Humble Adam Vegetable Pants

Learning something new is a crushing experience.  It’s embarrassing.  It humbles you.  It reminds you that you’re pretty much worthless, and it makes you feel inferior to those who have polished skills.  It’s easier just to do what you’re comfortable with, because until you actually try something new, you can sit comfortably on the sideline, watch the experts, and go, “Well, good for them; I could do that too, I just don’t want to.”

Once you dive in, though, once you really decide to give something new a shot, you take a risk.  And that’s really scary.  It’s scary because when you try something new there will be moments when you sacrifice your ego, and it’s inescapable that at some point you’ll be made to look and feel foolish. 

I’m trying to learn something new, and I had forgotten just how humbling the learning curve can be.  Currently I have a bag of frozen peas in both of my pant legs. There are two bulbous lumps under my biker shorts just above my knees where I’ve stuffed my vegan contraband.  I like frozen peas, but not so much in this capacity.  I’ve put the peas under my shorts so that they stay mashed against my upper leg.  Presumably, this will keep the swelling down.   And while I’m proud of my ingenuity (ice is hard to come by in the UAE, so I’ve supplemented frozen veggies for ice bags) - I’m not particularly proud of my twin injuries. 

I might not be able to walk tomorrow, but if I do endeavor to move about come morning, I have a sneaky suspicion that my gait will lack its standard swagger.  Words like “hobble” and “shuffle” come to mind.  Assuming I do manage to hoist my aching body out of bed, I foresee myself limping into the kitchen, walking right past my normal pit stop at the Golden-Graham cabinet, and heading straight for the freezer where I will retrieve two new bags of fresh frozen peas to stuff into my dress pants before heading to work.

That’s probably what will happen, so I’m trying to figure out how exactly I should explain these two lumpy bulges jutting from my thighs to my extremely-limited-English-vocabulary students tomorrow.  They’ll surely point to the protuberance on my lower torso and ask “Why, Mr. Adam!?”  And how will I explain?  Mr. Adam – He uh..Peas in his pants… That won’t work, will it?  Anyway, it looks more like poops in pants with these bulgy bags. 

I’ve taken up a new sport here in the UAE.  Actually, I’ve taken up a slew of new activities – but the hobby responsible for my currently-worthless legs is Gaelic Football.  Like I said before, learning a new skill is a humbling experience.  Tonight at my first practice, I pulled a muscle in my thigh.  Maybe the word pulled doesn’t accurately describe the incident.  It was more like someone ripped my muscle into shreds and simultaneously tied the pieces into white-hot knots.  I puréed a muscle in my thigh?  I liquefied a muscle in my thigh maybe?

Speaking of settings on your blender, let me explain what Gaelic football looks like, because I bet you’re wondering; It looks like someone dropped soccer, kickball, volleyball, and American Football into a blender and then poured it out onto a 100-yard pitch of greenery.  It’s a really tasty game.

I didn’t even know the sport existed until some of my new friends from Ireland invited me to their tournament in Dubai where they said they’d be playing teams from Oman, Yemen, and the like. After absorbing that first game, I was hooked.  It was a beautiful match - running, kicking, passing, jumping, tackling, blocking.  It involved a host of skills I had used in other sports, and I decided at that moment that I was going to learn this new thing.  It couldn't be that hard. When the match was over I asked if I could join the team, and got a heavily-accented, “Aye, lad.  D’be great ta have yeh!”   

So tonight I commenced my first real practice with the group of 15 lads who, in true Irish fashion, are all named Michael, except for the two whose names are also Michael but who go by Mick. 

Less than a minute into the scrimmage, I sprinted up the field and tried to kick the ball mid-stride.  It was mid-kick when I thoroughly blended the muscles in my right thigh, all but disabling that leg.  The running kick wasn’t a movement any of my previous athletic training had prepared me for, and my body retaliated immediately.  Hit the showers, Showalter! My body shrieked at me from just above my knee.  Turn it in, buddy.  You’re done! The pain was not the kind I could ignore.

