Fast Times in... the Land of Friendship?

I was listening to podcast on NPR today talking about memory and time, and why time seems to move faster as we grow older. The fact is, no one knows why, but they did propose 3 different theories. One that seemed relevant to me was the idea of memory building and the exposure to new things. When we're young we are processing so many new things that it seems to take a long time. The older we are the more our brains skip over the mundane details of birthdays, holidays, the work week, marriage, and summer vacations, thus, since our minds are in a way processing and encoding less information, the time that does go by seems to go by faster and faster.

I may have mentioned this in a previous blog, but I remember thinki

ng after only 24 hours of being in Kuwait, that I'd been here a whole week! And thinking that after being here a week that I'd been here a month! Everything was so new and my brain was trying to take in so much that each day felt multiplied. Now... the sensation that the days and weeks are moving faster makes more sense to me. Of course, I'm no where near being a veteran of overseas living, but naturally, I'm more comfortable and more at home than I was during September, that month of 110 degree heat and the barrage of new people, places, and unnecessarily long free-way names. I suppose

what I'm trying to do, in a roundabout kind of way, is shoe my justification for why I haven't updated this blog in awhile: things have been moving fast! I know I don't owe anyone an explanation, but it made me feel better to do so. Now that I got that out of the way...

So...it's March and the weather is getting hotter. On the other side of the world baseball teams are making their rosters and shoe sales for cleats are going way up; it's finals week at my Alma Mater; wardrobes are making a slow transition for the changing season; and dust and pollen are making seasonal allergy sufferers suffer. Speaking of dust, we've gotten our first taste of a few mild sandstorms here in "Kuwait: The Land of Friendship". (I saw this painted on a wall at the airport and it made me laugh...then it made me a little sad.) Out came the surgical masks and in came the sand in my eyes! Where I'm from we have indoor recess because of this wet stuff that falls from the sky. Here, we have indoor recess from sand that rises from the ground...a little backward you could say. It hurts to be outside for too long, but for a short period of time in the morning the sky turned this amazing orange glow from all the sand in the air! And later in the day, looking through floating dust, the sun looked like a glowing moon, and as a friend of mine described it: a contemporary Ikea lamp.

Today it's cleared up and I was able to take a walk to the gulf, but the hours of sitting in my flat looking upon the clouds of dust and the persistent Pakistani/Indian cricket games was not without listening to some good ol' Woody Guthrie tracks about that treacherous Dust Bowl period. Different? Yes. But it was nice to feel somewhere else for at least a little bit :)