It was the armoire, wasn't it?

For the first eighteen years of my life my family rented all of the furniture in our house, our couches, our chairs, beds, bookshelves, dressers… everything. We did this, presumably, because at any given moment we were only going to stay in Saudi Arabia for a couple more years. We were only going to stay until my dad turned 50 and then until I graduated from middle school, then boarding school came around then finally, after working for Saudi Aramco for over twenty years and with two kids heading off for college, my father decided we were probably in it for the long haul.

I should preface this story by saying that my father does not buy many new things and when he does he goes about it in the way most people go about finding a spouse. He has to court several dining sets, testing the chairs, wiggling parts, looking for anything to hate and eventually rejecting most candidates for reasons the rest of us strain to understand.
“We spend more on the cat every week than you would spend on that coffee table,” we’ll argue.
To which my father will sigh and reply smugly, “We’ll think about it.”

When my sister and I were both in middle school our family car, the 1989 Mazda Delux my father bought the year my sister was born, finally broke down on the highway as we were driving home from the mall. The car had stalled every now and then for the past couple of years and most of the paint had chipped off the front and back hoods with rust patches slowly eating through the passenger doors. Of course, this meant nothing to a man who once drove around a Volkswagen with a hole you could accidentally put your foot through if you missed the break petal. So when my sister would remind him how embarrassed she felt when her friends asked her why our gardener had his car parked in front of our house at 10 pm he would just chuckle to himself, obviously a little too amused by the idea of my sister having to explain to her friends that we didn’t have a gardener.

As the cars behind us honked impatiently, waiting for us to push our smoking Mazda to the side of the road we snapped bitterly at him, “Now can we buy a new car?”
“*sigh*…We’ll think about it.”
My father walked ten minutes every day to catch a bus to and from work for three months before we finally bought a used Camry from a family friend.

My sister and I complain but the person who has probably suffered the most is my mother, who for many years fantasized about picking out living room sets and kitchen tables but could never convince my dad to commit to anything that permanent. We would watch movies together and when the rest of us would get choked up by a tender moment she’d say,
“Do you like that orange couch? I think I want a couch like that.”
“Mama, that woman just died on that couch.”
“Maybe a little darker than that one”

Not to mention that my mother is a notoriously compulsive buyer. When my father finally realized that it would be less expensive to buy our own furniture than rent it for ten more years, she bought an entire living room and kitchen set in less than two weeks. I went shopping with her for our dining room table shortly thereafter and at the first store we went to she almost talked herself into buying a table that looked like it belonged in a torture dungeon.
“It’s nice isn’t it?! Que rústico!”
“It has nails sticking out of it.”
“We can cover those.”
“That chair is missing a leg.”
“But the other five are okay!”
“Yeah, we’ll think about it.”

It’s a good thing my father never tried to back out because if he had tried to stop her mid-buying frenzy I have no doubt he would have found himself on the wrong side of an ugly divorce. I imagined getting a phone call from her to tell us that after thirty years of marriage she had finally had enough and thoroughly unshocked I would reply, “It was the armoire, wasn’t it?”

She guards that furniture with her life and for the most part we try to abide by her rules because we know it’s going to be a long time before she gets a new set. To the best of my knowledge there had only been one major incident, when my sister sat on the armrest of one of our black leather couches, accidentally snapping the support beam. I thought my mother would never speak to her again, I had never seen her so distraught. This includes the time when two years ago on the day after Christmas I woke up and sat with her in the living room for about three hours before I noticed that the house was unusually quiet.
“Where’s Ana?” I asked.
“She went to the hospital with appendicitis,” she said without batting an eyelash.
Her child undergoing urgent surgery she can handle but when that child accidentally breaks her couch she practically has a heart attack.

She tried to fix it but a little bit of wood still angles out from the side forming a small bump under the armrest. Sometimes I’ll look over only to find her staring intently at that bump, no doubt replaying the incident over in her mind, thinking about how she could have stopped my sister and saved her beautiful couch. Now in the middle of a horror film when she sees a nice sofa or an armchair she likes she still points it out, but ads, “it’s probably better made than this one,” glancing over hopefully at my father who nods unexcitedly. And she stares back longingly at the screen, wishing she were as lucky as that girl that's about to get eaten by zombies.. her couch seems to hold up against pretty much anything.

