Day to re-meet

peace,

MashaAllah what a day!

I feel like I haven't blogged about what's going on around me much lately. This is bad. I did, after all, start this blog with the intention of recording the days, since I happen to have a faulty memory sometimes of how I felt and what really went down.

Today was a good day. Today I had occasion to do a lot of thinking, not all about positive things.

I started off by waking up supa-dupa early to make sweet potato pies from scratch, for my roomie to take with her back to her mama in Idaho. Her mother visited us about 5 weeks ago, with her younger sister. They were very very nice, and I was in an unhappy place at that point, so I didn't feel that I gave them the best reception. But the other day I made pies (which were gobbled up by us all) and so had the fabulous idea of making pies just for B.'s mama. Yay.

The reason pies are such a big deal is because I made them 1) completely by hand (no blenders and beaters for me, thanks) 2) completely from scratch, 3) without a recipe (that's right, I just did it by memory- and I haven't made potato pies in like a year) 4) using a technique that I just thought might turn out better. So MashaAllah pies, because I used a stick less butter, more eggs, and made a custard-like mix on the stove before mixing in the potatoes (if you've made potato pie before, you understand this) instead of just mixing it all together. It cut my baking time in half, resulted in a much flakier and less soggy crust, with no other noticeable effects on the taste. I did toss a lot of egg whites, but whacha gonna do. (Now that I think of it, I should've saved them for angel food cake. Bah!) Not to mention it was so tasty B. ate half a pie herself, several increments of which she ate for breakfast at different times. I'm happy about that.

Not so happy about the fact that I asked my mother for her recipe several times before, during, and after Ramadan, called HER several times, emailed her, and somehow never got it. No big deal except that this is one of a number of symptoms I've been noticing lately of something that I want to write about when it's not so late and I don't have to be up so early the next day: parent burnout. When your parents are as supportive as mine (and they're 'bout average), this is something you don't think of as a possibility, but man, between me and my youngest brother I think my moms is worn out. Like I said, I've been thinking about this, and this is just a reminder to myself to write about it later. It really is a whole post in itself.

But anyway.

I then proceeded to go do an interpretation. That gave me another chance to think. I was interpreting for a speech therapist and the mother of two young boys, the oldest of whom wasn't speaking at just over 2 years old. In any language. Eeeeechhh so much legalese went down in there- I seriously spent half the session reading documents to the mother so she could sign them. She didn't have a SSN, neither did the child's father, and the mother guarded the kids' ss cards like solid gold, yo. She didn't want to list any addresses on the forms. And her second child was clearly more advanced than her first in terms of vocalization and social interactions. Meanwhile, she's in a subsistence level apartment that, while picked up, had filthy carpet, a bed in the living room, and no color at all. It wasn't that I felt pity for this woman, because there really wasn't room for that. More like, I felt the precariousness of the situation- I mean, I was there because she'd managed to obtain care for her child, and it wasn't even in a language she spoke, read, or understood- and I know that she's one of the lucky ones.
It reinforced my feeling that I need to be a Educator-Midwife (CNM, of course, just because they're treated better by institutions in this region), that it's soooo needed, especially from someone with my linguistic skills.

Spent the day at work but thinking more than working.

Annnnnd then I got to Alma Mater just in time to miss my Arabic class. Not to worry, though, my teacher and the founder of the (free, revolutionary) language program ran into me as I decided to eat and then go pray at the musallah, so we had a good conversation. I want to go into this in more detail, but it's soooo late... tomorrow, insha'Allah. Suffice it to say that when I knew I was walking onto campus late, and as I have lately, I just had this feeling that I was going to be more anonymous than I had been since my first days as freshman. Totally false feeling, even these years later I still ran into some familiar faces, including EBrowne, who was part of WordUp!, this student group that was a very cool Christian equivalent to MSA but with more scripture and less social issues (I digress...), and talked to her. That got me thinking some more. About what, I'll have to say later.


But, yeah, so, I'm still here, still thinking, and I have a lot to discuss. I'll be back. 'Eid Mubarak to those I haven't seen or talked to since, man how fast the month went! I hope you had excellent celebrations, and I'm looking forward to hearing allllll about them. And congrats to Sherry- she's posted vid of her very cute nephew, masha'Allah.

peace
TwennyTwo