Reading

First, something that I read, and loved, because it put in academic terms many things that I have always felt about the phenomenon of Wifework: What marriage really means for women. Of course the author, Susan Maushart is Australian/American, so there are real cultural differences in our experiences, but she really sums up the parts that get under my skin really well. Been meaning to mention her work for a while. I'll revisit this at some later point.

Second, my thesis reading is totally overwhelming me. Everything I read points me to at least five (if I'm lucky.. more likely fifty) further references that look interesting or relevant or life-changing. And of course I don't have the time to read it all. And of course I don't have access to a decent library, so a lot of books that I could skim and recognize as "not really relevant even though they sound like they should be" remain tantalizingly out of reach, even as they stick out their tongues and wag their fingers at my focus on the texts I *am* reading. It has become very clear to me that this is one of my major obstacles in completing writing tasks. The allure of more things that could be read leads me to collect far more material than I can possibly read, which means I put it off, which means I don't get started on writing till far too late. So now that I've identified this problem in so many words, I need to seek some suggestions as to how I can circumvent the problem: I want my reading to be thorough; that's something I'm not willing to sacrifice. So how do I identify "thorough enough," given that "complete" is never an option where reading and learning go?

Ok, back to reading about qualitative research methods, so I can decide what to go with sometime in the next week. :)



--
"I raise my hands to frame the light,
Raise my voice in the middle of the night,
I close my eyes when I start to sing,
It's a way of, way of praying"
               - Carrie Newcomer, The Yes of Yes

Can We or Can't We?

Last night, H and I had dinner at one of his colleagues.' This is an unusual occurrence for us, socializing with people from his workplace, especially since we've moved to Abu Dhabi. The conversation ranged from politics to parenting to comparisons of Abu Dhabi and Pakistan, to any number of things.

The politics part I won't really get into today, other than to comment that I discovered something about myself: I used to get very frustrated when I heard people blame all or most of Pakistan's woes on "the foreign hand." Now I am amusedly exasperated. Something to discuss in more detail another day, perhaps.

The conversation on parenting is what I want to focus on. We were agreeing that too many children in Pakistan were given far too free a hand by their parents, in terms of how much money they had to spend, in particular. We talked about how a lot of drug money had flooded into the country in the 80s and how foreign remittances from expat workers created "money for free." Too many kids had fathers who were working abroad, usually in the Gulf, and sending most of their salary home. These kids never saw how hard their fathers worked, and they worked hard. At jobs that their kids would consider beneath their dignity, for long hours, in pretty nasty living conditions. All their families saw was a sudden influx of wealth. We're not talking extra pin-money here. Family incomes increased exponentially.

The point of this conversation about the Dubai-chalo (Let's go to Dubai) phenomenon was that if kids don't see any of the effort that goes into earning money, they have little respect for money. And this was where things got really interesting, from my perspective. Our host made the remark, only half-jokingly, that it was mothers who would be answerable to God for their failure to raise their children appropriately, the implication being that their moms should teach them that their dads are working hard. And our hostess added, well, of course the mothers would be responsible for the upbringing, but the fathers would be answerable as to whether their children had been brought up on halal  or haraam kamaai ('legitimate or ill-gotten earnings', but the phrase is laden with a whole constellation of connotations in Urdu).

I can't honestly say that I know enough about the Quranic view of parenting to be able to comment on whether their opinions are correct from a dogmatic point of view. I would be willing to speculate that there are probably scholars who would espouse these views. But I'm left wondering how much we can and should control our children's attitudes, in the way that our hosts seemed to think that parents should. I suppose the expat workers' wives could try to get their kids to empathize with their fathers' experiences, but I wonder how many of the mothers were able to empathize themselves. They would have little to no exposure to the reality themselves, except for what their husbands told them in the month or three they were home every two or three years. Could those moms be held responsible for their kids attitudes? Can *any* parents be held responsible for their kids' attitudes?

Pondering.

Small victories

For the first time in I don't know how long, I actually have no ironing pending. I have a load of laundry drying on the rack so there will be more tomorrow, but that's just the nature of housework. The cool thing is...there isn't any more TODAY. And laundry is actually under control. There's a load to do tomorrow, but that's ok, too. There isn't room for another load on the rack.

Housework and I don't get along. A former student, also my husband's niece, sent me a postcard recently, because she said that she thought of me the minute she saw it:


Once I had stopped laughing, it got me thinking. That statement is a patently irrational position. And it's perfectly reasonable that it reminded her of me. And that makes me uncomfortable. Because I don't like being irrational. Housework, unpleasant as it is, simply IS. And it regenerates itself every day.

What I've realized over the past several months is that I have used my anger about gender inequities as an excuse not to do that part of the housework that even *I* think I should be doing. I've also realized that getting angry because my husband isn't doing it doesn't clean the house. This is obvious to most women, apparently. And doing the work puts me in a much better position to argue the injustice of it. heheh.

Another time, I will have to write about my husband's chief line of defense in these arguments: "Fine get angry, but don't make that DOR (division of responsibilities, for those of you who are equally corporate clueless as I was) that I suggested!" and why that ticks me off, even though getting down to making it might actually be very much in my interest.

