Pizza Crisis

I just had dinner, it was another one of Nahida's home-made pizzas. But lately, the cheese isn't melting like it should instead it just goes dry, hard and rather bland. When I approached Nahida on the matter, she explained that there's no foreign-made (usually Turkish) Mozzarella cheese in the neighbourhood. But hold on, I'm sure I saw some Saudi made stuff in another neighbourhood, must give directions to Nahida. But why can't Iraqis make decent Mozzarella cheese in the first place. The sanctions are over, it's been five years, someone must of been making decent Mozzarella by now.

Saturday Night

Oh joy! I'm bored again. It's around eleven at night, and I'm yawning and I might as well go to sleep. Lately though, I'm finding it hard to convince myself to sleep before midnight. Once it's midnight though, I don't have any trouble going to sleep which is good. I wonder how I'll wake up tomorrow since Nahida's gone off to the farm for the night. It might be so hard, maybe I can wake myself up knowing that no one is there to wake me up. I've been waking up early everyday lately too. I haven't woken up in the middle of the day in ages, and I'm beginning to imagine that it must be so good.

Piling On and On

Yesterday, our department from college along with another one held a lunch-time party at a restaurant, the last installment of our graduation celebrations even though we've yet to really graduate. I was in a really bad mood that day. Nahida kept bugging me about my tie and collar not being straight before I leaving the house. Then on the way, after picking up a couple of the guys the car stalled a couple of time. Whilst waiting for the car to choose to work I figured that I could get the car running using a little trick which worked.

It seemed we were the first to get there. Not even the organizers were there. We walked in and having been here before I started to the the guys there to get a drink before anyone else showed knowing it was going to be an alcohol-free party. I knew this place had booze because the last time I came here was with Farah and I ordered a bottle of wine.

The guys told me to wait and then a couple of US soldiers walked in asking for the owner. They were pointed to the back and then came out to the bar to buy a bottle of booze each. After they left, I too got my fix. For 10,000 dinars ($7) I was poured a miniature Johnny Walker whiskey in a glass. The guy serving me the drink warned me that the bar was to be closed during the party and showed me to hide the drink in the neat shelf below the bar.

One of the organizers and a friend of his showed up shortly, and I had to greet him with a kiss with my whiskey breath but he didn't say a word. After I discreetly had one more drink, his friend asked me what I had to drink with a big grin. I denied that I had drunk anything and he grinned even more and pointed out that I had whiskey on my breath. He went on to brag about having drunk half a bottle and I gave some discourse on drinking in moderation is best. My concern was not to give reason for the organizer to get pissed off and make a drama.

I never drink Johnny Walker whiskey, it didn't take me much time to realise why. I started to feel tired and was becoming very hungry. Fortunately the appetizers came in early and I had myself a feast. After which I became quite sleepy. Of the guys, I think I danced the least that day. My class seemed to have to split into two groups whilst dancing and I danced with both. More moments of me that I really don't want to see on tape.

The party had started at around eleven in the morning and finished around four-thirty in the afternoon. Half-way through I was struggling to keep myself awake. But it did end and the weather was nice enough not to have to pretend that the air conditioning in the car works. The air conditioning needs to get repaired again. Dropped the guys home and then got home and laid my ass on the couch in agony. Nahida was still upset with me for having a go at her that morning. I was tired and grumpy to care.

I was grumpy and tired the rest of the night and was wondering why was it that my ass was hurting so much. It had been a couple of days since I notice a slight pain, but it was noticeably there now. My trouble was that I couldn't quite pinpoint it. Today too, it was quite obvious to everyone that I looked exhausted and it was all because of that annoying pain coming from my butt. I had figured that the pain was coming from above my anus and that I must've bruised my butt but I'm certain I never did fall on it or anything.

It wasn't till I got back home today that I had myself a good look at my butt in the mirror that it became clear that I've got piles yet again. So I dashed out in the car to find me some medicine pretending that the air conditioning works. I got myself a different brand from the one I got last time. But was disappointed to find that it didn't have that relieving menthol ingredient. The pain has subsided however. And another pain, Nahida, is back. It was so nice that she left to Shamiya today, leaving the house to me. So unfortunate that she had to come back the same day.

I'm a G Now... But Oh Nooo!

Yes! Last Wednesday, I finally got my new G type passport. The one I've been waiting over a year to get. I was surprised to see that it wasn't the traditional green like the old ones and that instead was a navy blue. The weather was quite nice that day too, it even rained when I went back to college. I was so happy to get my new passport. But maybe, I should have paid attention to the omen of the day before...

The day before, Nahida showed me a couple pair of shoes of mine that had been taken to the shoe polisher. One of the pairs was fine even though it seemed like the shoe polisher might have over done it with that black mucky stuff, and the other which was brown and had become black too. How the shoe polisher could've been so thick is beyond me. I got a little mad saying I bought those shoes simply because I didn't have any brown shoes.

So I was really happy to finally have a passport and thus finally granted the right to travel out of this god-forsaken country should I ever be motivated enough to get off of my ass. I showed it to all my friends, saying "look I got my new passport!".

Nahida had warned me to check for any mistakes on the passport. And I swear that when I got it at the passport office, I did take a good look at it and noticed that they had misspelled my mother's name in English. My British passport doesn't include that bit of information and as long it was spelled right in Arabic I guessed it wasn't a big deal. Nahida mentioned that some people didn't even have their own faces on their passports. And as far as I was concerned my biggest worry was that they have my name misspelled in English.

It wasn't till I was on my way home, gleeing at my new passport that I finally saw that they had the month of my birth wrong. It said 01 instead of 10. Now, that's a screwed up mistake, the kind that makes it useless. It probably wouldn't be such a big deal for most, but passport control would be comparing it to my other passport and would notice the discrepancy. And maybe passport control has some kind of record on the computer they use too.

I just don't understand how I wasn't able to notice the mistake when I first got it. What screwed up part of my mind got me to convince myself that there was nothing wrong with the passport when I was inspecting it at the passport office. I know that that "01" caught my eye but then my subconsciousness somehow hi-jacked my mind and got me to ignore it. This kind of thing always happens to me when I get over-excited about something.

Nahida said she's going to take it back to the passport office on Sunday to fix it. From what I've understood from some of my friends is that the passport office would make a corrective note on the comments or something page, but that too isn't really great. I wonder if the date of birth is included in the machine readable bit.

Yesterday, I had a fight with Suzy over the phone because she's my partner in my project group and hasn't contributed at all up till now with something that doesn't really focus on our subject. She then tried to blame it on our other project partner saying that whenever she wanted to help type something up that the other partner would say that she'd do it herself and that I never asked her to do any real work either but had only asked her to read stuff which she didn't end up reading. I really didn't want to call her to fight with her but it ended up looking like that.

On the bright side though, I don't have to worry about impulsively flying off to anywhere since I still don't have a valid passport.