Ode to Skype

About a year and a half ago, I wrote this very frustrated post about a skype catch-22 wherein M and I lost our credit and couldn't call our family in Egypt. Well, since that time, I've become a super avid Skype user, and I felt they deserved a much-love shout out right here. It's only fair, since I took them to task when they were making me unhappy.

Ode to Skype:

My sisters live two airplanes away
timezones, miles, landmass and oceans between us
hours of sleep and waking upside down
or inside out
Days and nights reversed
Lives inverted

My sisters who
shared my room
whispered late into
the night with me
were the cause of my drowsy eyes
at the kitchen table
my sleepy smile

My sisters who know my secrets
who keep me grounded and help me fly
who giggle better, hug better, bake better, tease better
than anyone I know
My sisters who gave me
the nieces and nephews
I long for all year
who keep me counting down to summers together
when we can laugh at the kitchen table
over breakfast, eyes half open
bleary but dragged to life by the kids
who slept at eight

But
until the kitchen table
until the hugs in person
until the wiping off each others' tears
I see them through the screen
the kids running to and from the computer
voices ringing with excitement
saying hi to their cousins
cooing at babies
shouting to be heard over the din
of all the voices

and the kitchen table spans three continents
an ocean
twelve hours worth of timezones
(some for breakfast, some for supper)
and we're still together
despite the world of bustle in between.

Little Angel Bonding Time

I have had the pleasure and joy of seeing Baby Angela two days in a row this week: last night, my sis and brother-in-law were over for dinner, and of course brought the tiny little bundle of adorability with them, which allowed for much cuddling time. Today, I babysat her for a couple of hours after work. Baby Angela is still only 3 and a half months old, so me describing to you in excruciating detail what she does is really not interesting unless you're one of her doting relatives, you kind of have to see it yourself. But let me just say that up close, this little girl is spunky and has a lot personality. When she's lying on her back on the ground, she raises her hands and legs in the air and circles her legs as though she's riding a bicycle. I think she's just inspired a new exercise method!
Also, the mohawk: Baby Angela has a mohawk right now. Not a real one, but an "I'm semi-bald and when my hat comes off the hair in the middle of my head makes a bee-line for the cieling" kind of mohawk. So cute. She rocks the look like the little punk that she is...
In other Little Angel news, a hilarious story from my Dubai Little Angel, who is turning three in a few months. Apparently, his mother took his teddy bear "Bobbo" from him one day in order to wash it a while back. She told him Bobbo was taking a bath and put him in the laundry.
A few days later, my other sister (Baby Angela's mom) reports over-hearing this conversation while on the phone with her:
Mother: "Little Angel, how many times have I told you, take your foot out of the washing machine".
Little Angel: "But I want to take a bath".
Ha! From the mouths of babes, indeed.

4 Umbrellas Later

I don't think I've mentioned here yet that I've started working out of the Montreal office more and more. I still go to Ottawa for work, but not as often, and since the Montreal office is so wonderfully close to our place, I actually walk to and from work now when I'm here.
Now, I love everything about this new arrangement except for one little detail:
I am notorious for forgetting my umbrella at home. No, scratch that. I bring my umbrella, I just bring it on the days it's not raining. I can carry it for a week to and from work and that week the clouds will not shed a drop. Then I'll forget it and before I head home that afternoon, I'll look out the window and it'll be pouring away. So, I'll go into the Pharmaprix in the plaza downstairs and buy an umbrella - and use it that day before the cycle begins again.
I don't dare get up and count the number of umbrellas M and I have at home, but my guess is that the number is around 7 or 8- and we're two (2!) people. And I'm pretty sure 4 of those were purchased in the last month. By me.
Case in point: yesterday I checked the weather - no rain expected on Monday, but rain expected today. No worries, I would take my brolly today.
And then today happened, and while I was packing my lunch, I remembered that I need the umbrella, but by the time I was done, I'd totally forgotten. and then it wasn't raining in the morning, so I didn't notice when I left the building.
Then, this afternoon as I was heading back from work, I left the office and it was dripping. I walked 100 feet, turned around and went back inside to the Pharmaprix to buy yet ANOTHER umbrella. And then I walked the rest of the way to my errand, did my errand, and walked home without needing it at all. The moment I had the umbrella, the rain stopped. Go figure.

