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But now I’m going there. House is abt 60% unpacked. Bizzy. Off to Chateau for some R&R. peace & chikken grease.

Wireless, and wirelessless. No wires and no wireless. The wireless internet router is being packed in a few min, and I have awoken at 7:30 in the morning to check my email before that happens. Junkie Me.

It’s mostly Khalid’s fault. He’s lying on the one remaining carpet behind me and cooing at the same blue dog that, ahem, attacked him yesterday, so I guess he’s forgiven both of us. 😉

See y’all on the other side!

Internet over & out!

I’m in the process of customizing this template, which of course means accidentally making the text in the ‘About Me’ section blue so that no one can read it. Oh yeah, I meant to do that…yessss…

And I would finish customizing it, but reality calls. It sez, “FOLD THE LAUNDRY!” and “WE WANT TEA!” and “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT BUTTER!”

Reality is a strange place. Oh and last night, I did something I never ever thought I could, and according to Momma, HF, and LilGrey, never ever should. I removed my own stitches. I had two stitches inside of my mouth from last week’s removal of a wisdom tooth (Abez: Now with 50% less wisdom!) and thanks to a pair of tweezers and a pair of scissors, I now have none. Admittedly, the idea gave me the heebie-jeebies for about ten minutes before I gave the stitches an experimental tug. That was relatively painless, so I gave them a snip and they practically fell out.

What was painful though, was the way HF grabbed me by the ear after he caught me. You know how your mom does that when she’s scolding you? Hehe.

Yeah, that may be one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done.

Also, this may be one of the most random blogs I’ve ever written. Owlie is back! Hooray! And she brought me a DDR pad! And I was up until 2 am last night stomping away! And I am w00t! w00t I say, w00t!

By Abez, The End.

Last night HF popped his head into the kitchen with a box of mithai in his hand. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘Did you say to put the mithai in the fridge?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, soaping up another glass.

‘Good, because that makes more sense than putting my ties into the fridge.’

HF was relieved. I was happy for him.

SubhanAllah, things these days are good. Well, things these days specifically are good, though you never know how those other days will be, and whether you’ll contemplate flinging boxes over the side of the balcony as compared to taping them shut and sending them to the new place. We’re in the process of moving, InshaAllah. The exact move date is uncertain, but the non-essential items of the house are slowly but surely being sorted, arranged, and taped shut. As of yet, none of them have been flung over the balcony.

Did I mention that it’s 6:20 am?

Bebeface is getting a head start on religion by waking up for Fajr at the age of 5 months. Alhamdulillah, he’s grown a lot since I last blogged about his age specifically. (3 months) He’s learning how to sit up, he plays with his fingers and has learned how to smile with two from one hand and three from another crammed excitedly in his mouth. Up until one sentence ago, he had been sitting in his stroller and chewing his Yellow Tiger and contemplating his socked feet. As of this sentence, he is in my lap, holding firmly to the edge of the computer table and staring at the monitor. (Psst, Momma there’s a typo in p2, l5.)

We’ve been up since 5:30, and having prayed, we’ve also had Weetabix, a shower, and a diaper change. Right now we’re sucking our fingers and rubbing our face sleepily into Momma’s t-shirt. Bebeface does wake up several times a night, but usually not for longer than the time it takes to nurse and fall back asleep. He’ll be running out of steam soon, and then we can go back to bed InshaAllah.

*rubs eyes sleepily onto own shirt*

AssalamuAlaikum alls of ya’ll

JazakAllahu Kheiran for all the duas and well-wishes and the ‘what the heck happened?’s I’ve gotten. So here’s what happened. Basically, as we were passing through an intersection on a yellow light, a car coming from our right slammed into us from the side, knocking us into the turn lane on oncoming traffic and into the front end of a truck. It looked like this:

The other car, a BMW, had been waiting for the light to change, but for whatever reason, decided to accelerate before it turned green. It shot out of the red light fast enough to knock us askew, and as the car spun the rear-end of our vehicle hit the bmw again, knocking the bumper off. Then we crashed into the front of the truck. The car is quite simply totalled. It took three consecutive impacts, the first from the bmw on the side, another from the bmw at the back, and the third from driving head-on into a truck.

SubhanAllah for good people, the man who had been in the car to the left of the bmw had also been waiting for the light to change, and he testified to the police that he had been waiting at the same signal and saw the bmw accelerate when the light was still red. He’s also the man who brought Bebe’s car seat and stroller to me, first to the shop, and then again to the hospital. We were all driven away by police/ambulance reapectively, so he packed our stuff into his car and followed us there after talking to the police.

