In other news, I am alive and well. Every day I blog something in my head and I wish someone would invent a gadget that can upload my mental posts to the internets. Until then, these posts remain unpublished. Like the majority of human thought they are inaccessible and fragile. I could use a Pause button right about now.

I am still amazed at how life channelled itself as I have always wanted but never imagined that it actually would. I am here, the break with my Jordanian history took place and I started living elsewhere and pursuing what has been my ambition for a long time, but I still cannot wrap my mind around how it all happened and when it started. It’s like a flow of events, now that I look back at it, and there are no dramatic breakages.

Obviously that is not true, because there were several dramatic breakages along my journey here. To this point in my life. But I am numb and I am unable to compel myself to distinguish what happened when and how. I will look back at this marvellous period with awe one day; awe at my ability to distance myself from my own self and look at myself from without, like an observer and not a participant. Awe and wonder.

I have been in the UK for almost two weeks now, I am perfectly settled and I started my program. This time is full of newness; things to learn, ways to think, people to meet, food to cook. I am taking it all in, every last drop of it, because I feel a sense of accomplishment just by being here. I feel that I have successfully overcome the emotional, financial, and social hardships that obstructed my ambitions for years. I feel that I am proud of myself for sticking with myself and for fighting for my future and my present. I feel rewarded.

Lest this turn into a self-congratulatory narrative, I will move on to say that I sincerely apologize for not being around much lately. Obviously I have been quite busy back in Jordan after I got my studentship during the summer; seeing friends, enjoying Amman, being with family, organizing my trip and finalizing travel and accommodation arrangements. And then I left, somehow, in circumstances that could not have been any stranger and started acclimating myself to my new life.

I say strange circumstances, yes, because during the last two weeks of my stay in Amman magical things happened. These two weeks were a surreal chunk of my personal history and gave me memories that I will treasure for the rest of my life. Then on the night before my flight, my brother got into a fight and got stabbed in the back of his head which, needless to say, forced us to stay up all night partially at the hospital with police officers hovering around, and partially at home, worrying.

I hadn’t slept properly for two weeks and not at all the night before my travel, so when I did actually leave home my parents and I were too sleepy to understand that I was leaving. That of course cut back on the amount of tears and softened the heart-wrenching nature of our goodbye. It was like watching a movie, because I really had stepped outside myself during that time. I wasn’t even myself. I was a person leaving home and family after years of struggling to do so, but being incredibly detached about it. I had no feelings.

If I can venture a guess, I think that that was due to the fact that my brain was sleeping at the time. It was probably that, and this survival habit that I have which makes me go numb whenever I really shouldn’t. I think my system is not used to being pumped with too many, or too strong, emotions. It simply puts itself on numb mode and sees to it that it records the littlest details with the utmost care, for replaying later down the road, when the event itself is distant and when it is safe to feel things about it.

Anyway, my brother is fine. He wasn’t badly stabbed, as in he luckily only got a flesh wound, and he got stitched up. 13 stitches I think. But, as you might agree, that definitely was not the healthiest way to say goodbye to Jordan. Going to the hospital at 12 AM, thinking you’re going to identify your brother in a morgue because his friend who called you would not tell you what happened and would only say “do not panic and just come to the hospital,” and then seeing him alive but all bloodied up, then when he turns you see his head awkwardly shaved and crudely stitched up, all of that is not very pleasant when you have a plane to catch in a few hours.

There is much more that I want to write about, but for today I think this post is long and rich enough, even if I say so. I really hope that this would break my silence and prompt me to blog again, because quite frankly, I miss it. How have you been?

My upbringing didn’t prepare me for either, really. I always thought that was because I never went to any summer camps largely because my parents couldn’t afford to send me to any, and also because they never bought into the idea in the first place. I am not sure that argument makes any sense now. I loved physics and biology equally as I loved Arabic and English. I hated math and chemistry as much as I resented geography. It was a tough call. So I made my first list.

It was a list of pros and cons for the two choices. Literary pros: good at Arabic and English, will get a high total. Literary cons: limited options of study. Scientific pros: more options of study open. Scientific cons: hate math, will get lower total. The trump card? I wanted to make my parents proud. Literary stream it was.

After I passed Tawjihi with flying colours, it was time to make another list. Again, I was extremely neutral about things. Do all Tawjihi graduates go through the same confusing greyness? Up to that point, I hadn’t given it much thought what I wanted to become or do for a living. Yes, there were certain ambitions if you will, like becoming a nurse or a vet, or a diplomatic attaché, but they weren’t solid enough to build a choice on. Plus, I’d already gone with the literary stream as per my first list.