Newest Angel on the Block

Exciting news: my baby sister now has a baby of her own! Our newest little angela made her debut yesterday morning bright and early. She's a beautiful, healthy baby and her parents are already doting over her as we speak (unless she's napping; then they're gratefully trying to get some sleep as well ;))
Once again, I find myself in an enviable position to establish myself as "favourite aunt", since I'm the one living nearby (my baby sis literally lives down the street in Montreal) and I'm working hard on building that status, as I did with my two little Dubai Angels when they were still Ottawa Angels and I was still in Ottawa. (to my other two sisters, I kid of course. We can have a three-way tie for favourite aunt :))
A funny story about our newest angel: At some point during my sister's pregnancy, Montreal Angela was dubbed "Baby Banana" (this had something to do with my sister grocery shopping and coming across plantains which we called Baby Bananas, I think). Anyway, even when Baby Banana was well beyond the size of her namesake, we were still calling her that.
Well, last week, my little Dubai Angel ate a banana, looked up at his mom, and told her, Mama, I have a baby banana in my tummy.
To which his mom responded, What about Auntie? Does she still have a baby banana?
His answer: No, I'm the one who has it now.

Looks like he'll be looking out for his little cousin from the get go!

Who Knew?

Yesterday M and I and a few of our friends went for a bike trip around the downtown/lachine canal area of Montreal. It was supposed to take a couple of hours, 3 max. 6 hours later we were heading home with extremely sore legs, sunburns, hunger pangs, and huge smiles. I've biked along the Lachine canal before, but never past St-Pierre (the point where Highway 20 meets highway 138). Yesterday, we continued well past that point, and were rewarded by our discovery of Parc Rene Levesque, an absolutely gorgeous little peninsula off Lasalle, sticking out into the river.
On our way back downtown, we left the canal and rode back along the river path itself, through Lasalle and Verdun.
All I can say is that Montreal has surpassed my expectations for natural beauty and gorgeous, quiet neighbourhoods I didn't know existed. I'm somewhat in love with my adopted city right now. Stunning, and totally bikeable.

P.S. My sisters are back home in Cali and Dubai respectively. I miss them insanely but I'm surprisingly not bawling my eyes out every 5 seconds. I'm shocked at my resilience.

Power Out

Do you know that song, Power Out, by The Arcade Fire? That was my evening yesterday, in Ottawa.
First, let me set the stage: the day before, I had arrived at my parents' place after work and it was alive. The Angels, all five of them, ran to the door to greet me. The oldest California Angela let me in before I had finished rummaging for my keys. Her baby brother blocked me by trying to run out to hug me. It was lovely.
All evening, the place was buzzing. Kids playing/fighting/singing/screaming/exchanging toys/yanking toys out of each other's hands, and their moms (and my mom and dad) preparing for a little trip they were going to take to Toronto. So, Tuesday, a house with 5 children 6 and under, and 5 adults. Wednesday, me.
My plan, early on in the day, involved a trip to the gym after work, but as it got closer to quitting time, the heat had taken its toll on me. I felt like I was melting, and had no interest in getting any hotter. So I went home instead. At the grocery store in the plaza next to my parent's house, I bought two oranges and went in search of their spelt bread (the store has just changed hands, which means some of our "alternative" products are usually eliminated or modified... I have to say, the new company is not as interested in providing the allergy free stuff as the old one was) I was walking up the last aisle when the power cut. Darkness. Kinda refreshing, actually.
They were still able to check me through at the cash, but when I got home, I realized it wasn't just the plaza, it was the whole neighbourhood.
I could read, right? well, I could, but I didn't feel like it. I wanted radio. I wanted noise. The problem was that my mp3 player's battery was almost dead, and all the other radios in the house worked off electricity. No good. I used my laptop until the battery died (25 minutes, no internet, obviously). I switched to my dad's laptop. 25 more minutes. I dug up the flashlight ad emergency candles, in case. I sat there feeling pathetic that I didn't know what to do without outside stimulus. But I didn't.
In Montreal, I would have gone for a bike ride. In Ottawa, I have no bike. I eventually went back to the plaza to find their power returned before it did at the house.
I am resolved to find some way to not need technology so much. But right now, what I have is proof of dependency.
I'm writing this from Montreal, on my now-charged laptop, with another window open on another blog, a third on facebook, and a fourth on my email. Must stop?

