I don’t own an umbrella. Or a rain jacket. Or a pair of wellies. And I hope I never have to. It isn’t that it doesn’t rain out here in the Deserts of Arabia. It does. Been a regular bath all weekend and most of last week. But rain is lovely. Why would I want to hide from it?

The real deal rain started Thursday night, as I parked at the softball grounds where the big regional tournament was kicking off. It started with some gentle wind that soon picked up speed and sand to be something like an instant exfoliating facial. That’s fairly common out here. If you don’t get that lovely sand in your teeth feeling at least once a week, something is lacking and your diet will want fibre.

My teammates and I were standing outside, discussing the next day’s game schedule when the first heavy raindrops fell. Like a polite but insistent tap on the shoulder they seemed to say “Um, pardon me but, I am about to let loose. You may, you know, just maybe, want to get under something watertight. A bit.” And with a clap of thunder it was as if the Big Top in the sky (because my life, afterall, is a Three Ring Circus) broke and the water that had been accumulating up there dropped down with not so much as a by your leave. As everyone took off running to shelter I had a leisurely walk back to my car, enjoying the drops that filtered through trees around the fields, and headed home.

Does it sound like I too am running away from the very precipitation I profess to love? Nay. I was simply moving to a more convenient location. When I got home I had a short walk in the rain, enough for my clothes to get that soft, cool and slightly weighted feeling without being soaked. But the responsibilities of Grownup Land were calling to me by way of a messy house and dinner needing to be cooked, so I headed back in. I’d just finished the dishes and was dusting off the computer table when Hem got home, wrenched open the frontdoor with her 1000 watt smile on full, and said: “IT’S RAINING!” My smiles can’t compare to hers, but I probably had my biggest one on a well when I answered: “I KNOW! LETS GO PLAY!” And with that, I grabbed my big shawl, threw it over my skirt and blouse, slipped on some flipflops and we ran out the door. At that point the storm was a proper gale, with the wind turning my skirt and shawl into sails that, had I not been such a dense little human and more bird or boat-like (lighter or more buoyant), would perhaps have sent me flying.

Of course, walks in the rain are incomplete without jumping through puddles and splash battles. You see, though we are wholly and thankfully water insoluble, we rain-loving beasties, and do not thus melt into a puddle of steaming sludge ala The Wicked Witch of the West when drenched, we do undergo a metamorphosis of a kind. We turn into 7 year olds. So not only do we happily galumph through standing water that, in drier times we’d turn up our noses at and walk distances to avoid, but we even kick it up at each other and manically seek out the deeper puddles, all the better to splash you with my dear. At this point Hem and I resembled the progeny of the Yip Yip Aliens and used kleenex. My slip and skirt were plastered to my legs, making walking an interesting experience, while my shawl had gained water weight in an unbecoming way, and was finding it hard to stay on my slippery hair. Hem’s clothes were equally squashy, and her normally voluminous mane clinging to her face, but she didn’t care either. We skipped around the block and sighed tragic sighs when the rain finally stopped and we had to go home.

Nice thing though, about being a grown up – or at least being some manner of creature who is a grown up and a 7 year old in turns - is that you can come home soaking wet and not have a parental unit squawk at you for leaving puddles in the floor. You squawk at yourself. “I had just done the floors!” I laughed as we came in, leaving snailtrails around the apartment as we rushed about trying to find dry things and get our wet clothes in the wash. Within half an hour we were both cleaned, dry and semi respectable looking. What, us, play in Dubai’s decadent rubbish run off? Never! Proper ladies we are!

In fact we proved our proper ladydom the very next day, when we got gussied up to the gills for an Emirati wedding. Somehow I managed to finish my fourth knock-out softball game in less than 24 hours, survive my personal trainer session, and drive home in time to be wrapped into a gorgeous magenta and blue sari loaned by Hem, style my hair, put on some serious war-paint, pull on bangles and wedge myself into a pair of highheels. It was all covered up in an abaya till we got to the women-only venue, where despite how over-done we felt, we ended up being some of the most mildly made-up chicks in the room. With Hem, expertly doing her 1950s vixen look and me probably seeming like a Mannequin on the Loose, no one could have guessed that just a night before we were hair-streaming, dripping wet, hooting, goofballs playing chicken with oncoming cars in a torrential storm. Ah but we were. And we'd be happy to do it again.

