The wrong end of the tab.., p.21
The Wrong End of the Table, page 21
I’m not talking about large-scale things like the zombie apocalypse or a structure fire or how the universe will expand and one day break apart.5 My worries are usually inwardly focused, such as “How career-damaging is it when on my first day at a job a guy walked by my office to introduce himself and I asked, ‘And what do you do here?’ only to find out he owned the company?”
These issues accumulate and leave me little time to worry about “realer” things, like watching the safety demonstration on a plane (I promptly fall asleep). But when it comes to the tiny minutiae of me, or anything about my person, you can bet I’ve spent time analyzing them to death and figuring out a way to solve them.
Forget the phrase “Necessity is the mother of invention.” My motto is “Neurosis is the mother of invention.”
Because of all the time I’ve spent trying to fix what’s wrong instead of just letting it be, I feel I’m well equipped to offer some how-to advice, Dear Reader.
Disclaimer: this chapter contains issues of a sensitive nature that Arab girls aren’t supposed to talk about, such as pit stains, nip slips, and alternate uses for tampons.
“Headlights.”
Not actually a nip slip since no actual skin is exposed, a headlight is still embarrassing and attracts unwanted attention, especially when you’re in eighth grade. I’m talking about the problem most young women had before padded T-shirt bras were invented—it resulted from the combination of a too-thin bra under a cotton shirt in a cold classroom. And even though you might be in an all-girls school in Saudi Arabia, an educational institution is still no place for “Wet T-Shirt Night” at Bobo’s Tavern.6
Here’s how you can take matters into your own hands, so to speak: soft double-ply toilet paper folded into small squares should take care of any headlights in the case of a padded bra malfunction. Just be careful that they don’t look like you’ve got lumpy beanbags in your shirt.
Perspiration.
If you grew up in the seventies and eighties, you may remember the deodorant commercial that warned, “Never let ’em see you sweat.” It stressed me out. I desperately wanted to never let them see me sweat. Up until I turned thirty-two and discovered clinical-strength deodorant, I couldn’t figure out how not to sweat. As an Arab, I often use my hands to talk, producing large, sweeping gestures that may reveal a giant circle of sweat pooling under my armpits. If you’re like me, you might find this so embarrassing that you stop engaging in philosophical debates in college—because you literally can’t communicate without using your hands to talk. During the winters, I kept my coat on indoors to mask any dampness, but the problem was I got overheated, which caused sweat to bead up above my brow and frizz out my hair—another major issue among Middle Eastern girls.
I can tell you that I missed out on some fantastic college conversations with affable young men. Stupid sweat glands. I tried using dress shields, but I was always sweating through the adhesive, and the shields would end up migrating. For a while, I had the bright idea of folding a paper towel in half lengthwise and tucking it under my arm, held in place by my sleeve. As long as I didn’t gesture too much, I was high and dry! I congratulated myself on being a genius … until the one time I wore loose-fitting sleeves. I’d found myself engaging one-on-one with the hottest guy in the poli-sci circle on campus. We were so in sync and connecting so well that I swear I heard wedding bells. But then I made a gesture and felt something slip. I looked down and didn’t notice anything awry, so I continued, gesturing animatedly. That’s when Hot Guy started chuckling. I looked down and discovered the paper towel rising from my cleavage like some great white shark’s fin. My almost-future husband commented on my great comic timing, which in hindsight was a compliment, but at the time I wanted nothing more than to be taken seriously. I excused myself and never saw him again.
More “in a pinch” ideas you can thank my neurosis for:
• Tampons placed in shoes can relieve the pain of pointy or tight shoes—just please make sure you use dry, unused ones.
• Sanitary pads are good clothes defuzzers. See above caveat.
• Sharpies are not advised to be used to cover gray hairs, mainly for the carcinogenic aspects. Hats are better.
