It's Always Something...: Like a Birgin.

I’ve had a couple of pretty conflicting emotions these past two days. Yesterday while I had my girls over for the “Wives Club” (including a new gal named Vanessa, which was fun) we were talking about the next few weeks of get togethers. Vanessa will be in Cairo for her birthday next week so the she’ll come the following week. I realized that I was going to gone the next two weeks following and I had my first twinge of “home” feeling about this place. I got the whole “aww, lame I’ll miss it” feeling and then had to laugh at myself because I will be missing it AT HOME with my FAMILY! Haha. So that was sort of funny.

Then this morning I had a typical shit-this-isn’t-home feeling when I was comparing grocery ads for Fred Meyer and Albertson’s (General Mills cereal is on sale at Albertson’s for a buck fifty this week, ya’ll!) when Stu called. He asked what I was doing and I told him and he laughed… it was funny, right? Well… in whatever mindset I happened to be in, it was suddenly very unfunny and I got really sad. Why the hell am I comparing grocery ads for US stores? Am I crazy? Apparently. In my head before his call it made perfect sense: I am trying to figure out a good system for saving as much money in every avenue of our lives as possible when we go home. So ad-shopping seemed a logical step. But here we are, more than a year away from even the prospect of going home and I’m looking at ads (even worse, I am also excited about what I see on sale). Sigh.

On another note I had to take this blog over to Word to finish because our ghetto, it’s-not-1950???, internet has crapped out on me again… over and over. I think this upcoming vacation will be good for me. Not only to be able to see my family, but to regroup and calm my mind before heading back over here. Yesterday at our little get together, we were talking about how the longer you’re here, the bitterer and more intolerant you get. We can all laugh about the ways we “deal” with this bitterness (Stu by considering actually hitting the Pakis that cross the road all over the place, me by yelling at the men who shamelessly stare, embarrassing them, Rainy by trying to understand why a store would employ people who speak neither English nor Arabic, in a country whose national language IS Arabic and deals primarily in English…), but it doesn’t change that we are typically bitter.

I have people who read my blog tell me over and over to “take it for what it’s worth” or “enjoy the opportunity” or a handful of other choice phrases, and I understand where they are coming from. Before we moved here, I would likely have been in that boat too. But it is a completely different thing to have to live with it day in and day out. I try to avoid complaining, but there is a certain mental threshold for the amount of times you can hear an Asian sing Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” accented… “Like a Birgin, toushed for da berry furss tiiime”, and that threshold was somewhere back in March. That song will never be the same to me again. I am to the point of literally craving my own language, in my own dialect. I got a call yesterday from that journalist I told you about a month or so ago, and when I answered the phone it was literally shocking to hear an AMERICAN accent on the other end, but from a local phone number. So shocking in fact that it actually took me a second to understand who this guy was… “Uh… Hugh?...... From the National?..... Oh, right, the NEWSPAPER….. Here…. In the UAE…” was pretty much what went on in my head.

In other news, was anyone else aware (and if so, damn you for not telling me!) that the so-called “terrible twos” do not necessarily start at, uh, TWO?!? In fact, as I did extensive research and am now more than aware, they can start LITERALLY at ONE… Like, say, two days after your precious angel TURNS one! Yeah. So my child who is normally praised with being “such a good boy” and “well-behaved” has developed some fun new attributes such as squealing (yep, it’s not just for pigs anymore), THROWING himself on the floor… like a two-year-old, and hitting and yelling at Mom and Dad when he doesn’t like that we’re telling him not to do something (say, stick his little fingers in the 220 volt outlets in the wall). I was liking that it was other people’s kids that were brats… what the heck?

Anyway, contrary to the above paragraph, here are some wonderful-Kaden pictures to discount everything Mommy tries to convince her readers! “Wahahaha”, he says.