And imagine my surprise when Knicq appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. I was waiting for my turn in x-ray when he showed up, even before HF did, bringing his usual supply of cheer and comfort. JazakAllah Knicq. You are a good bhai.

And my lovely HF called when he was enroute, and when I answered the phone he said, “You know, Abez, if you want me to spend more time with you there are better ways of letting me know.” And then he bought me chocolate and took me for an adventurous spin in the wheel chair, and we went zipping through the halls of the hospital with Khalid riding asleep in my lap.

It’s been two or three days I think, but I have yet to let myself even think of what might have happened. I am very well aware that any one of us could have died should Allah have decided so, but I refuse to imagine anything having happened to Khalid. Even writing this right now is difficult- my throat gets tight and my eyes fill and I get this horrified, panicky feeling. I can’t imagine my life without Bebeface. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose him. I don’t want ever to be lost to him, either. Chalk it up to Momma hormones, but to think of my baby crying and me not being able to be there for him- to think of my child growing up without his mother-

Alhamdulillah.

May Allah bless and reward and shower with mercy and kindness everyone who brought nercy and comfort and kindness to us. Allah, please give us life so long as life is good for us and death when death is good for us, and reunite us with those we love in the hereafter. Ameen

Second Test post, here we go…

ding?

sorting out some technical ish-yous.

You know those plain, brown plastic Bata sandals? The ones outside of the men’s section in any Pakistani masjid? The ones that everyone has a pair of to do wudu in, the ones that everone’s father has owned at least once and everyone’s mother has ‘borrowed’ around the kitchen a few times? I saw one yesterday.

It was lying on its side in the fast lane on Emirates Road, ten feet from a white sheet with a growing red stain on it. Inna Lillahi Wa Inna Ileihi Rajioon. Verily wa are God’s and to Him we return.

The space-ship Cognition navigates through a dense, interstellar mass. The ship’s thrusters sputter and choke on what appears to be a green, swirling entity of viscous goo. The engines stall and the ship, drained of power, begins listing starboard in the sticky mass. The camera zooms out and pans away as the ship begins its eternal drift, lost in the Snot Zone.

So yeah, I had a Thought, but it got lost in my head- my head being full of snot. I seem to have a semi-regular occurrance of the Uncommon Cold- at least once a year I will be invaded, commandeered, and ransacked by a horde of germs so vile and so crafty that they could not possibly be of this earth. So I’ve decided they’re from space.

*fits tinfoil more snugly over head*

The aliens are getting their kicks by turning up the space-ship’s furnace and then turning it suddenly off again, so the poor crew is first all sweaty and then all cold. Alhamdulillah, the Germs seem to have spared Bebeface from the invasion, and HF seems well too. I’m the only one in the house who’s sick, which leads me to believe that my immune system must have betrayed me, and I’m wondering which of the bits sold out. Traitors.

I have a date to go play at The Chateau (the magical castle where Owlie and Momma live) but I’m thinking of postponing it for yet another day. It’s not nice to come bearing germs, especially alien germs. And it’s also not nice to use up all the tissues in the house. And it’s even worse to use up all the toilet-paper when the tissues have all been used. And I had a thought, but the aliens have it now.

So I’m going back to bed. Captain Snot-tastic, over and out.

1. I am copping out of a real post and instead doing a five minute post while simultaneously rocking Bebeface to sleep and also needing to clean the house as soon as he finally decides to snooze.

2. I hum X-mas carols. All year long.

3. I once sewed a pair of pants that had one leg stitched on the wrong way- Up.

4. I am the daughter of a practicing, Sunday School teaching infidel, hehe. (Hi Mom! I love you!)

5. I need to vaccum. Bebeface is asleep and it’s time to clean ze house now, hooray!

This post will be continued later. In the mean time, have some doggerel, fresh from the pound. :p

Ah, the shy, sweet smile of a child who has just covered your left shoulder in baby-splat. heh

Yesterday BebeFace sneezed with the pacifier in his mouth. Rather, the pacifier had been in his mouth until it was shot out at a dangerously high velocity, landing on the opposite side of the bed. Apart from devious and well-aimed peeing skills, my son has now developed the ability to launch projectiles. My boy.

I gave my son a mohawk today. True, he was defenseless at the time and true, it may have been flagrant abuse of my status as the more mature one, but it was too easy and too tempting to resist. He looks like the tiniest little rock star. 🙂

Soon he’ll be as bald as a potato- his head will be shaved in accordance with Sunnah, with the hair weighed and an equal weight of silver given in charity. What then? I’ll have to try styling his eyebrows or summat, hehe.