Further Along The Road Less Cluttered

Amongst the many facets of my life that I am attempting to unclutter (why is that word so much better than 'declutter'?), the thousands (4987, to be precise) of PDF files that I have accumulated over the course of literature reviews for masters courses, teaching preparation for multiple subjects, and materials development for teacher education were really weighing on me. Every time I thought of going through and trying to rename them, my heart would sink. And I knew I had to identify them, because I have two cartons of paper that can't be thrown out until I know for sure which of those articles I have electronic copies of. Also the slight matter of actually needing to write up a literature review for my thesis proposal...

So after renaming about 200 of them, I decided this was for the birds. Laziness, as I believe Benjamin Franklin said, is the mother of invention. Or some serious web-searching. And what do you think I found? It turns out that Zotero is not just a convenient way to keep your bibliography. If you import your existing, lazily-left-with-the-long-string-of-numbers-from-the-online-database-as-a-title into your Zotero collection, Zotero will give you the option of retrieving the metadata for the PDF and automatically creating an entry in your reference collection. It took my poor overworked Inspiron's 1GB of RAM about 12 hours to do the import of the ~4GB of PDF files, but now the majority of those files are in the process of getting automagically identified and indexed in a format that I will be able to directly pull into a bibliography.

There are still a bunch of files that it can't identify itself, and I'll have to go through and search for the references. Some of the documents don't contain OCR'ed text, and some of them don't have readily identified DOIs, but if it takes care of 80% of them, I'll be a happy woman.

Note to self: When downloading PDF files, download them directly into the Zotero collection, so that this nightmare need never be repeated.

It never ceases to amaze me how stupid I can be. And that apparently there are enough other people out there who are equally stupid that someone comes up with a free software solution for our stupidity. :)

Inbox Zero, YAY

After months without internet access, I had a huge (for me) backlog of email in my inbox. Today, I managed to go through and get it down to zero. Yay for GTD and Yay for getting down to the business of actually uncluttering my life instead of just reading about it.

I got permission from my university to work on my thesis from Abu Dhabi, so five years after I was supposed to, I've actually started working with an advisor on drafting my research question for real. Yay for moving forward on long-overdue personal projects.

(I'm in a celebratory kind of mood. It doesn't show, does it?)

How to import Nokia (or any .csv) contacts into Thunderbird 3 on Windows XP

There may be a more elegant way to do this; I'm simply documenting the method that I ultimately found successful, in the hope that someone, somewhere may be saved some time.

I was working with a Nokia 3110c. I have no idea whether that matters, but I would expect that the same method would work for any Nokia that you could connect to the Nokia PC suite.

Software required (you may be able to use other versions of the software, but I don't know):
1) Nokia PC Suite  ver. 7.1.40.1
2) OpenOffice Calc 3.1.1 (You could equally well use Excel or any program that allows you to look at CSV (comma separated values) files.
3) Thunderbird 3.0.1

Optional: AutoHotKey v. 1.0.48

Part 1: Exporting contacts from Nokia 3110c

1. Open up Nokia PC Suite and go to the Contacts manager. Follow the on screen instructions to connect your phone with the application. It's fairly straightforward to do so.
2. Select all the contacts you want to export (Note: I save my contacts to phone. If you have them saved to SIM, you may need to copy them to your phone first.). If you want to export all of them, Ctrl-A works as Select All. If you want to export some of them, use Ctrl-click to select all of the ones you want.
3. Go to the File menu, and select Export.
4. Pick a convenient location to save the file. You will need to open it again fairly soon.
5. Give your file a name (nokiacontacts or some such), making sure that the Save as type: box has Comma Separated Values (*.csv) selected.
6. Press the green check mark.
7. Exit Nokia PC Suite
   

Part 2: Formatting contacts file for import into Thunderbird

1. Open up Thunderbird.
2. Click on the Address Book button or simply Ctrl-Shift-B
3. Go to the Tools menu in the Address Book window and select Export.
4. Choose a location and filename.
5. Make sure, once again, that the Save as type: box says Comma Separated. The default on mine is LDIF.
6. Click on OK.
7. Boot up Calc/Excel/whatever program you will use to edit your CSV file. (The instructions that follow are specific to Calc. Some of the steps may be different if you are using other software.)
8. Open the .csv file you created in Part 1 from your Nokia phone contacts.
9. The Text Import dialog box should open up. The first option you can change is Character Set. Change this from Unicode to Western Europe (Windows-1252/WinLatin 1). I'm not 100% certain you have to do this step, but I think it might be critical.
   
10. Check that the Separated by: option has the Comma box checked off.
11. Press OK.
12. You should get a spreadsheet with the first column "Title" preceded by some gobbledygook characters. Delete the gobbledygook. Save the file, selecting Keep Current Format.
    
13. Also open up the .csv file you exported from Thunderbird. You'll notice that the Character set reads Western Europe (Windows-1252/WinLatin 1). Leave it that way. 
14. If you compare the two files, you'll notice that the fields are not exactly the same. So go ahead and plan which field from the phone contacts should map to a given field in the Thunderbird addressbook. Depending on how detailed the info is that you keep in your phone, this may take some time. I advise that you actually change the names of the columns in the nokiacontacts.csv to match the Thunderbird fields.
15. Delete all the columns in nokiacontacts.csv that you won't be mapping to Thunderbird. If you don't have an equivalent field in Thunderbird, you can transfer it to a Custom field. There are 4 available.
    