Surprise!

When I said my sister and her kids' arrival from Dubai was pending, I meant pending. Last Monday, Dubai-sis and the Little Angels arrived in Montreal as part of a little surprise for my parents, who weren't expecting them for another two weeks. The accomplices in our little plan were my sis and her hubby in Dubai (well, they were actually the engineers, the rest of us were accomplices) and my sister and I, plus our hubbies, here in Montreal. We've been keeping our little secret for months, casually fake-counting-down the days until their arrival with my parents, and finally, the day had arrived.

At the airport, my sister's flight arrived shortly after another one from Mexico city, and the cbc was there to cover the Mexico flight given the whole swine flu, thing, so we were hanging back as we waited for her, hoping that my parents wouldn't happen to be watching the news on cbc that night... She told us later that the porter who helped bring her bags out walked really slowly so as not to come in contact with "the mexicans" as he would say it, and kept telling her to keep the kids back. Now, my dear sis makes a point of avoiding the news (too depressing, she'll tell you) and had essentially spent the last two days in transit. When she'd left Dubai, the story was still breaking. By the time she'd arrived, it was everywhere, but she'd missed the whole thing. All she could think was "why is my porter racist? How unfortunate..."

I took Tuesday off work, rented a van, and she and I drove up with the little angels alternately fighting and falling asleep in the backseat. We called my parents when we were about 40 minutes away, and they were confused, then surprised, then thrilled. My mom actually figured we were on some sort of three way conference call when she heard my sister's voice on my phone.

Now, they're here for the next three months. Next up is my california-sis and her little angels' arrival in late June. It's gonna be a par-tay!

I had figured I would cry when we saw each other at the airport, but the reality was that it just felt so natural, so as though we'd never been halfway across the world from each other, that I just fell right back into my routine with everyone. I'm pleased to report that Little Angela still adores me just as much as I adore her, and she's trained Little Angel well. Whereas she calls me "Khalto Noosa", he - in his two-year-old manner of pronunciation, calls me "Katto Nooda" (this is a full-fledged graduation from "Nonno", what he called me last year as a one-year-old before they moved, and equally adorable).

So, spreading the joy and reporting on the beginnings of a fabulous summer of aunthood. More stories to come, I'm sure.

It's Open

Remember this? It's finally open. Day 1 today. and they have TV's. Showing hockey. Heaven.

Zen and the Art of Sitting Still

Okay, so the truth is that this post has nothing to do with Zen, but I can't think of a sentence that includes "the art of" and not start it with "Zen". It's the tail end of flu season here in the wonderful Ontario/Quebec region of Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal. I include all three areas because M and I were in TO for a fabulous long weekend last week hanging out with my awesomely extended family, but towards the end of the weekend, I caught some sort of lovely bug. At first, I couldn't figure out what I had, but as Sunday rolled into Monday (and Tuesday, and Wednesday), I felt like I was running the slightest fever, followed by general icky-ness, sore-throatedness, congestion, headaches, you name it.
Everything was unpleasant enough to make me a general grouch, but not enough to keep me at home sick. By Thursday afternoon, I thought I was back on the upswing, and had high hopes for a long bike ride in Montreal on Friday after work. Not so: Friday, I crashed and burned. My body had had enough. Sleep! it screamed at me. Sit still. and so I did, for basically the whole day. and then M came home from work and made me a cup of peppermint tea and we watched a movie and then I slept more.
I got up this morning at 10 a.m. feeling like a new person. Energy? For reals? and I was so pleased with it. So pleased I felt I needed to load the dishwasher, and pull out the dustbuster, and gather a few other things that were here and there and needed doing. And then M asked me, ever so thoughtfully to please.just.sit.still.
Hmmmm, good point. The man is on to something. See, I'm obsessed with multi-tasking. I can't just ever be watching the hockey game or writing a blog post. I do both at the same time (like, right now... the Habs are down 2-0. Not pleased. Trying to stay on topic). I can't cook one meal at a time. I usually put 3 things on the stove together, or I cook while I'm on the phone. Read and/or write and/or eat on the commuter bus. Same for the OC transpo bus when I'm in Ottawa. Even at work, I rarely have one window open at a time. I like to switch between 3 or 4 tasks so I don't get bored. I find I get more done this way, except....
Except when I'm sick. Then I'm supposed to sit still. Right? Right. It actually took about 3 hours yesterday to settle back down and get into bed. I kept not being able to stay still long enough to go to sleep, even though my body was exhausted and my eyes were drooping. And today, the second the energy was back, it was like I couldn't possibly read a book or watch something.
Productivity is good, but I think I need to settle down and read my body's signals. Relax. I sat still to write this post for the last 30 minutes, so there's improvement there, right?
Oh, and the score is still 2-0.

