I can see Nas rolling his eyes!

I was at Queen Alia airport, coming from Egypt. As I picked up my bag and went out of the immigration door, I came across a huge zaffe, with the dancers and the drums and the horns… the whole nine yards really!… the party was waiting for an Egyptian couple moving to Amman.

While waiting for the couple to come out, I chatted with an Egyptian lady with the party. I was told that the groom had been living in Amman for a few years.   He went back home and brought his beautiful young bride with him. It was all delightfully romantic.

That happy look in her eyes caught my attention; she was thrilled by the promising possibilities of the future.

I remember thinking how excited she must have felt. She probably felt the world revolved around her that moment.  What a chic start, she was moving into a new country fully made up… wearing the white laced-dress, she probably had dreamt of wearing all her life… I wondered about the scene before boarding the plane in Cairo… were her parents with her? Was the scene emotional?

A twinge of pity hits me whenever I look into these pictures… I almost feel sorry for that young lady, coming into the unknown with so much optimism! Looking forward to being with her handsome groom, looking forward to having her cinderalla- like life… every time, I find myself hoping she is happy wherever she is, and praying that had kept her optimistic look and happy smile.

Whenever I see the picture, I think of another young Egyptian lady, who moved to Amman around the same time. Hiyam helps clean my sister’s house. She  is young and had so many illusions when she moved to Amman…

Someone would hardly believe the home she moved to in Amman.  It is in the garage of a very prosperous Deir- Ghbar building.  This automatically, means that Hiyam who grew up in some Egyptian village, has to live huddled together with her husband and her future children (they are two by now)  in an 8-sq meters room. This very room also includes the bathroom, the kitchen, dining room and is more cluttered up and unaired than any common rat hole. …ohh and they also get to breathe the cars fumes as bonus. One could safely say they are not living there; they are rather COOKING. 

The husband is a guard, who has to wake up at 3 AM to carry one of the tenant’s jackets. He is expected to 24/7 for 140 JDs. Hiyam  did not go back to Egypt since 2006, because her husband’s contract does not include a vacation… the month he is away, he needs to bring another guard to replace him, and thus no salary for one month.

Hiyam helps him by cleaning houses for living… she hates how west Ammany  madams lead frivolous, useless lives…how they are really not as classy as they try to convey to the world… this is manifested by their love to shout …but what she hates most is when they misplace their things and accuse her of stealing them…

Malgre tout, Hiyam is a cheerful human being… She thanks God that she has a roof above her head and a loving husband at her side!

Rosie lives in England and Aaron lives in the States… but they have figured out a creative way to be together.

“These are the compilation images Rosie and I have done together. Every Sunday Rosie takes an image in England and I take one in America, and we put ourselves together, even if it is just in a photo. Love separated by an ocean.” Aaron said.

It is totally fascinating for me that they are not in the pictures together!! The pictures are too pretty not to be real… And as always I am super fascinated with technology and how the impossible becomes possible with technology. And anyway..i think that declarations of love using modern technology are super romantic!

I leave you with the blog… in it they describe the pictures and show the before and after… they also talk about techniques and videos and other cool stuff….I think i am in love with their site… and feel that anyone who likes photography would also fall in love with it … 

By the way…I wonder why at our side of the world, we don’t see this kind of creativity manifested in any way? I mean is it lack of drive? lack of tools? lack of training?… what is it?

Before yesterday, at the Rabieh demonstration. Adrenaline was running high at the prospect of the police taking down the tent. The tent has been set up there for more than a week now, in an open demonstration till the Israeli ambassador is out of Jordan.  (They did not take it down, the rumor has it that the Prime Minister interfered in their support)  Even though I was there with my guy friends, that did not seem to stop random guys from coming for a chat. They would ask me about my camera, or give me snippets of information about what was going on…all done courteously. However all conversations had a flirtatious undertone backed by a body language mixed into it. I won’t delude myself into thinking it was directed towards me personally…in that setup, I was simply a female!

Q. got a bit protective, he was trying to warn me about men there…. he cracked a few jokes about the trend in that space.  A group of women would gather around the fire (it was cold). That would surely attract one man to add oil to the fire to make sure it stays on.  More men would automatically join…and more men… soon, the geography of the place would be defined by groups of men gathering around smaller groups of women!

Now he might have been joking, and the picture I am painting here is definitely exaggerated since men outnumbered women by dozens… but there is some truth to it.

For years, scientists have suspected that people feel attraction more intensely when they are excited, be it through anxiety, fear, anger… I found this 1974 article that states that attraction occurs with increased frequency during states of strong emotion… I guess if we take it back to the basic caveman analogy, the main aim of human beings is the survival of the race. Therefore in times of war, when people feel threatened, they are driven by instinct to reproduce and survive…. and thus they become more flirtatious and physical.

To bring the argument full circle, I will have to take it back to Jordan and analyze it according to what is going on there.  People have been gathering in this tent every day for hours… they also have been meeting in protests… these setups, being public, are quite respectable… especially when there is a cause such as Gaza attached to them….  protests are perfect spaces for guys to meet girls, and for girls to meet guys.

Nas had an interesting insight into the argument. He thought that protests are spaces where people meet others knowing that they share core values.

To analyze his argument… Whoever is in a protest is someone who is passionate about the cause they are protesting about.  They are people who subscribe to a certain set of beliefs and personality traits, such as being public, courageous.  I don’t know maybe vocal, driven, active (?) therefore they do share something strong in common… including a basic intellectual compatibility…. I am not saying that everyone in protests is the same… but I am saying that a protest is a space where the probability of finding people who share common ideologies is high…. For me it is much simpler… the caveman analogy! We are hard wired to make sure the race survives.

