Monday, March 10, 2014
Equations As Art
When mathematicians describe equations as beautiful, they are not lying. Brain scans show that their minds respond to beautiful equations in the same way other people respond to great paintings or masterful music. The finding could bring neuroscientists closer to understanding the neural basis of beauty, a concept that is surprisingly hard to define.
In the study, researchers led by Semir Zeki of University College London asked 16 mathematicians to rate 60 equations on a scale ranging from "ugly" to "beautiful." Two weeks later, the mathematicians viewed the same equations and rated them again while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex. (...)
Mathematicians say they are unsurprised by the findings. "When I see a beautiful mathematical construction, or an unexpected and wonderfully intricate argument with precise logical interlocking pieces in a proof, I do feel the same way as when I see some art that amazes me," says mathematician Colin Adams of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. Daina Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., says beautiful math results "sound like a melody. For me equations are beautiful if they have elegant solution or lead to unexpected, surprising results."
Understanding just what beauty is, not to mention what makes a thing beautiful, is not easy. Beauty is not simply something pleasing that brings happiness. Sad things, after all, can be beautiful. "There is the experience of beauty in pain," Zeki says. Take Michelangelo's Pietà, a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Jesus Christ in her arms. "It's not a joyful thing, but it's very beautiful." (...)
Zeki and his colleagues admit that beauty is not perfectly defined, but say their studies could lead toward a deeper understanding of the idea. "The question we address is what neural mechanisms allow us to experience beauty," Zeki says. "The central issue that emerges from this work for the future is, why is it that an equation is beautiful?"
The study found, for example, that the beauty of equations is not entirely subjective. Most of the mathematicians agreed on which equations were beautiful and which were ugly, with Euler's identity, 1+eiπ=0, consistently rated the most attractive equation in the lot. "Here are these three fundamental numbers, e, pi and i," Adams says, "all defined independently and all critically important in their own way, and suddenly you have this relationship between them encompassed in this equation that has a grand total of seven symbols in it? It is dumbfounding."
by Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American | Read more:
Image:Quinn Dombrowski/Wikimedia Commons
In the study, researchers led by Semir Zeki of University College London asked 16 mathematicians to rate 60 equations on a scale ranging from "ugly" to "beautiful." Two weeks later, the mathematicians viewed the same equations and rated them again while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex. (...)Mathematicians say they are unsurprised by the findings. "When I see a beautiful mathematical construction, or an unexpected and wonderfully intricate argument with precise logical interlocking pieces in a proof, I do feel the same way as when I see some art that amazes me," says mathematician Colin Adams of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. Daina Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., says beautiful math results "sound like a melody. For me equations are beautiful if they have elegant solution or lead to unexpected, surprising results."
Understanding just what beauty is, not to mention what makes a thing beautiful, is not easy. Beauty is not simply something pleasing that brings happiness. Sad things, after all, can be beautiful. "There is the experience of beauty in pain," Zeki says. Take Michelangelo's Pietà, a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Jesus Christ in her arms. "It's not a joyful thing, but it's very beautiful." (...)
Zeki and his colleagues admit that beauty is not perfectly defined, but say their studies could lead toward a deeper understanding of the idea. "The question we address is what neural mechanisms allow us to experience beauty," Zeki says. "The central issue that emerges from this work for the future is, why is it that an equation is beautiful?"
The study found, for example, that the beauty of equations is not entirely subjective. Most of the mathematicians agreed on which equations were beautiful and which were ugly, with Euler's identity, 1+eiπ=0, consistently rated the most attractive equation in the lot. "Here are these three fundamental numbers, e, pi and i," Adams says, "all defined independently and all critically important in their own way, and suddenly you have this relationship between them encompassed in this equation that has a grand total of seven symbols in it? It is dumbfounding."
by Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American | Read more:
Image:Quinn Dombrowski/Wikimedia Commons
To Have and to Hold
The MacGuffin, in Alfred Hitchcock’s formulation, is “the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story” — the object of desire, the ball all eyes are kept on. The Maltese Falcon is a MacGuffin, as are the letters of transit in “Casablanca,” and a MacGuffin par excellence is all the more potent, dramatically, because its exact significance and innate value go unexplained. One thinks of the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction” as an iconic MacGuffin: What is in it? No one will ever know, but every viewer feels the power of the symbol.
