Getting ready

The past few weeks have been a blur of full-time Arabic training, full-time management training with part-time Arabic training, inventory lists, luggage shopping, property manager emailing, and fevered list-making. There have also been blood tests, bike rides, hair cuts, board game parties, long runs, pottery classes, grocery shopping, and dog walks mixed in, and I read The Beautiful Ruins, which was pretty good. The snow has melted, my block shop scarf finally arrived, and we’re moving around the world in a few months.

This is a sort-of apology for not blogging, but I can’t bring myself to feel particularly bad – if this were a hundred years ago (or even ten), I’d be apologizing to a book with a lock on it. So whatever. Here’s a picture of my haircut.

Arabic is incredibly difficult – when I first found out I would be getting a few months of full-time (one now and one after my other full-time training in July), I felt pretty confident that I’d be more or less fluent. Now I feel like I’ll be lucky if I can order a meal or buy a camel hair rug (note to self: look up word for rug).

The problem is that, unlike French or Spanish, the words almost never sound like a word from another language I know, so there’s no deducing or guessing when it comes to the meaning. When we were in Mexico, I felt pretty confident blundering my way through with very limited Spanish, because I could understand about 80% of what people were saying. In Arabic, it’s all or nothing – I either know a word or stare blankly at my teacher, eyebrows hopelessly furrowed.

I’m still enjoying it, especially because there’s no pressure to reach a certain level by the time we go. But I’m also glad that I’m not spending more time in full-time language training, because did I mention it’s difficult?

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Despite being announced on April Fool’s day, the Canadian government’s decision to open a diplomatic mission in Baghdad caught my attention immediately. You see, the current arrangement is that a few staff in Amman are technically assigned to Baghdad and fly in, staying with the Brits (who have a full embassy in Baghdad). One of those employees will be me (well – half of me, anyways; my position is split between the two missions).

Inside the Green Zone in Baghdad, from the Atlantic (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

It’s a pretty unique assignment, and although I had a few concerns about safety, after speaking to several people who have worked that position in the past, I felt pretty confident in applying. The opportunity for regional responsibility is uncommon at my level, and I’m excited to get to travel to a country that is otherwise generally out of bounds (I hear they have good kabobs, which pretty much sealed it for me).

So you can understand that I’m now very eager to see how (or indeed, if) this new set-up will change my role vis-à-vis Baghdad. As is often the case in government, when I asked around today (albeit at language school, where we’re all out of touch) people had some divergent understandings of the new situation, so I’ll have to wait for the dust to settle and get in touch with the mission directly (or, equally likely, find out when I show up this summer).

At least my mom isn’t worried. See, my aunt’s first posting was there back in the early 1980s, so my mom visited Iraq and Jordan. She reminds me of this more or less constantly, although I have had to point out to her that things have probably changed a little since she was there (love you mom!).

Hazardous environments

I spent the last week at a military base a few hours outside of Ottawa, learning about combat first aid, how to conduct myself in the event that I’m kidnapped, how to painstakingly walk out of a minefield, and other rosy topics. While Amman isn’t considered a high enough risk to warrant this training, because my position covers Iraq I was told that it would be prudent to sign up for it.

It was incredibly interesting, but I’m eager to never need to apply anything I learned. Nevertheless, I paid close attention to the session on IEDs, mindful of the news coming out of Baghdad the day before. I was also eager to pick the brains of the military guys teaching the course on how safe I would be and how foolish I was to accept this position – their professional opinions were “very” and “not at all,” although I still suspect that we were approaching the question from very different perspectives.

I’ve always considered myself fairly risk-averse, but speaking to several predecessors of the Amman position really quelled my concerns about Baghdad – the four people I spoke to (all women and almost all my age) had such great things to say about the job that I felt fairly  blasé about the whole thing when I applied (although I didn’t tell my mom until almost christmas, ha).

Now, armed with my new knowledge about the scarier parts of the world, I wouldn’t say I still feel blasé, but I do at least feel confident that I won’t be wandering blithely into a situation that I wasn’t prepared for. And who knows, maybe I’ll find out that I’m much more into risk than I ever thought.