Hope it rains tonight too. :D

Okay children, settle down. I can’t actually post the pic of our mag cover. Because that would, in no uncertain terms, be outing me. I probably shouldn’t have even mentioned the cover image, but too late now. This blog has remained anonymous thus far and I’d like to keep it that way. So if you want to do the sleuth work yourself and track it down, go ahead, but I can’t be pasting my employer and name on the blog.

So on to... whatever. I was told to update, so I am. Meh.

Being a single young female in Dubai is … interesting. Well, I should remove the single part – not because I aint single – I very much am – but because I suspect a different marital status wouldn’t change things too greatly. No one is checking for a ring on my finger before they get up to their shenanigans. So just being female would suffice.

To begin with, there is the usual road romance – where my driving style is apparently tantamount to running around in a short red dress. Seriously, dudes, can it not just be that I’m in a hurry and you’re in my way? I’m a journalist, constantly behind schedule, and plus I’m just one of those driven people who tries to fit a million things into a day. So I drive like I’m trying to get somewhere in a hurry. And all the other cars on the roads are slow-moving obstacles. And yes, there are also the days where I’m just in one of those self destructive moods and I feel like pushing me, my car and the laws of physics to their limits, but those aren’t all that often. Normally it’s just me, racing myself and the fact that there are Jumeirah Beach Boys trying to race beside me is totally besides the point.

They do sometimes catch up to me though. I’m a speed demon, yes, but I don’t break red lights. Often anyways ;). So when they do catch up, I get a range of reactions. Some roll down their window and hold out their phone with their number displayed prominently on the screen. Others just lean over and grin. Some rev their engines while we wait for the light to change as an invite to ‘try that again girlie.’ And many of them, when we get rolling, will either try to follow me home or motion me to stop and what, chat? Discuss the weather? I have no idea. Like I said, I’m in a hurry and I really am not interested in an Emirati teenager who’s borrowed his dad’s BMW or a mid-life-crisis-struck Lebanese dude with his gel shellacked ponytail barely hiding his bald spot or other guy who I can’t help but wonder what his muscle-car is trying to prove or overcompensate for.

This form of madness is not limited to roads but also extends to the running track as well. Hem, TFL and I have been at a local park about five nights a week running and 'ruwalking' as TFL puts it. And nearly every night there is some strange occurrence. Again, when I’m on the track, I’m there to run. And I do. Once I’ve finished my warm up and stretches I don’t stop till I’ve covered at least 6 kilometers, and sometimes go up to 10. Granted, I don’t run very fast – it’s more like a medium jog – but I'm apparently a bit hard to keep up with. And yet that still hasn’t stopped The Red Bear – a giant gentleman in a crimson tracksuit - from making his presence known. Whenever I come across him as I'm doing my laps, he speeds up, edges towards me and stares down at me. I don’t know if he’s trying to smell me, or commit the cut of my shoulders to memory, or what. It’s just weird. Thankfully, he’s a slow moving creature and I’m past him rather quickly.

Yet I have to wonder what The Red Bear thinks to be the ideal outcome of his personal-bubble-invasion. Is the idea that by squeezing beside me as I huff past will force me to breathe deep of his irresistible male musk and win me over by sheer olfactory overload? Or is he thinking I’ll look up and be hypotized by the eyes that I assume lurk beneath his bushy brows? Or maybe he’s hoping I’ll have an asthma attack and he can be there to catch me as I fall? Really guys, how does this work out in your mind? Ah well, at least he’s getting fit. And if sniffing passing female runners motivates him to get out there and get healthy, I can be charitable.