16. THIS STEP IS REALLY IMPORTANT: You may or may not notice that Thunderbird has a First Name field, a Last Name field, and a Display Name field. You HAVE to put something in the Display Name column if you want names to show up when you look at your contacts in Thunderbird. Otherwise, the names will be there, but will not show up unless you open the contact up for editing. You have some options for what to do about the Display Name field. The next few steps are what I chose to do.
    
17. Make a copy of the First Name (DupFirstName) and Last Name (DupLastName) columns in the nokiacontacts.csv file.
    
18. Select a contact's DupFirst and DupLast names. So if First Name is Mohammed and Last Name is Ahmed, select Mohammed and Ahmed from the DupFirstName and DupLastName columns. Now merge those two cells (Alt-O-E). Calc will ask if the contents should be moved into the first cell. Tell it Yes.
    
19. Either go through and do this for each contact or follow OPTIONAL PART 2a.
20. Save nokiacontacts.csv, making sure to Keep the Current Format.
    

OPTIONAL PART 2a. Automating the Display Name Merge I have 521 phone contacts. I was not looking forward to repeating Step17 521 times. So I wrote a little AutoHotKey script to do the merging for me. Here's the script. You will need AutoHotKey to make it work.

1. Open up Notepad or any text editor.
2. Enter the following script, which simply automates Step 18, telling the software to select the cell to the right, press Alt-O-E, then Alt-Y, then Enter. And repeat this 520 times.
   

#m::
loop, 520
;YOU SHOULD REPLACE the 520 in the above line with the number of contacts you need merged.
{Send +{Right}!oe
SetKeyDelay, 15
Send !y{Enter}
}
loop
return

3. Save the text file as merge.ahk
4. Install AutoHotKey. I got it a long time ago and don't have the URL handy, sorry. Might add it later.
5. Double click on the icon for merge.ahk
6. Return to nokiacontacts.csv. Select the first DupFirstName entry. Hit Windows-M and let AutoHotKey complete the merge for you.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This script assumes that you have DupFirstName and DupLastName in adjacent columns. Also, it may be a kludgy script. I've never used AutoHotKey before, and I have no programming experience.
7. Go back to the Part2 instructions.

Part 3: Importing contacts file into Thunderbird

1. Open up Thunderbird
2. Press Alt-T-M or go to the Tools menu and select Import.
3. At the Import dialog box, select Address Books and click on Next.
   
4. In Select the Type of File, choose Text File (LDIF, .csv, etc.)
5. Select your nokiacontacts.csv file. The dialog box will read LDIF at the bottom. You will need to change that to All files or Comma Separated in order to see your .csv file.
6. You should now see an Import Address Book dialog box. The column on the left shows the Thunderbird Address Book fields, and the column on the right shows the nokiacontacts.csv fields.
   
7. You have to move the Thunderbird fields up and down to match the appropriate nokiacontacts.csv fields. TIP: Start by matching up with the first field from nokiacontacts.csv, and work your way down, otheriwise you will have to keep realigning fields. So align First Name with First Name, then Last Name with Last Name, etc. Thunderbird remembers the order you last used, so if you've never imported an addressbook before, and you put your nokiacontacts.csv columns in the same order as the thunderbird.csv file, you may not have much realigning to do. I've messed around with it too much to know for sure.
   
8. Make sure you have all the appropriate Address Book fields checked. Every time you click on the field, you toggle the checkbox.
9. Press OK.
10. Enjoy the fact that you have now done in 15 minutes what it took me a few hours to figure out.

At some later point, I will try to figure out whether I can actually merge address books. Will update the post then.

City of contradictions

What happens when you put a PakAmeristanican in Abu Dhabi? Turns out,
not very much, at least for the first six months. Immigration tax, here,
is levied in lost hours and dead trees.

It never occurred to me that every culture has its own special brand of
(il)logic. And it should have, because I really should know that
cultures think differently. Certainly Pakistan and the United States do.
Why I expected that the UAE would fit one or the other mindset, I don't
know. Sheer intellectual laziness on my part, I guess.

Why do I call it a city of contradictions? Well, let's see: the
population of the UAE is something like 3/4 expatriates. But you always
remain, as far as I can tell, a resident alien. There is no possibility
of naturalization, unless you happen to be an expat woman who marries an
Emirati man. Then, of course, like all women naturally do, you give up
any identity you might previously have had, and take on your husband's,
immersing yourself in it entirely. ;)

Every house in Abu Dhabi is connected to a fibre-optic cable network,
but internet access is prohibitively expensive, and even when you get
online, the number of sites that are blocked by the state-owned telecom
company is simply phenomenal. You can't access flickr. You can't access
a lot of blogs. I've only had an internet connection for a month or so,
and I've already seen "This site is blocked" on countless occasions. And
really, my web-browsing activities are rated G, maybe PG-13
occasionally. Also, the only reason I have internet access is because I
went out and purchased a USB broadband modem, allowing me essentially,
to use a cellphone connection to connect. The cable internet connection,
which we applied for on the 14th of July, as the call center person
kindly reminds me every two weeks when I call again to request
follow-up, is STILL not active. Two months ago (four months after we
applied), people finally came and installed a cable modem and wireless
router, so the home network has been working since then, but they told
us that the link wouldn't actually be up for another week. Eight weeks
after that, some men from the telecom company put in the cable, and said
it would be three working days before the connection went live. That was
Saturday, twelve days ago. It still doesn't work.