One thinks also that, in real life, the briefcase — every briefcase and every satchel and knapsack and tote and much derided so-called murse — is itself a kind of MacGuffin. The exact details of the personal effects and professional necessities a man daily organizes in his bag don’t matter. What’s meaningful is the male bag itself, which, ever evolving, has developed into a fascinating index of masculinity.
I hope that I will not run afoul of the gender police in supposing that the typical man’s relationship with his bag is different in kind from a typical woman’s relationship with hers — more utilitarian, less personal and mystifying even in its mundanity. He operates according to a system of codes that are harder to read and quicker to change, and when his semiotic knapsack opens, a thousand questions spill out.
What can it mean that I have seen the editor of GQ on the street wearing a simple backpack labeled JanSport? Don’t get me wrong; he looked good. But if such a major arbiter of male fashion sees fit to wear a bag scarcely distinguishable from that shouldered by Johnny Sixth Grader or Average Joe Busboy, then we have ourselves a puzzle on (and in) our hands. The pinstriped senior partner porting a leather case back and forth to Larchmont, N.Y., the graphic designer toting a bourgeois revision of a prototypically blue-collar kit bag, the dude swinging a Louis Vuitton carryall to the gym — each is lugging around an awful lot of symbolic weight.
No bag in the history of male bags — a history that stretches back to the leather loculus (meaning “little place”) of the Roman soldier — has more cultural baggage than the briefcase. With its right-rectangular rectitude and immutable sense of authority, the iconic attaché case is as rigid as the values of the corporate culture of which it remains a symbol.
One thinks also that, in real life, the briefcase — every briefcase and every satchel and knapsack and tote and much derided so-called murse — is itself a kind of MacGuffin. The exact details of the personal effects and professional necessities a man daily organizes in his bag don’t matter. What’s meaningful is the male bag itself, which, ever evolving, has developed into a fascinating index of masculinity.I hope that I will not run afoul of the gender police in supposing that the typical man’s relationship with his bag is different in kind from a typical woman’s relationship with hers — more utilitarian, less personal and mystifying even in its mundanity. He operates according to a system of codes that are harder to read and quicker to change, and when his semiotic knapsack opens, a thousand questions spill out.
What can it mean that I have seen the editor of GQ on the street wearing a simple backpack labeled JanSport? Don’t get me wrong; he looked good. But if such a major arbiter of male fashion sees fit to wear a bag scarcely distinguishable from that shouldered by Johnny Sixth Grader or Average Joe Busboy, then we have ourselves a puzzle on (and in) our hands. The pinstriped senior partner porting a leather case back and forth to Larchmont, N.Y., the graphic designer toting a bourgeois revision of a prototypically blue-collar kit bag, the dude swinging a Louis Vuitton carryall to the gym — each is lugging around an awful lot of symbolic weight.
No bag in the history of male bags — a history that stretches back to the leather loculus (meaning “little place”) of the Roman soldier — has more cultural baggage than the briefcase. With its right-rectangular rectitude and immutable sense of authority, the iconic attaché case is as rigid as the values of the corporate culture of which it remains a symbol.
by Troy Patterson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: john Vink/Magnum Photos
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Aberdeen unveiled this statue today to mark the city’s first annual Kurt Cobain Day. It would have been the Aberdeen native’s 47th birthday.
Just more evidence why Kurt Cobain wanted to get the fuck out of Aberdeen.
Jesus wept.
We Won't Be Together Much Longer
by Alex Balk, The Awl
Image: Jeffrey Zeldman, via Flickr[ed. Public Service Announcement. Am I the only one who forgot it was Daylight Savings Time today? My bedside clock automatically changes (who knew?) and I actually manually reset it back to the wrong time.]
