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(What? It was just begging for a Spice Girls title. I couldn’t help it.)

Little White Liar has offered up another Composition Challenge:

Make a list of 5-10 things you want. Make them things you personally want for you (no Miss America “World Peace” shenanigans). Then think of one thing you need. You can’t already have it, because really, who do you think you are? Just rubbing your self-contentment in everyone’s gaping life-holes.

And here we are.

Five things I want:

1. I want to use all of my stupid phone minutes in a month. At least once in my life. I used to spend much of my time on the phone but I don’t anymore. I absolutely cannot figure out how to talk that much. And my free evenings start at 7 p.m.! So how am I supposed to get all that phone talking done BEOFRE 7?!? And then Saturdays and Sundays are free. I don’t think I can do it, you guys. I pretty much entirely feel beaten by my phone plan, and I wish that at least once, I would know what it was like to use every single last minute that gets paid for anyway. I know this is trivial as hell, but I mean it. I want to stop feeling like I’m Sprint’s bitch.

2. I want to go back to Italy. There are so many places in the world that I want to see and experience that I doubt I’ll get to them all before I die, so it seems mighty stupid to want to return to a place I already got to spend so much time in, but there it is. Lately it seems I have a conversation about Italy at least once a day, with different people, brought on by different things, and often the Italy subject isn’t even brought up by me, but it has built in such a way that it’s now a very palpable want. I don’t just want to go on vacation, either, and spend a couple of days looking around, like, “Yep, there’s Italy.” I want to go for a long time and get lost in places I’ve never been and have a reason to speak the Italian that grows ever-rustier in my head the more time passes. And mostly, I want to eat gelato every day. I’m pretty sure eating gelato every day is good for your heart.

3. I want more kissing in my life. Yeah, I said it. Kissing is lovely. Except when it isn’t. And bleah! Have I ever had more than my fair share of un-lovely kissing. Like the one who would pretty much come at me with his tongue out and I’d think “Oh no!” and turn my head so he’d kind of end up licking my face, sort of like a dog. There’s no excuse for things like that. Maybe what I mean then is that I want no more bad kissing in my life, ever again. I think I’ve paid my dues.

4. I want a new computer. Lest we have any unpleasant disagreements I want to tell you now, Computer I Am Using Right This Minute, that I love you very much and I don’t want anything to happen to you, ever. It’s just that… you know.

5. I want to finish Ulysses. It’s been nearly 6 months, and granted, I’ve read other things while I should’ve been reading Ulysses, and I haven’t even picked it up in at least 2 months, so it just sits there on one of the nightstands, collecting dust and making me feel like a failure. The thing is that despite what other people kept telling me about the book, it’s really not that hard once you pick up its rhythm, it’s just that it’s so damn long. And I have the attention span of a gnat. The two don’t go together very well. I actually want to finish it before 2009, so I’d probably better get cracking, but… sigh.

One thing I need:

Direction. Being directionless has its charms, and I am well aware of them, but I think it’s probably time to try something else.

It’s Composition Challenge time. I love Composition Challenge time.

I am uncertain.

For the Composition Challenge, which I would be sad about if it were no more, I am going to write something that I totally don’t want to write. But I figure that my not wanting to write it means that it should be written. It’s not pleasant or uplifiting or funny, and… I don’t know. I’m sorry, I guess. And with that fine introduction out of the way, here goes.

You know the classic question about superpowers? The one where you can choose between invisibility and flying, and you only get to choose one, so which one do you pick? I always pick invisibility because I say I think it would be fun to see what I could get away with if nobody could see me, but the truth is that I pick invisibility because I actually want to be invisible. My weakness is my intense desire to disappear. It’s a strange weakness for a person like me to have, I suppose, because I often do all these “look at me!” activities, but I don’t really want anybody to look at me at all, and I’ve gotten really good at hiding in plain sight.

I have never once really truly asked myself what I want, because I am afraid that if I ever had to look, really look at something as raw as my own desire, the reality of it would overwhelm me, and I wouldn’t know what to do. And then there’s the part of me that thinks I don’t deserve anything anyway, so why bother? I know this part of me is wrong, I hate this part of me, I tell this part of me to shut up, yet somehow it always ends up being the stronger part of me, and my weakness, the part that wants to be invisible, just sits there and takes it.

So time goes by and things change and things stay exactly the same and I get closer and closer to not being here at all. Things happen to me — jobs, relationships, whatever — and I entertain them until it’s time for whatever happens next. I don’t ask for things, I don’t push for things. I spend all my time reacting. I am boring. I am wasting my time.

