On the Passage of Time

Oh, hai.

Sooooooo... 8 months go by pretty fast, eh? Is anyone out there anymore?

I am at my desk in the Riyadh Sheraton, avoiding writing a set of implementation plans for technical and vocational education reform in the Kingdom that are due tomorrow. Mind-bogglingly, I have made about 25 trips to Saudi Arabia since April, all while working on this project.

I have a new kind-of-really-amazing boyfriend and a new flat and my very own shisha in which I concoct amazing smoky grape-mint goodness that I enjoy in my garden listening to bugs chirp. I can see the tallest building in the world and the biggest mall on the planet from my bed. I swam with dolphins at the Atlantis last weekend and when you touch them, their skin feels like plastic, which made me suspicious. I haven't really been doing enough dramatic travel recently, but I was in the US in August and sometimes, that's just good enough. I am super excited for cool (read: 90 F at 7 PM) weather and fall/winter running season, which will start with the Abu Dhabi half marathon in November and will end with the Comrades ultra in May, inshallah.

I have had some pretty big drama over the past three-quarters of a year and have drop-kicked a few things, both literally (there was a "hiya!" noise involved) and figuratively ("oh bai!"). However... I sort of feel pretty stable and content these days. Work is okay, life is good, and I just feel... settled.

When I moved to Dubai 2+ years ago, my stock line was that I planned to stay for "a year or two." And yet, having handily passed that milestone, I feel no desire to leave anytime in the foreseeable future. Sure, I've morphed into a more jaded and - if I may say so, gloriously post-colonial - expat than the wide-eyed, eager, aspirationally open-minded keener who moved here in 2007, and I don't necessarily like the implications of that. (In the words of a friend, "I don't think it's good for you to be so full of rage all the time - maybe you should move home?") But... it is what it is, and if it doesn't sound pretentious for me to say this, I think that at some point unbeknownst to me I crossed the proverbial line in the sand where it became easier and simpler and more palatable for me to stay here than to go home.

I mean, homeward-bound I will eventually be. But right now I kind of feel like... this is my life and I don't want to change it. It's not just that there's no "push" making me leave, there's also a lot of "pull" making me stay.

Especially given the new boy. Who plies me with good wine and fattening food and nice hotel getaways and ample spooning and a kind of affection and security and stability that I have never really felt before in a relationship. I find that I keep describing it as "bizarre," but I mean that in a good way.

And that's that. I have an 8 AM flight back to Dubai tomorrow AM and I am still getting emails from my team members at 2 AM Saudi time. Bleh. I will go to bed now.

If anyone is still reading, send me a smoke signal or a carrier pigeon and perhaps I will consider a resumption of this whole "blogging" thing.