Starting to Get the Shakes

On Tuesday November 18th at 3:17 pm I decided to give up Facebook for exactly one week. I did this because I have a problem. It isn't necessarily that I am going through everyone's pictures or reading their interests or looking through posted items to see if I find anything good. And it isn't even that I re-read my info sections on a regular basis to make necessary corrections or that I go in search of funny lines from 30 Rock and South Park to update my status or peruse the internet for things I can post on my wall. It isn't what I do on Facebook. I'd say most people probably do those things (right? right?). It's the frequency. I go on Facebook anywhere from 15 - 20 times a day... That may even be an understatement.

Whenever I read anything mildly entertaining or hear a line that I think is in any way funny, the first thing I want to do is post it on Facebook. This, my friends, is insane. It is insane in a way that makes complete sense in my head when I'm changing my status for the fourth time that day, deleting the others so no one will know exactly how much of my time is consumed with quoting funny lines from movies, TV and David Sedaris. It's insane because NO ONE cares and, although I can think of one exception to the rule, no one even notices. In fact the only person I can think of who would notice that "Elena is tippy canoe and Tyler too" has the same problem as me.

It's getting to the point where I feel like I'm detached from the physical world, like I know everything about people that I don't even say hi to when I see them in real life, like there is a separate existence inside this 17" screen where I exchange witty banter with other people through status updates and that is downright frightening. At times I take a step back and I see myself myself doing this and I just think, "oh dear God, that is unbearably creepy."

And when I do have real conversations with people I find myself intertwining their Facebook personalities with their real life selves.
Example:
"I'm going to go watch Love Actually want to come?"
"I'd rather not."
"What?! I thought it was one of your favorite movies!"
"Kind of... wait when have I ever told you that?"
"Uh..."

It's not healthy. It needs to stop.

Yet I experience moments every day when I feel a strong urge to hop off that wagon. Today my boss showed me a video of Sarah Palin speaking in front of a turkey slaughter house while this dude in overalls standing right behind her slits their throats and puts them through a machine that holds them up while they bleed to death. And as I watched her talk about Thanksgiving dinner at the Palin house while this headless turkey kicked furiously behind her, I wanted nothing more than to sign on, post the link and write "Maverick" in the additional comments section.

God, I miss Facebook. But it's always wise to have a good sanity check.

Still,
Maverick.

Don't Argue with the Crazies

This past week there was a great deal of controversy surrounding one infamously charming redhead's comments on the CMC Forum about gays, the sanctity of marriage, the disgusting homosexual lifestyle and just about every other right-wing, homophobic cliche you can think of. The editor in chief took it down, and such is his right as the proprietor of a private enterprise. But Red got huffy and started throwing fistfuls of proverbial shit all over the internet eliciting a massive backlash from the do-gooder campus liberals. And I don't mean to insult them when I say that because many of them are my good friends and some of them posted extremely eloquent, well crafted arguments on the Forum's website. But I have to say it:

Don't argue with the crazies. Please, don't argue with the crazies.

I don't know this kid personally but he is the kind of individual that I feel comfortable sizing up from a distance. He has perfected a skill that takes very little talent but draws a lot of attention: he offends people. He offends people on a deeply personal level and he does it because he feeds off of attention the way most of us live off of say, food. He does not say controversial things, he says sensational things. There's a big difference. He does not form well-structured arguments using factual information to back up his points, he spews unfounded opinions that are not only misguided but terribly unoriginal. It's shock value. He has the personality equivalent of a SAW movie.

I don't even want to mention his name because I'm sure this kid googles himself on a regular basis and does a little happy dance every time he shows up as the center of attention in some random person's blog. I don't want to mention his name because he is irrelevant. He is a caricature and he should be a joke... but he's not.