I heard my body’s cries, but I was determined not to listen. I wasn’t going to let Michael and Michael and Mick and Michael and Mick think that the new guy was a winy arse, so I kept going. I pushed through the pain and ran all over that damn field on my one good leg: frequently falling down, sweating profusely, letting my man score, turning the ball over, and making a thorough mockery of my former athletic prowess.  I had forgotten just how humbling the learning process could be. 

The whole practice was excruciating.  Every step I managed to lurch out of my seething leg was agonizing – but I kept going.  With only five minutes of scrimmaging left, I started to see a light at the end of the tunnel (an MRI perhaps).  The practice was almost over! So. Close.  But when a loose ball rolled my way and I hobbled violently after it, an eerily familiar pain shot through my only good leg – my left leg.  Maybe I’d overworked it in an effort to compensate for the futility in my right leg, or maybe it’s time to admit that both of my legs are about as durable as the cardboard roll inside holiday-wrapping paper.  But for whatever reason, I perfectly mirrored my first injury on my second leg.  Enter not one, but two bags of frozen peas.

Right now my legs are so stiff and tight that I don’t want to move them.  Unfortunately, I know that’s what I need to do.  I need to get up and stretch out the muscles – to elevate my legs and bend them at the knees, to pull my heels up to my butt and stretch.  But that’s going to hurt and I’m scared to.  My legs are cramped and tight.  Any rotation is going to crush me.  I know I need to forge through this pain and take my aching legs out of their comfort zones though, and the longer I wait to do this, the more rigid and stiff they are going to get. 

With a strained muscle, here's how the pain manifests - If I wait until tomorrow to try and forge through this pain and get my legs to do something they don’t want to do, they’re going to be even stiffer than they are now.  So I’ll probably decide to wait another day.  And on the next day, they’ll be even worse, so I’ll put it off again.  The next day they will be even worse, so I'll surely delay the pain of stretching them again - ad infinitum until my legs are practically cement. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.  

Learning something new is a humbling experience.  Just a month ago I stood on a white-sand beach in Dubai holding my sleek, new skim board.  I’d never ridden a skim board before, but I wanted to learn.  I worked up my courage, purchased one at an outfitter, and took it to a beach in Dubai.   Standing barefoot in the sand with that board’s orangish hue glistening under my arm, my sun-bleached hair, and my desert tan, I felt cool.  I really did.  I knew as long as I remained statuesque, I was a sight to behold - a regular Dubai beach boy.

However, I knew once I made my first move, and commenced the learning process, my aesthetic appeal was going to catch the first wave out to sea.  I considered playing it safe.  Maybe, I thought, I should just walk up and down the beach with my board and look cool for whoever is watching me. 

And who was watching me were these beautiful Italian girls in thong bikinis lounging nearby.  They were all sipping drinks with umbrellas in them, and I kept catching them peeking over top the pages of their magazines to look my way.  For the time being, I felt rather enchanting with my California-guy vibe.  But alas I hadn’t come to impress severely underdressed ladies; I had come to acquire a new skill, an experience which would turn out to be, like all learning experiences, a devastating one.

I untucked the board from beneath my arm, and held it with both hands just like I’d seen guys do on TV.  I took a deep breath, waited for a good wave to retreat back into the ocean - and then I took off running.  I dropped the board in the shallows, mid sprint, and jumped upward, as if to mount it.  One foot landed on the board.  Success!  But not so fast – the other foot failed to make contact with anything other than my rapidly descending face right before it plunged into the sandy water.  I did a couple of awkward looking summersaults when my momentum refused to let me stop, and the board continued its solitary journey down the beach without me, leaving my awkward body to wobble around like a soggy pretzel in the shallows. 

I quickly bounced back up to check and make sure no one had seen me, and by “no one” I mean the Italian ladies attired in tightly stretched shoestrings.  Sure enough, they had been watching, and all of their beautiful Italian eyes began to trickle back down to the glossy pages of their gossip mags.  Goodbye, beach boy façade.  Learning sucks.    

In my former life I was more of a teacher than a learner.  I taught kids how to write during the school day, and in the evenings I taught guitar lessons.  On the weekends and during the summers I went to the lake and taught my friends how to wakeboard.  I was good at some stuff, so I shared my knowledge with others.