That Kind of Day

We're Canadians, so the snow should really, really not be an issue. And it wouldn't be except there's so darn much of it! More than I remember getting in the past - which is probably my mind playing tricks on me, considering last year we almost broke the record for snowiest winter, and that my childhood memories are filled with sliding (sometimes head first) down the HUGE hills in the school yard where the snow piled up all winter until it was well over 2 meters high (also, chanting "I'm the king of the castle! and you're the dirty rascals!" from the top of the hill after climbing it - oh children, so charming).
Perhaps it's that in my childhood, all this snow meant just another plaything - a hill to be climbed, an evening tobogganing, a snowball fight to be had, angels and forts to be made. Now, it's all just something to walk around. Or rather, to try to walk around (come check out the great job they do clearing this stuff in the fabulous frozen metropolis that is Montreal, and you'll know exactly what I mean).
Yesterday, on the way home from Ottawa, one of my fellow commuters got off the bus at Kirkland as he always does. As he walked down the hill to the parking lot where his car was parked, he fell 3 feet into the snow. Waist deep. The bus was driving away as he rolled himself out. yeah.
I think maybe I just need to take up tobogganing again.

All Hail the Presse Cafe

There's been an empty store front at the end of our street for months now, and M and I have been watching closely to see who'll take it.
Our dream: an independent bookstore with a coffee shop built in.
What happened? First, the store front turned out to be not one, but two store fronts.
Recently, a sushi place opened in one of them. This is very, very good news, but it's not a coffee shop.
More recently, (two weeks ago to be exact), a sign went up in the other window for a Presse Cafe opening soon.
Victory!

The Overground Underground (or "I can't feel my toes")

There was another Gaza demonstration today - around 10 000 of us showed up, and it was a good mix of people too (not just Arabs or Muslims. Seems to be that as the crisis goes on for an extended period of time, more and more people are becoming aware of just how bad it is...)
We marched from Dorchester Square at Peel and Renee Levesque all the way to the Complexe Desjardins at Renee Levesque and St-Urbain (1.1 km away).
After the Demonstration, we were too cold to walk home outside, so M introduced me to a new area of the Montreal underground. Now, having lived in the city for about 10 months (and living downtown!) I've walked the underground in the core downtown area a fair amount, but this was a whole other area I didn't even realize was connected. We walked for about 40 minutes without stepping outside at all and exited 3 (3!) minutes from our place for the last bit. Not only could I actually feel my feet by this point; they were actually warm. And I should clarify that the underground is actually a stretch of tunnels and overpasses, so the term underground is not 100% accurate. Sometimes, you're inside and at street level. Sometimes you're a floor up...
But here's the coolest part: on our walk, we came across two separate wedding parties using random parts of the underground as background for their wedding photos. Now, some areas are just regular brick wall, or completely ordinary, but some are actually extremely artistic. The first bride and groom were taking photos against a yellow background. The second were in Windsor Station, taking their photos at a pretty elaborate staircase. I took no pictures of either couple (though I did congratulate them as we passed), but here are a few grainy cell phone shots of a neat tunnel area on our route....

Let's Play 5 Questions!