I tell myself to stop it, because it’s not like life is an endless commodity, and my greatest fear is waking up one morning and realizing I’m old and wondering why the hell I never did anything, yet I don’t stop it. And I wonder how I got to be this way, because I wasn’t always like this, and I can’t remember, I haven’t been able to figure it out, I don’t know when I turned into such a goddamned coward.

So there you go. I’m fucking great. Cheers.

Little White Liar has a new(ish) composition challenge and I am eschewing the hours of fun it is to memorize new vocabulary words in order to write something in response to it. It was a tough decision to make, but I think I’m making the right one. So, the theme for this round: my origins. Down to bid’ness we go:

I come from people of desert sand and cotton fields. Of strong coffee and iced tea. Of cardamom and white sugar. Islam and Christianity. My father, the Arab and my mother, the Southerner. One of my longest long-standing jokes is that I am the only Arab redneck you will ever meet. Being an Arab redneck means that I talk a lot and I don’t like wearing shoes. In case you were wondering.

On one side, I come from an ancient people who can trace an oral history back thousands of years. They come from (and in many cases, still live in) the land that sits on the tip of the Arabian peninsula and the people who, proudly, invented coffee as a beverage. My relatives have coppery brown skin and dark, intense eyes. Soft-spoken until the conversation turns heated (and it can turn heated about pretty much anything), the voices carry loud and strong and full of fire. The realm of the Yemeni immigrants seemed to be centered in the kitchen. Every Arab home I’ve ever been in smells the same, it seems: of curry and cumin, cinnamon and coffee, perfume and sweat and life. Eating with my hands at meals spread out grandly on the floor. Dancing, singing, telling stories and monopolizing an audience, talking with my hands, drawing pictures in the air of the visions in my head. When I remember my childhood in these places — and I don’t know how accurately I recall — I am so young and so free, barefoot and proud and strong and brown, more brown, from the hours spent running in the sun, chewing on sugar cane, drinking my Pepsi out of glass bottles as hot as the summertime, wearing tiger lilies in my hair and laughing, laughing.

And on the other side, I come from farmers. Sharecroppers. From the Mississippi River delta country in Arkansas (if you’ve seen Walk the Line, or at least the beginning of it, you’ll know exactly where — seriously, my grandparents and their kids lived next door to the Cash family). Church on Sundays and old, old, old gospel music and four-part harmonies (and shaped-note singing), iced tea in the summer and warm biscuits with butter and honey. Washin’ on the line and a cake in the oven and bare feet in the dirt of the garden. Snappin’ green beans before dinner and driving, driving for miles, driving some more. Accents as thick as molasses and stories as unbelievable as the expanse of the Mississippi River when you cross it the very first time. Telling the difference between corn and soybeans when they’re nary six inches tall, commenting on their height throughout the summer, being transfixed by how lush and green the rolling farmland really is. Large breakfasts of biscuits and gravy and sausage and eggs and potatoes and eating until you’re stuffed and sitting at the table talking until you’re hungry again. Catching grasshoppers and catching ants and catching lightning bugs and going to sleep warm and full and tired from a busy day. Using the word “y’all” without a hint of irony. Goofy humor and beans and cornbread and making peach ice cream on the porch. And the Bible, the words, the tie that binds, bringing us all together now, all together now, these days only when somebody dies and someone sings I’ll fly away oh glory I’ll fly away in the morning when I die hallelujah by and by I’ll fly away.

And there is me, in the middle. The bridge, one bare foot in each world, with bracelets around my ankles and an apron around my waist, not knowing what any of it means. Knowing exactly. This is what I’ll give my children.

Thank goodness for Little White Liar and her composition challenges, of which I have only done one (see here, like, if you want to), but I always mean to do them, and when I read the latest one, I was all “Squeee!” so there. When I was in 5th grade, I was in OM (Odyssey of the Mind… I guess it used to be Olympics of the Mind before they got sued by the Olympics), which was something that smart kids used to do, and maybe they still do, though I know that gifted education/enrichment programming has repeatedly gotten the ax over the years, especially now, thanks so much President Bush and No Child Left Behind. But totally don’t get me started on that. Anyway, the deal with OM was that teams had some sort of topic that they then had to research and present creatively, often in the form of a skit, and there were things that had to be built and certain restrictions and rules. And then teams presented in regional competitions and were judged and the top teams went to a state competition and from there you skipped right over nationals and went to an international competition. I never made it to internationals, though one year we were very close, but when I was in 6th grade (the last year I did it) my team made it to state, mainly because we built a 6′ tall Mount Vesuvius and did a skit about the last days of Pompeii and closed it with a song-and-dance number in which we changed the lyrics to “Stayin’ Alive” to “Buried Alive” and did some Travolta-dancing. Am I being too big of a geek right now? Because I sort of feel like I may be crossing the line a little bit. And I’m sorry, because it’s only going to get worse, because I haven’t even gotten to the point yet.