I got hired to come to the UAE to teach too, but it turns out that here I'm more of a learner.  I’m living on a learning curve.  I’m learning how to survive in a new country.  I’m learning how to navigate new roads with new rules.   I’m learning how to teach a new subject to a foreign culture.  I’m learning how to ride a different kind of board on an unfamiliar body of water.  And in case you forgot about my legs that are currently frostbitten and garnished with peas - I’m learning to play Gaelic football. 

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Do one thing every day that scares you,” and I think I’m doing that.  I’m trying things I’ve never tried before.  I’m taking social risks and initiating conversations with people I would have been scared to talk with before.  I’m eating new foods and playing new sports.  All of this stuff scares me - but you know what?  It's completely reinvigorated me - and I’ve never felt more alive.  Before I embarked on this journey, I could feel myself getting stagnant.  But now that I've made camp on the learning curve, I'm reenergized - authentically engaged in life.  

It’s unfortunate that as we get older, we get proud.  And when we get proud, we choose to avoid all situations that could dampen our garish pride.  We avoid all that scary business Eleanor Roosevelt was talking about, because we might be made to look foolish if we try something we’re not already good at. So we play it safe.  We continue doing what we are comfortable with. We don’t put ourselves through that initial pain of learning something new. It could be too embarrassing, too humbling.  And, of course, it is embarrassing and humbling, but it's also necessary in order to avoid an existential life cramp.  Here's what I mean -

Consider my aching, stiff legs.  Right now I would be much more comfortable just to leave them how they are – perfectly straight with no weight on them.  Getting them to move into a new position is going to be painful.  What they want to do is cramp up and stay cramped.  I’m going to have to make these legs do some things they’re scared to do soon.  I’m going to have to force them through some pain.  I need to walk on them, stretch them out, and put them in uncomfortable situations.  I need to coerce them into exiting the comfort zone. If I don’t do that, they’re just going to get tighter and tighter.  And the longer I wait to stretch them out, the tighter they'll get.  And the tighter they get, the less likely I will be to stretch them out.  It's that perpetual cycle. 

And that’s how people are.  If we don’t force ourselves to forge headfirst into the pain that comes from learning something new, we become rigid and stiff - cemented in our old ways.  And the longer we wait to try something new the stiffer we become, and suddenly it feels impossible to unstick ourselves and learn something fresh. 

The longer you stick to what-you-know, the harder it is to venture into the realm of what-you-don’t-know.  If you don’t force yourself through the initial pain and get out of your comfort zone today, tomorrow you will find yourself stiffer and more set in your ways, just like my leg muscles. Because of the increased rigidity, you'll put it off for another day.  The next day will be even harder, and you’ll be even stiffer, so you’ll delay doing it again. On the next day you’ll feel even more inflexible – ad infinitum until you die and rigor mortis sets in.  Then your stiffness becomes eternal. 

That’s a bit dramatic, but you get the point. 

The only way to avoid a life-cramp is to push yourself through some pain.  To do something new and end up with frozen peas stuck up under your pants or to crumple into a wet mess in front of scantily clad babes that you’d rather try to impress.  To talk with new people and risk looking like a fool.  To try new foods and drive on new roads. And sure, it’s easier to sit on the sidelines, do what you’ve always done, and laugh at the foolish looking people who are taking risks and making mistakes, but that kind of existential stiffness is the kind that no amount of frozen peas can fix.  

Letter To An Old Friend

Dear America,

I know we said we’d keep in touch after I left, but of course we knew that would be easier said than done.  All things considered, I think we’re doing a good job staying connected.  Anyways, I hope you’re doing well.  I just had a conversation with a new friend about you.  I had no idea that so many people here would be so interested in you.  Remember how you used to quote Anchorman and say, “I’m kind of a big deal?”  Turns out you are!  People over here, they ask about you all the time.  

