Don't get smug, it never really gets easy. . .

If I listen closely I can still hear the patter of water dripping onto my bathroom floor. That would be my slowly drying jeans and khakis hung over the shower rod. If I get lucky they’ll be wearable by the end of tomorrow.

Tonight I had a harrowing encounter with The Humbler. For the uninitiated, The Humbler is the thing that sneaks up on you whenever you have delusions of competence, efficiency or adjustment and contentment. It’s the snowboarding face plant the run after you mentioned that you hadn’t fallen yet today. It’s the homework assignment you remember you forgot just after you were about to relax after getting anything done. And when traveling, The Humbler is everything hard. I say everything because that’s how it seems. Nothing is easy, which is precisely why the situation is so demoralizing. Once you’ve put out Fire A, you turn around and three more have just started. Nothing can ever be simple or easy. And as soon as you think you’re on top of things, you’ll be viciously and forcefully knocked off your false pedestal.

My downfall was the laundry. After ten days in Amman, I was running out of clothes. Dryers are rare here, but most households just wash clothes in a washing machine and hang them out to dry. With sunny 60-degree weather during the day, things dry fast and it’s not really a problem. My washing machine was sitting unplugged on the balcony and when I first moved in I thought it was a stand-alone freezer (it’s the same shape).

This morning I dragged it to the corner of the balcony near the door, and ran an extension cord outside to plug it in. The machine wasn’t connected to a water source, and after consulting my landlord (who told me to “follow the directions”), I tracked down a hardware store and simply asked the employee whether I could manually pour water into the agitator to wash my clothes. Turns out I could. So five or six kitchen bowls of water later, I’ve loaded a towel into the machine.

The particular towel in question is navy blue and rather prone to covering its user in fuzz of the same color. Those of you who have ever washed a fuzzy sweater or an article of clothing that has bled understand why I decided to wash it by itself (and thank God I did, as the thing did bleed and turn the water blue).

At this point I was feeling rather proud of myself. I’d bought powder detergent (not bleach, which I did check for) and started it up. Much easier than rewiring an oven, which I’ve also had the privilege of learning how to do. However halfway through the wash cycle I realized I had a serious problem: rinsing.

With no water source connected the machine, how was I going to rinse the towel? And where was I going to drain the water to? The second question turned out to be the easier part, sort of. I turned on the drain, and like I’d feared, water started flooding the balcony. However the balcony has a drain, like most rooms in the house, in order to clean it. You scrub the balcony with soapy water, then squeegee it down the drain. I just appropriated the feature for laundry.

Unfortunately the extension cord and surge protector were on the balcony. For the record, Jordanian surge protectors float. I walked through the inside of the apartment to the other door on the balcony and unplugged it from the wall before any critical parts got wet.

Fast forward to coming home after work. I throw the towel in the bathtub to rinse it later, put a new load in the machine and cooked dinner. I stole the five-gallon jug off the top of the filtered water dispenser and filled it up in the bathtub in order to fill the washing machine. The spin cycle goes haywire if I try to use it, so I just wring out my pants before taking them into the bathroom to rinse. As I turn on the faucet I remember (3 seconds too late as I’m perched on the edge of the bathtub), that the pull switch is stuck and water will only come out the showerhead. So I just use that to rinse the two pairs of pants.

Here is the point when I became demoralized. Perched on the edge of the tub rinsing, realizing I had most of a load of laundry left to do and just desperately thinking there had to be a better way than this. I was (am) running out of clothes. I’m paying an exorbitant amount for an apartment that only I live in. The kitchen is a mess, the sink leaks in the other bathroom. There’s no central heat, and I can’t even catch a break on the damn laundry. Seriously?

Frustrated and near to tears, I did what any sensible adult would do: I called my mom. Moms can always tell when you’re close to your mental breaking point, no matter how well you try to cover it for the duration of the conversation. But helpful as ever, she told me to put the towel (which had been mucking up my ‘rinse cycle’ by running out blue) in the kitchen sink and then rinse everything else in the bathtub. I amended it by using one side of the kitchen sink for the towel and the other to rinse the rest of the clothes. Granted I had to do the dishes first but those needed to be tackled anyway.

As I was coming down to the wire and running out of spaces to hang clothing on my outdoor drying rack, my patience gone an hour ago and my sense of humor hanging by a thread, I had an epiphany. Sitting on a chair was an extra metal grated refrigerator shelf that I hadn’t had room for. It neatly fit over the width of the bathtub, and the spaces between the slats would allow whatever clothes I laid on it to drip into the bathtub and down the drain.

The shelf from the freezer and two more from the fridge were commandeered into service, and in the end, all clothes were set to dry and the washing machine is drained. And I’m taking the rest of my clothes to a friend’s tomorrow. They won’t get dried but they won’t be a nightmare either.

