FUNNYACCENT

Riding Sub On Sunday Night

HOW BEAUTIFUL THE MOON IS?

Di wajah mu ku lihat bulan
yang mengintai di sudut kerlingan
Sedarkah tuan kau ditatap insan
yang hauskan belaian

Diwajahmu kulihat bulan menerangi hati gelap rawan Biarlah daku mencari naungan di wajah damai rupawan Serasa tidada jauh dan mudah dicapai tangan Ingin hati menjangkau kiranya tinggi di awan Diwajahmu ku lihat bulan bersembunyi dibalik senyuman Jangan biarkan ku tiada berkawan Hamba menantikan tuan

THE WEAKEST LINK- THE GAME WE PLAY

It's amazing how some of us become an aggressor after a while being at the other end. Things are not working well at my work place. Three women joint forces and turn to the weakest link. The fifth woman remain neutral.

SEEING WITH THE THIRD EYE

I like to remind myself again:

"Actually, we do not "experience" our life; we experience the emotions resulting from our beliefs. Since we are certain that the events and people around us are the cause of our emtoions, the real cause - our beliefs - is ignored. We are continously comparing life to how we believe life whould be. What we call our experience of life is just our reaction to the on-going comparison." Richard Treadgold.

I was out all day and when I came home I forgot to check my voice mail messages. After buka puasa I continued to read Fatima Mernissi's book Beyond the Veil for the second time. I add this book to my Heavy Reading List because its content. I'm not only to stop and look up into a dictionary every two or three page, I have to stop reading to ponder over some serious issues she wrote.

Issues about the traditional Muslim view of women and their place in the social order, sex and marriage and regulations of female sexuality in the Muslims social order. The more I read about Muslims women issues from Muslim women pov the more I'm convinced, women opression in Muslim society is nothing to do with Islam teaching, but more about Muslim men controlling.

One of many popular topics that Muslim men love to talk at least from Malay pov is polygamy. Not even once I come across this writing in any form of writings back home:

Marriage by capture or purchase implies a structure of virilocal polygamy. This was a novel idea in the Prophets's time, as is evidence by his own inconsistent attitude towards it. Although he himself married thirteen women, had adamantly opposed Ali, his son-in-law, when the latter decided to contract a second marriage and thus provide Fatima, the Prophets's favourite daughter (who was not particularly known for her beauty), with unwelcome co-wife.

I will not allow Ali Ibn Abi Talib and I repeat
I will not allow Ali to marry another womean
except if he divorces my daughter. She is part
of me, and what harms her, harms me.

The Prophet appears to have known that it was harmful for a woman to share a husband. Another illustration provided by the Ansar, the Prophet's political supporters. They thought polymamy so degrading that urged one of their daughters, Leila Bint al-Khatim, not to marry the Prophet. They argued that she was too proud. She might get jealous and make trouble in the household of the Prophet and thus provoke tension between him and his allies.

A third example is that of the Prophets wife (or concubine) Rayhana, whom he is supposed to ahve divorced because she was too jealous to bear sharing him with her co-wives. He remarried her when she regained control over her feelings. But probably the most outstanding instance of rebellion against polygamy is that Amina, the Prophet's great-grandaughter. Whenever she contracted a marriage, she insisted on keeping total control. Before marrying Zaid Ibn Umar she set these conditions: "He will not touch another woman. He will not prevent her from spending his money, and will not oppose any decision she might make. Otherwise she will leave him.

No wonder in some Muslim countries they are so adamant about letting the girls go to school. Even if they did, these girls will not go beyond the basic reading. When we go to school we will learn to read. Reading open the many doors of learning.
Learning allows us to ask questions. Unfortunately, not all our questions will be answered. There is an education system that teach the students to memorize the contents of the books, and do not go beyond that.

IF NERVE COULD BE TOUCHED

I have to be honest with myself that I cannot work with children aged eight and above. I find myself come close to lose my cool the other day when Miguel came into the office. He asked me if he and his siblings could go to bed at 10:00 P.M.

I told him it’s past their bedtime and the next morning was a school day. As soon I said it, he asked again, “Can we go to bed at ten?” I was stunned. Did he understand what I had just said? “Your bed time is nine o’clock,” I reminded him and he knew it.

