Marjorie in Qatar

Something astonishingly good just happened, which sadly reveals me to be astonishingly dim-witted.

I was just videotaping myself playing guitar in order to critique my form (zomg am I holding the guitar awkwardly). At the end of the song the pick flew out of my fingers and seemingly disappeared, and (since it was my last pick) I spent 15 minutes searching for it to no avail. Eventually I concluded that my cat had found it first and run off with it, as is his wont.

Oddly enough, it took me a while to have the obvious idea of watching the video of me dropping it, which revealed that it had gotten wedged in a funny corner between two couch cushions on our L-shaped couch. When I pulled the cushion up, I found the pick -- sitting next to the Buddhist rosary I lost back in July.

I bought this rosary in Hong Kong and wore it all summer -- while traveling, while hiking, while cutting my nephew's umbilical cord -- and when I lost it I was distraught to a hilariously ironic degree, given that it exists in order to remind me of the Buddhist virtue of non-attachment. Nevertheless, when I failed to find it the morning after I returned from England, I assumed I'd left it on the plane. I ordered a similar shu zhu online from Singapore, which I've been wearing ever since. But it turns out that the original one was within about a foot of my normal evening nestling spot the whole time.

How is it possible that I haven't looked under that cushion in three months? I am utterly bewildered. I know I looked there when the shu zhu first turned up missing, so it must have migrated a bit since then, but still.... Now I'm really happy the guitar pick flew out of my hand when it did! Thank you, Neutral Milk Hotel, for making me rock out so hard!

Today, for the first time, Justin and I did something that almost all of our friends have been doing since they moved to Qatar: we hired someone to come clean our home.

The nanny of some of our friends was looking for some part-time work on the side, now that their kids are both in school a couple mornings a week. So Flora's going to come clean our house every Tuesday morning, for QR25 ($7) an hour.

I still have very mixed feelings about this venture. It was pretty awesome to walk into the house this evening and see dust-free furniture, gleaming floors, and cat-fur-free furniture (YAY). And Flora's happy to get extra cash. But I feel weird employing someone to do personal tasks I don't want to do myself. I don't think it's good for people to shuffle off the "menial" parts of their lives to someone else. But then, Justin points out I was shuffling them off to him anyway!

Quote of the day, from Justin: "You don't look a day over 29! Well, maybe a day."

It was a fun birthday. I had lunch with a good friend I wish I'd spent more time with this semester, and the lunchroom even made mashed potatoes, my favorite! I walked back to my office from the lunchroom to find a group of students gathered outside it. They promptly burst into singing happy birthday, and gave me cake. In the afternoon, I got a really awesome birthday card from my parents (which sorta inspired the self-indulgent montage at the bottom of this post). Then, after work was the annual end-of-year staff party! Yay birthdays!

Also, I now know how to say "I am 30" in Bengali: "Amar boyosh tirish." If I find myself stranded in rural Bangladesh in the next 364 days, I will be able to communicate my age. That's a load off my mind.

A foreshadowing of my inevitable midlife crisis next year:

Me: "Just think: when the buddha was my age he was still a prince. He hadn't become an ascetic yet, let alone left the ascetics and become the buddha."

Dave: "When Alexander the Great was your age, he'd conquered the known world."

It's been a good day. I was moderately busy all day meeting with freshmen about their first English papers, and I met briefly with a colleague about a possible collaboration that will make me fabulously happy if it comes to fruition. And I am absurdly cheered by little things, like that my fingernails are still painted black from a party this weekend for which I got all gothed out.

Then after work some students invited me along to iftar at an Indian restaurant I hadn't been to before. Yummy dosas and lovely palak paneer ensued, along with requisite geeky conversation about inductive proofs, greedy pirates, and whether Thomas Aquinas' fourth proof of the existence of God actually proves the existence of the maximally hot chick.

For the last week I've been back on the medicine that makes me really depressed. Today we halved my dosage, and I was somewhat trepidatious about what would happen. It turns out that, and this was probably somewhat predictable, withdrawing a drug that makes me dysphoric makes me... really, really euphoric. So between dinner and our scuba lesson I spent an hour blissed out on the couch listening to Pink Floyd.

It's been a good day.

Visiting the States always provides an interesting opportunity to think about the many ways that living in Qatar has changed me. For example, I'm a lot more gregarious than I was when I lived in Pittsburgh, and generally a lot less fearful -- or at least a lot better at ignoring my fear.

A more obvious example is that I didn't drink before I moved to Doha, and indeed viewed drinking as immoral, whereas now I don't mind drinking. This is actually indicative of a larger shift in my thinking about ethics. Islam is willing to condemn a lot of behaviors which may or may not be inherently harmful, simply because it is believed that God disapproves of them. Of course, plenty of Christians do the same, but my increased familiarity with another religion's list of disapproved behaviors has thrown into sharp relief the problems with divine command theory. It no longer seems reasonable to argue that an action may be unethical simply because one culture's version of God has taken a disliking to it. If an action is unethical, it seems to me, it must be so because it causes harm (is likely to cause harm, has a tendency to cause harm; let's not get too utilitarian here). On a more personal level, seeing Muslims avoiding actions that seem morally neutral to me (like falling asleep on one's stomach) for fear of offending God has made me realize the extent to which my own "moral" stances were motivated by the same desire to be "good enough." I wasn't avoiding alcohol because it has deleterious effects on society; I was avoiding it because doing so allowed me to think of myself as A Good Person. That no longer seems like a good motivation, and thus, I no longer avoid alcohol.