How Silence Became a Luxury Product
Unwanted noise is perhaps the most irksome form of sensory assault. A bothersome sight? Close your eyes or turn the other way—eyesores are, generally, immobile. An annoying taste? Spit it out. (Why was it in your mouth?) Sound, on the other hand, is ambient, elusive, enveloping. Even the softest drone can echo cacophonously if it worms itself into your head. Ulysses was not seduced by the sight of the sirens. Poe’s telltale heart does not torment with its smell. “Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption,” groused the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.”
Noise ranks as the number one gripe of restaurant-goers nationally according to a Zagat survey, and it is the complaint submitted to New York City’s 311 hotline with the greatest frequency. (From 2012 to 2013, noise-related calls to 311 increased 16 percent according to noise activist Arlene Bronzaft.) Even if these complaints are just cyclical resurgences of an age-old problem—the ancient Greek colony Sybaris mandated that certain noisy tradesmen (potters, tinsmiths) had to live outside the city walls; Elizabethan men couldn’t beat their wives past 10 p.m.—we seem to be dealing with it differently. From noise-canceling headphones to the popularity of silent retreats, there has never been quite so great a premium placed on silence. And not only do we value it in a general sense, we’re willing to pay for it. Silence has become the ultimate luxury. (...)
Why has silence become a commodity? To some extent it seems an outgrowth of a back-to-basics, purity-as-priority impulse. Food can’t get from the farm to the table fast enough; toxins must be avoided at all costs; the “disconnectionists” preach digital detox. Absence, in other forms, has become a commodity. How many products advertise their virtues by what they don’t include? BPA-free baby bottles, GMO-free tomatoes, and gluten-free oatmeal—never mind that it didn’t have gluten to begin with—are all available at your local supermarket.
by Chloe Schama, TNR | Read more:
by Chloe Schama, TNR | Read more:
Image: Image Source
In the Name of Love
“Do what you love. Love what you do.”
The commands are framed and perched in a living room that can only be described as “well-curated.” A picture of this room appeared first on a popular design blog, but has been pinned, tumbl’d, and liked thousands of times by now.
Lovingly lit and photographed, this room is styled to inspire Sehnsucht, roughly translatable from German as a pleasurable yearning for some utopian thing or place. Despite the fact that it introduces exhortations to labor into a space of leisure, the “do what you love” living room — where artful tchotchkes abound and work is not drudgery but love — is precisely the place all those pinners and likers long to be. The diptych arrangement suggests a secular version of a medieval house altar.
There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem is that it leads not to salvation, but to the devaluation of actual work, including the very work it pretends to elevate — and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.
Superficially, DWYL is an uplifting piece of advice, urging us to ponder what it is we most enjoy doing and then turn that activity into a wage-generating enterprise. But why should our pleasure be for profit? Who is the audience for this dictum? Who is not?
By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, DWYL distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving us from obligations to all who labor, whether or not they love it. It is the secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.
Aphorisms have numerous origins and reincarnations, but the generic and hackneyed nature of DWYL confounds precise attribution. Oxford Reference links the phrase and variants of it to Martina Navratilova and François Rabelais, among others. The internet frequently attributes it to Confucius, locating it in a misty, Orientalized past. Oprah Winfrey and other peddlers of positivity have included it in their repertoires for decades, but the most important recent evangelist of the DWYL creed is deceased Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
His graduation speech to the Stanford University class of 2005 provides as good an origin myth as any, especially since Jobs had already been beatified as the patron saint of aestheticized work well before his early death. In the speech, Jobs recounts the creation of Apple, and inserts this reflection:
But by portraying Apple as a labor of his individual love, Jobs elided the labor of untold thousands in Apple’s factories, conveniently hidden from sight on the other side of the planet — the very labor that allowed Jobs to actualize his love.
by Miya Tokumitsu, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Leslie A. Wood
The commands are framed and perched in a living room that can only be described as “well-curated.” A picture of this room appeared first on a popular design blog, but has been pinned, tumbl’d, and liked thousands of times by now.
