A friend from palestine has come to live with me for the last week. We have talked about Palestine and the affairs of his village, their troubles with the Israeli settlers, how the settlers set fire to farmers' wheat fields and olive tree groves, how they shot a man in the next village over. We talked of Egypt and its elections, of Syria and the horrors of the Assad regime. We talked about how coming to America from Palestine makes life seem like a dream. Everything is so safe, stable and easy. Your mind and heart refuse to believe that it's real.

Three days ago pro-regime henchmen killed 49 children in the Syrian village of Houla; they stabbed them with knives, strangled them with their bare hands. Three days ago we cursed them for their depravity. Two days ago we shook our heads at the callousness and indifference of the world. Today we have a barbeque planned on the porch, a swimming outing scheduled at noon. We are laughing in the dining room, and joking in the hall. We fret about the chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon.
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1: Humanity is abhorrent.
2: Why do you say that?
1: We invent morality to distinguish right from wrong, we praise knowledge as the conduit to translate morality into concrete action in the world, but when circumstance requires us to choose between morality and comfort or contentment, we don't even attempt the difficult choice. We sidestep it. We thump our chests and put forth a righteous face without righteous action.
2: Do you hate yourself so much?
1: I don't. I hate our weakness. I hate our hypocrisies. And don't change the topic here.
2: I'm not. Everything you say is true. But you seem to me like a person who wants to change the world. And maybe you can change the world out of hate for yourself, but it is nothing compared to what you can do when you work to change things out of love for the world.
1: How can I love something that is so broken as this?
2: In a broken world, everything ever worth loving is broken as well. So if you have loved even once in your life, you can love again, and you can love the world.

Time seems to move faster as you get older. It slips away from us too easily.

That's why you should be careful not to blink as you go about your daily business--shopping at the grocery store, commuting to work, taking the garbage out, brushing your teeth with your reflection in the bathroom mirror--you must never blink, or time might slip away from you entirely.

"I'm looking forward to seeing my woman again after all these months. I think she feels pressured by it, though. I was talking to her on the phone last night, and she said, '[in poor falsetto voice] Oh, how can you look at me? I'm so old, and fat.'

"And I told her, hey, sweetheart, honey, I'm not having sex with a body, I'm making love to you."

--My former neighbor Jim

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Jim is a tough, fat, earthy 55 year-old grandfather of three with a bad back, bad knees, and a soft heart, who has spent his entire life working as a general contractor, and who would spit high philosophy in the evenings while he smoked his cigarettes on our stoop.

When I was a kid in junior high I swore a solemn oath to myself that I would never stop finding farts funny.

It wasn't that farts were the creme de la creme of humor. Even in junior high I knew there was funnier stuff than farts. It was just that adults, the responsible ones at least, never allowed themselves to laugh at them. I remember once my mom or dad passed wind while we were all in the car, and neither of them laughed or said anything. They seemed so sad and pathetic to me then, sitting there stiffly in silence, like there wasn't a stink in the air.

What the hell, I thought. Are adults so uptight and humorless that they can't laugh at something as universally funny as farts?

I pretty much held that view from junior high through college and beyond, until a few years ago something happened that changed my mind. I watched my grandfather physically deteriorate slowly from old-age, and then rapidly from cancer. He lost the strength to walk to the bathroom on his own, to lift his pants up so we walked him to the bathroom, we pulled his pants up for him, he lost the ability to sense when he had to go to the bathroom, he wet his pants, so we got him diapers, he lost the ability to remember, so we sat by his hospital bed and reminded him of who we were and who he was.

It made me realize that, as transcendent as the human mind and spirit can be, ultimately none of us escape the indignities of our bodies until the very end. And in some sense,if we accept their inevitability, they cease to be indignities. Sometimes my grandfather was embarrassed, but we were never embarrassed for him or of him. It was just... a part of his life.

Neways. I got to thinking, maybe I was wrong about what transpired in the silence and the foul air between my parents that day in our car. Maybe it wasn't some humorless sense of propriety that kept them from laughing at farts, maybe I just hadn't learned what they'd already known all along: that farts are a part of life.
--Deep Thoughts by Brian

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Or I guess it could've also been their humorless sense of propriety. We are asian, afterall.

“They call it falling in love because you get this feeling in the pit of your stomach like you've just jumped off a cliff. And if it's unrequited love, that feeling never goes away---you're just falling and falling and falling until eventually you think you're just going to die. Now, if it's requited love, if it's reciprocated, you're still jumping off the cliff, but someone else is jumping off with you. It's like instead there's this great chasm between the two of you, and you jump off the cliff and into the chasm at the same time with the belief that if the two of you meet in the middle, you will fly.” 
--19 year old Me

[resurrected and reconstructed from a late night conversation with Matt R in the shadowed living room of the D Family]

Muslims: weird people who don't fit in, don't belong, suspected of doing strange, blasphemous things behind closed doors, bullied at school, sometimes made to feel ashamed of their identity, and in response other times obnoxiously proud of their identity, fearful of discrimination in public, in the workplace, fearful of hate crimes while walking down the street, while in their home, denied the fundamental right to be treated equally by the law of the land due to a national politics fueled by a discourse of hostility, distrust and bigotry. 

Gays:

Of all the gifts I've been given in my life none are as dear to me as love.

There are few villains in real life and the ones in stories are proxies for the more mundane evils of ordinary people.
Atrocity does not require depravity. All it requires is a roomful of ordinary people doing ordinary things and none of them with the courage to stand up and say, No.

Some days all I want is to squeeze every last drop of life out of time---to sing at the top of my lungs, off key and off beat, to watch clouds migrate across the sky in constantly changing forms like half-made creatures suspended in God's mind's eye, to dance like no one's watching (preferably while in fact no one is watching), to climb a mountain, swim in a lake, to watch ants rearrange the pebbles around their home and, with little twigs, to assist them with their enormous tasks, to tell people that I love them, or better yet to show them that I love them, to be joyful, to be sad, to be heartbroken, to fall in love, to be dreadfully serious, and to laugh at myself for my seriousness, to fall quiet and be still and feel time like the water of a river running through my bones and destined for some fathomless eternal sea.

Eventually all rivers run dry. All created things come to their end. And meanwhile here I sit like an enraptured clown on the riverbanks trying foolishly but blissfully to count every passing drop.

alhamdulillah

When I die, I want to know I tried my best to help people however I could, to cultivate love with people wherever I found it, and to worship Allah as best as I knew how.

And if death overtakes me early and suddenly, I hope I am not caught in a moment of ungratefulness for the gift of my existence.
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It's okay if it turns out I'm not nearly as resolute as my resolutions require me to be. But I figure I might as well aim for my best.