burnt pita and lady gaga

Burnt pita happened this morning. I didn't know you could burn pita in the microwave, but now I do. And I had to go without pita and peanut butter for breakfast, and honestly I was a bit crushed. Today was just ick, a million little things going wrong and driving my sanity up a wall and over a cliff. I almost didn't post, but I remembered I didn't write a blog yesterday so I figured I owe you all one.

Nothing much has happened. Only Mubarak stepping down, and you know, that's no big deal...well obviously that's a lie. We were actually told to stay in the night he stepped down because people were going crazy, even in Jordan. Our family went out, and we could hear firecrackers and yelling in the street outside our building. It was quite a night for celebration. Now everyone's hedging bets on who goes next. Most people are going for Algeria or Syria, I think, but according to Betsy (who came over to chill and have tea last night) the army in Algeria is against the people and further revolts would create a bloodbath. Not that Egypt wasn't bloody enough, but I suppose it would pale in comparison to some other countries.

Two of the things that went wrong today involved people randomly hitting me up for money in Khalefa, which is strange and was horrendously awkward. A woman carrying subway and wearing the niqab came up to me at the elevator whispering, and I couldn't hear her so I bent closer and she told me, "I need your help my daughter very sick want to go to hospital" and all I could say was "le, asefa" and then stand there awkwardly at the elevator. It's not like I didn't want to help her; if her daughter really is sick, that's horrible, but as a general rule don't give money out to strangers. And then, about 3 hours later, Brooke and I got into the same elevator with a man who ripped two sheets out of a stack of flyers he was carrying and handed them to us. He mimed something about possibly not being able to hear or talk, I wasn't sure which one, and the flyers were in Arabic so we just took them to be nice. However, once we got out he started following us and he was waving after Brooke. We turned around and he rubbed his fingers together, making a face of absolute disgust. When we realized he wanted money, we handed the flyers back and he was incredibly affronted and stalked off to wait for other people at the top of the elevator. Again, I don't want to be rude or turn down charity, but I had no idea what he wanted or what it was for and he had no way of explaining what it was to us, so the only thing we could do was say no. And it didn't help that he had us trapped with him there in the elevator.

Anyway. That's the short version of a day that just went downhill from breakfast until Lady Gaga came on the tv. Fu Fu loves his music videos, and one of the channels randomly decided to do about 5 videos of nothing but Gaga, and then Brooke and I had the lovely occurrence of having to explain Lady Gaga to our Iraqi host dad. Be it in English or Arabic, it was pretty impossible to explain who and why and what Lady Gaga is, especially trying to explain her hold on the American public, despite her craziness. Brooke captured it pretty succinctly, however, saying, "Everyone loves her, but everyone thinks she's crazy."

Oh, yesterday I met my peer tutor. She was pretty nice, and I look forward to meeting with her more. Also, got my fingerprints done today for my residency application. But I lost my cellphone yesterday and haven't gotten it back yet from the bus station, and I left my gym bag at the gym today. Today is not my day. Tomorrow, inshallah, it will be better.

Beth