Month: March 2007

Keep on scooter-ing!

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Scientific name: Callistemon viminalis
Common name: Weeping bottlebrush
Location: Singapore

Jeremy is in the midst of giving up coffee. Please forgive him if he seems a bit short tempered.

I’m in the middle of reading a thriller! I used to not like these books because they freaked me out so much with all the shooting and suspense, but now I love them because (unlike real life) the bad guy always pays the price, the good guy gets the girl and all loose ends are tied up neatly – all within 300 pages. But I still can only read it while it’s light outside or while someone is in the same room as me.

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Scientific name: Brugmansia
Common name: Angel’s Trumpets
Location: Taiwan

I read Frank’s blog, cause he actaully posts some interesting material. On this one particular post, Frank links to a pretty interesting article about how a study of suicide bombers found that they were not the poorest of poor, and somewhat more educated than average, which runs a bit counter to my original thinking…

It was all good, until I read the first comment on the post. That royally pissed me off! Considering that the topic was economics and not religion. It still rankles me 4 days after the fact. You can read my response to that post from the link.

Out of respect to Frank, since it’s his blog, I’ve refrained from adding anymore comments, and I hope people will respect that wish as well. I’ll leave you with 2 links, and a response from Arif…

The Washington Post asks some panelists why people kill each other? Why do racial groups and ethnicities fight each other?

Response 1 and Response 2

Arif’s response (tho I think he uses a bit too strong of wording in the first paragraph)….

I am a Muslim and I agree with and thank my good friend that people need to be more considerate of Islam and Muslims and their relationship to (or lack thereof) to terrorism. Those that do not just show how ignorant they can be. And of course it’s not entirely their fault when the media serves to perpetuate and glorify that ignorance. But it is not sufficient to just blame the media. Those that are ignorant should either educate themselves on the issues or shut up and save some face for themselves and those they embarrassingly represent.

People have made fun of this 72 virgin thing a lot and its motivation to terrorism. You have to get to heaven first before you get that and there nothing in Islamic teachings that says blowing yourself up (suicide) when you take out a bunch of other innocent lives (murder) will land you in heaven. Now the 72 virgins thing, is a contextual thing and likely figurative, but who really knows with religion… there are probably analogues of what rewards heaven brings in Christianity and Judaism, but in the end it the specifics do no matter, as long as those who believe are given some higher motivation to do what believers are supposed to do… be good righteous people according to the contexts of their belief system.

It’s true that most of the terrorism incidents we hear about these days involve Muslims, but it’s important to distinguish between politics and religion. Though Islam itself does bring the two together in certain cases, the manipulations certain people will make of their actions and followers to bring a greater cause to their political agendas do not necessarily mean that a religious belief system actually condones the actions under whose banner they fly. You want other examples of terrorism? The Crusades by the terrorist “Christians” against a flourishing Islamic society. The IRA in the 80’s in Northern Ireland. The Revolutionaries against the British Rule in the colonies. The Sandinistas. The Christian Right when they attack abortion clinics and murdered doctors performing them. Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of an FBI building. You get the picture. I don’t mean to point my finger to Christians per se, but those who wage terrorism under that label, hence the quotes. Obviously Christ preached a message that was the opposite of what those that fight under his name would use as their justification. Terrorists are terrorists, whether they call themselves Muslims, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, whatever. The former is a means, an action, while the former is a label used for a belief system. Because a terrorist labels themselves as such does not necessarily mean they are exemplars of the belief system.

Terrorism is a poor man’s war (though according to the article not literally poor), ie those that do not have the means or power support base to wage a full scale war on a sovereign but feel strongly about their ideology or political agenda. And it encompasses many different groups and many different motivations. There is no more legitimacy to a national war on the scale the US wages directly or indirectly than there is to terrorism, that a non sovereign group wages.

As to the concept Jihad that terrorist often ascribe their actions to, I think the vast majority of Muslims would and should believe that our true Jihad as Muslims is against those like Osama that threaten to bastardize and hijack our religion into a tool for their agenda. Jihad in a true Islamic sense is 1. the internal struggle within yourself to be the best practicing and believing Muslim you can be, 2. the defense of your personal body and that of all others around you from harm of an attacker, and 3. the defense of the religion and its ideology from those who seek to destroy or harm it. Nothing in there legitimizes killing innocents for your cause religious or not.

