Category: being

The Friday midday prayers are the most important prayers of the week – the equivalent, if there are such equivalences, of the Sunday morning service. They are followed by a sermon which can be heard as clearly across the city as the call to prayer.

I don’t understand it of course, so I always look in Friday’s paper to find out what that week’s sermon is about. This week, it’s about conserving water.

Time was I wore my glasses cos they made me look good.

Now I wear them cos they make me see good.

……
Srsly, I am thinking of starting my own greetings cards business

so, you know I left twitter, and with all the privacy carry-on, I’d leave facebook too, except I like keeping in touch with my cousins and playing wordtwist with my friends, and I don’t post any photos or anything, and plus, I just can’t sever my ties with the interwebs quite that much.

Anyhoo, I found this thing diaspora. I’ve got no real idea what it is, but it looks kind of cool, and I’ve always loved dandelion clocks, so I’m going to give it a try.

Sorry I’ve not had a chance to upload my photographs. It’s the thought of all the cords. It makes my heart race and my head thump. Cords suck. As opposed to the chords eldest lad has been messing with on the keyboard this week. Those chords soothe my head and calm my beating heart.

Do you know what’s stressful? Deadlines that’s what. Specially when you’re an uptight control freak with compulsive tendencies. All good living in the moment, that which doesn’t kill us practice, but not good for the knots in my back and my neck and my stomach.

On a lighter note, I am very much hoping that tonight I will have energy to upload photos of my weekend so that you can see what I did on Friday. It will leaving you gasping in amazement, wide-mouthed with shock and perhaps even a little in awe of my awesomeness.

You will have to come back to see, because YOU WILL NEVER GUESS.

PS Unless you are my friend on facebook, in which case you already know, but don’t tell anyone, okay…and if you aren’t my friend on facebook, doesn’t that just prove that you are missing out?

Some things I have done instead of working on my short story:

1. put a beer in the freezer;
2. refereed a(nother fucking) pokemon dispute;
3. untwisted the cord connecting the computer to the internet (an aesthetic, not technical, issue);
4 listened to that interview Tony Abbott did on the 7.30 Report the other night;
5. felt father turning in his grave;
6. started worrying (again) about the state of the world and what if – I mean, really, what if the Libs win, because, quite apart from anything else, I will have to stay living here;
7. had sms conversation with friend;
8. got beer out of freezer, opened freezer-cold beer, downed freezer-cold beer;
9. worried some more about the Libs winning the next election
10. given eldest boy his piano lesson (on which situation I will tell you more tomorrow).

Update one:
by last night, eldest boy had returned to form: ‘Why would I spend my money on gold? It doesn’t do anything.’

Update two:
the gold machine has sold out – at least of the cheap stuff. Sorry, you’ll have to wait until they refill it to read all about Adelaide in front of the Gold Machine.

I have deactivated my twitter account. Again. The first time I did it, I thought I was deleting it, but then I managed to get it back, so I think it just sits in there waiting for me to change my mind. Again.

This isn’t some ‘the interwebs its all wack and woon’. For what it’s worth, I think you can spend a lot of time on the internet and still get your novel written; that you can be a switched on mother and tweet; and you can choose to tweet over choosing to do something else because tweeting is, for one reason or another, better for you than whatever else it is you were going to do.

I think twitter is fun, and I get its appeal.

For other people.

It’s just not for me.

Firstly, it’s the time thing. Not so much that it takes time away from other things. More that other things leave me with little online presence time these days and without putting in the time, twitter really is no fun.

I feel like I’ve always just missed something. Like I’m at a party, and I go into the kitchen, just when the action has moved to the hall, and I get to the hall only to find that everyone is on the patio. And so on. This is exacerbated by the time difference for me…by the time I get home, most people I know are either off to bed or not up yet. I log on and spend half an hour reading about what just happened in other people’s days, but never quite being able to get the thread.

Which leads me to the rather pathetic and tragic part of my story. The cool kids. When I’m on twitter, I feel like it’s full of cool kids, and I’m not one.

Now, I’m not saying that this is the case, that it really is cool kids and others. I’m not bagging twitter or the many brilliant twitterers around. Like I say, I get twitter’s appeal, I reckon it’s fun, and I in no way attribute the end of the world to twitter (not when we’ve got Tony Abbott running around in his budgie smugglers doing a better job of ending the world).

It’s just I’ve never, ever felt that way with blogging – and that’s not because I am one of the cool kids, that’s because I’m forty years old and I long ago gave up caring about shit like that. Didn’t I? I don’t know what the difference is, but with blogging, I’ve never felt, ‘what about me?’ On twitter, I was starting to feel that way and honestly? If you are forty years old and you’re worrying about shit like that, then there’s something going on, and you need to do something about it. Because that’s what’s good about being forty. You’re not twenty. And you’re certainly not sixteen.

For a while, when I realised I was getting weird about twitter, I decided to use it differently. I think probably the more you tailor it, concentrating on food tweets or writing tweets or knitting tweets, the better it is. So I tried that. I tried to use it as my source of news, following every news source and NGO and media outlet I could find. I did find out stuff, but then I realised my collection of news and facts and information was no less random than it was before. I was better off checking out The New Yorker website once a week than following the link to the article that someone else was telling me I should read. Sure, I found out about the crack in the aquarium at the Dubai Mall pretty much straight away. But actually, I already knew about it, because my friend’s husband had just phoned her.

Besides, I’ve only got so much to say, and I’m not sure I’ve got enough for twitter and facebook and my blog (and not to forget I need to save some things for any fiction or essays or memoir that I might one day write). There are different people in each of those forums, that’s true, and I am endlessly fascinating, what with the gold-dispensing ATMs and the many different ways I have to gripe about the sand and the heat, but all the same, I do hear myself get a bit repetitive. Like I’m the person at the dinner party retelling the same story she told at brunch last week and at coffee the week before.

I could have let it go dormant, just sit there gathering dust. But then it sits in the back of my mind saying, ‘You should oughtta be doing something about me.’ So, it’s better to deactivate it. It would be even better to delete it. If I thought that was in any way possible.

Just now on my way into work, I heard on the radio that Emirates Palace (which is not, in fact, a Palace, but rather a palatial hotel) has installed the world’s first gold dispensing machine. 175 dirhams will buy you one gram.

In the interests of good blogging, I shall go and check it out. There’s an embroidery exhibition I’ve been meaning to visit anyway.

There’s an article on the front page of the paper. You can read it here (I recommend it).

Howcome it only takes five minutes to spend an hour in my google reader?