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Ok. So I’m not leaving today, but it seems that there’s a good chance that if my current plans actually pan out, I’ll be moving. I’ll be back in the Big Apple.

I’ve gotten so used to the idea of myself as a rural girl that this is a bit strange for me. More than a bit strange. I spent my freshman year of college in New York and packed it back to the verdant country of my youth so fast, and with so little regret, that I have since considered myself a bona fide, genuine, patent country bumpkin. This is so central to my self-image that when I fell in love with a man who loved the city and wanted to stay his whole life through, it gave me serious pause. I’m a tree-hugging granola chick. No ifs, no ands, not buts – and no urge to fight the fact that I see my life unfolding over green New England hillsides. That’s me. I’m rural, and that’s just the way it’s going to be.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Lizzy, you fool, I’ve seen your Facebook profile. You live in a city. And you’re right. I do live in a city. But Boston is to New York what a Chihuahua is to a Great Dane: lunch. Or possibly something to be squished underpaw on your way to the park. It’s peas.

In Boston, I keep my car. I blissfully ride around in traffic with my own radio blasting, and nobody’s elbows and nobody’s knees are rubbing against any part of me. In Boston, unless you’re way, way downtown, you actually get to see the sun at hours of the day that are not noon. Boston is small. It is manageable. It’s only an hour and a half from the house I grew up in. It’s not a chasm of urbanity. It’s just a brief vacation from Western Massachusetts. I figured I’d stay here until….oh, I don’t know, until I got hitched and decided to have kids and got worried about things like regular exposure to nature for the terribly small. Until I found a job that was portable enough to cart out of the city with me. Until I got sick of it. Until something drew me somewhere else. Until I got my life in order. Until I hit a brick wall…

Oh. Right. Remember last post, when I was all, “I’m a stuffed animal, and 25-and-jobless is my brick wall of pain?” That’s why I’m going to New York. Thank God I have a short-term memory and can remind myself of my own reasoning.

So: New York.

So what, right? So what if I became an urbanite? I mean, can I? Can my relationship with the city be rebuilt? Will I learn to relove the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and can I value it so much that the towering hunks of concrete, brick and stone blocking out the sun at virtually every hour of the day won’t bother my country-grown soul?

And let’s say I move to the city. What, then? Do I consign myself forever to urbanity, never to own a lawn or play in a sprinkler again? Will I become different? Will the crunchiness I hold so very dear in myself fade away with five, and then ten, years in that hub of hipness and fashion? Will I become (gulp) cynical?

The thing about me is that I’m not terribly fashionable. I’m not terribly put together, or neat, or in-the-know about pretty much anything. I’m earnest. I try to be nice. I don’t want that to be beat out of me. I like being nice.

So what happens to a girl like that in a city that’s the hottest of hot things? I don’t like hot things. I like independent coffee shops and the sound of screen doors squeaking shut. I’m sort of afraid that I’ll fade into – not mediocrity, that’s not the right word – irrelevance.

Once, in Cairo, my roommate asked me to buy her some fruit from a peddler outside our apartment building:

So I dutifully went down to buy us some nice produce. Trouble was, I’m too small and too polite to function effectively in an operation like this. It is impossible to describe to you how the women swarm around these things. I was poked, elbowed, and pushed out of the way by women twice my size and up to four times my age. See, to them, it was normal. That’s how you go to the vegetable cart. You shove the other women out of the way, pinch and sniff your veggies, stuff them in a bag and then stiff-arm your way over to the scales. You weigh your own stuff, slapping impatient hands out of the way, and then force your bills into the hands of the guy in charge of the cart. Then you charge your way out of the throng and go make yourself a nice tasty dish. But to me…I kept hoping, with the naivete of a green traveler, that if I just waited long enough, my time would come. It did….about half an hour later. The vegetable cart guy looked at my pale form waiting on the fringe as though I were from Mars. I’m sure he couldn’t imagine for the life of him what I was waiting for. I was waiting for my opportunity. I was waiting for peace and quiet. I was waiting in vain.

So this is my fear. My fear is that in New York, I’ll be waiting for the subway to be less crowded, I’ll be waiting for that shirt everyone’s wearing to be on sale, I’ll be waiting for someone to notice me and say, “Hey, you look like you need help.” And I won’t be surrounded by foreigners. I won’t be able to excuse my sticking out like a sore thumb, because these are my peeps. These are Americans too. Only, like, on speed. And in Armani. Or Prada. Or whatever – see??? I don’t even know.

