On Straddling Time Zones

“One foot in and one foot back. But it don’t pay to live like that. So I’ll cut the ties and jump the tracks, for never to return” – The Avett Brothers (I and Love and You)

6 days until take-off. What??

I’m not quite sure where the summer’s gone. Just a minute ago I was sulking at the prospect of having to waste 2 months in Annapolis before my departure. Then I found myself saying “Don’t worry, I still have 3 weeks” to friends when the dark clouds of goodbye began looming in the distance. Now I have less than a week with so much to do and so much to say.

The truth is, though, I’ve been straddling time zones for quite some time. I am a planner, and that tends to work out for me pretty well in America. I get things done. But somehow in Morocco my plans can’t help but be thwarted. Appointments are never kept (at least not on time), deadlines are rarely met, and to-do lists don’t seem to exist. All plans are tempered by INSHALLAH...”If God Wills It.”

Ironically, the laid-back culture stresses me out. Paperwork moves slowly – so slowly. (For example, I wasn’t an “official” Fulbrighter until 2 days ago). When I stress about things in Morocco, generally the answer I get is “eh...it’ll all work out, inshallah.” And it does, I guess.

But somehow trying to plan for Morocco from America through Morocco with Americans is enough to make me a crazy person. It certainly has. Last week I spent several days with my sister in-law at their new home on the beach in North Carolina. I think those days charged me with enough sanity to make it through the next week of packing and planning. I may be out of sanity by the time I get to Casablanca next Monday morning, but by then who cares? I'll slip back into the inshallah version of myself and everything will be fine...inshallah.

In the next few days I’ll post again. I understand some of you may not know why I’m going back to Maroc, or what my project is, so I’ll spell that out in detail. It’s something I’m quite excited about, and I’m really looking forward to sharing my research with you as the months go by. I promise the posts will pick up once I’m on site.

I’m also adding some new things to the column on the right. One will be a glossary of Arabic phrases and culture-specific terms. The first time I use them they’ll be written like THIS (note “Inshallah” above) with a brief explanation. Any time after that, they’ll probably be italicized, but the explanation will be in the glossary, in case you would like to refresh your memory.

Most likely I’ll also add a cast list, for some of the more significant characters that I meet. That way you can easily distinguish Hamouda from Hamada, for example.

And now up I go into the attic to find some large suitcases...

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On breathing easy

Since being notified of my grant, there was just one more hurdle to be cleared – medical clearance. The rational version of me wasn’t worried about it, but paranoia started eating away at me. I figured the only thing that could possibly hold me back was Tuberculosis. 21st century America doesn’t tend to be too concerned with TB but I thought it would be so poetically tragic if I somehow contracted it and had my grant taken away. My paranoia was irrational, but not completely unfounded, thanks to brother’s recent run-in with TB.

But, hamdulilah, my lungs are officially Tuberculin free. The paperwork hasn’t made it to the authorities yet, but things are looking good for an early September departure. Last week I attended a 3-day orientation. I found out that I will probably not get an additional language grant (LAME!!) but that a nice-sized language allowance is included in my research grant itself, so I’ll be able to take some classes in the Moroccan dialect – with the shwia’s and the bizaf’s and the lack of vowels.

The orientation made me antsy to get going. Just hearing words like “wakha” (which means “okay” in Moroccan), and hearing people flow from English to Moroccan to English to French all in the same sentence made me nostalgic for my other home.

I’ll probably go back and live with the Khattabis (my old host family) for a bit. The oldest daughter, Dounia had her first son a week ago. I can’t wait to see the little guy. I expect that they'll be my home base until I find an apartment, hopefully in the same part of the Medina.

Suddenly I feel like the next 2 months before I leave will be very long. I have an extensive reading list in preparation for my research, but I’m starting to get jittery. At least now that I know I don’t have Tuberculosis I can breathe easy.

On my reason for blogging

I had a blog in high school and my early college years. At its prime it captured the way the 16-year-old version of myself looked at the world. Most of it is pretty silly - I'm not 16 anymore and I’m hardly amused by the things that seemed so adventurous then. I chronicled the days of getting hopelessly lost with Miss Margie Bennington (before the days of GPS), my narrow escapes with police officers (my driving has much improved since then), and the day-to-day life of a light-hearted, if rather sarcastic high school student.

The blog continued into college, but eventually fizzled out. I always attributed this to the fact that college life was mundane and I ran out of material. This doesn't seem to make sense, though, since my life in high school wasn't particularly flashy either. I think the real problem is that I realized that my audience was much bigger than I thought. Periodically throughout my freshman year I would meet people, and they'd say "Hey! You're MegPav! I read your blog all the time!" This always creeped me out a little, and in the end had an adverse effect on my blogging. I became too conscious of my audience and my writing lost its freshness. I abandoned the blog during my sophomore year, resurrecting it once every 6 months or so, only so I wouldn't forget particular anecdotes that I hold dear for some bizarre reason or another.

I tried to blog during my first stint in Morocco, but got bored with it pretty fast. I was drinking from the fire hose, and all attempts to communicate that failed miserably, so I gave that one up too, and poured my thoughts into emails to my family and friends. Occasionally I search through my gmail archives to remember the details of a long-lost anecdote. A recent exploration of past emails reminded me of the "Cheese Man" - my black market booze vendor during Ramadan. Other times the emails help me remember emotions I felt at the time, rather than the emotions that I impose on the situation in retrospect. Fez is now so familiar to me, I feel like I'm going home. But going back through my emails I remember how miserable I was my first couple of days. It was hell-hot, and I was lonely, and desperate to find an English-speaking friend - enter "Padre," an American friend of a friend, with his side-kicks Jack Bauer and Flag Especial.

I have been mostly content with my gmail archives as the primary storage for my memories, mostly because I didn’t see any need for them to be public. But now I do...

I feel a little bit like Huck Finn, who was so profoundly changed by his time with the Grangerfords, but when he got on his raft he left them forever. They never came back into his life – they were just a blip – but they were a blip worth recording. Without them, it's hard to fully understand why Huck changed in the ways that he did. I feel the same way about the people, places and things (nouns in general) that I encountered in Morocco the first time around.

There are a handful of people who had an enormous impact on me while I was there. I consider some of them among the most important people in my life. But most of them I will probably never see again for any extended period of time. I don't want to forget these blips, and I want to make known how I have been impacted by them. I think it will help other people understand me.

This blog will primarily be to record my newest adventures, and the newest characters in my life. But I wouldn't be surprised if nostalgic posts about people from my previous life in Morocco appear from time to time. After all, how can I visit the cheese man without thinking of Aaron Sakulich? How can I barbecue on a rooftop and not be reminded of John, Robert, Drew, Megan, Erica and others? How can I sit at a cafe for hours on end and not feel a tug on my heart for Nicholas Heuer, my partner in all sorts of crime? I hope, despite my failed attempt at blogging last time around, that these characters can be immortalized in this new one.

You’re all relieved, I’m sure, to see that I’ve progressed beyond the pepto-bismol color scheme of my high school blog. I hope to entertain, because God knows that I have a knack for getting myself into predicaments in Morocco. If it will be funny later, it’s funny now, so I’ll do my best to share my awkward culturally confusing misadventures. Beyond that, it’s a mystery what will pop up here. But stay tuned because things will no doubt get interesting.