Oh, and here's the punchline. The hold "music" for Etisalat (the telecom
company) is a series of marketing pitches. Yesterday, this is what I got
to hear: "If you are having trouble configuring your internet
connection, or accessing the internet, you can use Esupport, our
troubleshooting software. Best of all, it's free. For more information,
simply log on to www.etisalat.ae/esupport."

My three year old son couldn't figure out why I was laughing like a
madwoman while on hold.

The Great Switchover - Prelude

Most of the people I know in Pakistan have illegal copies of Windows installed on their computers. It's not that I have an inordinate number of criminally minded acquaintances. It's a combination of convenience and convention.

First the convention part. Somehow, we don't really take copyright seriously. It doesn't strike most people here as theft. My discomfort with people buying pirated books strikes them as yet another of my endearing (or not so endearing, depending on the person, their mood, the context, etc.) idiosyncrasies. And these are people who would never steal an object or money from someone, people who think of doing an honest day's work as an act of worship, etc., etc. Somehow, intellectual property does not compute. There may be a connection with the fact that Bhutto (ZA, not his daughter) actually abolished copyright laws when he was prime minister. We haven't really registered that they're back on the books.

The convenience part is this: Actually getting legal, licensed software is much, much, much, harder than getting pirated/unlicensed software. This is not as true for laptop buyers, since most of them ship with pre-installed OS, but for desktop users it is pretty much universal. Unless you are one of the few Pakistanis for whom money is no object, you aren't going to buy a branded PC, you're going to go down to Hafeez Centre/whatever the computing plaza is in your city, and shop around a bit, and then buy a pre-assembled computer from one of the many tiny shops in the plaza, maybe ask someone who knows a bit more than you about computers to go along with you. If you are a bit more hardware-savvy, you might buy the components from Hafeez Centre and then put it together yourself.

When you buy the pre-assembled computer, the guy behind the counter will ask you, "and what software do you want installed on this?". If you're the average PC user, you'll look blank, and he'll say, "OK, I'll go ahead and put the standard stuff on", and this will include Windows, Microsoft Office, anti-virus software, something for email and webbrowsing, some kind of media player, and possibly a plethora of other software like Acrobat Professional, Photoshop, etc., etc. Also, there will be a ton thrown in that actually IS freeware (Think Google downloads, Skype, etc.).The average PC user won't even know that they're getting pirated software, they just think that it comes installed with their computer.

If you're a bit more PC-literate, you may have specific software that you want installed, and some that you know you don't want. And the guy will go ahead and customize the installation to suit you. In a week or so, you'll start seeing the Genuine Advantage Validation Failed nag screens (or not, depending on how savvy your vendor is), and so you might come to realize that you're actually using unlicensed software. Or not.

Or you could be more conscious of copyright and licensing issues to begin with, and ask for licensed software. And the vendor will look at you as if you've suddenly grown horns. A couple may be able to tell you where to get it, but those two vendors will be reluctant to do so, and tell you how stupid you would be to go for that option. No one else will even be able to tell you where to purchase licensed Windows XP.

If you're particularly persistent, you'll ask around, maybe look online. At that point, you'll see the price of genuine operating software, look at the difference between what you would have paid at Hafeez Centre (nothing, or maybe Rs 100=USD1.25 per program if you wanted the installation disks. If the vendor was a nice guy, he might just burn the installation software on to a DVD for free, complete with a text file of SKU numbers, and possibly key generating software.).

If your conscience is loud enough, you'll still want to buy the software, and you'll find that you can only purchase it online. And that to do so, you need a credit card. And like most Pakistanis, you will not have a credit card. So you can either look for a friend who will lend you their credit card or do the transaction for you, or you can apply for a credit card, or you can just forget about it.

It's not that it's completely impossible to get legal Windows; it's just SO much harder, and SO much more expensive, that the number of PC owners in Pakistan would drop by at least 50% if there weren't pirated software vendors. And no, I haven't really done the research on it, but I have spent years feeling guilty about using pirated software, and knowing that I couldn't own a computer if I had to buy the software that I regularly use, even just the bare minimum. And I earn a decent salary. So it's safe to assume that other people, who earn less decent salaries, and have more dependants, would similarly be unable to afford home computers if they had to purchase software at the prices that Microsoft charges.

And you may sit in moral judgement on them for doing so (and if you're Microsoft, you may actually come after them with a police team), but the fact of the matter is that most people are not going to forgo the utility that a home PC offers because of what seems like some abstract notion of ownership. Particularly when the sale of pirated software is so ubiquitous that I would guess the majority doesn't even realize they're using pirated software. They've never seen genuine, licensed software. Literally everyone they know has the pirated discs.

Given the convenience+cost equation, most people just don't bother with genuine software, even when they are aware that they are using pirated. It's kind of like if the lost & found department were in a poorly marked room on the fifth floor and there were no elevator; how many would bother to go turn in a found item? It isn't that people don't know that the right thing to do is turn it in, but it's just too darn hard.