And this is where I must make my biggest criticism, and it does not lie with Archie. No, my liberal com padres, I must criticize you. Because every time you say anything to this kid, he wins. Even if you make a great argument and everyone can agree that you are in the right, and even if he can't convince one person that his opinions are superior and even if everyone stands in a circle around him patting each other on the back preparing to burn him at the stake, he wins. He wins because when you argue with him, you validate him.

His source of his power is not the strength of his arguments; it is his ability to offend you. This is not about winning, it's about controlling your own ego, because the only way to beat him is to deny him the satisfaction of being worth your time. If you want to fight for gay rights, do it on your own terms.

Never argue with the crazies. Choose your battles, some of them matter.

The Mysterious Golden Egg

My roommate just got back from the quick-e mart down the street and gave me the rest of her Maiji yan yan choco cream snacks. Cool, right? You have no idea. For those of you who are not aware, yan yans are cookie sticks that you dip in Nutella-like spread. So I went right for the kill and halfway into my first stick she stopped me, "wait, what does it say?"

A bit confused, I looked at the stick which read, "Horse... Gallop Away"
what?
So I pick up another stick: "Zebra... Herbivore"
Okay one is a command one would use particularly with horses and the other is a descriptive noun that does pertain to Zebras but really includes a much larger class of animals what the hell is this?
Next stick: "Squirrel... Your Best Friend"
False. And completely irrelevant. Doesn't even tell me anything factual about squirrels.
"Seal... Loves to Sun Tan"
uh huh..
"Rabbit... Eat more carrots"
No, you eat more carrots
"Sheep... Wool Sweater"
wow, poor taste
"Mole... in a hole"
Oh my dear God.

Why would you even think of putting these words on sticks? And all together???? I mean... it just makes so little sense, whoever did this is an absolute genius (or Japanese, but still).
And then the best stick of all just says "Golden Egg" and nothing else. But of course, there are no words to describe a golden egg. I mean it's not like a beetle which, I don't know about you, but automatically makes me think "lucky color brown." No, golden eggs are a rare breed of... seriously, that's not even an animal why include it?

I have no idea but i can't stop giggling.

Many thanks to the nation of Japan (or possibly Korea) for giving me a great reason to stop reading about the Todaro Model (pictured left, under the yan yans). I literally stopped everything I was doing and ran out to the living room to steal batteries from the remote control so I could turn on my shitty camera to take a picture of these things. I had to, I was really hungry. Just in the course of writing this blog entry I have eaten every single one of those sticks except for Golden Egg. I could never part with the elusive Golden Egg.

In Other Parts of the World...

One of my favorite literary characters, Dr. Larch from John Irving's The Cider House Rules keeps a journal about St. Cloud's, a fictional rural New England village in Maine (probably?). He begins every entry with the same phrase: "In other parts of the world..." the implication being that St. Cloud's does not quite live up to the same standards. This is a useful phrase when it comes to describing things in Jordan, and the Middle East generally. It comes to mind when I see some of the ideas Jordanians have imported from other places and missed the point when it comes to implementation.

My favorite example is the trees on the sidewalk.

In other parts of the world, trees line sidewalks in cities and suburban neighborhoods. Sometimes people have built their cities around these trees, which once stood as part of a majestic forest. Other times people plant trees along the sidewalks to provide shade for the occasional stroll around the neighborhood; for children to climb; for dogs to alleviate themselves; for general aesthetic pleasure.

In Jordan, we also have trees on the sidewalks. Now, normally the sidewalks here would only be wide enough to walk three abreast. This is fine, but somewhere along the line Jordanians got confused about the concept of trees and this makes my life difficult. Here is a conversation I envision between the people who's decision it was to plant trees on the sidewalks in Jordan:

"We need to plant trees on the sidewalks"
"Why?"
"I don't know. People do that, I've seen it before"
"Okay, what trees do we plant?"
"Uh, that one"
In fact, I'm a little skeptical about the last two lines of that conversation. It probably stopped at "plant trees"

You see, in other parts of the world, trees have a long trunks and branches up above. They sit at the edge of the sidewalk and you can comfortably enjoy the shade of their branches and the company of your friends walking beside you.

