“So, those are pictures of your fingers?” I put on my practiced “impressed face” and nodded enthusiastically.
“And all the photos were taken with my mobile phone.” The artist added with equal enthusiasm.
He went on to explain how inspiration struck one afternoon while painting the interior of his house. Playing around with different concrete stains, architect Bassem Al Mansour dipped his fingers in red, then yellow paint and when he looked as his hand saw that his digits resembled the forms of people. He ran from one window to the next trying to find the best light that would bring his finger family’s stories to life.
The result was a duet exhibition, called Familiar Matters (his fingers and the print work of a friend/artistic partner), showing unframed photos with such titles as “Grandmother – grandchildren,” “Engagement blessings,” “Grandmother kisses the bride,” “We agree on the marriage,” and “The Visit.” Each role in the saga played by Bassem’s paint-covered keyboard tappers.
As an editorialist, amateur art critic and sometimes cynic, I’m not sure how to feel about this exhibit. For my magazine review I will, no doubt, spin it positively, noting the unusual whit of a story told, literally, with finger paint. It takes a curious and unaffected mind to see painted fingers and look for a story rather than the nearest sink and bar of soap. The repetitive simplicity of a blue background with red and yellow objects in the foreground reassures my comfort with primary colors and his descriptive titles cause a quick snort of a smile.
All these things are much appreciated in Kuwait, a somewhat sober and irritated place. Goofy humor and adult playfulness without illicit underpinnings are rare. Maybe too rare to entertain the funny bone of the local art socialites. The overall low attendance and rapid exit of those visitors might suggest non-interest, confusion, distaste or just disappointment that so few other gallery snobs will get to see them in their new Luis Vuitton shoes.
On the cynical side, I wonder if Kuwait is so parched for humor that pictures of someone’s fingers, taken with a mobile phone, enlarged, printed and hung with Scotch tape can get an audience in one of the country’s premier fine art galleries – a gallery that also holds an original Warhol. I wonder if this is another example of the small-pond-syndrome that surrounds this tiny, filthy, rich country. We say it all the time: You can be average anywhere, but in Kuwait you’ll be exceptional and my skepticism raises an unimpressed eyebrow at the “art” exhibit of which I am professionally obligated to give a positive review. In the end I'll appease myself with the fact that I like the artist personally and the praise is going to a well-deserving person.
Would Familiar Matters make it into an art gallery in London or New York? I wouldn’t know – what do you think?
It’s about time I talk about Kitten-Shirt-Guy. He and I have never actually met, but we see each other most mornings in the weight room of the gym at the Holiday Inn. I’ve not met him on purpose. I like my name for him and I don’t want to feel obligated to call him by his real name, if only in my head and to those lucky enough to hear my tattles of his exploits.
Kitten-Shirt wears sunglasses. All the time. They are the black, biker-style, wrap-around kind and I wonder if he wears them brushing his teeth in the morning. I wonder if he does brush his teeth in the morning. I’ve deciphered from his Arabic slang (he spends half his gym time on the phone) that he is Kuwait and Kuwaitis aren’t known for their dental regimen.
Kitten-Shirt is bald – shaved head – so he’s fierce, not follicle-y challenged. The extra-thick mustache is added proof of that. Kitten-Shirt is shorter than me and wears Zumbas pants. Remember those? MC Hammer’s version of chef pants. He also wears black Converse with white laces, his only redeeming fashion quality. But, as you would guess, Kitten-Shirt is so named because of his choice of torso coverings. He favors the muscle-baring, low-cut "nipple shirts," as I like to call them; the weightlifter's answer to the spaghetti strap girly-tank.
There I was, doing my usual routine of lunges and twists when I saw it: A brilliant white, cut-at-home nipple-shirt tied in little knots at the shoulders (to give just the right amount of peek-a-boo cleavage) and decorated with an adorable iron-on tiger kitten front and center. I think he made it himself. Biker sunglasses, mean face, inflated muscles with bulging veins and a tiger kitten – cute as a button – on his skimpy shirt.
Sadly, Kitten-Shirt-Guy is the most entertaining anecdote of my mornings. I wonder what he will do tomorrow… Must work-out to find out. And that's turning a frown upside-down.
