Okay, I'm done torturing you guys with rants on the insanity of various forms of male facial hair. For now.

Today's Halloween here in Amreekistan. For those of you not in the know, it's an arcane and bizarre holiday in which people are allowed the liberty to dress up as French Maids in polite company, demand sweets from complete strangers, and vandalize property. My kind of holiday! Except that, well, I'm Muslim, and we don't jive like that. We're not allowed to bandwagon on other people's holidays. Especially god of death and decay honoring ones. Sigh.

But apparently I don't even need to try to get credit for my Halloween spirit. Those of you who know me are probably aware of my, ahem, unusual taste in clothing. Lets just say as a multi-racial, culturally confused, contra-generational odd ball, I don't dress like most folk. Being the patchwork quilt of humanity that I am, I figure I get to wear whatever I damned well please, even if it looks like a museum piece.

So then I shouldn't have been surprised when the day before, on my way home from class, my boundary-crossing antics got me thrown into a whole other grouping. That of early Halloween reveler. As I biked past a group of ornery looking teenagers at the local high school, one of them looked up from her pouty angst and excitedly announced - "Look, a girl in Halloween clothes!"

She was pointing at me.

*blinks*

Sorry guys. Turns out being surrounded by textbooks and nerdlings does not make for very entertaining blog writing. But hey, be happy. It could be worse. You could be LIVING my life instead of having to read about it.

So rather than talk about the mysteries of fraternity hazing (saw a guy in a tiger suit being walked in the rain yesterday), or consider the insane injustice in the world that allows some girls to be beautiful AND geniuses (who knew Engineer Barbie was real) I shall go off on a tangent. A very distant tangent. One that has NOTHING to do with college. NOTHING I SAY!

Let us instead consider mustaches. Where on earth do these things come from? And what exactly is the big idea? And most simply, WHY DEAR GOD, WHY?!

I get the two other extremes in the male facial hair situation – clean shaved or bearded. Guys grow hair on their faces. Apparently lots of it. Either you fight the good (or bad if you’re into the sunnah) fight and keep your facial hair in a constant state of retreat, or you accept the inevitable and perhaps evolution and become a hairy beast.

Dudes who may be vain, insufficiently hairy, non-daring or just want to look ‘clean’ (a euphemism for non-serial-killing-truckdriver-cultleader) tend to go for the hairless look. Guys who are either religious (Muslim, Jewish, Amish), rustic, lazy, or ugly (a good beard masks a thousand flaws, or at least a weak chin) are usually the bearded ones. Generally. I know I’m painting with rather a broad brush here, but hey, work with me.

Then you have mustaches – an insane aberration of the equation. You don’t get the effect of being cleanshaven – namely appearing normal. And you don’t get the benefit of the beard – the time saved not grooming. What you have instead is the worst of both worlds.

You still have to waste a disturbing number of cumulative man-hours mowing your face every morning. Add to that the extra time spent avoiding the sacred proximity of your ‘stache. Not to mention the agonizing when you accidentally cut it too close and end up asymmetrical for a few weeks.

And though you are partially shaven, your insistence on growing the hair beneath your nose and above your lip throws you back into the category of ‘oddball’ along with your more hirsute fellow men. Yes, you are spared the worst of the stereotypes that beardos get, but being thought a lost member of the Village People, a fan of Geraldo Rivera, or a time traveler from the 1970s is not much better.

Might I add, that a mustache, even in the best circumstances on the few men who have managed to rock said facial hair, can suspiciously look like overgrown nostril filters. It does appear to be sprouting from your nose, for lack of a better explanation as to why that lone area of your face would be hairy while the rest is not. And it IS kind of gross to highlight EXACTLY how hairy your upper lip is. Yes, this is me seeing the world through girl eyes, but still. I figure most of the mustachioed ARE trying to impress girl type people.

So why, men, WHY grow a mustache? If you’re hideous, it really can’t help that much. I mean, we can still SEE the rest of your face. Even with all the concentrated ugly in the world, shading your upper lip in hair is unlikely to improve it. It’s a short lived distraction at best. Eventually we will cease to be amazed by the curtain of bristles that shifts and waves as you talk and breathe and notice you’re a beast.

But you say that going baby-faced is rather pansy. Granted it IS a bit strange for men to choose to deliberately look like their pre-pubescent selves or their wide-jawed sisters. So you want to be manly, but not THAT manly? Not man enough to grow a beard, but man enough to make yourself look like a South American drug boss? Ok. I can respect that. There’s something to be said about the self-sabotaging anti-vanity aspect of the ‘stache. But why not just wear an eye patch or stop brushing your teeth. Really.

Any mustachioed wonders want to weigh in?

Like my dear friend Hemlock, my life of late has been an ongoing social experiment. It runs a little like this -

Take one semi-sheltered/semi-seasoned young hermit.
Remove benefits/strains of friends and family.
Give her home, fridge, transport, schedule to manage.
Drop in foreign environment.
Mix in absurdly extreme weather.
Regularly dose with inhuman expectations.