• If you need to quickly polish your black shoes while you’re rushing out the door and accidentally stain your beige carpet, then try to remove the stain with bleach, thus causing a big white blotch—don’t fret! Black coffee poured directly on the white blotch will camouflage it enough that you get your deposit back when it’s time to move out of your apartment.
• It’s never a good idea to give your shirt a “quick press with the iron” while you’re wearing it—even if you turn the iron on the lowest setting. Take off your shirt instead.
• The third time will not be the charm when you attempt this same thing thinking you’ve got it down this time.
• If you find a roach in your floor fan, there’s no reason to throw the entire fan in the garbage, since “cockroach juju” is probably not a real thing.
• A tiny lemon rind makes an excellent earring back—and you also have garnish for salad. (Just kidding about that last part; that’s gross.)
• Used coffee grounds work as an amazing and invigorating (albeit messy) body scrub.
On second thought, with the exception of the last item, consider this a how-not-to list, courtesy of my previous mistakes.
Happy to do a public service.
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1 I have a recurring dream where I’m visiting a foreign country and I witness an explosion. The sole survivor is a young child of about five years old, and when we lock eyes, we know it’s meant to be…. Okay, I admit I watch too many movies.
2 From what I’ve read. I don’t know them personally.
3 Don’t you just love my friends?
4 Unless they’re placed high up on the shelves.
5 See: Annie Hall.
6 A fictional place. Any comparison to a real venue is coincidental.
41
A Conversation with God (When You’re Sick as Hell)
We’ve all done it. Woken up in the middle of the night sick with the worst headache or stomachache or hangover and made desperate bargains with God about how we’ll promise to change our ways if He just takes the pain away.
Typically, I’m not like the people who prefer to find God during a crisis. In fact, I spent a lot of time talking to Him when I was younger, usually during my prayers: “Dear God, protect Mom, Dad, Brother, and Sister. Let me do well on my history test, and let Robbie like me and want to do paint-by-numbers together.”
When my family moved to Saudi Arabia, I learned to do proper Muslim prayers, complete with the ceremonial ablutions,1 and I enjoyed my daily talks with God. As I got older, and particularly after we left Saudi Arabia and moved back to Kentucky, it became harder to pray five times a day, and I tried at least to do it in the morning. I’m not proud of how lax I got, but the truth is, life got busy. And like any relationship, if you don’t work at it, it slips away.
I still continue to have my chats with God; it’s just that the platform has evolved, becoming more spiritual and less ritualistic. I’ve often found my connection to Him when I’ve been out in nature, for example, witnessing a gorgeous sunset over the bluffs of Palos Verdes, California. Other times, it’s been in an amazing piece of music.2 Sometimes I’d get both together and kapow! It would be sublime.
But of course, I’ve also had my fair share of moments of pleading with Him when I’ve been so sick I felt as if I were about to die.
So, there I was one night, kneeling over the toilet. I had been jolted out of a deep sleep an hour earlier by the most hellish migraine of my life. Nausea. Vertigo. All forms of hell. And now, forty-five minutes into that tortuously slow descent to death, I realized the bittersweet hilarity of the situation:
“I’m holding my own hair out of my face as I’m throwing up.”
I said this out loud to no one and laughed and cried hysterically from the absurdity. Then I started laughing and crying about the fact that I’d had enough composure to find the situation hilarious in spite of the fact that I was clearly dying. Then one of my cats wandered in—possibly having heard me talking out loud—and I started thinking about how cats were terrible in situations like these because they didn’t have thumbs to help me hold back my hair. And then I got scared and thought, Maybe I’m already dead. If these weren’t afterlife thoughts, they were clearly ones of delirium, which is often the stage before you flatline.
Either way, I needed to consume something quick. I dragged myself to the kitchen to look for some cola and crackers to calm my queasy stomach but quickly discovered I had neither in my pantry because I’d recently adopted a no-sugar, no-carb diet. I cursed myself and my idiotic California lifestyle and shook some sea salt into my hand and swallowed it. It helped.