I sure hope the Browns beat the Eagles and Syracuse basketball pulled out a win. Given my luck lately I might be better off rooting for their opponents. But who knows, maybe I’ll catch a break at home. They’re rather scarce over here.

Why you should sleep in socks

I spent my first night in Amman, Jordan, cleaning mold out of my freezer. Evidently it's endemic here. Personally I'm convinced that it will overtake me one night as I sleep and I'll quietly expire a hushed fungus death. But forgive the melodrama.

Amman is a sprawling city, spread out over 20 hills, or jebels and there's one long road that runs all the way through it, punctuated by 8 circles (big roundabouts). You basically need a car to get around, or must take public transport. Mass transit, be it public buss or taxis really isn't all that expensive, provided you're not paying ten times the amount you owe, like I did for two days.

The apartment I'm living in for now is large and spacious, in truth too big for just one person. Aside from alleviating boredom and loneliness, I'll be glad when my roommate arrives in January so the place isn't so empty. The central heat isn't usually turned on, so instead I drag an old propane heater to whichever room I'm in and keep a window cracked. I have turn it off when I leave the room or at night when I sleep, so in order to stay warm I've just piled on the clothes and blankets.

I would say that Amman building are just really good at dissipating the summer heat, thus making them cold in the winter. However, I've been informed that this is false, and they're as miserably hot in the summer months as they are frosty in the winter. Hence, while I find sleeping in socks sort of morally repugnant, I've decided to make an exception. Principles seem rather expendable when faced with shivering and hypothermia. Since I, like many other women, can vie for the claim of most constantly cold person, it's going to be an interesting three months.

A wizard always arrives precisely when he means to. . .

The motto of Liverpool, an English club soccer team, is “You’ll never walk alone.”

It’s a good thought in terms of fostering team unity, but it strikes me as something even truer. The dark periods in life of stress, despair, anxiety and frustration are usually, in my experience, dispelled by the right person intervening at just the right time. Timing is everything. This is why we call our friends in the middle of the night struck by insomnia: because we know they’ll answer the phone. For this same reason, we reach out when we know someone who has been where we are. By their very existence, we know that our current situation is neither permanent nor world ending.

As I walked in the door of my apartment two days ago, my Christmas present from friends in England was sitting on the couch. I was pretty sure what it was -- I love my friend but she’s less than stellar at keeping secrets (well, unimportant ones anyway). But the fact of the matter was that right in front of me, at a time when I’d been needing it the most, was a tangible symbol that someone who cared about me was thinking of me.Experiences like this constantly reassure me that I’m never really alone.

Right now, another close friend is in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest, doing geographic research with an indigenous tribe called the Maijuna. This will be the first time in seven years of friendship that we’ve gone more than a week or two without any kind of contact, even if that was just phone tag. But I couldn’t be happier for him, and his Bonsai tree is sitting on my nightstand, keeping me company until he comes back for it. And I know he will; no question about it. It’s just how we are. Gone and then back.

My yoga teacher this morning said that its important to pay attention to both sides of the body, because as we engage one, the other relaxes and stretches. If we never allowed the opposing side a chance to rest, the whole body would come out of balance. Relationships, she said are like this as well. Sometimes we are the strength our friends need to soften into; other times they provide the pillar that we lean on. Both roles are necessary, and neither exists without the other.

So as I know, I encountered a setback and failed to meet my first week’s deadline. However, looking back upon this day and this past week, I realized that until right now, everything I needed to come together wasn’t quite there. So now then, is exactly when I should be doing this.

Perfect timing.

4 Weeks. 4 Blogs. And go.

This personal bet was born of a few things:

1. I haven't written a new post in awhile and I've been meaning to.
2. For me, writing is a form of meditation, which I think I'll be able to do better than regular meditation because as much as I'd like to (and I do realize that this is the point) I don't have enough time in the day to sit still for any significant period.
3. Besides hopefully learning some amount of focus, forcing myself to write may actually mean that I put into words the things that are running around in my head, some of which may be worth remembering.

So here are the terms:

I will post one blog per week for the next month. There could be more than one (don't hold your breath) but at the minimum there will be a new post each seven-day period. The week will run from Monday morning to Sunday night, and posts may come any time within that particular week. Week one begins tomorrow, January 14th. Week four ends Sunday February 10th. There will be no cop-out posts containing lame excuses such as "I had nothing interesting to say this week." There is always something interesting and/or important to say. The challenge of a good and disciplined writer is to draw from his or her experiences regularly, not simply when the mood strikes.

Best of luck to me. I will endeavor to come up with something worth your valuable time.