Quotidia-A Day in the Life of

                                                       Quotidia - A Day in the Life of

                            "To speak is literally to open the body to penetration by opening 

                            an orifice...it suggests a certain incompleteness, a need to be in 

                                relation. Speech relates the person who is speaking to other

                          people...It requires acknowledging their existence and, by extension, 

                                                                  their parity."

                             Jane Tomkins, West of Everything: The Inner Lives of Westerns

                             In The Road Less Traveled, John Peck defines love as the extension

                                    of oneself toward another for the purpose of connecting.

By the weekend after I arrived, having been given three days to adjust to my job before teaching, to do paperwork, observe, I taught my first classes. I am a late shift Lecturer, meaning that my classes are from ten in the morning to noon, and from three twenty to five ten pm. I team teach, which means I have a set of seventeen students in the morning and a different set of eighteen in the afternoon, as most teachers here have the same group twice a day; my co-teacher has the same groups at the opposite times. My job requirements are to teach four hours five days a week, Sunday through Thursday (in the gulf Arab states the weekend is Friday, the holy day, and Saturday) and to keep one hour of office hours each day. For this I am given a paid apartment, utilities and furnishings included (read AC), medical insurance, forty three hundred tax free dollars a month, a paid round trip airplane ticket home each summer, and just just a hair under four months of paid vacation a year.

I awake each morning around 6:30, make a mug of tea while listening to an On Point or a Diane Rehm podcast, then go out onto my back patio and write a bit, relax in the sixty some degree morning. It is quiet, although one can hear traffic and every so often an airplane taking off. My mind is still. My emotional state is clean, unfettered, upbeat. The many birds sing and twitter in the row of tall, tree like shrubbery behind my place. Before long, having finished my tea, I make some espresso in my little Italian brewer on the range, put on some classical music, set out my button shirt, slacks, belt, leather shoes, make my lunch, usually flatbread with cheese and maybe some leftover lamb kefta or chicken, tomato, hot sauce, onion, and a piece of fruit, then head to the shower. 

Now I have always, always been a big fan of water. As an elementary school student in Madison, Wisconsin, I used to walk up to the YWCA building near the state Capitol building for swimming lessons. I remember walking home in the cold Midwestern winters after dark, maybe ten years old, the longer parts of my bangs frozen solid where they stuck out past the hood of my parka. My morning shower is just a small nod to the sea creature inside of me. While I was hoping for a bathtub, this will do. I sit on the tiled floor of the shower, point the water toward the wall, drink my coffee and read for twenty minutes or so, chillaxing, letting the water do its magic, bringing me to full consciousness the way the spring rains bring new life to the flora of the earth, finishing my coming into the new day, into my new awakening here. A shave follows and then plain, Middle Eastern yoghurt, which is looser, less gelatinized or smooth than what we have in the States, banana and/or strawberries, and muesli, while I continue to read. I take a half a vitamin C, brush my teeth, pack my knapsack with my teaching folder, water, and my lunch, head out the door and walk the fifteen minutes to Building Fifty-Eight, reading as I amble.

So why did I want to come to this foreign land. For the money, sure, partly. For the amount of paid vacation, absolutely. But there is much more. I came here because I have always dreamed of living a life outside of my own known culture, my own lands, my own people. I wanted to experience living in a part of the globe where an old house or public building or park is older than my grandfather, places where old means seven hundred years old, fourteen hundred years old, four thousand years old. I want to try to perceive that depth of time filled inside the stone walks whose surface is grooved from the hands of persons dragging across it as they talked and walked along it over the course of millennia. The Middle East has always fascinated me, always exerted a pull. The mysterious, veiled peoples, the vast deserts, the tales and intrigues of the spice routes and the oases, the camel caravans, the hookahs and the souks. While I have every hope to experience other parts and places, one has to start with only one place. This is that one place, that beginning, for me.

What the Muslim world has contributed to all peoples in so far as the importance of learning and universities, their early advancements in science, medicine, architecture, literature, is far beyond what most of us have come to understand. In the Western world it was the peoples of the Middle East that first compiled books into vast libraries, from Samarkand to Baghdad to Alexandria to Cadiz. It was the practice of performing ablutions, ritual cleaning before prayer, specifically of washing one's hands and holding them up to allow the cleaning waters to drain down and off at the elbows that was responsible for the now common practice of surgeons to scrub up before surgery, a medical procedure first practiced by Muslim doctors, who understood the importance of germ free environments for practicing surgery while in Western Europe they were bleeding people and practicing essentially shamanistic rites in lieu of established medical practices. While London and Paris were villages with open sewage running down the center of muddy roads, the great metropolitan areas of the Muslim world had running water, lit streets, paved, broad avenues, public gardens of jasmine, of rose, and of orange trees, fine embroidered cloths of silk, grand palaces.

