Monday, April 14, 2014

I'm Back. Did You Notice I Was Gone?


            Well, hi. Sorry for being away so long. As usual I don’t have even a semi-gelatinous excuse. I haven’t even been busy in the normal sense, though I’m always busy in my own inexplicable way. Every week since my last post I’ve wanted to write something on here and I’ve started and abandoned about fifty blog posts in that time. So it’s not been a lack of interest in blogging but rather a lack of decent writing coming out of my fingers (though between me and you I blame my brain more than my fingers).
            But today I’m posting whatever I write. It’s going up, no matter how dull.  
            Since you last saw me I’ve undergone a kind of personal renaissance. I don’t know what else to call it. Remember how I said I was feeling weird? Well, it’s turned out to be a good thing, for the most part. I do feel weird but I also feel like I’ve woken up out of a coma. I don’t know what has changed, or why, but I’m enjoying life more now. I’m happier.
            After my parting comments the last time I surfaced on this blog (how I shouldn’t even be entrusted with potted plants) I have not only allowed the blog to nearly die but I have actually succeeded in killing the only two potted plants I owned. I threw them out a month ago. That’s kind of funny, don’t you think?
            In the four months since you last saw me we experienced a bomb going off 150 metres from our house, my sister Theo come to stay and had her own sort of spiritual rebirth and I bought a skirt that stops above the knee. Oh, and we made a rather painful decision to move back to Dubai at the end of the school year. It has been an eventful period.
            The day after the bomb I wrote about it but in the end didn’t post it. It felt cheap. What to say? You can google the gory details if you want. It was the Dec 27th assassination of minister Shatah. Because of the shock reverberations off all the tall buildings in our neighbourhood it sounded not like a single explosion but about twenty of them, a fraction of a second apart. It was terrifying and surreal.
            Not many days after that bomb Theo braved travel advisories and the sheer dismay of long-haul, economy-class travel to come to Beirut. I couldn’t have been happier. I wore a pink sweater to the airport and she said later that when she came out at arrivals the sweater stood out in the crowd like a beacon calling her home.
            We had a ripping good time. Theo, I feel at liberty to say, had the time of her life. In spite of the regular carnage in Lebanon people here know how to live. Theo had been squirreled up on her beautiful acreage on Vancouver Island for so long she’d forgotten about high heels and late-night cafes. After a month in Beirut she didn’t want to leave.
            As for my news about my new skirt, I realise it may not be strictly thrilling to you but it was pretty exciting for me. I had given away my last above-the-knee skirt years ago when the kids were infants and my legs got too fat to sustain public display. They are less fat now, yes, and I suppose I must tell you something about that.
            Five or six months ago when I began to feel weird, I suddenly stopped craving sugar. It happened almost overnight. I couldn’t believe it then and I still can’t believe it. The weight just started melting off me like magic.
            I’m not making this up. People keep asking me if I’m on some kind of special diet and they look at me with that peculiar eagerness which I suppose means they hope I’m about to reveal a secret weight-loss trick that no one else on earth has heard about.
            When I say it was like magic for me that’s because I wasn’t eating very much. My problem was never with eating too much food. I don’t even like food that much, to be perfectly frank with you. My problem was with eating too much sugar, so when I stopped craving it my caloric intake took a nose dive.
            I like to think of myself as a very confident person who can discuss anything without batting an eyelash but I have to tell you that this is embarrassing for me to talk about -- really embarrassing. I’m only doing so because to completely omit talking about something which has had such an enormous impact on my life would, I feel, sort of render everything else I say on this blog disingenuous. But I don’t want to go into a ton of detail and I think I’ve said enough to give you the picture. I’ve been dropping jean sizes and feeling better than I have since I can remember and that must suffice for you.
            In case you’re worried about me (really, you are too kind) I can assure you that I have had a full check-up with blood tests since all this began and I don’t ail a thing. My mother-in-law keeps suggesting to me in a theatrically horrified tone that I may have diabetes but alas for her it doesn’t appear that I will sink into a sugar coma any time soon.
            As for our upcoming return to Dubai, I’m going to talk about that another day. Mostly I’ve been pretending it’s not happening. Not that Beirut has turned into my dream place to live -- as much as I’m enjoying it these days -- but the kids are settled at their school and frankly, I think I had convinced myself that the next time we moved it would be to a Western country and hopefully to the red maple leaf itself. As comfortable a place as Dubai is, I just didn’t see us going back there to live. It’s been a harrowing mental recalibration.
            So that’s what’s been going on with me. What’s been going on with you? You can write to me, you know. I like getting letters.
            My address is: not-alberta@hotmail.com
            See you back here soon.