alone time = verbal incontenence

It happens to the best of us. Living in a closed society can make it unusually difficult for people to make the same kind of connections that they have at home with their friends and family. A lot of expat women end up spending a lot of time at home cooped up with their kids or even by themselves, because the heat levels, the abayas, the lack of public entertainment sources, the prayer closings, the drivers, the blah blah blah million and one barriers to doing the things you always did at home result in it being ten times easier to stay home than to get out and go somewhere social. A lot of women fall into a pattern of inertia, a bit of a black hole in time, and I am just as guilty as the next. For instance, if I walked out of my home on any given afternoon to go to the compound store, and someone asked me what day it was or what time it was, I would not know. As a general rule, time stopped somewhere a year and half ago for me, and I therefore cannot make a distinction between Sunday and Tuesday. Those details slowly become filed in the brain as "not relevant"

As a direct result of all that isolated time-stopping quiet time, I find that when I call my friends and family back in Canada, I literally cannot stop talking. It's the kind of flood-talking where the person on the other end of the line could put the phone down, watch Seinfeld, come back, and you would still be talking, not because anything particularly earth shattering has happened, but because you've gone into withdrawal from the lack of human interaction and this is the rebound effect.

I know this post makes me sound like quite the fruitless loser...what can I say? it's not completely untrue........ha ha..oh well, that is what candy is for!