some guy in lebanon

You are browsing the archives of 2009 July.

Two weeks in the United States – and already Lebanon feels like a ghostly place, a world that seems to have been swept away like a dream, groggily whipped clean and evidenced only be sleepy eyes and the strong need to brush ones teeth.

And I am left feeling like an alien, strangely unkempt and unused to 24-hour electricity, highspeed internet, and unknowing stares as I try to approximate Lebanon to those who ask “Where have you been?” – I find that my Middle Eastern home is a place of course that that is as alien to those here, as I was to it last November.

“Yikes,” is a usual exclamation, followed by the type of face one makes when the milk has gone sour. “What’s it like?” Of course there is no reasonable explanation – “It’s fantastic,” illicits the same ‘sour milk’ response as before.

Two weeks in America feels more abroad than two months abroad – I find that I am clinging not to myself, but to the self I was before I left. Or worse, to the self I was years ago – as if a thirteen hours on a plane is enough to bring about a pubescent attitude about everything, and a sort of general anesthesia, or worse, a full pathology, marked first, by devolution and second, by amnesia.

Even my writing is clearly suffering – who writes ‘anesthesia’ and ‘amnesia’ in the same sentence?!

You were once my hostess. Now you are my home, my friend and my sister. I say these things with the utmost seriousness, and a firm understanding of the context of each statement. Homes, friends and sisters do not enter my life lightly or without struggle.

Though you offered me no promises, this is my promise to you: No matter where I go in life, who I meet, what I see, I will sing your praises to whoever will listen, to the point of outright obnoxiousness.

Before I go to America for vacation on Wednesday, let me offer the following comment I made on November 4th, 2008:

“My new boss Marc remarked to me today, with excitement, trepidation, and the cynicism of a westerner towards the United States of this past decade, of the irony of my arrival the day before the most important American election of the modern era, and that I would begin to work on the day after. He dared not even suggest that Obama could pull it off.”

I’m tan – “How did you get so tan, Will?” You might ask – Well, dear reader, this is for three reasons:

1. I live at the eastern end of the Mediteranian. One can get a tan just by walking around
2. I spent Saturday at “Lazy B,” a wonderful little cabana-style resort south of Beirut.
3. I spent most of Sunday sitting in no-man’s-land at the Syrian border in the sun. For five hours. Just to be in Syria for forty five minutes.

I want to remark on this last point – “Why did you go to Syria, Will?” Well, dear reader, it’s because my visa was going to expire and they changed the rules in Lebanon requiring an exit stamp to leave at the airport if you’re in your third month of a tourist visa. But I couldn’t get an exit stamp because my visa was going to expire in two days, so they told me ‘just go to Syria – you don’t need an exit stamp.’ Of course, going to Syria means waltzing into one of the most skeptical-of-Americans nation in the world – they purposefully make you wait forever if you’re American to dissuade you from coming back – or something, I’m not really quite sure (they fax the information to Damascus – who knows how long it sits next to a cup of coffee there). Luckily, they let me in after I got a mean tan – I had to be out of the country for “a few mintues” according to Lebanese authorities in order to renew my visa.

Unfortunately, I have renewed my tourist visa too many times, so they confiscated my passport on the way back into Lebanon, and I spent this morning at General Security sorting things out.