Some days are just wrong in a million ways. They’re cursed from the get-go. But apparently, they can be fixed. Try my yesterday for example.

I woke up late and rushed out the door without breakfast or much else to get to work, only to arrive five minutes late for the morning meeting and get chewed out by bossman. I then had all of two minutes to run down my leads, send out faxes, make my phone calls, and rush out the door for an event that started on the other side of town, five minutes ago.
Got there in a reasonable 10, but ended up spending another 10 creeping along in traffic just minutes from the place. Finally parked my car and rushed up. Found the event, and walked in for the last two minutes of the presentation I came to hear – oh joy. Decided instead to grab the dude after to get briefed in person, but found his English totally lacking and no translator present. Settled on a visiting western official for my comment. Was in the middle of interview when bossman calls and says, drop everything and haul arse to another event, on the OTHER side of the traffic-clogged highway I just got off of.
Walked out the event and found a massive jam outside and decided I was better off walking the 2 kilometres to the pedestrian crossover and over to the exhibition centre. Brilliant idea, except that I was wearing black, in a hot desert country and my feet were clad in Pakistani khussay – elf shoes that give me about four blisters per foot when I just wear them around the office, let alone power walk a few miles. So I took them off. Went barefoot, giving about 200 people on Sheikh Zayed Road something to talk about around the dinner table later tonight. Thankfully, encountered little glass or rubbish, so I wasn’t bothered.
Walked like the wind to the building and then proceeded to got lost in the massive hall. After another kilometre’s rushing (this with the shoes ON), I finally found my destination. Sailed in, asked for a press pass and stood there smiling. Turns out, I don’t get one. Too many reporters from your number one favourite schitzo tabloid already registered. No space for little old me. This despite the fact that we’re corporate sponsors of the event. So I called the office and asked them to take care of it. Got a sheepish call five minutes later saying, “just come back. It’s too much drama. I hope you can catch your other scheduled events.”
So I left. In those gawdawful shoes. Power walked my way back out of the stupid hall, kicked them off and then picked my way through the under construction parking lot, over the pedestrian crossover, down the glittering Hotel Boulevard, to my car. In no shoes. Got in and drove.
You would think that just about now, I’d be ready to kill someone. Or everyone. But no. I just drove straight to Baskin Robbins. All wrongs were set to right with a scoop of peanut butter chocolate and another of Raspberry Cheese Louise. I arrived back at office half an hour later all smiles. I think my bossman thinks I’m quietly plotting his murder. But I’m not. Ice cream is the cure for a crappy day.

Chocolate cake for breakfast – three days running.
Frozen mixed vegetables for dinner – nearly every night.
Substitution of popcorn for all things.
Taking karoke to dangerous heights (or lows depending on who’s hearing).
Leaving for a party without my skirt slip and not catching it till I arrived and saw my slightly inappropriate reflection in a big window. Yikes.
Leaving all the cabinet doors open in the kitchen cuz I’m gonna have to open them all later anyways.
Forgetting to go shopping for a week and living off of old carrots and frozen strawberries in the mean time.
Doing the laundry and turning my OWN clothes the wrong colours. Genius.
Discovering that bills need to be paid on time.
Hoolahooping in the kitchen
Pulling a Tom Cruise (from Risky Business, not Oprah) on the slippery hallway tile.

So I’ve finally got to the bottom of a major mystery – namely why the hell I can’t seem to get ahead in Dubai. Turns out I’m scary. Massively. Did a poll of Indians and Brits and everyone agreed. Probably the first and last thing those groups will see eye to eye on ever. Turns out they don't know what to make of me at all – looks like oppressed chattel, talks like a Big City American punk, gets the Orient, gets the Occident, and passes on most of popular behaviour. Dunno why that would wig people out but apparently it does. Explains why the management doesn’t want to do jack all with me. Dark horse and whatnot. Ah well. Their loss.

