munir's adventures

Suffering from a strange experience - what seems to be rather extreme caffeine response. Had an espresso and a latte yesterday, at 2 and 4 o'clock respectively. Nothing out of the ordinary - I'm quite sure I've done worse in the past few weeks (especially when Andrew was visiting). I usually feel rather insignificant symptoms from caffeine, even when I purposely try to use it to stay awake. Oddly, though, I had the hardest time falling asleep when I tried at about midnight. It's been at least months, and perhaps years, since I've had this much trouble falling asleep. Eyes were wide open, thoughts aimlessly wandering. Read more of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (for my History of Economic Thought course) to see if that would help me fall asleep. (That makes it sound as if the book is immensely boring, which it isn't really, but there is a way of reading any serious book that can be a rather effective somniferous.) In any case, that didn't work. After much patience I finally fell asleep. Only to wake up at 6, fully alert. No grogginess, no half-sleep (like when I know I need to get up for something, or have a strong need to pee). Full on, strong heartbeat, wide-open eyes. Can't get back to sleep. Hmm. Time to blog!
(Apologies for the post title. I'm a lame-o.)

Ok, I know it's yet another thing to keep track of, but I've been using tumblr on and off for a while, and will keep doing so. For many things it's just so much easier to post to. And it's so clean and fresh!
Anyway, munir.tumblr.com for anyone who's interested. I've got it set up to have all my vox posts show up there as a link. I may stop that, since it overloads the place.

When driving alone, what do you do?  Sing along to the radio?  Think about your day?  Something else?
Submitted by carapiccoladiva.  

I haven't driven (never mind alone) in a while, but definitely I sing along to my iPod. In fact, I do this to an extent that is deleterious to the safety of myself and those around me. I'm already a bad driver to start with (I'm sort of between bad and horrible. really) and the music and singing just up the badness. But they're so much fun! Oh, and podcast lectures are great too. There's a bunch from different universities. I think they're not so bad in terms of making me a worse driver, but they make me get lost far more frequently. See, a song distracts you because reaction time is slower, but it's easy to stop paying attention to the music when you need to figure out a turn. With a lecture, you can't just skip bits of it randomly. It follows in sequence! Someone's talking to you! So anyway, I often realise far too late I missed my turn.

I got my iPod fixed! That made me happy. I forgot how wonderful it is to have a fully-functional iPod. For the past... over six months, my iPod has worked, but only partly. The hard drive had these hiccups, so some songs would freeze, and the whole system would freeze on occasion when loading stuff. That meant I only had a few songs on it (well, only a couple hundred or so) and changed them very rarely. So it was useful as a way of having good music when I want it, but it didn't allow for much change or exploration. And also, I was living in far-off-bad-internet lands, so that didn't help either. Anyway, now my iPod is fixed, and I'm getting podcasts again! They're lovely. I listened to the BBC Newspod on the bus home, and then at a cafe across the street. It's a bit long (just over 30 minutes) for a daily podcast, but if I can keep up with it, it's a great way of keeping up with the news. It's got a good overview of what's happening, but also some more detailed pieces on a few things. I think it's a selection of bits from all BBC programmes, rather than a news summary per se.
Oh, and video podcasts! I got all of the Flight of the Conchords podcasts, and devoured them all in a couple sittings (on my MacBook, though, not my iPod). What a lovely show! And they have two of their episodes available entirely on podcast! Download these now if you haven't watched Flight of the Conchords.

Walking home yesterday, I saw a funny sight. I should have taken a picture, but that felt a bit awkward. I was walking behind a boy and a girl, about university age. The boy was wearing a t-shirt that was tight, and he had some rolls of fat that kind of ballooned out of his shirt (nothing extreme, just trying to paint a picture here). Anyway, it gave an exaggerated picture of his upper-body girth. His legs, though, gave the opposite impression. He was wearing slim jeans, but they fit him just right. He seemed almost abnormally small hipped and legged. Not chubby in the least. The girl beside him looked like his exact opposite. She had a normal upper body, and narrow shoulders, but a pretty heavy-set bottom. I guess a pear shape is pretty common for girls, but she was exceptionally big-bummed, without being fat.
Anyway, the contrast was curious. Human bodies are wonderful!