So I thought I’d write to tell you about the conversation I just had.  It was weird – this conversation.  The whole time I felt like I was speaking on your behalf.  I talked for like an hour in an I-think-I-speak-for-both-of-us kind of way.  I don’t know if you would have agreed with all the things I said, but I didn’t really have a choice since you weren’t here but I was.

Anyways, I said that you and I both agree that Media is a liar.  Now I know he is your friend and all, and you probably wouldn’t have said that.  But I bet if you and I switched places, and you were here and I was there, you’d see it my way.

Okay, so maybe I didn’t really speak for you.  Maybe what I said was more along the lines of what I wish you would say. I know you’d prefer to speak for yourself, but you weren’t here, so I had to speak for you.  Abu Ahmed and his friends were sipping coffee at this table in a sunlit coffee bar, and they wondered how you felt about them. And they're really cool guys.  

So since you and I are such good friends, I wanted to present you in a positive light to them.  Just like everyone else in the world, they had already talked to your boy Media, so I was thinking that maybe their perceptions of you might be distorted. 

This guy Abu Ahmed – he’s an Arab.  Ha, I suppose that’s redundant.  I could have just said, “You see, Abu Ahmed.  Period.”  You would have known he was an Arab by his name, huh?  You don’t need to see anything else to place him geographically right? Abu Ahmed = Arab.  He’s this really soft-spoken guy with dark eyes and an ornery grin.  Super chill dude.

Wait…Let me back up.  I know you want to hear about Abu Ahmed, and I will tell you about him, but I’m going to nudge him down the ladder of paragraphs here.  We have some other stuff to talk about here on the top rungs, and besides - you’ll meet up with him later when I’m telling him and his friends that you’re not really like Snookie or any other cast member of Jersey Shore.  Ha.  I bet you can’t wait for that.  By the way you can blame Media for that.

Before I tell you about this Abu Ahmed guy, I want to talk to you about something kind of serious – I want to talk to you about some of the things you said to me when you found out I was leaving for the Middle East.

I remember that you were concerned for me, America.  You said you were really worried for my safety and all.  Also, I think you kind of just liked having me around so you just said some things to make me second-guess my decision to leave.  You said things like, “How come you are going to the middle east?”  But the way you said Middle East it was like you hadn’t brushed your teeth in a couple of days.  You asked, “Is it really safe there?”  And that question - about it “being safe” - you said it like you knew it wasn’t safe and that I was being naive for not acknowledging that fact. 

You also said that I shouldn’t go to a Muslim country.  It was like you were scared of Muslims, and I get that.  I really do.  I remember 9/11.  And I used to listen to your friend Media even though I never really liked him.  And what he said about Arabs wasn’t very flattering and sometimes it was scary. But wait until you meet Abu Ahmed and his friends.  They’re not scary at all, especially sitting at a round table in comfy chairs making sipping noises and laughing.  

We were sitting at this coffee shop together, me and Abu Ahmed, and he was teaching me some Arabic words.  He tapped his finger on the table and said “Towela.”  The Arabic word for table is towela. That reminded me of something. Remember back in the day how you used to call those things Arabs wore on their heads towels.  I suppose I laughed at that back then, but now I feel a little bit guilty about it, because my friend Abu Ahmed had one like that on his dome, and it actually looked kind of cool, and I can’t imagine calling it a towel with him sitting there.   

We also used to make that joke where we said that Dirka Dirka Jihad thing.  Remember that?  I laughed at that because it was from a funny movie, and I didn’t know any Arabs back then so I figured that was pretty harmless. I definitely wouldn’t do that here because it was kind of a dig on Arabs and most of them are just like Abu Ahmed.  Maybe when you come to visit me what I’m saying will make more sense.   

I remember your friend Media used to tell stories about Arabs getting hauled around in the back of flat bed pickups with guns strapped across their chests.  He’d talk about how they hid in caves and yelled out commands.  There would always be dust and sand blowing around in his stories.  No grass or trees.  Flies would land on dudes and they didn’t bother to brush them off.  Ha.  Gross.  Anyways, after all that stuff he said about the Arabs, it’s no surprise you expressed concern for me.