So, the latest Blog "meme" comes via XUP, and is called 5 questions. She did such a great job explaining how it works on her blog, so I'm just going to go ahead and steal the instructions:

It’s kind of a fun interview exercise because fellow bloggers can email you asking to join in and then you have to email them back 5 interview questions - things you’d like to know specifically about them. Then they answer the questions on their blog and invite other bloggers to join in which means they have to come up with 5 questions for those bloggers. Get it? (Complete instructions are at the end of this post).

On with the show. Here are the questions XUP posed to me, as well as my answers (as usual, extremely run-on-sentency).

1. As a Muslim and a woman in Canada, do you face any additional challenges in the workplace and/or socially?
   I really think that if you want to look at them as "challenges", you could, but that in essence, we live is such a pluralistic society that it's hard to say there's a "standard" any more, so I probably face as many challenges as anyone else, except mine can be categorized under one lump sum of "this is because she's Muslim"... For example, I don't drink, nor do I attend social events where alcohol will be served. What this means is that if I'm going out to dinner with some friends, no one at the table can order a drink... At work, I'll skip the group lunches if I know that some of my colleagues are going to be drinking, but we end up doing a lot of "in office potlucks" instead, and the formal lunches are only 1 or 2 times a year. A few of my good friends from high school and university have gotten married recently, and for their weddings, I attended the ceremonies, but not the receptions, because of the alcohol thing. I explained it to them and they didn't mind. The important thing was to see them on their special day in some way or another.
   Honestly, I don't mind. I probably face more challenges dealing with other things that make me unique or different, like my food sensitivities (try avoiding wheat, dairy, and sugar in an office that ADORES all of the above. I have no will power. I break down. I eat it. I get sick. I chide myself and promise I'll never do it again... And then someone buys a box of Laura Secord Chocolates and puts them next to the photocopier that afternoon, and it's breakdown of will power all over. You get the drift).
   Other adjustments? I pray 5 times a day, but I'm pretty flexible about the specifics. If the nurse's room is in use, or we've got a lot of back to back meetings, I'll just use my office.
   I've had the very very rare situation pop up where someone is down right discriminatory, but then who hasn't? If I wasn't Muslim (and Arab: double-whammy!) I'm sure it would be something else, like sexism, or some other form of discrimination. Honestly, I've been a minority for so long that it's what I'm most comfortable with. I don't think any of it is insurmountable. You just have to explain to people why you're doing "thing x" some other way...
   
2. You commute regularly between Ottawa and Montreal. If you both could have the same or better jobs in the same city, which one would you choose to live in?
   Hmmm... I have to say that right now, even though commuting is hard, I get the best of both worlds. I live in downtown Montreal and get to work at home 2 days of the week, and I live in the 'burbs in Ottawa and work in downtown the other 3 weekdays. I love the vibe of Montreal. I love the vibrant spirit that's just there. I love the "bigness" of it. But I love the quiet of Ottawa, and the kind of unobtrusive beauty, and until last February, Ottawa was my whole life. The overwhelming majority of important memories in my life took place in Ottawa. My sisters and I tobogganing in our back yard in our old house in the winters when we were little; biking with my dad in the summers along the Ottawa river bike paths; going to the Public Library as a teen and coming home with more novels than I could carry; babysitting at the mosque on Fridays; going to Canterbury High School and finding out there that, no matter what I did with my "working hours" in my life, I would always really be a writer; there are too many... Ottawa will always be home. If my husband could work there, I would probably choose to live there. That said, I'm sure my parents missed Egypt like crazy when they moved to Canada for my dad to finish his PhD. and that was over 35 years ago.
   
