I need a week or so away from the Internet.  Or, specifically, from blogs.

So, if you have a blog, I don’t hate you, I haven’t unsubscribed, you are still 100 degrees of awesome.  I just have some stuff I have to do.

[Write something about how I need to reorganize my entire house and bills and life because I cannot see straight due to the clutter that has accumulated over the past fifteen months.  Husband, beware, I'm going to purchase refill tape for my label maker, file folders and more whiteboards tomorrow and thus life with your crazy super organized wife will resume shortly.]

Anyway, I’ll be back here and at your places in about a week or so.

I will still be on twitter and Facebook because, my God, there’s no need to get crazy and turn into the unibomber.

[Reminder to the uninitiated: Yes, I know, Muslim bloggers should not use the word "bomb" on their blogs.  Even when trying to be funny.  But me?  I like to thumb my nose at the establishment. Bring on the body scans!]

In the meantime, let me tell you about how this weekend, my mom gave me my childhood in a box.  You know, kindergarten certificates and newspaper clippings, etc.  It was a strange thing because, well, I just thought she’d want to keep that stuff forever and ever because she loves me so much.

But, apparently, she, too, is sick of the clutter.  The clutter of my childhood.  Sob.  She didn’t say it, but I swear as she handed me the box, I heard her voice boom “My job here is done” in my head.

Anyway, in this box was a paper written by a psychologist who had the joyful task of evaluating me for gifted classes when I was twelve years old.  I had not, until this weekend, actually seen the written results of this evaluation, but had only heard them.

Mostly in the context of, “You are way too smart to be getting crappy grades like this.”

Now, please, I’m not going to get annoying and share the actual results with you because most of you already know I’m very smart.  Haha.  No, but, really, I am.  And I actually have documentation, now.

However,  I do want to share the following excerpt with you, my dear, non-judgey friends:

“Faiqa appeared to be highly motivated to do well.  On occasion her anxiety about doing well probably had somewhat of a negative effect on her performance.”

You know what?  That information?  Would have been NICE TO KNOW twenty two years ago.  Correction, twenty two years, three thousand self help books, three majors, one husband and two kids ago.

Because that’s what it took to get me to realize that it is not the gold stars and head pats that matter, but that life’s real joy resides in the things you actually do in life and how you feel while you are doing them.  We do things because they feel right and good and honest.

Gold stars are for gunners, not winners.  In the end, a gold star doesn’t make laying your head down at night any easier or fill one’s heart up with a sense of completeness.  A gold star just tells you that someone else thinks you’re doing a good job.  You have to think you’re doing a good job, in the end, that’s what matters.

Life lesson:  A good job is the one you enjoy.  Gold star optional.

Still, yeah, it would have been awesome to know that when I was twelve.

I absolutely don’t want anything to be different, of course.

I’m just saying that some of those self help books were a real pain to read.

And it would be nice to get that money back because I have a lot of label maker refill tape to buy.

See you in a week.  Or so.

For the past two years, I’ve only read a handful of new books.  For some reason, I just kept reading books that I had already read, over and over again.

I think it might have played out this way because I, for one reason or another, felt that my life was getting increasingly chaotic.  Reading the same books comforted me.  In life, I’m not sure what’s going to happen next, but I know that in the last third of Mistry’s A Fine Balance, I’m going to start shaking my head at the mess that is humankind.  Or that somewhere in the last fifty pages of the The Deathly Hallows, I’m going to weep like a runner up for prom queen.

The point is, last week, I put an end to all this.  I decided it’s time to read new books by authors I’ve never considered, in genres that, until now, I’ve either ignored or rolled my eyes at.  Because predictability, while comforting, does not leave a whole lot of room for expansion of the mind, soul or wit.

Recent post pregnancy weight aside, I’m feeling the need to be expansive these days.

So, I went crazy and bought a slew of books and have neatly placed them in a stack on my nightstand.  A reminder, if you will, about my renewed commitment to live outside of my comfort zone.

I was about seven or eight when I got my first library card.  I remember the excitement, the expectation, and the inevitable joy of finding new treasures of wisdom, laughter or tears in each book I brought home.  I feel like that again when I look at the stack.