But it turns out you shouldn’t have been scared for me, America.  I appreciate the sentiment though.  I really do – but the truth is there was no need for concern after all.  These guys are actually really nice.  There aren’t any swarthy men with guns in truck beds.  I haven’t seen anyone in a cave, and there are actually trees and some really nice grass here.    

If I tell you something, can you keep it a secret?  Of course you can, that’s what friends are for.  I’m just being honest here – I’m a little surprised about how chill these people are too.  I didn’t expect them to be gun-packing killers like Media made them out to be, but I thought they’d at least hate you.  After all, as much as I never really liked Media (even though he’s your friend), I did hear his stories, and I figured there was some truth in it. 

But here’s the deal, America.  Almost all Arabs are really gentle and generous and understanding, just like Abu Ahmed, that guy I was telling you about earlier.  It’s like, if you were here, you’d want to hang out with these people. But I’m not really sure they’d want to hang out with you yet, because mostly what they know about you is from Media. See, he’s already talked to them. 

And that’s what Abu Ahmed and I ended up talking about at the coffee shop mostly – we talked about you and Media.  I don’t really like talking about people who aren’t around to defend themselves.  I hate gossip.  But that’s what we did; we talked about you and Media.   Actually, we talked about you and Media after Abu Ahmed insisted that the waiter bring me a big soft chair from the other side of the room and then twisted himself into a social pretzel to make sure I was the center of the conversation. 

I was like the only native English speaker at the table right?  You should have seen it, America.  I bet I looked really funny there, a white guy with spiky blonde hair sitting at a table with a bunch of Arab men, some of them in those things we called towels.  Anyways, I think it would have been real easy for Abu Ahmed and his friends to pretty much ignore me.  Or at least engage me with a brief introduction and some pleasantries and then ignore me.  But it didn’t happen like that.  This dude went way out of his way to make me feel welcomed - to feel like a part of the group. 

But when I think about it, America, that’s probably NOT what we would have done if we were drinking a beer at a long wooden table at our favorite watering hole and in walked Abu Ahmed.  I mean we would have said hello right?  I think so, but then what? Would we have bought his drink? Probably not.  Would we have started ignoring him in favor of people who could speak our language and people we had stuff in common with? I bet so.  Especially if it was me and you and Media at that bar together.  I can see it now.  Media’d probably start making fun of Abu Ahmed right there.  Of course, it’d be in English, so he wouldn’t understand, but I could see that happening. 

But that’s not how Abu Ahmed, or most Arabs operate.  They are like the most genuinely welcoming people.  So even though he didn’t speak any English and my Arabic is complete weak sauce, he and his friends made sure I was the pivot on which the conversation turned.  There was some hand gesturing for clarity, and one guy who spoke both languages did quite a bit of interpreting, and somehow we talked and it was really interesting.

We talked about how every group of people has some rotten spots, but that Media makes entire societies look like that one brown spot in an otherwise tantalizing piece of fruit.  It’s like the Middle East is this juicy red apple but it’s got one little brown spot the size of a nailhead on it.  Then Media drones on and on and on about that nailhead-sized spot and forgets about how delicious the apple actually is.

You know how I’m always using metaphors and stuff, right?  Well, here’s what I was thinking about at the table when we were talking about stuff.  This isn’t what we talked about exactly, but it’s what I was thinking about in my head.

Imagine your boy Media is sitting alone on a deserted island, okay.  And imagine he hasn’t eaten in like 10 days and he’s dying of starvation.   Then all of a sudden, a big, red and juicy apple drops down from the sky.  He’s saved, right?  No.  He’d die of starvation. He’d die just sitting there holding that apple because he’d be so focused on the small brown spot where the apple got bruised in the fall that he’d forget you can actually eat an apple and that it’s really good.

That is what I was thinking in my head, but outside my head we were talking through translations about how super-small groups like the Taliban or the cast of Jersey Shore often end up smearing the image of an entire region or country.  Sure, those minorities are just tiny spots an otherwise perfectly good piece of fruit, but they’re all Media talks about.  Ha, I just realized I’m probably using that whole apple metaphor because of the old quip, “one bad apple spoils the whole bunch.”