Edda went to a child psychologist today to measure her IQ and her adaptive behavior ability. We are just starting to poke our fingers into the mysterious marshmallow that is the bureaucracy surrounding getting special needs services in the US and one of the first requirements is to have these two standardized tests completed.

Some of the questions asked were ridiculously advanced (Does she know not to bully or taunt her classmates?) and others she used to be able to do, but can no longer do (namely some fine-motor things like turning pages in a book), but I think we were in a cheerful mood and somehow this went OK.

Jeremy has been concerned for a few days because he didn’t really want to know exactly how low Edda was going to score on her IQ test. It has taken us a year since her diagnosis to really believe in our hearts that she knows much of what is going on around her and that her mental capacity is not to be underestimated.

The adaptive behavior test was mainly a series of questions for us – social/gross motor/fine motor. The IQ test started with a page with 4 pictures on it – of course, a lot of the questions he asked her were things that we hadn’t taught Edda and we usually do 2 pictures at a time and her tapping can be misinterpreted because the pictures were really close together, but she looked at them and listened to the questions and tried her best. So she got the animal question (giraffe) and the shape question (triangle) without a doubt. Woo hoo!

(Jeremy did justifiably accuse me of trying to cheat on the first question, so I stepped away from her after that. I just want her to show what she knows! – Just a bit of enthusiastic encouragement gone a bit astray..)

Edda and I high-fived and laughed a bit after it was all done.

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Scientific name: Euphorbia milii
Common name: Crown of Thorns
Location: Taiwan

And for the check too. I will definitely go out and get a nice meal.

With Vince’s birthday and the trip to Taiwan, the house is overflowing with stuff! I can hardly move around this house without stepping on newly acquired plastic items or eating a tasty Taiwan treat.

Enough people have asked me, “So have you started packing yet?” to make me think that a little bit of organization around this house might be a good idea since the movers are coming in 3 weeks!

Jeremy might make all the airline/hotel/apartment plans, but I’m in charge of making sure we don’t move broken toys, stained clothing, outdated medical records or empty tubes of toothpaste across the Pacific Ocean. Why are these items around the house to begin with? Hmmm, the big question.

I have a dream that one day we will live in a modernist house with glass and stainless steel and absolutely no clutter anywhere! Where do those people put the extra toilet paper they buy at Costco? Forget about the toilet paper, where is the remote control – you never see the remote in any of those glorious magazine spreads. But I know this dream is an unattainable fantasy because one look at my parents’ house or Jeremy’s parents’ house will reveal our genetic destiny to live in a house with piles of old magazines. And by golly we do live in a house with piles of stuff everywhere.

Jeremy and I even had a discussion about piles of magazines. Because frequently, one will be reading a magazine in bed and leaves it on the nightstand when it’s time for lights out and then sometime later the next person has to go #2 and grabs it from the nightstand and brings it to the bathroom where it gets left and, later, during the kids’ bath, it gets completely soaked and then we have to let it dry and it gets all crinkly and then the cycle repeats itself until the magazine is a pulpy, smeary form of its former self and no one knows if anyone has read the whole magazine. Egads, maybe you missed that expose on Paris Hilton or maybe didn’t see the recipe for peach melba or didn’t see the 5 simple things to do to redo your living room!

So we’ve invented some sort of magazine reading system that will be installed at our next house. I think it involves post-it notes and metal shelving. But I am not optimistic, I’m sure it will devolve into a pulpy mess before we know it.

Anyhow, I did manage to throw away some old catalogs today. Hooray for me!

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Scientific name: Pachystachys lutea
Common name: Golden shrimp plant
Location: Singapore

Oh yeah, this is a series of text messages (or SMSes for you Singaporean folks) between me and Arif on Monday night while I was on a date…

Arif: How did the date go/going?
Me: We are having breakfast.
Arif: Huh? Does that mean u got some??? Heh heh, is she official?
Me: No i was just joking but you should have seen the look on your face 🙂
Arif: Agh u bastard! Ur rit it prob was funny.

Laff.

This is blogged by request for Pei-Yean.

