hasanhujairi[dot]com

I don’t understand why I can never travel light.

Every time I go somewhere I have to carry notebooks, books, clothes (way too many), toiletries, a few more books, a musical instrument or two, some photos to show people, etc…

I’m about to walk out of my dormitory in West Tokyo to live on a farm for ten days. I’ll be volunteering as an interpreter, and I will also be introducing Bahrain’s culture to a number of Japanese and non-Japanese youth. I participated in this same program last year and I remember having a wonderful experience.

In the next ten days, I’ll be away from all internet (and probably telephone) access - and can you believe that this is only a bit over an hour outside of Tokyo?

silence.

(I don’t know what else to say.)

On the train this evening, on my way back from a long day of volunteer work, I started to recount a few things that happened over the past few days as I absent-mindedly leafed through a notebook I had been carrying around with me here in Tokyo for most of the last three years. And when the train started to move again after stopping at one of the smaller stations along the Chuo Line, I suddenly felt as if there was something amiss: I was, for that moment in time, convinced that the conductor suddenly reversed the direction of the westbound train towards the east. This, however, did not make me panic. I figured that as long as I am inside the train, it doesn’t matter which way it took me. The train could only run along the designated tracks and nowhere else. If the train was in fact headed in the wrong direction, I could just get off at the next station and switch trains. My life, here in Tokyo, is reduced to being one of the thousands of commuters on a train somewhere in a big city.

Time froze at this moment, allowing me to look around a little. I noticed two young women looking at me. They were talking about fortune telling and being able to sense the color of someone’s aura (whatever that means). After a little hesitation, one of them told the other, “Go ask that foreigner over there if you could read his fortune. And can you try to make out the color of his aura?”

The fortune teller of the duo sheepishly walked over to me and asked me where I was from. I gave her the usual, “try to guess, would you?”. The fortune teller said, “Italy?” and I said, “close enough” (to encourage her fortune telling skills). She then said, “Can I take a look at your palm?”. When I showed her both the palms of my right and left hands, she looked confused. She then said, “umm.. maybe I should try looking at your aura first?”. I said that I didn’t mind showing her my aura as long as it didn’t involve anything socially unacceptable (I said this with a laugh). She then looked at me again and said, “hmmm.. mysterious. But maybe it’s because you’re a foreigner here, and not like a local. Perhaps the way one reads the aura and palm of a traveler is different than one who is settled down. Sorry, I can’t do this.” She said this as she turned around and walked back to her friend.

I’m still not sure whether all this was a scam, a philosophical encounter, or two girls trying to strike a conversation with someone who was obviously from a faraway place. On the upside, once the fortune telling girl walked away, I felt that the train seemed to be running in the proper direction again. Was all this some sort of joke? Perhaps it was.

As I walked up the stairs, I was staring at what had to be the stupidest cicada I had ever come across in my life. It, the single buzzing insect, kept flying into the hot florescent lamp in the landing and shrieking painfully as it burned itself more and more. Yup, you guessed it, this is another blog entry in which I associate myself with something else: sometimes it’s a homeless man in a train station, sometimes it’s a pigeon with a puffed up chest, sometimes it’s an ugly crow, and today it’s a stupid cicada.

Cicadas, you see, are nature’s way of reminding us that Summer is upon us. And I’ve never seen a place where this is more so than in East Asia, where the cicadas shriek the loudest in what might be considered their Summer songs. I’m not talking about cicadas in any symbolic or spiritual sense, I’m just talking about the ugly insect that makes a rather disturbing sound when the Summer is at its hottest and especially when it is slowly being singed to death by a hot electrical lamp.

Once every four years, the cicadas, unknowingly to the rest of the world, announce the arrival of the Summer Olympic games. (I know, that does sound a little far-fetched, but nevermind).

Just moments ago, I was downstairs in the plaza lounge, where a projector projected on a large wall the opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I was practically the only non-Chinese person watching the ceremony and didn’t feel much of the “Olympic spirit” during the extra-long ceremony. There were a few things that put me off: how the Olympic flag was passed from a group of children to a fearsome group of revolutionary soldiers, and how the ceremony was completely run by Chinese (making it more of a specifically Chinese Olympics rather than a global event). The “theme song” with Sarah Brightman and “the other guy” (can’t remember his name) was terribly boring, and the last guy who lit the Olympic flame looked like he was going to get a heart-attack or burn the support-wires that were suspending him scores of meters above the ground.

The Chinese students seated around me, of course, cheered mightily at the end of each segment that was just an overdone light-show spectacle of media effects and fireworks. They cheered when some paunchy washed up politician would show up on the screen. They stood up when the Chinese national anthem was being played, and sang along to it, too. I didn’t understand any of their gestures: Especially not in front of something as inanimate as a grainy projection on a concrete wall this late at night.

(On another note, I also didn’t really appreciate a few particularly unpopular politicians being given attention and airtime as they blankly waved at the athletes down below - who on their part were too busy waving at someone else in somewhere else - this however cannot be blamed on the organizers of the event).

