Is it seriously less than one week away? :)

Remember folks: You never know what's in your qadr.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiun

Giving up Sins: An Easy Prescription
by Hazrat Maulana Yunus Patel Saheb (daamat barakaatuhum)

…Death visits – more often, very unexpectedly, and no true Muslim would want to be seized by the Angel of death when Allah Ta’ala is displeased. I often say : We now have instant tea, and instant coffee, and instant cereal and instant pudding and so many other things on the market are instant – we are also living in times when death is just as instant. So any sin is too much of a risk in the face of the reality of death. …The Hadith is explicit : That we will be resurrected on the day of Judgement as we have died and we will die as we have lived. …Would any Muslim want to rise up on the Day of Judgement in sin, for all of mankind to witness what kind of life he led?

Dear old students.

Dear my old students from other schools,

I'm sorry that I don't remember your name, where I know you from, or anything particular about you. My memory is really that bad. But it's not all my fault. You've grown a lot as well. But really it mostly boils down to my memory. I'm lucky if I remember my name sometimes. I'll leave you with a poem by Billy Collins. Although I haven't had that many students as of yet (this will be my fourth year of teaching), it does resonate with me.

“Schoolsville”
from Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins

Glancing over my shoulder at the past,
I realize the number of students I have taught
is enough to populate a small town.

I can see it nestled in a paper landscape,
chalk dust flurrying down in winter,
nights dark as a blackboard.

The population ages but never graduates.
On hot afternoons they sweat the final in the park
and when it’s cold they shiver around stoves
reading disorganized essays out loud.
A bell rings on the hour and everybody zigzags
into the streets with their books.

I forgot all their last names first and their
first names last in alphabetical order.
But the boy who always had his hand up
is an alderman and owns the haberdashery.
The girl who signed her papers in lipstick
leans against the drugstore, smoking,
brushing her hair like a machine.

Their grades are sewn into their clothes
like references to Hawthorne.
The A’s stroll along with other A’s.
The D’s honk whenever they pass another D.

All the creative-writing students recline
on the courthouse lawn and play the lute.
Wherever they go, they form a big circle.

Needless to say, I am the mayor.
I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main.
I rarely leave the house. The car deflates
in the driveway. Vines twirl around the porch swing.

Once in a while a student knocks on the door
with a term paper fifteen years late
or a question about Yeats or double-spacing.
And sometimes one will appear in a windowpane
to watch me lecturing the wallpaper,
quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding the air.