We also have Long Haired Loper – another running regular. The other night, after weeks of grinning as me as I run by and/or being elbowed by his friend, he finally called out something. In Arabic and a dialect I’m not familiar with. Um, dude, I’m running, wearing headphones, and though I know I pass for Arab, this is Dubai and I could be any number of nationalities. Wouldn’t it be wise, when you finally screw up the courage to say something to a girl, to pick a line that is a little more international and intelligible. Right now, all I got was “Ya Khilwah” – which means Oh Mrfmrf. Could have been Hilwah, which means 'sweet.' I dunno. I felt kind of bad for him.

But it’s the guys who chase women from their cars that I have less patience for. Hem was the first to notice them – a few cars that no matter how many times you turn the corner on the running track, are a few yards ahead, lights on dim, engines idling. One night she made a note of the license number and realized it wasn’t simply a proliference of white Lexus growing like mushrooms across the park – it was the same car. Eventually, the mysterious stalker parked properly and removed himself from his vehicle – and made us all wish he never had. Ah, so THAT’s why you stay in your car. Please, cram yourself back in there. Or, leave your car at home permanently and walk EVERYWHERE until you no longer resemble an ant mound. Since then I’ve lifted my eyes from the ground in front of me and noticed a few other ‘stalker cars’ that idle beside the track until you pass them, and then zoom ahead, park, and idle again. So he wasn’t Hem’s adoring fluke. It’s a damned trend. Wow. That is like, the best hobby ever guys. It’s such a wonder why you’re obviously single.

You can probably tell at this point, that I’m not always the most observant person. I don’t bother looking for that kind of attention and only notice it when it’s really overt. But that doesn’t mean I’m totally oblivious either. Which is I’ve begun to be suspicious of the nonsequitar question of “So, uh, would you only date a Muslim?” coming from yet another Western male – and its less direct versions of “So do you go out?” “Do you like to party?” and the latest corker “Do you enjoy fine dining?” Of course though, me being me, I tend to think: Well, maybe they’re just very curious about Islam. Or maybe they think I could use a good meal. Or maybe I look/smell/sound like a shut-in who eschews sunlight, human contact, hors de oeuvres, small talk and food requiring cutlery and they’re concerned for me. But then one of my more worldly friends laugh and tells me to quit being naive. Yeah, that again.


So what exactly is the point of this blog beyond a wastage of words and time? And a massive rant that make me look like a sour-faced, man-hating termagant? Haha, which, oh yeah, I totally am. I guess the moral of the story is – if you’re interested be direct, enunciate, speak English and quit sniffing me! Much obliged.

I have henna on my hands, nail polish on my fingers and a date…… with destiny! *cue dramatic music*

Ok, well, maybe not the destiny part. It just sounded good. But the rest is true – and totally not my fault. See, very last minute my magazine decided to do a cover image that required a close-up of female hands – on no budget. As we sat in our editorial meeting, hashing out the idea, the boss says: “Ok then, who’s it gonna be? Nicest hands in the office?” And suddenly I found myself wondering if I’d been punked, because almost immediately all six sets of eyes swivelled onto me. Or rather, my hands. So I too looked at them, and um, I dunno, they look normal to me. Kind of rough actually. I have lots of scars and scrapes, my nails are never even and well, they’re JUST HANDS!

The boss didn't seem to notice or care. He gave them a long look, scanned over the other women in the office and said: “Right, Owl’s got the best ones. And we want this cover to look Arab, so, get henna put on would you and polish them up a bit. We’ll do the shoot on Sunday.” And with that, the meeting was adjourned and I wandered out in a slight daze with orders to ‘prettify those hands’.

But dudes, I haven’t had henna put on my hands professionally since I can’t remember when. I don’t even think I had it put on for any of my siblings' weddings. I don’t like holding still for a long time and though I sort of went through a henna phase in my teens – where I did tattoo-esque patterns on my hands that I constantly refreshed on my own – it was never proper pretty stuff and didn’t take long.

So when I got home, I told my roomie. Hem is a total henna fanatic. About once a month, when she gets down, she spirits herself away to Ajman where the henna artists know their stuff, and comes back with intricate designs up to her elbows and a huge grin on her face. She’s cute like that. I, on the other hand, am low maintenance to the point of absurd. I go to the salon twice a year for a hair cut and that’s it. Everything else I either do on my own, or don’t do.