Now, in the US, Islamophobia has taken firm hold. Sure West Nile Virus is a concern, as is MERS and the Avian Flu. But not a one of them, in my mind, has the potential for the type of catastrophic destruction of peace, of culture, of individual happiness that is posed by the contagion of ideas that is spread by a phenomenon such as Islamophobia. The roughly one and a half million Iraqis that have died since we put boots on the ground did not perish from any one diagnosable medical condition. Nor will a one of them them ever participate in the reformation of any representative government. They have already been democratized. 

Never one to buy the hype, anyone's hype, and sick of the party line, sick of hearing people like James Inhofe, US Senator from Oklahoma state to our nation's body of elected legislators that the ongoing military battles in the Middle East are not of a territorial or a political nature, but rather are "a contest over whether or not the word of God is true," where our almost elected former President, George W., tells us how "those people don't value human life " and freedom like we do, living in my country that has invaded thirty countries since the end of World War Two and helped to topple or subdue the popular political movements in forty countries, and yet professes the spread of democratically elected governments, I have firmly ascertained that I want to see for myself. So far I have yet to encounter any person, slogan, book, or thought that demonstrates that a single word of it is true. 

Have you ever watched Terry Gilliam's film, Brazil? It is the perfect, easy to see analogy of what is happening to our American socio-political culture. It is the state metastasized into an all watching, all controlling mechanism for control through the propagation of fear. Vague references to terrorists pop up as the state has formed beuracratic agencies for the abduction, processing, and torturing of its citizens with rather insouciant and alarmingly mundane mechanisms of state. There is a term for the phenomenon of feeling so sure that you are being watched by the state that you modify and moderate your own behavior just in case you are being seen by the state, or by your neighbors, who may, after all, report you. In essence you do the work of the government for them.  It is called the panopticon. Look it up. When Gilliam was asked what he thought about the post 9/11 Bush administration's policies and proclamations, Gilliam stated that he wondered if he should take legal action against the administration for intellectual property right infringement.

And, frankly, carrying forty-four thousand dollars in credit card debt, I made the choice to surrender myself to a debtor's prison. I think I currently pay about thirteen hundred dollars a month in minimum payments, about seven hundred of which is interest. This prison, KSA, not that it feels or acts like one, but, rather, I say this simply as a tongue in cheek manner to refer to the fact that I needed to go away, to put myself in a place where my focus could be on righting my financial ship. As far as prisons go, this is a very nice one, the kind where white collar criminals go, the ones where you are never restricted to your cell, where you can play ping pong and tennis, watch HBO 24/7. I figured that if my prison were the holodeck, like in the Star Trek series, a place where you could formulate any environment that you wanted, then this would be what my debtor prison holodeck would be. Here too the state exerts control on its population, and I am mindful of that.

I teach from ten to noon. Seventeen students. Activities vary from reading, listening, speaking and writing activities used to teach vocabulary, grammar, essay writing, and pronunciation. The students are, by and large, respectful, warm, interested in learning. My job is that of performer. The relationship between the students and the educator is the single most important part of the pedagogical process, at least in my opinion. Then the job boils down to about two things: the activities need to be designed or manipulated to hit the students at the level just above where they currently sit, what is known in the ESL field as input plus one, and the activities and atmosphere must be swapped up to keep from stagnating, to keep the brain alive and active, using a rotation of activities every twenty to twenty-five minutes and a mix of serious, humorous, and inspirational energies, like a coach may do, to make it soak in past the affective filter, the anxiety and difficulty of working in a foreign tongue, and to allow the brain to do what it is designed to do, what it wants to do and does do in the absence of any blocks, soak in information, learn about the world around that our senses feed to it. Essentially I am a performer.

I do not teach from noon to three-twenty. I spend most of that time in my office, first eating my lunch and checking my email, Facebook, downloading podcasts, paying bills, then leaving for thirty or forty minutes usually to get a Dunkin Donuts coffee prepared by my friend from southern India, Abdulrazak, who learned after the first time I came in that I like a large drip coffee with three ice cubes in it. He is thin, dark skinned, about twenty-six, a consummate professional at his job. His English is British accented, inflected. He and Sumeet, his coworker, work the shift until two-thirty and they are a remarkable pair, efficient, clean, smiling, a joy to interact with. The coffee is seven riyals, about two bucks, and I always give ten. We chat for about ten minutes, learning about each other. 

It is this type of interaction that reminds me of John Peck's beautiful definition of love. Yes, it feels like love to me when I connect with these guys, young, earnest, sincere, glowing. They live a hard, seven day a week work life, yet they display only a flowing joy that makes me question my own situation, as though I am a lord who comes down from the manor house. Abdulrazak, who works the register, greets me with an extended hand over the counter, a grin, and "Hello, sir," every time I walk in. It makes me smile. "Hello, Abdulrazak! How are you guys today?" "Sumeet, how are you?" The ten minutes or so spent most of my work days interacting with these two gentle people do, in fact, feel like a form of love. There is a noticeable, and I would venture to say, shared, experience that is in some manner transcendent, greater than. 

