Forever Tainted

I’m sorry you don’t want me anymore. I’m sorry you’ve decided it’s time to end it all. I’m sorry you did it in such a harsh way that almost makes me want to hate you. And I’m sorry, but I need you to know one last thing: I will not once wake up with regrets but you will.

I know I’m leaving your heart and home better then when I found them. Your house is cleaner, more organized and all around more mature. And I believe along the way you learned to keep it that way. Your heart is stronger, more confident, even more sensitive (when you’re not lying to yourself about how you feel and can feel for others). I believe you will continue to grow both emotionally and physically because of the confidence I helped you find. I leave you with a clean conscience myself, knowing I did the best for you I possibly could.

On the other hand, you will wake up one morning full of regret for letting me go. You will realize not only did you leave a relationship prematurely and fail to take all you possibly could from it, but you gave me nothing positive to take away with me. You left me more broken then I was when we met. You will wake up with regret, and on that day I want you to remember one thing... Everything we have done is what made us who we are today. So even though you fucked up real bad, you need not torture yourself thinking about it. One day, you’ll be given another chance. Please learn from this one and fight for the next. You’re still young and you still have a lot to learn about both life and love. If you allow yourself to learn from this lesson, you will find happiness one day. And I so hope you do.

I loved you and you loved me too.

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to face, but whether it is the same problem you had last year. ~John Foster Dulles

It was just over a year and a month ago my romantic life exploded into raging anger, so much so that I could not bear the idea of staying one more day in the same country as my ex. Today, I’m preparing to move out of my ex boyfriends’ and my house and out of the city both he and my psychotic mother live in. If there’s any truth in that beautiful quote above, and I believe there is, I am not a very successful person right now.

Completely tossed the other night and dealing with heartbreak I called the boy and asked him why he did what he did to me. A little over a year after the breakup, he has little to say except, “I’m deeply sorry for what I did to you. I miss you terribly and thinking about the love we shared almost brings me to tears. I still love you”.

There’s a lot to say about that and any comparisons that can be made between boys from the west and local boys. Both of them can be assholes, but local boys seem to be more passionate about their women (and note the plural). They seem to take better care not to inflict pain on a casual basis, where as boys from the west are colder, less considerate and can seem emotionless though more often than not, they’re faithful.

Since being home, I’ve learned to miss a few of the comforts a local boy would offer. I miss being almost force-fed when I’m not really hungry but clearly haven’t eaten enough. I’ve missed being dropped off at the entrance of a shop rather than a block away in the parking lot. I’ve missed being picked up when I needed a ride – and even when I didn’t really. I’ve missed being asked if I needed anything while he’s on his way to me. I’ve missed the small surprises. I’ve missed knowing that at 3am if I had a craving for a donut or pickles, he would be more than happy to go pick those things up for me. The list goes on and on, but to sum it all up I’ve missed being spoiled rotten.

But are those little things worth the pain that comes with knowing 9 times out of 10 he’s probably spoiling someone else alongside you? To be honest with you, I’m not even sure I know the answer to that one anymore.

Anyone who plays poker knows the person with the largest stack has the highest chances of winning, even early on in the game because they know they can bully their opponents out of taking huge risks with their smaller stacks by betting big, even on lesser cards forcing everyone to weigh their risks and fold. Relationships are much like that. The one who holds the ‘power’ tends to feel less pain when things go bad, and can thrive off the weaker person’s insecurities. But should the weaker person take a stand, and say “Fuck you, I’m all in”, the chances of them winning that hand seem to be greater as the power shifts and the player with the larger stack most-likely gets caught by surprise and makes the foolish mistake of calling on shitty whole cards.

People get high on power like they get high on bigger stacks of chips in poker. They make fatal mistakes, believing for that brief moment while they’re on top that they are invincible. But before they know it, the weaker player has doubled their stack and stands face to face with them.

I’ve been at my sister’s place for two nights now. On the morning I left, he decided to break up with me. That’s all good because I knew it wasn’t working out anyway. But the rejection hurt, and gave him the bigger stack – and I’d been miserable. Last night I went all in, and said, “Fuck it, and fuck you.” And now, I feel a billion times better.

