A Ray of Light

So here's a news flash for you all - the world isn't ending yet, no matter how much it feels like it.

This morning I got up late for my walk.  I went to bed with a headache last night and hadn't quite kicked it, so I hit the snooze button a few more times than I should have and eventually I made it out under the tempestuous skies.  I was in my ninth lap around the track when it started raining, and as I rounded the far side of the soccer field, the end of a rainbow appeared, right over the back end of Zaisan hill.  It literally stopped me in my tracks.

One reason why I like to be alone when I take my morning walks is that this is my time to talk to my Heavenly Father.  This helps me to get my head and heart straight for the coming day, get the things that are bothering me off my chest, and renew my determination for the things I gotta do (like stop eating so many frickin' sweets).  The state of the world in general has been weighing me down a lot lately, and specifically the events that are playing out in the US, and this is the subject I was warming up to as I was on my ninth lap.

Whether you're religious or not, you've gotta be asking yourself what on earth is up with this year, but if you're familiar with scripture at all, you should be trembling in your boots.  Horde of locusts: check.  Flood: check.  Famine: in the forecast.  Plague: checkity check-check.  And last week left me feeling like civil war was on the horizon as well.  This is a fucking scary, shitty ass year.*  But there's this relatively obscure** doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, that in the year preceding The End there will be no rainbows.  One of my many LDS Facebook friends made a joke sometime since this year started, asking if someone was keeping track of rainbows, and as I stood in the rain, watching the full arc of the rainbow shimmer into existence over the valley where I live, I thought, okay.  So not this year.  Not yet.

Since the world's apparently not going to end just yet, that brings me to point B.  This goes out specifically to all of you who call yourselves after the name of Christ.  I don't know any other religious group who is as intolerant and hypocritical as y'all are being right now.  I've seen a lot of straight, white, cisgender people whose words and actions are not in line with the teachings of Christianity.  I'm trying not to turn this into a rant, so I'll just remind my fellow believers that Christ himself said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."  You may be thinking to yourself, "I've never ___ed*** anyone, and I'm not racist," but it's not enough just not to cause harm to each other.  Specifically I'd like to ask my fellow Saints, for whom part of our baptismal covenants is to mourn with those that mourn, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort if they can say that their thoughts and actions are in line with this principle.

To be fair, I'm probably not the best person to write this post.  I'm cranky and I kind of hate people - for the most part I've loved social isolation because there are far fewer people to annoy me.  But the thing is, we have to take action.  This morning I felt moved to start taking action by writing this post.  If you're wondering what you can do, one colleague suggested donating to an organization that fights against injustice - he specifically linked the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Another friend posted screenshots of a 2014 article about how to protest without going out.  Whatever you can do, do it.  My American readers, we come from a nation that rose from revolution.  If you were educated in the American school system, chances are you learned about the Boston Tea Party, and how this act of destruction helped to forge our country.  Remember that.  And ask yourself if the last line of our pledge of allegiance - with liberty and justice for all - is a fact or a myth.  Because the struggle toward that ideal is what has made our nation great, and the fight is still not won.


*I was going to write this without any obscenity because it's one of my rare churchy posts, but sometimes you just can't express things properly without swearing.
**That happens when you've had ongoing revelation for the past 200 years.
***Insert hurtful action here

The Ongoing Saga of the Missing Passport

It has been four weeks and two days since I lied about my nationality. That was the irony of the situation...par for the course, I was cross (the fact that the taxi driver smelled bad didn't help) and I didn't feel very chatty (which is always when they decide they want to talk to you), so when he asked me where I was from, I told him Canada. It was after getting out of the cab that I looked into my purse and realized my passport was gone. And I thought, "I probably deserve that." (I don't think I deserved the rubbish month I had since then, but maybe I'm just biased).

Panic did not set in immediately. I had vague recollections of cleaning my purse out, of moving it out of the zipper part because I kept looking at it and thinking, "That is going to fall out." I have a distinct memory of thinking, "I should put this in my desk." So I went into the apartment and looked for it. When I didn't find it, I decided I must have put it in my desk. It wasn't until I got to school the next day and realized it wasn't there, either, that I started to panic.

Should my passport have been in my purse? Negatory. Ever since a colleague from GDA had her purse cut off her with her passport inside on the streets of Saigon, I've been a little paranoid about losing mine. Especially as it collected more and more stamps and visas...it's like a personal history of my last nine years. But HR Twitgirl said she needed it to get me a letter of experience, and I refused to leave it in her care while waiting for the Trunchbull (our new principal) to make her way through the volcanic ash. I should have left it with her - probably she wouldn't have lost it, and if she had, she might have gotten fired over it. Oh well. Hindsight. 20/20 and all that jazz.