So. When I was in 5th grade, my team was working on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, of which, of course, only the Great Pyramid at Giza survives. We built the Pharos of Alexandria out of papier-mâché. And I drew the Colossus of Rhodes with a Sharpie on a bedsheet. It was totally awesome. And we made the Hanging Gardens of Babylon out of green construction paper. Ah, creativity!

You know, I’ve gotten this far and I realize that there was actually no reason to write all that, except maybe to say that hey, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World? Pretty neat. Not really worth it, huh? Yeah, I know. But I’m not erasing it now. So we’re just going to live with it.

What is the point? WELL. Instead of writing about what I did back when I was in 5th grade, I’m going to write about what the seven wonders of my world are (hence the title of this post, ahem). These may not all be the fanciest things, but I swore to myself one day when I was 21 that as long as I live, I will never lose my sense of wonder. There is nothing in the world greater than allowing oneself to put all the jaded cynicism aside and go slack-jawed and starry-eyed in silent, worshipful awe. Seriously. Find something small and let yourself marvel at it sometime. Admitting that you’re surrounded by absolute beauty is good for you every once in awhile.

Anyway, down to business. Let’s go:

1. Michigan

Is it cheating to pick an entire state? I don’t actually care because I’m doing it anyway, but I thought it’d be appropriate to ask. Right. So. I’ve been to a lot of places in the world, and I’ll get to some of them a little later, but when it comes down to it, there is no place I think is more beautiful than Michigan. Certainly I’m somewhat biased, because I was born and raised here, but it’s really only been in the past few years that I’ve come to see this place for the treasure trove of gorgeousness it truly is. Now, where I live, I’m mostly landlocked, though there’s the Kalamazoo river, which is, of course, lovely. And oh, do I have a thing for farmland and dilapidated barns and rolling hills. And then there are the Great Lakes. From the sand dunes to the rocky beaches, they’re just… beautiful. And the lighthouses! There are so many lighthouses here. I chose the accompanying photograph because it’s of one of my favorite things about this state — solitary oak tree in the middle of a cornfield. They’re everywhere, just like that, those proud, old trees, and they never fail to make me smile. I love trees anyway, but when they’re alone like that, they’re absolutely majestic. Yes, Michigan! The feeling’s forever! Indeed. (Gotta give props to 1980s tourism commercial jingles, you know.)

2. My Grandmother’s Garden

My grandmother, who turns 93 this coming August, grows flowers like mad. There’s always something in bloom in her yard and it’s always gorgeous. I love to go to her house and walk around her yard and shoot pictures of her flowers and she loves to walk around with me and talk at me, so it’s a really good deal. I grow flowers in a haphazard “let nature take its course” sort of way, mainly because I’m too lazy for weeding. I have hollyhocks and irises and echinacea and black-eyed susans and peonies and lilies and mums some vinca that I cannot. get. rid. of. Occasional asters and daisies. But I don’t have poppies, and her poppies are my favorites.

3. Fireflies

Okay. Fireflies are probably definitely cheating, but still. From the tail end of June through the beginning of August, the night is full of visible, easily-catchable fairies, and if that’s not wonderful, then I don’t know what wonderful is. My favorite thing about fireflies that I will probably never photograph because it’s so beautiful that I always lose myself to it so entirely that I never even think of reaching for my camera is when I’m out in the middle of nowhere, and I see them. In the country, they dance in the soybean fields, low to the ground and on the plants and zipping up into the sky like the earth’s very own shooting stars and it’s astounding. Ethereal and joyous. Absolutely breathtaking. There are other reasons for this choice too, private ones that make me smile, that make me know that fireflies are really rather magic. Yay, fireflies.

4. Venice

(Horrible scan, sorry.)