Swing night at Swing Central in Redwood City was tonight. Only Mike and Betty showed up. That was a bit sad, but not unexpected. The crappy thing was that the class that we signed up for was more a styling/variations of the basic step kind of class, not necessarily a beginner’s class. I’m not sure if it’s what Betty had in mind… There was some rambling at the beginning trying to get Mike into a class that he could learn the basic step in. Good thing there was a drop in beginning class starting at 8:15, so Mike really only had to wait an hour or so for it.

Betty and I took the class we signed up for. It was okay. we really didn’t do a lot of actual dancing, sadly. And for the longest time I could only remember the basic step. Ha! It’s been that long. Betty and I stepped into the drop in class with Mike, just to make sure he was okay. It was fun, but I had already learned all that stuff before.

Now I suppose the meat of it… It’s nice to get out on the dance floor. A lot more stuff came to as I started dancing, tho I butchered my Charleston quite a few times. I’m a hella lot more comfortable doing lindy than east coast, but they kept change the tempo of the songs. I couldn’t quite figure it out. And the songs were short. I also still stand at the sidelines waaaaaaay too much. I need to be a bit bolder asking random people to dance.

I think I still like salsa better. for some reason I feel like there’s a better connection with your partner salsa dancing. Swing, it seems everyone’s looking at the floor or their feet or something. Salsa I feel like I can look into someone’s eyes a bit more. Maybe it’s just that you’re always changing distance between your bodies, whereas I feel more intimate salsaing because you move together. Also, sadly, in some way, swing makes me think of Jocelyn and a lot of emotional ruckus I went thru in 2001.. It’s quite possible that’s coloring my perception of the dance a little bit.

Funny moment of the night. I was sitting by the dance floor. Some girl came up to me an asked me if I wanted to dance. I was sorta taken aback, and was like, “uh .. yeah”. “That wasn’t very enthusiastic.”, she responded, semi cheekishly, semi seriously. 😛 She still danced with me, tho I doubt she’d dance with me again. hahhhaha.

Last night, Edda cried half the night and we took turns comforting her in the darkness of her room. We had no idea why she was so upset until we got up this morning and took a look at her.

Oh, that swollen eye! Not pink eye, thank goodness, perhaps just an allergy or infection. I still take Edda (for these straightforward diagnosis/medications) to the pediatrician who misdiagnosed her Rett status simply because he’s the closest doctor. I figure if it was anything more serious, I’d just take her to the Children’s Hospital. I think he hasn’t dealt with many special needs kids because he seems a bit hesitant to even touch her.

But Edda did get to miss school (that tricky girl) – by 10:30 am after a dose of Zyrtec and eyedrops, she was as chipper as a beaver in a forest.

Vince did manage to wake up and remember that he was suppose to hand in some homework yesterday so he made Jeremy wait until he rushed through some illegible Chinese.

Hurry up!

During therapy today, Edda had a brief episode which I guess I reluctantly have to label a seizure. Edda has always had brief episodes of being spaced out – most commonly upon being woken up from a nap. Sometimes she will be sleeping soundly, then all of a sudden, her eyes will snap open and she will look around and seemingly not recognize where she is or who I am.

Now these episodes are happening during her awake moments – there was one Monday morning that Jeremy saw – a shivering while watching TV, no loss of balance and then one today during a session with Ranjit, our therapist. Now, these are really, really brief. About 10-15 seconds and then a few minutes to reorient herself to her surroundings as if nothing has ever happened.

Normally, I like to discount Jeremy’s and my observations because we don’t really know what a seizure looks like, but Ranjit surely does and Edda’s teachers, who also are familiar with seizures, also mentioned an episode about two weeks ago. We have an appointment with a neuro next week (which we had already scheduled as a “we are leaving! bye!” kind of appointment) and I suppose we will mention this stuff to her (she’s the one who was very gloomy when she realized what Edda had – basically writing her off), I don’t want to medicated Edda unless the seizures become more serious since the seizure medications have their own nasty side effects.

I thought we might be lucky and not experience any seizures, but now maybe I can just think that we’ll be lucky and the seizures won’t get any worse. Oh, my little soybean, keep that noggin of yours as tidy as you can.

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Vince – professional ball winder

Then I stuck it into a yarn bra given to me by Amey. It’s suppose to keep the ball from tangling up.

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Scientific name: Thunbergia grandiflora
Common name: Skyflower vine, Clock Vince
Location: Singapore