what brought me to a life of honesty

once, a long time ago, i stole some quarters from my mom’s purse.

i had so many in my fist, I could barely close it.

as I was walking up the staircase in our house, there was the inevitable soft clink of sweaty quarters slipping around in my greedy tight fist. My father, the shrewdly honest, figured out in a lightening flash what was up, and demanded that i reveal what i was so desperately trying to hide within my childish grip.

when my fingers slowly unfurled, like albino spider legs, he kneeled down and cried at the thought of his daughter, the thief.

i never stole anything again.

my favorite person of the week

i just recently (and BELATEDLY) discovered the beauty of the thinking and writing of Amartya Sen, nobel prize winner, economist and visionary

check out his autobiography: http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/1998/sen-autobio.html

eerie...........

You Are Likely a First Born

At your darkest moments, you feel guilty. At work and school, you do best when you're researching. When you love someone, you tend to agree with them often. In friendship, you are considerate and compromising. Your ideal careers are: business, research, counseling, promotion, and speaking. You will leave your mark on the world with discoveries, new information, and teaching people to dream.

The Birth Order Predictor

the states i've visited are in red

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

countries i've visited

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands


well.. unfortunately, i wasn't able to limit the red to just the cities i went to... so it makes my travel look more extensive than it actually was...

thought i'd share

a favorite poem of mine:

anyone lived in a pretty how town
by E. E. Cummings


anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

how to flirt

http://www.sirc.org/publik/flirt.html

my newest way of procrastinating................

which, by the way, is one of my 43 things... to stop procrastinating.

go figure...

varanasi

varanasi... a place i haven't yet been....

Room to Read

This year, I decided my birthday gift to myself, (albeit a humble one since I don't have too many funds right now), would be to give money to a charitable cause.

After doing some research on the internet, I found Room to Read which seems to me a fascinating and worthy organization. Also, it's a good match for someone who's a bit of a book-a-holic, such as me.

Here's what they do, in their own words:

"Room to Read seeks to intervene early in the lives of children and help provide them with an education and the lifelong gift of literacy.

"To increase the likelihood for success, Room to Read enlists community involvement. Our challenge grants require villages to raise a significant portion of the overall expenditure (through donated land, labor, materials and cash) for building a new school, thereby allowing our cash investments to go further so that we can help more villages. We also establish libraries, computer labs and language labs in conjunction with schools whereby they contribute shelves, desk, and chairs. Our challenge grants act as catalysts for community building while also maximizing the local participation and expertise brought to our programs to ensure they are run efficiently and effectively."

i can't believe i actually hit send on the following email

... and yet it's such a satisfying feeling. The below email was emailed to a lady running a matchmaking bureau in Gujarat, who periodically sends me emails (addressed to my father, even though it's blatantly obvious that it's my email address to which she's mailing them!) listing the particulars of gentlemen who are interested in my biodata.

I hope I don't sound too catty. That wasn't my intention. Just that, how are all these men, (Weight: 55 Kgs.) going to be interested in anything about me, other than my U.S. citizenship?
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Sat, 5 Nov 2005 20:08:25 -0800 (PST)
From: "yesha n." View Contact Details Add Mobile Alert
Subject: Re: Matrimonial
To: (email deleted for privacy)

Dear Mrs. Shah,
My name is Yesha; thank you so much for forwarding
these ads to me. I have two concerns, however.

One is that I currently need to lose a lot of weight.
(My current weight is 60+ kilograms.) To be very frank
and realistic, I don't think men who are very thin and
short will be attracted to me...

Second is that, as I grew up in the U.S. and I care
more about being able to communicate well with, and be
attracted to a prospective mate, than I do about their
family background...

Would it be possible to know more about their
knowledge of English and of literature?

Many thanks,
Yesha

blah, blah, blah

everything is blah blah blah, here in this overheated, overinsulated apartment in north jersey.
:(

bronchitis, laryngitis, cross-country flight, fever, chills, sweats, no sleep and the GRE (!)

wanted to share that, despite having gone through, in rapid succession: bronchitis, laryngitis, cross-country flight, fever, chills, sweats, and no sleep, I still managed to get to the GRE test center in time today, and, more importantly, did okay... well, at least on the verbal and math part. (the analytical writing section won't be scored for another two to three weeks... but i'm hopeful that i'll have more than a zero score... ha ha.)

my verbal score was better than my math (surprise, surprise...)

(740 verbal... 530 or 520 math-- can't remember, as everything from this morning is in a best-forgotten fog... except for the fact that they allowed me to take cough drops in with me as long as they were pre-unwrapped before heading into the testing room--thank goodness, for the sake of the other test takers, as well as for my poor throat)

okay, so the math isn't that great, but honestly, it's an improvement from the scores I got on the practice tests I took!

anyway, glad it's over...

now.
have to decide where to apply to school. and for what.
(well... have already given that some thought, but it still needs some more.)

thanks for listening!

uh oh....

the alternate title i was thinking of for this post is, "... now the fun begins..."

my twelve yr old niece (friend's child) just emailed me the following forward. hmmm........