So much so, I can share with you all we almost got attacked by a nice big bear and her baby cubs last night. My sister lives in an awesome place on the edge of the forest. With a couple of cherry trees and an apple tree in the yard, the bears like to sneak down at night for dinner. With a bear on the tree at the edge of the yard, we made the mistake of walking over there to get a better look in the pitch black of night. We didn’t see the cubs until the mama bear growled at us, sending us all flying towards the house and up the porch stairs – where we finally decided to get a flashlight and brilliantly walk out there again. Since running up the stairs I was tripped by my sister’s puppy and bruised up my knee and foot real well, I decided not to go much beyond halfway through the yard this time. I’ll tell ya, it was a thrill.

It’s not such much a pain anymore,
as a hollow in my gut,
an ache,
emptiness,


when love starts to die.

I’m leaving tomorrow for the mainland. I’m off to spend a few weeks with my sister. In preparation for that trip, I went shopping today. I have never loved clothing shopping. In fact, when I was in Dubai, I had a Lebanese girlfriend who would come shopping with me, choose the clothing she thought would fit and I would like, and only then would I bother trying stuff on and actually purchasing. If I had to go alone, I wouldn’t stop foot in a changing room. There’s one thing Lebanese girls have, and that’s an eye for fashion and that persistent nature of making you do what they think is right!

Moving on... today’s experience was of the most horrific shopping experiences of my life. I realize and accept that I’ve gained 25lbs since I’ve been back in Canada. I’ve enjoyed watching my breasts go from a B cup, to a D in no time – I had simply convinced myself that that’s where it ended. What I didn’t expect was to find my thighs too big to get into the size 10 I’ve been since I gave birth to my son. I’m not even joking more than once I almost cried in the changing room, realizing how my body now resembles a fucking pear.

So after trying on 20 odd pairs of pants or shorts, and realizing I wasn’t going to fit into any of the ones I would have a year ago, I left the shop buying only a few tops and nothing more.

I headed out that door and strait to lunch – and damn Thai Stir Fry tastes good when you’re dwelling on the weight you’ve gained. I picked up a 6 pack on my way home (which is probably the cause of the weight I’ve gained to start with), and I’m packing as though the shopping trip never took place.

Chapter II?

~*~

Nationality plays the biggest role in your life in Dubai, with it being one of the most racist multi-national societies on the planet, if not the most. Walk into any coffee shop or restaurant and survey the tables. The first thing you’ll notice are how each table has its own nationality and invisible borders seem to separate each of the races as starkly as black on white. This mentality spread as far back to my days in an International High School there, where the school cafeteria was just as divided. I remember disliking this reality as a naive teenager and attempting to change it.

A new Indian girl had joined a few weeks after school started. She didn’t seem to click right away with those of her own nationality and it wasn’t uncommon to find her eating alone during lunch. I invited her to eat with us, partially out of sorrow and partially because at that time, I believed I could fix the world of all its ailments. She refused. A few days later, I attempted again and to my utter surprise she jumped up and screamed at me that I hated her and I did so because she was Indian. She then burst out in tears and ran out of the cafeteria. Coming from Canada and before this instance not really grasping the depth of racism I was shocked and disgusted by the accusation. I never did talk to her again. It was only years later that I realized how it must have felt for her, after having her parents beat it into her that all white people thought they were superior and since we thought so, we must be. I shit you not, later in life I have come across Asians who argue that the only reason Canada is a better place to live than the UAE is because Canada is run by white people (a complete loud of crap, but believed by many just the same) and the UAE is run by brown people.

Despite that being as far from the truth as possible for most new comers to Dubai, eventually westerns are given a superiority complex and find themselves in an ongoing battle with locals about who in fact rules their country, because despite the largest part of the population being Indian or Asians, they simply aren’t competent enough to take on the roll – it must be the Arabs or the westerners. Look at any job listing in the local papers and three out of four times, you’re going to find a requested race. Next to managerial or leading high paying positions, Westerners or locals are requested. Next to low paying administration or secretarial jobs, you’ll find Indians, Pakistani or Filipinos being requested. I dare anyone to find a domestic help, construction labour, or table waiting position in a restaurant, offered to locals or westerners. No, no, those low paying, low respected jobs are reserved for the lesser races – who cares if they have experience and degrees that make ours look like they came out of a cereal box!