“Hello Jordan, you were always my favorite New Kid,"said my derisive husband as we turned off the highway, heading from Queen Alia Airport to our first hostel destination in Madaba, Jordan. I punched the #1 button on our rental car’s preset radio stations and Fergie’s voice came crashing through the airwaves, “When I’m in Jordan I listen to 97.1, Jordan’s No. 1 hit Radio station!” No way, Fergie has been to Jordan before me? I thought to myself. Natasha Bedingfield’s latest jingle, a duet with the comeback Backstreet douche-bags, kicked in as we drove past a well-lit advertisement for a new suburban development featuring the smiling faces of White couples and happy parents swinging their red-haired youngling between them. Our tourist-level-deep Jordan experience was yet to come, but the first initial splash with the cool spray of Western white-wash sort of stuck with me.
It got me thinking of all the other advertisements and White people imagery I’d noticed in my limited travels through the Arab world. It would appear that when the message is fun, relaxation, convenience or fulfilment, the preferred spoke models are of the more pasty variety. Stroll past any “Coming Soon” boarded storefront of any mall in Kuwait, Bahrain and the Emirates, or skim the brochure of any health spa, hotel, restaurant or shopping center and the gleaming, naturally pink complexions of attractive Crackers staring back at you with placid blue and green eyes. It’s like they’re saying, “Look, look, live here and live like White people.” “Drink this and you’ll laugh like White people.” “Don’t you want your banking experience to be like the White people? They never have to wait in line – see how they’re smiling?”
I wonder how many smiling White people the proprietors of such ads have actually encountered in the Middle East. I’m certainly not one of them. I've got a well-practiced angry face that I wear everyday in Kuwait. I forget to turn it off, sometimes, after I've left the country. I still remember reactions from beach goers with vacation buzzes when I was in Thailand. Someone actually stopped me to ask what was wrong... "Did something bad happen to you?" they wanted to know. The look is one of defiant indifference and slightly hateful complacency. It takes about as much work to perfect as Zoolander's "Blue Steel." It's my only armor in an amorous and sexually repressed world where men assume a woman solo is a woman soliciting.
I'm not the only one with a Blue Steel, everyone around here, talking about Kuwait now, looks slightly hateful and indifferent. Eye contact is either a personal insult or a personal invitation and a smile, my God, a smile is practically a public display of orgasm. I'd venture to say that both genuine smiles and orgasms are rare for women in the Middle East. An increase in one would probably lead to an increase in the other and so far, I haven’t seen it. In fact, I can count on one hand, using only three fingers, the number of times I've seen people with the look of bliss about them. I'm talking about just random occasions when a person looked happy for no reason at all; everyone beams when the first bottle of real Johnny Walker Red comes out.
Occasion One: Marina Mall, the local cruise spot for adolescent boys of all ages and gaggles of girls whose layers of skin-tight clothing are surpassed only by the layers of make-up they're wearing. The husband and I were at the food court, waiting for a movie to start and I couldn't stop myself from noticing a young-middle-aged woman with her family seated near by. Trying to figure out why my gaze was so drawn to a very normal-looking woman in a very normal situation, I realized that she was smiling. She smiled at her kids and her husband. She looked bright and happy. It was the first time I'd seen this since moving to Kuwait.
Occasion Two: Stuck in traffic on Arabian Gulf Street, I looked toward the seaside, as I often do when traffic is slow, to see if I could separate the color of the sea from the sky. The coast to horizon of Kuwait is like one big yawn of faded blue-gray, but today I saw something that made me laugh out loud. Not in an “I laugh because I need to find humor so that I don’t cry” kind of way, no, it really gave me the giggles. A large-ish woman, wearing a black abiya and hijab, had turned out of the morning rush hour, parked her car in front of a small playground and was vigorously pumping her feet back and forth, swinging gleefully on a yellow, dinosaur-headed swing-set. Occasion Three: At a "beach party" hosted by a friend's event management company I was coerced into being their photographer for the day. The day’s activities were many of the typical picnic games I remember playing as a kid: dodge ball, volleyball, tug-of-war, potato sack races, and others. People in their early twenties in America would not have paid $50 for boys and $35 for girls to attend such an event, especially without free alcohol and definitely not if alcohol was prohibited. But these kids ate it up. There were around 150 young people, running around like 5-year-olds on a pint of ice-cream and pound of cake frosting. One guy in particular, had an overload of good feelings and stopped mid-bolt to scream. Eyes wide, fists clenched, he dropped to his knees still screaming joyfully, not knowing what else to do with the foreign emotion.