In the mean time, BebeFace is shedding his skin. Where he was once an underwater-type creature, he is now turning into a land-based baby, and that includes and change of skin as well as pink dots. His belly-button fell off too. Or rather, his umbilical cord. I tell you- kids these days have no durability. Bits of my son have been falling off left and right ever since we brought him home. What’s next, his ears?

So my first real (but non-paying, hehe) project as a newbie graphic designer has been launched! I designed some T-shirts for dawahgear.net. They’ve started out with just a few designs, and there are other designers on board. Here are three of my designs, two are available as t-shirts, the third should be coming soon InshaAllah. I’ll be posting the new designs if/when dawahgear uses them, InshaAllah. 🙂

The guy who runs this project is making a great effort, and I pray InshaAllah Allah blesses him and purifies the endeavor for him. Ameen.

My pasta sauce smiled at me. Benevolently, even, hehe.

Every week I get an update from babycenter.com. The website helps to keep simple track of where you are, where you’re going and what to expect when you get there. It also has interesting facts like, “This week, your baby is the size of an onion!”

The website says that the weekly updates are reviewed by a team of doctors for medical accuracy and whatnot, but I think they’re suffering from some glaring omissions. Take, for example, the update I got this week:

How your baby’s growing: This week your baby weighs almost 2 pounds and is about 14.4 inches long with his legs extended. He can now open and close his eyes, and he sleeps and wakes at regular intervals. He may suck his fingers, and although his lungs are still immature, they would be capable of functioning – with assistance – if he were to be born prematurely.

Your body is gearing up for the final lap, so you may start noticing some new symptoms. Along with an aching back, for example, you may find that your leg muscles cramp up now and then. They’re carrying extra weight, after all, and your pregnancy is putting extra demands on your circulation. Your growing bulge puts pressure on the blood vessels that return blood from your legs to your heart and on the nerves leading from your trunk to your legs.

Now read the update with the necessary corrections.

This week your baby weighs almost 20 pounds because that’s how much extra weight you’re carrying, and is about 14.4 inches long with his legs extended. His legs are often extended, and there are times when he may not be curled into fetal position at all, but rather, standing on one leg with his arms extended above his head to maximize the appearance of your stomach as well as poke you in the ribs now and then. He can now open and close his eyes, and he sleeps and wakes at intervals directly opposite to your schedule, which means he’s most feisty and kicksome from midnight to Fajr. He may suck his fingers, which is a silly habit but at least he isn’t picking his nose, and although his lungs are still immature, they would be capable of functioning – with assistance – if he were to be born prematurely.

Your body is gearing up for the final lap, so you may start noticing some new symptoms. Along with an aching back, for example, you may find that your leg muscles cramp up more often than now and then. You must be careful to work the cramp out before trying to stand up, lest you lose balance and end up hopping on one leg and going ‘ow ow ow!’ Not that we’re saying you’re fat, but your pregnancy is putting extra demands on your circulation. Your growing bulge, the one that no longer fits into any of your pants, puts pressure on the blood vessels that return blood from your legs to your heart and on the nerves leading from your trunk to your legs.

SubhanAllah. I don’t know if there’s any way to describe how it all really feels, carrying a child. Yeah, pregnant wimminz complain, it can’t be helped sometimes. You used to be one person with a waist and a fitness level of some sort. Now you’re two people with no waist and indigestion.

(My theory on heartburn and pregnancy is that indigestion is God’s way of keeping pregnant women from gaining too much weight.)

You used to stay up late, you used to have energy enough to fly up the stairs and zip around, now you take stairs slowly and have difficulty tying your own shoes.

(My theory on pregnancy and shoelaces is that your legs must get longer when you’re pregnant, which is why your shoelaces seem impossibly far away.)

You used to pay as little attention to your stomach as you did to your elbows and knees, it was just another part of your body. Now, you rest your hand on your stomach and feel for the movement of the child held under just a few layers of tissue. You hold your stomach and feel amazed, content, blessed. You put your hand over your stomach protectively when you cross the street, and there are times when you wrap your arms around it as best as you can and pray that you do right by the tiny person inside.

You wonder, you worry, about when your child will be born into the world- into this world, with all its darkness, with all the forces that human malevolence directs against humanity. Your child is weeks away from being born, months away from walking, years away from temptation, but you’re already worried about how the world will treat them. You can give them only so much, you can teach them only so much.

