I'm still doing that other thing.

500andcounting.blogspot.com

Go there!

Um. In other news, I forgot why I opened this site to post. Shit.

oops. as tom requested----

500 and counting

whoops

Good point gara.

one more time:

500 and counting

Not that I've posted much here anyway as of late. But I'm starting a new project, 500 and counting.


Because, to be honest, Ive lost interest in blogging: I find myself reading short fiction and poetry reviews daily, and I'm at a place where I have enough flurries of words and stability in my life to do this. So everyday, for 5 months, I will write something brief and call it a story.

Go there daily, make my sitemeter stats flourish so I don't feel like I'm just talking to myself

Harassment (A Reprise)

Happily, two of my oldest Cairo friends are in town for the week. The nostalgia tied into my anticipation, and mixed with my recent decision to leave Cairo in a few months, well it's all gone to my head. I've been walking around sighing at Downtown belle-epoch period buildings, thinking about all the conversations on the train to Alex, the sing-along dinner parties, the late nights, drunken two-steps, dramas, satellites and horrific x-treme sport adventures. The summer of 2006 I moved to Cairo, wet behind the ears, without boundaries and ready for action. Cairo spent the first few months brutalizing me into my place, and these two boys witnessed it all firsthand. Oh, the memories.

So, how does the city prepare me for their return? In the only way it knows how- ferocious backlash.

Last night, while walking home from work, Cairo gave me a little something to remember the good old times with: a random groping. (Thanks Cairo, ever consider a present that doesn't end in tears? Socks maybe?) A guy walked past and gave me a solid ass pat. I turned, and started yelling. He ran. I chased yelling what was my best approximation to Haram Aleek, which my walking companion, Farzina, interpreted is Haramea (thief) and began prancing behind me, shouting thief in Arabic.

Eventually someone stopped the guy and I caught up. My reaction: Hit him with my purse. Yell. When that did nothing I hit him with my fists. And when that didn't cause bruising (or give me my dignity back), a random Cairene started hitting the offender in the face with his fists. The Men of Cairo escorted the guy off and sent me on my way. Victorious, kind of.

I laugh through the story when I tell it, and everyone who has seen the harassment treats it like I'm scoring a point for Team Victim. But, it makes me feel sick. It's been well over a year since I've been physically harassed and I hate that my immediate reaction was one of violence. I wasn't even furious at what happened, it was just instinct: someone touches you, chase, scream, punch. Then feel miserable afterward. I am no longer a ball of righteous fury; I am simply mindless aggression, which makes me a little disgusted.*

What added to my unease was that not one of the men who stepped in and hit then escorted away the groper understood English. I realized afterward that they hit him without knowing what he had done to me. They just assumed, and reacted with violence equal to my own.

When I was younger I used to have dreams that I was being attacked and I couldn't defend myself physically, anytime I attempted to throw a punch my body was paralyzed. In these dreams I was frustrated and terrified. In reality, I wish that it had worked out that way, that I had found a less base way to deal with what happened. Or at least a one where the consequence equaled the action, however a brutal face beating and possible police involvement (which I wouldn't wish on anyone, apart from murderers and local bloggers. Ha. Man, I'm topical) is not what I would've chosen.

Welcome home Ziyad and Simon, good to have you back.

Note: I've changed my theory on the Egyptian Knight in Shining Honor from the assaults of 2006. Now I believe if you directly ask for help (for anything not just hassle), or cause an incredibly huge scene someone tends to step in. Making me feel both invincible and coddled.


*I hate telling this as an individual story, because I love Egyptians. I think generally the people in the country are kind and curious, two things I enjoy. If I didn't love it here, I wouldn't be here. The harassment doesn't happen often anymore to me, but I know it still happens to other women. I wrote this post to deal with my own feelings about my behavior that evening, not to be a social critique.

I have a secret to share with you internet:
I read celebrity gossip. Everyday. It's true. I know looking at me you'd never guess it. M. E. Detrie, with the unwashed, unbrushed hair, wearing a child's size 8 John Deere hoodie, traces of make-up from two days ago KNOWS what goes on in Paris Hilton's life on a daily basis (rumor is she's been necking with Elisha Cuthbert, which is, well, inhumanly sad for Elisha Cuthbert.).

But what I find interesting, as someone who doesn't own a TV, is why do I care? Why is Britney Spears on the front-page of CNN.com more often than Darfur? I guess because its easier to understand a human self-destructing than it is to comprehend a decade old on-going killing campaign. More fun to watch to.

I guess there's something about the slow motion tragedy that is every person's life that I just find endlessly fascinating. I get the feeling though, that there are thousands of stories out there that are much more interesting than which actress is snorting what drug. But, housewives in Tucson don't get nearly as much paparazzi. I've met so many people with amazing, interesting stories; and told by the right story-teller, even my life is filled with more adventure, heartache and scandal than anything I've read about Lohan (though, that's debatable, dependent on how you rate drug-usage. I don't rate it at all.)

