. (photo taken from my little sister, Meriem, who is my favorite photographer of all time)

We are creatures of habit, human beings like to nest and get comfortable. And over the past three years I have nested here at Hopkins, I’ve invested and become entangled into the habits and quirks of this university. And now as my friends and I have entered our final year, everything throws us into a transcendental crisis. We have roots at Hopkins, we are familiar and comfortable and suddenly we have to fathom that next October it will not be this campus we will be enjoying the brisk air at. Change may be grand and welcome and all that jazz, but for the moment a very big part of me wants to crash on the couch in the Little Theater and pretend that I won’t have to give up this familiarity.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

-Isaac Asimov

Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant

-Saadi

It is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance.

-Saint Jerome

Human beings have the amazing capacity of dealing with all sorts of trials and tribulations that happen in our lives, we have the gift of allowing ourselves and others forgiveness and forgetting. It is the best of humans that forgives those that trespass against us, and I can only hope to gain the height of self-awareness and openness of heart that comes to some individuals so easily.

When I am trespassed against, I am like an elephant – it gets engraved into my mind and I am compelled to acknowledge the effect it has on me. I have a distinct inability to forget transgressions, something my mother is forever admonishing me about. I never allow ignorance as an excuse, not for myself nor for others. So when my professor leaned across the table we were sitting at, gestured at my name and asked me if I had been educated in the country as a way of trying to explain what she thought was my poor writing, all I could do was laugh. Out loud and harshly and my brain racked with trying to legitimize the question and why my professor would find it at all appropriate to ask it. Instead of the snippy remarks I wanted to make, not the least of which included the fact that many adults who learn English as a second language speak and write it better than many native speakers, I bit the inside of my cheek and left at the first possible opportunity to go calm myself.

To say that this was the first time I’ve experienced this situation or this question would be a lie, but it was the first time it came from a professor and somebody, with a PhD and who teaches at Hopkins, from which it was more of a shock than a confused local in rural West Virginia. My experience with professors at Hopkins, overall, has been nothing short of exemplary and while I’ve had a few mishits (namely my Orgo lab professor who turned me off recrystallization forever), in my three years I have learned from the most brilliant minds who genuinely care about their students and their abilities. That being the mold of professors that I held to be truth, this experience is such an unfortunate anomaly.

In the immortal words of Thumper...

My personal inclinations have always been strongly antiracist and highly sympathetic to minorities because of the obvious self-extension it offers me. That being said, I appreciate the novelty of dealing with cultures and individuals that were previously unexplored. To approach that from an angle of ignorance and ethnocentricity cheapens the scope of human experience. While I may not be able to change my professor nor reprimand her for her stereotyping and unfortunate remark, I can use it to remind myself and those around me of the dangers of falling into a mental pattern of ignorance.

Anyway, the whole racist look hasn’t been in for quite some time, please do try and keep up professor.

I'm not hip enough for this to be my photo, courtesy of http://omgruok.blogspot.com

Small, sleek, cowering, timorous beast/ O, what a panic is in your breast!/ You need not start away so hasty/ With hurrying scamper!/ I would be loath to run and chase you,/ With murdering plough-staff

-Rober Burns, “To A Mouse”

Like most upperclassmen at Hopkins, I live off-campus. My apartment building dates to the first half of the twentieth century and thus has its roots firmly into this patch of Baltimorean land. That comes with the occasional viewing of furry friends, which I had never seen in their natural environment because I had only ever worked with them in a lab. The first time I saw a mouse in the early dawn light, at that time where shadows often play tricks on your eyes, I sat straight up and watched in shock as this triumphant mouse went home after a night of scavenging.

Needless to say, I wasn’t having that. The exterminator that services our building is spectacular and got rid of the problem within a few weeks, with the aid of our constant vigilance as to where we left our chocolate and snacks. It had been a good seven months since any sighting when my roommate woke me up a few weeks ago at 1:30 in the morning insisting that she could hear a mouse collecting spoils in her snack box. And sure enough, he was. Was ensued was standing on her bed, yelling sporadically at the mouse to go away, and then a 2 am trek to the dumpster to get rid of the box of snacks, our trash and anything else we conceived in our sleepy state would be attractive to a mouse.

That mouse, which was obviously the mouse version of the fat cousin from the movie Ratatouille, had the audacity to come back and find a stash of chocolate my roommate had forgotten about since we moved into the apartment. And not only was he audacious in coming during waking hours, but this bourgeois mouse selectively only ate dark chocolate and then around the caramel in the Milky Ways. I was a little be shocked and a little bit impressed at the personality he demonstrated.