Depaysment

As excited as I am about Amman, the closer our departure gets the more it hits me what I’ll be leaving behind. Friends and family, of course, but the sheer physicality of moving away from Canada is something I’ve never really considered before. Complaining about winter may be a national pastime, but I find it strange to consider that this is my last brush with snow for a few years (it doesn’t count unless it stays for months!).

Right now outside my window, the sun is shining and snow is falling straight down. It’s cold out, but it’s clearly spring. I can practically hear the sap running; soon they’ll dynamite the ice on the river and the entire city will smell like mud and new grass.

homegrown

Ontario doesn’t have coasts or mountains or even big sky-filled plains, but this landscape has been the backdrop to my entire life, and it’s strange to know that the next few years will play out among sand dunes instead of mixed deciduous forests. This country – this province – has always been home; the smells and the birdsongs and the look of rock-lined lakes and evergreen trees have always marked my internal compass.

I’ll adjust, of course – I’m resilient and globally-minded and all that. But I hadn’t been expecting that I’d want to say goodbye to the land.

To dos

Although it’s still a bit early to start doing some of the preparations for our posting, that hasn’t stopped me from constantly thinking of things to add to the list. Here, a sampling:

1. Figure out whether we’re going to sell or rent our place. Take steps to do either of those – realtors and whatnot for the former, renters and property managers for the latter.
2. Sell, donate, or throw out anything we don’t want to keep…
3. …because we have to compile an inventory of everything we’re storing or shipping.
4. Get in touch with the moving company to organize assessments, pack-up dates, and bulk purchases.
5. Figure out what we’ll want to bring in bulk (maple syrup, sriracha, quinoa, who knows what else); buy it.
6. Get camping gear.
7. Stock up my wardrobe – maxi skirts, a one-piece bathing suit, flats, demure tops, hiking shoes. Ditto Eric (well, different clothes, but the same idea).
8. Eat as much shellfish and pork as I possibly can.
9. Unlock our phones so we can bring them with us.
10. Learn to drive standard – if we buy a car in Amman, we don’t want to end up paying way more for an automatic (or destroy our gears while we’re learning)
11. Figure out if we’re going to buy a car here, or there, or from some third location. What the hell do you look for when buying a car?
12. Get Gatsby’s Good Neighbour Certification so he is an unquestionably excellent dog.
13. Decide if we’re going to try to ship a 2-year supply of dog food or take our chances there. Our options for Jordan seem to be either prohibitively expensive dog food or making our own.
14. Sort out Gatsby’s travel – it seems as though Royal Jordanian will take him for relatively cheap (9 or 10 “additional baggage fees” as opposed to unaccompanied cargo the way most airlines would), and they have direct flights from Montreal, but there are still things to consider like heat-related blackout dates, buying him a custom-sized crate, and getting all his veterinary stuff in order.
15. Get Gatsby’s eye surgery (he has a goopy eyelid thing, ew).
16. Buy house stuff – we own two sad sets of sheets, old flat pillows, and hand-me-down towels from my grandmother. It’s time to move on from those days.
17. Find a home for my jade plant – I recently realized that I won’t be able to bring it with me! So sad.
18. Buy luggage – our shipment will take around 2 months, so we need to bring more than carry-on with us this time! But we don’t own anything larger than a 30L backpack.
19. Learn how to sharpen my cooking knives.
20. Figure out what we’ll do for banking overseas – do we keep our Canadian accounts? Get one there? Both? I confess to being ignorant on the subject.
21. Learn Arabic.
22. Replace my glasses.
23. Travel to Owen Sound and Oakville for various goodbyes.
24. Get Eric’s diplomatic passport.
25. Update our health insurance – our provincial care won’t work abroad, so we’ll be covered under my work insurance instead, but apparently it can take months for them to update our status.
26. Find out if we can renew our driver’s licences before we leave.
27. Confirm our departure date – I thought it was going to be the end of August, but it’s suddenly looking more like mid-July!

This is not comprehensive at all, but it still feels daunting – especially the house and car stuff. It’s going to be an interesting few months!

