This past weekend I helped my parents with some gardening and yard work.  It was a lot of fun, surprisingly.  Or not so surprisingly, I guess.  I’ve always liked doing work outside–mowing the lawn, shoveling the driveway, etc.  Being outside, side by side with my dad, doing some hard manual labor always made me feel more useful than being inside vacuuming or dusting.  But that’s another topic for another day.

On Sunday we worked together to first trim the bushes.  I used a trimmer to make sure all of them were perfectly rounded and flat on the top.  I felt like I was back in ceramics, smoothing out all the bumps on a newly spun pot.  It was nice to fashion it with my own hands.  Anyway, after that finished we had to cut up one of the trees in our yard that was having an identity crisis.

I say this because when we first bought the tree so many years ago all of its branches were growing downward.  It’s a crabapple tree, so its branches droop downward.  I guess that downward growth was forced by man when it was just a little tree, so now that it’s growing up, it’s starting to rebel just a bit.  A few of the branches on the top are growing straight up!  It looks like the tree is vomitting new green leaves.  Unfortunately for it, as healthy as the branches were, we called over Usman uncle and his chain saw to cut the new branches all of.  Sorry tree, but pain is beauty.

Anyway, with all the trees and bushes trimmed up and pretty, I noticed that our yard was still missing something… flowers!  So yesterday when I went with ammi to Randazzo’s, we picked up some flowers and brought them back home.  In the afternoon I went oustide to plant them. (more…)

In March of 2005 I went to a local Dairy Queen with an old friend of mine that I’ve known since I was in 2nd grade, Karen.  We had met earlier for lunch, and decided to follow up with some ice cream.  After going through two years of college, it was nice to know we hadn’t lost touch.  We were still capable of laughing, joking, talking, and relating to one another.  I was really enjoying my time catching up with her.

I had ordered my ice cream and sat down when the following occured: (as retold in my old blog)

We were carrying on a normal conversation, plenty of stupid jokes and funny memories.  In the middle of all my laughing, I kept seeing this boy, about 11 years old, gawking at me.  He was staring.  Everytime I looked, his eyes were fixed on me.  It was quite rude.  And I thought to myself, “Where does this kid get his manners from?”  Of course, I looked over at his father, and his old man’s staring at me, too.  Let me tell you, it definitely wasn’t because I’m some sort of stunning beauty.

Nope, here in homogenized milk white Northville, they were staring at me because I looked so different.  After a while, I started smiling at the man and his son, hoping that they’d realize that I saw them giving me dirty looks.  I thought that if I was smiling, they’d realize I was a nice person, and stop looking.  But did it work?  Nope.  My smiles recieved more glares. 

I just don’t get it.  What was so different about me?  I was a 19 yr old girl, out getting some ice cream with an old high school buddy of mine at a local Dairy Queen, in the town where I grew up.  I was laughing and smiling just like any other person.  But at the end of the day, I’m something different?

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