but how weird are cell phones really?

behind a house in sebha, a village in the northern badia, i sat down in a tent on the rug, careful not to show my host the bottom of my feet (which is very haram in bedouin culture). i leaned up against the camel saddle being used as a back support and sipped my small cup of bitter coffee. my host moved a scarf away from his throat, held a tissue to it, and cleared his throat via the HOLE IN HIS NECK (a heads up on his traecheotomy would have been nice. the family later showed us a photo album from when he went to new york for the surgery). i pulled out my notebook and ash flurries from the fire pit at the center of the tent settled on the pages, welcome warmth from the spring rain that was falling outside. i was interviewing my host for my ISP (independent study project) about shared water resources between jordan and syria, as he is a prominent farmer in the northern badia. just as he started to answer my first question in frog-throated bursts, my cell phone rang with a call from my mother. i knew i couldn't answer, not because it would have been rude (arabs tend to answer all phone calls no matter the situation and without apology), but because i don't think i could have mentally coped with occupying two such different spaces at once.

i've been thinking a lot about these two worlds (and though they aren't so different as to call them different "worlds," i lack a better alternative to use). i've been quite homesick lately (reading joan didion's "slouching towards bethlehem" and her remarkably accurate depicitons of life Out West aren't helping) and have been pondering just how it is that i can feel so connected to two places that are halfway around the world from one another. i'm literally living two parallel lives. one by keeping in touch with family at home, wasting time looking at facebook photos of my friends having a ball at college, getting an easter phone call and being able to hear the voices of my entire extended family on the other line (but how weird are cell phones really?). the other, by speaking half in arabic, by spending 20 minutes planning my outfit in the morning as i ponder whether or not showing the bottom half of my calves at an interview with the jordanian secretary general at the ministry of water is culturally appropriate, by generally not undersatanding what the hell is going on most of the time.

i feel like right now i'm occupying both these worlds simultaneously. the smell of the pacific ocean and the feel of a coastal breeze are as strong in my mind as the taste of shay marameeya or the sound of the call to prayer. i don't exactly know what this means, or if this is damaging to my psyche or whatever, or if i should just "carpe diem" and all that jazz. all i know is that it's exhausting, and i miss home, and as much as i love jordan and i love SIT and the fact that it's not actually school and my host mom and i had a good cry last night over tea and dessert about how we both don't want me to leave, i feel mentally like "hallas," i'm done, let's wrap this up, let me enjoy some of my mom's delicious grilling on the back porch because that's what summer means and right now all i want is SUMMER please allah. because while i've gotten used to functioning in this culture, and i really do LIKE this culture, and i feel that i have learned so much that i could never have learned back home, it's not HOME and i don't think it could ever be home because home is california and it will always be california and please GIVE ME CALIFORNIA. now, preferably.

but maybe i'm just overwhelmed with emotions (lots of crying this week, incidentally) because i'm stressed with this dumb ISP and i'm worried it's going to suck and i hate handing in a sucky end product and what the heck am i doing with my life and i'm a crap researcher and do i really want to even be at college because all i really want to do is hang out with babies on a farm and eat vegetables or something. and maybe it's just because the end is nigh and with only 3 weeks here in amman i'm sort of just feeling like "ok well just hurry up and end already" because the deadline is in sight and i feel i'm inching towards it at a snail's pace. and i just applied for a job in MN and if i get it i will literally have 2 days at home before i have to turn around and jet off to st. paul, which is putting a tarnish on my otherwise happy silver 4-week eurotrip fantasy that looks something like that movie "if it's tuesday, this must be belgium" but without all the protagonist's casual girlfriends and am i going to be in belgium on a tuesday? cuz that would just be too much. and then if i don't come home for thanksgiving and go to chicago as per usual then i will have spent 2 days at home in 11 months which is just absurd, really.

and even though it doesn't seem like it, i'm really quite alright, but this quote by joan didion did make me cry yesterday because did i mention i miss california?:

"California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."