Life list 84 – how to leave voicemail

There have been a some occasions in my fledgling career where I’ve been given something important to do on a short deadline. I’m proud of the fact that my bosses have recognized the fact that I’m the nearest warm body my unique talents and abilities, but the problem I always run into is that short deadlines often require phone calls.

The tendency to leave long, Virginia-Woolfe-esque stream-of-consciousness voicemails is genetic: I have saved on my phone several two-minute-plus messages from my mom. When I was a teenager, a few times I was cut off by friends’ machines – before I had finished my message! – and had to call back and, after taking thirty seconds to explain what had happened and why I was calling back, resume my message.

Last year, my boss told me that I needed to immediately call someone four levels above me (sidenote: I work in a very hierarchical organization) to explain to her that I needed $400,000. Having just arrived in the position, I questioned none of this (I should have questioned all of it). I just picked up the phone and gave her a ring.

The wise thing to do when the voicemail kicked in would have been to hang up, but I forged ahead. “Um, bonjour,” my message began, “you don’t know me, but…”

About 90 seconds later, I trailed off for the last time and hung up the phone. My officemates were laughing so hard that one of them had fallen out of her chair. In desperation, I called a friend who worked with the woman I had just left the horrible message with to ask if she was in, and ended up telling him the whole story. Unfortunately, when he went to check with her assistant to see if he could delete the message, she returned, so instead the three of them – my friend, the senior manager, and her assistant – all listened to my voicemail together and had a good laugh.

She never called me back, and it turned out that my boss (who I later found out was largely incompetent) was wrong about who was in charge of the money.

***

After that, I resolved to learn how to leave voicemails. My fear had always been that if the person didn’t know why I was calling, they might not call me back, so I would over-explain in the message. Polling my friends and colleagues revealed that this was totally unnecessary, and that I could just leave my name, number, and the reason for my call (which make perfect sense, given the instructions on every voicemail ever).

A year later, I don’t even have to write a script before calling! Well, I do in my head, but that’s a big improvement from the on-paper ones I started out with.

What simple thing are you challenged by? Please answer that question to reassure me that I’m not completely incompetent.

Pans not shaken

I’ve whined before about not being able to hold multiple careers simultaneously, but indulge me – I’m in my twenties, after all. At dinner the other night at a restaurant with an open kitchen, my eyes were continuously drawn to the line of knife blades flashing, pans being jostled, and flames licking the ceiling (actually, the fire department came; the flashing red lights lent a certain excitement to the meal). Eric caught me staring and put his hand over his heart. “Your idealized dream!”

And here’s the thing – I would hate working in a restaurant. Intellectually, I know that. I don’t like being rushed, I don’t like working at night, I don’t like fire or being too busy to go to the bathroom and I cannot abide cranky customers (as a barista, I would give mean people decaf).

But despite that, there’s this part of me that desperately wants to be a chef, in addition to all the other things I currently do or want to do (a diplochefsmithcher?). I love cooking, and I enjoy making things with my hands, and maybe I would get used to the late nights and enjoy an easy camaraderie with my fellow cooks and I could totally get neck tattoos and nobody would care, although it might get in the way of my cookware line (would I be too edgy to have my picture on the box?!).

alliums

Probably not, though. I love cooking in my little kitchen. I like the mindful spacing out I can do over the chopping block and a big pile of garlic cloves – dice dice dice, smash dice dice dice, scrape dice dice dice, repeat. I like having three burners on and something in the oven, checking, tasting, spilling, swearing; I mostly like pulling up to the dining room table and nodding yup, I did this.

It’s the missing piece from my otherwise much-beloved job; the production of a concrete useful thing. Like most office jobs, although I am involved in useful work, and occasionally am even lucky enough to see a direct impact, I leave empty-handed each day, laden down with only an empty travel mug.

I’ll stick with my current gig for the time being. I still mess up some pretty basic things (including the weird scones I just took out of the oven, which decided to eject their butter all over the pan instead of absorbing it) and the late shift doesn’t really appeal to me. But they do say that people have multiple careers these days, so who knows?

