The Mist

The season is starting to change here in the UAE, and apparently one of the signs is fog. As one of the professors put it, October is a foggy month. The temperature is not as ungodly hot as it was, and for a while the humidity had broken, but the humidity has come back with a vengenge. Tanja and I were catching a late movie at the Film Festival downtown on Sunday night, and when we walked out of the theatre past 11:00 the humidity was so high that my glasses steamed up immediately. That set us up for yesterday morning when I woke to the thickest fog I have ever seen, which made getting into work more than a bit of a challenge (made worse by the fact that Emiratis tend to drive way too fast). The fog was so thick that you couldn't even see the Zayed University building, which is huge, until you were about ten feet away from it. We actually got lost in the parking lot getting to school. Amazing. Tony tells me that the appearance of the fog also means that everyone will get sick, which is an old wive's tale, but one that he is starting to believe. To be fair, it seems that everyone of us has a cold, so maybe there is something to it.

I also chose to entitle this blog post The Mist because that is apparently my new nickname, given to me by Tanja and Laura, which relates to my tendency to, like mist, come and go and sometimes just disappear altogether. Actually, I like it very much, and, sadly, it is utterly appropriate. Every one of my friends would have their own story of me suddenly disappearing from some social event because I just needed to be alone. As the great Canadian philosopher reminds us, "I need a crowd of people, can't stand them day to day." My one concern would be that the name sounds too much like Master Shake's alter-ego, The Drizzle.