During our food drive, the setup was very safe. People were working hard, in a very public open space for long hours… in a way the setup gathered all the necessary elements for young people to meet and get to know each other and hopefully to fall in love.  Truthfully, a lot of innocent flirting was going on (I personally was delighted).  Those youngsters had definitely many things in common.  Now, I find myself waiting for a day, in a few years, when we will receive an email from someone telling us that they are getting married and that they met in our food drive!

Ok.. that was my intellectual relief from the intensity of the situation… I have not been this emotionally drained in a long time… I have been glued in front of Al Jazeerah waiting for the ceasefire…

Today we will know what the UN has decided. Inshallah there is some consciousness still alive in that group of people.

…. I spent at least half of my life believing that there is one person for each one of us. I blame this idea that was planted in my head at an early age on a conversation I had at a very early age with a friend that I looked up to at that point of my life.  This friend said once in a moment of lucidity that we only have one true friend and we only have one true love.  Since I was gullible and easily impressionable, and the words came out of my mentor’s lips from all people, I lived years and years not only believing intensely in that idea, but fighting for proving it is right!  Ironically this friend’s life has been the perfect example of the opposite extreme!  His lifestyle is the proof that this nice idea is only a nice idea!  He has been going out steadily with at least 3 “fiends” because he hates the term girl friend and these “friends” not only know about each other, but somehow they managed to become best friends! With time my friend stopped believe in marriage, he does not think that one person can satisfy all his needs…. But I won’t get into this today. This is worthy of a post on its own!

Couple of years ago, I was talking to a mathematician friend, and I was arguing passionately that we only have one true love, and this friend went into a calm logical explanation that this is mathematically impossible, as there are 6 billion people on this earth and the probability that we fall in love more than once is simply more than 1!!! And I had no other option but to see the error of my ways!

These three conversations came to my mind today in my trip from Aqaba to Amman where I spent it being amused by May Ziadeh’s confused love stories. May was in love with 3 different men. A German guy, with whom she had a brief thing, but he disappeared from her life at a later stage and she ended up going to Germany few times to find him.

Gibran Khalil Gibran, with whom she corresponded for more than 25 years.  The stories say they have never met, although one rumour was that they met once, for one whole night, where they spent it talking على ذمة the person who came up with the rumour. Gibran on the other hand had a very busy love life that was characterized by a series of intense affaires with different partners. At the same time he was corresponding with May, sometimes very emotional and romantic letters, he was seriously dating a woman in Boston, having affaires left right and centre, with several girls and corresponding seriously with another lady!

So since their love story was only platonic it never crystallized into anything concrete, they loved each other without really loving each other. There was no passion, obviously since they never met and if the rumour was true they only spent one night together, that was not passionate enough because it never led to any other nights.  There was also no commitment what so ever because of his bohemian lifestyle and her strict feminist views and belief that love must lead to marriage other wise it is not love at all.  Beside the fact that they both were in love with other people. And whether in my idealistic phase or in my cynical one, the one thing that remains unchanged is that relationships without passion is not the kind of love I am talking about here.

The third man in her life was Abas Mahmoud il Aqad. A man that was the object of my fantasies since I was very young.  His dark skin and good looks, his defiance to the school system that he never finished, yet managed to become Abas Mahmoud il Aqad,  one of the most intelligent and intellectual men in our culture, all were elements that made me completely fancy Al Aqad, even if he is not a person in my life, yes the very same kind of feelings girls have for Enrique Iglesias,  Orlando Bloom or that cute Egyptian actor il sa2a..  May and Al Aqad had a very flirty relationship, where they dated on weekly basis… he wrote her lots of beautiful poems, and she wrote him lots of naughty letters… however, their love died in the crib, because she called him once and the phone was answered by Sarah, a woman that he fancied!

I guess what I am trying to say here, is that love is something very volatile, it comes and goes, and maybe it is time for girls to move away from this Cinderella notion, because I promise human beings are too weak and curious to fall in love only once.

T. literally spent these days walking between Bond street and Tottenham court Road, which happens to be one of the most famous shopping areas in the world! So YES a woman’s process of redefining herself, definitely includes  a major redefinition of her wardrobe! We turned from residents to tourists with her; we have been walking around London, attending musicals and concerts and posing for pictures in front of every high building!!

On the fourth day, T. confessed that one of the reasons she came here is to think of a marriage proposal that is perplexing her. The guy is smart, successful, ambitious, extremely good looking, funny and from a very good family. There is one little problem though, she feels that he is not in love with her personally, but he is in love the high score she made on his list of requirements. When she explained this, the visual image that was created in my head was rather funny. Here I imagined him sitting with her in a romantic setting explaining his principals in life, asking her questions and ticking on a list in front of him. for some reason I just remembered all those  guys explaining their principals in life to their girlfriends while  walking in the gardens of jame3 il jam3a (the Mosque of the University). I wonder if the gardens still attract these romantic souls?? In our case, the perplexity comes because 3arees il ghafleh! is too good to pass, especially that her parents like him, and she is in the right frame of mind, since all her friends are getting engaged and she feels the social pressure.

I am one of those people who are really unromantic! I don’t believe in fairy tales and happily ever after. I believe that relationships need hard work to flourish, they need wise judgements and  intelligent choices, but in this case I could not help wondering if two people made a very intelligent choice based on a very well defined list of requirements would that bring happiness to them? Would that be enough to ensure that the marriage would be successful? And where should a person draw the line of what is enough and what is not?! Just thought I should share….

I am reading one of the most intriguing studies ever, it is called Tearoom Trade. It is an eye opener to a shocking world I knew nothing about. And here I thought I am a cultured, well read individual… it is funny that being at school is a very humbling experience. It makes a person feel that the more she knows the less she really knows… perplexing hah? time to sleep… it is 2:30 AM and my eyes are closing on their own.