Those were the words some crazy person said as he punched me in downtown Amman a week or so ago. They mean "This animal," which was rather random considering I was just walking down the street and had never seen the guy before. It was only on the shoulder, so it could've been worse, but still, he just punched me. He then proceeded to grab a shai-boy's change purse and threw it into the street to the dismay of the people stuck in traffic.
This was kind of funny, because I was just telling a friend that I've never been in a real fight, apart from an ill-fated locker boxing match during my freshman year on the hockey team against a guy with 40 lbs. on me.
If I'm reading the Watson Fellowship guidelines correctly, in this situation, I should have "confronted challenges as opportunities", "eschewed the known for the unknown", and "fully explored the culture of my project country." In other words, I think the ghost of Ol' Thomas J Watson was telling me to confront this quite literal challenge as an opportunity to throw my first punch, immersing my fist in the culture of his jaw.
Instead, I muttered "majnoon" (crazy or "afflicted by genies") and kept walking, which will allow me to continue exploring Jordan instead of its prisons....or hospitals.
(As a sidenote: this is the second time I've been hit by a crazy person abroad. The first time was in a train station in Bari, Italy.)
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