3. What is the hardest decision you've ever had to make all on your own?
   This is the hardest question. I put off answering this meme while I tried to think of an answer for this, and the bottom line is that I couldn't come up with anything profound at all because any hard decision I have to make, I don't make on my own. I'm very fortunate that some of the people closest to me are actually exceptional people that others look up to and seek out for advice constantly, and that are only ever, at worst, a phone call away. Case in point: my parents. My mother has been part of every big decision I've ever made. She's a details person, and she will sit through every last point and review things until I'm no longer lost. My father is a great sounding board, and when he's done listening to me rant about something, he can usually, in one or two sentences, give me a "grand scheme of things" reminder that helps clarify my position and re-orients me. My sisters are all incredibly supportive and know me insanely well. My husband is super-patient, non-pushy, and brings to my decisions a different perspective since, unlike everyone else I've listed, he hasn't lived in my immediate family unit for the last 25 years. I know this sounds like I'm gushing about these people ridiculously, but it's the truth. And while they'll all tell you I'm a bit stubborn and hard-headed when I want something (albeit using nicer words), it's usually when I want something small, like a chocolate bar, or to watch movie X instead of movie Y.
   So, the hardest decision I ever made on my own? Pretty anti-climactic, but it was probably to go to Arts Canterbury High School for the Literary Arts program, even though it would mean an extra 2 hours on the bus each day, and an extra hour at school, for 4 years. And even that, I asked what my family thought about it. If you want something COMPLETELY independent, it would be something ridiculously minuscule, like buying a bike. Not a hard decision.
   
4. What is there about you that you think makes you just a little bit different from anyone else you know?
   I have a ridiculous memory for completely useless trivia facts and words/lyrics. Anything from the fact that retired hockey player Dave Andreychuk and my uncle have the same birthday (September 29th) to lyrics of "Over my head" by the Fray, to the lyrics of a spoof version of Bohemian Rhapsody that Flogo posted on their website during the 2004 Presidential election, to whole sections of dialogue from Lord of the Rings. I'll correct my sister if she's singing a song and changes some obscure line by one word in the bridge... Also, I have yet to meet another Muslim woman who loves hockey as much as I do.
   
5. You are granted 10 minutes to go back in time, meet up with one person and tell them something. Who would it be and what would you tell them?
   I thought about going back to some famous historical figure and telling them something that could have changed the outcome of the world, but I wrote this off because it strikes me as hubris, and I just don't' think that little old me, given ten minutes, could really accomplish some huge, global thing. So, I'll go for something more personal.
   I'd go back in time to when my maternal grandmother was alive and tell her thank you and how much I love and appreciate her. She lived in Egypt for almost all of her life, but came to stay with my mom when my mom was pregnant with my sisters and I, and we formed a very very tight bond. When I was a baby, she called me her little Cinderella and wouldn't let me sleep in the crib (which caused all sorts of "adjustments" when she had to go back to Egypt and I was used to cooing in the bed with a grown up. She'd make sure my older sister didn't jump on the bed if I was napping. When she came back for the birth of my younger sister, I was already so used to her that she mostly took care of me to free up my mom for my younger sister.
   She came back and stayed with us again for about a year when I was around 10, but I don't think I truly realized just how much she did for us. I loved her, but I loved to go out and play more, and by then, she wasn't as mobile. The next couple of times I saw her on visits to Egypt, she was getting older and starting to forget things. But she had a beautiful, warm heart, and it wasn't until after she died by a few years that I really, truly thought about her more deeply as her own person and not as simply my grandmother. I'd tell her that I included her in my prayers every day, and I'd give her a hug.

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Here are the rules if you want to participate in 5 Questions.

1. Send me an email saying: ”Interview Me” to hummingintheshade@gmail.com
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You can then answer the questions on your blog.
4. You should also post these rules along with an offer to interview anyone else who emails you wanting to be interviewed.
5. Anyone who asks to be interviewed should be sent 5 questions to answer on their blog. I would be nice if the questions were individualized for each blogger.

Juliette et "Wow"! (or 'Must Love Chocolate')

Coming to Montreal soon? Want somewhere to majorly overindulge your chocolate addiction? I've got just the place for you: Juliette et Chocolat on St. Denis. As good as advertised (and I don't get paid for this, swear...)

'nuff said..

Eid Mubarak!

It's 20 below today in Montreal, for the first day of Eid Ul-Adha (makes me think of a Christmas song that starts with "Oh the weather outside is frightful...").
On this Eid, my sisters are
a) here with me in Montreal enduring the same temperatures,
b) in sunny California with my parents, or
c) in Egypt, praying the congregational Eid prayer in an outdoor field along with most of her husband's family's town.

