sticking like ducttape

assalaamu alaikum

man talk about being hungry.

i dropped off my sister at her college early this morning, and then went straight to my campus to study. i didn't eat breakfast or anything so i come home hoping for some fresh rotis or something, but there is nothing. after looking around the fridge for a couple minutes, i end up pulling out a container of raw chocolate chip cookie dough, and begin my assault. its been in the freezer forever so its hard as a rock, and i didn't know it was possible to mutilate a fork so badly until i tried to hack away at the cookie dough and get a few bites in. and then by accident, i threw the fork into the trash can, and i'm too lazy to go dig through the trash and take it out, so its gone.

finish strong or dont finish at all

assalaamu alaikum

so the day finally came. the time for a decision. today is the last day to withdraw from classes, and after performing istikharah and debating the pros and cons of dropping math all yesterday and today, at the point of actually getting ready to drive up to the college and drop math, i decided to stick with it. there is no turning back now. i'm just going to have to buckle down and study.

3 weeks left in the semester.

in basketball, i want the last shot - more like every shot, shhh - but when it comes down to the clutch, i want it and i go for it. the same way, my entire life in schooling, whether it was the "last minute, up all night science fair project that wins", or the "did not study all weekend but come in monday morning 10 minutes before qari sahab gets there and memorize my lesson out of sheer terror", or the "last minute essay that keeps you up half the night" i've always come through at the end. maybe this spoiled me, but the thing was, i always KNEW that i could do it.

this one is different, because i hate math, and i really do NOT know if i can pull this one off. and now as the clock ticks, its almost dhuhr time. after dhuhr is class with the sheikh. then i gotta go to DC, and by the time i come back, who knows if i will still have time to reverse the decision.

but its done now. if i was to drop, i should have gone half an hour ago. then again, anything can happen, and at the end of the day, i might be writing an entry bout how this whole post was garbage, but as of now, its on. ball in.

prayer time.

walaikum assalaam.

assalaamu alaikum

dang homie

you know its bad when spring break's been over for 2 days, and you finally decide to look for your bookbag.

AND only to make it look like you were studying the entire morning and not wasting time eating roti with ice cream...

aha...dang homie

salaamu alaikum

back from the MIST party, aH, which is always good times. this was the first time during this "spring break" that i've actually went somewhere, and it was definitely a blast of fresh air. the thing is i feel so unproductive when i am at home. and when i started thinking about it and tried to figure out why, i came to the following conclusions (theories):

1. i don't really feel like my day has "started" for REAL until i've showered up and changed clothes and all that jazz. when i'm at home, i just sit around all day long, eat cereal, and sleep. do i ever leave the house? of course. five times a day at LEAST, which brings me to the next point.

2. i live 15.4 seconds away from the masjid. i sleepwalk to fajr, sleepwalk back, and hit the sack again. days that i'm off or when this is possible, ill waste time at home doing nothing until dhuhr, and ill still go the masjid without actually "starting my day". i could go the entire day like this, cuz the masjid is my backyard.

which really makes me wish that we lived a little further away. another reason is that living this close to the masjid has spoiled me. one of my boys would ask how its possible for me to be late to prayer, miss a rakah etc. he understood once he moved into the house next to mine. of course there are so many benefits of living so close to the masjid, but i can't help but wonder or hope that if i lived a little farther away, i would be so tortured by boredom that i would have to get out and come to the masjid, which would then not actually be my backyard, but me coming out to the community. it would make me a lot less lazy and teach me how to manage my time.

3. i am procrastinator extraordinaire. and my house has a lot to do with that. i cannot do a lick of work inside of the home. i can come home from college with a weeks worth of assignments to do or catch up on, and really have an intention to start on it, but once i step in the house, i see the sofa in the living room or the nice empty floor next to the computer, and oh wait, the COMPUTER. so you guys are prolly like "computer? i can understand that...but the sofa or FLOOR?" very simply put: i sleep there. all my room is to me is where i change my clothes, and maybe hit the bench when i'm feeling lucky. i sleep downstairs either on the sofa, or on the floor. therefore, when i am at home, i cannot study. its either sit on the comp, or feel very sleepy and just lie down.

4. i don't know what four is. maybe its because i'm not even going to a real college. CCBC is just 13th grade. which is why i need to transfer as soon as possible, which i cudda done a semester ago, but chose not to for who knows what reason.

this semester started as a fully loaded killer for me. next thing i know, the darul uloom classes became less structured/scheduled and more "sheikh says come at this time tomorrow...ok." and i found out i didn't need my anatomy&phys class, resulting in me dropping it, and all of a sudden, i have so much free time, and i am so unproductive its not even funny. and whats really sad is that i'm still near failing math when i could be smashing it. (see all of the above post)

so, let me end with an intention and the crux of worship: duah.

