ramadan at harvard is very different than it was back home.
fasting was a much more intimate affair then. ours being one of just a handful of muslim families in the area, the four of us were normally the extent of each other’s company during the month, in the peak hours of the morning and right [...]
today i took a trip to dickson brothers’ hardware store in harvard square. before today, i don’t think i ever really acknowledged that it existed. like all other things though, my acknowledgment didn’t really matter, it existed just fine on its own finely tucked, or more plopped, between the many book stores and coffee shops [...]
what is a poem, and what are politics? who is a poet, and who is the politician? what constitutes poetry, and what makes similar words fashioned, something political?
these are the questions of the day. the first questions of a semester. the big questions that will begin to be answered by the smaller questions i and [...]
i just finished doing my laundry.
it’s a simple chore and sometimes i really appreciate the simple, mechanical aspect of folding my clothes. i am reminded of the mythic sisyphus, as painted by camus: an absurd man, who is condemned by the gods to roll a giant boulder up a hill only to have it roll [...]
an educated mind, i have realized, is simply a mind that can shop better than others.
this afternoon, in preparation for ramadan, we went shopping. we bought thousands of plates and forks and knives and napkins and…well, stuff, lots of stuff.
but we shopped discerningly; it was enlightened shopping. we made predictions of how much we would [...]
it was a carnival of days as i waded through the many modes of harvardania.
my first “mode” was the iop, the political mode some may call it, though i would suggest every mode is political. the institute of politics or rather its subset the harvard political union (hpu) is filled with talk of pragmatic propositions [...]
exactly seven days ago, i returned to a crazy cambridge for take three of “undergraduate education.” the characters were the same, though some minor ones will likely see less time on the set, the weather hasn’t changed much, mostly cloudy overcast, and most of the plot remains intact, i would estimate a good ninety percent.
but [...]