“It was Christmas Eve, babe, In the drunk tank…”

I know I put up this video last year, but my mood seems to be oddly the same this year:

The weather in Amman has gotten completely wild, to the point that the wind was literally blowing me sideways as I made my way down the street and to the house (I could point the taxi driver in the exact direction of my home, but I’m embarrassed by my accent. Plus, I save an extra 10 piasters.). There might be snow at the New Year, or else that’s just a wild rumour.

I’ve been reflecting on what a naughty girl like me would like for Christmas, or what she even deserves for Christmas, in fact. Continue reading ““It was Christmas Eve, babe, In the drunk tank…””

Schedrik – Carol of the Bells, the Original Ukrainian Version

There’s lots of cool performances and recordings of this song on YouTube, but here is one of my favourites:

It’s just a very basic fan video, but the performance really struck me.

Incidentally, one of my favourite lines from the original goes – “you have a black-browed wife.” It’s congratulating the guy that the swallow is singing to the man of the house (yes, the song is about a swallow flying in to a house and predicting a good new year for the family – the words that they’ve made up in the West do not correspond to the original, though they’re still pretty good). A “black-browed” woman is a beautiful woman. Lots of people are surprised by that, they tend to assume that Ukrainians value blondness and very light features above all.

It’s a very happy song, set to an extremely haunting tune. The original was a folk song that was then arranged by composer Nikolai Leontovich.

I also like these two little girls singing it (when I was little, I also worse a similar costume, and also sang a little, and there may still be incriminating videos that will one day show up to ruin my life):

There’s also this video of a choir from Kemerovo (Siberia). The camera really shakes, so don’t watch the video. Just listen. It’s beautiful:

Finally, here’s an instrumental from the Claymation Special. Good times.

The Obligatory Christmas Music Video

Is it weird that this song makes me miss North Carolina? You might as well change the lyrics to “little sister brought her new boy friend. He was an aaa-rab.”

Well, except that I’m nobody’s little sister (sometimes I wish I was – although being a little cousin ain’t so bad either), and my parents were more of the hard-working middle class immigrant stereotype, but still.

You know what I miss about Christmas with the family? The clutter. The happy clutter, to be precise. I miss the twelve different kinds of wrapping paper, all frayed at the edges, and I miss the coffee beans spilling out of their little gift bags, and the stains of red wine in the glasses that I always forgot to wash, and other such nonsense.

Of course, if you’ve never been to Jordan, please don’t be deluded that we don’t have Christmas around here. I’ve been binging on mince pies for what? Like, three straight days now. Many people have holiday lights and Christmas trees peeking out from their windows, and I pass a huge Christmas billboard on my way to the office, which is, in some ways, better than passing one hundred Christmas billboards on your way to the office, I think (call me a bitch, but there’s something about the image of a gift-wrapped Lexus that fills me with misanthropic hatred and envy).

It’s just not the same, that’s all.

The Vajayjay, the Womb, the AIDS test, the Eternal Battle

In a last-minute dick move we may as well have expected from the Bush administration, newly introduced regulations mean that basically anyone can refuse a woman health services now, for as long as their decision is based on nebulous “beliefs.” As Jill points out over on Feministe, this is being framed as an abortion issue, but the fact is, that’s total crap. Legislation protecting medical professionals unwilling to perform abortion already exists.

The vague new regulations essentially mean that anything from receiving emergency contraception to getting rid of a dangerous ectopic pregnancy is now under threat.

Then again, for some of us, this issue is already pretty old. I remember that when I tried to obtain emergency contraception back in Charlotte, North Carolina, about 6 years ago, I was refused at two hospitals. At the first hospital, a nurse called me a “slut,” and at the second hospital, I was told that I needed to claim I was raped in order to get help.

I took my chances. I still remember the morning I went to meet an old teacher of mine for coffee over at a bookshop a few weeks later, and triumphantly announced, “I’m not pregnant!” The woman at the table next to us gave me a dirty look. I scowled right back. I was so happy. I wasn’t going to treat an unplanned pregnancy as anything other than an unplanned pregnancy. The possibility of it was not “joyful” to me, and I was not going to pretend otherwise.

I wonder where the dirty look woman is in the world today. I wonder about the nurse that called me a slut. I wonder why it was so damn important for these two individuals to show their disapproval, try to keep me in line, try to make me feel ashamed: I was not their daughter, I was not even the daughter of a friend. They didn’t know me.

Of course, what they did know is that there were certain roles that women were expected to fulfill – I bet neither one of them had ever asked for Plan B, or was publicly excited at the prospect of not being pregnant. Or, if they had, I bet they had a talk about it with a pastor or another person they trusted, and decided to repent. And who the hell was I, then? Did I think I was better than them, or something? Did I think I could change anything?

You know what I hate about being a woman? Continue reading “The Vajayjay, the Womb, the AIDS test, the Eternal Battle”