We've been on an email streak for a couple of days, the entire family (4 sisters, 4 brothers by marriage, 2 parents), starting with discussion of funny things my little Angela's done recently and into "Happy Eid" exchanges, and what everyone will be doing. The Montreal crew? We'll be gorging on chocolate... (There's this place we've been meaning to try forever, and we figured a huge celebratory day is as good a time as any. I have book buying plans too, thanks to a bunch of recent exchanges with my favourite bookworm buddy about good reads - Glass Castle, March, here I come).

This year, I've truly been feeling the "internationalness" of the family. Everyone is everywhere, and yet with the Internet and phones and texting and VoIP being what they are today, I feel like we're all in the same place. I'm loving the stories from overseas and down-under (as we jokingly refer to Cali), and I'm loving being able to hear them so frequently.

Eid Mubarak to everyone, wherever you might be!

Retirement Ceremony deep breath

It's sports weekend in Montreal. Tonight, the famous and infamous Patrick Roy will have his jersey retired by the Montreal Canadiens. Tomorrow, the Grey Cup, the Canadian much much much poorer cousin to the NFL's super bowl, is being played here between the Montreal Alouettes and the Calgary Stampeders... needless to say, my attention will be on tonight's hockey game.
The habs have been playing awful hockey lately, (scraping by with some wins, but not really deserving them) and they tend to play even worse on ceremony nights, so deep breath here... and in the words of the always hilarious Mike Boone:
The only thing that might mar a magical evening at the Bell Centre is the possibility, given the volatile nature of the honouree, that Patrick Roy Night could become the first jersey number retirement to degenerate into a lectern-clearing brawl. But we're probably safe. No one wearing a tuxedo has thrown a good punch since Frank Sinatra.

Iftar

This is the word for "breakfast" in Arabic, both breakfast when you're having it any day in the morning, and breakfast when you're breaking the fast after a day of no food, no drink, no bad behaviour, no blowing up...
Back in university, we would be sitting in the computer lab pre-iftar. At first, this was "the Cube", a grey little cube shaped building filled with computer stations, for Computer Science students, and then we would be in the cornily named "library of the future", in the basement of the SITE building, once it existed. We would be scrambling to finish up some assignment or another, perhaps writing the last few difficult lines of code, or hitting compile and praying there would no compile errors, knowing we still had the horrible run-time errors to face. Maybe we'd have already found them; maybe we'd be debugging slowly, exhaustedly, ready to pull our hair out from the effort at looking the same line that seemed fine but was clearly throwing our whole program into disarray. Or, possibly, we'd have given up on all of the above, and had our programs open in some random window on the computer but were only pretending to work. Possibly, instead we were chatting, or checking hockey scores, or surfing away those last few minutes until we had a mandated break to break our fast and clear our heads of the "if-thens" and "elses" of the code that had started to infest our heads...
The SITE building was on one end of campus and Iftar was in the University Centre (shortened to the Uni-Centre, because what's the fun in saying the whole name of anything?), and we had two options to get there:

1. Follow the long, wining path of tunnels through about 5 buildings, zigzagging across campus from the inside to avoid the cold.
2. Take your jacket, go upstairs and brave the elements in what was a shorter trek than in 1, but also a colder trek.