In Jordan, there are two main types of trees, uncomfortably short palm trees and Christmas-shaped trees. Now you might think, "Yay! Christmas trees! Palm Trees! Pretty!" I disagree. Walking along the sidewalk in Jordan is like trekking through a confusing rain forest, one where coniferous trees miraculously sprouted along side date palms. Now, most of the Christmas trees have expanded so that their base covers the entire sidewalk. Several times I have actually had to step into them and climb out again (come on, there are cars in the street!).

The palm tree branches, on the other hand, are conveniently located at eye level.. for me... I am 5 feet, 4 inches tall. To top things off, these trees are planted about three feet apart, so when you stumble back after fishing your sandal out of the Christmas tree, a palm branch inevitably gouges out your eye. I presently have two scratches on my forehead, one on my cheek and a ripped shirt collar from these violent trees. (Okay, its acne but I'm serious about the shirt and the scabs really could be from trees, people totally believe me when I tell them that).

Sometimes i daydream about hacking through those trees with a machete. And then sometimes I find a cool stick in the road and I lunge at the branches all "AHH!" And then my three friends start walking more quickly and I have to jog after them (but not too quickly, there are trees in the way). Now you may ask, "hey, why don't you walk in the street like everyone else?" Well, Negative Nancy, there are two things I strongly believe in: one is safety and the other is complaining.

#1 - There are cars in the street, and I no longer react to honking the way that I should. When I hear honking, I usually respond to the car with "thank you, yes I do have breasts" or when I'm in a particularly good mood I throw up the middle finger. This is a little counterproductive when "beep beep" actually means "I'm going to hit you," and not "hey, I like your ass." Now I'd say 97% of the time the latter is applicable, yet this does not help me very much when one of those other 3 cars kills me.

2. What good are funny trees if I can't complain about them? This is my theory about most inconveniences in life. I love wrestling with their branches and squeezing by them with my back against some stranger's fence. You may say this is because I am starved for attention and yes, that is true. There are baby videos of me jumping up and down in front of the camera while my parents try to tape my little sister playing the piano or something equally uneventful. But regardless, I appreciate those trees for who they are and aside from wanting to chop them up with a machete isn't that what we should all do, just get along?

Yes, I am actually in Jordan

It occurred to me recently that I have been in Jordan for a little over a week and I have not posted anything about it. Since I started this blog because I was on my way here, I guess it is more than fair that people should expect me to write a little something substantial about my "life experiences" and not just ramble on about serial killers on the sides of breakfast foods.

Well I guess I can start off by saying it is incredible how at home I feel when I am surrounded by white people in an Arab country. It also helps that this group happens to be a fine collection of young individuals. I think that the combination of 19 girls and 8 guys in a country where displays of public affection and intimacy are frowned upon will make for quite a drama-free, celibate semester. With the exception of one couple, who were engaged before they got here, I will be surprised if anyone gets laid.

Having said that, my experiences with my Jordanian home-stay family remind me quite a bit of Juliette Lewis in The Other Sister. For those of you who have never seen this movie, The Other Sister is the reason that I can never take Juliette Lewis seriously ever again. In the movie, she plays a mentally challenged woman who wants to go live with her even more mentally challenged boyfriend and there is a lot of weird dialog between her and Dianne Keaton about sex. Here is the IMDB synopsis: "A mentally retarded girl proves herself to be every bit as capable as her 'perfect' sister when she moves into an apartment and begins going to college." I've seen the movie several times because it used to come on Super Movies almost every day and when you are addicted to television, you will watch pretty much whatever is on including The Other Sister for the second or eighth time even though you know it makes you wince when the two retarded people start mouthing "olive juice" to each other. But lets not get into that.

I am basically the other sister in my Jordanian family. They talk to each other in this super-speed, hybrid version of Arabic then sometimes my host mother turns to me and asks me a question very, very slowly. I then give her a blank stare and I laugh and I look around to see if someone will translate for me and no one will so she repeats the question even more slowly as everyone stares at me to see if I understood "Do you want to more food?"
I then form a reply something along the lines of "I am good.. from fish?" and everyone has a good laugh at my expense and goes on with their conversation, which is probably about me.