Of course Hem took the mission of prettifying my hands very seriously. I obviously was not going to do the henna myself. So she calculated the time to make sure my henna would be at its most vivid the day of the shoot, called up her salon and booked an appointment. She then very sweetly drove me down to her henna parlor and was my emotional support as I put up with holding still and giving myself over to pissy beauticians. She even called them back to fix something they’d messed up and made sure the design was neat, Arab-looking and appropriate. On the way home she issued maintenance instructions and outlawed me doing the washing up till the photoshoot, as to not fade the henna. 0_0

Then the next day Hem suggested I get a manicure. I’ve never had one done. I don’t really care to start. My nails are ok. I file them when they get ragged and they tend to look fine. So that I resisted and instead gave myself my own manicure, buffing my nails to high shine and evening out the shape. When I was done, I held out my hands for inspection. Hem came over, her brow furrowed, and considered them. “They look good. But you need nail polish.” Oy vei. Me and nail polish don’t get along. I can apply it pretty well – all those teenage years of trying to be an ‘artiste’ means I can wield a steady brush – but what I can’t do is be inert till the paint dries. I seem to put it on well but within minutes I’m reading a book or putting things away or sticking my fingers in jars full of rocks – the usual stuff that ruins the finish. Again though, I gritted my teeth and did the needful – I gave my nails a delicate neutral coating and then – held still. For like, 10 whole minutes. Dude, that is called commitment.

And come this morning, I woke to find I had someone else’s hands. They were moisturized, hennaed, filed, shined and painted. And… dare I say it… pretty. And very not me. To my annoyance they were actually kind of distracting as I drove myself to work. My hands are patterned! And shiny! And colourful! ACK!

Eventually – distracting borrowed hands not withstanding – I did get to the office. Where I pulled on an abaya, wrapped a sheila around my hijab (to “be the Arab” my boss insisted I was) and turned myself over to the studio. There I was posed, fussed over and photoed. Now my fancied-up fingers are on the cover of Important Biz Mag. Which makes me… a covergirl. Hot damn. Only in Dubai and ONLY in a recession.

I would like a marshmallow please. A super sized one. One I could sort of jump onto and bounce across before settling on my back in the middle like a swimmer in the Dead Sea. I’d lay there, my toes poking up, my face to the heavens, close my eyes and float away.

Sleep eludes me lately. Or rather, it teases me. It leaves me cold and alone when my alarm clock trills at me from some unfathomable distance across the soupy darkness of my apartment. In the time it takes me to kick up from my twisted pile of bedding and swim out to that noisome bit of evil, I turn around and find sleep gone. And I am awake, groggy, and feeling very much cheated. But we only just met! I had finally stopped tossing and turning about 3 hours ago. Come back!

But it’s gone. And I have work to get to – stories to edit, writers to guide, bosses to soothe and fires to put out. So I begrudgingly rise and get on with life, and anyways, I know it will be back later. Because while sleep has little to no interest in being around me when it’s dark and quiet in the world, it loves to pop back in the middle of my day. Copious cups of disgusting tea-bag tea seem to put it off, so I douse myself throughout the day to keep sleep at bay.

This sleep villain is smart though. It knows I can only have so much tea before giving myself a stomach ache or getting too jittery. And it knows I can’t have any caffeine in the second half of the day, otherwise I’ll be wound up for another sleepless night. So patiently the imp waits while I doggedly work through my to-do-lists with a fatigue-befuddled mind. It even shows admirable restraint, allowing me my commute home in relative alertness, helped along perhaps by a blaring radio.

When I get in the door at home, however, sleep pounces. And I am without defenses. Caffeine cannot be had. Loud music will bother the neighbors. And there are no pressing duties to keep me occupied. I am utterly vulnerable and terribly tempted. But I know I can’t. Because if I close my eyes even for a few delicious minutes now, I’ll recharge that problematic battery of mine for another 24 hours. So I lurch around the apartment, cooking and cleaning, while abstractly dabbling in online word games and conversations, waiting for my running partners to come over. If I can just last till then, I’ll be fine.