Ya Allah, make us from those who You take Your work from. Accept us for this deen.

Ya Allah, purify my intentions and help me act when action is needed, and restrain when restraint is needed. Take away my laziness and make easy for me my endeavors.

Ameen.

dasss wasss goooooooood

salaamu alaikum
this is the 1st place winner for poetry in MIST 2006. congrats to my boy hasan, known also as baller4life. here it is:

In my head I’ve got these dreams, these depictions, descriptions
Barrages of collages, colors outside the spectrum of sight, just light beyond the range of my vision
But they fill me to the brim, no use to suppress them, no way to win
Except through the burning of my soul, the fat of laziness dripping off its end
By expending this newly born piece of flesh and muscle into its truer function
As it pumps my blood and life through these wrinkled veins into these flashes of imagination
No, more like personalized personification of a reservoir of emotion
Dampened, barred and hidden behind a veneer of the visage of men.
So instead I intend to attempt to paint this picture of thoughts and feelings with words
Because my fingers and hands cannot fathom subtleties left to the mind, hold, or grasp this burden of worlds
This sketch of a solemn soul sitting in solitary at the strand of a stream, holding stones
And it might seem like a dream, but if you know what I mean, he’s grinding them down with scorching coals.
This fiery heat of struggle, dirt falls away as it bubbles when he experiences trouble,
Sharpened and shaped by all the times that he felt prone to the suggestion, that he should just lash back in an act of reactionary aggression, because he can take revenge and avenge his pride for that snide comment or the backbiting from behind, but to swallow that coal, and take the cold in his eyes and lump in his throat and throw it away, disregarding the pain of bowing low and letting go of the hate, the ire in his gaze, the daggered words on his tongue, the fire in his ways, the urge to simply stain a steel sword red, or put a gun to a head, or just return what was said, and what’s been said has been said, so to take this to bed and forgive and forget without remorse or regret grants a greater reward, far more whole than the black hole of revenge, gratification of a soul with a spine that can bend like the kind tree that bears its fruit low to even the lowliest of men.

And no its not the end, he knows that rest is not his friend, he dodges a bullet from a gun, its the whisper of shaytan, to leave his stones alone and show his own that this is what he’s done, unless he wishes to undo the labor that he has done to none, by leaving his stone, his soul, his whole, outside in the sun, because the stagnant heart is nothing but a degenerating one.

So now he’s back, he was never gone, with this same stone clutched,
Grinding viciously with a heated coal that burns him to the touch,
Crouched over and working fiercely, because his mentality’s such,
That he knows he started this job, and finish it he must,
So with another chafe of his scrape he unveils the glitter of past times and present dates,
And takes a step forward when he couldn’t contemplate
The leaving of his prayer for the next time he would wake, because what if he didn’t wake and met his fate and his lord in this most miserable state, of heedlessness
So he wakes from his warmth in the cold air of the night,
And prays to his Lord takes the sweetness of Light when no one saw or heard
He took another step forward when he curbed his desires, blasting through the doors of vile indecency, by fasting on the day in which he would eat normally, or all the times that he felt the tug of this world come at him so bold, he’s hanging off a single strand while stranded at sea in the midst of a storm that swarms him so, that he surely would not persist in his hold of this string, but he does and that’s what strengthens his resolve and drowns his remorse and remolds his whole soul into a resilient slave and a true mortal.

And this rock that he shapes with his bloody hands and welling eyes, feeds his soul to mold one simple characteristic goal: Patience in relations, in frustrations, in temptations, bearing not the limitation of reactionary situations, but patience is pro-active like meeting your enemy with a smile, or walking that extra mile, plunge headfirst into that trial, and with this you turn that first rock in your pile into a rock no more, and you see that your efforts are worthwhile because you have just won one battle in a war and these metaphors can’t fully store the heat of this metamorphosis, but this process will be hard and bitter, sometimes even torturous, to take your sweat and time put your heart and mind to the test, you need a map? take the Quran and look up your coordinates, and become of those fortunate enough to read and actually learn from it,

And then if you see your rocks you’ll find that the stones are now refined, gleaming with light of Allah’s Noor and his signs, and you know in your mind, that this is small victory and you have so many more stones to find, and to grind each and every one will be just as tough, but for that you have just carved Patience into a Diamond from the Rough.