You pray desperately that God protect your child, not from being in the world, but from falling into the world. You pray that your child is given a character that God loves, an intelligence and a faith that will carry them through this life and save them from the consequence of deliberate sin. You hope and you pray, but you don’t know what kind of person your child will be. You do, however, have faith that God is never unjust, and God loves His creations more than you do, and this insane, overpowering, indescribable love towards a small human you’ve never met is nothing compared to the mercy that God has promised yours and all other children.

You wonder what kind of person, what kind of Muslim lies resting inside of you.

You feel the gentle nudge of the child turning from one side to another and you are relieved, reassured for a time at least, that your child is safe.

Well, I’m back home in ze apartment again, sleeping in my own bed and coughing germs onto my very own husband. Ah, the comforts of home. My three-day fever being over, I’ve moved on to tackling my five-day cough. It sounds pretty gross, really, and is not at all the debonair vocalization that one comes to expect from a ladies’ man like myself. *wiggles eyebrows*

I’m sort of weak and wobbly feeling, and if I was a better sick person I could use this to my advantage. I could delicately wheeze and look yearningly towards the window, meaning I wanted an ice-cream sundae, or I could turn over in bed and sigh, indicating that I wanted a new laptop. The opportunities are endless, but I have failed to avail any of them because my brain is running below standard too, and by the time I come up with really good demands, the opportune little cough or sigh has already passed.

I’m no good at being sick. I get bored lying in bed and I don’t want “sick person food” (except for my Momma’s chicken soup, which is magically delicious regardless of whether you’re diseased). I want ice cream. I want pizza. I want nachos and chocolate cookies and the stomach sez that if these things taste good, then logically they must be good. And what harm can come of it? Illness is bacterial, or viral, or psychological (hehe) not nutritional, so why can’t “sick person food” be stuff that makes you happy and therefore more energetic and more likely to recover? Does chocolate ice-cream not make one want to get up and dance? If they served more ice-cream in hospitals they would have a lot more dancing patients and therefore a lot less sick people.

That’s it, isn’t it. Feeding sick people bland food is all a conspiracy by hospitals to keep you sicker for longer, therefore increasing hospital revenue. Trust me, I’ve had hospital food, and it definitely saps your will to carry on. We, the common people, have simply carried the hospital’s ‘wisdom’ into our own lives, not realizing the damage we are causing to ourselves.

Friends, colleagues, I believe I have made a valid case, and a review of my theory (boring food makes you sad, sadness leads to lethargy and weakness, your weakness gives the germs the upper hand in the battle) proves, without a doubt, that HF should bring home a pint of chocolate ice-cream.

Stat.

Thank you.

What have I been up to lately? Well, at the moment I’m under quarantine. Momma, Owlie and I are ill and keeping each other company with flu germs. HF has gently and tactfully suggested I enjoy the Chateau for as long as I like.. and am infectious, hehe. I suggested he come and visit me, he muttered something about sick people having such unreasonable demands. :p Everyone should keep their distance, actually. Knicq bhai, Mona, BL, back I say! back! The Chateau is a red zone for flu germs and unless you want to lose a week of your life to blown-out tissues and bottles of cough syrup and aspirin, you’ll stay away.

On top of it all, because I’m, err.. hehe, expecting (InshaAllah, InshaAllah) the meds I can take are quite limited. Acetamenaphen is safe, and so is Robitussin DM, but nothing else that I know of is ok for now. I have to pop in to my Tabiba and ask her what will clear up my nose without hurting my lil Bebe.

*sappy smile*

Yeah, we’re expecting a Bebe, a cute little bundle of MashaAllah to be delivered late this March, hopefully via UPS, and InshaAllah healthy and well and naked and pink. 🙂 In the mean time, I’m still sick and I’m going back to bed. I woke up at the unholy hour of 7:30 am when the cough syrup wore off and have been up HTML’ing since. (I fixt my blog, see?) Back to sleep with me.

You know, for a while I broke my blog? hehe

Back from running amok in married-land. Will update soon, going out for dinner now. 🙂

Peace & Biryani Grease!
-Mrs. Abez

For a while we lived with people,
but we saw no sign in them of the faithfullness we wanted.
It’s better to hide completely within
as water hides in metal, as fire hides in a rock.

-Rumi

Here we are, coming to you live from yet another net cafe in Sharjah where I am surrounded by people speaking the national language, this according to Knicq bhai, being not Arabic, but Malayalam. hehe

I don’t know where to start. There are zillions of things to blog about, but I don’t know how to say them. Take, for example, the time I was sitting in the lobby of our hotel when the hotel manager, an Arab man in a white thobe and white head-thingy (amama?) came with an incense burner of Oud. I don’t know what Oud is, I only know that it is a fragrant wood that smells nice when smouldered in a funny little dish on the coffee table. Yesterday, the manager very happily brought this smoking, fragrant incense burner to us in his hands and said,

“Do you know this?”

