Intro

Well I suppose I should begin by introducing myself and letting you get to know me. My name is Jumana and I am 27 years old. I currently reside in Virginia, along with my favorite two pets or pests you decide (i have a husband and a four year old son). They are both handfuls of extreme Libyanness and they are so alike it is oftentimes scary. I decided to become a blogger because I could not help myself. I am constantly reading/researching online and every once in a while I come up with a brilliant phrase that I will never be able to remember come the morning. It is my curse--the curse of the literary one night stand. So instead, I choose to immotalize my one nights stands here; now that would not be enough to fill a page, so there will be tons of randomness interspersed throughout. But enough about that...........there is so much to say.
I am the mix that is somewhat unenviable--the child of Arabs who made their way to the West. We are labelled as Westernized Arabs by those who don't know any better; "those" being mainly the diehards who love to say that with a sneer on their face. I consider myself a Libyanized American; someone who thanks God that her parents had the foresight to raise her in the USA, and yet invariably finds herself drawn to anything regarding Libya. There is a part of me that feels drawn to my roots and yet Libya is as alien to me as nothing else could possibly be. It is a soul wrenching feeling that few get to experience. Imagine living your entire life served up the same sidedish (Libya) and then getting to experience it as the main meal. All you can think is, "This is unpalatable." So invariably I get labeled a snob, which I think is pretty far off the mark. But I know that I am not alone, as I have met others like me, although relatively few and far between. I would like to know how it is that I am filled with such pride over ancestry and yet I feel at home most in the cities the Libyans have long since abandoned. I feel like a total stranger in the medina surrounded by living and breathing people. And yet, I will never feel 100% like an American because my relatively recent blood lines remain in Libya. I am the eternal nomad, constantly searching for sustenance and moving on so maybe I am more like my ancestor's than I think.