What if I’m left out of everything New York-y? What if I’m so provincial that I become the last kid picked for the softball team? I’ve already been that kid. I have no desire to relive the fifth grade. I was so clumsy, and broke so many bones in such quick succession, that I earned the nickname “Grace.” And I didn’t have the excuse of growing into some long limbs that would turn pretty one day. I was awkward and short. Now I’m about to be awkward and short in New York.

Lord, help me.

An official introduction

Hi/salaam. I’m a recent(ish) college graduate and recent(ish) convert to Islam. Hence the name of the blog. By all accounts, I should be considered a “yuppie” at this point in my life: twenty-five, capped-and-gowned, reasonably intelligent….ah, if only it were that simple. The reality is that the term “muppie” applies to me only in the loosest sense. I’m Muslim, sure, but technically I’m not exactly employed. Not gainfully. Not like I imagined, in days of textbook-laden yore.

Hitting my mid-twenties like a stuffed bunny against a brick wall has made me realize several things…and wish, above all, that someone had told me the inevitability of postgraduate letdown.

I can’t help but think, “If I had only known….” But then again, known what? What would I have done differently? I’ve spent most of my life charging ahead at whatever it is that I want without much regard for wisdom, prudence, or patience. There’s not much reason to believe that my 18-22-year-old self would have really taken it to heart if someone had pulled me out of Chem 11 and whispered: Just fyi, life is going to be a black hole of confusion and poverty after you graduate. After all, my fancy-pants liberal arts college gave me every reason to believe that I would be shoulders and heads above the other struggling post-grads. In short, I thought the world would hand itself to me on a platter. Oh, how foolish I was.

If I’d known….if I’d really known, I’m not sure what I would have done. Since graduating, my life has been fairly eventful. I’ve driven across the country twice. I’ve adopted a cat. I’ve become Muslim, to everyone’s stupefaction (including my own). I’ve worked in a lab, taken the MCAT, and flirted with the idea of going to medical school more than once. I’ve been to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan. I’ve seen the Kabba. I’ve been a full-time student of classical Arabic. I’ve sat and had tea with one of America’s foremost scholars of Islam. I’ve interviewed for roughly one billion jobs. I’ve rewritten my resume about five hundred times. I’ve been engaged, married, and divorced. And lastly, but certainly not least, I’ve decided to abandon my scientific career for my own version of a little girl’s princess dream: becoming a writer. I don’t know if I would trade all of these experiences (which, I’m told, will build character in time) for a nice, shiny law degree, or a few cushy, predictable years in grad school. I’ve been in the grad school of life, baby. Now, if I can only make something of myself, I’ll be glad for the school of hard knocks.

In the meantime, I’ll be stumbling: towards faith, towards a temp agency that will take me (take that, ego), towards becoming a better person, towards explaining my transformation from a postmodern-feminist/superliberal/secularist to a practicing Sunni Muslim. [note: I wouldn't consider myself to be not a feminist, or a liberal, at this point. I'm only a former secularist. But we'll get into that later, I'm sure.]

I recently visited my alma mater, and met some professors and friends who haven’t seen me since before I converted. It’s funny; I can see the enigma running circles in their pupils. I come from a small, small school in the middle of rural New England (not exactly a bastion of diversity). Islam, Muslims, converts….these things are sometimes more ideas than real things. It’s easy to forget this in a city, where I can ride the T and see other women covering there hair and exchange “salaam” without the other riders blinking an eye. Back home – back at school, I am so much more of an oddity than I am here. Perhaps it’s because I’m white, and my scarf just doesn’t suit me. Perhaps it’s because I leaped into the deep end of faith and abandoned my “common-sense”, intellectually-responsible, secular roots. Perhaps it’s because I’m simply an articulation of an unfamiliar phenomenon. Perhaps my professors look at me the way a parent looks at a misbehaving child: this is not the way you were raised. Honestly, I’m clueless. In reality, they are as inscrutable to me as I am to them.

Still, I think it’s important to bridge these gaps. There’s no reason to think that this isn’t exactly what my education prepared me for…after all, haven’t I thought for myself, choosing a path I knew they would deprecate?

So this is the story of me. Struggling, like so many of my peers, to find a way to pay the rent, feed my cat, and maybe buy a new pair of shoes every once in a while. I happen to be doing it with one foot in my past of achievement, normalcy, and secularism, and the other in the present of unemployment, its accompanying humility, and faith. Do check in from time to time.

I’ll try to be as interesting as I can.