It’s like how every friendship has a few little hitches here and there, but you can’t focus on those.  Those hitches are the brown spots.  Your friendship is the apple.  You have to focus on the good stuff to make the friendship work.  But that’s not how Media is; he focuses on the bad stuff. 

Okay, I know you hate to talk about this - but we have to talk about it.  No one ever likes all of their friend’s friends, but seriously, I don’t like him.  Media.  You keep saying he’s cool, but I don’t see it. I know I harp on this too much, and I’m assuming you still like him and you guys probably still hang, but seriously.  I’m not into him, and I think he’s like half pathological liar, half attention whore.

It’s like he has been saying Arabs are gun-toting terrorists riding in flatbeds chanting death to infidels just to get attention.  But Abu Ahmed isn’t like that.  I mean, he just met me and then he paid for my whole tab.  But I suppose stories like that don’t really get you much attention.  And that’s all Media wants.

I suppose I had some friends like him when I was younger too, but either they grew out of it, or I quit hanging out with them.  Here’s the deal, America.  Your friend isn’t just twisting the truth about the Middle East.  He’s also going around the world saying you are like the cast of Jersey Shore so that the world sees you and thinks you’re like Snookie or the Situation…

See how I ended that last paragraph with an ellipsis?  I like those.  I really do.  Dot Dot Dot.  It means stop reading for a second and think.  I thought it was an appropriate place to put one because I thought it would be a good place for you to pause and think…I dig thoughtful pauses. 

I was thinking maybe you’d want to stop and think about what I said for a second,  because I’m meeting people from all over the world here, and a bunch of them think you’re a booze-pounding, thoughtless heathen who beats everyone up and lives in a tanning bed.  They want to talk about you, because your friend Media is always talking about you, and making you sound crazy to them and making them sound crazy to you.

And there you are, America – intelligent, thoughtful, hard-working, and I’m trying to speak highly of you, but there’s your friend and he’s always talking louder than me, and the world thinks you’re half Situation, half Snookie!...

I put that ellipsis there because it’s another good place for a thoughtful pause.  You were probably like, “What?!  Me? Snookie?  Why would they think that?!” Well, think about it. (I suppose I could have just put dot dot dot to make you think about it).  Your so-called friend talks about that one rotten spot on you to the rest of the world so that’s a big part of what people think of you.  You can’t blame them for thinking that’s how you are.  

We do the same thing.  It’s just like how we used to kind of think all Arabs were crazy and we made mean jokes about them.  It’s just because that’s what we kept hearing from your friend.  Listen, I know I’m really taking some digs at your boy Media.  Sorry. I hope we can still be friends. 

Anyways, then there’s Abu Ahmed with his kind smile, his enthusiasm for teaching me Arabic words, the social gymnastics he’s pulling off to make me feel welcomed to his land, and Media would never pay a lick of attention to him.  He’s too boring, and I suppose if Media were telling a story about Abu Ahmed, no one would listen for very long.  And that’s the problem.  The more he embellishes, the more people like him and pay attention to him.  Okay, I’m done railing on your friend. 

Like I said, I hope someday you can come visit me here.  I’d like to show you how great this place is.  Plus, I think it’d be good for people here to see you.  The real you.  Not the part of you that Media likes to tell them about, but the real you – the you that loves learning and the you that innovates and creates.  The you that understands people and wants to help.  The you that I will always tell people good things about, no matter where I am.

Your friend,

Adam Showalter

If Not For Wheelers, What are Weekends Four?

"We use the weekends for rest, you see?! You Americans - you go! go! go! all week and then on the weekends you go! again.  We Arabs, we use the weekend for rest.  Not for going and doing.  For rest!"  

I'm quoting my colleage Tarick here.  A genteel soul if there ever was one, but I'm beginning to think he doesn't share my enthusiasm for pursuing adventure on our days off.  For the first four weeks of school I asked him every Sunday (our Monday) what he did over the weekend. On each of the four Sundays I received "nothing" as his response.  This week when I asked, I received the charged retort I've cited for you above. 