“Yes,” I said, “It’s Oud, and it smells lovely.”

“Wait one moment,” he said, kneeling at my feet. (Abez sez: wha…?)

He then set the Oud on the floor and lifted the hem of his thobe so that the smoke wafted up into his clothes.

“See?” he said happily as his dress filled with smoke, “It makes your clothes smell nice!”

“Ok,” I nodded politely.

Then he grabbed the hem of my jilb (shock!) and held it above the incense burner and suddenly my dress was filling with smoke.

“Two weeks!” he said enthusiastically, “It will smell good for two weeks!” He then stood up and took his incense and went away, presumably to good-naturedly infringe upon the airspace of other hotel guests.

There were several thoughts that pushed into my mind just then. The first was: did he just grab my clothes? The second was, Thank God I’m wearing pants and the third was, should I tell him I wash my clothes more often than every two weeks? hehe.

For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devil’s tunes
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.

— Ernest Hemingway

There’s a difference between critical self analysis and analytical ego-stroking. I’ve noticed that most online quizzes only fit into the latter category. All results are good. You are awesome. You are a leader or a protector or a bright sparkly light in the human cosmos. Post these results on your homepage.

Are there any online quizzes that tell you that you are not awesome? That you maybe even suck? That you’re a lazy, self-satisfied machine who lives their life with blinders on?

There’s a difference between critical self-analysis and just criticism though. There should be a quiz that tells you what your failings are, gently, and then advises you on how to correct them. Basically, the quiz should say, you’re a good person in spite of letting your personality and your spirituality slip. You need to stop thinking that you are where it’s at and you’ve reached the zenith of personal development. Life is a journey, personality is a matter of evolution, and any time you’ve stopped going forward is a time when you’re making no progress. Any time that you’re not making progress is a time when you could be stagnating. Stagnating is one step away from going backwards.

I’ve missed Fajr three times this week. I was stagnating for a bit, and now I’m going backwards. I have so little Taqwa that I took the alarm clock this morning, turned it off and went to sleep with it in my hands. If I were, spiritually speaking, where I was just a few weeks ago, this wouldn’t have happened. And if, a few weeks ago, I had not stopped moving forward, I would not have been stagnating then so I could be regressing now- the regression being, not missing fajr, but missing Fajr and not feeling sorry. That’s the horrifying part. Everyone is a sinner, but to sin without regret… well… that’s a different matter altogether.

There has never been a single month in my life where I didn’t miss a Fajr, but to not feel the pangs of sincere regret in the morning is a definite backsliding. If I were to try and place my Fajr performance of now on a timeline of spiritual growth, I’d say I’ve gone back to being 19 again. At that age I was just struggling to pray five times a day, and I can remember making myself a chart that first month, just to see how many prayers I was actually missing. I remember that in the first month there were more than 20. They weren’t all Fajr. And I hadn’t felt sorry, only vaguely aware of them.

When I think of where I’ve been as compared to where I am now, it scares me. At my spiritual highest I look forward to praying. Where I am now, it has become something I have to get out of the way before I move on to other things, Astaghfirullah. This is the way complacency works. You stop. You rest. You lean back, and sometimes you sit down even though it had taken you months to get on your feet.

And yet, I can’t beat myself up too badly. Maybe this is because I’ve taken enough quizzes that tell me how awesome I am in spite of this. Or maybe it’s because I prefer to think solution-oriented thoughts. Yes, I am lame, spiritually substandard, lazy, and ought to be ashamed of my behavior. And yes, I will fix this. What’s my plan?

Step One: Rebuild Taqwa. With enough Taqwa you get up for prayer even if you’re dying, because you are sincerely genuinely aware of how great your debt of gratitude is. Your death is always on your mind, not because you’re depressive or fatalistic, but because you know that death is the end of your opportunity to prove yourself worthy of God’s Mercy, and so you hurry up and work faster.

Step Two: Get to bed earlier. Until I have enough Taqwa to pop out of bed like bread from an overly-enthusiastic toaster, being tired only makes things more difficult. So I am making a new rule for myself. If I’m not in bed by 2 am, then I am officially an idiot. Well, moreso than usual…

Step Three: Figure out what the heck is wrong with the alarm clock! The high-powered, air-raid siren alarm hasn’t been working for the last few days, and we’ve been using the namby-pamby portable travel alarm since then- the quiet, little one that I can turn off in my sleep and then cuddle up with like an ugly, rectangular teddy-bear.