Here’s an excerpt from what I read today:

He tapped irritably at a control panel.  Trillian quietly moved his hand before he tapped anything important.  Whatever Zaphod’s qualities might include — dash, bravado, conceit — he was mechanically inept.  He could easily blow up the ship with an extravagant gesture.  Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did. (62)

I sort of love that last line.  Can you guess what I’m reading?  It shouldn’t be too hard since they made a movie based on it just a few years ago.  Have you read this book?  What did you think of it?

Also, I read very, very fast, so that stack of four or five books is going to be gone in about a week or two.  In the past, I’ve limited myself to classical works, literary fiction, memoirs, personal/spiritual development, history, “ethnic” literature, some young adult and Harry Potter.

I’m trying out other genres, what might you suggest?

Back when I took History of the Old South, somebody brought up the topic of whether Florida is really part of “The South.”

I never knew this was a topic for debate until that moment. I grew up in the Florida, and, yes, ma’am, why I do consider myself a Southerner.

I mean, sort of.  Minus the legacy of racial tension. Hey, my people were chilling out and drinking lassis when all that nonsense was going down.

Anyway, this past weekend, we went to Savannah for my birthday and as I munched on some of the best fried green tomatoes a human being has ever eaten, I started thinking about that question, “Is Florida really the South?”

I suppose you could define it in terms of the Civil War. Confederate state? Check.

Or whether people have an accent. Most people who grew up here say “Y’all,” “Yes, Ma’am” and “No, sir,” and have a tendency to drop the last letters of their words, as in “goin’ ” or “surfin’.”  Check.

South of the Mason-Dixon line… check.

Racism or racial tension. Ummm. I’m going to go with “check” on that one, too. Trust me.

Hospitality? Hello, we have Disney. So, check.

Although, I think there’s a viable argument to be had in the idea that Disney has actually made Central Florida decidedly less southern with the passing of time.

Sweet tea. Check.

Don’t get me wrong, if there was a big “Who’s the most Southern?” contest between, say, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, Florida would definitely go running from the stage faster than Kanye on a day he forgot to take his meds, but I stand by the fact that I am a southerner.

Sort of.  Sigh.

Is Florida southern? How do you define “The South”, anyway? And what the hell is rule for capitalizing the word south?

This morning, twitter alerted me to the news that eight people had been shot in downtown Orlando.

Obviously, this news was shocking and bizarre.  And, of course, sad.

It was particularly sad for me to read about it because something similar, if not even more horrific, had happened the day before.

There’s a lot of ways a blog post about this incident could pan out.  We could discuss gun control, mental health, a distressed economy or some permutation of them.

But, really, the only thing that keeps playing in my head has to do with how the people who walked into the Gateway Center’s eighth floor had no clue of what an incredibly bad Friday they were about to have.

It’s a pretty trite perspective, I know, but that’s all I can seem to think about.

Being human is so … hard, isn’t it?

Animals and plants have it easy.  Nourishment, shelter and reproduction.  There are no complicated nuances.  Any complications generally arise as the result of our complications bleeding over into their efficient existence.

But us humans?  We’re complicated creatures.

I keep wondering about the two people who have been reported dead.

Who were they?

And, my God, why them?

Why not you?  Or me?

I don’t mean that it should have been me or you, I mean, it could have been me or you.  Easily.

We lock our doors, look both ways before we cross the street, take our vitamins, eat right… and we think that this is going to make a huge difference.  The truth is that it makes only a little difference.

I’m wondering about those two people… reports are preliminary right now, so we don’t know anything about them.

I’ve got these sappy movie scenes playing out in my head.

Like, a pretty, middle aged woman slams the door shut and makes sure she mutters, “Jerk” in earshot before she gets in her car, pointedly refusing to say good bye to her husband after the argument they just had about who was going to take their son to soccer practice… or maybe she got in the car, put the keys in the ignition, sighed deeply and then went back in the house and yelled, “Hey, I’m mad, but I love you, OK?”

Some single twenty something guy stumbles into the kitchen, makes some coffee and then trudges out of the door feeling a slightly numbed despair as he realizes he hates his crap job… or did he jump out of bed and greet the morning with joy and purpose, knowing that whatever he was going to do today was really going to mean something to him?

