Family Evolution

When I was a child, my family in Canada consisted of my parents and sisters; the closest relatives we had were an uncle in the U.S. that we saw on occasion and his family. We took trips to Egypt to visit extended family every few years, but in reality we made family in Ottawa to compensate. I think back over my childhood - all the way up to university - and lose count of the "aunts" who became my aunts, the girls my age who acted as substitute cousins. These were the people we spent our special occasions with: the people we saw during Eid and Ramadan and grew up around. In some ways, they were more than family, because we had chosen each other; in other ways, they would never really be family, and we each had our distinct, nuclear units because at the end of the day, we only had a certain common history, and no common blood.
I remember my excitement when my mother's youngest brother moved to Ottawa, how absolutely thrilled I was that I could start a story with "my uncle" at school, and really, truly mean "my uncle" and not a friend of the family. I remember how thrilled I was when my baby cousin was born and I had an actual cousin to play with and coo at within driving distance. In some bizarre way, the presence of relatives in the city validated Ottawa as my home. I had family here, close by.

Over the years, it became normal. My Canadian family grew as more cousins and second cousins made the move. Eid became a celebration at our house where, instead of my parents trying to find a way to surround us with company, we tried to figure out how to seat everyone around the table. My parents' house became the "family house", the house where everyone came together for events and holidays, the equivalent of my grandparents' house with the massive veranda in Alexandria. When my sisters got married, the family grew again in the form of brothers and their families. Until that point, my only experience with brothers was through my male cousins, who played rough with us and pushed us in sports and up trees on our visits to Egypt. Two cousins in particular served as my older brothers, teasing and joking with us through out the years. As they got older, they would come to North America to work in the summers, and then stop by Ottawa to visit for a couple of weeks before they returned for the fall semester.

Eventually, the older one moved to Ottawa; two months ago, the younger one moved to Toronto. Last night, he and his family came to visit at my in-laws' place, where we're visiting in TO for the long weekend. There was something remarkably unremarkable about looking around the living room, seeing M and his family and my "original older brother" and his family there all in one place, a new family extension forming. 

When I was little, I could count on one hand my extended family in north america. At one point, I couldn't even do that. I now need both hands and feet to do it, and I love it.

I want my hour back!

This weekend, we turned the clocks forward to daylight savings time, and while we won't have to deal with the sun setting until nearly 7 p.m., the downside is that I suddenly feel so behind.
Daylight savings time (DST) used to happen on the first Sunday in April, and all through university, this hour-thievery had such an enormous effect because it was always, always, always right around exam time. I felt like the time people were out to make sure I couldn't have just 60 more minutes to figure out a proof, to solve a program that refused to compile, or even to just sleep so that the next day's studying would make some sort of sense...
Two years ago, the U.S. decided to move DST three weeks earlier, and being the good Canadian neighbours we are, we of course followed right along. It was necessary, 6 weeks of time difference (three in the fall when setting clocks back, three in the spring when setting clocks forward) between places like New York and Toronto would have wreaked havoc on the business world, but you wonder why Uncle Sam really thought it was such a good idea to do it anyway...
The theory was that it would save energy, that 3 weeks of extended day light would mean people would turn their lights on later, blah blah blah, yadda yadda, insert more detail...
There is NO way to ever measure whether this worked. What I do know is that at work, we were thrown into a frenzy working on the DST project, making sure all IT infrastructure, systems, and applications were DST ready... It was many hours of overtime for many people. Some did so much OT they bought flat screen TVs with the money after. Others took vacations. (Me, I just did the boring thing and put it in the bank). It was like a mini version of the Y2K freak-out 7 years earlier... We love to have to worry about whether something wrong with the machines can possibly cause the whole world to end.
In hindsight, I look back fondly at the DST project as the first really technical, large scale project I worked on. But I still got up this morning and realized that instead of the 9:50 blinking on my clock, the time was 10:50. And I still feel groggy while I write this. And I still feel, well, honestly? A little jipped.

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.

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.