Rethinking the role of religion in ethics made me rethink religion generally, and about six months ago I came to the conclusion that I am no longer Christian. My allegiance is fundamentally not to a Christian worldview but to a secular one. (Thought experiment: if I could choose between a universe in which the Muslim world universally accepted Jesus' messiahship, or one in which it universally accepted the principles of tolerance, free inquiry and rationalism, which would I pick?)

I'm not sure what else to say on this subject, so I'll end here.

I will, however, note that I wrote a long post on secularism a year ago, but never polished it enough to post it publicly. Since I'm unlikely to make any further changes to it now, it is now publicly viewable here.

Yesterday there was a presentation for faculty and staff who might be interested in moving to Doha. A lot of it was question and answer time and, as always, I was struck by how wrong the questions were. People ask whether the students' English is a barrier to learning, when the interesting question is really one of transitioning students from an educational system that doesn't promote critical thinking or problem-solving. People ask about how women are treated in Qatar, when really women are not the subject of most discrimination or exploitation. They're just the wrong questions, because people don't yet have the experience to ask the right questions.

When I learned about the pre-Socratic philosophers in college, I felt immensely sorry for them. They were doomed to failure, because the questions they asked were inherently unanswerable due to the way they were framed (e.g., "How did the many derive from the one?"). On the other hand, those guys did give birth to philosophy and science, so maybe in the grand scheme of things they're not too ashamed of themselves.

Lately I've been spending a lot of time asking myself what career/field would make me happy. A friend suggests that this may be the wrong way of framing the question, but I don't think I've figured out what way of framing it would be more productive.

Too sleepy to tie my thoughts together....

If at the end of our journey
There is no final
Resting place
Then we need not fear
Losing our way.
-Ikkyu

When you go to live abroad, you generally sit through lots of presentations on the Stages of Culture Shock. The presenters tell you a story that goes like this: when you arrive in the host country you'll be really excited and everything will seem wonderful. Then things will start getting stressful, and you'll find the host culture strange and frustrating. Eventually, though, you'll adapt to the new culture and feel at ease in it, and even become bicultural. The presentation will probably include a graphic much like this one:

The presumption is that the end result of living in another country is having warm fuzzy feelings about that culture.

(The irony seems lost on the presenters of such information that this very story -- "the individual struggles, overcomes, and lives happily ever after" -- is a quintessentially Western narrative. I wonder how people from other cultures characterize their crosscultural experiences?)

For me, the Adjustment phase came with the realization that my own expectations were culturally bound, and that it was therefore both unfair and unhelpful to judge my host culture by my own culture's standards. Of course, I would have said I believed this statement before I moved to Qatar, but in reality it took several months for me to really grok its implications. Adjustment is when I stopped feeling irritated when people cut in front of me in line at QTel, because I understood that they were just following their own culture's standards of etiquette instead of mine. It's when I realized that Westerners dislike the abaya because we see our own level of dressed-ness as "normal" and anything more than that as "oppressive," which is silly given that lots of people in the world cover less of their bodies than we do, and would see us as similarly oppressed.

It's a very cool thing, reaching Adjustment stage. Everything becomes relativized, and weird things about your host culture start making more sense and stop bugging you. And more interestingly, you start re-evaluating your own culture, because its "common sense" no longer seems self-evident.

I think I'm beginning to feel that there's a post-adjustment phase, though. Sometimes I jokingly call it the Bitter Expat phase, although really I think most of the bitter expats I've met never reached Adjustment. But I do think that Adaptation is not the end of the story. "It's all relative" is a realization you must make in order to understand a new culture, but in the end it's not a good ending point for one's understanding of cultural variations. (I've linked to Bagish's "Confessions of a Former Cultural Relativist" before, but it's relevant here.)

I feel like I've reached a point where I realize that, though my initial judgments about Qatar may have been off-base because they were unthinkingly based on my own culturally bound preconceptions, that doesn't mean I can never make a judgment about an aspect of Qatari culture. I am more willing now to say that the way unskilled laborers are treated in Qatar is an abomination, for example, and that Qataris' propensity for treating maids like children is simply unacceptable by any reasonable standard of decency. I am more willing to say that shari'ah is not a good basis for jurisprudence in the 21st century. Of course the U.S. is not a shining model either, in terms of either immigrant labor relations or a functional legal system. And maybe that's the key: it seems more justifiable to judge all cultures against the same standard (whatever one's personal standard is, as long as it is well thought out, as long as one makes it explicit) than to judge the host culture against one's own culture, as one tends to do on first arrival. Whatever it is, at some point I stopped feeling that being an outsider disqualifies me from evaluating parts of my host culture. It worked for de Toqueville, after all.

This whole train of thought, incidentally, grew out of a silly conversation about Land Cruisers this morning; I realized that my feelings about Land Cruisers is a good barometer of my stages of culture shock.

Honeymoon:	Gosh, look how many Land Cruisers there are in Qatar! And they're all white! How cute!
Anxiety:	Why do they keep flashing their lights at me? Should I change langes or ignore them? Argh!!
Rejection:	What is WRONG with these drivers? Why are they so RUDE all the time?
Adjustment:	The fact that it's rude in MY culture to tailgate someone doesn't mean Qatari drivers are being rude.
Post-Adjustment:	OK, they're not being rude, but it's a stupid way to drive, and it illustrates an underlying selfcenteredness that seems really destructive.

I just dropped the last of my peeps off at the airport.

(Zahariel, for those of you who are awaiting his return.)

I am very sad now.

The end.

Itsu kara ka kodoku boku wo kakomi kishimu kokoro
Sugiru toki no naka de kitto boku ha kimi wo nakushiteyuku...