Sometimes I catch the words "American," and "Saudi Arabia" as my family tries to explain to other people that yes, I did grow up in Saudi Arabia but no, I do not speak Arabic. I get a lot of disapproving stares because of this, which, lets face it, I probably deserve. But nevertheless, it adds heaps of extra, unnecessary guilt to my life (I'm Spanish, I'm all set on guilt, I've been collecting it for years).

In many ways I am also lucky that my family speaks English far better than I will probably ever speak Arabic, and to top things off I might be the only student who has internet access at home (suck it bitches). Still, aside from the slow boyfriend who wants to get it on to marching band music, I feel for you Juliette Lewis. It does seem at times like I am progressing way more slowly than I thought I would. Of course I've only been through one week of Arabic classes. Maybe things will improve once the second or third month is up.

Snap, Crackle & BTK

Until very recently I thought that the zodiac guy, the BTK dude and all those criminals on SVU were "cereal killers." It turns out they are actually serial killers, as in a person who attacks and kills victims one by one in a series of incidents. I was always a little confused as to why a common breakfast food would have anything to do with murder but I guess I never stopped to think about it for too long. Whenever I thought 'cereal killer' I just pictured
some twisted mug shot pasted to the side of a Rice Krispies box, like a mix between those missing children's pictures they print on the sides of milk cartons and "wanted" posters in a wild west saloon.

Now obviously there are several things wrong with this picture. To begin with, this isn't Oklahoma in 1860. If we know what the serial killer looks like/who he is, chances are we aren't going to wait for a concerned civilian to identify him in a grocery store, only to turn up as the dude's next victim. Not to mention that cereal is a very family-friendly thing. I'd imagine that Kellogg's stock would significantly drop if they started posting frightening pictures of rapists and murderers on a product targeted mainly at children. Oh, here is a maze, a picture of some cute little elves and the bind, torture, kill guy. Have you seen him, Jimmy? I have never seen a mug shot on the side of a box of Frosted Mini Wheats or Coco Puffs and yet to this day when I hear the words "serial killer" I still picture something along the lines of this:

Go figure.

Track and Field

Today when I was walking back from the clinic I passed by the track/soccer field near my house. I usually walk through that field to get home but winter is track and field season and all of Dhahran Middle School was there. In other parts of the world, track and field is a sport that athletic, motivated kids take up maybe shortly before high school. But in Aramco track and field is a sport for everyone, fat kids, short kids, chain smokers, drug addicts, and one or two people who can actually run.

When I attended Dhahran Middle School track and field season was one of my favorite times of year. Of course my track and field experience consisted of maybe 6% track, 4% field and 90% walking around talking about boys. Practices officially started at 3:15 but it was much more fashionable to roll in around 4:00 because that way you missed pretty much all of the scheduled activities. So my friends and I would change clothes, eat some french fries, then I would sit around awkwardly while my friends smoked cigarettes (I was really into those Truth adds...) and then we would wander over to the track.

Maybe I would run a lap or sprint down a lane, and by sprint I mean take a short jog but most of the time I just sat around pretending to stretch. Of course there were a few kids who were naturally very fast and they would run around and around because our team needed them for when we participated in one of our three meets. There are only four Aramco middle schools and one of them had a graduating class of four girls last year (seriously, no guys.. ouch) so with around 120 kids in each grade, our school won everything based on sheer numbers.

So as I walked by that field today I watched the slender, athletic kids running around, followed by the far less motivated mass of walkers and then the occasional chubby asthmatic kid behind them. I watched the high jumpers rolling around on those comfortable blue mats and the shot putters trying to hit each other with those heavy balls. And in good DHS fashion, they could only really throw the thing 2 or 3 feet which quells a lot of safety concerns (still, our school never really did trust us with javelins).