I feel strongly about pirated books. I feel strongly about pirated music. By pirating, I mean someone selling copies of someone else's work. I'm less certain about copying your legally purchased CD for a friend, and am positive that there isn't anything ethically wrong with creating a mix CD of tracks from various CDs that I have legally purchased, so long as I don't sell it. So I spent some years feeling guilty about using illegal Windows, because I didn't know about Linux. And a few more after that feeling guilty because I didn't know about OpenOffice.

Linux seemed really intimidating, but OpenOffice sounded fantastic, so last year I removed Microsoft Office from my laptop and installed OpenOffice. There are things I know how to do in MS Office that I still haven't figured out in OpenOffice, so it still takes me a bit longer to get stuff done, but it's at the point where on most things, it's just that muscle memory hasn't yet set in, but I can get the job done.

As of last year, I no longer have any illegal software on my laptop, other than the Windows operating system (My laptop was shipping with Windows Vista, and I REALLY didn't want to install it. So I felt very little guilt in installing XP from the disc my computer guy was kind enough to provide.). The process of finding alternatives for all the software I use regularly has been fun, and a highly educational experience.

So what software have I ditched and with what have I replaced it?

1) MS Office to OpenOffice, and am considering SoftmakerOffice and go-oo as potentially faster alternatives.
2) Adobe Acrobat Professional to PDF X-Change Viewer and PDFTK Builder
3) Symantec Antivirus to AVG Antivirus
4) Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox, although I'm considering trying out Google Chrome (not bothering with links to those).
5) MS Outlook to GMail and Mozilla Thunderbird w/ Lightning. This is the conversion I'm least happy with, because I haven't figured out a decent integration of all the PIM stuff that Outlook used to do.
6) Windows Media Player (which I always hated) to foobar2000, iTunes, and MediaPlayerClassic.
7) Nero to ImgBurn
8) WinZip to 7Zip

In the process of looking for alternatives, I have also discovered utilities and misc programs that can do things I would never have thought of. In fact, I had no idea that people had come up with so many cool ways to get so many cool things done.

Lifehacker has been an invaluable resource. The articles are very helpful, and the comment threads really flesh things out, providing a variety of perspectives.

I've gone a little nuts downloading things that I will have to re-assess for usefulness to me, but I can now clone disks, resize partitions, remove duplicate files (I have been LONGING for someone to do this for me), and am learning to do stuff at the command line.

All of this has led me slowly but surely to decide that it is time to ditch Windows and take the plunge into Linux. The plan is to change my desktop and my laptop, but I'm not brave enough to do both simultaneously. The desktop is older, a P4 I bought 6 yrs ago, at least. And I use the laptop more.

So this is also providing the impetus to actually clean all the crap off of my desktop. I inherited my dad's P3 when he died, and have been trying to figure out what to do with it. The hard drive is bigger than my P4's, and I have to get data off of it too. I haven't had the energy to really deal with figuring out what on the computer is worth saving, e.g. pictures that my sister sent to my parents but hasn't kept copies of, and business related documents, vs. recipes and maps that my dad was downloading.

So, I installed his hard drive into my own computer case, but haven't done much with it yet. Moving to Linux means repartitioning the hard drive, which I've been planning to do anyway, so I'm doing the prep work in the mean time. In fact, I've been writing this post on my laptop while I removed 6-7 GB of duplicate files from my hard drive, then making a backup DVD of my work related files.

Next post will be about the process of prepping for the switch, including things like, what to do with 6 years of hoarded email, which files to backup, etc. Very little of this is stuff I've figured out on my own, but I figure even just having the links in one place might be useful. Also, more selfishly, I then have a kind of checklist for redoing this process on my laptop.

More soon.

Responsibility

Before I had a child, my brain new that life would be irrevocably changed by becoming a parent. I knew there would be this awe-inspiring responsibility, which I naively thought was something akin to what I felt for my nieces and nephews and students. When I first saw a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin says something to the effect of "They don't let you become a mom until you can fix everything just right," I sympathized with his mom, who was going to have to explain to him that she couldn't bring a dead squirrel(?) back to life. But I didn't really understand.

Then my son was going a bit berserk in a fit of hyperactivity, and nearly fell. "And what if you had fallen?!!," I demanded in my my-heart-is-only-just-coming-back-down-from-my-throat voice. "Amma (Mom) would catch me," he calmly and cheerfully declared. And my heart broke in advance for that inevitable time when he will no longer take that for granted, because he will have learned that there are times when Amma can't catch him, can't keep him from hurt, etc., etc. It's not the fact that he will no longer believe it, but the pain of disillusionment that kills me. (Even though I know I've survived this knowledge about my own parents just fine). So what is it about being a parent that makes your brain melt?

Foreign and Domestic Policy

Being a Pakameristanican can be a frustrating experience sometimes. Two animals jumping about in one skin, and even more confusing, two brains trying to co-exist in one head. The whole half-partridge, half-quail thing again.

Take discussions of politics. When I think about or talk about Barack Obama, my heart leaps up at the sheer "American Dream"iness of his rhetoric, and I am naively idealistic enough to hope that he can actually make real change domestically. But then I look at the drone attacks in Waziristan, and my stomach starts to turn. And holding both of those views simultaneously is exhausting enough. But trying to discuss American politics, or America, with anyone who can't at least see the possibility of both views is simply paralyzing.