Right, so I’ve written about the time I spent in Venice several times here, but I think it was always from a more experiential perspective and not as much from an “Venice! Omigod!” perspective, so let me do that now. On the day I arrived in La Serenissima, I was anything but serene. I was just getting over the flu and also I’d had several panic attacks about the fact that I was moving to a foreign country where I didn’t even speak the language and what the hell was wrong with me and also I’d been traveling for upwards of 15 hours. It was hot, and when I got onto the vaporetto (this is a vaporetto, for the record, and it is HORRIBLE), I didn’t know that I had to be tough and defensive and pushy and mean (it was my first time, but I learned), so I ended up shoved rudely across the deck until my lower abdomen was pressed painfully against the edge and I would’ve been worried about tilting headfirst into the canal had I not been pinned tightly in between two large loud tourists. After I figured out how to tune out their stupid banter, I was able to lose myself in the fact that oh, wow. Everything was so pretty. At least I was able to do so until we got to the ferrovia stop and everyone started moving around again. Built on a series of islands in the Venetian lagoon and connected by hundreds of beautiful bridges, it is marble and water and graceful decay. Sure, sometimes it does smell like ass, and walking through the fish markets is not for the faint of heart (or stomach), but it also sometimes smells like fresh bread, so there’s that. Also if you happen to be on the Grand Canal during the time of day when the light turns golden, it’s like living inside a painting.

5. The Bohm

Seriously, look at that marquee.

6. La Pietà

(Obviously not my photograph. I’d give credit where it’s due but, uh… I dunno.)

Okay. So. By the time I saw this sculpture, I’d seen a lot (a lot) of Jesus art, because Jesus art is highly inescapable in Italy, and that day, I’d already had my mind blown by the Sistine Chapel, but before I’d left the States, this sculpture was the only thing on my list of things I absolutely had to see. I’d seen a photograph of it in some book when I was a little girl, and I stared at it for… I don’t know. A really long time. Since then I’d always thought it was extraordinarily beautiful, and I wanted to look at it in person. When I walked into St. Peter’s Basilica, I actually walked right past it, until I caught a glimpse of something white out of the corner of my eye and turned my head and was drawn in by its tractor beam. It is now behind glass because it was attacked by a hammer-wielding crazy in the 70s, but even though it’s completely unapproachable, it’s still powerfully beautiful. My mother had asked me to tell her if marble truly breathed, and I’d thought it was just one of those crazy things my mother says sometimes, but then I swear — I SWEAR! — Mary sighed, and before I knew what was happening, tears were running down my face. I’m not one for public displays of emotion, especially not something so icky as crying (ahem), but in this case I couldn’t help it because it was just that beautiful. Did I have a religious experience? Yes, though not in any sort of conventional sense. I have no idea how long I stood there, moved by marble, staring in silent reverence at the pure grace of stone.

7. Sweet Pea

Okay, if you’ve actually made it this far, this is the part where I get so sappy you think you might throw up. Aside from the other parts like that (see: crying over a statue). There were a couple of other contenders for this last spot: Bieszczady, Poland and the sunflower fields of South Dakota, namely, but then I realized that if I were to be honest, then I’d really have to go with my dog. Now, I’m not one of those people who thinks that their dogs are human beings, I mean, the reason why I love her so much is that she’s a dog. I mean I don’t dress her up, or anything. Well, except for the one time with the feather boa (oh, all right… two times), and yes, there was the small issue of the hat on Halloween, but that was it. I swear. Also, I tell my mom that Sweet Pea may be the closest she ever comes to having a grandchild, but that’s just a matter of fact. And anyway, the truth is that Sweet Pea saved my life. Adopted almost exactly five months after Stacy was killed, when I was still trying to navigate what the world meant when she was no longer in it, Sweet Pea made me laugh every day and mean it. And then there were the job issues which I am never going to write about here, but suffice it to say that when 2005 rolled into 2006, my workplace went from being a place I looked forward to going to every day to being a place I dreaded so much I would cry a little bit each morning when my alarm went off. But none of these things are why I’m choosing her. Why am I choosing her? Because she’s gorgeous. Part border collie and part hound, she is sculpturally beautiful — all muscle and clean lines. And when she runs? It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Low to the ground and incredibly fast, she is powerful and graceful, pure deliberate motion and animal instinct (I think when she does this she is herding the trees in the yard, since of course I have no sheep for her to keep in line). Really — really — she’s just stunning.

And there you go.