And, let me get really morbid and ask, what words spin in one’s head as they lay on the floor bleeding to death because of someone else’s complete madness?

“This can’t be happening… is this really happening… I’m not done here…Oh, God, is this really happ…. “

The End?

I would imagine that it would play out that way.  I don’t think in a situation like that most people are evaluating whether they’ve lived a good and meaningful life.  I would imagine you cling to the hope that this is not it.

There has to be more.  Please let there be more.

I don’t know about you, but I’m done living for that last moment as of right now.

It gets bantered about quite a bit, this idea of “When I die, I want to know that my life meant something.”  I figure we spend the majority of our time and energy trying not to die, so I imagine in that moment, I’m going to be too scared to make sense of anything.

The fact is that every single moment in our lives means something.  Every single second, actually, and we consciously choose what each of those seconds mean.

Or whether they don’t mean anything at all.

In the end, we are not who we are in the last moment of our lives.

We are who we are right now.

It’s not “When I die, I want my life to have meant something.”

It’s, “As I live, I’m making this moment mean something.”

The notion exists that, in some way, every person who leaves their nation to settle in the United States is running away from something bad and towards something good.

Frankly, nothing could be further from the truth for a great deal of the immigrants that I know.  The truth is that in this nation there are many foreign born individuals who were neither tired nor hungry when they arrived on our shores.

The leaving of one’s homeland is a concept that is more than familiar to me.  I’ve often referred to my family as jet setter bedouins of the modern era.  In my head, of course.

Nearly sixty years ago, both of my grandfathers left their ancestral homes in India and crossed a man made border and became Pakistanis.  Twenty years after that, their children left Pakistan and magically became Americans.

I am a woman who is quite aware of the artificial aspects of the construct we call “nationality.”.

Still, nearly two weeks ago when we received a letter from INS instructing my husband to report to his oath ceremony I reacted with a considerable amount of glee.  “Daddy is going to be an American,” I cried to our daughter, “Isn’t that wonderful? Congratulations Daddy, isn’t this exciting?!”

My husband smiled an odd smile, not the kind of smile that I expected.  It was not the usual smile, the one that can brighten any room or get us free tickets to Disney while we’re standing at the gates with our wallet out (yes, that happened, twice).

It was… a sad smile.

The kind of smile that you force onto your face when you know that you are leaving something precious and meaningful behind.  The kind of smile that you must put on your face, so that others are unaware of the pain that lives behind it.

You see, like so many immigrants in this country, my husband has nothing to run from.

If he lived in India, his life would be beautiful and amazing.  He would fit in all the time.  He wouldn’t have to bend his mind around the most simple cultural nuances that we take for granted here.  He would never have to mow a lawn, do the dishes, or clean the pool.  Because, back home, they have people for that.

In all ways, his life would most likely have been easier in India.

These things didn’t occur to me until I saw that sad smile on his face.

That smile told me that being the native born American child of immigrants is not the same thing as being a naturalized American.

We, the children, are the beneficiaries.  We do not feel the pain as acutely of turning over the old passport for the new one.  We do not feel the sensations in our hearts that make us feel that we are somehow betraying who we are and those we have left behind.

I have no words for my husband on this day that will quiet those thoughts.  They may very well be true, I don’t know.

I do know this, though.

I can recognize that he did not decide to become American because India is a bad place or that the people were bad there.

I can recognize that opening one door means closing another, and that it is alright and completely understandable to feel ambivalent and even a little sad about that.

I can recognize that he, like my parents, did this for me and for his children.

I can recognize that as our children get older and he tells them that he became an American for them, they will grow up, as I did, with a deep feeling of importance and a sense of destiny because of his actions today.

I can recognize the incredible strength it takes to forgo one set of emotional attachments for another.

I can recognize the wisdom that we live in a world where international alliances are precarious at best, and the borders and hearts of every nation become less welcoming with every year that passes.  At the very least, having matching passports would offer us the perceived comfort of knowing that we will always be together.

I can recognize that like my parents, more than the word, “Congratulations” from me on this slightly bittersweet day, he needs to hear the words “Thank you.”

Thank you, Tariq, for becoming an American today for our family.

May this day open the doors before you to all sorts of joys, prosperity and goodness that will quiet the sad feeling that there may be some that are slowly closing behind you.