>HOW TO TELL IF A GUY LIKES YOU:
>
>1. The guy will be extremely nice to you.
>2. He will tell you that you did something good, even when
>you did it horribly.
>3. He might make fun of you.
>4. He will want to be your best friend.
>5. He might complement you on something normal like, your
>hair, even if you wear it that way everyday.
>6. He will stick up for you.
>7. He will start hanging out with your friends.
>8. He will flirt with you.
>9. He will call you for no good reason.
>10. He will make eye contact with a serious look on his face.
>
>
>HOW TO TELL IF A GIRL LIKES YOU:
>
>1. They always talk about the different kind of guys they
>COULD have.
>2. They stare at you with a smile on their face and won't
>look away until you do first.
>3. They ALWAYS seem to be talking about how nice or cute
>you are.
>4. They laugh at all your jokes, no matter how stupid they are.
>5. They will ask you who you like, continuously.
>6. They talk to your friends about you a lot.
>7. They always are flirting with every other guy, except you.
>8. They always try to make you jealous.
>9. They beg you to do everything for them.
>10. They always ask you what to do in a bad situation.

something i learned about today at the NY Folklore Societies Writng Folklore Conference

Bernadette Mayer's self published book _Utopia_, which she gave away for free, when she discovered that bookstores could not sell it.

http://home.jps.net/~nada/mayer11.htm

got to hear and meet kirin narayan!

in 1994 or 1995 perhaps, an acquaintance (actually a very handsome man of the what-I-thought-of-then as the advanced age of 29, and upon whom I had a huge not-to-be-requited crush) mentioned to me that i would enjoy reading Kirin Narayan's book _Love Stars and All that_

new to the bay area as i was then, and having this aforementioned unrequited crush on this handsome fellow, I picked up the book as soon as i found a copy. and fell in love with this sweet, irreverent, romantic and yet realistic novel by a woman who was a former berkeley academic.

tonight i finally got to hear, and subsequently meet and speak to Kirin herself, at the New York Folklore Society's annual field trip (like a mini conference) up in Tarrytown, NY.

first of all, she read about 10 pages from a memoir she's working on. it was great. about her family, especially her relationship with her brother Rahul, when she was growing up the youngest of four children in a biracial family on Juhu Beach in Bombay. I was riveted... there were times when i was just so excited about the kinds of things she was writing about, that she was reading, and also by the fact that i actually was lucky enough to have the opportunity to listen, that actually became a bit lightheaded, and with a big goofy grin plastered on my face.

and then, afterwards, i got to speak to her... can i even believe, she actually even thanked me for a comment i had made upon a question she asked the audience...

needless to say, i'm a bit giddy right now, so not making much sense.

more later!

september breezes

... i stepped out of the house, on my way back to the car, to pick up a bag of cookies and salad dressing pressed upon me (so sweetly that i could hardly refuse, though i hardly know what to do with so much food now that i am no longer at the bustop coop) by the kind ladies of the New York folklore society (yes, i know... random... but anyway--that's another post...)

as i was saying i stepped back out of the house to go to the car, parked on the sidelawn in front of the two-story, two-family house on First Street, of which my parents rent the top floor. As i stepped out, i noticed something i hadn't noticed before. the breeze.

deceptively like a bay area breeze... so like a bay area breeze, that just for a moment, i forgot what the coolness of the breeze means, here in New Jersey. i was lulled into thinking this is right, this is normal, this is just how weather is.

But. Here the coolness doesn't mean business as usual, weather as usual, with the nights cool and the days less cool, as it does in the bay area. here it means: september is here, really here, maybe a few weeks late, (despite what the calendar says) but here, bringing with it cool days, bringing with it fall, bringing with it, maybe sooner, maybe later, but definitely bringing colors to the leaves, a briskness to the air, a crisp something, that, while now it mimics (or seems to, to my bay-area honed senses) the bay area breeze, it's much less an everyday than it is a harbinger... harbinger of the change... the thing that, more than anything else, I've been drawn to the east coast for... that autumn season. the fall has always been my favorite season, growing up here in jersey. then it seemed inevitable to me that trees should become glorious for a few weeks, maybe a month each fall... but for the past eleven years, i forewent (or was it forsook) the fall, in favor of the hot days of September and October in the Bay (well-earned, of course, after the cold, fog-ridden days of July in San Francisco)

But now. the breezes blow here in NJ... and stressed though I have been by this move, by the idea, even if it's not to be permanent, of giving up my beloved bay, its culture, mountains, and yes, even its fog (foolish that i am, i get teary-eyed thinking about the fog fingers, rushing, galloping down twin peaks) even so.... here is the silver lining... giving up fog for fall...