As the high of my purge wore off, I started feeling crappy again, so I drank some water and got back in bed. As I lay there, I realized I hadn’t properly prayed in a long time. I figured it was the right time to reconnect with the Guy Upstairs. It had been a while, and I had a lot on my mind.
1. Dear God, it’s been a while, and I have a lot on my mind. I hadn’t intended on this being our first encounter back. I’m sorry for my current state.
2. Please, God, don’t let me die alone.
3. If you let me live, I won’t mess around with ironic Halloween costumes (like Male Hipster Douchebag, especially when the mustache makes me look like Saddam Hussein).
4. I won’t leave the house in a baseball cap, yoga pants, or shapeless jeans.
5. God, if you let me live, I will start actively looking for someone to settle down with.
6. I will make eye contact with the businessman at the gas station.
7. I will go where the men are.
8. Where do the men hang out these days?
9. Should I start going to the Mosque?
10. I’m going to start going to the Mosque.
11. What am I thinking? You can’t meet men in the Mosque. Sorry, God, it’s this migraine.
12. Should I join a softball league?
13…. I don’t like playing softball.
14. Maybe a pottery-making class.
15. Do straight men make pottery?
16. My girlfriends are great about connecting me with dudes. Perhaps my lazy male friends need to step it up. They’re the ones with more dudes as friends.
17. Or my gay friends. Do they have straight male friends?
18. Am I hanging out with my gay friends too much?
19. Karen says I should stop hanging out with my gay friends. I’m going to listen to her.
20. But my gay friends are awesome.
21. God, I’m worried I won’t find anyone anytime soon.
22. How the fuck have I not met anyone yet?
23. Am I putting out a vibe that says, “I don’t want to meet anyone”?
24. I will ask Karen for a reality check about the vibe I’ve been putting out.
25. Maybe I should call Mom and ask her.
26. Scratch that. That’s a horrible idea.
27. However, I will listen to her and stop wearing gray and black.
28. I will also wear more blush, like she wants me to.
29. Maybe even get my eyebrows done.
30. I’ll get back on the online dating sites.
31. This time, I won’t be funny in my profile. I will be serious and mysterious.
32. I won’t click on anyone whose profile picture features a bicep tattoo.
33. I won’t click on anyone whose profile picture shows him playing guitar on stage or holding a microphone (unless he’s doing a TED talk).
By the time I got to this point, I was feeling relaxed, mainly because my migraine meds were finally kicking in. And I realized the crux of it—I needed someone in my life to hold my hair as I threw up.3
I had stepped out of the dating scene about a year prior, aware I needed a break to take care of myself. Clearly, now it seemed my priorities had reorganized. It was time to refocus my attention.
I fell asleep, happy in the knowledge that, beginning tomorrow, my life was about to change.
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1 The ceremonial act of washing parts of the body before prayer.
2 To any young Muslims reading this, don’t let anyone tell you that it’s blasphemous to find God in music. The Holy Quran is often recited in a melodious voice, resembling singing. Just make sure you don’t find yourself dancing to this.
3 Okay, I’m not being completely literal. But what you do want is to have a guy in the other room, located a safe distance away, waiting for you to emerge so he can present you with a bowl of soup. Like that scene in Sex and the City when the strong, independent Samantha gets sick with the flu and realizes how nice it would be to have a man around to bring her liquids.
42
Love & the Search for Meaning in the Universe, Pt. 1 (The Wrong Kind of Saddle)
When I woke up the next morning, I was still loopy from the drugs but also psyched that I knew exactly what I had to do: not only to jump-start my love life, but also to steer it into that two-car garage next to a white-picket-fenced-in home. The previous night’s conversation with God was justification enough; it’d brought about the sudden realization that I was ready—to be coupled up, to find a nice guy, to find THE ONE.
