Once again while surfing the net via StumbleUpon I came across this really cool site, MuchoBene.com. It is basically an anonymous chat service where you simply type in a question and whoever has the program downloaded and feels like it, can answer it for you. Without downloading the program you can only ask questions. Go to the site and try it yourself.

As for me I tried it by asking this question: “How do I find true love?” Here are the two conversations that followed, I think you will find them entertaining:

CONVERSATION ONE
me: How do I find true love?
him/her: Stop looking so hard.
me: lol … im not looking at all actually
me: i just wanted to see what pretentious bastards would try and asnwer this ?
him/her: Heh heh. Well, you do have to get out there somewhere! So, how many of us pretentious bastards tried to answer?
me: two
me: two really pretentious bastards
him/her: lol
me: anyway i have found my true love
me: its sushi
him/her: Excellent! Have a good day!
me: you too man

CONVERSATION TWO
me: How do I find true love?
him/her: The internet
me: good answer
me: lol
me: its awfully pretentious of you to try and answer this question though
him/her: indeed it is
him/her: but I couldn’t let it go
me: lol … i see … irresistible eh
him/her: hey, I know at least 5 couples who found it that way
him/her: it’s pretty cool
me: 5 couples off the internet … i dunno seems tacky
him/her: you’d think, but they seem to be happy
me: how long they been at it?
him/her: couple of years for 2 of them
him/her: lavalife seems pretty succesful, plentyoffish, not so much
me: well i guess if they are both geeky enough to look for love on the internet then they have a lot in common already
him/her: good point
him/her: whatever turns you on, I guess
me: lol … i think im becoming a supergeek myself …. addicted to stumbleupon … its how i found this site … gotta get a life quick … or i might hook up with an internet chick and be one of those guys.
him/her: hail stumbleupon
You say: i must escape … k man … fun talking … take care
him/her says: later

Four hours in, we were dragging our feet and worn out. We had climbed 3,500 feet up, most of it just within the last mile. The trees were dense and the rocks were slick with yesterday’s rain.

A few steps and suddenly I was aware there was more light peaking out from behind the trees. My pace quickened. The light shone brightly from beyond a sharp bend in the trail. Taking the turn I was bathed in warm midday sunlight as the trees gave way to a broad flat cliff with an astounding view.

“Subhanallah!” It’s all that I could say. It was the most breathtaking view I had ever seen before in my life. I pulled a “king of the world” arms spread in the air pose and collapsed on the edge of the cliff with my buddy A. Rolling hills with every shade of yellow and green stretched out before us in every direction until they disappeared in the haze of the horizon.

A. was admiring the broad shadows cast on the terrain below us by fast moving clouds while I laid there and soaked in that warmth and massaged sore, now unburdened, shoulders.

This view was worth the struggle and suffering it took to get to the top. On the way down we suffered even more and a week later my left knee still aches. But it was all worth it. I could hike the rest of my life.

Yesterday, I saw the movie “Into the Wild” and it awakened in me my long buried desire to trek the world. Life has a funny way of smothering you with anxieties, worries and responsibilities. It’s difficult to look past it all and take a hard look at the end. It’s not far off and maybe even closer than we think. I read once that life is a crack of light between two infinite chasms of darkness. You only get one life, one infinitely tiny span of time racing towards an unknown finish line. What will you do with yours?

I have friends who are financial analysts, doctors, lawyers, accountants, social workers and teachers. They’ve married and settled down. They have kids or are planning on it. Forty, fifty years maybe and they will be gone. What will their life be about. I know aunties and uncles who are staring at the sunset and I can’t imagine that they are happy with what they’ve done with their lives.

I once read some of Ibn Battuta’s adventures. He traveled the world for thirty years. He met Sultans and Emperors went from riches to poverty and back again, escaped death a dozen times from both man and nature, experienced the deepest sorrows and the greatest of elation. He was a pauper, a pilgrim, a judge, an ambassador and a nostalgic old man, all in turn. Now, dead and gone, he is a legend.

Who will want to read the stories of our lives? What’s it all worth, the sum of the daily grind, rich meals and a closet full of junk? To lift a quote from “Into the Wild”:

“… [I] know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing the blind, deaf stone alone with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.”

How few can say their experience approaches this feeling. There’s always a weight holding us down, crushing us and our hopes and dreams with it. I remember being a stupid child, wide-eyed with all the adventures I was going to have. I didn’t care what anyone thought, I’d dance myself silly or spin myself till I collapsed, the world whipping all around me. Time makes you hard and jaded … jagged.

Ever crossed a desert on a camel, squeezing water from a cactus and eating lizards and snakes to survive? Ever been stung by a scorpion or chased by bandits? Ever slept under a moonlit sky or navigated using the stars? Ever been so hopelessly lost with no way out that you knew you would surely die, then, against all odds, been rescued?

It’s one thing to know that ALLAH is your constant companion, but it’s a whole other thing feeling him there; every morsel fed directly from his Hand and every path to a spring is guidance from His will. Where is temptation and sin on these barren roads? Where can they lead but to piety and communion with the one to whom you will inevitably return. This is where the sajdat ash-shukr comes spontaneously from the core of your being in the place where life hinges on a thimble of water.

But when the traveler makes his home everywhere, his true home is nowhere. In life, it seems you don’t choose your path but you choose your regrets. Some will have their crying babies and their heavy maidens and others will have memories and some rusty stories.

