A couple of weeks ago, Riegheena and Gamila both gave me this award, which is kind of nice–I’ve never gotten a blogging award before. The tradition is to hand off the award to a bunch of other bloggers by linking to them, so I picked a few of the blogs that I enjoy to read / look at, and thought I’d link to them here.
First, I’d link to some of my sisters’ blogs, which are pretty cool:
My sister Sarah keeps up a livejournal called News from the Desert, where she talks about her life and posts up cartoons. She’s an aspiring cartoonist, and often she retells funny experiences in her cartoons (like our winter vacation as a family–pretty hilarious!).
My sister Kate has kept a couple of blogs, but the one that’s active right now is Kate’s American Life. When she was in Jordan, though, she kept this really interesting blog on her experiences there. She has all kinds of stories from her adventures there on that blog, including how one of her Arab neighbors proposed to her! Her blog (which is no longer active) is one of the best cross cultural blogs I’ve read.
Together, the three of us keep up this group blog on some of the dinners and get togethers that we have. We call it Excellent Bird, after this hilarious inside joke we’ve had forever. Basically, it comes from a line from Disney’s sleeping beauty. I haven’t written anything on that blog…yet…but yeah, I’m going to stop being lame soon.
Moving outside of the family and on to my BYU friends, I know of a couple of good blogs that haven’t yet been tagged with this award. I could mention Drek, Aneeka, Gamila, or Reigheena, but they’ve already gotten this award already, so I thought I’d try to go outside of quark for this one.
First, there’s Angela’s blog, who writes poetry and comes to quark writing meetings every once and a while. I usually don’t like reading poetry (as I told Angela’s friend in one of our meetings last semester, hard sci fi meets miss fantasy!), but I like reading the stuff she writes. Also, Kelli Nicole is a girl I met a couple of years ago in a dance 180 class, and she does some amazing photography! I especially like her portraits, but all of her pictures are just amazing. Finally, Paradox is a convert to the LDS church who blogs on how her life has changed / is changing, and on her struggles as the only member of the church in her family. She was accepted to BYU just recently, so she’ll be here probably next year sometime. She just started a photoblog as well.
Moving a little bit further out, I’d like to extend this award to some of the Middle Eastern blogs that I really enjoy to read. First, there are two photoblogs that I really enjoy keeping up with, Natalie’s Photoblog and Seeing Things. The first one is written (I think) by an American in Afghanistan who takes some really interesting pictures of that part of the world, and the second is by an Arab from Dubai who has a really good eye for photography, and who is also interested in a number of humanitarian issues.
Finally, there are three Iraqi bloggers that I very much enjoy keeping up with on their blogs. I think that everyone in the world has a story, and one of the coolest things about blogging is how you can share your story with other people. And when we read good stories, the way we see the world changes for the better. The stuff I’ve read from these three bloggers has definitely changed the way I think and see the world. The three blogs are Days of My Life, A Star from Mosul, and Baghdadentist (which is just starting up). Thank you for the amazing stories that you share with the rest of us!
And to everyone else, thanks for making my day! Keep up the good work blogging!
