Saturday, December 31, 2005
Home for the holidays!
A much needed break finds me in Dubai for the winter holidays, away from the cold, gray and rain of Paris. Home does wonders for my self-esteem because it plummets even lower when my brother makes fun of my weight, height, acne and IQ. If that's not bad my parents laugh and say, "Oh! Isn't he clever to think up those things!" Then again, what are brothers for? I reiterate by making fun of his weight, height, acne and single status until I realize that I am single too. By the end of the first day I have hit the refridgerator with my mouth wide open.
Okay, so it isn't really that bad and yes, I am exaggerating just a tiny bit to gain sympathy from anyone who is willing to listen. However, I must point out that as a female middle child of an asian family i do always get the short end of the stick which should not be confused with the stick that is used for beating up asian children because I really am too old for that now ( secretly I do believe the cessation is more due to the laws that have recently passed against abusing children but I like to lie to myself once in a while).
An example of why I really hate being caught between my older sister, the genius, and my younger brother, the einstein, is this winter's family reunion. My younger brother had come down from the U.S. a few weeks before I did. My parents arrived at the airport to receive him but because of baggage checks and other inexplicable reasons (please note this is the Dubai International Airport and reasons for delay often cannot be described other than due to the stupidity of the retarded local people who work in positions that actually need some level of intelligence, no lower than a gorilla's, to do). Mom and Dad found themselves waiting for a long time before my brother finally emmerged from the clutches of the evil airport staff and its bumbling goons.
On Christmas Day I arrived in Dubai from Paris and ran towards the exit sign of the airport as fast as I could least the idiotic controllers should delay me by starting to ask ridiculous questions such as, "I can't find your residence visa page (in the passport). Why?" Because you are probably incapable of even killing yourself you pathetic dunce, I would think. Since my family and I do not celebrate the birth of Jesus (or , in my case, any other religious event) I expected my parents to be at the airport with their loving smiles to receive me. Unfortunately, that was not the case and after frantically searching for them in a sea of foreign faces and giving everyone else who got their loved ones, friends or even the hotel guy with the sign for Mrs. Popadum and family, the 'up yours' sign, I succumbed to calling them and saying, "where the hell are you guys?". Turns out they were late.
I don't really mind that they were late because I can understand that my 7AM arrival and Dubai's horrible traffic can impede someone from being punctual. The kicker is that my dad said, "oh, your brother took ages to come so that's why we thought we can come a little late." to which my mom added, "say, your sister will arrive on New Year's day, we better come early too so that we won't be late like we are for Mariam." Being the middle child I am some sort of guinea pig for everything, including time.
At home my status as middle child is lower than my two cats, Zoe and Cookie, who have taken over my bed and I sleep on the couch. I detest my cats because they always zero in on my things to break and my allergies to them don't make me like them anymore. Of course, my brother gets a bed and when I told my mom, "It's me or the cats!" she replied, "well, you aren't here for very long now, are you?" Shocking, isn't it. The cats belong to my brother yet I feed them and clean their litter. My sister loves the cats but she won't do any of the dirty work and my brother does it when he feels like it. Yet, if one day the litter is full or the cats are hungry, it is, "Mariam, why didn't you clean their shit?" I do it grudgingly thinking I don't even like them and my ambition is to throw them off the balcony one day (if it weren't for my mother putting up a grill over the balcony wall) and how interesting that after all that they trust me with the cats. It's a bit like the Emirati families who torture their Indonesian housemaids but make them take care of their babies and being horrified when the housemaid shakes the baby to death.
The only thing that is good about being the middle child is that I can 'rebel' and have no reason for it save the fact that I was born in the middle. There are lots of articles (courtesy of YahooNews) which say that middle children tend to be less intelligent (so it's not really because I slack off in class), they break rules and are more likely to be angry. So when my shrink asks me what ticks me off, why I smoke, party or have homicidal thoughts towards cats, I can blow a puff of smoke in her face and sneer, "because I wasn't born first".