My program is called the Preparatory Year Program, PYP. The PYP Director, a Britisher by the name of Paul Brown, who almost always wears sneakers and a Portland Timber sweatshirt, asked me if I would be interested in teaching summer classes. He does a bit of pressuring on all of the eighty Lecturers in the Program because apparently there is usually a dearth of people who will agree to stay and teach in the blistering heat of summer! I played the "my mother needs care" card. Heck, it has always been my go-to line that the best three things about teaching are June, July, and August! I have not enjoyed a paid summer off since the year before my first son, Teo, was born, the summer of 1992, the last year I taught high school aged adolescents. And I do in fact feel that spending a significant portion of my summer with my mother is the best way to spend this excess currency paid out in units of time.

My evenings are spent in quiet fashion. Seeing as how I no longer live on a property that keeps ales flowing from a tap, there is none of that. Hmm, what to do, what to do. So. So I have tea, cook Arabic food, exercise, study Arabic, write, clean house, sit on my back patio, walk, watch shows from the hard drive that a good friend, Derek, loaded up for me, listen to Jazz, specifically Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. John Coltrane's My Favorite Things has jumped up to the top of my current play list. I walk to the gym a block away to ride the bike four or so times a week, walk to the co-op to pick up the paper or some needed items, cook, read. As far as cooking goes, I have bought Arabic ingredients like tumeric, mixed kabsa spices, curry seasoning, tamarind paste, coconut milk, basmati rice, ground lamb, golden raisins, fava beans, yoghurt, chicken, lemons, and a very soft, somewhere between cream cheese and yoghurt, Lebanese cheese called labneh, and a harder, very low fat Arabic cheese called halmoudi, and I experiment. 

On the reading front, I have digested a fair number of books in the three and a half weeks since leaving Ellensburg. Two on Saudi Arabian culture and history, the Louis L'amour book referenced in another blog entry, The Walking Drum, a great recounting of the 33 Chilean miners trapped for three months more than 2,000 feet below ground, Deep Dark Down (thank you, Sam!), a book on the change in popular film and TV programming imagery, and themes present in US culture since the 9/11 attacks titled Reframing 9/11, and now I am in the middle of both Reza Aslan's latest book, No God but God, an intimate, anti-inflammatory history of Islam, and a collection of British fantasy author Michael Moorcock's fairly recently released collection of Elric of Melniboné. Bereft of the sedative qualities of alcohol, reading has always been my brain's primary source of going on vacation. My, the places it is traveling these days, my body is eager to catch up.

My head clips along at its own pace, often turning down muddy lanes best not entered, exerting its pull towards chewing over old hurts. Some of what I am focusing on is pulling back the reins, clucking gently at my horse, patting along the side of her neck, and turning her around to point back and onto the broad, sun lit avenue leading towards the future and all of the grand days ahead.

My teeth are better cared for. I wear nice clothes every day, leather shoes and belt, button shirts, slacks. I write one or both of my boys most days. I plan a lot, my finances, my travel desires, make lots of lists. My life is slower and it is all in all much better. Certainly I miss many people, but where I am and what I am doing, the choices I have been making, all seem right, feel right. Like a basketball player in the groove, I can throw up any shot right now, and it's gonna fall straight through the center of the net. I go to bed usually by ten-thirty or so, read until I am good and heavy lidded, then knock off. 

I suppose in the last analysis, what I am really working on is trying to return to a place where I can feel like I love myself again. The ordeal of the last decade, my recent, or should I say most recent, marriage has more or less obliterated this ideal within me. I'm writing this as I sit on an exercise bike pedaling away. Metaphorically speaking I am riding hard to put distance between me and the dark corner of the Twilight Zone where I have been living, one of those bad dreams where it doesn't matter how hard you ride, you get nowhere. I look back and it is too clear to see that inside of myself I have been cycling through this grotesque process of internalizing the understanding that I must be a loser, must have no self love to continue to remain in relationship with someone who treats me like dog shit. The bad feelings, the knowledge of what I have been doing, wha t I allow, furthers the ugly over eating, the binge drinking, because why not, I have already shown to myself that I am a sorry piece of shit, right? Why not heap on a little more. But that is not where I am today. No. No I am not. Putting on my workout clothes, grabbing my water and a sweat towel, hopping on the bike, I feel lighter, in feel less burdened. I feel no longer like anyone's door mat. Perhaps that small, flickering light I can see far off ahead of mea s I turn the pedals a bit harder, perhaps that is a small fire struggling to stay lit, a small campfire called love.

My debtor prison holo deck time is being served and like Michael Milligan, the boys from Enron,  Scooter Libby, and Pablo Esobar during their Club Med incarcerations, I am not suffering. I hate to think, on the other hand, of myself as killing time. Since re-reading Thoreau's Walden recently, I can not think of that particular idiom without visualizing, hearing, his turn on it, "One can not kill time without injuring eternity."

               "Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of existence."

                                                           Erich Fromm

   

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