My brain gets short circuited when I am told that Uncle Sam isn't much better than the Soviet or Chinese governments. For one, while I have always seen the world in shades of gray, there are definitely lighter grays and darker ones. And the difference is significant. So I find the comparison to be unjust, in terms of degree. But also, I see the difference in ideals as quite significant. And people in Pakistan are wont to view American ideals as mere rhetoric and hypocrisy. Which I know not to be true. American governments lie to their public, by omission, and by deliberate distortion of the truth. What the American people are actually guilty of is not caring enough to figure out when their government is lying to them about things that don't appear to affect them directly.

I am similarly dumbfounded when people talk about Pakistan as if it's turning into a hotbed of fundamentalism. The oversimplification in that is simply mindboggling. Of course, the fact that I am currently living in Pakistan means I have to put up with less of this sort of incomprehension and mindlessness than the anti-American kind.

How do you explain America to someone who has never been to the US and who has only experienced the US in terms of its foreign policy? So these are people who are by no means ignorant, who know more about more parts of the world than most educated Americans I have come across, and who hold America and Americans (as a group, not necessarily as individuals) in contempt because of their view of the US as imperialist.

Aadha teetar, aadha batair (half partridge, half quail)

I am so tired of being ticked off about how much more my career is affected by being a mother than my husband's is by being a father. Every few months I start to think that I've finally learned to deal with it, and then something throws me into a tailspin.

Fundamentally, of course, the problem is that I'm not really convinced that I should learn how to deal with it. A big part of me thinks that I should change things so that my husband and I have more evenly distributed responsibilities as parents ("The personal is political," etc.). But I also know that it's not something I can do unilaterally. I'm skeptical about how much people's opinions on these issues change with time, so I'm not too hopeful about my husband coming around to my point of view. And so the pendulum goes back and forth.

I think my ideas about gender roles in the home are pretty progressive (or radical, depending on who you ask), even by American standards. When you live on campus at a progressive liberal arts college, you tend to see somewhat unconventional living situations, e.g. stay at home dads whose wives are the breadwinners because they're both happy with that set up. You also end up meeting many couples who are less obviously unconventional, but have far more egalitarian households than is the norm: they both work, they both share the housework in an evenhanded way, they share childcare in an evenhanded way, and it's taken for granted that, of course, that is how things are done. And it is in the quiet taken-for-granted nature of the sharing of labour in which the departure from the norm lies.

So my experience of American couples was this egalitarian one, generally. There were exceptions, but they stuck out. More importantly, the fact of their existence meant that it was possible. Guys who were not "wusses" could, in fact, have the sense of justice to recognize what was fair, and the 'gumption' to step up to the plate and take on the responsibilities that follow from that recognition.

The knowledge that this is possible, that what I have always known internally, deep down in my gut, to be right and fair, actually exists in the real world, made concrete for me things that I considered non-negotiable in a marriage. I wasn't going to accept anymore the arguments I had always known to be weak: "well, it might be fair, but that's just not how guys are," "aisa to nahin hota," "women ALWAYS have to compromise in marriage".

Fast forward to 2009, and here I am, in a situation that is utterly conventional: my husband works an insane 70-80-hour work week, my career has come to a screeching stutter, and I am surrounded by housework (which I have always, and will always, hate. Make that HATE. There are SO many more interesting and rewarding things one can do with one's time.).

And the reasons for this are not entirely external. I would love to be able to blame it all on the sexism of those around me, but try as I might, I can't escape the voices in my own head, the ones that expect me to live up to my mother. I am assailed by guilt because I don't find being a wife and mother as fulfilling as she did, and because I don't want to be as devoted to the home as she was, and the sneaking suspicion that I would never be as good at it as she was. Are all women doomed to this constant tussle?

"..must I be content with discontent...?"

The Glory

The glory of the beauty of the morning, -
The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;
The blackbird that has found it, and the dove
That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;
White clouds ranged even and fair as new-mown hay;
The heat, the stir, the sublime vacancy
Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart: -
The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning
All I can ever do, all I can be,
Beside the lovely of motion, shape, and hue,
The happiness I fancy fit to dwell
In beauty's presence. Shall I now this day
Begin to seek as far as heaven, as hell,
Wisdom or strength to match this beauty, start
And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops,
In hope to find whatever it is I seek,
Hearkening to short-lived happy-seeming things
That we know naught of, in the hazel copse?
Or must I be content with discontent
As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings?
And shall I ask at the day's end once more
What beauty is, and what I can have meant
By happiness? And shall I let all go,
Glad, weary, or both? Or shall I perhaps know
That I was happy oft and oft before,
Awhile forgetting how I am fast pent,
How dreary-swift, with naught to travel to,
Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core.

Edward Thomas


I found the lines "... must I be content...with wings?" at the opening of a novel my sister-in-law left behind. They spoke so eloquently of a recurring feeling/thought in my life that I just had to track the poem down. And what a rewarding search. I have found a poet whose existence I was completely unaware of, although some lines sound familiar. And he writes such achingly beautiful verse. sigh.