Lovingly lit and photographed, this room is styled to inspire Sehnsucht, roughly translatable from German as a pleasurable yearning for some utopian thing or place. Despite the fact that it introduces exhortations to labor into a space of leisure, the “do what you love” living room — where artful tchotchkes abound and work is not drudgery but love — is precisely the place all those pinners and likers long to be. The diptych arrangement suggests a secular version of a medieval house altar.
There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem is that it leads not to salvation, but to the devaluation of actual work, including the very work it pretends to elevate — and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.Superficially, DWYL is an uplifting piece of advice, urging us to ponder what it is we most enjoy doing and then turn that activity into a wage-generating enterprise. But why should our pleasure be for profit? Who is the audience for this dictum? Who is not?
By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, DWYL distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving us from obligations to all who labor, whether or not they love it. It is the secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.
Aphorisms have numerous origins and reincarnations, but the generic and hackneyed nature of DWYL confounds precise attribution. Oxford Reference links the phrase and variants of it to Martina Navratilova and François Rabelais, among others. The internet frequently attributes it to Confucius, locating it in a misty, Orientalized past. Oprah Winfrey and other peddlers of positivity have included it in their repertoires for decades, but the most important recent evangelist of the DWYL creed is deceased Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
His graduation speech to the Stanford University class of 2005 provides as good an origin myth as any, especially since Jobs had already been beatified as the patron saint of aestheticized work well before his early death. In the speech, Jobs recounts the creation of Apple, and inserts this reflection:
You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.In these four sentences, the words “you” and “your” appear eight times. This focus on the individual is hardly surprising coming from Jobs, who cultivated a very specific image of himself as a worker: inspired, casual, passionate — all states agreeable with ideal romantic love. Jobs telegraphed the conflation of his besotted worker-self with his company so effectively that his black turtleneck and blue jeans became metonyms for all of Apple and the labor that maintains it.
But by portraying Apple as a labor of his individual love, Jobs elided the labor of untold thousands in Apple’s factories, conveniently hidden from sight on the other side of the planet — the very labor that allowed Jobs to actualize his love.
Image: Leslie A. Wood
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Life
For legions of Rolling Stones fans, Keith Richards is not only the heart and soul of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, he’s also the very avatar of rebellion: the desperado, the buccaneer, the poète maudit, the soul survivor and main offender, the torn and frayed outlaw, and the coolest dude on the planet, named both No. 1 on the rock stars most-likely-to-die list and the one life form (besides the cockroach) capable of surviving nuclear war.
Halfway through his electrifying new memoir, “Life,” Keith Richards writes about the consequences of fame: the nearly complete loss of privacy and the weirdness of being mythologized by fans as a sort of folk-hero renegade.
“I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me,” he says. “I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s 30 years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.”
By turns earnest and wicked, sweet and sarcastic and unsparing, Mr. Richards, now 66, writes with uncommon candor and immediacy. He’s decided that he’s going to tell it as he remembers it, and helped along with notebooks, letters and a diary he once kept, he remembers almost everything. He gives us an indelible, time-capsule feel for the madness that was life on the road with the Stones in the years before and after Altamont; harrowing accounts of his many close shaves and narrow escapes (from the police, prison time, drug hell); and a heap of sharp-edged snapshots of friends and colleagues — most notably, his longtime musical partner and sometime bête noire, Mick Jagger.
But “Life” — which was written with the veteran journalist James Fox — is way more than a revealing showbiz memoir. It is also a high-def, high-velocity portrait of the era when rock ’n’ roll came of age, a raw report from deep inside the counterculture maelstrom of how that music swept like a tsunami over Britain and the United States. It’s an eye-opening all-nighter in the studio with a master craftsman disclosing the alchemical secrets of his art. And it’s the intimate and moving story of one man’s long strange trip over the decades, told in dead-on, visceral prose without any of the pretense, caution or self-consciousness that usually attend great artists sitting for their self-portraits.