There. That’s my plan. It’s 1:40 already so I need to get moving. Please remember me in your duas. I suck.

Can you find my donkey?
He’s wandered off, y’know.
I’ve never really met him
So I’m not sure where he’d go.
I don’t think that I’ve seen him
Or even know his name,
But despite this, he’s valuable
And needed all the same.
You’ve got a donkey, too
Whether you know it or not,
But he may not be four-legged,
He may be a lamp or pot.
Everyone’s got a donkey,
It’s something that they seek.
Not an object that they’ve lost
And will find again next week.
Your donkey is what drives you
In search of all your dreams.
It’s pursuit is what leads you
On a life of heady schemes.
Some donkeys are ambition,
And others- zest for life.
Either way your donkey can
Cause happiness or strife.
So can you find my donkey?
If you help me I’ll help you,
And together we will search
For my donkey and yours too,
Or for my donkey and your trophy,
Or my donkey and your soap,
For my donkey and your dreams
Or my donkey and your hope.

-Z H Khan
6-30-97
4 am

How much is your anonymity worth to you? Because anonymity is a double edged sword, the privacy you cherish is the same privacy that people can hide behind when they take jabs at you. And really, who wants to be sucker-punched by someone they don’t even know? It hurts anyway.

Everyone’s life has different facets and each facet has its own appropriate time, place, and circle of friends. My blog is a personal place for my friends. I don’t know if I want haters, and I don’t want traffic due to morbid curiosity either. That’s why, I think, I publish some things on other websites but not on my blog. You can’t please everyone all the time. At least let the grouchy people keep to the forums. :p

Does this not make any sense darlings? Heh. It does to me.

Nod and smile, smile and nod. 🙂

This is one of the more amusing pictures I brought back from the UAE. This dress, it called to me from a boutique window, it beckoned and said, “Take me to your leader!”

At which point I stopped in my tracks, shook my head uncertainly and asked the dress to repeat itself.

“Excuse me?” I said unsurely to the store window, “Did you just ask me something?”

The beads (all one million of them) shook malevolently and the bottom of the dress started turning funny colors (check the photo!). The dress thundered “FOOLISH HUMAN!” and I took off running before it could threaten to suck my brain out. This mannequin was actually an alien. How do I know? Because it was dressed like a belly dancer from space.

Thank you and goodnight.

hold yer horses here people, update coming soon to a theater near you. 😉

We’re off to the Rainbow Steak House for a partee shartee. Biryani is being served. If you know what I mean. wink wink.

Today is our third day in the UAE and to be honest, I’ve spent most of it sleeping. I just woke up from my second nap today (the first was an hour, this one was three) and I have to say, man, I needed that. As far as desert countries are concerned, this one is a bit cold right now, and after coming over on a cold Gulf Airways flight and then stepping into the cool weather, I’ve lost my voice and I’m developing a cough. 🙁 I’m also battling chronic sleep deprivation. I was up all night before we came, I slept three or four hours the first night, and three or four hours last night. I’ve been keeping up my will to vacation with frequent and powerful naps, without which, I found I kept mislocating the elevator. I would be standing in front of the elevator then everything would start spinning and the elevator would be listing steadily to the left. The fridge was eluding me too, veering off the right when I approached it. I need all my concentration in order to successfully use such badly behaved appliances, hence- the naps.

It’s 4:50 pm and I woke up about ten minutes ago. The view from outside of our window is of a nice market area with shops of rugs on floors with hookahs spread between the patrons, strange boutiques, and the occasional upscale perfume shop. (The sandal wood and itar and some lovely thing called ‘Oud’ had snuck out of the door to tease us before we even got to the shop.) Also, we found a Baskin Robbins. That was a good and lovely thing, especially since the guy working there spoke Urdu. In spite of living abroad, I’ve never actually traveled to a country where I couldn’t speak to the shopkeepers, and after trying out my broken, nay, positively defunct Arabic out on other people, I was ready to hug the nice Indian man with the ice-cream scoop when he said he spoke my language. Hallelujah. We ordered a triple sundae and three spoons.

We ate ice-cream until we found it difficult to walk back home. We spent 20 dirham. I don’t yet have an andaaza (a proper idea?) about what the value of a dirham is. I know it’s 16 rupees, but things are priced differently here. A small bottle of water was one dirham, and that’s cool, but the ice-cream sundae was 20 dirham, and that either means that water is very cheap or ice-cream is very expensive. I’m not sure yet.