Failing my own resources, I started begging Heavenly Father. I told him that I wasn't up to this test of my faith, that I needed that passport back, asking him to enlighten my mind to find it, or soften the heart of the person who had it, so that it would come back to me. Then I went and I revisited every place I'd been for the week previous - the mall, Dunkin Donuts (I'd only been there the once, mind you), the golf club, Ivari, the Hilton. No sign of it (and I was not the most patient daughter of God, let me tell you). Since I was out sick on the following Sunday (four days since I discovered it was missing), I visited the police - even if no one had turned it in I needed to start the process to get the report for the consulate. It was depressing - part of me just refused to believe it was gone, but as the next week went by I had to admit it was not coming back. I went back to school on Tuesday and told HR Twitgirl that I'd lost my passport. Now, let me explain something about Twitgirl. She's 23, and inherited her position when we sacked her predecessor. She is only comparatively competent, and even though she speaks English, she tends to talk to you like you are a KG student, and has some very confusing turns of phrase. So I told her I'd lost my passport, and she said something about ten days and not to worry, they'd get the police report I needed.

I let a week go by (it had been two weeks then since I lost it), and visited her again. She hadn't lifted a finger toward dealing with it, but said she'd go to the police that afternoon. I was busy the next day, but went to her on Thursday, expecting she'd have the police report. Nope. Apparently they need the ID card of the Man at RAK ceramics (our parent company), and he wouldn't be sending that until Sunday. Sunday I checked in with her again, and she said he still didn't send it, that it would come tomorrow. >sigh< I went ahead and asked for Wednesday off and filled out the online application and lost passport notice on the Dubai consulate's website.

Now, catch this - the Evil One, in her vast state department knowledge, let me know that if I filled out the lost passport notice, that it would be cancelled immediately, and it said so on the website as well before I submitted it. Just keep that in mind for now.

HR Twitgirl finally got the ID card to the police, and informed me that it would be TEN MORE WORKING DAYS until I got the report. I was not impressed. I let my head of school know I was not going to need Wednesday off after all, and walked around for the next week with steam coming out my ears. Twitgirl told me later in the week that she'd used her "wasta" and that they'd get the report on Sunday. Okay, well, actually it was Tuesday (four weeks after losing it) before I had it in hand, but you know, details, details. The fact of the matter is, Tuesday afternoon I had the report, I had the next day off, and I had a car booked to pick up that afternoon.

And this is why I know SOMEONE out there has a sense of humor...because that afternoon I get a call from Rakesh to tell me that he'd head that one of the British school teachers had found a passport with a RAKESS visa in it. When it is too late (by a week and a half) to skip this whole rigamarole. I was locked into getting a new passport, mine has been cancelled. Here's the thing that burns me - so apparently it wasn't a BC teacher who found it, it was some Filipino that he knows, who told him about it. Now I don't know WHEN he told Mr. BC about the passport, but if it's been any length of time WHY didn't I hear about it before? And even more to the point, what kind of a douchebag holds onto a passport they found for FOUR WEEKS WITHOUT TURNING IT IN!!! Did he not think it was important enough that someone would be looking for it?

Anyways, the moral of the story is I went to the consulate yesterday (which took effort - the taxi driver didn't know where the hell he was going so I had to hoof it ten minutes longer than I should have). When I got to the security guys at 12:20 they told me to come back at 12:30. Five minutes later there was a queue twenty people long, and that really cheesed me off. Then I got a little belligerent - I kept it in my own head, mind you - but yeah, I basically realized I'm racist as I looked around at the other people in the room, who got there ahead of me, most of whom were not "real," whitebread, born-in-the-USA Americans, feeling slighted that I had to wait until they managed to sort their issues out before I could finally take care of my business - and since I speak English and have a modicum of intelligence, I would have been finished a lot faster than most of them. And I've got to go back in another week or two to pick the damn thing up. None of which would have been necessary if the loser who found my original had just turned it in. Grrrrrrrr.

On the plus side, I got to do a little shopping, since I parked at the Dubai Mall (did you know that, in addition to all the cheesy/trashy Emirati lingerie stores, Dubai Mall has a La Senza, a La Perla, and even an Agent Provocateur? Trufax. Yes, I am a Mormon girl with an underwear fetish, deal with it), and had lunch at the Macaroni Grill.