Which is part of the problem. Because if I resist the heavy pull of sleep then, it does not return. Sleep is a fickle friend, ask it to come back later and it leaves in a huff. So after my evening run, I come home, have dinner, wash up, and find… that I am utterly awake. No longer do my eyes wish to prolong each blink. My head has lost its ponderous weight and stays upright easily now rather than slumping to my chest. And it seems nothing will slow my breathing to the depth and rhythm that one seems to need to call sleep back.

Alone, I am left to my own devices till exhaustion takes me way past the witching hour. And that too, only reluctantly. It is not a deep or restful sleep that finally comes, but a petulant and evasive one. I seem to sink and rise out of slumber for the first few hours, regularly shattering whatever dreams bravely try to coalesce in my weary mind. With each turn or shift of my pillow, that delicate web of rest is broken and has to be remade. After punishing me for my late afternoon rejection, sleep eventually ends its torture shortly before dawn and allows me a final surrender. I get then a few hours of rest before I wake again and start the cycle anew.

O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my sense in forgetfulness?
~William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I

Like SARS and the bird flu of yore my Hazard-Prone-Ocity (HPO) is apparently contagious. And jumps species. It has gone from being in me, to being in my apartment and is now concentrated around the bathroom.

It all happened because the shower-head decided to kill itself. A few weeks ago it apparently realized could not face the world any more and jumped to its doom and broke. A little before that, the bathroom sink had decided to spring a leak and water our cleaning supplies in the bathroom cabinent. Then on Friday we had the straw that broke the camel’s back – or rather – mine.

After hours of lovingly cleaning and shining our studio and bathroom I’d turned my attention to the shower stall. I was just finishing up my afternoon-long scrub-job and was wiping the shower door clean when I stood up and, in typical Owl style, miscalculated space and smashed my lower back into the tap. That unseated the fixture from its moorings, causing a gentle but boiling hot jet of water to issue forth. Btw, are you not majorly imbrezzed that I fought the stall and I won. It broke and all I got was a bruise. *points and laughs*

Ahem. So, at this point, Hem decided that we had better call in The Marines – aka – the landlord and his fixit-men. Because as much as Hem and I like to pretend we’re total dudes (in contrast to being sad, needy, single females, you know) – we aren’t really. I may be able to put together furniture and drill holes in things and whatnot, but I don’t do plumbing or electrical work and the house needed both. And Hem’s manliest skill – beyond always paying for my dinner and driving like a hooligan – is outsourcing. So she called the landlord and he said he’d send his ‘men.’

You would think that calling the experts would solve all our woes. But they did NOT. Because I am me, and fixit-men never really fix anything without breaking other stuff along the way, and plus, life is drama.

Early Saturday morning we awoke to a knock at the door. Or rather, Hem awoke. I had only gone to bed about 3 hours ago, so there was no way in hell I was moving. She got up and discovered the Three Ring Circus sent to repair our bathroom and alas, it was not Allegria. It was three dudes, a ladder nearly bigger than our apartment, a bunch of tools, and a cloud of cement dust. She directed them to the broken bits of our house while I stubbornly burrowed under my blankets and pretended I wasn’t there. And when I set my mind to something, I do it with aplomb. At some point, apparently the men and their ladder actually came over to the bed where I was pretending to be one of the lumpier throw pillows, and instead of waking up and moving, I just curled myself into a ball on one side while they stood on the other to fix the lights above me. This is what we call Dheet, which is Urdu for thick-skinned/stubborn/oblivious.

And yet, for all their climbing on my bed and crashing about, the fixit men had not actually fixed things. They broke them further. “Madam, the bathroom is made bad. The pipes are uneven in the wall. We cannot put a new tap as it is and have to do some things,” the head fixit man said. He then put us on indefinite stand-by for his return to fix our bathroom and left. We hesitantly peeked into the bathroom and found what had formerly been a gleaming but slightly leaky place had been turned into a construction site. No longer did we have access to a shower of any kind – he’d messed up the tap. And even the rest of the bathrooms functionaries were not operating at their usual level – something had been done to the water pressure and there was no hot water anywhere. Not to mention there was cement and dust and mud and foot prints and essence of man all over. Gross.

