Prolific Immigrant

This is one of my favourite photos of Sharshoora and I taken on the 28th of September 2002 at Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights’ “Unite For Justice” event on Parliament Hill.

The photo always makes me laugh because I sort of look stoned and she looks like she’s carrying a light saber.

Sharshoora was in Ottawa for only a year and we got off to a rough start because the first time she came over was due to a conspiracy between my mama and hers.

There was a boy mama wanted her to meet and so mama asked that I invite her over for a cross between a “game night” (snore) and a “Yay Maha Got Her Masters” thing. Or maybe it was my birthday. Anyway, the people at this thing are individuals to whom – less than a month later – I would develop a severe and extreme allergy. This post is about them. As an aside, let me confirm that this group of ‘friends’ eventually imploded because they all talked so much about one another.

Back to game night. I’m not a “game night” sort of girl. I have never been a game night sort of girl. But this group most definitely was, and so “game night” sort of became a staple for maybe two months. Did I already say: SNORE? Well just in case: F*cking Snore.

Sharshoora was rightfully put off by this display of snoredom and mistook me for one of Them, A Game Night Gal.

Luckily, that was the first and last evening of it’s kind at my place.

I immediately took to Sharshoora and started following her around Ottawa. Within two days, she caved and we started spending our weekends together. (Lucky I’m sort of cute and charming.)

For the rest of that entire year, Sharshoora slept at my place practically every weekend. It just started happening without discussion I think, because we found our mirror nerd in one another. Neither one of us takes ourselves seriously at all, or those around us for that matter, and most definitely, we continue to find the funny in everything.

When I couldn’t find the funny, which was oftentimes the case when family discussion turned to marriage, Sharshoora would always make me chocolate cake and tell me that everything was going to be fine. The chocolate cake became the third in our ménage.

In the basement of her apartment building, she had a movie vending machine, and we would rent several movies a weekend, hang out watching them or Felicity reruns, eat, laugh, and eat some more. Our diet consisted of: chocolate cake (we made one every Friday and it was gone by weekend’s end), chips and cola. She really liked pumpkin seeds and would eat so much that her lips would turn white over the course of the evening.

She also used to do this thing where she would pour out a little of the cola and then close the rest of the 2Ls. She’d sit up on my kitchen counter and repeatedly shake the cola and then open it slowly to let the gas out. Once the gas was all gone, she would drink the cola. I now do this because she was right: It just tastes “sooooooo” much better.

At the end of the year, Sharshoora left for Georgetown and we lost touch. We both sort of suck for letting that happen. We tried to get in touch a few times and didn’t manage anything relatively decent in terms of conversation time.

Finally, she came back for a much-too-short visit in August of 2005. We spent an evening together getting caught up and trying to speak at the same time in order TO get caught up. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to bake chocolate cake.

She also tried to meet up with us in NY in October of 2005, but work pushed my dates back and she couldn’t make it out.

And then this summer, she got married:

I know. She’s stunning, this due to her Palestinian blood (her other half is Lebanese). We’re all pretty that way. She is absolutely one of the most beautiful women y’all’ll lay eyes on.

And she is a bona fide nerd. And she’s brilliant. And she’s working on her Masters at Columbia in Quantitative Statistical Analysis. And she’s hilarious, in Arabic (I take the cake for hilarity in English ya Sharshoora). She will make you piss yourself laughing and her sense of humor has no bounds. Case in point: one time her mama told the girls not to come home when it was dark, and so they came home the next morning after the sun came up. I’ve always admired this capacity of hers to find the loopholes re our limits when it came to our mamas’ rules…

Yesterday we finally managed to catch one another after much too long. We spoke for approximately an hour trying to catch up on all that we’ve missed…it’s incredible how a couple of years can be condensed into an Agenda less than an hour long.

I rang.
She answered.
I squeaked and squealed.
She screamed.
And the rest is history.

I knew I missed her, I’d just not realized how much until that moment.

Her husband and her have an apartment in the heart of NY at the corner of 6th and 16th and the plan is for me to head over for a weekend come Spring. She’s confirmed the presence of a flat screen and has asked that I merely bring the chocolate cake mix and the cola.

I can’t wait.