Which brings me back to my observation of White people representing fun; is happiness really a foreign emotion to some people? A day outside on the beach, playing games with a mixed (“mixed,” meaning boys and girls together) group of friends seems pretty normal to me. Exchange the beach setting for a wooded park or sunny field and you’ve covered the leisure activities of most American youths. We think nothing of talking and laughing in the presence of girls and boys we know and don’t know – it’s not even really classified as “fun;” it’s just normal. Compare to the three marked occasions of happiness in three years of living in Kuwait.
Maybe it just looks unnatural to have smiling Arabs on advertisements and “fun like White people” is just more believable. I don't know, but can anyone tell me where they at?
A story of my first Kuwait wisdom tooth extraction
"Baining Madam?" He asks for what must be the seventh time, bloodied drill in one hand, dental pick in the other. He heaves over me, out of breath, dropping sweat beads onto the inside of the scarlet spattered acrylic face shield that separates our two bio-hazardous fluids.
"You have bain?" He asks again. Hells yes, I have freakin' PAIN! You’re dismantling my skull one tooth fragment at a time!
"Uh-huh." I answer, without moving my tongue. I taste pennies and calcium; the warm, gritty, iron flavor of flesh and bone.
"Iza, okay?" He gestures with the drill. "I zink I almost zere." Well have at it, there man, no need to hold back now. I close my eyes as the drill starts. I smell burning, there's more splattering, more gauze, and the drill is exchanged for chisels and picks. Cracking, breaking sounds, pulling, yanking, pulling, prying. The dentist sits down with a harrumph.
"Iza stuck." He sounds defeated.
It's been hours. I'm tired. The muscles of my neck and back and even my glutius maximus ache from pulling back against the pulling on my jaw, the effort to free a wisdom tooth from its tight socket. The Novocain started to wear off about 15 minutes ago and I steady my breath into 5-count inhales and exhales. I think about the possibility of ancient peoples giving birth and having their teeth removed without painkillers and decide that generations of medical advancements have made us all soft. I will survive this. It’s just a tooth. All I have to do is wait, it will be over –sometime. Breathe.
He's back, leaning over me, peering into my mouth, bushy eyebrows fierce. The light is adjusted, tools are exchanged – he has a plan. I close my eyes. Inhale-2-3-4-5. Exhale-2-3-4-5. Drill. Water. Drill. Inhale-2-3-4-5. Exhale-2-3-4-5. Water. Suction. Searing, wincing pain.
"Baining Madam?" A pause in action.
"Uh-huh!" I look for his eyes to communicate my extreme contempt for him at this moment.
"You need more Novocain?" I can't tell if he's annoyed at the interruption or relieved for the break.
"Uh-huh. Yagh." Screw reviving my forefather’s toughness in a single dental visit; find a section of gum that's still intact and stab me with more of that sweet numb-juice.
"Okay, I zink you need oral surgeon." He says after 2 hours and 45 minutes of sadistic torture. "We take you for more x-ray now, I zink zere is one bieces still inside. Ze oral surgeon will cut it out for you."
"Uh-gkay." Why argue, really?
While we wait for the x-rays to be inspected and the additional shots of Novocain to take effect, let me fill in some details from the beginning of the story. After the extensive dental work of my teen years I was left with only the two bottom wisdom teeth. Previous dentists had warned that the day would come when they would have to be pulled, but no need to rush it they said, when they hurt, go to the dentist. Easy enough. Those two teeth began to hurt. My co-worker recommended a dentist, I made an appointment and on a Wednesday evening, right after work, I went to see Dr. Bain… er, make that Hussein or something. He looked in my mouth, asked which one hurt the most and announced that we would start there. It will take only 45 minutes or so, he estimated, to remove both.
