you feel the earth, it wanders out from under your feet

This week has been difficult.  Most nights I have been on the telephone with various family members for several hours, attempting to help them find common ground that is stable enough to take steps forward rather than to remain frozen in deadlock, or worse, to slide backward.  I think some progress has been made in that direction but it's really hard to tell at this point.  I am tentatively optimistic (which may be stupid) but this is my usual stance and may not be reflective of situation and circumstance.

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In spite of, or perhaps because of these difficulties, I have been trying very hard to get ahead in my studying.  My play opens in the upcoming week and therefore I will be out every night without time for homework and study.  This meant it was necessary to get at least a week ahead so that a week off wouldn't leave me behind schedule.  Fortunately I had started Operation Blast Ahead prior to The Meltdown of Family Life and was able to accommodate excessive hours of phone chat with the study schedule with only minor negative side effects (mild stress headache... moderate exhaustion).  I wrote the quiz today and got 100% on the multiple choice.  This leaves only the long answer questions which the professor will email to me after he marks them.  I am pleased that I have managed to stay on the rails in spite of it all.

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I am sorry that the long weekend is almost over but I got a better sleep last night than the night before (due to the fact that I remembered to wear my anti-snoring earplugs to protect me from Shawn's assaults).  Next weekend is a long weekend (Happy Birthday Queen Vickie) and immediately after that we begin the sailing course.  I still haven't begun that set of study requirements but having glanced through the manual briefly I can see that the 3 chapters we are expected to have read for the first class are only about 20 pages in total.  This, in comparison with the 50-page chapters I have been reading for my psych course, four at a time, will be nothing.

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I am reading Infidel by Ayaan Ali, which is the biography of a Somalian women who lived in Somalia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and later the Netherlands.  I'm still in the first quarter of the book so perhaps my assessment is premature but so far it strikes me as a book that may be so successful because it appeals to Islamophobes.  She writes about the Muslim faith very negatively and I imagine the market for such writing in America following 9/11 is enormous.  

However, having spent the year prior to moving to the coast working with and teaching at the college whose primary clientele was Muslim women, mostly Somalian, I have the feeling Ali has missed the mark.  Her descriptions of Somalians don't jibe with what I have seen firsthand.  Perhaps the Westernization of these women had already changed them, but even those who had recently arrived just didn't match the picture I see Ali painting of them.  The same is true of the men.  Although there were people I would consider more fundamentalist in their views, most of them were what I would call "moderate Islamists", something the foreward of this book (written by Christopher Hitchens) decries as nonexistent.  Hitchens calls the Muslim faith a religion steeped in hate and violence and on this point I completely disagree.  I do not believe Muslims are all extreme fundamentalists who promote terrorism any more than I believe it of Catholics, Protestants or any others.  

The people I knew wanted to be respected and treated with dignity, just as anyone else does.  They wanted the freedom to practice their faith without judgement and discrimination.  Their faith had nothing to do with terrorism and violence. 

There were distinct differences between what I would consider "Western values" and the way the Somalian women operated, but none of these differences were things that should make harmonious coexistence an impossibility.  

I'm finishing the book because it interests me to read another viewpoint on a subject I find fascinating.  But not because I agree with it.

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