“Can we go to bed at 10:00?” He asked again for the third time. I’ve seen this game many times when he wants something from this mother. He repeats the question over and over again and the question turns into a whine. His mother would scream at him and rapidly cuss him in Spanish and English. He goes away, whining and throws himself on the couch.

I never seen the woman speaks in a low tone to any of her children. She's not the only women here who communicate to their children with screaming and cussing. They've been raised by their parents that way, and that's the only way they know how communicate.

Miguel stood in a doorway, leaving a little space between his body and the doorframe. “The other lady lets us stay until ten.”
“Miguel, did you hear what I’d just said?” He nodded his head. “Did you understand what it meant?” He nodded again. “But the other lady let us stay until 10:00.”

The staffs heard this trick before. We talked about it. Like mother like son. I wanted to see how far would he go with his game. I looked at him and he looked at me momentarily, and turned his head to his siblings in the living room. I kept my eyes on his face without saying anything, but a question swirled around my head, “Why don’t I just say no to him?”

Am I being professional here? This is exactly what we’ve discussed in the meeting last week. We share a similar experience with Miguel. He prods our nerves endlessly when he wants something. He expects to be yelled at when we say no. That is how he and his siblings get the answer every time they approach their mother. I’m trying to let him process the fact that ‘NO’ comes in different ways.

He is eleven years young. He has a determination to get what he wants the way he wants it. “So, we have to go to bed at 9:00?”
"You got it, Miguel."

I WONDER AS I WAIT

I never had a shower this fast. 10 minutes flat. My first thougt was to have a shower in the bath room in the main office, but I didn't want to leave the small office unattended.

When I came out of the bathroom, Jesus was lying on the couch watching cartoon on tv. Since they've been here I never seen him or his siblings have the books in their hands. All they do is watching tv. I wonder when they do their homeworks?

Last week, when the volunteers were here, Jesus was whining as usual. He said he did his homework in his room, and refused to show his finished work to a volunteer.
Carmen, the kid's mother didn't help much either. She falls asleep anywhere she lands her ass.
Jesus is 10 years old, 5' 3" tall, weight 180 lb, and he whines. His sister is way too big for an eleven year old girl too, and she sucks her thumb. Both of them are obese.

These kids are among thousands of inner city children that will fall into the cracks of failing education system. They are among thousands of the children of this city have become the victim of greedy politicians who have no idea what they are doing because they are from privilege world.

They send their children to an expensive private schools. They live in another world, the world they create for themselves and their honcos.

A SLICE OF LIFE

Place: outbound Red Line Train
Time 6:60 P.M

A Black kid sat opposite me. He had a backpack at his feet and he was reading a paperback, America After 1945 (After Hiroshima and Nagasaki). He was a fast reader.

A train stopped at South Station. A white man in a long light jacket boarded.He sat one seat away from the kid. His salt and pepper hair, heavy on salt matched his unkept eyebrows.
He turned as his neck was stiff a couple of times toward the black kid. He tried to peek at the book the kid's was reading. He succeeded in his third attempt when the kid turned the page. He looked hard and long at the kid. His instinct told him he was being watched. He looked up and our eyes met.
Forcing his smile, he quickly looked away and took out Wall Street Journal from his briefcase.
The kid looked up and asked the man, "Do you have a time?"
The man looked at the kid, snickered," Ask it from somebody else," he spat out the words.
When the train entered Downtown Crossing, the man fished out his pocket a handful oc changes. He took a quarter and turned to the kid, "I'll give you a quarter."
A frown crossed the kid's face, "Excuse me?" He looked at the quarter in the man's hand, and his expression changed. " I asked for a time."
The kid closed his book and stood up. The man shrunk and mumbled to himself. That son of a bitch never apologize.

Hip Hip Bonsai

Since I've been working 12 hours shift on and off for the past few weeks, I almost killed all my potted plants. This morning, as I was picking up my sweater under the heater, I felt the cold air rushed in through the crack of my bedroom window. I pulled the curtain to lock the window. If the wall is not made of bricks I would've banged my head against it when I saw what I left on the window sill.

Five stalks of my bamboo plants sat on the window sill, looking sad and whitered. When the temperature dropped into fourties last week, I removed all my plants from the kitchen and living room window sills.
I forgot about the plant I left on the bedroom window sill.
I could barely see the water, the hairy-like-roots curled up and shriveled. I tossed the sweater into the laundry basket which ended up on the knob of closet door. I took the plant in the glass vase to the kitchen.
I poured in some water from Brita pitcher, and gently shook the vase to loose the roots that stuck to the bottom of the vase.