I suppose we find celebrities so noteworthy because they are celebrities, but I think a lot of it is enjoying seeing someone, anyone, with huge character flaws acting selfishly, miserably and beautifully.

There's something comforting, relatable, in it.

I think I'll call them Sparky, Motsy, Philip, Professor Wikipedia, Rex....

I think we all know, I am not the classiest of girls. On any given day you'll find me wearing whatever I fell asleep in, which is usually what I was wearing the day before. (I'm kidding! I only fall asleep in my clothes 4 times a week, and I typically change in mornings. Though its getting cold and even that's starting to seem less important.)

So when I moved onto the boat of luxuriant hedonism, I expected it to be, well, a luxuriously hedonistic lifestyle. I assumed I would have to invest in a fur bathrobe and Paris Hilton-esque sunglasses, and spend my nights sipping Italian wine while coyly flirting with Arabian princes on the balcony. No luck, sadly no sheiks have made their way to the Imbaba slum district, surprising I know!

However, I quickly learned that houseboats on the Nile are buggy. Looking like I was raised in Canada by lumberjacks means that it didn't take long for me to not be bothered by the bugs. But this weekend I realized that comfortableness that has developed might be too extreme. I woke up and went out to the balcony to have my morning tea, only to see my roommate had dropped a tablespoon of peanut butter on the ground, my immediate thought was "I should clean that up." Then, I thought "Nah, the ants will get it."

Couple hours later, the peanut butter was just a slight oil stain.

That's right. I treat the bugs like they are the house dog. Well, I've always wanted a pet in Cairo, I suppose.

Coming up with names for all of them is going to be a hassle though.

School-yard rules

A little behind the rest of the world, I've been reading Thomas Friedman's "From Beirut to Jerusalem," beyond being a wonderfully well-written insightful though obviously sided account of the 70s and 80s in the Middle East its gotten my wheels turning again about this region.

Friedman's Op-Ed for the New York Times this week makes an interesting argument- that democracy may not be as important diversity. Respecting others rights, after all, is a keystone of democracy.

The very essence of democracy is peaceful rotations of power, no matter whose party or tribe is in or out. But that ethic does not apply in most of the Arab-Muslim world today, where the political ethos remains “Rule or Die.” Either my group is in power or I’m dead, in prison, in exile or lying very low. But democracy is not about majority rule; it is about minority rights. If there is no culture of not simply tolerating minorities, but actually treating them with equal rights, real democracy can’t take root.

But respect for diversity is something that has to emerge from within a culture. We can hold a free and fair election in Iraq, but we can’t inject a culture of diversity. America and Europe had to go through the most awful civil wars to give birth to their cultures of diversity. The Arab-Muslim world will have to go through the same internal war of ideas.

Maybe instead of state-building we should worry a little more about "creating an environment of tolerance" as my high-school guidance counselor used to call it.

Better Thongs and Tassles

Nothing has been happening in Cairo lately, well for me anyway. So I'm going to tell you a story about my mom.

A few years ago my mother's best friend, K, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. As she got ill, my mom took it really hard. I've learned it isn't easy to make close friends when you're middle-aged, and having lived in the city for only a few years, I was glad my mom had a friend she felt she could talk to. Near the end, when this friend was in the hospital permanently, my mom decided to bring K some of her favorite magazines to help keep her busy. This friend loved home decor magazines, Country Homes-esque glossies profiling beautiful living rooms and well-lit kitchens.

My mom on the other hand, finds these magazines to be, well, dull. Her approach- Who cares about looking at furniture? Let's give K something worth staring at.

So she bought a stack of interior design magazines, a stack of Playgirls and set to work. I came home for the weekend to find my mother, at the age of 53 with scissors and a glue-stick at the dining room table cutting out photos of naked men and meticulously gluing them onto the pages -- positioning the man wearing nothing but cowboy boots delicately on the expensive sofa, and perching a man in a silver g-string on the white granite kitchen counter.

She filled the pages of one of the Better Gardens & Whatever with naked, leering men, shoved it in the middle of the stack of magazines and headed to the hospital.

I should be so lucky to someday be the kind of adult she is.

The Great American (unwritten) Novel

Whenever anything bad happened in my life, my mother always would tell me "someday you can use it as material for your novel." Until she had expressed it, I had never even considered being an author. The first time I had my heart broken by a musician, the first time I broke someone else's heart (an mechanical engineer), the medical scares (cancer, unknown), all the short-comings and failed auditions (Shakespeare), it was always the same reaction-- "your novel."

I thought she was insane. She probably is. The thing is, I don't feel a novel coming, and bad things are happening to me less and less often. Its been almost a year since the last bad thing found its way in and out of my life (XXXX). So that book that will never be written is getting thinner and thinner with each passing year of happiness, which I think would be a good thing. But my mom, so full of faith in my writing ability, might disagree.