Last night I dreamt of Obieland. It feels like I'm staying at Nikki's, although the place is somewhere on E College St. and hers never was. It's night time, and I decide that I need some groceries, having just gotten into town. Friend M doesn't accompany, because she doesn't see the necessity. So I'm walking into town, but for some reason, my first stop on College St is an Indian grocery store. I'm very aware that I only have about $10 or $15 in my pocket (being short of cash is such a familiar feeling from college), so I ask the store owner for some things, but then tell him I'll be back in a bit. What I really want to do is get to Gibson's. I realise that this Indian store is in the place that used to be Hunan when I first arrived in Obieland, and later became the more upscale version of the Mandarin (can't remember the name, but they used to serve the most gorgeous tiger prawn). After the shock of the restaurant simply having disappeared has worn off a bit, I suddenly realise that Gibson's simply isn't there any more. Even the space has disappeared. Then someone tells me that they've taken over the second floor of the Oberlin Bookstore, so up I go, and the Gibson's counter is there.

I forget what happens after that. I suppose the dream comes from having seen the Conservatory magazine yesterday, and not being able to figure out where it is that they're putting the new Con building. Also, just being terribly homesick for Obieland. It's weird, though. Before, dreams about the US have always been about specific people. Last night was definitely about the place.

I've been working on a post about nazar, and how the concept affects me as a parent, but getting it down in words is more complicated than I had anticipated. So here's a less pretentious post in the meantime. :)

Yesterday, I went to a wedding. Given that it's December in Lahore, and yesterday was Sunday, there's nothing unusual about that. But weddings always inspire reflection for me, because they become an opportunity for armchair sociology.

The most interesting part first: The wedding video was being shot by a woman. And all the catering staff (well, the visible ones, anyway) was female. I've never seen a wedding video being shot by a woman. The still photographers at two weddings I've attended in the US have been female, but never the "video guy." In fact, the term "wedding video crew" always inspires in me instant repulsion and memories of assorted annoying men, of varying degrees of sleaziness. I didn't want a video crew at my wedding, partly for that reason. I've also never seen a whole crew of female servers at a formal event.

But the paradox, which is what makes for real sociological interest (at least for me), is that the wedding was a completely segregated affair. As in, they booked two separate halls at a posh hotel, one for male guests, and one for female guests. So you had women taking on roles that are normally the preserve of men in Pakistan, but for reasons that are totally "unliberated." Like the fact that initially women would become ob-gyns here because women didn't want to go to a male doctor (or the men in their families didn't want them going to male doctors).

So I was quite entertained by that paradox. And the lesser paradox of the female videographer wearing a head scarf, taking video of women who only have their head scarves off because they are in an all-female situation. Most of those women would be very uncomfortable with men seeing that video. And yet it's hard to imagine that the wedding video won't be viewed by at least the close male relatives of the bride and groom.

And then there's the idea that arranging separate spaces is more of a religious duty than avoiding extravagance. I've seen segregated weddings before, but usually they involve putting up a partition in the single hall. I've always been uncomfortable at events like that, particularly since I got married (more on that in a second), but given the strength of people's convictions, and how extremely uncomfortable those people would be in the absence of a partition, I've never sat in judgement on it. But this just strikes me as excessive, and more ostentatious than religious.

Why does it make me more uncomfortable now that I'm married? Several reasons, really, all of them practical. For one, once you're married, you get invited to weddings more frequently (don't ask me why, pondering that one may need to be the subject of a whole different post). So the frequency with which I have to deal with segregated weddings has increased. For another, I get invited to weddings where I don't know anyone, because the person getting married is a former colleague of my husband's, for example. So, there I am at a party that I've only gone to because it's important to my husband, and I can't even sit with the one person there who I know. Third, co-ordinating exits just becomes irritating. Thank God for cell phones. But still, if one of us forgets to take their phone, or it's accidentally left in silent mode with the vibrate function off, or doesn't hear it ring in the hubbub of the reception, then we are simply doomed. Before I was married, this wasn't an issue, because at such an event, I would usually be on my own.

Another time I will expound further upon the subject of weddings in Pakistan, and related idiocies.

Apparently there were three explosions. Not in the theatre complex itself, but in the Punjabi Arts complex next door. And there appears to have been a stampede at the performing arts festival in the ensuing panic. Allah rehem kare. Allah rehem.

So about an hour ago, I'm in the middle of the "Ok, Haroon, nursing time is REALLY over" battle, when I hear a boom and the windows rattle. Lately the house has been over-run by painters and workmen of various sorts, so I think "Someone must have left the terrace door open, oh no, wait, I hope that wasn't an explosion." Twenty minutes later I hear another boom. The battle with Haroon was still not over, so I couldn't go check the TV. Then I realised that in my ongoing saga with the cable provider, I had agreed not to have TV service for one evening while they tried to figure out why my internet connection kept going on the blink. So I checked online, and couldn't find any mention of anything untoward, so crossed my fingers that it was just a transformer going kaput or something like that.

Fifteen minutes ago, my sister-in-law called to say there had been an explosion at the performing arts festival going on at the open air theatre complex a couple of miles from my home. I still can't find anything on the internet. As I write, I can hear sirens going past. God have mercy.

Good friend NE Iowa Mom wonders how I'm going to gather my data in a quantifiable form. I think, though, that I am looking at more of an in depth interview, text coding kind of study. Because I am curious about the issue of "the good man," but I'm also curious how people at school react to a female principal, and what she sees as the factors at work in how she and other school community members interact with each other. What's worrisome, really, is how to turn this into something manageable. I don't have years to do this study, although I could turn it into a longer project later (maybe a case study of, say, half a dozen female principals of all-boys' schools?), so I have to come up with something where I can gather the data, analyse it, and write it up, all in under six months.

