I am listening to "Don't look back in Anger" by Oasis. This song takes me right back to 8th grade. Every time I hear this song, I get that nostalgic feeling in my stomach. Flashes of the street where I lived and the people I surrounded myself with appear to me too easily. I am not much of a music fiend. I start liking songs by accident most of the time. I never seek out music that I think I will like. Often I find myself annoyed at friends that insist on playing me songs that I don't know and will never hear again. What I enjoy about music is being able to sing along to all the lyrics which means I have to have heard the songs enough to memorize the lyrics. I also enjoy songs that take me back to a different place. And sometimes I like a song just because the beat is so darn catchy. But I don't dissect music and I feel no need to.
Now that that soliloquy is over.... Let's get an update on my life shall we?
As you may know I have been teaching English as a Second language through a small private company for about a year now. I have also been working as a recruiter of international students for a private university in the area. Since I started, the CEO has decided to found a preparatory college in Redlands. We got all the investers and we are opening this fall. I am now the director of the ESL department there and am working right now on creating the classes that we will offer. I am still recruiting students for the other university as well. PLUS, I was just told that they held aside a couple regular classes that they thought that I would be good at teaching. So you are looking at (....reading the words of) the new teacher of Intro to Acting and Intro to Oral Communications!
Anyway, for those of you who have taken classes such as these, I was wondering there were any assignments you paricularly liked/disliked, things you hated/loved about the teachers, things that you remember helping you learn, and any other precious nuggets of truth......
People usually don't respond to pleas such as these, but please help me out ok?
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Saturday, August 04, 2007
New Zealand
Hello all! Starting on July 16th, Jason and I were in New Zealand for two weeks. I got back on Monday and have been meaning to write several posts about our trip but I have been playing catch up at work and home. Jason didn't come home with me because he went on to Papua New Guinea on a month-long mission trip. That is right, he will be in the country that just outlawed cannabalism in the 1970's for a month......
Anyway, he has the camera so he transferred all of our New Zealand pictures onto my ipod so I could bring them home and include them in my blog. I tried to transfer them onto the computer yesterday and quickly found there were no pictures on my ipod..... under settings the photo import was turned off. So....it has been a horrible blow for me.... :] Just kidding. Everything will be fine, you guys will just have to wait a month to see our pictures and hear our stories. I think I will import one picture from the internet from a particularly beautiful place we experienced. That will make me feel better.
Anyway, he has the camera so he transferred all of our New Zealand pictures onto my ipod so I could bring them home and include them in my blog. I tried to transfer them onto the computer yesterday and quickly found there were no pictures on my ipod..... under settings the photo import was turned off. So....it has been a horrible blow for me.... :] Just kidding. Everything will be fine, you guys will just have to wait a month to see our pictures and hear our stories. I think I will import one picture from the internet from a particularly beautiful place we experienced. That will make me feel better.
Interestingly, none of the pics on the internet were as good or taken from the same angle as the ones Jason and I took. It is interesting because there is a huge sign that says "Best View of Banks Peninsula.....20 meters" . And it really was the best view. Anyway, here is a different view form Banks peninsula. And yes the water really is that blue....
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Here they are...
So I got a week to go up to Bend to celebrate Jason's mom's birthday. I celebrated my mom's birthday right before I left but since none of us were avid photographers, I don't have much documenting the good time I had with my mom and co. But I have lots of pictures in Bend. So enjoy!
Just kidding, we stopped just to see this elephant seal and I don't know if there even is such a website.
Here is a silly picture of us. Jason looks funny becuase they used a wide angle lens.
We went to a lake and I took my nieces on a wave runner ride.
We were coming back from a movie when we drove past this strange modern pirate man. And realized it was Jason's step-dad........
We drove part of the way home along Highway 1 from Seaside to San Louis Obispo. Here are some particularly beautiful shots.
We stopped at a beach along the way to dip our feet in the sand and what do you suppose we saw lurching it's way towards us but this scary monster! So we ran back to the car after documenting the strange beast to send to unidentifiedmonsters.com.
Just kidding, we stopped just to see this elephant seal and I don't know if there even is such a website. We are back home now and very happy to be unpacking and cleaning our house.... sigh.
Monday, July 02, 2007
The World Today
I thought this was an extremely interesting article. I found it on the Daily News website and in light of the recent botched car bombings in the UK, I thought that I would copy and paste it here for you to read. I am in Bend, OR right now so soon I will update with some fun pictures.
"I was a fanatic...I know their thinking, says former radical Islamist"
By HASSAN BUTT - 2nd July 2007
When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.
By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us.
More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.
The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.
And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.
For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: "What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq."
I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.
Mohammed Sidique Khan met with the author on two separate occasions
Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombings, and I were both part of the network - I met him on two occasions.
And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.
If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?
How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?