2 a.m. in Jersey

just been looking at my last few entries. it's been a long time, and so much has happened. can't even hope to catch up, not really. so won't try.

just suffice it to say, it's friday night/sat morning now, depending on how you look at it, and i've been in NJ since Wed morning. i've moved here. well. not here, here. not to jersey. but to the east coast general ny nj area. am in a limbo right now. don't know where i'll end up when. life is open a bit too, maybe, just maybe. but it's good too... so many possibilities. so much responsibility to pick the right ones, to make the right choices, each choice leading so irrevocably to the next.

hope to be moving to ny soon. maybe even by the end of this weekend, depending on my friends' schedules.... I'm moving in with some friends in Queens. long story, but they're letting me stay there till i figure things out. very generous of them and i'm tongue tied just thinking of it. ashamed to be taking the generosity being offered to me. and yet grateful.

i will try to write more soon.

on the subject of Work and Life

despite the heavy title, i'm not going to get too deep here... Just a note to say that, since quitting, I've been thinking (or trying to--tho at times the mercurial mind evades being pinned down to think in much the same way as runaway mercury from a broken old-fashioned thermometer)... anyway, as i was saying have been thinking alot on this topic...

If you know me well, you know that one of my tools for thinking is reading... and writing too. So I picked up a book last week that is helping me with this thinking process... though at times it has me in a whirlwind of too many ideas, as I can hardly put this book down. It's called _What should I do with my life?_ by Po Bronson...

And then today, Priya emailed me this:

Why Do You Work So Hard? Is it maybe time to quit your safe job and follow your path and infuriate the establishment?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, July 8, 2005 now part of stylesheet -->

