Behind the surface

Several days of spending several hours unpacking box after box of my life has given me a lot of time to contemplate the changes I have made, both recently and over the course of my life accumulating all this crap. I've found it to be a bittersweet time. A time of lingering grief mixed with relief and even a little excitement. I'm adjusting to the shift from an academic-centered life to the illness-centered life as symbolized by my replacing the thesis material that I usually keep in the portable file on my desk with folders of Social Security and HUD paperwork. Accepting that since I don't have as much storage space in this apartment, boxes of my old Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew flashcards and textbooks, as well as notes from undergraduate courses can probably find a new home in my mother's storage shed as they will not be readily needed anytime soon. Unpacking novels first and placing them on the most convenient shelves where my Middle East section would have been befor...

Ha'aretz: Family of boy shot dead by IDF donates organs `for peace between peoples' When Israeli soldiers shot and killed his son, Ahmad Al-Khatib remembered his older brother who had died of kidney failure from lack of a suitable transplant and decided to donate his son's organs. "I don't mind seeing the organs in an Israeli or a Palestinian. In our religion, God allows us to give organs to another person and it doesn't matter who the person is," said Jamal al-Khatib, the boy's father, who added that he hoped the donations would send a message of peace to Israelis and Palestinians. And indeed, they went to three Israeli girls, two Jewish and one Druze. It's not the first time those who have lost their lives to terrorism of either the state or individual sort have gone on to provide life for those on the other "side." On September 22, 2002, the Catholic news agency Zenit reported that the parents of a Jewish student killed in a suicide a...