For this procedure in the States, if you want them to, they'll knock you clean out; you wake up with ice-packs, a prescription for Vicodin and you're on your way to enjoying chocolate milkshakes, movies in bed, and a few days off of work, oh yeah, and a little swelling. In Kuwait, however, things are a somewhat different; forget the good drugs, forget the knockout surgery, you're wide awake the whole time and get a measly Tylenol substitute for comfort afterward. And, just to add humor to the situation, the Arab/English accent replaces a "p" sound with a "b" sound since there is no "p" in the Arabic alphabet, hence the question of "bain." Why they insist that something is "baining," with the i-n-g, remains a mystery.
As a side note: prior to making this appointment, I had just heard a story, a friend of a friend, who went to the ER at an international clinic in Kuwait with a deep cut on her thumb. She'd been packing dishes, sliced her thumb when she broke a glass and went to the hospital for stitches. The anesthesiologist miscalculated the dose of local anesthetic and sent her into cardiac arrest. They had to revive her with the "Clear!" – ZAP! paddles, for Christ's sake.
With this story still fresh in my mind, I apprehensively eyed Dr. Hussein's framed university credentials and tried to recall the "What to do if You're Having a Heart Attack" instructions that I saw in a chain email once. Something about raising your left arm while hitting your chest and forceful coughing… Or maybe you raise your left arm and then hit your chest with it…? It didn’t seem like valuable information at the time.
Back to the dentist chair now; I've been moved to the oral surgeon's room where I wait with a mouthful of gauze. I'm remember a snippet of the TV show Scrubs when the actor Zach Braff tries to entertain an old cranky patient by stuffing cotton balls in his mouth and imitating an Italian mobster's accent and I wonder why it's never as funny when I do it. Maybe it's because I'm a nasal-voiced, white girl with awkward comedic timing, but really, you'd think that would only make it funnier. Huh, another mystery.
With the call to prayer sounding faintly from the street, my savior surgeon enters the room. She stands about my height with my butt in the chair and her feet in comfortable cross-trainers. She's covered in white fabric from head to toe; white hijab, white doctoral coat, white butcher's apron, white linen pants and white gloves. One normal sized eye looks at me with all the compassion of Mother Theresa and the other blinked from behind a telescopic magnifying lens. The monochromatic layering gave her the appearance of a dense feather pillow, add the head apparatus with rotatable, interchangeable lneses and visions of anthropomorphic mole-nuns come to mind.
"Shhh... Habibti, shhh..." She whispers from behind the dental mask as the chair is reclined to its lowest setting, my head now lower than my knees. "You're very strong," she says. It sounds like she means it. One hand rests on my forehead or gently squeezes my shoulder during exchanges of dental instruments; that constant contact a gesture of reassurance.
"Alright, Habibti, we're almost there." I believe her. When the masked face leans close I can hear her muffled Arabic, reciting the evening maghrib prayers. I pretend that she is praying just for me. I makes me feel better. She completed the ordeal with eight stitches.
"Okay, that one's finished." She leans back and clicks one of the lenses up, it perches outside of her line of sight.
"Would you like me to get the other one while you're here? Or maybe you'd like to go home now?"
"Yahg. Ohm," I try to sound as casually desperate as I can manage.
And so concludes the tale of my first wisdom tooth extraction in Kuwait. The saga continues with part two, later, after I get a chocolate freakin' milkshake.
She has a personality that can blow out a sparkler. She hates her job, but signed a contract committing herself to another two years of service. She hates her boss and co-workers, but denied an offer to transfer to different department. She hates her commute, but hates sharing rides even more. She hates her apartment manager, her husband’s family, her life and now, she hates me too. I cancelled her yoga class and, in so doing, have taken away her one coping mechanism for a terminally dismal existence. This is my story: I am a yoga teacher, not a magic cure for bad decisions and I cannot fix you.
She takes one last long inhale through a lip gloss stained Virginia Slim and then crushes the butt into an ashtray next to several other butts in a similar condition, victims taking the fall-out for frustrating week, no doubt. She glares at me; jaw set, and tells me that this yoga class is the only thing she looks forward to in her dreadful life and without it she will surely lose her will to live.