But I suppose I am seduced by a different type of beauty. Overgrown trails and majestic sights romance me. High mountains beckon and deserts dare and mock me. Do I spy an oasis or is this a fool man’s dream? I imagine there’ll be no answer before wearing thin a hundred shoes, or humbling a hundred haughty mountains, or taming a burning desert or cheating an angry sea. But, for now at least, this is my forbidden love. Some day soon I’ll vow to trek round the globe, restless, until the horizon is mine.

I leave you with another quote from “Into the Wild”:

“It should not be denied that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations. Absolute freedom.”

My idea of extreme sports, mainly intense internet surfing, presents marginal payoffs. This includes this rather odd discovery. Apparently some Sikhs believe that origins of male Muslim seductive mojo is black magic. This is their only explanation for the apparently high incidence of Sikh women abandoning their religion in order to date or marry Muslim men. I could think of a few hundred other reasons, but really, would any of them be funnier that black magic? Here’s a screen capture of the comments. Here is the original link.

I am not proud of this but I’m not ashamed either. Way back when I used to work at a private school with a rather unenlightened administration. Just to take an isolated example of asinine administrative logic, I once pointed out, convincingly, that the use of random, out of context lists of vocabulary words is a pedagogically unsound teaching method. The answer that I got was, “then what do you suggest we do with all of these books? We paid so much for them.” Needless to say there is no arguing with that. I wanted to answer, “You can shove them up any orifice you wish” but you see then I would have sounded crazy.

(more…)

This is an actual conversation I had in Google Chat today:

S: pharmacists
me: huh?
S: how do you feel about them being called “doctors”
due to the PharmD?
me: I care about this as much as the Pluto planet controversy
S: awesome
so what’s your opinion?
me: in america you are free to call urself whatever you please
see “Dr” dre
see “president” bush
S: lol
thx
i recycled your joke
and gave you no credit
me: khiyana!
(deep betrayal)

I cam across this cool and incredibly frustrating game that I wanted to submit to digg. It’s called Multi-Tasking. But when I tried to submit it to the fine folks at digg I got this message:

This domain has been flagged for non-English content. Currently, we only allow submissions in English. Please refer to our FAQ (digg.com/faq) for more information.

So I had to put the link here and submit this to digg … circuitous I know. Enjoy the game. Also be sure to visit Islamify.com the Muslim Social News Site.

A friend of mine sent me a link about how the gay marriage ban has been overturned in California. He was all upset. Since he was a dude he was able to summarize his feelings with a concise, “This Sucks.”

I, on the other hand replied, “I am saving my outrage for when they allow consensual relationships between older gay men and 11 year old boys.” Can anyone say NAMBLA?

I don’t really know how all this gayness got mainstream. If you’re gay and you want to have a private party with your friends and call yourselves married, be my guest. (That was a figure of speech, you’re not really invited to my place.) This is America and here you can do that. But why are you going to FORCE everyone else to recognize that you are married? This is why I don’t like big government. Groups can hi-jack the state and use it’s coercive powers for their own agendas.  Can you say neo-conservative, nincompoop Bush-hole?

More and more often advertising on the billboards of major highways, on the backs of buses and on store fronts is getting racier and racier. In my part of the world there is a certain ad for a radio station that features three naked women with the radio station’s logo strategically placed to keep it legal.

Needless to say, for the practicing Muslim man the ubiquity of these ads makes it quite challenging to go outside of our homes without surrendering to wandering gazes. So in a moment of genius I fancied a solution.

Particularly egregious public displays of nudity and indecency would be targeted by guerilla graffiti brigades who, upon cover of darkness, would descend on said advertisement and deface pictures of sultry damsels with crude spray painted niqabs (veils).

Mind you I am not encouraging anyone to do this (though it would be very cool and ballsy) and I myself am too scared of the perverted institution of sodomy and racism that is the police to try it myself.

So I retreated to the fantasy lab that is photoshop and had a taste of what that would feel like with these three movie posters. Enjoy them now that they are halal. (Just because these movie posters are now halal, doesn’t mean that the content of these movies are, so don’t get any funny ideas.)

That took much longer that you would think. You know, after all this time spent fiddling with these pictures, I don’t think they look like niqabis so much as they do ninjas. Ninjabis anyone?

“I’m a bum.” That was the answer I gave to someone who asked what I do yesterday. He pressed on asking what I put on my resume. Here was my answer (rant):

“Resume? Resume!? I don’t write resumes! Why should I? ‘Here you go sir, here’s my resume so you can judge and rate me and grade me. Am I acceptable to you? Am I fit to work beneath you and take your orders?’ No, thanks! Dude, I don’t write resumes! Why should I humble and demean myself by submitting myself for approval or rejection like a bad high school essay to be all marked up in red and given an arbitrary grade? Does that make any sense to you? It doesn’t to me.”

That was enough for him drop the subject. Now, I just have to work on making those statements justifiable since I have been sending out quite a few resumes lately and I feel just a little hypocritical. But you know … I don’t care. I enjoyed that rant, it was worth it and I want it to be true. It was nice to pretend for a while.

As an avid web surfer I come across a lot of great pictures of Muslims. After a while I realized that there needs to be a place to collect these images and share them on the web. That’s how ShootMuslims.com was born.

Feel free to visit the site and enjoy the first few submissions. Also, if you have any suggestions of great pics, visit the contact page and submit them.