I’m happy today. I’ve finally found the words for the very complex bit of reasoning that has been trapped and tangled in my head for a long time – why I believe in God.
When I was an angry little pre-teen, I did not want to believe in a god. My life sucked. The world was ugly. And I’d never seen anything nice, let alone divine. But I never really bothered to believe or disbelieve in anything. I just didn’t care.
When I got to the age where the rules that I was expected to follow from the faith it was taken for granted I had, began to infringe on life, I needed to finally decide. I was an American teenager and if I was or wasn’t going to fall headlong into the drugs, sex and rocknroll of my peers, then I needed to know why.
So I thought. A lot. I think I spent a lot of time locked in my room back then. And argued with a lot of teachers and older people. It seemed there were lots of contradictory reasons why people believed in God, lots of myopic ones, and lots too personal ones. As a wanna-be intellectual, I wasn’t going to accept that mankind has always believed in God, and all of humanity can’t be wrong. Sure they can – they have and still tend to think women are inferior. As an amateur debater, I was not going to swallow illogical arguments like – God exists because there is beauty in the world. There is also massive ugliness. And as a hardened sceptic, I could not tap into the emotive faith aspect, as I felt nothing.
But there was something. Try as I may, I could never quite understand why ANYTHING should exist. If you don’t believe in divine creation, then you tend to believe in the Big Bang theory. It’s the one that says that there was a bunch of gasses floating about in the nothingness that was not yet space, and they got together, and started reacting and building. They went boom and the universe was formed.
But I kept asking how the gasses got there. Stuff does not just appear, and then build up and go boom. If there was ever a point in that there was nothing, left alone in the supposed vacuum that is space, then it would have remained nothing. And what is space – it’s not just nothing it has dark matter and energy in it. And why does time exist? And if matter cannot be created or destroyed, how is it there?
That I exist meant to me that regardless of the theory of evolution, the big bang, or whatever - something must have kicked it all off. And THAT something has to be defying the basic concept of all things that exist requiring a point of creation. If we move, then something unmoveable that put us into motion. So there has to be a God.
It worked for me, and I filed it away and moved on. There was a God, He made me and I should try and I owe him acknowledgement if not obedience. Then I ended up choosing to practice Islam and haven’t really taken the thought out to examine the God reasoning since. But I was thinking about Gnosticism the other day, wondering if it was as simple and sound as my 14-year-old brain thought it was. So, of course, I hit the internet and found I’m not the only one who’s worked this out. It’s called The Kalam Cosmological Argument and goes a bit like this:
In the case of the kalam cosmological argument, the distinction drawn between the universe and God is that the universe has a beginning in time. Everything that has a beginning in time, the kalam cosmological argument claims, has a cause of its existence. As the universe has a beginning in time, then, the argument concludes, the universe has a cause of its existence, and that cause is God.
The uncaused existence of God, who does not have a beginning in time, is consistent with the initial claim of this argument: “Everything that has a beginning in time has a cause.” God’s uncaused existence therefore does not give rise to the problem encountered in the discussion of the simple cosmological argument above. (thanks to www.philosphyofreligion.com).
Yeah, God’s existence defies the laws of physics, but there is no reason why He would have to be limited by them. He made them up, after all.
Oh, and that unmoveable doing the moving, that’s sorta the core for all of Aristotle’s philosophies on the natural world. He saw that was change and motion all around us, and in order for that to happen, there must have been a first cause. His “Prime Mover” is the source of all change and motion while being itself unchanging and unmoving. To motivate the heavens to move, this unmoved mover must be perfect, so Aristotle called it God. Dude was a genius, and if it works for him, it works for me.
So that, ladies and germs, 10 years down the line, is why I believe in God. Glad I finally figured it out.

It's called Superman by Five for Fighting. Brilliant, no?

I can’t stand to fly
I’m not that naive
I’m just out to find
The better part of me

I’m more than a bird
I’m more than a plane
More than some pretty face beside a train
It’s not easy to be me

Wish that I could cry
Fall upon my knees
Find a way to lie
About a home I’ll never see

It may sound absurd
But don’t be naive
Even heroes have the right to bleed
I may be disturbed
But won’t you concede
Even heroes have the right to dream
It’s not easy to be me

Up, up and away
Away from me
It’s all right
You can all sleep sound tonight
I’m not crazy
Or anything

I can’t stand to fly
I’m not that naive
Men weren’t meant to ride
With clouds between their knees

I’m only a man in a silly red sheet
Digging for kryptonite on this one way street
Only a man in a funny red sheet
Looking for special things inside of me

It’s not easy to be me

I wish I could just turn off my brain. It’s whirring and clicking far too much. When I sleep at night, I dream I’m awake, at work, writing, talking, planning. So realistic and humdrum they are I sometimes cannot remember whether things have happened in my dreams, or in the real. And just close my eyes, and I see the road I spend half my waking hours on driving, swerving, braking, constantly scanning. I never really have down time. I want to just hit myself in the head with a rolling pin and enjoy a short coma where there will be no thinking, worrying, timing – just breathing.