I've had quite a few headaches in my life. The funny thing is, I go through periods with lots (sometimes almost daily) and periods with almost none, sometimes months-long. I know in Nigeria, for example, I remember thinking that I was done with these headaches. I was there for six months. When I got home, though, I think they started again. I had a few in Afghanistan, but only for part of my time there. I think my first two months were ok, and my last month I started getting some again, but not that frequently.
Anyway, I've been getting quite a few here in Montreal. I'm trying to figure out what they are. My Dad once suggested I keep some form of log of how I feel. A calendar with Xs for days I got a headache, for example. Seems like a good idea, but one I wouldn't keep up. Anyone have a suggestion of how I could get myself to keep track?
I was thinking one thing that could help is not just marking days I have headaches, but days I don't. So I would have a three-state system, instead of a two-state one. Yes/No/Unspecified, rather than Yes/No. That way, I would know whether I just forgot, or whether I didn't have one! I know it sounds trivial, but it's the kind of thing that can make a system useful.
Which reminds me of the kind of thinking I did lots of when I was working with Mercy Corps, doing my Monitoring and Evaluation system-building stuff. How do you collect data that is useful, despite being (mostly) badly collected, and with frequent omissions. I think one of the biggest mistakes I did with the Sri Lanka system was to assume that all data is collected perfectly. That whatever form you design will be understood well, entered on time, accurately, and for all partner groups/field offices. This was obviously rather optimistic.

I recently got these new headphones for my iPod. They were just a cheap pair from some big store. In-ear, like the ones that come with iPods. These, though, have some form of plastic thingy that fits inside your ears. I used them for the first time today, and while walking through the streets of Montreal, had the strangest sensation. They subdue outside sounds far more than headphones I've had in the past, so I felt like I was in a movie. Normal street things would happen beside me, but I could hardly hear them - they sounded quite distant. The music I was listening to had me just gliding on the sidewalk, just observing what's around me. 

Had dinner last night at a UNAMA guesthouse. (Invited by a guy from Microsoft’s humanitarian wing after a meeting on some collaboration we’re planning – don’t hate me Dad.) Matt, one of the guys there, an Aussie working for the UN I believe, somehow got onto the topic of a training he’d given earlier that day on how to deal with being kidnapped. Part of the training he gave was explaining how to deal with severe pain. If your gets broken, for example, you should focus on the rest of your body. Imagine your broken arm is off to the side (handy – it is!) and think about your breathing, the sensation in your other arm, legs, etc. (The kind of advice, of course, that’s easy to give but hard to imagine following. If I’ve been kidnapped in Kabul and they’ve broken my arm, I’m feeling that pain.)

Oh I think this stemmed from a conversation where someone was recommending this Indian spa they’d recently been to. They were saying you come out of the place feeling very zen, at peace. Matt was using this kidnapping training advice as an example of being zen.

The sound of occasional explosions in Kabul was another topic of conversation. This woman Beth (UN as well) was recounting that when she got here a few years ago, any sound of explosion was treated very seriously. People would get worried, often stopping work to go to their guesthouse. Now, people just look up, “wow, that was a loud one,” look down again, and get back to work. Even the big explosion we had in Kabul June 17^th that killed 35 men, the worst such explosion since the fall of the Tabilan, didn’t faze people here. I frequently hear explosions in the office, but yeah - we just look up, and talk about whether we think it was a controlled explosion (construction work) or a bomb.

I guess you get used to anything.

Arrived home last night with our garden particularly fragrant. It’s been quite beautiful for some time now, but the past few days have seen the smells bloom as well.

Went out to dinner with Emmad, a Pakistani colleague who I wish I'd spent more time with. A couple great things about him:

His name is spelled with two m's because of his mother's insistence at some point in his adult life (after consulting some form of fortune teller) that he must change his name to change his fortune (he'd been going through some bad luck). He compromised by keeping the same pronunciation but changing the spelling (from Emad to Emmad).

Every expat in the Afghan Mercy Corps office gets a week off for R&R every 8 or so weeks. People either go home to relax, or to some attractive tourist destination not too far away (of which there are plenty). Not Emmad, though. He goes to Iraq. Granted, he has a good excuse - his wife and infant son live there. Not in Baghdad, thankfully, but in the still-dangerous-enough city of Kirkuk in the Kurdish North. This puts him in the odd situation of trying to move his family to Afghanistan, in part so they're safer. Yeah, not many people do that.