In the boutiques we wandered through, the average price for a dress was about 600 dirham. Walking through Marina Mall, we saw a phone that was priced at 5000 dirham. I’m all confused about the money here. Like Pakistan, different denominations are not only different colors, but they’re different sizes, and a handful of change involves a red, blue, green, and purply bits of paper in all different sizes that make me think of playing Monopoly. With Bedouins.

The people walking the streets seem like a very wide mixture of humankind, there are of course, the Arab men in their gleaming white thobes (Thobe: the shirt that never ends!) and the Arab women in their gorgeous black abayahs and then there are Phillipinos who work in the shops, and they’re dressed like Americans. And the waitresses at the Steak House last night were in vests and short skirts, which was very weird initially. And the man who stamped our passports at customs was a deep and lovely black, and instead of the African accent I was expecting, his mouth issued forth rapid-fire Arabic. It was almost as weird as seeing that Chinese guy who sings ghazal in Urdu. Yes, he’s real. Does anyone else know who I’m talking about here?

Well, everyone else here is dead asleep, since naps seem to be catching, so I’m going to sneak over to the refrigerator and see if I can find the leftovers from dinner last night at the Rainbow Steakhouse. We’ll have some pictures soon, InshaAllah, right after I wake up and go take some, haha.

Peace & Shawarma Grease,
-Abez

UAE Vignettes:

This morning in the airport lounge, I went to do wudu for Fajr. As I walked into the bathroom and began my religious splishy-splash, I noticed a Pakistani woman come in behind me. She was dressed in a fancy green shalwar-qameez and she had a little girl, maybe one and a half years old, trailing behind her. I noticed, in the huge full-length, wall-long mirror, that instead of going to the bathroom, the woman began looking around the bathroom sneakily. You can always tell when someone’s trying to be sneaky. The effort it takes in trying to seem nonchalant is always a dead give away. She was definitely trying to be sneaky. First, she set her bag down on the counter, but when she turned and saw that she would be visible from the lounge when the bathroom door opened, she picked her bag up and carried it into the corner of the bathroom, directly behind me. She set her bag on the floor and began to rummage around in it with her back to me. Then she suddenly turned towards me with a cigarette dangling from her mouth. She lit it and sucked down on it like it was the very breath of life.

Walking down the aisle of the plane mid-flight, I heard a man’s cell-phone go off. He had no plans on answering it, apparently, so it rang a few times and attracted the attention of the petite stewardess walking in front of me with a pot of coffee. I swear, she went razor-back. If you have a dog, then you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, then a dog going razor-back is the snarling, teeth-baring, fur-standing-up precursor to attack. The stewardess, she went razor back, and reversed up the aisle to where the man was watching the phone ring. She said, ‘Excuse me sir, cell phone should be off.’ The man picked up his phone and, looking superciliously through the stewardess but not at her, dropped it into his pocket without turning it off. The stewardess repeated (as she bared her fangs) “Sir, your phone.” The man looked at her as if seeing her for the first time and took the phone out of his pocket. “My phone?” he asked innocently. She snatched it from his hand, turned it off, and gave it back. That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for the rest of us who can’t believe it when people refuse to turn their phones off and seem to harbor secret plans of wanting the plane’s equipment to go loopy and make us land nose-first in the ocean. Ha!

Afghanistan is wrinkly. Seen from above, it is a reasonable facsimile of chocolate frosting that’s recently been whipped. It has folds and crisp, sharp edges from where the beaters were taken out and left stiff ridges. It looks distinctly… tasty. Now you know why they’re fighting so hard for it. I’d battle for Chocolate Frosting Land too.

Abu Dhabi is a big golf course; a very green and lovely one with more palm trees on the sides of the roads alone than Pakistan has within its national borders. One of these days, I’m going to roll my sleeves up and try to climb one. When no one’s looking at me. As I scale greenery on the side of the road. (You! Stop looking!)

The Kitchen is its own country. The apartment of our lovely and amazing hosts has a kitchen that’s bigger than my bedroom. I’m not joking. It’s huge. I’ve never seen so much counter space and so many cabinets at one time! Living in Pakistan, where kitchens are the size of walk-in closets, my sense of kitchen space has been warped. Back home I’m used to being able to work the stove, the microwave, the blender, and the kitchen sink without moving from my central position.

At the Moment: It’s time for lunch, I heard the ding! of the microwave and I can smell parathas frying. Pity me for messing my stomach up the day before coming, my lunch will consist mainly of yogurt and fruit, but you know what, I put a serious dent in the fig population that used to inhabit the coffee table. Best. Figs. Ever. Excuse me, I think I may have missed a few.

