Day 63

What I should be doing is writing a research paper on al-Zawahiri but instead I realize that you have had no updates on the recent history in a little while. It’s Halloween today, which means nothing here (except to us students who have thrown innumerable parties in its honor this past weekend). I was thinking of the little moments here today while procrastinating further on homework while listening to “The Good Stuff” by Kenny Chesney.

And he walked up and said, "What'll it be?"I said, "The good stuff."
He didn't reach around for the whiskey;He didn't pour me a beer.
His blue eyes kinda went misty, He said, "You can't find that here."
"'Cause it's the first long kiss on a second date.
Your Momma's all worried when you get home late
And droppin' the ring in the spaghetti plate,
'Cause your hands are shakin' so much.
And it's the way she looks with the rice in her hair.
Eating burnt suppers the whole first year,
And askin' for seconds to keep her from tearin' up.
Yeah, man, that's The Good Stuff."

Life in Jordan is no country song, but in my own way I can relate. All that I am here is made up of these little moments, of this good stuff. I made a couple bullet points to outline the charm of this reality for me.

Little moments:

· Listening to a song in the cab for three minutes where the only words sung (at all, and in English) are Happy Birthday… mmm, hap-py, BIRTH-DAY! to a rockin’ techno beat.

· Cat fights outside our windows at all hours of the day/night (real cats)

· Being mesmerized by the Ziploc that held the cereal my mother sent me- it’s amazing.

· Believing the “widespread dust” as a weather warning on weather.com is just nonsense, and putting freshly washed white sheets outside to dry

· Being incompetent enough to shake the un-closable container of milk EVERY single morning all over the kitchen floor

· Arab polka music outside our windows so obnoxious that my roommate and I end up laughing so hard we spit out the condensed milk we didn’t shake onto the floor.

· Realizing that certain toilets don’t flush here after leaving a sizeable gift

· Snickering about women who are holding men’s hands.

· Forgetting that overstuffing the washing machine (meant for three items of clothing) means that it will leave a small lake in the kitchen

· Being excited to find yogurt where the expiration date hasn’t passed (only once)

· Eating five-seven bowls of yogurt a day because of the one small warning from my doctor at home (yogurt is good for your stomach, see if you can get some)

· Using the same dish for every meal, every day

· The polka music is still going

· Lugging containers of water from the “little store” every week and carrying them up the three flights of stairs

· Using a roll of toilet paper in three days at my house (everyone must have UTI’s here from the amount of toilet paper in use)

· Being in a room without cigarette smoke (that’s just a joke, that would never happen)

· Cab driver proposing marriage to me because he is afraid his wife looks like Jackie Chan

· Going to a nice restaurant with my girls to be given a “complimentary dish” of cold mini-fries and cat food (Iams?)

· Having my shoes destroyed, I mean absolutely destroyed.

· Watching Ugly Betty in disgust- look at all those blonde women! Look at how all those blonde women are dressing and what they are talking about and how provocative they are! The first scene in Desperate Housewives was a woman walking into her house to see her husband having an affair! HARAM! (and really believing it)

· Drinking Nescafe (that should get its own blog)

· Thinking that Jordanian poop stories are the funniest stories in the world (I thought pooping while running/racing were good stories, but my friends have me dominated here)

· Often preferring to use the outdoors bushes than the indoor bathrooms which tend to be incubuses for viral plagues

· Watching my friends date local Jordanian men

· Watching locals walking around in shirts that say “I want to suck…a lollipop!” or “Orgasm Donor” and being entirely oblivious

· Seeing a runner and wondering what he is running from and who is chasing him

· Being covered in cigarette smoke, showering to get the smoke off my hair, to hop in a cab with a smoker

· Wondering if every single red mark is ringworm

· Eating bran cereal for dinner for several consecutive weeks

· Eating anything I drop off the floor because wasting food is major haram

· Being physical unable to waste water and developing compulsive tendencies regarding waste

· Getting into serious verbal brawls with cab drivers who take me for a tourist and cheat me

· Pulling all sorts of words I know together in Arabic or from a mixture of languages to form something that resembles grammar to communicate small actions and/or desires

· Silently rejoicing in the back of the cab when dissecting words such as f-a-r-m-a-s-ee in Arabic on the street signs

· Becoming extraordinarily culturally insensitive while here only to know that when I go home and someone says something ignorant about this culture, I will jump them

· Using the call to prayer as a time gauge

· Missing silly things like dogs, consistent internet, iced coffee, mattress pads and outdoor running paths

· Carrying shampoo, conditioner a towel, soap, my iPod and flip flops around school all day to shower at the gym for warm water and more pressure

· Having clean feet (oh, totally just threw you a curve ball!)

· Wondering how I’m ever going to leave

The weather is phenomenal this weekend. It almost feels like the Northeast… Its mid 60’s and some of the perennials are dying which means that shortly my jasmine will be gone. It has rained the entirety of Friday and Thursday night it poured. Watching the rain in the desert is something else. They don’t really have drainage systems here so it just rises up and floods the streets. You don’t realize the destructive capacity of rain until you go to a place with little infrastructure. I left the gym last night around 530 or 6pm, my usual time and it was pitch black outside. It feels like home.

It’s funny because when you are spoiled with luxuries, there is so much more room for the little moments to send you into a foul mood, a depression, an upset for a time. When the little moments aren’t a nuisance of life, but ARE life, then you are forced to put everything into perspective and smile anyways. When you have more, there is more potential for things to clutter. When all you have are these moments and the clutter doesn’t exist, what else can you do but accept them, thrive off them. I laugh more here than I ever do in New York as I realize how petty so many inconveniences really are. If you can’t laugh, what else do you have?