Since Tarick doesn't want to swap weekend adventures, I guess I'll tell you guys.  

This weekend I decided to visit the Emirates of Sharjah and Fajairah.  I've been learning to skimboard, and I heard Fajairah has some great skimboarding beaches.  If you don't know what skimboarding is, maybe that's because I invented it.  Okay, I didn't invent it, I just perfected it.  Okay - I suck at it.  But I did master one little trick which you'll see in a video below. 

On my way to Fajairah (a 3 hour trip from Al Ain), I ran across this place that rented fourwheelers (Motorcycles as they called them).  

Without any training or warnings, these guys set me up with a fourwheeler. They gave me a helmet, but it was too big and the straps didn't work.  Safety was their number one priority, if by "number one priority" we mean "the thing they didn't care about."  

While I was riding, I took a video to help you throw up.

Oh Tarick, if you only knew what you were missing out on.  Rest on the weekends?!  I'll rest when I'm dead...come to think of it, I'm surprised I'm not.  

When I got to Fajairah, the beaches did not disappoint.  I spent all day consuming mouthfuls of salt-flavored sand learning how to do this trick.

And here's the thing...the best part of it all, the highlight of the weekend - I purposefully left out of the blog.  You want to know what it is?  Come over. 

Do Buy (Dubai)

Leah exhales a long, wispy cloud of cigarette smoke from her lungs.  “I can’t believe how much I love this lifestyle,” she sighs.  “It’s so not like me.  Back home I was such a hippie.” 

This is not Leah’s home, however, and right now she looks anything but hippie.  Her high heels are peeking out from under her black dress, and she’s got them propped up against the balcony railing at the top of this high-rise apartment building in Dubai. All things considered – she looks about as concerned with love and nature as Enron was.  I can easily imagine her thumping under a pulsating strobe light in a nightclub, but I can’t very well conjure up a mental image of her, clad in a flowery dress, swaying back and forth in an open field to the sounds of Phish or String Cheese Incident. 

She looks more Dubai Brothel than Doobie Brothers. 

“…Such a hippie.” She repeats with an emphasis on the word such, and then she carries on.  “Seriously, before I came here I loved being out in the country and wasn’t a fan of the city and I didn’t care about money…and I sure as shit didn’t care about shopping.” She waves her cigarette-free hand over her new dress.

Obviously, she’s not exactly cheerful about her transformation from communal earth lover to capitalist city slicker.  Suddenly she looks uncomfortable on this balcony in the sky.

We are both in Dubai to spend a night out “hitting up a club” with mutual friends - something Leah says she can’t imagine herself doing back home, and frankly I can’t imagine myself doing it back home either.  Just hearing someone say that they were hitting up a club used to be verification enough for me that the speaker and I had nothing in common.

I tell Leah I don’t really blame her for shirking her beatnik ethos here though.  The city of Dubai is like a siren from Greek mythology luring in consumers from around the world with its seductive song.   It’s lush with Prada, Gucci, Chanel, Rolex, and a slew of other two-syllable brand names that I recognize from Kanye West lyrics.  A hippie philosophy wouldn’t make sense here.  You can’t ignore money here, and how could anyone possibly feel connected to nature in a place like this?

Right now, we’re both looking out over an urban dreamland.  The twinkling lights from towering white buildings in the distance are winking suggestively at me.  Crystal waters course through man-made inlets and canals below, glimmering as they meander about the city.  Million dollar Ferraris and Porches, glossy with fresh coats of wax, zip around 25 stories beneath us on absurdly spacious highways that wind artfully around electromagnetic metro train cars.  How is a stretch of timber in the middle of a field supposed to compete with this, I ask my ex-hippie friend?

After only a few months in the UAE, I am starting to acknowledge similar changes in myself.  I was never a hippie back home, but I certainly tried to avoid materialism and mindless consumerism in my old life. I tried to focus on creating and building rather than buying. I chose to use my time and energy to write music and stories, push my body to its limits on the wakeboard or in a race, or mentor a student. 