But, despite my respect for this mouse and his elitist tastes, he had to go. Our apartment underwent a bleach-cleansing process and traps were set every three feet in an attempt to encourage our friend, now named Sir George V because a bourgeois mouse deserves a name with a title and a number, to die a gallant death.

And sure enough, a few days ago, around 6 am while I was making my morning coffee I heard the sure snap of the end of the tale of one of the only mouse that I’ll ever have any inkling of liking for. I was seriously a bit sad to see him go, I like animals with personality, but I rather remember Sir George V fondly than have to continually put my chocolate on top of the fridge. So so-long Sir George V, it’s been real – RIP and please don’t send any of your friends or family to take your spot!

People who know me in real life know that I make very few apologies for what I believe in, I’ve always been strong-willed and, as my mother would say, stubborn. More than that, I know what I like and what I dislike and I didn’t need to wait to grow up to know that, I always have and have stood by those convictions. So when I say that I hate Facebook, I am completely serious. I cannot stand the disconnected facade of human relationships that exist on this website, and the only reason I let it exist at all is because of my family abroad and friends I made at the international peace camp I went to when I was 15 and I frequently and without warning deactivate it because the hypocrisy of it annoys me.

But how does this relate at all to my Hopkins blog? Well for a variety of reasons, not the least of which entails my reflection at the beginning of my senior year and looking forward to post-university days. Just typing that out gives me a little bit of an existential crisis, but I know that I am capable of, and will keep in touch with friends that I’ve made at Hopkins without Facebook. And also because I had to learn how to do that when I first came to college, because it is so easy for us in this modern age where social media and networking sites have replaced real inter-personal relationships, to forget that writing on each other’s wall once or twice a year does not constitute a friendship. It requires a bit more effort, a bit more investment of time and thoughts to continue the connections with people that you deem worthy of that effort.

Furthermore, there is the question of privacy. Marlon Brando famously once said “Privacy is not something that I’m merely entitled to, it’s an absolute prerequisite.” I might cherish my own privacy a bit much, but divulging too much is never a good thing. There is a reason that self-help interview sites always mention to change one’s Facebook to private settings, the picture, information, etc if you’re apply for graduate school or a job. But I’ve always thought that that is the way that it should be all the time. There has always been a certain joy in finding out tidbits about one’s friends and relationships building over time, so that only one’s closest friends know everything about you. That differentiation has all but evaporated in an online world where nothing is sacred and everything is up for disclosure. (If you think I’m being over dramatic, check out the website http://www.stfuparentsblog.com/ seriously do it – if my memory serves me correctly, I don’t think the author uses bad language but freely discusses bodily functions of babies, just a head’s up).

I am by no means advocating not using Facebook, that is a personal decision to make and it obviously serves its purpose of allowing people to stay connected. My question, however, is the merit of that connection and making sure that the quality of relationships isn’t sacrificed in the name the number of “friends” one has online. So with this being a new school year, no matter where you might be, give a real conversation a try, call somebody on their birthday, go old-school and send an email – the benefits of building meaningful connections and relationships will be yours to reap for years to come.

All the best.

My motto in life to be honest.

Always toward absent lovers love’s tide stronger flows.

Sextus Propertius

I have always been adamant about my need to not spend my summers at Hopkins. I love the university, the quads, the buildings, the lecture halls (besides Mudd 26), the restaurants in Baltimore, my friends, my apartment, watching football at PJs, my Tutorial kids, etc all the other things that make my life at Hopkins so great. But I need to be away for a few months of the year, I need to go home to Alexandria and be in the house that I’ve lived in since I was thirteen and hang out with my parents and sisters everyday, go for walks in the park behind our house, hit up my library and DC on a continual basis – because these are the things that calm my mind and relax my soul. And that is exactly the medicine that is needed to get ready for another (and my last?!?!) hectic and amazing year at Hopkins.

I don’t know if I have mentally prepared myself for another grueling year at Hopkins. I have a tendency of forgetting the hours of hard work, the stress and the anxiety that rules my life for weeks on end. But all I have to do is remind myself of the people I love at Hopkins, the experiences I enjoy, the moments of pure learning and exploration and the support system I’ve found there and I am reassured that I will not only survive my last year, but perhaps even thrive.

Look out for one last blog entry before school officially begins next week, I have some pre-senior year holy-cow thoughts I’ll be sharing. And just in case you ever wondered where the saying from which this post take’s it name comes from, you can thank the Roman poet Sextus Propertius.

The best thing about school starting again – that would be the English Premiere League and Serie A starting up again. Liverpool won at the Emirates against Arsenal for the first time in eleven years, suffice to say, I was over the moon! Enjoy the last week of August everyone!