I don’t budge. I know that I need to leave teaching for a while and no guilt trip in the world has a grip strong enough to make me change my mind. I would empathize, I’m not an uncompassionate person after all, but all my empathy was used up, along with my patience, about four months and 50,000 repetitions of the same 10 complaints ago. I am done. I have nothing let to give, not to her and not to any of my other students. My sparkler is soaked to its metal core with the spittle of malignant negativity.
Alright, let’s leave this cheerless story for a second and talk about something else: yoga teachers. When I read the profiles and biographies of yoga instructors of all types, and I often do read these, I hear a story similar to mine. The circumstances that guidied us to begin our yoga practice differ, but our motivations to teach are often similar. We teach yoga because we want to help people. Yoga helped us be better at life and we want to show our gratitude by helping others with their journey. We know we don’t have all the answers; we still get tired and struggle with frustrations big and small. We sometimes eat too much or too little, or drink too much and sleep too little, but we give our time and share our experiences with honesty and humor, hoping that someone else’s day might be a little better for it.
On my own yoga journey I have come to believe that one of the most important things the practice teaches us is how to make better decisions. At the core of things, our choices will either obstruct or release the flow of energy in our lives. With patience and practice we learn to recognize which alternative will lead to which result. Then, after more practice the choices become clearer and making the best decision becomes simple instead of nerve-wracking, gut-wrenching agony of weighing pros and cons. Our lives become simpler, list of things that makes us smile becomes longer and, one by one, the number of things that totally stress us out drops down to just a few real doozies. (I’m still working on this one, but I’ve seen the spark and I’m running towards it with gusto.)
With this in mind, let’s go back to my student, the one diagnosed with a chronic in-frustration of complaining. What is she doing wrong? Besides smoking before a yoga class and besides infecting me and the other students with an aggressive case of negativity, coupled with the “my-life-is-worse-because” syndrome. Yeah, other than that – those were the obvious ones. She is committing, what I like to call, “yoga abuse.”
Yes, yoga can change your life. Yes, yoga can sustain your energy and possibly even help you to see the good in your in-laws, but it isn’t a bottomless trust fund bank account of karmic debt relief. It’s like a regular bank account, but with an excellent high-return interest rate. You have to deposit thoughtful introspection and good decisions before you can withdraw abundance, peace and vitality.
When a person makes conscious choices that are detrimental to their mental, spiritual or physical health they will suffer the retaliation of those actions. Using yoga to cope with the repercussions of their “sins” without fixing the behavior is sort of like robbing a bank every time cash is short and then repenting after the deed is done. Sure, forgiveness is real, but they’re exploiting the system. Using yoga to survive their own little self-destructive cycle will cut them off from receiving the much more beneficial lessons yoga teaches about loving oneself, living in simplicity and, duh, making better choices.
As a compassionate teacher with a suspected yoga-abuser in your class, what do you do? Our instinct is to care for and nature them, at the very least, while they are in our class if not outside of the classroom as well. They are obviously unhappy and we hope that with enough time and meditation they will break their cycle and decelerate the spin of their downward spiral. My advice: do not step lightly around this cancer. For the lack of a better expression; drop the mo f*kin’ hammer.
As an instructor it is your duty to make the classroom a welcoming and neutral space, free from the tangles that bind us in the regular world. It is not your job to fix everyone who rolls out their mat in your healing place. Love, care, encourage, advise if you feel you can, but do not let yoga abuse go untreated in your classroom. Weed through the overgrowth of spiritual irresponsibility and nip that negativity in the bud before it spreads to you and your students like an organic-biological-weapon from M. Night Shyamalan’s movie The Happening.
Maybe you can learn from my mistakes before your sparkler sputters out.
I’m a girl and I’ve never liked pink or lavender. Nor have I have bought anything on the merits of its “oh-for-cute!” factor. I call myself “girl” more often than I call myself “woman” although I have a Bachelor’s degree from Texas Woman’s University. My earned income is one-third of my husband’s although he has only an Associate’s degree level education. While I think this is criminally unfair, I do not resent him for it. I waited for my twentieth birthday before getting married so that I would not be a teenage bride like my mother was and ten years later we are still choosing not to have children. I believe Motherhood is sacred, but I also believe that I can be a revered woman even if I choose not to exploit my uterus.