The outcomes hypothesized include-
A smarter Owl (if my education is a success)
A sicklier Owl (if I am some anorexic nut with a doctor phobia)
A more capable Owl (if I hadn't already been running my parents' home for years)
A dead Owl (if I truly am a hazard to myself)

So far, I have neither exploded nor drowned, so as far as experiments go, it's been a relative success. I've figured out lots. Left to my own devices, I'm rather a home-body. I cannot handle television. Tomato paste is our most versatile friend. And I can still learn stuff. Like how to change an inner tube!

So yesterday, on my way to class, my bike's front wheel suddenly blew out. At least, that's what I eventually figured out as the sound whooshing air that had suddenly appeared mid-ride got quieter as my ride got more wobbly. With no time to fiddle with the damned thing, I quickly got off, locked it up on a random street, and caught a bus. On my way home, I stopped at a bike shop, picked up a new inner tube (size estimated from a nearby bike of a similar make), and went to retrieve my wonky chariot.

After all that, I figured I was in for a few minutes with a ratchet and I was set. Managing my back-to-back schedule without the aid of my bike to cut down the run between classes, finding a bike shop, getting the right sized inner tube, and walking home a wobbly bike was the hard part. Changing a puncture? Piece of cake.

A piece of rock-hard, glued-to-the-floor, inedible cake, maybe.

The damn bolts were practically frozen on. I found the right tools, and set to work, but the only thing that shifted after all my labor were probably the bones in my wrist. Then I ATTACKED those right tools with various hammer type things, and still no dice. If I couldn't get the a damn wheel off the body, I couldn't change the tube. Tired and hungry, I decided to go to bed. I'd either take it to a bike shop in the morning, or wait until my big bro came down for a visit on the weekend ("Welcome! How was your trip? Fix my bike?").

But come morning, I'd changed my mind. Without wheels, I had been late for every class. I had to have my bike back! With half an hour to spare I decided to try one more time. I picked up the socket thingy, and attached it to bolt, but still couldn't twist it loose. Then I proceded to tear up my landlady's tool box and basement in search of something I could use to change the leverage. I found an adjustable spanner, attatched it to the handle of the socket thingy, and gave it a push, instead of a twist. After a few nervous seconds, the bolt gave, and I freed the wheel.

Success? Er, not yet. Detatched from the corpus-cyclus, the wheel decided it was on its own and wouldn't go down without a fight. I spent the next ten minutes wrestling the tire, trying to pull it off the rim. I'm sort of short on brute force, so I didn't bother with that strategy for long. I wedged something long and skinny between the frame and the tire, and popped it off. From here, it HAD to get easy. Right?

Wrong. Sigh. I excitedly ripped the new tube from the box, and looped it over the rim. Er, it was, like, four inches too long. Oh no, wrong sized tube! I double checked the numbers on the tire, and they were the same. So something else had to be wrong. Like, um, me. I figured the tube got bigger when it expanded, which is why it was too long for the smallest/innermost part of the equation. It had to fit the outer edge, so I poked it into the tire, and prayed I didn't end up squashing or twisting it in the process. Then after some more strenuous wrestling, I got the tube-filled tire back on the rim, and ran and bolted the wheel back to the frame. It all looked good... but would it work? I had to walk it down to a filling station to find out.

With forty minutes before class left, I rushed out the door, pushing my still floppety bike along. I got to the nearest filling station, and asked if they had an air machine. "I ga wan, bat it likely esplod you bike!" the Asian mechanic told me. Ah, well we'd already done that once in the past few days and I know how to fix it now. So I hooked it up to the industrial strength air machine, and bit my lips as it shot the piddly tube full of 'explosive' car air. Would it shoot the perhaps wrongly reattatched tire off into space, releasing the tube inside to strangle me as it overfilled with air? Would I find out I'd twisted the tube inside and end up with a weird assymetrical tire? Would it look ok until I got on and discovered I'd forgot something in my haste to put the bike back together, like, say, the bolts?

So I filled the tire, took a little air out for good measure (don't want to get shot to the moon if I hit a pothole too hard), and got on. Still uncertain of my success, I pedalled a bit, and tested the brakes. Everything seemed fine. In less than 20 minutes, I'd managed to change a tire on my bike and not lose any limbs or cause any accidents.

Yes I know most of you figured all this basic repair work back when you were 10 years old, but hey, I'm slow. For me, this has been the first quantifiable skill acquired during my adventures at the Ivy League and I'm thrilled. YAY!

It smells faintly of cloves, saffron and boiling milk. Downstairs a grandfather lives in a glorious past, telling of wonderful holidays and beautiful places long gone. Nothing compares, everything glows, and if only you had seen such a thing. A son patiently listens - only just - before the beleaguered wife interjects, admonishes, and brings the reminisces to a halt. We are here now! A new topic is covertly slipped into the stream of soliloquy, and the banter resumes, redirected to the present.