There were just too many benefits to being coupled up. In addition to having someone hold your hair up while you puked, you also had someone to make you food, buy you tissues, and scoop out the cat litter box. Other benefits of having a boyfriend/husband/domestic partner:
• You have a standing date for holidays, as well as any revival Loverboy concerts.
• You have a built-in excuse for when someone asks you to do something or make a commitment: you can use the whole “I have to check with my other half” thing.1
• You can take advantage of two-for-one deals on plane tickets and sushi bars.
I made coffee, reloaded the dating apps on my phone, and sat down to update my information, thus launching “Dating Ayser 2.0: Back in the Saddle.” It was a new, formidable me: smart, serious, ready for a long-term relationship. I was out of my experimental phase of dating and now looking for something real. I repeated my mantra for swiping right:
No tattoos. No microphones. No guitars.
While we’re at it, no photos of anyone in front of Machu Picchu.2
I swiped right several times, and if there was a match, I let them contact me. Sometimes, I would simply write, “hello.”
While I made my move online, several more well-intentioned friends also set me up with guys they knew. And thus began Round Two.
TIM: Writer friend of a writer friend. Nice guy. Wanted to talk about writing and only writing, including the process of writing, such as where I best got my inspiration and what I ate to reward myself and … snooooze. Needless to say, this relationship wasn’t going anywhere outside the writing room.
Because of Tim, my friends coined the name boardroom to refer to a guy who carries on ad nauseam about work.
CARL: Friend of a friend. Another setup. On paper, hilarious and adorable and charming; in person, he reminded me of that singing, dancing frog from the old Merrie Melodies cartoon who refused to perform once brought in front of the talent agent. Actually, to be perfectly honest, we both became that frog when we met face-to-face. Neither of us had anything to talk about. On one of our dates, we went to see a movie, so we only had forty-five minutes to engage with each other—and still, we couldn’t do it!
Once, after a trip to Brazil, Carl gifted me with a fuzzy empanada coin purse.3 It was such a sweet gesture that I gave him a third chance, but again there was no chemistry.
So, my friends coined the name fuzzy empanada for a guy who is great on paper, but not so in real life. I moved on.
BRAD: Met online. Direct and blunt, which was refreshing as I was tired of the wishy-washy dudes I’d encountered as of late. I should have known not to proceed when, after giving him my phone number and chatting with him for the first time, I asked him for his last name and he responded, “Do you want my social security number, too!?” This was a clear sign to not go through with meeting this individual, but I’m the queen of giving someone the benefit of the doubt. I sucked it up and went out with him.
At dinner, as I eagerly dug into the roasted brussels sprouts appetizer the restaurant was famous for, Brad announced he liked submissive women. Not thinking twice that this might refer to a sexual preference, I carried on with the date.4 The restaurant was very loud, so I kept needing to lean in,5 literally, in order to hear him. And I’m sorry to say he was not gifted in the sweet breath department. I held my spicy drink under my nostrils like a nosegay, which had the unfortunate effect of making me sneeze. I developed a sort of dance, swaying back out of range to avoid his breath whenever he said something,6 and swinging forward when it was my turn to speak.
Once the date was over, we clapped hands in a half-shake-half-fist-bump sort of way and said good-bye. A small part of me still considered seeing him again—perhaps he’d had a bad night. Then I googled dom/sub relationships and froze in horror as I realized what I would be getting into. Just as I was about to delete his phone number from my contacts, my phone pinged with a photo text. It was from him, showing a photo of a weird-looking leather strapped contraption and the message, “You’re back IN the saddle, I HAVE a saddle …”
Suffice to say that was the end of that.
In honor of Brad, my friends coined the terms nosegay to refer to a guy who has unfortunate physical (or physiological) attributes that make him an unsuitable partner.7
MAX: Another online connection. The first time in my life I’ve been stood up on a date. Ever. I took it as a sign that I was finally taking chances in life and not playing it safe. Look, Ma, I got stood up! … And, not to play into stereotypes, but he was German,8 and so I never saw that coming.9