Printable Version
Email This Article
Mark Morford
ArchivesSubscribe to Notes & ErrataSubscribe to RSS FeedWho is this guy?
Why Do You Work So Hard? - Is it maybe time to quit your safe jo...07/08/2005
The Great Tom Cruise Backlash - Will this annoying phase pass, o...07/06/2005
Burn, Canada And Spain, Burn! - Look to the skies, see the wrath...07/01/2005
Keep Your Foul Paws Off Aslan - Will Disney butcher "The Chronic...06/29/2005
There remains this enormous and wicked sociocultural myth. It is this: Hard work is all there is.
Work hard and the world respects you. Work hard and you can have anything you want. Work really extra super hard and do nothing else but work and ignore your family and spend 14 hours a day at the office and make 300 grand a year that you never have time to spend, sublimate your soul to the corporate machine and enjoy a profound drinking problem and sporadic impotence and a nice 8BR mini-mansion you never spend any time in, and you and your shiny BMW 740i will get into heaven.
This is the American Puritan work ethos, still alive and screaming and sucking the world dry. Work is the answer. Work is also the question. Work is the one thing really worth doing and if you're not working you're either a slacker or a leech, unless you're a victim of BushCo's budget-reamed America and you've been laid off, and therefore it's OK because that means you're out there every day pounding the pavement looking for work and honing your resume and if you're not, well, what the hell is wrong with you?
Call it "the cafe question." Any given weekday you can stroll by any given coffee shop in the city and see dozens of people milling about, casually sipping and eating and reading and it's freakin' noon on a Tuesday and you're like, wait, don't these people work? Don't they have jobs? They can't all be students and trust-fund babies and cocktail waitresses and drummers in struggling rock bands who live at home with their moms.
Of course, they're not. Not all of them, anyway. Some are creative types. Some are corporate rejects. Some are recovering cube slaves now dedicated full time to working on their paintings. Some are world travelers who left their well-paying gigs months ago to cruise around Vietnam on a motorcycle before returning to start an import-export business in rare hookahs. And we look at them and go, What is wrong with these people?
It's a bitter duality: We scowl at those who decide to chuck it all and who choose to explore something radical and new and independent, something more attuned with their passions, even as we secretly envy them and even as our inner voices scream and applaud and throw confetti.
Our culture allows almost no room for creative breaks. There is little tolerance for seeking out a different kind of "work" that doesn't somehow involve cubicles and widening butts and sour middle managers monitoring your e-mail and checking your Web site logs to see if you've wasted a precious 37 seconds of company time browsing blowfish.com or reading up on the gay marriage apocalypse.
We are at once infuriated by and enamored with the idea that some people can just up and quit their jobs or take a leave of absence or take out a loan to go back to school, how they can give up certain "mandatory" lifestyle accoutrements in order to dive back into some seemingly random creative/emotional/spiritual endeavor that has nothing to do with paying taxes or the buying of products or the boosting of the GNP. It just seems so ... un-American. But it is so, so needed.
Case in point No. 1: I have this sister. She is deep in medical school right now, studying to be a naturopathic doctor at Bastyr University just outside Seattle, the toughest school of its kind in the nation, and the most difficult to get into, especially if you've had no formal medical training beforehand, as my sister hadn't.
She got in. She bucked all expectation and thwarted the temptation to quit and take a well-paying corporate job and she endured the incredibly brutal first year and rose to the top of her class. Oh and by the way, she did it all when she was over 40. With almost no money. While going through an ugly, debt-ridden divorce.
Oh you're so lucky that you have the means to do that, we think. I'd love to do that but I can't because I have too many a) bills b) babies c) doubts, we insist. We always think such lives are for others and never for ourselves, something people with huge chunks of cash reserves or huge hunks of time or huge gobs of wildly ambitious talent can do. It is never for us.
And truly, this mind-set is the national plague, a fate worse than death.
And while it must be acknowledged that there are plenty who are in such dire financial or emotional circumstances that they simply cannot bring change, no matter how much they might wish it, you still always gotta ask: How much is legit, and how much is an excuse born of fear?
The powers that be absolutely rely on our lethargy, our rampant doubts, the attitude that says that it's just too difficult or too impracticable to break away. After all, to quit a bland but stable job, to follow your own path implies breaking the rules and asking hard questions and dissing the status quo. And they absolutely cannot have that.
Case in point No. 2: I have a young and rather brilliant S.O., a specialist in goddesses and mystics and world religions, who is right now working on a book, a raw funky spirituality "anti-guide" for younger women. She took a six-month leave of absence from a very decent, reliable, friendly administrative job so as to focus on the creation of this project.
And while she has no trust fund, she does have the "luxury" of small parental loans to help her through, though it hardly matters: Giving up her respectable gig was insanely stressful and wracked with doubt. Leave a honest job? Give up paid health care? Have no reliable source of income for months on end? Trade calm stability for risk and random chance? No way, most people say. And of course, it was the absolute best choice she could've made. Time instantly became more fluid and meaningful. Mental clutter vanished. Possibility grinned.
Case in point No. 3: Not long ago, the CEO of one of the largest and most powerful international real estate firms in the nation quit his job. Stepped down. Not, as you might imagine, for retirement and not to play more golf and not to travel the world staying only in Four Seasons suites, but to work on rebuilding his relationship with his estranged wife.
My insider source tells me it was one of the most touching, and unexpected, and incredibly rare corporate memos they had ever seen. No one -- I mean no one in this culture is supposed to quit a job like that just for, what again? Love? Relationship? It's simply not done. But of course, it absolutely should be.
We are designed, weaned, trained from Day 1 to be productive members of society. And we are heavily guilted into believing that must involve some sort of droning repetitive pod-like dress-coded work for a larger corporate cause, a consumerist mechanism, a nice happy conglomerate.
But the truth is, God, the divine true spirit loves nothing more than to see you unhinge and take risk and invite regular, messy, dangerous upheaval. This is exactly the energy that thwarts the demons of stagnation and conservative rot and violent sanctimonious bloody Mel Gibson-y religion, one that would have all our work be aimed at continuously patching up our incessant potholes of ugly congenital guilt, as opposed to contributing to the ongoing orgiastic evolution of spirit.
It is not for everyone. It implies incredibly difficult choices and arranging your life in certain ways and giving up certain luxuries and many, many people seemed locked down and immovable and all done with exploring new options in life, far too deeply entrenched in debts and family obligations and work to ever see such unique light again. Maybe you know such people. Maybe you are such people.
But then again, maybe not. This is the other huge truism we so easily forget: There is always room. There are always choices we can begin to make, changes we can begin to invite, rules we can work to upset, angles of penetration we can try to explore. And if that's not worth trying, well, what is?
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Subscribe to this column here
Mark's column archives are here
The RSS feed for Mark's column is here
Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin'-new SF Gate Culture Blog
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.

monday morning

it's monday. have been not working now since june 16th... but it doesn't seem that long... maybe because my first two weeks off, i went to jersey...

yesterday i went to see Khaled and Cheb i Sabbah at the free Stern Grove Concert. Along with me were Nisha, Betsy, Sandhya, and her bro.

I especially cheered when Khaled sang "Aisha," which i remember only too well from the old El Rio days... remember those? (well, at this point, I guess this is directed to Parisa and Sarah, as other suspects have long moved on...)

Why is it that we prefer our favorite singers to sing the old favorites rather than introducing us to their new music, which they must more excited about?

ohio, by way of New Jersey

June 24-27, pappa and i drove the 9+ hours from nj to oHIo... it was a bow with several strings, as pappa had a wedding to attend, and we both had friends in the area. childhood friend pranav and spouse mytheli have just recently moved there with their adorable daughter meena. it was wonderful to spend time with pranav, mytheli, meena, and pappa... we talked each night till 1 a.m. or longer! As you can see here, pappa and pranav had a great reunion of silliness, too!