Come to this street with
only your sweet fragrance.
Don't walk into this river
wearing a robe!
Paths go from here to there,
but don't arrive from somewhere!
It's time now to live naked.
-Rumi

SHE: Don't you have a boyfriend in London?
ME: No.
SHE: Oh - do you have a girlfriend?
ME: No.
SHE: Don't you want one of those? Or both?
ME: Can't say I'd object.
SHE: Well, you're still young! How old are you?
ME: Twenty-eight.
SHE: Oh. You're not young.

Ah, that is clever. I love it. Not because it offers the merest scrap of evidence against the idea of "Aparthied Israel" but because it points out the hypocrisy of those who object to a discriminatory social/political system not because they believe in equality but because they want to be the ones doing the discriminating.

( Read more... )

Long-time readers may remember ArabSoc Guy (ASG) whom I met some years back. He is one of the most intellectually pleasing people I know, in part because we disagree a lot and his outrageous intelligence means I have to work HARD to contradict him. We had lunch today and then watched the Battle of Algiers. He finds me both attractive and repellent ( Read more... )

Via shanmonster, a section of a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks ( Read more... )

Oh sure, al-Jazeera, let's all pretend Mizrahi Jews have never existed and every last bit of Middle Eastern culture comes from non-Jewish Arabs ( Read more... )

I was having a conversation with someone last week who approved of having lovers outside one's main relationship because a partnership is just too intimate and too long-term to be adequately exciting. Seeing a partner every day, seeing her when she's ill...all this deadens the romance a bit, he said. A solution is to have a lover and keep her in a ( Read more... )

Now, when he and I meet, after all these years ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

List at least five songs that have been getting unreasonable amounts of play time lately on your musical device of choice. For me ( Read more... )