As I stared at the cicada that was unknowingly killing itself, I stood there and wondered why I hadn’t been able to enjoy the Opening Ceremony. Was it because all my cultural references were skewed towards enjoying a different type of stimuli? Or had I been to focused on the “burning florescent light” of over-politicizing a symbolic parade or was I justified? Or am I just tired after an especially long semester with a few rough patches along the way? Maybe I just need to lighten up a little.

Either way, congratulations Beijing on hosting the Olympics. May the games be peaceful and fun for all.

John Lennon wrote “Across the Universe” in 1967, when he was 27 years old. This kind of makes me wonder.

Freddie Mercury was 29 when Bohemian Rhapsody came out in 1975.

Robert Plant was only 22, while Jimmy Page was 26 when they penned Stairway to Heaven.

Albert Einstein was 26 when he published his 1905 paper entitled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, in which he introduced his theory of relativity.

Franz Kafka was 32 when he wrote The Metamorphosis.

Albert Camus completed L’Étranger (The Outsider) before his 29th birthday.

Ludwig van Beethoven was 31 when he composed The Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor “Quasi una fantasia”, Op. 27, No. 2, which is also known as the “Moonlight Sonata” . He was deaf at the time, too.

I’m 26 right now, and I still don’t feel close to coming up with my own masterpiece.

Maybe I should hurry.

I just set up a myspace site of my own at http://www.myspace.com/hasanhujairi, where you can listen to samples of some of my music. Feel free to give the sample a listen and let me know what you think

I also wanted to thank Hashim at Mello Studio for doing an excellent job in recording/mastering the samples provided.

Yesterday, a lightning bolt struck the train tracks at the station near my dormitory. This resulted in the traffic signals on the train tracks to go haywire, and all the fire alarms in all the houses, apartments and dormitory buildings to all set off at the same time: the town I live in was shrieking in havoc for a good half a century. Despite all this, I patiently waited for the train to get moving and headed to discuss Japanese folk tales with a friend over coffee.

In other news, I survived what was probably the most stressful semester of my academic career. I’m happy that it’s over without any disasters: I’d pick crazy stray thunderbolts over advanced microeconomics any day of the year.

Tomorrow will mark the last day of the intensive Summer course that I’m taking right now, so I hope to be able to finally catch up on all the lost sleep over the last few months. I wonder: is it possible to have a sleep-credit account? If so, I’ve probably already accrued a few decades in back payments to the sleep bank already.

Otherwise, I’ll be returning “home” in September for a month-long I-seriously-need-to-think-about-what-I-want-to-do-with-my-life kind of visit. Before then, I’m planning on hitting the beach in Yokohama this Friday (I can’t believe it’s been THAT long since I last saw the sea) and volunteering as a Japanese/English interpretor in an international youth exchange program for ten days somewhere in the countryside just outside of Tokyo. I hope these next few weeks will be full of adventures (so that I can have material to write about here on this blah-blah blog).

I’ve also been saddened to hear about the death of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who passed away on August 3. I remember how in the eleventh grade, my English teacher assigned us to read the entire novel of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich over the weekend. Even though I didn’t find the book to be lengthy by any means, I couldn’t get through it as fast as I would like to, just because it felt so isolating and ’silent’, and by the last evening of the weekend, I had gotten physically sick trying to get my mind around the story and all the details and symbolism and themes, and I had to miss class that day. I found out that day that most of the class had also fallen ill while while reading the book for similar reasons. I still find this amusing, but I must admit that it is one of the best novels I have ever read. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 for ‘the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature’. In his Nobel lecture, he gave a modest overview of his autobiography, which I find insightful on how he lived and approached literature. Regardless of the works he wrote, his life in itself and all the struggles he went through deserve recognition as well. Just thought that I should share my thoughts on this.

A conversation between a professor and a confused graduate student:

Professor: _____, you are going to apply for the PhD program, right? When’s the deadline again?
Student: Umm… sometime in January, I think.
Professor: Are you sure? I’ll call the admissions office and double check with them. (picks up the phone, asks a few questions and returns to the student)
Student (with a quizzical look on his face): Well?
Professor: Yes, yes, you were right. Don’t miss the deadline, alright? I think that it would be great if you could stay here for the PhD program.

Here, we take a short pause to look into the cogs turning inside in the student’s head:
Student (thinking to himself): ..but what I really want to be is a rockstar.

The professor then looks at the student, asking if he had anything else to say about his death sentence. The student says nothing but it seems like there is a lump stuck in his throat.

Who knows what will happen next.

I don’t understand the little street behind my dormitory.

It’s a little strip of street, with apartment buildings lining both sides for a stretch of 300 meters or so leading up to a t-intersection that is flecked with small restaurants (some of which are probably involved in extracurricular underground work, I imagine) and a small police station (that does nothing about said extracurricular underground activities of its neighboring establishments).

