Contrary to popular belief, I am still alive and having a great time in Canada. Just too busy seeing things and doing things right now so I can’t get myself to sit around and write something valuable and/or coherent. And oh, I only saw one moose so far and it was made of plastic.
Sorry folks, will blog when humanly possible…
You heard me right. I am leaving to Toronto – Canada first thing tomorrow morning. I’m super excited because I will get to see my Canadian uncles and cousins and it’s been so long since I last saw them. And you know, it’s twisted in a way but I click with them better than I click with my Jordanian uncles and cousins. Go figure, huh?
So as you might have guessed already, this means I had to pack again. This time though I did it in a more structured way and my “fictitious yet possible scenarios” were much better than, say, when I packed for Michigan in 2005 and slightly better than when I packed for New York.
I do not have any plans or expectations on where to go and what to see in Toronto. But that’s perfectly OK because I believe I will have a great time with my uncles and that they will take care of all my sightseeing needs. I bet my uncle will still beat me at cards, too!
At the risk of repeating myself and coming across as a complete numskull; I’m still going to say I’m super excited to go to Canada! If you’re there and want to meet up, drop me a line and we’ll see what we can cook. No promises.
There is this one person whose blog I have been following religiously for the longest time now. She doesn’t write much or often, but her posts are always well worth the wait. They’re like my dreams.
She takes gorgeous, mysterious, antique pictures of herself and her passions. She has invisible retro glasses to match her retro lifestyle, and it’s crazy refreshing to see things in sepia.
Simply classy.
“Send her to make keys.”
The chubby bald man obeyed. I remember that he wore the queerest glasses I have ever seen; they were exceptionally thick, very rectangular, and somewhat dimmed out by the black frame. His belly extended at least one and a half feet below his belt, but it didn’t look like jell-O. It looked firm in a strange way. Max himself looked like he has just popped out of a cartoon.
When I first set foot in that dungeon, Max introduced himself as “Maher, but everyone calls me Max.” He didn’t look like a Max to me, maybe a Boobah at best. I made sure my face did not reveal what I was thinking. To be honest, I was thinking “You looked so much better on the phone, Boobah!”
And he did. I had imagined him to be a tall, athletic, blond guy with a perfect smile and a taste in fine art, or at least nice hands. You see, he had a deep quality to his voice and it’s easy to drift away with that type of tone. Reality, on the other hand, was a totally different thing.
Max reached into his pocket and fished out some keys attached to a round key chain. He handed them to me and asked me to go make my own copies. An office virgin as I was, I didn’t mind. Besides, I thought I would get out of the dungeon and enjoy the sun outside. After all, the weather that day was great and the dungeon was full of strangers and suspicious cartoon characters.
I returned at around 10, triumphant. I felt proud that now I had keys to an important office, and on my first day, too! I figured they must have seen my potential, the sparkle of success in my eyes, my professionalism. They trusted me in a blink.
“We’re ordering breakfast now, want anything?”
I passed. Max ordered something and our German boss passed. Klaus had made his breakfast at home and brought it with him to the office. He gave me a task to do and sat to his desk reading e-mails from Berlin and mumbling under his breath what seemed like nasty curses in German. Then the unthinkable happened…
Klaus and I shared the same office. Not for lack of space mind you, but because our work was both crucial and intertwined and consequently we could not be separated physically. To add insult to injury, the window of our office was right next to Klaus’ desk so he was in complete control of it. At this point, it was closed shut.
I was absorbed in my task when I heard the sound of a plastic bag being pulled out from a cupboard. I looked at Klaus and there he was, extracting a tomato from a blue plastic bag. His bulldog cheeks were filling with saliva as his big wrinkly hands searched harder in the bag for something else. That something else was a boiled egg, and a salt shaker.
No way he is going to eat that in a closed space with a closed window with a newbie in the house? Think again! I watched as Klaus’ email reading was replaced with boiled egg biting, tomato consuming, and salt adding. Rinse and repeat, over, and over, and over again.
The room smelled horrible. The old man himself definitely came from a remote hole where they had no table manners or common courtesy. His food was not only offensively smelly, but it also sounded like ten little men and a pig were fighting over poop in a pigsty. Yeah, that twisted.
Chew. Chew. Drool. Add salt. Chew. Spit. Drool. Chew. Spill something. Chew.
I was not so sure about how I felt towards my new job anymore. The words “boiled eggs” and “professional” did not seem to go so well together. Said episode lasted for about ten minutes, but I was scarred for life.
TO BE CONTINUED…
- The Little Theater. At MoMA, July 12th 2007.
You may want to watch these two short clips about Dali and his art:
Even if it wasn’t for my twisted dreams involving elements of his surrealist works, Robert De Niro and a finger in an open bullet wound in my throat, honestly, you know I can relate to someone who said:
Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.
So a couple of hours ago I went to an Arabic food store called Ya Hala, you know, to buy some food supplies meshan el tabeekh. Mosh ino ana ba3raf atbokh ya3ni…
The minute I stepped into the store I discovered that speaking Arabic and getting away with some nasty remarks just doesn’t work in this store. Everyone, and I mean everyone, spoke Arabic. Even the Mexican guy by the deli section!!!
.jpg)
The place is owned by a Palestinian man and it had everything to make me feel at home in el balad, downtown Amman. Arageel, samnet el ghazal, roz masri, freekeh, borghol, jebneh, labaneh… and almost everything was made in Lebanon. So I concluded that Lebanese people are either really smart or their stuff is just very cheap.
The visit to the store was like a brief trip home. So refreshing, but you don’t want to stay there for long.
I just woke up from a nice nap, regretting that I spent the day at home instead of going to Manhattan. Just when I was about to start counting my stupid points, I saw that some news on TV were talking about an explosion in NYC.
A steam pipe obviously exploded very close to Grand Central, which is the station I would have used to arrive to NYC and to head home.
Imagine that! If I were there today, I would have possibly been hurt by the explosion or simply stuck as the police closed the streets and the people ran around. Horrible!
This reminds me of the Amman bombings and how close I was to getting hurt back then. This is freaky…
Enter the query to search and hit enter.
Copyright © 2004–2009. All rights reserved.
RSS Feed. This blog is proudly powered by Wordpress and uses Modern Clix, a theme by Rodrigo Galindez.