Good news first: I don’t think I mentioned this here yet, but last month I applied for a summer language program at the University of Michigan and I found out yesterday that I got in, so yay me! So now I have to find a place to live in Ann Arbor. And if you want to, say, buy some stuff from my Etsy store so that I don’t have to live in my car this summer, that would be totally sweet. (I’ll be adding more this weekend, including perhaps some prints of my photos.) But hey, no pressure. Heh.

Ahem.

Anyway, earlier today I read this post at Little White Liar, one of my good recent blog finds. I decided I would play along with this weekly blog challenge this week, and so this afternoon I asked my mom to tell me about the night she and my dad met. “What was your first impression of Dad?”

“My first impression was that he was… a lothario.” She laughed. “Turns out that sometimes first impressions are right.”

Yes. My dad: Casanova. (I’ve actually always been pretty aware of this about my father; more about that later.)

My mother said that she met my dad Ali at a bowling alley (awesome!) and that he was a big hit with the ladies. He was with a friend, an immigrant who went by the decidedly non-Arab name Steve. (Steve was my mom’s boyfriend throughout much of my childhood, actually, which just goes to show you that once you go Arab, you never go… uh, back. That’s not catchy at all.) My mom liked Steve because even though he didn’t speak much English, he seemed like an okay guy, but that night he was very very quiet. My dad talked to my mom that night, I guess in between being a hit with the ladies or something, and my mom decided that he would be a fun summer fling because “he was a good dancer, and good-looking and I thought I’d have fun for the summer. I met him in the spring.” Seven years (and me!) later, my parents split up for the final time (I was 2). So it was a very long summer fling, then.

My mom said that even though they laugh about these things now (and they do sometimes go on trips down memory lane together), they fought a lot and my mom kicked him out more than once for being — and I’m paraphrasing, because I don’t think she’d ever put it this way, though maybe she would, I dunno — kind of a dick. She pointed out that over time, my dad grew up some and stopped being such a player, which is nice, though I guess this was long after my parents stopped being together.

That was really kind of uncomfortable to write. But there’s more discomfort ahead!

See, I’ve always been fascinated by my father, because even at this point in my life, he retains the aura of this Other. He’s never been anyone comfortable or familiar enough to be someone as regular as a normal dad, I guess. And the thing that’s always fascinated me the most about him is that he’s ridiculously charismatic and possesses this seemingly innate self-assuredness, this confident (perhaps some would call it arrogant) rock star swagger. He’s mellowed out a lot in the past few years, because as he says, he’s an old man now, but even so, when he walks into a room, people turn and look. He’s handsome, yes, but good looks alone do not a head-turner make. I guess it’s that he always seems to know that he’s the best-looking man in the room, and everyone else believes it too. Much to my mortification as a teenager, women would throw themselves at him. He of course enjoyed every second of this, even though I could tell he didn’t take these women seriously at all, but my reaction was always something along the lines of “Gross! He’s my dad! Go away, Slutty Waitress At The Restaurant Where I Am Trying To Have A Family Dinner!” (I still have a couple of friends who refer to my dad as hot, to which I reply, “Ew! Shut up!”)

Thinking about it now, I realize that witnessing my dad’s non-serious amusement toward women who are attracted to him has done a lot to shape my own attitude toward men. I love my dad now, even though it took me a long time to be able to say that and mean it, so I don’t want it to seem like I’m calling him an asshole, because I think that these days, despite everything, he’s a pretty decent guy. But, now that the disclaimer is out of the way… I know deep down, on some plane of logic, that not all men are like my father, yet when it comes to relating to men in an adult, relationship-type way, I don’t tend to take things very seriously because I don’t think they’re serious. And it’s all fun and games until it’s… not. And when things look like they’re getting serious, I seem to have a magic gift for sabotaging them beyond repair. Or I fall for guys I know it’s not going to work out with anyway. Or both. I’m never conscious of this when I’m in the middle of things, but hindsight being what it is and all, I notice that I am totally awesome. Thanks, Dad!

Well, that’s cheerful. And self-revelatory, which is completely out of character, but for once, I’ll leave it alone, instead of erasing it and rewriting it until it’s glib and shiny.

I don’t know what else to write, but there it is. I feel closer to my mom now, knowing that even though she didn’t think my dad was serious relationship material, she went for him anyway because he seemed like fun. That sounds like something I would do. Go Mom! Also I’m glad that even though it didn’t work out in the end, my parents got together, since I owe my existence to that, and existing is pretty good, I think. For the most part, anyway. Yeah.