Inky

The most common question about my tattoos (or maybe second after “do you know what you’ll look like when you’re old?”) is how they’re viewed at work. Long before I started getting heavily tattooed, I considered what it would mean to work in an office – high necked tops, cardigans and long sleeves, no neck tattoos until I’m old or important enough to get away with it.

Herbert Heisenburg

Since I’m too broad shouldered for deep V-necks anyways, I considered it a worthy trade-off and dove in. Although having long arms have made covering my tattoos a bit more difficult than I had expected, I’m generally successful in keeping them mostly out of sight. People see them, though – in the summer when I’m attempting to slip into the change rooms unnoticed in my sweaty bike gear; at social events or training when I’m dressed down; when I get lazy and wear a 3/4 sleeve t-shirt and hope I don’t have any important meetings.

Somewhat surprisingly, in the 3 years I’ve been working in the department, I’ve had one negative comment (couched as concern, because diplomats are smooth that way) and countless positive ones. Lots of people want to know what the story is behind them, show me their tattoos, and make me take off my blazer in the cafeteria (usually when my boss is walking by).

I promise I’ll stop using pictures from our elopement soon. Blame Kateryn Silva for taking such good photos, and the only photos of my tattoo in its current form.

It helps that I don’t have any tattoos of zombies or swear words, and that I’m not otherwise very sartorially edgy (see above: cardigans and high-cut tops). But I like to think that it’s mostly because people recognise that the days of tattoos being the domain of sailors and jailbirds are over, and that there are lots of otherwise “normal” people who like tattoos as an art.

Presumably there are people that disapprove, but are polite enough to keep their opinions to themselves, which I admire (it’s a skill I’m working on with little success). But even those people must be able to differentiate between my style and my content, as it were.

I admit to a little nervousness about how my tattoos will be received in other countries. Certainly as a backpacker, I always got a lot of compliments (and requests to pose for photos, feeding my hope that one day I’ll get to be a model in a whisky ad in Japan). But my hope is that they won’t be viewed negatively in a professional environment.

At least they’ll always be a great ice-breaker for visiting prisons.

the Taliban Shuffle

not pictured: Eric, behind Gatsby

Despite my vague worry that the book titles I post here are going to get me the Wrong Kind of Blog Readers, book 86 was a funny and poignant memoir from a female foreign  correspondent who worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Sometimes I think it would be really neat to be a journalist, but then I remember that I like the following things:

- downtime

- my husband

- my dog

- safety

- easily accessible and good-quality coffee

- sleep

And I realize that I’m not a good candidate for driving through remote areas looking for jihadists to interview.

Then I remember that my actual job might sometimes infringe upon my access to those things that I like, and I figure that I’d at least better buy a hand grinder for coffee beans to keep in my suitcase.

dendochronology

If I were a tree, this year’s ring would be a good one. Thick and well-nourished; no storm marks or infestations to blemish the round. Of course I’d prefer that nobody, scientist or otherwise, take a cross-section of me just yet, but I can’t help but feel that far into the future, 2012 might show up in some trace sampling; new smile lines or gray hairs; a slight tan line that wasn’t there before.

confetti cannons

I finally saw the inside of an embassy, and realized that my job is a perfect fit. Then I did it again, to make sure. Then, after many spreadsheets, google searches, and unbearable waits, we found that we’ll be moving to Amman next summer – almost five years after I first applied.

At work in Ottawa, I started to feel like less of an impostor - then switched positions and started learning a whole new line of work. But the switch was easier this time, and I’m feeling more confident than I ever have, professionally speaking.

Eric and I traveled a ton, together and apart. During one trip, we decided that we might as well finally get married. During the next, we did. In between, we built tiny little symbols of our love that neither of us has lost yet, although Eric has so far managed to get his stuck on the wrong finger and throw it under the seat of a car.

I trained for, ran, and swore to never repeat, a half-marathon. I saw friends and family, although it could have been more frequent. I came very close to finishing my sleeve tattoo. I read a lot of books, and cooked a lot of food, which I then ate. I had fun, and didn’t cry very much.

Over the past several years, I’ve enjoyed an upward trend, and 2012 was no exception. Here’s to hoping that the streak continues.