Summer, indoors
Currently listening to:
Wilco
[The Album]
Now Reading
Stuff that happens to me
“Stinkerie”
Julien offered me a green mango this evening. I opened my bottle of bagoong (fish paste, a Filipino delicacy and habit, hehehe) and started to eat in the kitchen. When Julien entered the kitchen he held his hand over his nose, making gagging noises, staggering about and moaning: “It smells like a stinkerie!” (stinker-ie, as in boulanger-ie or charcuter-ie).
My darling Juju, if you are reading this : Faut pas exagérer non plus !
Currently listening to:
Iron & Wine and Calexico
In the Reins
Geography
I find it interesting that world maps are hard to come by in stores here in Qatar.
So after combing the shelves of Carrefour (all three branches), Villagio, and that little bookstore at the 3rd floor of City Center, I decide to go to Jarir Bookstore along Salwa Road.
I ask the guy for a world map. "Follow me," he says, exuding an air of authority. He leads me to the Travel section and hands me a map of Qatar.
I hand it back. "Errr… actually, I need a world map."
He opens the map and shows me Doha, filled with little yellow and red boxes indicating Doha landmarks.
"WORLD map," I tell him again. "With all the different countries?"
He flips the map over and shows me Qatar, and points to Doha, Al Khor, Ras Laffan, and Dukhan, then tries shoving the map into my hands.
"Asia," I say. "Europe. South America. Middle East?"
"This is the map," he tells me.
"This is a map of Qatar," I inform him. "I’m looking for the WORLD map. Qatar is NOT the world."
He doesn’t respond. He looks a touch irritated. I can see he wants to move on to another customer.
With a sigh I take it from his hands, wait until he disappears behind a bookshelf, and put the map back on the shelf. After a few minutes I find a world map hiding behind some photography books.
Jeeeeesus, I am so thankful Qatar is NOT the whole world.
Currently listening to:
Spiritualized
Songs in A&E
You think you can do these things…
Fucking hell, talk about itchy fingers! Four months after my attempt to give myself a haircut (and failing miserably: my hair is still uneven by 2 inches on one side), here I am again, fighting the urge to chop my hair off. I was mumbling my desire to give myself another haircut an hour ago, then started looking for pictures online to inspire me. Afterwards, predictably, the idea started to seem more and more brilliant that I dug out my thinning scissors (yes! I found them!) and started to measure how short I wanted my hair to be.
At the first strains of expressing my desire to “even out” my hair, Julien exhibited A) Suspicion, B) Skepticism, C) Forced Nonchalance and D) Panic. Just as I was about to make the first snip, he lunged at me, hustled me to the guest room, shook me by the shoulders and cried out, quite seriously and almost hysterically: “You think you can do these things, but you can’t, Nemo!”
Currently listening to:
Medeski, Martin and Wood
Out Louder
Pirates
In France last year, Julien’s mum, his sister and I went to Sephora, where I grudgingly exchanged euros for make-up brushes, eyeshadow, mascara, and a whole bunch of other stuff that came in different colours and bottles.
You’d think that I would’ve already known how to put on make-up. Well, I didn’t, at that time. My sister Dr. Doom, who “knows” these things, never really partook in the art of female bonding make-up sessions with me. It wasn’t like I would have joined her anyway. My mother’s concept of make-up is simple: Less is more, meaning, who cares if you put some on? You can scratch out events like proms or weddings, because I never attended prom, and my wedding planning was so lousy it was so obvious that make-up would be the last thing on my mind.
So last year, I started learning how to apply make-up. How hard could it be? I wasn’t a stranger to painting, so it couldn’t be that difficult. It’s like painting your face, right? I spent about 30 minutes in front of the mirror, painting and erasing and repainting. Then, I went out into the hallway and ran smack into Julien.
“What do you think?” I said, twirling.
“So cool!” he marveled. “You look like the one in Pirates of the Carribean! Damn, what’s the name?”
I said “Kiera Knightly” at the same time he said “Captain John Sparrow”.
—
***Procrastination at its best. I’m supposed to be packing since we’re leaving for France in 14 hours, and I haven’t even started.
Currently listening to:
Portishead
Third
Thinning Scissors
The other day, I bought a pair of scissors that hairdressers use. I found them at the pharmacy in the mall. “Thinning scissors?” I mused aloud, which made the Chinese pharmacist come over. “It’s used for shearing your hair.”
“Shearing?”
“You know, thinning your hair at the ends.” She touched her perfectly-thinned hair tips.
“Thinning scissors, then.” I was overcome with a sense of power. I can thin the ends of my hair!
A few hours later, Julien came home from work and gaped at me while I twirled for his benefit. “What did you do to you hair! It’s uneven!”
“I bought thinning scissors!” I snapped it several times infront of his face, hoping to impress.
That was the last time I saw my thinning scissors. He hid it somewhere, and I didn’t have the time to look for it before my flight to Paris.
Acute angles divide my path that I had lost
Damn, that’s what I get for editing the code!