Die-hard Stones fans, of course, will pore over the detailed discussions of how songs like “Ruby Tuesday” and “Gimme Shelter” came to be written, the birthing process of some of Mr. Richards’s classic guitar riffs and the collaborative dynamic between him and Mr. Jagger. But the book will also dazzle the uninitiated, who thought they had only a casual interest in the Stones or who thought of Mr. Richards, vaguely, as a rock god who was mad, bad and dangerous to know. The book is that compelling and eloquently told.
Mr. Richards’s prose is like his guitar playing: intense, elemental, utterly distinctive and achingly, emotionally direct. Just as the Stones perfected a signature sound that could accommodate everything from ferocious Dionysian anthems to melancholy ballads about love and time and loss, so Mr. Richards has found a voice in these pages — a kind of rich, primal Keith-Speak — that enables him to dispense funny, streetwise observations, tender family reminiscences, casually profane yarns and wry literary allusions with both heart-felt sincerity and bad-boy charm.
by Michiko Kakutani, NY Times | Read more:
photo: Patricia Wall/The New York Times
[Repost: October 14, 2011]
Halfway through his electrifying new memoir, “Life,” Keith Richards writes about the consequences of fame: the nearly complete loss of privacy and the weirdness of being mythologized by fans as a sort of folk-hero renegade. “I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me,” he says. “I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s 30 years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.”
By turns earnest and wicked, sweet and sarcastic and unsparing, Mr. Richards, now 66, writes with uncommon candor and immediacy. He’s decided that he’s going to tell it as he remembers it, and helped along with notebooks, letters and a diary he once kept, he remembers almost everything. He gives us an indelible, time-capsule feel for the madness that was life on the road with the Stones in the years before and after Altamont; harrowing accounts of his many close shaves and narrow escapes (from the police, prison time, drug hell); and a heap of sharp-edged snapshots of friends and colleagues — most notably, his longtime musical partner and sometime bête noire, Mick Jagger.
But “Life” — which was written with the veteran journalist James Fox — is way more than a revealing showbiz memoir. It is also a high-def, high-velocity portrait of the era when rock ’n’ roll came of age, a raw report from deep inside the counterculture maelstrom of how that music swept like a tsunami over Britain and the United States. It’s an eye-opening all-nighter in the studio with a master craftsman disclosing the alchemical secrets of his art. And it’s the intimate and moving story of one man’s long strange trip over the decades, told in dead-on, visceral prose without any of the pretense, caution or self-consciousness that usually attend great artists sitting for their self-portraits.
Die-hard Stones fans, of course, will pore over the detailed discussions of how songs like “Ruby Tuesday” and “Gimme Shelter” came to be written, the birthing process of some of Mr. Richards’s classic guitar riffs and the collaborative dynamic between him and Mr. Jagger. But the book will also dazzle the uninitiated, who thought they had only a casual interest in the Stones or who thought of Mr. Richards, vaguely, as a rock god who was mad, bad and dangerous to know. The book is that compelling and eloquently told.
Mr. Richards’s prose is like his guitar playing: intense, elemental, utterly distinctive and achingly, emotionally direct. Just as the Stones perfected a signature sound that could accommodate everything from ferocious Dionysian anthems to melancholy ballads about love and time and loss, so Mr. Richards has found a voice in these pages — a kind of rich, primal Keith-Speak — that enables him to dispense funny, streetwise observations, tender family reminiscences, casually profane yarns and wry literary allusions with both heart-felt sincerity and bad-boy charm.
by Michiko Kakutani, NY Times | Read more:
photo: Patricia Wall/The New York Times
[Repost: October 14, 2011]
The Arranged Marriage
“That point doesn’t count,” Andy shouted as I jumped around the ping-pong table doing my victory dance. “You leaned over the table to hit the smash and that’s an illegal move. We have to redo the point.”