Four years later, I had to decide again. I sat on a bench on a hot summer’s day, I still remember very clearly, took out a pen and a piece of paper and made three columns. Name of major, pros, cons. I made my choice based on the results of this comparison, then I stuck with it for three years. That list controlled the course of my life for the past three years, and you say words on paper are not powerful?

I made the fourth list to decide whether or not to remain in a relationship. Is that odd? I wrote pros and cons, projecting the current situation into the future, factoring in (rational)emotions and ambitions, career plans and family expectations. I calculated it all, and opted out. How is that odd?

It has been a long time since I made any lists. But as a true believer in the great practicality of this method of doing life, I always recommend it to others when they simply can’t make up their minds. It’s straightforward: unload your mind on a piece of paper and the thoughts that seemed to float about and crowd your brain will line up in an ink queue waiting for you to sort them out. It’s like magic.

Of course, there is a possibility that all of the decisions I made were wrong. It’s like a data processor really; the input you feed the machine determines the output you receive. If you key in crooked data, you’ll get the wrong outcome. Now take that and apply it to life from birth to death. Not so groovy, is it?

Maybe I keyed in the wrong data in that very first list I made– the variables were subjectively determined– maybe I could have had a high total if I’d gone scientific. And who’s to say that I wouldn’t have become a swell nurse, a true angel of mercy, undisgusted by strangers’ vomit and urine? And what if I didn’t leave that relationship? I’d have been married by now, a married nurse or computer engineer, probably unhappy and resentful — maybe even on the verge of completing a masterpiece of philosophical musings on the meaning of life as seen through the eyes of an unhappily married nurse. The book that would knock Zarathustra’s thus spoken gibberish out of print.

And then there’s all the other stuff I do without making lists. The list-free actions I call “manifestations of spontaneity.” They’re the random, everyday things that fill the gaps left by the list-determined actions, but are strangely influenced by them: like falling in love with the wrong guy and refusing to admit it, like adopting a hamster or a political opinion, like working with two absolutely clueless editors who are not worth a pile of my shit, or like cultivating a taste for pickles and refined music. The list of these things goes on and on ad infinitum, isn’t that ironic?

It is. But only if you make lists, too.

The title of the post says it all. Waiting has been the key feature of my days this past month. I have been increasingly busy starting March and the ball just kept rolling. Right now, I am typing this as I wait for my lecture to start. Earlier in the morning I interviewed someone for work, then had lunch with a friend, and now this. Today has been OK, not too busy compared to my typical days recently.

And the state of being busy excites me. It excites me because it makes time move quicker, but very soon this excitement turns into fear. Time moves too fast for me to understand it. I’ve always had this problem and I’ve said it over and over again in this blog: I don’t understand the passage of time. As I consume time doing things, I do not get the chance to fully absorb them or appreciate them, and then I find that they become part of the past. It’s this fleeting nature of things and time that makes me a skeptic. How can I know anything for sure when I do not fully grasp what I do, or what is done to me?

My biggest nightmare is to wake up one day and find that I am 50 years old and cannot justify my existence or the fifty years I’ve spent alive. What to do if a paralyzing fear of time keeps me in a sort of a twilight zone, where everything and nothing is possible? I hope that by the time I am 50 I’d have a good enough reason to be alive other than a natural expression of physical love resulting in my birth.

Take now for instance. I am waiting for many things to happen. I am suspended in time, barely getting by everyday on the hopes of a better tomorrow, and that better tomorrow may or may not come, but I wait for it all the same. I’m not static though, I am a planner and I like to think I am a doer. The one thing I can truly say about myself and not feel a tinge of deceit is that I am very focused, stubbornly so. It’s my only anchor as I wait.

Waiting is nerve wrecking. You’re here, you want to be there, but you can’t. Not just yet. You must wait. It could possibly turn your hair white especially if you’re not very patient.

As I reflect on my upbringing and life so far, I find that I have waited too long for change. Previously, I waited because I didn’t know that I could create this change myself. Now, I wait because I want to realize it to the fullest. It’s a fire burning inside my mind, eager to be let out and reflect its reds and oranges on my grey surroundings. It’s a pity that it should be leashed for so long, but one day it will be free.

I walked into the bookshop last night to prove a point. A couple of points actually. A-current fuel prices are making me the queen of mobility. B-I’m committed to buying the book I’m required to buy for class.

