Inside My Room

This is my room. This is where I've been hiding out for the past two years. Before this I hid in a different room (not pictured). Now that it is time to pack it up I realize just how much I'm going to miss it. I'll make a new hiding spot. Sure. But this one was special.


While living here I discovered Neil Gaiman novels and ordained him my new favorite author.


While living here I conquered the Friday Market, Kuwait's haggling megadome. I bought that rug on the floor for KD13 ($45). Trish Harris and I chipped down the price from KD20.


My friend Zahra asked "What's an Appa?" when she sat on our little couch one day and I introduced her to Avatar: The Last Airbender.



The orange scarf hanging under the cowboy hat was a gift from Silvia and Nino after sharing salmon, wine and chocolates in her tiny Paris flat.

Optimus Prime, who stands resolute on the corner of our IKEA bookshelf made surprise appearances in all sorts of places around our place. One day he'd remind me to take my probiotics or stand in my dresser drawer holding his suggestion of which panties I should wear for the day.

My art easel was remained, "Arch Weasel" when I told my husband I was giving it to Yusra and the static-ridden phone lines in Kuwait distorted my words.

We were living here when we decided to become helicopter pilots and move to Arizona. In the evenings after work we'd stretch out on the bed and talk about flying, listening to The Eagles of Death Metal.

We had celebratory bootlegged date rum cocktails when we paid off the last of our debt. Four years in Kuwait and we were able to accomplish what would have taken twenty in the US.

On my laptop in this room we sat scanning our 100-page mortgage document, trying to email our lending company during the Great Internet Outage of 2008.



In this room we planned our trip to Jordan to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary where we would spend six hours on The King's Highway from Jerash to Petra where we encountered jinn and reminisced on the mistakes and triumphs of our twenties.


I spent hours, a few moments at a time, perched on this balcony, thinking about what to do next.



It's all boxed up now. I'm quiet, but smiling.

What Time?

When it comes to planning there are two kinds of people: The "What-timers" and the "Wheneverists." At some point I migrated from the former to the latter group. This realization came when I analyzed my annoyance with the repetition of the question, "What time?" Most often, my answer is simply, "I don't know yet," or maybe a guess, "...around this time-ish." Most of the time I'm good with that. I have to be.

True, there are times when time is vitally important. Like, for example, when trying to squeeze in one more beer at Irish Village in the Dubai airport before your flight to Kuwait, or when dealing with Americans. We Americans have got to know what time. It's the knee-jerk response to any invitation. In Kuwait, and in many other countries I suspect, time is as inconsequential as the weather. It comes, it goes, it doesn't matter what you have planned.

Take this spring/summer for example: My flight leaves Kuwait on April 24th at 8:15am. Doug does not have his ticket yet. We are planning to be in Beaumont, TX on June 6th and in St. Cloud, MN on June 13th. Everything before, after, and in between is a big question mark. Along with all the other details in life.

Where are we going to live? In either a house, condo or apartment; somewhere in Chandler, or Mesa, or Gilbert, AZ.
When will we get there? Sometime in July, mid-August at the latest. School starts sometime in August and we should be there for that.
When are you going here?
When are you going to make it there?
When will you stay with us?
When will you see them?

The answer is: I don't know. Even if I did know, it would probably change before the actual when actually happens. I know it's hard for all you What-timers, but try to relax... not knowing is fun. Not needing to know is even more fun.

Becoming a Wheneverist is sort of like becoming a nudist; only less embarrassing for your friends and neighbors. Sure, you may need to carry a towel to sit on and have your cats declawed, and, sure, you might irritate less liberated individuals, but you don't give a damn. Cares to the wind, quite literally.

In truth, I'm just guessing - I've never tried nudism, but Wheneverism is quite nice.

That's yoga, Baby. Flexibility of the mind.

Screwtape Bird's Nest

It’s spring in Kuwait. Well, according to the calendar, it’s spring everywhere, but it’s been spring in Kuwait for a while – despite the occasional emails from home with news of the latest snowstorm.

The birds and bees in Kuwait are ignorant of snow falling on other continents. How could such knowledge possibly affect them, and, really, should they care? The birds of Kuwait are busy doing what they do best; nesting.

As I walked from the parking lot to my office building the other day I saw a modest brown sparrow bobbing between car tires, carrying a single, dried palm blade in her beak. The clack of my shoes sent her into the air, fleeing in awkward busts with the narrow leaf tagging along. Life, for this bird, is not unrelenting text messages, guiltily avoided gym sessions and financial worries; it is a simple mission, repeated year after year.

A few days later, driving to work, I saw another bird gathering materials to build a better nest as I slowed to roll over a set of speed bumps. She bounced and pecked, gathering the ribbon remains of a cassette tape before flying over the hood of my car. The tape flickered like a string from an Autobot’s kite.

I imagined speckled bird eggs hatched onto a bed of cassette tape ribbon and other bits of modern waste. Paper napkins might make a nice nest lining and the recycled-paper-brown type would be nature-camouflaged. Cigarette butts could act as lightweight filler for mud dauber’s adobe nests. Innovative and avant garde architects hype the genius of building with “found materials.” Perhaps a little bird told them where to look.

Bothered hippies see the downfall of the planet in a cassette ribbon bird’s nest, but I think they’re missing the lesson here. Take the human example of computers: sure, they may very well lead downfall of humanity, but imagine of all the other possible uses for such equipment, post apocalypse.

Cannibalized laptops could provide keyboard lettering for store names or residences. People would either fight over the A’s E’s and R’s or get creative combining the leftovers of X’s, Q’s, V’s and J’s. I see bicycle paths of flat screen monitors and stairs made of CPU's. Pagers will still be useless, but the nice artist-type woman living in the water bottle house next door might make a hobby of decorating them as Christmas tree ornaments.

The little bird with the cassette tape ribbon reminded me of a stand-up routine by the late George Carlin when he claimed, with all effing certainty, that "the earth will be fine."

"The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...a**hole."