Carefully I removed all the plants and cleaned the vase. I poured one third of the filtered water into the vase and put back the plant. This time I put it next to its twins on the floor next to the third bookshelf.
I'm glad I didn't bang my head against the wall. The plant was withered but not dead. Imagined if I did bang my head, I'd probably ended up with a headache if not a brain damage.

I use up the top of all my bookshelves, a refrigerator, a tiny space of my sewing table, a top of my old PCU, a top entertainment center and on the floor between EC and my current PCU. I make sure both of the terracota pots do not touch the PCU, but I think my plants do not like the idea of getting vibration from PCU.

Too bad I have no more room for a dwarf banana plant I saw at Home Depot last summer. I will get that plant as soon as we move to our house which will be on the ground.

Besides Money plants and bamboo, I have HipHip too. I bought HipHip two years ago at Home Depot. She is a beauty. Well, I'm not sure its gender, I suppose it's female because she has a female hips.
HipHip is my Bonsai plant from Hawaiian Umbrella family. It is an affordable Bonsai, not the three or four digits price kind of Bonsai. HipHip is doing great. She is pretty much growing by herself without getting much help from me.

I water her every week, and snip the brown leaves. I named her HipHip because the trunks shape like woman's hip, delicous curve at the right place. Hipliscous, I must say.

Last spring I went to see a Flower Show with Marylee. We skipped all the flowers and exotic plants booths. Our ultimate goal was to get to the Bonsai section. Both of us are Bonsai fans, but we are dirt poor to afford one. We hope to get one each with a reasonable price, between $20 to $30, if we ever got one.

We oohhhed... and aahhhhed admiring the beauty of the plants. Marylee circled the Japanese White Pine like a wolf cirling her victim. The gnarled trunk stood twelve inches tall. The branch grew heavily on one side, leaving the other side bare. We looked at the tag, it said the tree aged 75 years and price was $750.00. "Shit", muttered Marilee.

Marilee elbowed and pointed at the plant near the wall, "That's yours." It was Trident Maple. A spectacular sight I must say. Root-over Rock style, stood 6 inches. The roots looked like five legs spread over layers of rocks. On one inches trunk grew hundreds of tiny branches like the coral you see at the bottom of the ocean.

My heart almost stopped pumping the blood when I saw the price. $15.00!!! There must be a mistake here. I beckoned Marilee to check it out.
"Are you out of your fucking mind," Marylee chewed the words between her teeth,"Did you see the price?"

I almost dropped the damn Bonsai. I could my eyes deceived me? It was $1500.00. How could I eliminated the two zeros and moved the decimal point?

If Iqraq Means Read, Why Do We More Comfortable Listening Than Learning?

Iqraq was the first surah and I think most Muslim know what does Iqraq means? But why do we still left behind in many fields? Why do we still asking questions about the mundane issues instead of looking and searching for the answers by ourselves? Why do rely on experts to give us the answers when we can read and write.

Why do many of us swallow everything we hear from the experts and do not make an effort to make a research about what we learn? What happen to Iqraq. Later, these same people have an audacity to turn around and preach and judge the people they hardly know.

Eclipsing The Moon

Bundled up from head to toes freezing my ass, I stood outside to watch the moon eclipse. Tonight, When I left my house at 6:45 P.M, a large portion of moon was still visible.
When I got to work place 45 minutes later, one-third of the moon was covered by earth's shadow. As it said in a Lunar Eclipse journal, the reddish line around the shadow covered moon was visible.
I went inside to brew a hot coffee. I wanted to see the moment when the moon, earth and sun were aligned.

While looking at the moon, I thought about my mother back home. When she was about ten years old, she saw the moon eclipsed for the first time. When the moon was completely covered by earth's shadow, the villagers hit the chicken coops and the store where they kept their crops to chase away the bad spirits.
That was more than sixty years ago. We have come a long way.

Exactly at 8:06 as it said in the article, the earth's shadow covered the moon. The red sparkling ring around the moon shone. I could see it with my naked eyes. It was a speechless moment. I wished my mother was with me.