I am female because of chance; I am feminist because I think.
When I think about yoga and the wellness industry it has inspired and I wonder, “What’s up with all the pink and pastel?” It’s no stretch to say that yoga, at least in America, is a woman’s world. We grace the cover and nearly every yoga magazine with beauty and poise. We own the studios, teach the classes and speak at the conferences with sold-out, record-breaking attendance.Classes and conferences which are largely attended by, you guessed it, more women. I’m down with that. Some would say that women are long over due for a billion dollar industry to dominate. I just wonder; does female-dominated also mean that it has to be fuzzy, lovely and sweet?
My husband and I took our first yoga class together. The studio was owned by a brother-sister duo and the instructor was a husky voiced woman with bombshell curves and a Boat Pose that was (and is still) impossible to imitate. I fell in love with yoga that first night, but my husband felt like an onion in a strawberry patch. I continued to practice and even worked at the studio, priming sheetrock, building dressing rooms and ceiling canopies, to pay for my teacher training tuition, but my husband rarely came back. He would wait for me in the lobby when I attended the only male instructor’s class which was packed to the walls with sweating, blushing ladies of all confidence levels.
When I became a yoga teacher my husband rejoiced that I could now help him do yoga at home, and his friends waited with bated breath at each one of our BBQ’s, hoping that The Yoga Chicks would show up to denounce their vegetarianism with one slow bite of a mustard covered hotdog. Well, actually, they probably would have been just as happy to watch them eat a tofudog...but I digress. I tried, fervently, to get any one of the dudes who seemed to be every present in my life into a yoga class using various male-oriented motivations. The classes are full of women. At least one of them is bound to talk to you if you just show up and try a little. You’ll be able to marathon video game like never before when you can master the lotus position. Nothing worked. Sheepishly, and away from their comrades, they’d ask about yoga-for-this-pain and yoga-for-that-injury. They believed in the system, they wanted to go, but they dared not venture where so few men had gone before. So, women love yoga and men think yoga is for women… and? Is that really so bad? If guys know what’s good for them they can just show up, right – what’s stopping them? Certainly not the women, we want our husbands, boyfriends and crushes to do yoga with us. I mean, really, Sting the yoga master? Fifty-six years old and totally sexy. Alright ladies, think about this: The mechanic’s shop. Before I finished typing the m-e-c-h I could smell it; the imitable odor of greasy car fluids, tires, sweaty backs and fast-food taco farts. Even those of us who proudly flex our tough-girl voice will put off going in there alone. It’s man-tastic bowl of testosteroni and not in the annual fire fighter charity calendar kind of way. We need to be there, we know we have every right to be there, the guys probably want us to be there and still, we can’t wait to leave. It is distinctly marked man turf.
Yoga studios and mechanic shops: one cares for your body and mind and the other cares for your car’s body and engine. I would assert that both are needed for most humans in our twenty-first century world, yet an invisible segregation still lingers. Have we not progressed beyond drawing juvenile lines in the sand: One side for serene girl stuff and one side for stinky boy stuff?
Now, I am very aware that there are many manly men who practice yoga and talk about it publicly. Joe Rogan, former MMA fighter and host of Fear Factor is a prime example. True, not all yoga studios and yoga websites have pink or even pastel design themes, nor do all mechanic shops reek of oil and b.o., but we’re talking in generalities. And in general, the overall impression of the yoga industry is one that feels like a sisters club with “Girls Rule” sign written in bubble letters and sparkle paint posted to the front door with heart-shaped thumb tacks.
What I’d like to see is a female-dominated, billion-dollar industry that was just that; a whopping success. Just because women are running the show, it doesn’t mean that the presentation has to be girly, does it? As teachers and business owners, let’s ask ourselves who it is that we are marketing to. If yoga can deliver hope to those in need like no other thing can, are we trying to reach all people with that message – or just those who are like us…
“So, those are pictures of your fingers?” I put on my practiced “impressed face” and nodded enthusiastically.