I looked up at him making my puppy dog eyes, knowing they would work as usual.
“You know I can’t reach if I don’t lean over it. I’m short and little,” I said.
“Oh no, your cuteness isn’t going to work on me this time. I’m not losing to a little girl.”
His words angered me to no point. I had been practicing over the last year with my brothers so I would be a real challenge and he still saw me as a little girl. “I’m six, I can’t not be cute,” I shouted as I threw my paddle at him and stomped up the stairs out of his basement – and my favorite place in the world.
Even though I hadn’t seen him for five years, I had been thinking about Andy Khan since moving to Philadelphia for school. Our dads were best friends since the second grade and our families would get together at either our home in Alexandria or his in the Philly suburbs. We were best friends until it became inappropriate for us to be. I was 13 when my mom subtly hinted that I should hang out upstairs with the moms instead of following the boys out to play. I had been expecting her to say something any day now as I remembered Andy’s big sister was about my age when she stopped hanging with the boys. From the way he refused to look at me, I was fairly certain his mom had a similar conversation with him, too. Philadelphia lost its appeal without him and I stopped visiting with my parents. Eventually, I went abroad to boarding school and he went away for college. We both forgot we ever knew each other.
I heard about him over the years. He remained close friends with my brother, and my mom would gush about what a man he had become. I heard when he tied for the highest MCAT score in the country. I heard he had been accepted into the MD/PhD dual degree, a prestigious program that would earn him doctorates from both Harvard Medical School and MIT. I wondered what he had heard about me over the years, if anything at all. Did he know about my freak-out at Cornell and that I transferred to Drexel University’s accelerated law program instead? Did he think I was an under-achiever? Did he think about me at all?
A few months into my first term at Drexel, my parents came down to visit. They were invited to the Khans’ for dinner and dragged me along. I took longer than usual getting ready, though I knew Andy would probably be in Boston doing some groundbreaking research. As we entered, his mom, whom I call Aunty, enveloped me in a teary-eyed hug as she scolded me for not visiting in years. I was right about him not being home and as I let myself relax, I felt horrible about staying away for so long. I even hit it off with his big sister now that our six-year age difference didn’t seem as much. Soon the Khan residence became my home away from home and I visited Aunty whenever I missed my mom or her cooking, which turned out to be almost every weekend.
On one of my visits, I was cleaning up the mess in the kitchen; it was the least I could do after Aunty had cooked me that delicious biryani. I was loading the dishwasher with my back to the kitchen when I heard someone open the refrigerator. I turned around, shocked to see him in his own home. We openly stared at each other for a few seconds, taking in how each of us had grown and matured over the years, until I realized I wasn’t wearing a scarf. I awkwardly put it on thinking what’s the point – he had already seen me – but also feeling the need to cover in front of him more than anyone else.
Slowly, his shocked expression turned into a smug smile at my awkwardness and he asked, “Are you the maid? I heard we got a new one.” I chose not to answer and went back to doing the dishes hiding my smile from him; he knew damn well who I was.
Soon after, my parents called and said they were coming down to talk to me about something important. I knew what it was going to be about. My mom had been hinting at the fact that she was already married by my age for months. It was my time to enter the arranged marriage hunt. Now that I was 19, and soon turning 20, I needed to get hitched or at least engaged before my pickings dwindled to creepy, bald, old men. I was fine with an arranged marriage. I had seen hundreds of successful ones and being the good Muslim girl my parents raised me to be, there was no other way. I had my own list of demands, though. I wanted someone educated and between three and five years older than me. I didn’t want more than two children and would not get married until I received my JD. He would be solely in charge of supporting me and the family, as I only wanted to do pro-bono human rights work. In return, I would raise his kids, be a good wife, and never soil his name. I didn’t care what he looked like, but he had to be a practicing Muslim who valued his faith. Let the search begin.