Happy LFC makes me incredibly happy.

When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, disciminate, drive people into deeper poverty and shoot people dead whilst refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up and express their anger and frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.

-Corretta Scott King

The past few days Hopkins life has been the furthest thing from my mind. Despite the fact that the majority of US media outlets refuse to acknowledge its existence, the riots in England, primarily London, have confused, angered, and educated me about social issues that often go undiscussed. Condemning the rioters was easy from my home in America where I have never wanted for anything, material, opportunity or otherwise. And it was heartbreaking to see my friends in England angered and terrified about the destruction that was being done by members of their own community. But what I perceive as “their communities” may not be how they understand their reality. We assume a commonality of identity based on geographic or racial proximity, but the existence of subdivisions of identity and community occur across those lines. I had to realize that my understanding of the situation as an outsider, with no intimate knowledge of the social climate in the UK, much less the experience of a person without means in that society, meant that my opinion is worth nothing more than the time it takes me to type this.

My friend Hillary put it quite eloquently when she said, riots are not meant to educate, they are meant to express. Not every expression has to teach something to be effective. If you’re waiting for a riot to change something, you’ll be waiting for a long time. That’s not to say that every riot doesn’t have any long-lasting outcome, just that the outcome itself should not and usually is not the focus in a riot.

I do not know if I completely agree with this assessment because riots in their essence must have a cause and that cause is not yet completely understood, the frustration is being communicated by those involved as “we have nothing better to do” and “we’re getting our taxes back.” And while that may sound mindless and frivolous, it perhaps is just a lack of ability to communication the fire of frustration that has now burst. Especially when one considers the fact that the Prime Minister was reluctant and delayed in returning from his vacation to deal with his capital city literally being set on fire.

This article explains the historical setting which may help contextualize the situation. I may not have been instantaneously sympathetic with the rioters because my frame of mind was perfectly described in a tweet I saw stating, ”The Youth of the Middle East rise up for basic freedoms. The Youth of London rise up for a HD ready 42″ Plasma TV.” I am entirely cognitive and empathetic to the cause of countries where oppression is a commonality, but understanding a marginalized minority and their anger is a different frame of mind. To be honest, the British media’s hysterics did not help elucidate anything. In fact, the BBC, so often a source of journalistic pride gave us this gem of embarrassment for all humanity, and a prime example of racially driven profiles of people.

The title of this blog not only references the actuality of the riots in England, but of course the classic The Clash song from 1977. The racial undertones that that song is frequently understood to explore are demonstrated so well by the lyric ““Black or white turn it on, face the new religion.”  The automatic responses from many panic-stricken people was that immigrants were the cause of this unrest. But a minority cannot be entirely at fault for marginalization, society as a whole creates otherization and fear of the unfamiliar. It was immigrants, Turkish, South Caribbean, Korean, etc that patrolled the streets of their neighborhoods with bats to guard their homes and businesses from looters. They protected the neighborhoods of London when the police were left unprepared and under-maned.

My opinion on this is my own and is still being formed, but my proclivity to see the situation through the eyes of the oppressed requires me to understand all facets of this situation to the best of my ability. I wanted to offer this blog up as food for thought, hopefully it’ll inspire you to think about this situation at least for a bit because marginalization and deprivation is not a uniquely British or European issue, it happens in our cities as well. It is a commonality we must all understand.

You are invited to the festival of this world and your life is blessed.

Rabindranath Tagore

A few weeks ago my parents and I got a chance to explore the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. This festival has been around since 1967 and is basically an exhibition of living cultural heritage that has a varying highlighter every year, this year being the country Colombia, the Peace Corps and Rhythm and Blues. It’s one of my favorite activities in the DC summer, despite the fact that is continuously a struggle to breath in our humidity.

I wanted to visit a traveling exhibit in the National Museum of African Art before we explored the Mall, and the information guide kind of blankly stared at me when I asked her if she knew about North Africa. A+ hiring strategy there Smithsonian Institute. Considering my astute ability to look up things on my blackberry, we got to enjoy the exhibit and the lovely AC that went along with it.

I'm pretty sure my grandmother had a very similar plate to this priceless Persian piece of art.

The Festival always attracts the attention of locals and tourists alike. It provides, according to its official website, “programs of music, song, dance, celebratory performance, crafts and cooking demonstrations, storytelling, illustrations of workers’ culture, and narrative sessions for discussing cultural issues.”

If you’re ever near the area around July 4th, you should really come by and check out this festival and learn something about your world and the cultures and people that inhabit it that you never even contemplated.

Hope everybody’s July is treating them kinder than the 115 degrees DC was kind enough to inflict on us yesterday!