Um, I haven’t had lunch yet and I still have clothes at the tailors. Two, they’re at two different tailors. Chai is on the way to wine and dine us at Chez Daddy. While out, I’ll harass my tailor. (Riaz Saab, barai mahrbani, is ki daman pay double siali marna, varna ajeeb lagay ga!) My tailor and I have an interesting relationship. I give him clothes, he does weird things with them. I take the clothes back to be fixed, and we have communication problems. In the end, after two or three return trips and confused bi-lingual exchanges about what’s wrong with the shirt, things are fixed, eventually, and we all live happily ever after. Sort of. Well, about 40% of what we give him lives quietly in the back of my closet and sees very little use (five inch cuffs, come on!) but still. He’s a willing a polite man. And he always does things in a rush for us, which may be part of the problem, but anyway. I have to get dressed and go eat tikkas. InshaAllah next time I blog will be from the Yoo-Ay-EEEEEEE!

*phew*

2 am and now I get to sit down. But only for a bit. I have to pack my shoes. Yes, I’m packing two days in advance. Yes, my shoes are in little plastic bags. Yes, I’m weird like that. But I’m really excited! Wheee!

The time is 4:42. It’s t-minus 78 minutes until guests arrive tonight, but we can’t be cooking or cleaning because someone (acutally, 12 someones) has rather unexpectedly showed up to view the house. They’re getting the tour upstairs while we, the scullions, hide downstairs with flour on our shirts, food waiting in the oven and visions of sugar in our tea. Owlie did try to throw some sugar into my tea just as we were running away (that would be just as the people were arriving) but most of it missed and landed on the counter. She squirted some milk in the direction of my teacup too, but that landed in a pile of grated carrots.

As bad as the tea is, I’m enjoying this little break. Parties are really the most fun for the guests, the hosts have to set up and clean up, both before and after. But that’s ok. I wouldn’t be minding it at all if we would just get back to setting up and cleaning! Everything is on hold because there are seven men in the living room negotiating details of the house sale. There were five women too, but I think they’ve gone back to the car (or cars?) to wait.

Well, the only consolation is that all my guests are friends, only a few are real adults, and none of them will mind if we put them to slave labor just to get the last minute preparations done. My mother, in fact, recommends that all the decorating for a party be left undone, so that the first guests to arrive have something to do while you’re still slaving away in the kitchen. I think I’m going to take a roll of crepe paper and some tape upstairs. Somewhere, we have tin-foil fish (Undersea Journalism Club Party: 2000) and possibly a few grass skirts. Voila! Instant fun!

Ok, it’s now 4:52 and they’re still here. Hmmph. Owlie gave up and went to take a shower. I’m going to pray Asr and go through my extensive and stylish wardrobe (oops, am I lying again?) to see what I haven’t worn to three other parties this year already and maybe, just maybe, I’ll iron it. Decisions, decisions. :p

So here’s my big Friday blog: we’re going to the UAE! Yay! My ‘rents are going to the UAE to check out property and new acquisitions and they’re taking us along! Shopping, baybee! I’m going to stuff myself on cream cheese and shawarma and stuff! Stuff! They didn’t want to take us, and I started having flashbacks of 1993 when my father and brother went for a three-day tour of Jordan and Petra (first class) without taking anyone else along. They came back with only stories of the amazing stone city they had seen, much to our chagrin. (my dad went to Petra and all I got was this lousy t-shirt?)

So yes, after much negotiation and daughterly whining (daddy, you never take us anywhere!) Owlie and I have our tickets booked along with our parents’ and we’re all excited. It’s nice that we get to look around the UAE before actually moving there too, because as much as I like surprises, I’d prefer that a permanent move to a new country have as few as possible. If it’s searingly hot, I want to know that before I bring my sweaters next time, and if they don’t really have belly-dancing scorpions, then I’m just going to have to take some from here. Be prepared! that’s the boy scout motto. I may never have been a boy scout, but I met a girl scout once, and she tasted like cookies. I digress.

As crazy as this sounds, this is my first real vacation, ever. Yes, I’ve been down on weekend trips to grandma’s house and summer trips to Pakistan and summer trips from Pakistan back to the US, and once I spent four days in Jackson Hole, but that was for a conference. I also got to spend a weekend in Alexandria (not Egypt, Virginia) but I have never been anywhere that wasn’t the US or Pakistan. Hey man, this time we’re even staying in a hotel and buying things like shiny hijab pins and halva and maybe even a sand dune. I like sand dunes, I’ll get one and my golden mole can live in it.

So yeah, I’m going to Dubai! I’m going to Dubai! Woohoo!

I’m not updating until Friday. Hold your breath until then. I am too.