There is an invisible racial hierarchy in Dubai that tourists may fail to see, but those living there know where they stand. And there are a number of generalizations that can be made about each race based on that race living and working in the emirate. At the top of the racial hierarchy you’ll find the locals and the westerners, each of which complaining that the other thinks they rule the UAE. Most other nationalities will simply call it even between the two, once they put aside their own racial preferences.

Just below them, you’ll find the Arab nationals from countries like Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine. This nationality takes up few of the moderate to low paying jobs, and can somewhat rarely be found in the higher paying, more prestigious ones. However, when they do land such a job, they’re the first to flaunt it by taking out excessive bank loans to create the facade that they’re living the high life. This nationality is the one that drives beat up, old BMW’s and get ridiculed for thinking their cars are the shit, or should they stumble on a big enough bank loan, they’ll drive Mercedes spending their very last dirham (local currency) on it, along with a matching brand-named wardrobe, while having a barren flat to live in and little food to eat at home. And at the end of the day, who can blame them? If you don’t look good in Dubai, you must not be anyone!

The next tier is where the eastern Europeans fit in. The women in this category are more often than not accused of prostitution and you’ll rarely find them working a job away from serving tables at a shisha or coffee shop. They’re widely believed to have one purpose in Dubai, and that’s to find a rich local to marry for the sake of getting that all too famous Emirati passport. I lived with a Russian girl once. She was one of the hardest working, innocent sales people I’d ever come across -- but I must be wrong about that because UAE society says so.

The lowest form of life according to this hierarchy, are the Asians, whether they be from India or China, labourers even get their own lower-class, cheaper shopping centers. You’ll find that these are people who built this country and continue to make it thrive. They’re also the least paid the least respected and for some reason (perhaps the long, underappreciated days working in the sun?) the worst smelling. God forbid! Many of the major shopping malls have forbidden bachelors (another loose term given to the labour workers who build the country) from being in them – God forbid they clash with the shiny, picturesque interior. No nightclub will allow them entrance and many residential buildings have forbidden them from taking up residence in them. On the other side side of the coin, Asian or Arab taxi drivers will bypass another Asian or Arab for a western looking traveller a block or two down the street, based on the generalization that Westerners travel to less congested places, and they tip better*2.

One of the more complex observation of a society as racially fucked up as this one, are the numbers of people who actually seem to suffer racial identification crisis. Ask an Indian or Arab who has a Canadian passport where he’s from and he’ll tell you he’s Canadian, despite not having ever lived a day there. Ask an Eastern European who has married a national where she is from and she’ll tell you she’s local, despite having no local blood in her. In Dubai, there too much attention is paid on race, denying your race, judging others by their race, or denying you’re racist, when the truth be told... If you’ve spent enough time there and still come out claiming you’re not racist, you’re a liar and no Dubain (excepting those in denial) will believe you.

I’ve been back in the West more than a year now. I’m still trying to shake the idea that life is really only skin deep. I know some former Dubains who despise the UAE based solely on that that disgusting transformation of their once non-bias personality, conceived while residing there.

~*~

Should I continue? I think I'm going to have to. I'm just having too much fun writing... (And it's been a while!)

And this is how I'll start it...

~*~

An observation - all that is and could be Dubai

D is for Dubai...

There seems to be a fad of books being published with the layout alphabetic, one letter per essay as part of the overall theme of the book. Well, this book is about Dubai and I’m not nearly organized enough to actually follow an A through Z theme on the things that inspire me, enlighten me, or down right out piss me off about this booming Middle Eastern oasis. None the less, letters make for a great chapter titles and I’m too lazy to think up something original, so I’m ripping off that idea. And like any good start I guess I’ll start at the beginning.

A is for Assholes...

Whether you’re in Dubai on vacation or as an expatriate resident you’re bound to run into one constant there and it’s the assholes. Assholes on the roads, assholes in the clubs, assholes writing to papers, assholes on UAE blogs, assholes in the malls, assholes you pay your rent to, assholes begging for change, assholes jaywalking across the ten-lane highways with no regard for their lives or yours, assholes trying to scam you, assholes charging you more for products depending on your race, assholes being assholes, and assholes raping assholes in the front page news. Assholes, assholes everywhere!

