The room is dark and cozy. I’m sitting back on a leather armchair, cowboy-boot-covered feet propped up against an ottoman. I’m smoking a pipe and watching the flames flicker hungrily in the fireplace, and I catch a glimpse of my reflection on the portrait resting on the mantle. There’s a look of satisfaction on my face; an old man who lead a good, productive, enjoyable life. An old man who met a lot of charming people, an old man with no regrets, an old man who welcomes whatever may follow.

***

From the many identities that I can easily fall under, the identity that I relate to the most is that of being Arab; first and foremost, I am Arab, and as far as I know from family history, I do not have a single drop on non-Arab blood in me.

***

I’m hopeful towards a very good new year. A lot hopes, a lot of dreams, a lot of wishes.

***

I’m sitting on my bed, which is currently a mess of clothes as the aftermath of trying to decide what I’m going to wear tonight. There are a lot of wires around me, and a lot of phones. There are also a lot of tissues, as I have a pretty bad case of the flu, my eyes sting and I keep having quite violent bouts of sneezing.
Another year has passed.

***

And you know, it just stops. Halts. Comes to an end. As if it never were. Like it will never be.
Somewhere else, distant, something new springs to life. And everything is forgotten, and all anything is anymore is a hopeful future.

***

2004 was a bad year.
2005 was so much fun.
2006 was interesting, useful, different.

***

Quoting Amin Malouf, “The identity cannot be compartmentalized; it cannot be split in halves or thirds, nor have any clearly defined set of boundaries. I do not have several identities, I only have one, made of all the elements that have shaped its unique proportions.”

***

Can you believe this is the third new year celebrated on the pages of “And Far Away”? We’ve been a long way, together, she and I. We affected each other, we loved one another, we talked, we laughed, and we remembered.

***

I believe that experiences take a big role in shaping who you are. 2006 was full of life-shaping experiences in almost all aspects of my life. And I have no regrets whatsoever.

***

Another year.
We’ll go through this together.

I couldn’t sleep last night.
I kept waking up every hour or so, checking my phone for time, then going back to sleep, only to wake up a little later. Even my dreams were restless.

**

No one argues that Saddam was scum. But the whole affair is just so horrifyingly… savage.

It makes me laugh to think that some cliches are actually true; the world is a stage.

Eid il Adha. The celebration of sacrifice. Are you happy now?

..

Where’s the next sheep?

.
Previously on this topic:
Saddam and the Death Penalty

“Roba has, well, the most retarded taste in music you’ll EVER see. You have to hear the tapes in her car! She listens to all this weird stuff like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and other sorts of punkish weird music. On the other hand, in Arabic, she only listens to Kathem Il Saher, Fayrouz, and Asala. It’s like she’s going through inner turmoil and confusion on whether to be a punk rock chic or a 60 year old grandmother.”

(and yes, tapes. Hear that? TAPES. Like stringy stuff in a little rectangle. You can’t even find those downtown anymore.)

Although what you need to do would take 3 minutes tops, its so crowded the closest you could park your car is 43654764 miles away and you have to walk for 15 minutes in the freezing cold.
BLEH.

My love for her is unreasonable; she has neither the history of Damascus nor the culture of Baghdad, she has not the mosques of Cairo nor the skyscrapers of Riyadh.

What she does have though is a million steps. The daughter of mountains can not but have a million steps, squiggling endlessly from mountain to mountain, a never ending bundle of lines that start at the center and edge outwards like veins extruding out a throbbing heart, giving life to the well-toned arms, the tattered legs, the dirty hair, and the jeweled limbs.

Amman. The city of stairs.

How I love her.

(Movie footage taken while going up one of the many stairs that lead from Downtown Amman to Jabal Amman for a group class project. Music by Rum.)

Photographs taken at the Tijara Milk Bar in Jordan University, where their Batata sandwiches are really good.