But not here.  Here, I’m noticing something – it’s a subtle paradigm shift with a lifestyle change hanging on its coattails.  The abundant money and affluent way of life in the UAE are making a sneak attack on my philosophy - flanking my transcendentalist values from the backside.    

I tell Leah, “Maybe being a hippie was just a coping mechanism to help you deal with being poor and living in a lousy town.”  She looks at me sideways. I try to clarify.

“What I mean is, maybe your affinity for the outdoors and cheap living was born from necessity.  You knew you were stuck being poor and living in a janky town, so you just convinced yourself that you liked that kind of stuff. Now you have plenty of money to spend and you live in the greatest city on earth, so you don’t have to lie to yourself anymore.”

“Maybe,” she concedes reluctantly while she grinds her cashed cigarette into an ashtray and stands up. 

“Is it time to leave?” I ask.  I look down at my watch and immediately regret that I didn’t snatch up the pricey designer watch I tried on at the Dubai mall today.  My arm is incomplete without it.  Maybe I should go back and pick that up tomorrow, I catch myself thinking – mindless consumerism flanking my old philosophy from the backside. 

The thought alone is atypical of me.  But couple it with the fact that I just bought an overpriced watch here a month ago, and until then I’d never owned a watch at all - let alone two watches, and you’ve got yourself a classic case of materialism - the likes of which a younger version of me would have scoffed at.

We shut the balcony door and leave the warm, breezy Dubai air outside.  In the kitchen now, Leah pours a roller glass full of expensive whiskey and hands it to me. 

I leave the kitchen and stroll over to the window to take one more look out over the skyline before we leave.  On the windowsill I notice that, even on the 21^st floor of a soundly constructed high rise, there are a few little piles of sand.  The desert dust in the UAE is relentless.  It invades everything - from your hair to your car’s interior to the upper floors of a high-rise building in the middle of Dubai.  Sand everywhere.

“I think I know exactly what you mean,” I tell her, looking back and forth from the diamond in my watch to the deposits on the windowsill.  “It’s hard to stay grounded here.” 

I take a sip from my whiskey roller and then balance it on the small mound of sand in the windowsill. Just a few weeks back, I experienced my first sandstorm here in the UAE, and even though I was indoors when it happened I could hear it and see it. 

The sky darkened and the wind gusted furiously from all directions. It blew for thirty minutes, and after it passed I started noticing little piles of the chalky yellow stuff inside.  Sand had seeped into my car and into my flat, apparently through the small openings around the windows.  In each room there were tiny little hills of sand on the windowsills. In my car, a miniature sand dune had formed on my dashboard. 

Regardless of how tightly each window was sealed, some of that stuff still managed to creep in, and it was a nightmare to try and clean it out.  My attempts to clean the sand piles mostly just spread them around.

Standing at the window looking out at nighttime Dubai, I realize that materialism is just a sandstorm in your brain.  You spend most of your life scraping by financially and thinking poorly of those people hovering in the upper crust who spend money so flippantly – those greed mongers who talk about buying stuff all day long. Don’t those people have anything better to do than contemplate what to buy next? 

Then, when you finally get some spending money yourself - it doesn’t matter how tightly you’ve fastened your cerebral windows - some of that buyer mentality slips in through the cracks. Sure, you want your life to be about more than just purchasing things, but when you finally have the opportunity to spend more freely, the consumer ethos starts to creep in and leave little piles of materialistic sand that, try as you might, you can’t get rid of. 


Leah and I both thought we had our windows sealed tight enough. We thought we were immune to mindless consumerism. But we're noticing little deposits of it building up.  We live in the richest country in the world and get paid well for it.  The sand it is creeping in. We thought we didn't care about money, but maybe both of us were just telling ourselves that as a coping mechanism to help us deal with the fact that we had no extra money.  

I check my watch again.  The long hand glides over the sparkling little diamond that rests where the 6 should be.  10:30 p.m. - its go time.  I briefly consider wiping off the sand on the windowsill, but then decide to let it be. Some things just aren’t worth fighting.  Sand in the desert. Materialism in Dubai.  I trail behind the click click of Leah’s new high heels and follow her out the door – all set to “hit up the club.”