I looked up at him making my puppy dog eyes, knowing they would work as usual.
“You know I can’t reach if I don’t lean over it. I’m short and little,” I said.“Oh no, your cuteness isn’t going to work on me this time. I’m not losing to a little girl.”
His words angered me to no point. I had been practicing over the last year with my brothers so I would be a real challenge and he still saw me as a little girl. “I’m six, I can’t not be cute,” I shouted as I threw my paddle at him and stomped up the stairs out of his basement – and my favorite place in the world.
Even though I hadn’t seen him for five years, I had been thinking about Andy Khan since moving to Philadelphia for school. Our dads were best friends since the second grade and our families would get together at either our home in Alexandria or his in the Philly suburbs. We were best friends until it became inappropriate for us to be. I was 13 when my mom subtly hinted that I should hang out upstairs with the moms instead of following the boys out to play. I had been expecting her to say something any day now as I remembered Andy’s big sister was about my age when she stopped hanging with the boys. From the way he refused to look at me, I was fairly certain his mom had a similar conversation with him, too. Philadelphia lost its appeal without him and I stopped visiting with my parents. Eventually, I went abroad to boarding school and he went away for college. We both forgot we ever knew each other.
I heard about him over the years. He remained close friends with my brother, and my mom would gush about what a man he had become. I heard when he tied for the highest MCAT score in the country. I heard he had been accepted into the MD/PhD dual degree, a prestigious program that would earn him doctorates from both Harvard Medical School and MIT. I wondered what he had heard about me over the years, if anything at all. Did he know about my freak-out at Cornell and that I transferred to Drexel University’s accelerated law program instead? Did he think I was an under-achiever? Did he think about me at all?
A few months into my first term at Drexel, my parents came down to visit. They were invited to the Khans’ for dinner and dragged me along. I took longer than usual getting ready, though I knew Andy would probably be in Boston doing some groundbreaking research. As we entered, his mom, whom I call Aunty, enveloped me in a teary-eyed hug as she scolded me for not visiting in years. I was right about him not being home and as I let myself relax, I felt horrible about staying away for so long. I even hit it off with his big sister now that our six-year age difference didn’t seem as much. Soon the Khan residence became my home away from home and I visited Aunty whenever I missed my mom or her cooking, which turned out to be almost every weekend.
On one of my visits, I was cleaning up the mess in the kitchen; it was the least I could do after Aunty had cooked me that delicious biryani. I was loading the dishwasher with my back to the kitchen when I heard someone open the refrigerator. I turned around, shocked to see him in his own home. We openly stared at each other for a few seconds, taking in how each of us had grown and matured over the years, until I realized I wasn’t wearing a scarf. I awkwardly put it on thinking what’s the point – he had already seen me – but also feeling the need to cover in front of him more than anyone else.
Slowly, his shocked expression turned into a smug smile at my awkwardness and he asked, “Are you the maid? I heard we got a new one.” I chose not to answer and went back to doing the dishes hiding my smile from him; he knew damn well who I was.
Soon after, my parents called and said they were coming down to talk to me about something important. I knew what it was going to be about. My mom had been hinting at the fact that she was already married by my age for months. It was my time to enter the arranged marriage hunt. Now that I was 19, and soon turning 20, I needed to get hitched or at least engaged before my pickings dwindled to creepy, bald, old men. I was fine with an arranged marriage. I had seen hundreds of successful ones and being the good Muslim girl my parents raised me to be, there was no other way. I had my own list of demands, though. I wanted someone educated and between three and five years older than me. I didn’t want more than two children and would not get married until I received my JD. He would be solely in charge of supporting me and the family, as I only wanted to do pro-bono human rights work. In return, I would raise his kids, be a good wife, and never soil his name. I didn’t care what he looked like, but he had to be a practicing Muslim who valued his faith. Let the search begin.
by Sarah Hassan, The Smart Set | Read more:
Image: Andy Mabbett/CC BY-SA 3.0
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)