Duty done, the conversation referee passes into another room, dodging two boy-shaped blurs. Her grandsons, fuelled by stolen sweets and expectations, run to the living room. A sonic boom of giggling and jostling follows them out, to the picture window, where they stop. There the boys gawk at the newly strung fairy lights, blinking the arrival of the new moon to oblivious passersby on the road outside, before rushing off to find a new game that can only be truly enjoyed in the rare secret of the grownup night.

In another corner of the house, their mother stands with one ear on distant conversations and the other on the pots boiling on the stove. A rich tapestry of taste and tradition is being woven with her quick hands. She hums along to a worn record of praise, a full and steady voice, experienced in singing to bed little boys.

The mingled voices drift up upstairs, where alone is the visiting aunt, carried by an unpredictable wind from her solitary adventures in the wide world outside. The stoop shouldered intruder that her nephews have come to expect unexpectedly, sits in quiet, absorbing, smiling.

This is the sound of my family, together, on a holiday. God how I’ve missed it.

Eid Mubarak.

I am not in a Muslim country. I am not hanging out with Muslims. I am in the US. Alone.

So I shouldn’t be offended when Person X, a ‘friend’, cannot let a week go by without offering me a drink. When I invited my colleagues to fast with me one day of Ramadan, he brightly responded “Of course! But you must have three beers with me in exchange!” The funny wears off after the tenth time.

And I shouldn’t be hurt when a person I respect, in a position of authority, forgets how hard it is for me to be fasting at a cocktail reception. How is he to know how agonizing the sound of eating and drinking when one is on the twelfth hour of abstention – like nails on a chalkboard. When I finally could take no more, and begged leave to go, why then should I care that he answered bitterly “Sure. Go and meditate somewhere.”

Why should I expect others to inconvenience themselves on my behalf? When iftar time fell during our long drive, was it fair to assume that the caravan would stop to let me find some food? They had homes to return to, families to see, meals waiting. My religion is my problem. I would wait until we reached our destination.

Who am I to mandate a schedule change? Our three days of seminars were tightly packed. To make the most of the time, meals and lectures would be held at the same time – the speaker doing their thing while breakfast, lunch and snack were served. Was it reasonable to think they’d have done it differently for the sake of one lone attendee? Did they care that I’d never felt so hungry, strained and tempted in my life?

No. But I’ve been angry about it, blaming everyone but myself for what has been the worst Ramadan in memory. Then this afternoon I remembered something I said to a colleague a while back. He, a non-Muslim, had wanted print space and opted to fast in Ramadan for a column on his experience. But even half way through the month, he could not stop the constant stream of whining about how hard it was, never getting easier and how run down he felt. "I feel like I'm going to crack."

Standing silently as he searched my face for a sympathetic smile and a kind platitude, I tried to imagine what a month of fasting would feel like to the outsider. His experience was not like any Ramadan I'd ever had, where it only got easier as I went along, feeling stronger and more alive every day.

Then it hit me. “You know, if I didn’t have faith to fuel, interpret and buffer what I was doing, I think I’d feel the same way as you. Ramadan would be nothing more than self-administered torture.”

So Owl, where has your faith gone.

I'm off to the wilderness for a few days. Your homework while I'm gone (I'm infected with the damned stuff, it's only fair you be too), is to come up with better post labels. I think there's an awful lot of overlap in the ones I have, and a lot of my entries don't seem to fit in any of the existing ones. So a shuffle is in order. Help me come up with, I dunno, 7-8 labels for all my rotten little updates. Thankee. See ya in a few!

What is it about the wrong place to fall asleep that makes a nap so irresistable? Give me a bed, a sofa, or a quiet corner, and I'm all systems go, utterly awake. Put me front row, in a small group, before an important person, and I go out like a light.

I did it twice today! First there was my morning class - the one for which special favors had to be pulled to get me in. As I blinked in and out of consciousness, I dimply saw the professor notice my semi-intruding presence for the first time. "Yes....zzzz... it is I...zzz... the girl who bumped out a paying student to.... enjoy your lecture hall's cushy seats...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...."

Then in my afternoon class, I foolishly picked a seat directly before the professor. I remember then abstractly thinking, "hmm, it's not good to sit in the middle," but couldn't recall why. Halfway into the lecture on atmospheric entropy, I began to fade. No amount of embarassment or fear could keep me from the delicous pull of sleep. I melted, slipping from upright, pen poised, to head down, and hands slack.

And yet once the deed is done, the urge leaves me. It's like the moment I've let everyone else know without any doubt, yes, I am asleep, I wake up. My breathing falls to that slow, deep rhythm for only a minute or so. My tired mind finally lets go of its desperate attempt to follow the lecture gives over to the insane screenplay of dreamland. Or worse, I begin to drool. Or topple over.

And just like that then I'm awake, fresh. Repentent. But guilty.

:) Leave it to me to make sleeping seem sinful.