Originally I had written a long post with pictures and descriptions, but here’s the short version, as I seem to have mucked the post up:
Things that happened in 2007:
Lived in Paris
Watched Explosions in the Sky and Clap your Hands Say Yeah
Moved to Qatar
Returned to France for holidays
Moved flats
Received the French nationality
Got my drivers license (and a car)
Went to Japan
Went to Manila to hang out with the brothers
There! Others have probably read the longer version. Maybe it’s for the best… because I was kind of worried that it would sound that I was bragging about how “wonderful” my year was, and then 2008 would come and bite me in the ass by making nothing happen at all. I had visions of people rolling their eyes while reading the previous post, saying “How utterly lame.”
Oh, never edit posts by code, even though Wordpress is taking a long time to load. I’m going off to a corner to sulk now.
Currently listening to:
Pinback
Autumn of the Seraphs
Imbalance
For Christmas, I got Julien a bag and Guy Delisle’s graphic novel Pyongyang. The bag was supposed to be on sale, and I was fairly disappointed when the sales lady informed me that the sale was over.
Walking to the counter, I passed a stack of leather-bound notebooks, paused, then put one in my cart.
Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas indeed! I thought, smiling and pleased with myself. I got him loads of gifts this year! He’s gonna have to get me a real nice one to match these three!
He got me a car.
J’ai honte.
Currently listening to:
Radiohead
In Rainbows
Blinking lights
Today, I passed my driving exams !!!! On the first try !!!!
Qatar is a very weird country…
Currently listening to:
Deftones
Around the Fur
In an Expression of the Inexpressible
Driving school in France:
1.You enroll in driving school. You pay the fee.
2. You will spend a couple of months attending Code de la Route classes in order to pass the theoretique exam.
3. Once you start driving, your teacher keeps an attentive eye on you and the road.
4. Your teacher tells you off when you make a tiny mistake, constantly hollers at you for not respecting the distance de securité, and occasionally asks you trick questions like, “What is the colour of the car behind you?” or “What is the speed limit in the city proper?”
5. Your teacher teaches you how to change gears, where to place yourself in rond-points, how you should start slowing down when you see a curb.
6. A car comes too quickly towards your direction even if you have the priority. You ask your teacher if you should have honked the horn. She launches into a tirade about how you have forgotten the rules and stresses the importance of using the horn only when absolutely necessary.
7. You have faith in your driving instructor. She is aces.
8. You stop driving lessons because you move to another country.
Driving school in Qatar:
1. You go to a driving school. They ask you to pay a fee, then tell you that you can start after two months. They scoff at your look of disbelief. When you ask them if they will call you, they shrug indifferently and finally say “Okay.”
2. After two months, no one has called you. You go to the driving school. They rifle through a wad of papers and find one with your picture attached to it. They ask you why you did not come sooner. You bite your tongue and swallow back a snappy retort.
3. You brace yourself for a few sessions of Road Theory. Turns out, Road Theory classes do not exist. They give you an A4-sized paper with road signals on it and tell you to “read it because this is helpful.”
4. They stick you in a car. Your instructor spends 3 minutes showing you the gears. He then tells you to start the car and you to start driving, without you having any idea of what you’re supposed to be doing.
5. You ask your instructor, “I have a question… if I just want to slow the car down when approaching a curb, for example, should I push the clutch and the brakes or just the brakes? And if I’m on the 4th gear and want to slow down, should I go to the 3rd gear first, then the 2nd, or can I just go from the 4th to the 2nd?” to which he replies, “Listen. What I need is for you to be strong. You will learn how to drive. You are a strong woman, yes? You must be strong… for you and for me.” He then fiddles with the dial of the radio until he finds a station that pleases him.
6. You follow his directions until you get to a busy roundabout. You start to panic at the whizzing Land Cruisers, whose drivers think it hilarious to honk their horns at you when they see your driving school car. You gingerly try to enter the roundabout. Your feet suddenly want to dance the tango, and to your dismay they do, and the car stalls. In the middle of the fucking roundabout. Cars behind you swerve and start honking. You curse and are ready to cry, and your instructor restarts the car and tells you to continue driving. You are so tense that you drive the car onto the pavement. He steers you to safety. You are shaking in fear, waiting for the sermon, and all your instructor says is, “You have to be strong. For you and for me.”
7. Your instructor comes up with an idea to make you relax. He decides to talk to you. All the fucking time. Where are you from? What do you do? The conversation then switches to his family, his family’s medical history, his pets, his childhood dreams, his dreams for the future, the dreams of his childhood pets.
8. You have mastered the art of droning out unwanted conversation while driving.
9. You stealthily try to insert your questions about brakes and clutches in mid-conversation. You get satisfactory answers that make life easier.
10. A truck comes straight towards you even if you have the priority. Your instructor leans over and honks the horn several times, then shouts “Imbecile!” to the truck driver, who shouts something back (Probably, “To hell with you and your stupid driving student!” You wait for a couple of seconds while the truck driver and your instructor glare at each other. You wonder how your French driving instructor would have reacted…
11. After several sessions, things are better. You have stalled only once ever since, and not in a major roundabout. You continue cheery conversations with your driving instructor and occasionally miss exits. You are calmer now, thanks to your ever-calm instructor’s passionate quest to build up your confidence. You still panic, though. But this is ok, and, according to him, perfectly normal. You are a strong woman. For yourself and for him.
Currently listening to:
The Black Angels
Passover
