Ordinary Time

What is today? Today is Sunday. My roommates are at school and I am sitting at the dining room table staring at the apartment buildings across the street, and past them, the blank space that is the sky above the Nile. These are all developing-thoughts as I am writing, I wanted to write about something else, but now I am thinking about how I have never really oriented myself to time here. The weekdays are Sunday through Thursday (Friday and Saturday compose the weekend) but for some reason, whenever Sunday comes around (or whenever we come around to Sunday, it depends on the way you conceptualize time. In one of the versions of time-as-a-process in your head, is the calendar frozen and we slide across it like pieces on a boardgame, or are we suspended in the air, floating a few inches off the ground, and time is like a silk river that passes beneath our feet, with multi-colored panels to mark the days?) it always feels like it is still a day where I don't have to do anything I don't want to, a day where my actions are not owned or dictated by larger rhythms of the populated planet, but mine.

In the conventional calendar of my brain (another, standard, mental conceptualization of time), instead of readjusting the filled-in blocks (let's picture in the version of the calendar we learned in kindergarten that Monday through Friday are crayoned-in green, weekdays, and Saturday and Sunday are blue, the weekend days) so that Sunday through Thursday are green and Friday and Saturday are blue, my brain has coped by making Monday through Thursday green and adding Friday as a blue day. Thus, it is a shock to wake up every Sunday in the middle of a green day.

To complicate this futher, my friend Fatma has a calendar like this on her desk:

If you can’t read numerals or the letters indicating the days at the top, I’m not sure it’s totally clear that time in this calendar is moving from right to left, as does the Arabic language. On the one hand, this might seem like a really obvious thing to happen on a calendar written in Aarabic. If Arabic is read from right to left, as you know, why wouldn’t the calendars be oriented that way as well? On the other hand, the numerals used in Arabic (which aren’t Arabic numerals, those are the numerals we use in the Latin alphabet) are still read from left to right. For example, the middle box on the bottom row, appears to mark Wednesday (in Arabic, what we call Wednesday is literally "the fourth day"), 29 March 2006.

٢ is 2 and ٩ is 9. When I look at the calendar, I can't help feeling like in parts of the universe, we are now moving backwards through elsewhere's forwards-time, somehow without ever encountering the things that have happened before this instant, like we are moving through them, or above them, superimposed on top of them, which is why we feel nostalgia, or déjà vu, or loss, or feel like we can Feel the past or future if we stare hard enough at white dining room walls, squinting and trying to make out the scenes projected there as past and future time slide by like frames of film. Unless, of course, time is an infinity-symbol, and you are moving from right-to-left or left-to-right, only to be re-routed in the other direction once you round a curve.

I will get to the other things I wanted to say but I am going to make tea now.