Fast forward another day to Sunday morning – the beginning of the work-week here. The fixit men had come back later the night before, but didn’t manage to finish the job and had said something about coming early the next day. Which happened to be around 7:30, when I was in my nightgown and Hem was still in bed. When they rapped at the door I quickly grabbed a robe and a shawl and shook Hem awake. “They’re back!” and though it was an unideal hour to return and we were both really NOT dressed to have men in the house, the thought of a shower (as neither of us had had one in now over 36 hours), made us giddy and we let them in.

The first catastrophous clash happened within minutes. The circus had arrived in piecemeal – first the Head Fixit Man, a few minutes later his Lackey and then another half-hour later came their Third Wheel Pathan. Hem had gone to the bathroom when it was just the Head Fixit Man, who was in the meantime repairing a cabinet. I was lost in a pile of clothes in my closet when the Lackey came in and attempted to go into the bathroom. Of course, it was locked, as Hem was in there washing up. But rather than take that as a hint (door locked, water sounds issuing from the inside, one of two girls is not accounted for), lackey TURNED THE KEY that is in the lock and OPENED the door. At this point, I was preoccupied when I heard the door creak open and Hem go “HELLO! Owl, what’s going on?!” Lackey quickly shut the door before it got more than a few inches open, but DEAR LORD. How dumb can you be!!!

Hem later came out and I explained my distraction and ignorance of the fact that the door could be opened from the outside (never noticed the key before). She laughed off her near-flashing while I tried not to look traumatized. (SO SORRY YAAR!) Anyways, we had bigger fish to fry. We needed to be at the office STAT, but were both still in our PJs and our bathroom and attached studio were full of men and there was no place to change. I gulped down my tea, ironed my clothes, and sat to think. An idea came to me when the Pathan left the house to get something. I jumped up and locked him out and locked other two fixit men in the bathroom with the order of “Stay in there for a minute please.” I then did the quickest costume change known to woman-kind while Hem, a better friend than I, was the bathroom-door-monitor. And good thing she was too, because they STILL did not understand what it means when someone shuts a door and turns the key, because I was barely in my blouse before they tried to open the door and come out. Idjits!

It turned out that my dramatic clothes changing was all for naught anyways. The fixit men were trying to release themselves from their bathroom confinement to tell us that they still hadn’t repaired the shower and had to come back TOMORROW, bright and early. So we get to do this AGAIN. Tonight though I swear I’m sleeping in my work clothes, wrinkles be damned. And I hope the fixit men take the HPO with them. My back and my bathroom need a break.

I finally got around to watching 10 Things I Hate About You the other night. The movie apparently came out when I was a junior in high school – prime target audience age for that teen cult classic. But despite being repeatedly being told over the years that I channel the female protagonist – I had never actually seen it. And now, after seeing the flick, I can kind of get how appropriate that is. I mean, would Kat (Scowling Intellectual Main Character) have watched some dumbed-down version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew? Bet she’d have decried the desecration of literature and turned her nose up at the idea she had to see it because everyone else was.

Would the 17-year-old Owl have done that? Haha, probably. I was, and still am, a brat. But then, you’ll have to take my word for it. I don’t think anyone who knew me as a bitchy teenager – beyond Abez - reads this blog, so we have no objective comparisons to go by. But yes, I have kicked guys in the groin, been thrown out of class for my “smart mouth”, been the terror of annoying teachers, and scared silent attempted bullies. But no hunks were paid to knock me off my high horse nor did anyone really ever try. May have something to do with the fact that I also wasn’t anything near as cute as Kat. ;)

So after finally sitting through the movie – which is a rare thing for someone with my short attention span to manage – I asked my roomie if she thought the Kat tag was still apt for me. “Oh yeah. But you know, you’re more like the girl from She’s All That - way more emo.” Oh great, another teen flick I haven’t seen. It’ll probably be another 10 years before I get around to it either. So I Googled it and found another “anti-social smartass girl gets the guy” type plot. Uh thanks Hem.