What do you mean it’s “censored?” You have The Lion of Jordan and you don’t have The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy?

I ended up buying The Lion of Jordan even though I am not a fan of reading about the ruling family. Figured my father might enjoy it, at any rate, it makes for a good addition to my small library. It’s way down on my reading list though, right at the bottom.

I forgot where I parked my car. I went to the wrong level and imagined that my Havana got stolen. Then it occurred to me, I should have washed her at least. I spent a solid five minutes running around in circles, panicking, imagining life without my car, before realizing that I parked somewhere else. I found her at last. Sweet reunion with my mechanical companion.

I spent the rest of the night acting strange. In a sort of a well-meaning sadomasochistic mind fuck I messed myself, and another person, up. I can always trust myself to do something of the sort, it’s that damned, characteristic way of thinking (or not thinking) that makes me behave in the oddest manner. But this time I’ve outdone myself. It’s typical of me to do something that I don’t really want to do, for the sake of an image in my head, and then force myself to stop doing it and want it all the more after it’s gone. The continuous resistance-submission-withdrawal cycle has finally caught up with me.

At 3 AM I woke up, checked my phone for any incoming messages, read one and lost my appetite for sleep. Tossing and turning. Who knew images were so powerful? I stayed up until around 6:30, listened to my parents waking up for their morning prayers, and suddenly fell fast asleep. I’ve always hated waking up early, all the more so since I started working. My mission in life has been to find jobs that don’t require me to wake up early, and if so, once or twice a week. At 8:30 the alarm sounded, I dozed off until 9:15.

At work there was no place to park as usual. En route I grabbed my phone, wrote three different messages to the same person, saved them as drafts so I can decide which one to send. I settled on the last one, sent it, then went through that ugly phase between hopeful expectation and rational reservation. The girls from class kept SMSing me, making my heart skip a beat every time my invisible male secretary said “Excuse me boss, you have a text message.” That’s what my phone says when I get a new message. That, my black corset velvet jacket, and my shoes usually give people the wrong impression about me. Or not. Who cares?

The talkative new lady at the office was, well, chatty. I heard the usual complaints about the dirty windows and the unorganized surroundings, and nodded in agreement. Why didn’t you come in on Saturday? and then she clarified: I was here from 9 to 4. I didn’t really care, I don’t go to work on Saturday and the issue is out of the question. I couldn’t tell her that to her face because then I would have been sabotaging her innocent commitment to our mutual workplace. She’ll get it in time on her own.

That episode from two days ago kept playing again and again in my head the whole day. It got amplified and I felt something heavy lurk on my chest for the rest of the day. Nothing excites me anymore, not even honesty. I wonder when exactly it was that I abandoned optimism and simplicity. I wonder when it was that I realized that I don’t understand why I do the things I do most of the time. It’s all terribly garbled, makes me feel like my brain is a bowl of an infinite supply of Indomie. It’s the only kind of noodles I ever have.

I want to be de-noodlified. As my personal adviser, I decided that the first step is to distance myself from my phone and then wash my car. The second step would be to stay abreast of current news and diversify my activities. Finally, I decided to believe that when I close an old door, a new one opens. If not, then I’m pretty screwed.

Today’s input:

Well what do you know? A couple of new doors opened. Hah! Good thing I blogged this. Take that, destiny!

And then, when things work out and I get ahead in my career, they congratulate me and follow with an “if only you prayed, if only you were more in touch with god, if only…” It is as if nothing I do is good enough unless I link it to the heavens.

This makes me wonder if there is a prerequisite for parental love. Do parents sit down and discuss the attributes they’d like their children to have as they plan to become pregnant? Perhaps they write these down in points, things like “attention to details,” or “moderate religiousness,”  or even “blind obedience.”

I am obviously not what my parents bargained for. And I think they are going through a severe spell of buyers’ regret. Thinking about this, it must suck to be a parent and get stuck with a child not quite as conforming as you’d like. You’re bound together until death do you part, literally.

She was supposed to give birth today so…

…we arranged to go out last night.

I was excited and planned to wear my favorite satin pencil skirt.

It was supposed to be her last pre-maternal hangout.

At around 6 PM, I got an SMS.

“I am in a lot of pain. I don’t think I can go out. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Woo hoo! I’m gonna be an aunt again! You’ll make a wonderful mom. Love you :* ”

I then sat in my room wondering what will happen next.

At 1:20 AM I got another SMS.

“I did it! I gave birth to a baby boy at 9! His name is Laith and he is SO cute! It was OK!”