There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.
Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.
For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.
But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).
Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.
Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.
In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.
The notion of a global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain.
For decades, radicals have been exploiting the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state - typically by starting debate with the question: "Are you British or Muslim?"
But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Muslim institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology.
They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence against the unbeliever - and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.
This has left the territory open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, I repeatedly came across those who had tried to raise these issues with mosque authorities only to be banned from their grounds.
Every time this happened it felt like a moral and religious victory for us because it served as a recruiting sergeant for extremism.
Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism.
A handful of scholars from the Middle East have tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised so long ago by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion.
In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.
But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me as a far more potent argument because it involves recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don't actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.
The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief.
For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we'll stay here.
But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.
However, it isn't enough for responsible Muslims to say that, because they feel at home in Britain, they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers.
Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.
I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.
Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.
If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence.
And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.
"I was a fanatic...I know their thinking, says former radical Islamist"
By HASSAN BUTT - 2nd July 2007
When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.
By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us.
More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.
The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.
And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.
For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: "What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq."
I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.
Mohammed Sidique Khan met with the author on two separate occasions
Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombings, and I were both part of the network - I met him on two occasions.
And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.
If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?
How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?
There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.
Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.
For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.
But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).
Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.
Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.
In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.
The notion of a global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain.
For decades, radicals have been exploiting the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state - typically by starting debate with the question: "Are you British or Muslim?"
But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Muslim institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology.
They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence against the unbeliever - and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.
This has left the territory open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, I repeatedly came across those who had tried to raise these issues with mosque authorities only to be banned from their grounds.
Every time this happened it felt like a moral and religious victory for us because it served as a recruiting sergeant for extremism.
Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism.
A handful of scholars from the Middle East have tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised so long ago by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion.
In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.
But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me as a far more potent argument because it involves recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don't actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.
The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief.
For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we'll stay here.
But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.
However, it isn't enough for responsible Muslims to say that, because they feel at home in Britain, they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers.
Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.
I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.
Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.
If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence.
And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Pretty Funny....
Ok so I know that this video is pretty long but it is very interesting and well.... funny. The funniest part is toward the end. Anyway, watch it if you would like. If you don't like politics, don't bother.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9JE48XHKG64
Here is another one that is gives you the jist of the first video. The first video is uncut from C-span or something and this one is edited by fox news.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=0h6gehCPvpk&mode=related&search
Keep in mind this is before the 1992 elections so the Bush he is talking about is our current president's father.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9JE48XHKG64
Here is another one that is gives you the jist of the first video. The first video is uncut from C-span or something and this one is edited by fox news.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=0h6gehCPvpk&mode=related&search
Keep in mind this is before the 1992 elections so the Bush he is talking about is our current president's father.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Santa Barbara
A couple weekends ago, Jason and I headed to Danelle (Jason's cousin) and Josh's house for Jason's birthday. They live in LA but we decided to go up to Santa Barbara for a day trip. We went a pretty waterfall (Nojoqui Falls). I guess sometimes it can be a torrent of water but most of the time it looks like a fairy land of trickling water because of all the moss that the water runs over. Anyway, since this is the driest that Southern CA has been in years, the waterfall is pretty sparse but there was still enough water to be beautiful. Here is Danelle and I in front of the trickling waterfall.
Jason and I posing in front of the waterfall. You can see how lush and green it is.
Jason and I posing in front of the waterfall. You can see how lush and green it is.
Here we are back in LA walking along the beach. As you can see, Danelle is 5 months pregnant! Jessica, another cousin, came with us.
That's all for now!
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Who can believe it?
So, this is an effort to start writing on my wonderful blog again. I am determined to do so. I have decided to keep our small canon elf camera in my purse so that I can better take pictures. One reason I never updated was because loading pictures from our great big beautiful camera took to long and was too complicated for my little brain to really get into. So hopefully this will be the catalyst to get my blog going again.
This is the director of the play that I was in in January. Humph. Why should his picture come up for my name? Honestly, getting a free ride off my fame! ;]
It has been so long that most of you who ever used to read my blog probably won't even notice that I started writing again for quite a long time. Another thing that keeps me back from writing on my blog is that I realize that this is something that ANYONE can read. That keeps me from being too honest on here. Not that I am being dishonest... but I don't ever write about my deepest thoughts and feelings. I feel that those should be kept in a journal. But I don't have time to do both so I figure I will do one at least and that will help.
I have always had so many ideas for this blog and I am not sure if I will put them all into action but hopefully I will try to make some of them realities. OK, well thanks for checking my blog again. I appreciate it!
Here is the one picture that is actually affilated with me when I look up my name on google images. 
This is the director of the play that I was in in January. Humph. Why should his picture come up for my name? Honestly, getting a free ride off my fame! ;]
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