But hey, if the shoe fits. Folks like Knicq Bhai, Anjum, and Zainab would have you believe that I’m actually kind of… nice. Sweet even. *gag* I guess I can be, particularly compared to High School Owl. You wanna make something of it, punk. Do ya? But I’m also still angsty as all hell. I’m constantly raging against some machine or another – mainly myself. I am not angry like I used to be, but I’m still fairly tempestuous – to quote Kat. If there is ever any stillness in that storm, it’s only from serious application of will.

So I'm not as Kat-like any more. But yes, I still contain that tempest. I am just better at managing it but I haven’t gotten rid of it – as if I could. I guess I’m ok with it. It’s kind of useful. Being dissatisfied and angsty gets me places - like Peco Bill hitching his lasso to a tornado. And I can even steer it at times. So quit worrying about me and my angst. It’s part of who I am. Makes me ambitious, productive, funny and yes, at times fictional-character like. Ah well. I is who I is. Kat needs to quit tryna be like me. I was this first. ;)

Oh, hey! I have a blog! I, erm, forgot. Well, I didn’t forget that I HAD a blog. But that, it needed to be, you know, updated. And I hadn’t done that. I’m kind of very much spacey these days. Like walk out of the house with only one shoe and no pants kinda spacey. I have lots of figuratively half-shoed, pantless blogs floating around somewhere. At least, I think I do. I kind of remember having thawts. You know, brainthawts. But yeah. Wait, what? Who are you again?

Btw guys. It’s official. I need to get married. I absolutely MUST have a wife. Seriously, things need ironing, dinner needs cooking and I could really use a shoulder rub. Where the hell is my woman? Someone get the Bat Signal for me – we must to locate her.

But, wait, I’m not a dude.? Nor am I gay? Oh. Yeah. Hmm. So I can’t have a wife. Whatever. You’re such a killjoy. *scowls* Then YOU do my ironing.

Sigh…a few days ago I had a really brilliant blog idea. I remember that much anyways. It came to me, and I thought “This is a brilliant blog idea.” But what it actually was, I can’t recall. I am thinking it had the letter T in it. And maybe also an I. But I wouldn’t be writing about IT – cuz unlike you, I am not a desi boy. IT does not run through my ghee-clogged hairy arteries. And TI isn’t really a word. So, meh. I guess I’ll wait for it to come back to me.

Damn it, and it was good too. Had all the necessary bits and the ZZZING and even some huzzah. I remember that much.

Oh oh oh! I’M ON DRUGS! Yeah! That wasn’t my blog topic but I thought I’d share. My medical mystery is no longer so mysterious. I am the proud owner of a bouncing baby ulcer. And now I’m on acid blockers and other round tablet type things that I take with other tablet type things and it all comes together to become the hallowed Mixing of Medications that you’re warned about. Oooooh. Which may and may not explain this blog. But if you ask Adnan, I’m just a headcase and pills cannot be blamed. But also, he tells me I am a grownup. So we can’t believe much he says. Lastly, he’s Canadian. Exactly. I knew you’d understand.

Btw, I woke up this morning, and I was Hem. I had great bouncy luscious locks, I was wearing a diva-tastic satin daishiki and my roommate gave me tea. Which means, sorry to tell you this Hem, but she was musta been me. Which means she should have woken up looking like Toad As The Washerwoman, stumbled into every piece of furniture in our tiny flat, grumbled about someone leaving the sun on when she wants it dark, and then would have sat gripping a cup of her famous Disgusting Tea waiting for her humanity to return. But wait, I did smash my head into the pointy ends of TWO cabinets this morning, so maybe I was me, just with great hair. Amazing!

The thing that passes for a brain lately is running out of steam. So I must finish this and get back to the thing that passes for a job. Your last thought is this – Remember the Alamo. Because if you don’t, it’ll feel sad.