I usually walk down this street in the evenings, just to get my 10-minute rush of fresh air (as fresh as air gets in the concrete deserts of Western Tokyo). I don’t like the street much in the evening, because I have a feeling that some beast is always ready to pounce at me, but it always changes its mind in the last moment. Late in the evenings, this little street is where tired taxi drivers park their cars for a while to get some rest; their black cars and hazard lights give the street an unreal depth.

In recent evenings, there have been hoards of tennis ball-sized toads lazing on the sidewalks. They are silent, and they don’t move much, but they are certainly there. I know that there’s a small creek not too far from the street and I assume that’s where those toads come from, but I cannot be certain because the train station is not far off either.

The cicadas still haven’t started their summer songs, even though it is almost August. Oh, and the Summer monsoon has come and gone without bringing much rain with it. I feel a little uneasy about this upcoming Summer.

One of the houses on this little street has a tree full of citrus fruit that have started to rot and fall onto the street. This same house seems to attract more cats than any other houses on the street, which confuses me.

Sometimes, I can hear the sounds of pianos and flutes floating out of some of the apartments on the street, but none of the houses seem to show any signs of people living in them. It seems like I’m the only one who actually uses this street: It’s just me, the sleeping taxi drivers, and the lazy toads.

I will never understand this local backstreet.

I woke up early this morning to get to class on time.

I didn’t wake up out of my own free will, but out of the impossibility of ignoring my alarm clock’s buzzing sound cutting the enormous distance between itself and my bed. Every morning, I give up to the alarm clock and get on with my life. And every morning I look at the calender hovering on the wall near my door only to realize that it’s a Wednesday. It’s always just another Wednesday according to my calender.

On my way out of the dormitory building, I looked into my mailbox to see if anything had arrived in the mail: some unpaid bills and a magazine with an especially colorful cover. I tossed them all into my bag and shuffled my feet with my head down all the way to the train station. During the commute on the train, I opened up my bag to pull out the magazine I had mysteriously received in my mailbox, and flipped through its absentmindedly without any of the words registering.

“Another Wednesday,” I thought to myself. “It’s another Wednesday, and I’m reading a magazine while commuting to school.”

I suddenly had a vivid image of myself as an elementary school student again, sitting in the back of my parents’ Honda. Wednesday morning drives to school were nice, and the highlight would have to be my father stopping the car (while waiting at a crowded traffic light) to buy the only two local Arabic Newspapers at the time and a copy of a popular weekly children’s Arabic magazine for me called Majed (the only good thing - to my knowledge - to have come out of Abu Dhabi), which was much loved by many children of my generation (my generation still consists of children, by the way). My father always bought the newspapers and that one particular magazine from an always nameless, faceless South Asian who barely spoke any Arabic, but knew the titles of the publications he was peddling from the back of his dangerously-parked bicycle. My father would always greet him politely, pay for the newspapers and magazine in exact change, and thank him politely before continuing to drive (which has definitely left an impression on me).

Wednesdays, for the two and a half readers of this blog, were once the last day of the working week in Bahrain. Wednesdays used to be fun: elementary school students would be looking forward to the weekend ahead - a weekend of non-stop fun and games - and the only obstacle in the way from such fun was the short (yet long) school day ahead. It was that copy of Majed that reminded me of the weekend that was just around the corner. On the other days of the week, my father would usually make me read out loud the main news headlines on the first page of each of the newspapers he bought. If I would mispronounce any of the words, he’d correct me (without getting angry), and if there were any particularly interesting news headlines, he’d ask me to read out their corresponding articles that were written in very formal Arabic. On Wednesdays, however, my father would let me read my colorful copy of Majed.

Majed, and I’m not being paid to say this about the magazine, was (and probably still is) an interesting magazine. It had many different articles on general knowledge, a section with pictures and profiles of different fans of the magazine who were from all over the Arab World, beautifully illustrated comic strips of different characters that always encouraged good morals, a love for adventure and a thirst for knowledge (I know, I know! You’re probably rolling your eyes now, thinking that it is impossible for a children’s magazine to accomplish such a thing). But I really liked the magazine, and I would always sneak my hand into my bag during Wednesdays at school to make sure that the magazine was still there as the Arabic teacher would be teaching us the fundamentals of Arabic grammar or our religion teacher was teaching us whatever religion teachers taught elementary school students. The only thing I remember from that time is that the physical presence of the magazine in my bag against the back of my hand made me happy.

Back on the train this morning, I thought that having a magazine in my hands on my way to school would somehow invoke the happiness I used to feel as a child on Wednesday mornings. In his The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera says: “And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition”. In this sense, I was longing for repetition, but when the text in overly colorful magazine finally registered, I realized that it was some pointless publication by some (insert suitable belittling insult here) cult claiming to have the answer to all of life’s problems by calling a toll-free number or accessing some website on the internet. “How convenient,” I thought to myself as I ripped the magazine to shreds and tossed into the recycling bin in the station at which I got off.

As I walked into another Wednesday of my life, I wondered how many different publications by different cults (and I heard that there are tens of millions of cult members in Japan alone!) are circulating the garbage disposal system of Tokyo. Tons, probably. This very though made me laugh out loud, much to the confusion of passersby.