I stared into space.

My best friend is now a mother of another human being. A boy called Laith.

Happy. Puzzled. Curious. Reluctant.

I called her today.

“OMG! You can talk!”

…like I’ve never interacted with new moms, seven times before.

“Does it hurt? Are you in pain?”

“Yes. Stitches and all. But it’s alright.”

“OMG. You are a mom!”

“I look like crap. I want to get a manicure and a pedicure and have someone pluck my eyebrows.”

“You’re seriously thinking of these things?”

“I wanted to do these things before I went to the hospital. There was no time though.”

“Oh!”

New moms want normal things. I knew that but this was the first time I recognized it.

“My husband looks younger than I do.”

“You’re prettier than he is. How’s the baby?”

“He is good. Breastfeeding now. I don’t know if anything’s coming out though. ”

My best friend breastfeeds. For real. My best friend.

“Did you change his diapers yet?”

“No. Last night was my maternal honeymoon because the nurses did everything. Tonight is the real thing.”

“So, like, YOU’RE A MOM!!! I am so happy for you. But I can’t believe it until I see Laith.”

“Come over any time.”

I hung up and went to tell mom.

“Mom, she gave birth last night and yet talked to me on the phone!”

“Yeah, so?”

“So…nothing.”

You’d think I know the drill by now because I have been there for every new birth in the family. And I do know it. I saw my sisters and my brother’s wife right after they popped babies, saw what new moms do and don’t, what they like and what they dislike, and certainly knew that they can chat normally and crack jokes if need be.

But this was my best friend, who’s 8 days younger than I am, and that makes a world of difference. I mean, this means that I too can have a baby if I want to (which I don’t), and that fact seems to be very shocking to me because I have never considered it to be very true. It’s as if it has to be someone my age, someone I know very well and care a lot for, to go through these big milestones, for me to understand that I, too, can go through them at one point. A revelation.

I am an aunt, for the 8th time, and counting. These kids make me feel old.

Mosquitoes have acquired a lot of nerve recently. They now come in two varieties (traditional slim and extra petite), they attack in groups, and they target different body parts. Not only that, they also bite me while I am still awake. Have some decency, at least wait until I sleep.

As anybody who has grieved inconsolably over the death of a loved one can attest, extended mourning is, in part, a perverse kind of optimism. Surely this bottomless, unwavering sorrow will amount to something, goes the tape loop. Surely if I keep it up long enough I’ll accomplish my goal, and the person will stop being dead. Last week the Internet and European news outlets were flooded with poignant photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla at the Münster Zoo in Germany, holding up the body of her dead baby, Claudio, and pursing her lips toward his lifeless fingers.

Claudio died at the age of 3 months of an apparent heart defect, and for days Gana refused to surrender his corpse to zookeepers, a saga that provoked among her throngs of human onlookers admiration and compassion and murmurings that, you see? Gorillas, and probably a lot of other animals as well, have a grasp of their mortality and will grieve for the dead and are really just like us after all.

Nobody knows what emotions swept through Gana’s head and heart as she persisted in cradling and nuzzling the remains of her son. But primatologists do know this: Among nearly all species of apes and monkeys in the wild, a mother will react to the death of her infant as Gana did — by clutching the little decedent to her breast and treating it as though it were still alive. For days or even weeks afterward, she will take it with her everywhere and fight off anything that threatens to snatch it away.

Source

This revelation was unexpected because the pet shop said that both Hazza3 and Jongar are male, and they even said that they don’t ever sell female hamsters because they don’t want people to breed them. So you understand my astonishment in light of this discovery.

How did I find out, you ask. Let’s just say that determining the sex of a hamster is tricky business until they start doing things with their cage companions that make their sex a whole lot clearer to us humans with no experience whatsoever in rearing the baby hamsters which we expect to have within 16 days.

Initially traumatized by my doubts, I googled hamster mating and whatnot, and I even looked for videos on YouTube to compare the “events” and make certain it was not all a male fight over cage territory. Hours into my research, I realized that there is no information about male hamster fights which corresponds to what I was seeing, and I eventually gave in to the bitter truth. I even shot a video of the whole affair to document it and show it to my family, and also to upload it to YouTube. I won’t embed it here because my sister thinks that would be in poor taste, and quite frankly I don’t want a reputation as an animal porn producer. It’s true.

So there. Jongar is a girl, any suggestions for a new name? And are you a nice person who loves animals and would like to have a young hamster soon?