A much needed break finds me in Dubai for the winter holidays, away from the cold, gray and rain of Paris. Home does wonders for my self-esteem because it plummets even lower when my brother makes fun of my weight, height, acne and IQ. If that's not bad my parents laugh and say, "Oh! Isn't he clever to think up those things!" Then again, what are brothers for? I reiterate by making fun of his weight, height, acne and single status until I realize that I am single too. By the end of the first day I have hit the refridgerator with my mouth wide open.
Okay, so it isn't really that bad and yes, I am exaggerating just a tiny bit to gain sympathy from anyone who is willing to listen. However, I must point out that as a female middle child of an asian family i do always get the short end of the stick which should not be confused with the stick that is used for beating up asian children because I really am too old for that now ( secretly I do believe the cessation is more due to the laws that have recently passed against abusing children but I like to lie to myself once in a while).
An example of why I really hate being caught between my older sister, the genius, and my younger brother, the einstein, is this winter's family reunion. My younger brother had come down from the U.S. a few weeks before I did. My parents arrived at the airport to receive him but because of baggage checks and other inexplicable reasons (please note this is the Dubai International Airport and reasons for delay often cannot be described other than due to the stupidity of the retarded local people who work in positions that actually need some level of intelligence, no lower than a gorilla's, to do). Mom and Dad found themselves waiting for a long time before my brother finally emmerged from the clutches of the evil airport staff and its bumbling goons.
On Christmas Day I arrived in Dubai from Paris and ran towards the exit sign of the airport as fast as I could least the idiotic controllers should delay me by starting to ask ridiculous questions such as, "I can't find your residence visa page (in the passport). Why?" Because you are probably incapable of even killing yourself you pathetic dunce, I would think. Since my family and I do not celebrate the birth of Jesus (or , in my case, any other religious event) I expected my parents to be at the airport with their loving smiles to receive me. Unfortunately, that was not the case and after frantically searching for them in a sea of foreign faces and giving everyone else who got their loved ones, friends or even the hotel guy with the sign for Mrs. Popadum and family, the 'up yours' sign, I succumbed to calling them and saying, "where the hell are you guys?". Turns out they were late.
I don't really mind that they were late because I can understand that my 7AM arrival and Dubai's horrible traffic can impede someone from being punctual. The kicker is that my dad said, "oh, your brother took ages to come so that's why we thought we can come a little late." to which my mom added, "say, your sister will arrive on New Year's day, we better come early too so that we won't be late like we are for Mariam." Being the middle child I am some sort of guinea pig for everything, including time.
At home my status as middle child is lower than my two cats, Zoe and Cookie, who have taken over my bed and I sleep on the couch. I detest my cats because they always zero in on my things to break and my allergies to them don't make me like them anymore. Of course, my brother gets a bed and when I told my mom, "It's me or the cats!" she replied, "well, you aren't here for very long now, are you?" Shocking, isn't it. The cats belong to my brother yet I feed them and clean their litter. My sister loves the cats but she won't do any of the dirty work and my brother does it when he feels like it. Yet, if one day the litter is full or the cats are hungry, it is, "Mariam, why didn't you clean their shit?" I do it grudgingly thinking I don't even like them and my ambition is to throw them off the balcony one day (if it weren't for my mother putting up a grill over the balcony wall) and how interesting that after all that they trust me with the cats. It's a bit like the Emirati families who torture their Indonesian housemaids but make them take care of their babies and being horrified when the housemaid shakes the baby to death.
The only thing that is good about being the middle child is that I can 'rebel' and have no reason for it save the fact that I was born in the middle. There are lots of articles (courtesy of YahooNews) which say that middle children tend to be less intelligent (so it's not really because I slack off in class), they break rules and are more likely to be angry. So when my shrink asks me what ticks me off, why I smoke, party or have homicidal thoughts towards cats, I can blow a puff of smoke in her face and sneer, "because I wasn't born first".
# posted by Mare @ 3:16 AM 
