In-between days

It's spring!  But, of course, it's not.

I wore a yellow dress yesterday.  I danced on the walk home.  I spotted wet pavement that looked suspiciously like it was wet because ice had melted in the sunshine.

Happy Ayyam-i-Ha, world!  The celebration of in-between and before and days that don't count on the calendar, but count just enough to warrant this beautiful sunshine.

Last year, I waited on the sidewalk outside the Food City that was 20 minutes away from my apartment for someone to pick me up and give me a ride to an Ayyam-i-Ha celebration.  I was on the wrong side of the building and the wrong side of the world.  But when I made it, there was so much delicious food and we played games that I didn't understand and told jokes that had Arabic punch lines that lost their punch in translation and it felt like the beginning of something monumentally important.

This year is less adventurous.  I am making plans to stock up on grapefruit for the fast.  Clearing spaces beside my bed for a water bottle.  Wondering how I will make it until spring break without collapsing of exhausting.  There is a time for celebration, but there is so much work to get done.

My parents mailed me a hat, but I'm hoping I won't need it soon.  The sun is playing with my emotions, but I am too far gone to care.

Fun Sundays

Today was a fun Sunday.  At one point there were seven people hanging out not getting things done in the newsroom at the same time.  I actually think about half the staff dropped by throughout the course of the day.

I'm getting into this editor thing.  The staff is great, the paper is consistent and the publication errors are still there, but dammit guys with only two people on typo-catching duty they're always going to be there.  So really.  You can stop storming angrily into the office and bothering the ad manager now.  My office hours are clearly listed on the door.

Of course, I'm getting it now that I'm two-thirds of the way through my year as editor.  And not that I want to do this for longer, because 1. I miss weekends and 2. I like being responsible for just myself, not a legion of procrastinators.  But I like the independence of this position.  I like being around to help freelancers with their work and watch them figure out what they're doing.  I like the last few thing's Brady's written for his column. I like the new cover.  I like Danny's layout of the page with the engineering arch story on it this week.

Life is just so much better now that I've figured out how to do my job.  Can I just keep repeating that?  So much better, so much better, so much better.

(Disclaimer: Editorials are not better.  I am really tired of writing editorials.  I just don't have 500 words worth of opinions I want to print in the paper every week.  And sometimes I am home alone on Friday nights with 16 tabs open on my browser and it is just a struggle fest.)

The last two weeks were a little rough, but midterms always are.  And there was no mental breakdown like last semester, there was only militant to-do list making and finishing (guys, I am a machine. A really personable, vivacious machine who just GETS STUFF DONE*).

Anyway, Tuesday's cover is great.  My homework is done.  For the first time in two weeks I can actually shower during my 11:30 to 1 p.m. break tomorrow instead of run errands.  My editorial is really cheesy, but the rest of the paper is fairly decent.  And I am going to bed.

 

*Is this what growing up feels like?

On voice

A few weeks ago, we were talking about voice in one of my classes.  And my professor said, if this were a writing class, at this point in the semester I would be able to tell who wrote what without any names on your assignments.

And I thought, wow, magic.

And then I thought, oh wait, I can do that.

It's just that everyone's writing is so distinctive.  Their adjective uses are distinctive.  Their paragraph lengths are distinctive.  Their headlines are distinctive, their chronic errors are distinctive--even their photo captions are distinctive.

I compare authors' writing voices all the time.  Natalie Standiford is a little John Green-esque.  Tanjua Desai Hidier has some things in common with Michael Chabon.  E. Lockhart is a standalone genius of prose and plot.

Since I've been blogging for more than three years and writing articles for almost as long, I'm starting to get really well acquainted with my writing voice.  It's the reason I struggle with updating this blog every once in a while--because everything I write sounds like everything else I've ever written.

But consistency is nothing to despair over.  I avidly read pieces written by my favorite authors just for their voice all the time, regardless of their content (case in point: John Green's second zombie novella.  So bad. But also, good?).

A few years ago, someone said, Elika, you write how you talk.  I don't.  Or at least, I don't anymore.  But I write how I think.  And I use the phrase 'I feel like' and the words 'increasingly' and 'just' with overwhelming consistency, and sometimes I feel like I'm so unoriginal that if I left a shopping list sitting around someone would be able to identify it as mine.

But then again, I can pick out who's headlines are who's within seconds most of the time.  So maybe we're all distinct shopping lists.

Intersecting paths

There are so many stories I want to tell from this weekend.  So I'll start with this one.

I met a girl from Amman.  She's an exchange student in Kenai.  Her older sister goes to school at Al Ahliyyah, the university I went to in Amman.

She left after dinner, but before that she stopped.  "I just have to ask," she said.  "Do you miss mansaf?"

I remember that phase.  The I've-been-in-it-for-long-enough-to-know-what-I'm-doing-but-there-are-things-that-I-miss-so-much phase.  It was this moment where we were intersecting and I knew and I knew that I couldn't do anything because everyone lives through their travels in the same way at different rates.

"I'm just homesick for the food," she said.  Which I got, because halal pepperoni pizza is not pizza.

It was exactly a year ago that I moved to Jordan.  I'm keeping track of my days and reliving the corresponding events.  This is the day we moved in.  This is the day pigeons landed on our head.  This is the day we went to the citadel and ate at Reem Al-Bawadi.  This is the day school started and Jaime and I perilously navigated the bus home.  This is the day after that where nothing noteworthy happened which was noteworthy in and of itself because I foolishly felt that I would figure it out so quickly.

This weekend, I went to the Alaska version of the Northwest Returnee Conference.  It was a bunch of former exchange students telling pretentious travel stories and it was wonderful.  Before the sessions started, we were asked to write a piece of advice on a notecard for the exchange students that would be returning home at the end of the semester.

I wrote, "You're going to be sad and it's going to be ok."

I was sad.  I still am sad.  I miss it.  I miss my friends, I miss the cat that hung out near our apartment, I miss mansaf, I miss speaking Arabic.  But it's ok.  I'm finally getting to a point where I'm understanding how Amman impacted me and I'm ok.

NWRC was one of those seemingly unimportant things that ended up making me think a lot.  I'm really glad I decided to take (half of) the weekend off from work and attend the conference.  I'm glad I got to talk about all these things that I haven't spent much time thinking about between school and work and people who aren't interested.

It's just that there aren't that many Arabs, no Arab food and no place to practice Arabic in Alaska.  How was I supposed to ease my way in?  The 4 Arab exchange students from Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan I met in Juneau agree with me.