I used to alternate between the two, depending on how much time I had, how cold it was, how long of a break I was affording myself for this communal fast-breaking and prayer.
In the Uni-Centre, dates were passed around or set on a table. Milk or water in Styrofoam or plastic cups was also there, and the desks had been pushed aside in the small room to make space for prayer. Half the time, you didn't know half the people you were breaking fast with, after all, this was a campus of thousands of students, in thousands of programs, and you overlapped here because you were Muslim, and you had class or lab keeping you here to this hour, and so weren't already home. Regardless, you said salaam (peace, our greeting in Islam), you said taqabbal Allah (May God accept your good deeds), and there was a sense of being in it together, of having spent the last 12 or 13 hours in a state of un-having, of emptiness of material so you could fill yourself with something else, some form of perspective, or discipline, or appreciation for the rest of the world, who fasted, not voluntarily so many days of the year. After prayer there were tables set up for big foil containers filled with rice and salad and chicken. If we were lucky, there was samosa, every one's absolute favourite. The food came from people in the community, and it was free: in Islam, we believe there is a great reward for helping the fasting break their fast.
We would sit on the floor or lean against the pushed-back tables and desks, those with classes and labs to get back to eating quickly, those with a little more time winding down. We'd learn each other's names, forget, and ask again a week later when we happened to overlap at another iftar. We'd clean up and go.
This was one of the things I missed most about university, this ad-hoc coming together of a community in a place where the world doesn't revolve around your traditions, where the days are not cut short during your month of fasting and the schedules made more lax. Last night, I felt it again at the McGill MSA iftar. There is something about students and student culture. Something more fluid, more flexible than at the office, where things are set and established, and it's really very... nice. I sat with girls I'd never met and some whom I'd met once or twice, or three WHOLE times, and laughed and talked and got to know them better. We turned the cafeteria into an iftar hall, pulling tables together and pushing them back when it was over. There were those same, massive foil pans filled with rice and salad and a pot full of delicious, Indian style meat. There were taqabbal Allah's and come again's exchanged. I think I will.

Can I at least consider it a healthy addiction?

So M and I went to Paragraph, our favourite Montreal independent bookstore, yesterday, so that I could buy or order the remaining Ann Patchett books. Unfortunately, the only ones they had in store were Run and Bel Canto, two of the three I already own. I left the store having not placed the order, but instead with three other books. One, a classic that I've always loved and always wanted on my bookshelf, To Kill a Mockingbird. Two, The Gathering by Anne Enright, winner of the Man Booker prize for 2007, and three, a non-fiction, the latest by John Esposito, called Who Speaks For Islam.
I still have to finish Run before I can start any of these, but I think I'm actually dangerous to myself in a bookstore. If you left me there for a few days, I could easily run myself into debt. I can't stop...

Everybody has a story

My usual Thursday afternoon bus ride had a slight twist yesterday. I often pass the time sleeping, reading, or listening to the radio, but once in a while, the person I am sitting next to exchanges a few words and the conversation doesn't end, and so continues on in one form or another until we arrive. Yesterday, I was sitting next to a lovely Francophone woman who was going home to Repentigny after visiting her grown daughter in Outaouais. We spoke on and off the whole bus ride, mostly about the weather, about whether she'd catch her connecting bus or whether we'd get to Berri on time, about where she lived, about her niece and my niece. In short, lots of small talk.
At one point, our conversation turned to the importance of a positive outlook. How some people manage to get really upset about small things and how we really rarely experience catastrophe's in this part of the world, and so really, we ought to stay relatively calm when we're faced with the small "not good" situations that we're sometimes faced with.
Until this point, the main reason we kept speaking was not because the conversation was particularly interesting, but to pass the time (for her, I suspect) and to get some French practice, for me. A few minutes later, she told me two things: One, her husband had died 7 years ago from prostate cancer that had quickly spread to other parts of his body, and two, she had lived with epilepsy until the age of 42. She'd had three brain surgeries, here was the scar on her head, and she showed me a minor mark which I'd been looking straight at most of the bus ride without noticing anything was there, and was now fully cured and needed no more medication. Her husband had taken such good care of her for close to 20 years, that when he'd become sick, it was as simple as being her turn to take care of him.
The rest of the way home I thought about my own health. My biggest issue is my food restrictions, and honestly, everyday I realize how tiny something like that is. I have never known catastrophe, but this woman had faced difficulties I only imagine. It was very eye-opening.

For the Homesick

Or possibly just for me?
Here are a list of similar places in Ottawa and Montreal, if you're looking for similarities, which I often am:

• The bike paths on the Lachine Canal = The bike paths on the Ottawa River Parkway
• The Park at Mont Royal, and Parc LaFontaine = Andrew Haydon Park, and Mooney's Bay
• The Old Port = Sparks Street
• The Lookout from Mont Royal
• The Lookout from Parliament Hill
• Eaton's Centre = Rideau Centre
• Bugs in Montreal that love to bite = Bugs in Ottawa that love to bite

Happy summer. Keep Enjoying.