There’s something about the transitional nature that is Dubai that transforms people into assholes. On the roads, there’s no consideration for life, period. It’s not uncommon to watch road rage take control of the sanest of people, causing street fights at red lights, or drag-racer-wannabes on the main highways. As of 2008, the second leading cause of death in the emirate, were road accidents; the first cause cardiovascular disease*1. At the rate of any in habitant seeing at least one car accident per day every day, this comes as no surprise. The roads are well paved and predominantly strait; the cars are more often than not new luxury models so there’s only one explanation to this anomaly – Assholes being assholes behind the wheel.

Late one night I left my girlfriends place and stopped at a red light at the intersection on my way home. I found myself whiteness to some of the biggest assholes of them all. In the middle of the intersection, plastered on the road was an Asian man, his head crushed under his helmet, blood seeping from what seemed like every inch of his being. His arms and legs twitched constantly and you just knew he was taking his last breaths of air. He may have been the erratic asshole motorbike driver just prior to getting his ass whipped off his bike by some even bigger asshole of a driver, who had since disappeared, but neither of the two could possibly beat the asshole-ishness, when compared with the spectators of this man’s demise.

Standing in the middle of the road, not a single meter from a dying man was a crowd of men; some watching this man with morbid curiosity, some sipping tea and smoking cigarettes, but the majority of them just gabbing away like death wasn’t staring any of them in the face. Not one person went to hold this man’s hand, not one person attempted to offer him assurance, hope, nor whispered a word of encouragement in this man’s ear while he waited in vain for the ambulance to arrive. There is nothing else you can use to describe such a group of heartless bastards who could idly stand by and watch a man die, other than ‘asshole’.

In fact, there pretty much only one group of people in Dubai in my mind, that measure so closely on the asshole scale as the group of bystanders who could watch a man die without flinching, and those would be the suicide-for-cash types. Up until recently the laws in Dubai said if you were driving a car and some dipshit jumped out in front of you and died, you would not only face a jail sentence but you’d have to pay obscene amounts of blood money to the deceased’s family. Not long ago, it was discovered that a number of lower-class labourers who found themselves not meeting their idea’s of wealth while actually working to send home to their family, decided the quickest way to get rich quick was to commit suicide by killing themselves in an effort to weasel the living driver out of thousands of dollars. This tactic worked for a number of years. Only an asshole would destroy his life, and that of another person’s for cash. Thank God the authorities caught on and are now revising that law.

In the shopping malls and clubs you have assholes of a different sort. You have the ignorant expatriates walking around like new money, dressed to the nines in designer fashion clothing, as if that somehow covers up that they’re soulless no-ones craving attention and acceptance of others. They’re the very same assholes you find abusing their domestic help in the line ups of supermarkets, screaming obscenities like, “I thought I told you to grab the Lite, not Low Fat mayonnaise!” They’re the very same ignorant twits that park across two parking spaces, because for the first time in their life they have a semi-luxury car and they fear someone should park beside them and scratch their paint opening a car door in the obtuse manner that they themselves would, had they still been driving their shit Datsun, or Toyota Corola.

These same assholes seem to migrate to the nightclubs, and once you add alcohol to the equation you get a whole dimension of the assholes that they are. Take said assholes above, add sluttiness and no inhibitions about being a racist, egotistical, dumb-as-a-board-self-importance twat to the conclusion and you’ve defined night life in Dubai. Assholes I tell you, all of them!

If you’re into a larger than life cinema experience, over the drunkenness that is a nightclub don’t fool yourself into believing you’ll find fewer assholes during the show. UAE nationals cannot live without their cell phones. And though this trait once only belonged to this small percentage of the population, it’s catching on and UAE nationals or not in the movie, you’re going to hear more phones ringing and full-fledged conversations during the show, then actual dialog you paid to see. And if the phones aren’t enough to ruin your night, you can bet your asshole at least one asshole thought it appropriate to bring screaming children along for the show. Enjoy the cinematic experience that only Dubai has to offer.

In the “Letters to the Editor” section of local news papers, you find the same assholes writing the same bullshit that can be found of the majority of UAE based blogs. The complaints about rising rents, the horrible traffic, the commentaries and critics of locals, the locals bashing the expatriates, at the end of the day it’s all the same, over and over and over and over again. Nauseating repetition is the theme in any written media composed by the general public. Thus, it’s only fit to close this with the reality that I’m an asshole too. Stay there long enough and you can join the club!

~*~

What do you think? Would it sell?

