At the doorway

How I miss writing ! It's been ages since I last felt I can take an idea safely out of head and into words. Now at the tail of a year I find me very comfortable and willing to blog. Maybe it's my friend's comment that suddenly got me all determined to fight back and write. I remember it used to feel great back then when I could blog as soon as I had something on mind. Let me try now. Let me spill whatever comes to my mind.

Currently, I'm not enjoying free time or doing many interesting things but I generally feel happy "alhamdulilah". On the personal level, I feel stable and content.

I've been in the mood for history. I just finished watching NatGeo's "World War II: Apocalypse". An excellent 6 episode documentary about World War II. It features exclusive colored footage and an excellent Arabic dubbing. The content of the series is very fast paced and compressed but it managed to excite my old time curiosity about WW2 - that period of time that had shaped our modern world as good as it had scarred it. Yet, the ignorant - like myself - know too little about it.

Another thing I've enjoyed recently is a session about history (yes history again). Among the tens of emails I receive from our university's events advertising office I happened to read this message about a guest speaker called Mariam Saada giving a public lecture. The title of the lecture quickly captured my attention: "Spanish History: Post Andalusian Collapse". Let me point out why. I believe history repeats itself. The wise should learn from history to understand his present. And if WW2 is something I wish I've read much about, Al-Andalus is something I literally wish I had lived. I'm not going to speak much about the session and how fantastic it was. But I'll highlight a few things I liked a lot. Mariam Saada seems to me like a passionate person, in love with her work and research. She mentioned having worked on Spanish language, culture and history for more than 15 years. She is a very good presenter - sometimes hyper active - but still very catching. She didn't really talk about the civilization that grew and prospered in Al-Andalus for more than 800 years. Instead, she talked about its fall and what followed. She poured 400 years of the life of Spain in 2 hours. She did such a good job that I wished she didn't stop. When she eventually did, I went up to her rushing into the question about her next talk. Luckily she accepted a request to give another one at the GUC this week. She's going to talk about her personal experience balancing life as a post-grad. student, a researcher, a mother and many other simultaneous roles. Being an academic, the talk makes a lot of sense to me.

I realize I haven't changed by blog theme since long. And I don't know why I won't, at least for now. Is it nostalgia ? ... maybe!

Alright, having written around 50 lines. I feel very content about my come-back to blogging.