Arif, the silly monkey got himself in hot water yesterday when one of his teachers discovered that he forged my signature in his homework diary! He’s got detention for an hour for his effort and me getting to know about it which is a bit scarier from his point of view.
I wonder if him sharing George W. Bush’s birthday (July 6th) has anything to do with it!?
Anyway, I faced him with it this morning and warned him that if he wants to forge my signature, he’d better do it good, rather than just make do with a half-assed attempt that he would be caught at it.
Silly simian.
Comments
Detention
And I see the little gibbon is doubly blessed with a father who has a widely read blog 😀 What a nightmare!
Blame it on the Bush factor. That’s how I handle any criticism these days…. 😉
Salaam,
PM
PS: Chin up little gorilla! With your angelic looks you will have a lifetime for getting one over on the old silverback alpha leader 🙂
Oh my – that brings back memories …
I remember my mom complimenting me on what a good job I did (I’m [i]SO [/i]not getting into details here!). Any way – who knew, years later I’d become a graphic artist — that early experience with the right drafting tools and tracing paper helped out in the long run!
Detention
I’ll admit that I had my parents permission to forge, but only when I forgot to bring the test home. To this day I am extremely good at copying people’s signatures. I’d probably have a lucrative career as an identity thief were I so inclined.
Detention
Looks like he’s getting off easy. I’d say writing his own name a thousand times would help him remember which name to sign to papers.
Steve
July 6th
Don’t worry Arif, there’s hope!
July 6th also happens to be the birthdays of the following people (who you probably need to look up in the library)
Nancy Reagan
Sylvester Stallone
John Paul Jones (considered the father of the American Navy that now enjoys our hospitality in Juffair)
Janet Leigh (from the movie Psycho)
The current Dalai Lama
Burt Ward (who played “Robin” in the TV version of Batman)
Frida Kahlo (Mexican artist played by the Arab American Salma Hayek in the movie of the same name)
Sir Thomas Raffles (founder of Singapore)
I should know, since that’s my birthday too! 😉
Pretty good company, eh? Looks like we have better prospects than forgery!
Desert Island Boy
Detention
As an alumnus of Arif’s school, I have many good memories of the detention room. I assume he forged your signature because he forgot to get his “homework diary” signed by you or something, no?
Ah such good days they were. In my class there was one guy who would forge all of our parents’ signatures for us because he was really good at it. Maybe you should tell Arif to find someone in his class who is better at forging signatures.
Re: Detention
I would actually reward him for creativity … ;). He might not have done his homework that day, but he did try and take care of the problem!!
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Nice … your equation between good looking and American. (Incidentally, Arif’s mother is Scottish – not a drop of American blood methinks ..)
But, on a more serious note – why are you surprised Steve? What preconceived notions did you have about what Bahraini kids look like?
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maybe this?
Re(1): Detention
Looks to me like he kept the same problem and created a new one.
Steve
Re(1): Detention
All that said, he’s a good looking kid. I’m struck by how much he looks like an American kid. If you had given me no context for the photo, there is no way I could guess. There is a good lesson in that observation, I suspect.
Steve
Re(3): Detention
Jasra, Jasra, Jasra,
What preconceived notions are YOU working from?
Let me tell you plainly, good-looking and American do not automatically go together. It is pretty obvious to me here in DC that beauty is not distributed uniformly across America. DC is something of a sinkhole for Attractive Americans. Coming from north Dallas, where you can’t swing a dead armadillo without hitting a pretty girl, my eyes have been starving here in DC where it appears pretty girls are illegal.
There is a saying here that Hollywood is Washington for pretty people. The complementary saying is that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people. Let me be the first to confirm the truth of that. DC is one vast swamp of mediocre-looking people. We need some sort of gargantuan government initiative to start transporting good-looking babes en masse to Washington to address this grievous imbalance. Right now, the cutest chicks in town are generally Vietnamese and East Europeans from the former Soviet states. Unfortunately, the Russian chicks have horrible taste in fashion, so that subtracts a bit from their beauty.
That said, children are generally attractive where ever you go in the world, except for desperately poor places where they are dirty and in rags.
Mahmood’s boy has that glow of middle-class children. He’s well-nourished, unlike so many children in the world. When they played those tapes of children escaping from the Beslan event, what struck me was how scrawny they all were. You didn’t see any fat Russian kids. You could see their ribs. They were all underfed. The parents were all fat, though.
The fact of the photo itself tells you much. Poor children who have never had their portrait taken, take it more seriously. Arif is gooning around. Having his photo taken is old hat to Arif, nothing to take serious.
Children who are not valued by their parents are not photographed, except by accident. When you read the obituaries of children who died from abuse, they often have no photo to display. They were not important in their parents lives, not important enough to deserve even a casual photo. What photos they have are made in school or their face is cropped out of a group photo of their parents friends into which they have crept. Arif is the featured face and entire point of his father’s photo who subsequently published it. That tells me an enormous amount about what Mahmood values and how he wants to be seen by the world.
Jasra, I had no preconceived notions of Bahraini kids. I had not thought about them at all. I guess I knew that Mahmood’s wife was not Bahraini but I had forgotten about it. Arif looks like an Arab boy and a cute one at that.
The setting has an American feel to it. The background of the photo could be an American fast food joint in some suburban mall. There are no Arabic signs.
I guess why it’s a surprise is that we rarely get a view into normal middle-class lives overseas, certainly never in the Middle East. Almost all the immigrants to America are fleeing poverty to gain an American middle-class life. The view through the TV into the Middle East shows people living on the edge, one day at a time, in poverty. It looks a lot like what I saw in towns and villages in the Philippines, though without the hate.
