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I woke up early this morning to get to class on time.

I didn’t wake up out of my own free will, but out of the impossibility of ignoring my alarm clock’s buzzing sound cutting the enormous distance between itself and my bed. Every morning, I give up to the alarm clock and get on with my life. And every morning I look at the calender hovering on the wall near my door only to realize that it’s a Wednesday. It’s always just another Wednesday according to my calender.

On my way out of the dormitory building, I looked into my mailbox to see if anything had arrived in the mail: some unpaid bills and a magazine with an especially colorful cover. I tossed them all into my bag and shuffled my feet with my head down all the way to the train station. During the commute on the train, I opened up my bag to pull out the magazine I had mysteriously received in my mailbox, and flipped through its absentmindedly without any of the words registering.

“Another Wednesday,” I thought to myself. “It’s another Wednesday, and I’m reading a magazine while commuting to school.”

I suddenly had a vivid image of myself as an elementary school student again, sitting in the back of my parents’ Honda. Wednesday morning drives to school were nice, and the highlight would have to be my father stopping the car (while waiting at a crowded traffic light) to buy the only two local Arabic Newspapers at the time and a copy of a popular weekly children’s Arabic magazine for me called Majed (the only good thing - to my knowledge - to have come out of Abu Dhabi), which was much loved by many children of my generation (my generation still consists of children, by the way). My father always bought the newspapers and that one particular magazine from an always nameless, faceless South Asian who barely spoke any Arabic, but knew the titles of the publications he was peddling from the back of his dangerously-parked bicycle. My father would always greet him politely, pay for the newspapers and magazine in exact change, and thank him politely before continuing to drive (which has definitely left an impression on me).

Wednesdays, for the two and a half readers of this blog, were once the last day of the working week in Bahrain. Wednesdays used to be fun: elementary school students would be looking forward to the weekend ahead - a weekend of non-stop fun and games - and the only obstacle in the way from such fun was the short (yet long) school day ahead. It was that copy of Majed that reminded me of the weekend that was just around the corner. On the other days of the week, my father would usually make me read out loud the main news headlines on the first page of each of the newspapers he bought. If I would mispronounce any of the words, he’d correct me (without getting angry), and if there were any particularly interesting news headlines, he’d ask me to read out their corresponding articles that were written in very formal Arabic. On Wednesdays, however, my father would let me read my colorful copy of Majed.

Majed, and I’m not being paid to say this about the magazine, was (and probably still is) an interesting magazine. It had many different articles on general knowledge, a section with pictures and profiles of different fans of the magazine who were from all over the Arab World, beautifully illustrated comic strips of different characters that always encouraged good morals, a love for adventure and a thirst for knowledge (I know, I know! You’re probably rolling your eyes now, thinking that it is impossible for a children’s magazine to accomplish such a thing). But I really liked the magazine, and I would always sneak my hand into my bag during Wednesdays at school to make sure that the magazine was still there as the Arabic teacher would be teaching us the fundamentals of Arabic grammar or our religion teacher was teaching us whatever religion teachers taught elementary school students. The only thing I remember from that time is that the physical presence of the magazine in my bag against the back of my hand made me happy.

Back on the train this morning, I thought that having a magazine in my hands on my way to school would somehow invoke the happiness I used to feel as a child on Wednesday mornings. In his The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera says: “And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition”. In this sense, I was longing for repetition, but when the text in overly colorful magazine finally registered, I realized that it was some pointless publication by some (insert suitable belittling insult here) cult claiming to have the answer to all of life’s problems by calling a toll-free number or accessing some website on the internet. “How convenient,” I thought to myself as I ripped the magazine to shreds and tossed into the recycling bin in the station at which I got off.

As I walked into another Wednesday of my life, I wondered how many different publications by different cults (and I heard that there are tens of millions of cult members in Japan alone!) are circulating the garbage disposal system of Tokyo. Tons, probably. This very though made me laugh out loud, much to the confusion of passersby.