I'm tired. Really really tired. I guess owing to the fact that I got about three hours of sleep last night and was up and running at 5:20am for another photoshoot more or less has worn me out. The Starbucks I slurped down two hours ago is wearing off now and I'm here, heavy lidded trying to write a media kit for my business.

I leave Dubai tomorrow morning (or rather, in exactly 12 hours I have to be at DXB airport), and admittedly I'm sad to go. It will be a while before I see my uncle again, a hilarious guy who shares shocking similarities with me. We've been spending the last few nights talking, really just talking about life directions and our own five year plans. He empathizes with my distaste for school lasting another six years, though he's "wise" enough perhaps to insist that I just get it over with and also insist I finish it. I am offering him as much insight as I can toward the attainment of his life's goal, which is retirement, and which he'd hoped happened a year earlier. I suppose, though, he's capable of retiring now, but he's chosen to stay in the grind for another three years, and he still harbors a fundamental disappointment for not having retired earlier. We both came to the consensus, though, that we should be living life on our own terms, both in his work and my own life. He's sixteen years older than I am but it really doesn't seem like it and I suppose it never has. We've had good conversations in the past few days about how to make both of our lives more bearable for the time being, the both of us waiting for the big day we get to throw off all shrouds of responsibility (well, within reason) and just do stupid things like sit on the beach and program videogames (him) or hurtle down mountains at forty kilometers an hour on a Tuesday morning (me). He'll be coming to New York, though, which will be nice. We will hopefully have culinary adventures worth talking about. I think it's been him who has shown me all of the neat "hole-in-the-wall to blow-your-broke-student-mind" restaurants I know of that I would likely have never found myself. In exchange I offer the pittons of singing the praises of Peter Luger, dropping hints on Japanese restaurants I've known to be good and reasonable, and solidly warning him of Chica-licious' Times writeup (thereby making the damn place impossible to enter.) One day, on all fronts, I will have more to offer.

In other news, I see my other whole tomorrow at 3pm-ish local time. I can't wait; I think it's been months since we've spent any substantial measure of time with one another and I'm sick of being alone and I think he is too. I think the first thing I will do is fall asleep on his stomach, to the sound of his heart racing a little, then slowing to tango with the gurgles of his stomach.