It’s never a good idea to critique a story at 12:30 am when you’ve got a frozen shoulder from being on the computer too long and you’re exhausted and downright cranky. Increasingly I have been getting pleas for help from aspiring authors and darn it, I can still remember what it felt like to be […]

The weight has been gained and regrets and recriminations are slowly making the rounds inside my skull. “If only you’d been less of a glutton! You could have kept the weight  you lost during Ramadan off!” They’re telling me. Having Ramadan in the middle of summer has left me feeling quite disoriented. Feels like I blinked […]

and feeling rundown. Must be that I’m simply doing too much. On Saturday night I couldn’t sleep because I was running a list of all the things I needed to do in the morning in my head. Sunday was Eid and I was expecting up to a hundred guests. I guess that would freak anyone […]

I saw the moon from one of the upstairs windows last night. It’s waning. Reached full last weekend I think, and now it’s getting smaller and smaller and soon it will disappear for a few nights to be reborn. Kind of like how life goes. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly the month […]

The Arabic word ‘barakat’ is loosely translated as ‘blessing’ in English, but unfortunately the word blessing does not connote all the intricacies of the meaning of barakat. I’m no Arabic scholar, but from my understanding the term barakat has to do with blessings of plenty, abundance, providence. And it comes down to whether or not […]