What time is it in Doha, Qatar? (+ one Fall haiku and a quote on marriage and family)

Tiny update: I’ve added a new feature to my sidebar, to help my U.S.-based readers get a feel for the time I will be living at from January-May 2010. The link “What time is it in Doha, Qatar?” will take you to the current time in Doha, Qatar, where I will be living in the Spring semester. Smile tomorrow!

A haiku I wrote about a month ago:

Fall gasps the swirling
leaves–amber, ochre, russet,
brown–past my face.

Inspirational Quote:

A cool way of thinking of the relationship between family and marriage:

“When it comes to family stories, everything depends more on the use made of them than on their content alone. The appearance of one blighted marriage of one philandering mate or one illegitimacy in a family story does not mean that the family tradition is opposed to marriage or heatedly engage in a battle between the sexes, Often such singular  appearance are warning against the aberration, not against marriage. This was certainly the case in Jane Gikber’s family, a family opposed not to marriage, but to impulse and perhaps passion.

But families have their traditions, and if marriage is a well entrenched tradition in some families, in other families it is clearly less well rooted, and sometimes actually prohibited. Sometimes the prohibition or wariness about marriage has nothing to do with marriage itself. It may have to do with a family’s desire—usually unconscious, but sometimes quite conscious—to maintain the original family unit. That way, the parents remain the parents, and the children remain the children, despite time and change. The disruptions, realignments, and redefinitions inevitably occasioned by marriage don’t occur.” (Stone, Elizabeth. Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us. Toronto:   Times Books, 1988. 59-60)