As I watched them I smiled to myself and a good memory popped into my head. I was practicing my high jump by bouncing up on down on the big blue mat while three of my friends lounged around gossiping under the thin mat that lies on top of it. I was never a very coordinated person and somehow I managed to slip, rotate 180 degrees in the air and fly headfirst into the ground. I probably should have broken my neck doing that but I think when you're thirteen years old you have a magical ability to do things that would seriously debilitate normal people and end up perfectly fine.

I remember when I first got to boarding school I went to the first day of practices for Choate track and field and to my surprise, the coaches actually expected me to run... fast. It was a strange concept to me. Needless to say my short affair with track and field ended in high school along with my basketball and volleyball careers. It's really too bad because I always enjoyed sports before then, at least the Dhahran Middle School variety. I think it's a beautiful thing when you're a slow, overweight, uncoordinated 11-year old girl and you go to your first basketball practice and the coach (who is also your math, science and geography teacher) enthusiastically greets you with, "hey there! Thanks for coming! Go shoot this ball for a little while and then we'll play HORSE!"

Make Duplicate Keys

So I have written some papers in my life, a few works of fiction and usually I like to wait until after I write something to pick a title. Blogspot.com apparently does not share my enthusiasm for this practice because they made me pick a title right off the bat without writing a single word. I like to wait until after everything has been said, when the end is near in sight, to reflect back on the journey that brought me to this point and pick out a theme that ties everything together in a way that makes readers think 'well if that isn't the meaning of life...'

Blogspot would rather I look around the room and land on a random phrase to describe everything that I will write in the next four months. Well, fine. I started this blog because I am studying abroad in Jordan and my program recommended that I do this but instead of finding a theme and formulating a beautiful title I looked at the wall in front of me and found a flier titled "99 Ways to Cope with Stress" that I stole from the Returning Student Center in Dhahran about three years ago. The suggestion I like best at the moment is "Make Duplicate Keys," thus the title of my blog. Not that there aren't other gems on this list that some Aramco employee drafted as a second thought, never suspecting that it would undergo the scrutiny of a 20-year old college student and anyone who reads her blog. These suggestions aren't even numbered 1 through 99 and I have never bothered to count them but just glancing at the list leads me to suspect that Mr. Recreational Services Employee stopped around 50 and figured no one would notice. Lets take a closer look at some of my favorites and just to make things more organized, lets number them. Also I would like to mention that maybe for emphasis, the author hit caps on a lot of few of these:

1. AVOID TIGHT CLOTHES 2. Make Duplicate Keys 3. Tickle a Baby 4. Teach a Kid to Fly a Kite 5.DEVELOP A SENSE OF HUMOR (ouch) 6.Rub a Worry Stone 7.Dance a Jig 8.Breath slowly 9.Buy a Flower 10. SMELL FLOWERS (those two were right next to each other) 11.Do it today 12.HUM A JINGLE 13.Maintain your weight 14.Say "Have a good day" in pig latin 15.Learn a joke 16.GET TO WORK EARLIER 17.Leave work early(how contradictory) 18.PLAY WITH A CHILD 19.Quit trying to fix other people 20.LOOK AT PROBLEMS AS CHALLENGES 21.Look at challenges differently (also next to each other)

Needless to say this list is a mix of benign suggestions, probably formulated in a similar fashion to how I developed the title for this blog, creepy references to pedophilia and unnecessary insights into the life of its author, who is probably an overweight, socially retarded 40-something with far too many cats. It is also unintentionally hilarious, which to me, is the best kind of humor. Those last two suggestions really leave you wondering, if I look at my problems as challenges and I look at my challenges differently... then what the hell does that mean? I think that thought sums up a lot of why this list is so great. Another good question you might ask about some of these suggestions, especially "Make Duplicate Keys" is how exactly does that help me cope with stress? Personally, I think it was on the author's to do list and he was desperate to fill those 99 slots before 5:00 rolled around. But I suppose the real reason I finally decided to use this list to begin my blogging career is that the author added an inspiring little note at the end. It reads, "P.S. Relax, take each day at a time... You have the rest of your life to live" I like that he added it as a postscript, like a letter addressed to a suicidal friend. But yes, those are wise words and perhaps good ones to keep in mind as I count down the days until I am in yet another foreign country.