Cause you can't jump the track, we're like cars on a cable,
And life's like an hourglass, glued to the table.
No one can find the rewind button, boys,
So cradle your head in your hands,
And breathe... just breathe,
Oh breathe, just breathe

Had a massive adventure this weekend. Went to cover what I thought was your typical boring ‘lets piddle around and take pictures’ event and dressed accordingly – blouse, cargo pants, tasselled scarf and sandals. Turns out it was a land and sea campaign, and I was slotted to be on one of the speed boats. Ended up having to battle rocky wavees to get on a boat that was moored in water deeper than my height, all the while trying to keep camera and note pad dry. Then I had to disembark on an island, again with the water, and get back on the boat. I ended up in the drink four times in the course of a few hours.
I started off that morning with two safety pins and two straight pins to keep my hijab on and pants (a few sizes too big) up. By the time I was dunked for the third time, I had one pin of each, and had to decide which was the bigger priority – keeping my pants up, or my scarf on. A more difficult decision was never made. In the end they both got one each, and a prayer that they’d do the job. They sufficed – just barely – but I still needed help in getting my camera back to land dry and unruined.
When I jumped off the boat for the last time, we were anchored much farther from the shore, and the waves were at least two feet high. The first one hit me and I was with the fishes, glugging away to glory. I came up laughing and spluttering, scaring to death all of the lovely professional water people who had been trying to watch out for me. Amazingly, despite the fact that I had like, 50 per cent of the ocean in my pockets and my stomach, my camera was dry. I’d kept my hands straight up over my head, and they were clear of the waves when I went down. I couldn’t risk another wave though, and lobbed the camera back at the boat so a taller and more buoyant person could bring it to shore for me.
Now I’ve done a lot of weird and random stuff for my job – up in micro light airplanes, visited an autopsy incinerator, toured a sewage treatment plant and gone to fancy balls - but this was probably the one I was most ill suited for. I’m not a water person. Kinda comes with the territory – being a hijabi. When you’re swathed in enough clothing to dress a dozen people, drag is a big problem. I’m also not the most accomplished swimmer, though I do manage. I’ve never gotten used to salt water either, as being from the Great Lakes region spoils the ocean for you. And I get motion sick walking, so you can imagine what two hours of being at rough seas was like. I don’t know if I would have opted for the assignment if I knew what all it entailed, but I’m glad I did. Yeah, by the time I dragged myself ashore at the end of the day, I was one, salty, water logged, and snuffling little mess of a person. But I had great fun. Work should always be like this.

I have reached a pinnacle in my life. A long cherished goal, perhaps the only goal, in my existence has been attained. Nirvana here I come.

I own an air popcorn popper.

I can die happy now.

So this looked a lot better on my computer but when I saved it it went all blah - something to do with data transfer from sumfing into sumfingelses. Bumps or Jpegs or sumat.

Hey, that's a great line to use in the real: 'My face looked great in the mirror this morning but it doesn't transfer well into other people's eyes. You'll just have to take my word for it, I'm stunning in certain lighting.'

Don't you love how ambigious an adjective 'stunning' is.

I'm stunning.

So are electric eels.

On a lighter, and less self-pitying, note - perhaps I should NOT cover health issues at my paper. Today I was researching hemorrhagic fevers and nearly convinced myself I had Ebola. Genius that I am, as I was going down the list of symptoms and I found myself idly trying to apply them all to myself. Hypochondriac health reporter. Bad combination making for a short lived career.

I am in way over my head. In work. In life. Dunno who was the idiot who let me believe I could handle anything. Everything. Oh wait, that would be me again. The result is the painful conclusion - “You have been weighed, measured and found wanting.” It was funny hearing that in A Knight’s Tale. The baddy in the black armour deserved it. It’s not so funny getting it in the real. Kinda debilitating, really.
But I guess I deserved to be knocked off my high horse. I’m nothing exceptional and it wasn’t exactly healthy wandering around thinking I was. Blame it on the American school system. “You can do anything! Reach for the stars!” Bull. If you’re mediocre, so shall ye remain until you get a brain transplant and some extreme training from Niccolo Machiavelli.
So hello world, my name is Owl and I’m an idiot. Sorry it’s taken me so long to figure that out.