All Your Meme are Belong to Us
Jan 17, 2009
Salonika! tagged me, so here goes.
Rules
Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 16 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 16 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.
I dare you not to believe anything that follows.
- On my first day of work at a local digital marketing firm, I met one of my colleagues in the men’s washroom.
- From ages 3 to 15, I had the world’s strongest British accent. Then I lost it and I can’t bring it back, because I can’t fake accents. But apparently, it comes out when I’m nervous, teaching, or being formal.
I haven’t been to the UK in approximately two decades. - I am capable of talking faster than the speed of sound. Sometimes I sound like her.
- These are things I have wanted to be in my life, in the order of my wanting them: author-farmer, activist-lawyer, Nobel Peace Prize-winner, doctor, journalist, English professor, homeless, employed.
- For a while I was an English teacher at an all-girls’ Islamic school. I taught them about the birth of Christ; about how Christopher Columbus did not discover America; and how English isn’t always a language, sometimes it’s a tool you use to command attention and thereafter respect – given the demographics (working poor, racialised) of the class, it was the last lesson that I think mattered most.
I learned that I spell differently on whiteboard. - For a while this past summer, not a week went by when a random man on the street wouldn’t stop to talk to me in Spanish. I grew less apologetic and more amused as it went on. On a related note, my email address being what it is, I regularly get emails in Spanish, often with pictures attached.
- On the other hand, one night in Kingston a bunch of white boys in an SUV called me a nigger. It was simultaneously disturbing and hilarious.
- I can read one language I mostly can’t understand and understand another language I mostly can’t speak.
- At age 11, I could do vector math and prove complex geometric theorems. I have degrees in the biological sciences and English, but it’s Calculus I miss most.
- One of my uncles spent time in jail for being a communist, effectively ending his university education. He now runs a bookshop. One of my goals in life is to meet him, preferably after buying a book from his store. I’d like to know if the person I might have become is a person I’d want to be.
- Driving is always a somewhat harrowing experience, as I cannot, off the top of my head, tell left from right.
- I’m often oblivious to headlines, while I’ll note small print. As a metaphor for the way I live and interact with people, this is troublingly apt.
- One day I decided to open an account at Blockbuster. At the register, the boy behind the counter asked for ID and I gave him my driver’s licence. “You have to be 18,” he said, handing it back to me.
I’d just started my first year in university, so I took that as proof I wasn’t underage, but he seemed so certain that I couldn’t be sure. “But I am,” I said, confused and hesitant.
“According to your licence,” he replied, “you’re the same age as I am.” I looked at the ID. It was true, according to its birth date I was 16.
“Oh, ok.” And so I left, sans Blockbuster account.
Several hours later I remembered I was born in 1985, not 87. There must have been a mistake on my licence and I hadn’t noticed before.
To date, I still do not have an account at Blockbuster. And I continue to forget how old I am. - I know what it looks like when a place has no light except for the stars and the moon.
- For 12 of the last 15 years I’ve lived in walking distance of a Coca Cola factory – different factories, and in different countries.
- I fell asleep in almost every one of my classes last year. They were small classes, never numbering more than 15 people, so every professor saw me every time I dozed off, often because I was either sitting right next to or directly across from them. It turned out I was anaemic, which makes me feel a little less guilty, but no less embarrassed.
Tagged: everyone
I don’t think I know 16 people. Regale me, world.
8 Responses to “All Your Meme are Belong to Us”
1 yaser Jan 17, 2009
what does ‘racialised’ mean? i saw a poster the other day advertising a mentorship group for ‘racialised students.’
2 asad Jan 17, 2009
=) i think number five is pretty awesome. and thirteen is funny. i don’t think i was ever good at remembering my own age, and i’ve just become worse since i stopped celebrating my birthday.
oh and i’m a little anaemic too! (explains some of the fainting)
3 fathima Jan 17, 2009
yaser –
it’s about a process of constructing race. as opposed to saying these are students “of colour,” which implies that there’s something intrinsic and static about race/culture/difference, what this is about is the systemic practices by which people are made to feel different/foreign.
what i was thinking about here in particular was how obviously uncomfortable some of the girls — particularly ones who led culturally-sheltered lives — were in claiming english as their language, as something to which they had a right. so a lot of my pedagogy revolved around the need to see english not as a marker of some identity-position conflicting with their own (ie, western, elitist, etc), but a instrument that they could use to their benefit.
it sounds theoretical and academic, the way i’m explaining it here, but this was pretty basic. i’d never really encountered it so blatantly before, the way immigrant/nonwhite kids can be so self-conscious about their language skills and the way that insecurity invariably leads to further isolation
asad –
i’ve forgotten my own birthday on several occasions. i mostly don’t get the point, really
4 adnan. Jan 18, 2009
#3, i’d like to hear said british accent.
#11, you don’t need to know right from left, just follow the arrows.
also, sometimes when i’m picking up noaman from somewhere, he’ll tell me to pick him up from the south-east corner of so and so intersection. to which i say, “i don’t have a damn compass on me, tell me what gas station you’ll be at”
5 fathima Jan 18, 2009
“turn right, turn right, oh my god, i said turn RIGHT.”
“shit, where are we.”
6 iffat Jan 19, 2009
i just tagged myself.
7 ahem- « isms qua iffisms Jan 19, 2009
[...] January 19, 2009 after seeing the invitation to self-tag on runltw, i’ve used the following rules Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note [...]
8 Asmaa Jan 19, 2009
I find none of these hard to believe :D