I sat there looking ugly,
looking ugly and mean.
That’s a line from R.E.M.,
in case you don’t love and know them quite as much as you should, and today
it’s stuck in my head because I feel like Scott says. I don’t know why. I’m
reasonably sure I’m not uglier than I was yesterday, except of course for that
incremental notch further toward decrepitude and its accompanying hideousness
that each passing day brings all of us. I’m not meaner than I was, either. I
know that because I’m still feeling the love.
I’ve been feeling the love
for some weeks now. What I mean by ‘the love’ is not an urge to throw away all
my supportive Olga bras and tie die some long, cotton skirts, but rather a
feeling that I can sense something really fine just over the horizon. It’s a sort
of inexplicable optimism, and it’s a wonderful feeling but it drags around
behind it a foul, hot-faced beast of negativity that Theo and I call the Pit of
Red Ants. The name probably paints a sufficient picture for you.
So I’ve got all this happy
feeling, and sometimes I’ve got the paralysing horrors of the Ants riding hard
up behind the happiness, and it’s all swirling around and has been for some
weeks and I don’t know why. I’m pretty sure I haven’t floated off to the
fairies. I would know if I had, wouldn’t I? Anyway, it’s not that kind
of feeling. Reality doesn’t seem distorted. People and things seem exactly as
they have always and more’s the pity for that, I say, because I’ve always
half-envied the patients my friend Berg used to see on her rounds at the mental
hospital. Oh, I don’t mean that really. Don’t get your knickers in a twist and
start fuming that I don’t really know what it’s like to be mentally ill. I
don’t, I’m just babbling, saying what comes into my head, and sometimes one
needs to be a bit colourful to make one’s point.
I wouldn’t, for example,
wish to be like the lady who tried to take out her own eyes. But there was a
guy who used to dart down the corridors like he was trying to avoid sniper fire
and that intrigued me. Berg had a conversation with him involving a glove, I
don’t remember the details, but he said that he didn’t understand the glove,
and the phrase struck us all as being so wonderful that it has entered our
inner parlance. If I say to Berg or to Theo, “I don’t understand the glove,”
they get it. They don’t ask what the hell I mean. That’s what I’m talking about
when I say that I half-envy some crazy people. It’s these glove kind of people
who seem not so much ill as differently programmed.
I see that I have started
in the middle of this blog post, going on about weird feelings and leaving you
wondering what the sam hill is going on and where is the light-hearted snipe
about life in Lebanon that you’ve come to expect. With this post I believe that
I only set out to say that I’m feeling both strangely good and fairly bad these
days and it’s very unsettling. Everything seems a lot more intense. I
think it may have to do with a possible impending change in our living
circumstances but that can’t be everything. I’m not new to this expat lifestyle
of frequent change.
Theo says it’s probably
hormonal changes. You know, the beginning of The Change. I said how can that
be, I just turned 28. Well, you understand. You always feel quite a bit younger
than you are, except when you look in the mirror, and then you lie and say the
light is bad, and smile so that you don’t look quite so droopy, and you carry
on with your day not quite believing that first glimpse.
Theo knows about hormones,
on account of all her reading. She is quite interested in things like glands
and tumours and probably missed her calling. She should have been an
pathologist, hunched over her microscope examining slides of human liver
tissue, occasionally grunting in satisfaction at the detection of some lesion
or other and making excited notes in scrawling, block letters on a pad of paper
beside her.
What Theo has been
reminding me is that hormones are the ones actually in charge of our bodies. We
think our brain is at the helm, but that’s not quite right because it does what
the hormones tell it to do. Apparently we’re all just hapless lumps of meat
which do exactly as our endocrine system dictates. I don’t even mind the
thought of that, to tell you the truth. There’s something very soothing in the
idea of being a mindless sack of flesh. For example, maybe I don’t need to
worry so much.
So whether it’s hormones --
God help me -- or the stress of possible change or what all of a sudden
I’m as restless as a fat horse on boggy ground. I can’t bear to stay in the
house for a half-day stretch at a time. This from the woman who normally flares
with outrage because a plumber or water delivery man has dared to interrupt her
six-hour stretch of solitary tranquillity. I’ve been out walking a lot,
scraping beggars off my arm, enduring garbage and pollution stink, soaking up
the spirit of Hamra. Thankfully the weather is cool enough now to make walking
enjoyable.
Speaking of walking in
Hamra, here’s a tidbit for you that has nothing to do with anything. The other
day when I was walking down Hamra Street I saw a man in front of me reach over
and wipe his thumb down the back pant leg of his companion. It was the lower
leg, and there was nothing lewd about the gesture, but it was so strange that I
couldn’t help staring. I mean, they were walking just in front of me. The one
who had done the wiping caught me looking, and though I quickly looked straight
down at my shoes the damage was done. I had embarrassed him. But he had done me
a greater wrong by saddling me with such a mystery. If one needs to clean one’s
thumb, aren’t there easier surfaces on which to do it than the back of your
companion’s calf? Also, why did the companion not seem surprised or in any way
put out at being used as a tissue? Lastly, what was on the guy’s thumb anyway?
About then I needed to cross to the other side of the street and I decided it
was a grand time to go. As I moved away from the two men I heard the wiper say
something I didn’t catch, and then the wipee answer, “Don’t worry, she looks
like a foreigner.”
So there you have a brief,
disjointed account of the state of things with me this month. I really wanted
to start blogging regularly every week but it’s been next to impossible to sit
down and write anything lately. I hope to get back to it very soon. I hate when
I leave the blog dead for months at a time. It feels like neglect. I’m not
a person who should even have potted plants and a blog is the same kind of
thing. But I won’t let it die, I won’t.