That's almost laughable. No, correction. That IS laughable.

So what I'll have to do is scale this down in some way, and yet still manage to ask a worthwhile question that builds on the existing literature. Said literature seems to be pretty quiet about perceptions about female principals in all-boys schools. There seems to be more about female teachers. But the fact of the matter is that there are relatively few female principals in the world, let alone in the fortresses of patriarchy. Which is what makes this lady fascinating, at least to me.

Much to ponder.

(Re)entering the discourse

I've been silent on this blog for a long time. I've never really managed to get it to the point of being a regular thing.

That's at least in part because I've been too busy sorting myself out to deal with the things that have been on my mind in a more cerebral (and therefore, in my world, requiring writing down) kind of way. It would appear that I have cleared up some mental RAM, however. So I am now in a position to take stock of some of the more pointy headed kinds of things that are on my mind.

One is my research, upon which I need to build a masters thesis.

Then there's the state of my countries, and the world in general, which by rights, is not one topic, but occupies the same part of my brain. And since this is my blog, I get to declare it one topic.

And of course, there's the issue of domesticity, and within that, gender relations in the home space, different ways of organizing homes, the dynamics of extended families, and just how to get housework done more efficiently, so that it takes up less time.

Today I'm going to stick to the research part. I still haven't been able to identify exactly what it is that I want to find out, and it's kind of difficult to plan your thesis research without knowing what the question is.

I've decided on a situation that interests me: a private all-boys school, with a female principal. In Pakistan, no less. I have anecdotal evidence that this is a relative rarity anywhere in the world. I have to figure out where to get real data on the numbers, but that's mostly to support my assumption that this is an unusual phenomenon.

I'm interested in this one principal, in particular, partly because she's just cool. But also I see her opinions on what kind of men her students should grow up to be as being kind of counter-culture.

Now I need to flesh out my vision of the Pakistani context with evidence from the literature (if it exists). And I need to figure out how to get at the questions that I'm interested in answering. Articulating those questions would be a good beginning, but I'm struggling with that for now.

What I have so far is this: What happens when a liberal feminist becomes the principal of an elite all-boys school in Lahore?

Now I could compare this with how things were when the principal at this same school was a man, although gathering data on that might be kind of difficult, given our tendency to generate massive amounts of paperwork with little or no coherent organization.

Or I could compare it with a different elite boys school in Lahore, or several boys schools.

Or I could track down other female principals of all boys schools, figure out where they stand on feminist issues, and what their vision of the ideal student is.

Or I could see how everyone else's perceptions of this particular principal have evolved over time, or are informed by her being a woman.

What gets me most excited is the degree of variance of her vision of "good men" with/from(?) the yardsticks that society at large, parents, teachers, and the students themselves use to gauge whether someone is a "good man." And how this variance plays itself out in organizational dynamics, in curricular priorities, etc.

But how do you turn that unwieldy mess into a "real" research question?

Why is it that websites about motherhood all assume that you're either American or British? Probably because the authors are based in the US or Britain, I know, but they also seem to reflect no understanding that cultural differences count for a whole lot when it comes to parenting and division of labor between spouses.

Why do I gripe about this? Because there seems to be precious little "out there" to help the poor benighted PakAmeristaniMom. Being the "mixed up product of a conservative upbringing and a liberal education" has its downside. Your brain stops accepting the patterns that you begin to emulate instinctively, so you overthink every little thing. Like whether you're going to sew a button on your husband's shirt, or act as if it would be a betrayal of every feminist nerve in your body. And, no, it doesn't help that I can see the humor in the situation. Remember the whole scene about the blender as a gift from the Steve Martin version of "Father of the Bride"?

More seriously though, with a baby in the picture, the frame shifts dramatically. As all parents know, and keep trying to tell you, even as they accept that you will never truly understand this until you are a parent yourself.

So here I am, surrounded by people telling me, no, taking it for granted, that my career will now take a back seat. And a part of me thinks I should be grateful, because employers here are truly much more understanding of the pressures on new mothers. But the price you pay for that understanding is that your career is taken less seriously. You are automatically out of the running for a lot of things.

I have it relatively easier, simply because of being a teacher. My friend the physicist is agonized because she is struggling in an all male preserve with her first faculty position, in a field where falling behind for a year means you're out of the race. My friend the lawyer no longer practices law, because she's too busy managing her home and husband and kids. Instead, she's started up a business organizing upscale children's birthday parties. How does someone who fought her father tooth and nail on her decision to go to law school just ditch it for kiddie birthday parties? At least the physicist friend relates to my dilemma. Everyone else just seems to assume that the answer is obvious. (Give up your job; stay at home and take care of the kid(s)).

I am getting tired of resenting my situation, even as I am incredibly grateful for the wonder that is my son. It ticks me off no end that men can have a career and a family, no problem, but that women do not enjoy that sheer simplicity.

More on this later. The gripe could be unending...

So maybe the fears about the Virginia Tech shooter being linked to Islam by the media weren't totally unfounded after all...how idiotic can you get?