During his recent trip to Dubai, he noticed two major conflicting characteristics among the population. To start with, the smell; too many people there smelt as though a shower or deodorant were foreign to them and he often felt himself gagging as their fumes assaulted his nostrils.

The next thing he noticed were the beautiful people.

The eyes of the covered women were drawn up with make-up like he’d never seen before. The time and talent that must go into it, is incredible. He assures me, those eyes are one image most every western man takes home with them. Then there were the Barbie and Ken dolls casually walking around centers and malls – each and every one of them impeccably dressed, perfumed, and pampered. They were the perfect bit of eye candy.

It’s scary to think that anyone who has been in the UAE more than a year or two can place a race to each of the descriptions I’ve given above. From the smelly ones, to the perfect people, to those with extravagant eyes; we know from such little descriptive words that the smelly people are most likely Asian labour workers or overworked and underpaid Arab taxi drivers; the eyes are khaleeji women; and the Barbie & Ken dolls are most-likely Eastern European, Lebanese, or British.

With such stark contrasts between nationalities, with lines so easily drawn even by outsiders just visiting, is there any way the transitional society that is Dubai will ever mould together and work as one?

I’d rather be with someone who was proud to be Arab than someone who was too ashamed should someone, anyone mistake them for Arab. I have an Arab son, you dumb fuck.

I’ve had a fair number of bad days since I’ve been back to Canada. In the last year since I’ve been back, my mom has lost her mind and decided I’m a devil child – so saying all is and has been merry would be a fucking lie. But the truth be known, I’ve had far fewer bad days and far more great days then I would have had a year back in Dubai.

So we’ve had family visit us from the mainland – funny enough, one of them just got back from a stay in Dubai with the Canadian military. Last week, I took out guests for a short ferry ride to the inner harbour, where we fed live wild seals fresh fish, and did the tourist thing, watching street performers and eating world famous fish & chips. The fact that you can have such a great day and not spend a small fortune is just one of the things that make this city a much more desirable place to be, then the UAE and all its transitions right now.

On top of that, I can’t stress enough how beautiful it is here. Here are some of the photos from that tourist-type day. I was taking the pics, so I’m not in them.



~*~

~*~

~*~

~*~

~*~

~*~

~*~

A day in the life... I came home sun burnt, and loving it. Dontcha just kinda wish you were here?

... May you one day google your name and find this little note.

Dear Michelle,

At this moment your name is splashed all over the net, in blogs, and in news articles and to be quite frank, you disgust me. I am a former Dubai expatriate who remembers what the UAE was like more than a decade ago, before the likes of you were swarming to this desert oasis to ruin it.

It’s people like you that make Dubai an undesirable place to be. It is actions like yours and the repercussions of it those actions make the society unbearable for everyone else who lives there. You have successfully given officers one more reason to be weary of and harder on drunken Brits – even those who are innocent of any crime. You have successfully emphasized and helped solidify the myth in Arab minds that all western women are as shameless, easy and trashy as you are – thus encouraging them to further treat us all like dirt. You have successfully shamed yourself and your nation and without any true remorse for your disgraceful actions, and yet you plea for public sympathy by talking to the papers and making sure we all know the situation your mother is in.

You fear you will be made an example of, yet you fail to see you have made an example of yourself and from that day on the beach forward, your life will never be the same. You pity yourself, and can’t believe the situation you’re in – like you’ve walked a mile from your house and can’t believe you have to walk a mile to get back. Your ignorance, arrogance, and sheer stupidity are beyond believable. The dream world you live in, believing the general public will have sympathy for you rather than concur that you deserved to lose your job and your comfortable life in Dubai, and any pride you may have had prior to your arrest is almost surreal.

“We all make mistakes,” you plea. Being drunk, slutty, and abrasive to a police officer in a Muslim country after he let you off with a warning is not a mistake. It’s a disgrace, and a true representation of a dirty expatriate woman who allowed herself to get a little too big an ego, in the luxurious lifestyle she has been given and has taken advantage of for three years already.

May your 15 minutes of fame be short lived – you don’t deserve the attention. May you go back to the UK where your face will forever be known, and may you find a new job in an office where every-single-person there knows how easy it is to get into your panties and sees you for nothing more than the whore you are. May you never be given the opportunities Dubai has given you again.

Sincerely,

Tainted Female