We get lots of views of distressed lives overseas but not many of normal lives. Foreigners with nice lives feel no need to flee to America and tell us their stories. Normal foreign lives are not news. Only crazy foreigners running down their streets in a fever shouting “Death To America” are news.
Steve
Re(4): Detention
Looks like a college senior from Berkely.
Steve
Re(4): Detention
for the record, we were having lunch (Arif, his sister Hanan and I) at BurgerKing on Princes Street in Edinburgh in the first week of August.
Steve what are you a psychoanalyst in your spare time? I never even considered that a picture could tell that much about my personality!
Re(4): Detention
dare i even ask why you had this photo lying around?
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the power of google my friend! moreover, this girl actually lives in Edinburgh and aparently quite (in)famous!
Re(2): Detention
I must confess that I took up your offer Steve, let’s see what the school will do with it!
In his detention sheet I have written my note that he should be make to sign his name 1,000 times in order for him to remember who to sign as in the future. I’ll let you know what happens, if anything.
But I do not believe in that punishment is the only way to bring up good children. I firmly believe in raising them in an open, trusting and transparent environment and giving them responsiblities and their own privacy. Our household is not lax however and it is not a “free-for-all”, there are rules that they shouldn’t cross, and if they do then they are grounded. That usually works well enough.
Re(5): Detention
I have been taking pictures for fun ever since I got my hands on my first Nikon in high school journalism class and I have an undergraduate psychology degree with a lot of dust on it. Those two get mixed up sometimes.
Over the years, I can’t help but notice how body language and other things can tell you about the people in photos. Very often you can tell how well a couple is doing by their photo. For example, if you can’t get them in the same photo, that’s a bad sign.
Steve
Re(3): Detention
Sorry, Mahmood. I wasn’t implying that you were anything but a good parent. I certainly don’t want to be telling anyone how to parent. I don’t have the credentials. I would rather confine myself to telling people how to think about everything else.
When I was about three, some girls at my father’s grocery store encouraged me to stuff some candy in my pocket and walk out with it. When my Dad found out, he chewed me out and forced me to go back to the manager, confess and apologize for stealing candy. I have no recollection of it. My Mom told me about it when I was an adult. Still, I believe that it had a lot to do with my intolerance for lies and theft. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.
I tend to play the Dutch uncle with the kids of my family and friends, forcefully telling them when they screwed up and why and what they should be doing. Then I drop it. I’m a hardass. Yet a lovable one.
Everyone’s got their own way of doing things and a little bit of every way probably balances out over the long term.
Steve
Re(4): Detention
Steve makes an intersting point,
[quote]”I guess why it’s a surprise is that we rarely get a view into normal middle-class lives overseas, certainly never in the Middle East. Almost all the immigrants to America are fleeing poverty to gain an American middle-class life. The view through the TV into the Middle East shows people living on the edge, one day at a time, in poverty.” [/quote]How do we as Arabs try to alter perceptions in the West? How do we provide information that is easily accessible, and entertaining without patronising the viewer/listener? We make films,Documentaries, soundbites, commercials anything that captures the immagination of the registered voters in the West. Steve the American is asking for more information. he acknowledges that outside from the “news” he sees and hears very little. This is our fault. We should be bombarding(unfortunate word) the West with images and footage of exactly how we live, and how similair it is to the Western experience. The Arab press is full of fire and brimstone about how misunderstood we are, and yet nobody has produced anything worthy of transmission in the West. if we want them to know us, we gotta tell ’em,[b]in English[/b].
Steves understanding is clearly beyond the camels/tents/oil scenario, but the man is conceding that he has no other reference source.
This we can and should do something about.
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I try. I sell tools for storytellers, but the “official” storytellers here are only concerned with getting to their retirement unscathed. And to hell with anything and anyone else.
So when I *do* try to do something, I get screwed! yet, I continue trying. maybe some day I will make a differnce, I just hope that by that time I won’t be in debtors prison.
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Mahmood, I can’t even begin to imagine what search term one needs to enter for google to give that picture as a result. What did you search for ?!
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ugly kid!
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That was one hell of a psych session….and from one little picture. wow.
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My 6 year old daughter just saw this picture and asked with deep concern: “Why is she smiling?”
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Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of this extremely pierced stuff in New York City. It used to disgust me, now I just ignore it.
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Peace Taker,
You make a very interesting point and one that Americans can relate to. Most of the world gets its impressions about Americans from Hollywood movies. The prevailing view is that we are all a bunch of beautiful and materialistic scatterbrains, obsessed with alcohol, sex, guns, and high velocity cars. I have family in Europe and have had to deflect some of the stupidest questions brought about by distorted understandings of my country. A cousin came to visit and was quite shocked that ugly people actually existed in the United States. It’s difficult not to laugh, but how can educated people not know better? Certainly, we can make documentaries, but it’s Hollywood entertainment the masses prefer to watch, with all its false and ridiculous distortions.
Re(6): Detention
Send your family to DC. There’s like a Big Ugly Magnet here. The Ugly American is well-represented here.
However, if you want to do the best girl-watching in America, have lunch at Madeleine’s in North Park Mall in north Dallas and watch the women go by. It’s inspirational. That’s what makes America stand tall, buddy.
I wasn’t too impressed by the women of Hollywood, I mean the real women walking on the streets. Much of Hollywood is pretty nasty. You can have a fabulous and famous movie studio with twenty foot high walls surrounded by squalid little shops. The only place you can see cute chicks is on Rodeo Drive. Even then, most of the locals there are pretty wacky, including some of the wackiest gay people anywhere, like caricatures of gay people.
Steve