Losing Control

The good news is, I've got the remote con back for my projector. The bad news is, it took me all evening to check the last place I would look...

Today was a bit of a wash. My partner in crime was in Dubai trawling for jobs, so I really didn't have anything exciting to do today. I went to church for the first time this week in the Mormonmobile. Yes, that's right: the Mormonmobile. One of the plethora of Mormon RAKESS teachers decided it would be a GREAT idea for us to engage one of the school vans to take us to church and back every Friday. I'll admit it has its good sides - like the fact that we leave (approximately) a half hour after the meetings end, rather than, oh, two hours, and it only costs 15 dirhams each. But on the other hand, I'm enclosed with even more people but less legroom. Oh, and I spent the entire ride back entertaining the Heusners' three year-old. Sometimes the fact that every child loves me can be a burden. However, since I had to teach Sunday School this week and didn't have the money to rent a car or take a taxi, I took - for the first time in my life - the church bus.

I should have started reading my next lesson when I got home. Socrates once told me that the elder Vigliotti girl is too smart to be Mormon, and while I disagree because I've known some fricking smart Mormon kids, she is definitely going to keep me on my toes. But no - I got home and went to the computer, where I'd downloaded the first episode of the last season of Lost, got it on the memory stick, and plugged it into the projector, only to realize I had no idea where my remote con was. I started to turn the living room upside down, but I was lethargic in spite of the fact that I slept through sacrament meeting. Also, I was fasting, and as the locals will tell you, sleep is a great way to make the experience more pleasant! So I slept about two hours this afternoon, and woke up to look around for the remote again, and, failing to find it, went in search of food and a few things from Carrefour.

One of the things was alternatives to "fizzy drinks." I keep failing to give them up, but I'm going to try again. Don't ask why. I like coke. Maybe I'll just become a social drinker - I'll go on my Thursday night binges once a week. I kind of like that idea. In the meantime, I've got Tang. Orange tang for the nostalgia of it and fresh baked crybabies in my great-mom's house as a child, although I was pleasantly surprised to find that it comes in mango and pineapple and I think one other flavor, as well.

The other thing was ice cream, which seems to have survived in spite of the fact that I forgot to put it away for...uhmmmm...two hours after I got home. I finally gave up on finding the remote and managed to manually load Lost. Five minutes before the end, Socrates called me back and so I had to restart it since I haven't figured out how to pause or fast-forward the damn thing manually, and let it play through again until it got to the right spot. Then I started looking for the remote again, incidentally finding the ice cream was sitting on the counter. I was upending furniture, which apparently involves me tripping backwards over my upside-down end table (again, I found myself cursing the fact that no one was there to be amused by it and/or be in awe of the fact that I managed to do so gracefully and with a minimum of self-damage - MAD NINJA SKILLS!!!) when my eye landed on the bag of cheetos I munched on throughout my sick day, and I thought, "Surely not." Surely so. There on top of the cheetos was my remote con, a little cheesy but none the worse for wear. Yeah. That's what my day has been like.

Yesterday I had my first sick day in five years. I probably could have toughed it out, but I didn't. Sometimes you just need to stay home and take care of yourself. So I did, and it was good.

The Birth of Home Entertainment

Have I ever told you about my great plan? I don't think I have. When I accepted my mom's generous gift of her "gun" (the laptop she splurged out on when my Dad bought himself a new gun last year), complete with cd/dvd burner, I decided that the days of big clunky televisions were at an end. Also, because RAKESS doesn't provide them for teachers, so I didn't want to spend money on something that I was just going to end up leaving behind. No, I was going to be advanced in one aspect for once and think about getting a projector, about setting up a home theater, and this plan was confirmed when I got to my apartment and saw my beautiful, tall, blank wall. On Saturday, I went to the GITex Expo (chingus: think of Yongsan or Techno Mart, but put it all on one level and clean it up a little. Also, no ahjjusshis) in Dubai with Poonam (whose idea it was - she needed a laptop), Melissa, and Rakesh. I was really going because I wanted to spend time with Poonam, but I figured as long as I was there, I should see what I could do about a projector. And so I went ahead and seized the day, because the projector came with speakers and a 500GB hard drive, a carrying case, and - ooooohh! - a portable screen.

Yeah, seriously, what am I supposed to do with THAT??? But all in all it was a good deal, and let me tell you, watching movies on it ROCKS. My current plan for my next soiree is a bit of a potluck party on Halloween and we'll all watch the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Classic.

What else did I do this weekend? Stayed up WAY too late on Thursday night (or woke up way too early Friday morn) - but karaoke was on the table, so I went for it, and it was great. Friday morning saw me on my way to church with Tamsin and her son (Rick stayed home to take care of their daughter), and in spite of the fact that my lungs were a little tarry from the previous night's atmosphere and I was very tired, it was probably the most spiritual I've felt in a long time; I was actually happy to be there. Here I am, finally about able to get myself a license and car and the freedom to attend church in Dubai, and I'm thinking that I might just stay in Sharjah. As long as I don't end up with the kind of calling I have to be there for EVERY Friday (which would give me the chance to visit Dubai every once in a while and make contact with the singles there), I think I could live with it. And I'd feel guilty abandoning my friend Kellie there, now that she's been called as the youth Sunday school teacher. So yeah.

On the way home Melissa called in a panic trying to locate her camera. In answering her questions in the car I had to implicate myself a bit more than I would have wanted to in front of Tamsin and John. I told them on the way in that I was really tired from being up too late the night before, but I didn't want to go into the gory details. Mind you, I didn't actually do anything wrong. But there is this thing Mormons talk about every little once in a while called the appearance of evil. Oh, and people have a tendency to justify. See, even though you and I know I didn't do anything wrong, the kid doesn't know that, and I don't want him using my bad behavior to justify his own. Heck, even if he did, he might think, "Well, if Ms. Becky (Sister Becky? I don't know what these guys should call me) can go out with her friends and happily coexist with their choices, then so can I." Except Ms. Becky's had a lot of practice at politely declining and fairly supportive friends who've never pressured her to join in, and I don't know many high schoolers that mature.

When she started to recount her escapades of the night before I hurried her off the phone...not only did I know I was going to be hearing about them the remainder of the night, but there was no way either of them needed to overhear any of that, not to mention I was only five minutes from home. When I got there the two of us decided to call off our outing to Dubai that night (because her crush changed his mind about coming, because I'd only slept two hours the night before, and because we haven't really seen much of Poonam lately, due to the fact that she's a workaholic, and there was just no WAY I was going to be able to go along for GITex if we were out late the night before. I felt really at peace about the decision to call off a night of what passes for debauchery in my world for a friend.