Metro

The metro ride downtown was great. It was empty enough that I was actually able to take a seat next to an old man who smelled like sugar cookies. Across the aisle from me a woman, covered in beige apparel from the top of her head to her feet, sat quietly crying. A man whose frame was smaller than hers sat next to her, lightly jabbing her with his shoulder and speaking to her, clearly trying to cheer her up. She didn't speak, just kept her eyes on various parts of the car's ceiling, I suppose so as not to meet the gaze of curious watching strangers. She eventually mustered up a weak quarter-smile, but you could tell it was mostly for the sake of her companion.

Two hours later I'm waiting for the train to leave downtown and take me back home. As the platform gets more and crowded I notice how small the proportion of women is. We all get on the train, I am holding on to the bar near one of the doors. Two young men get on the car and stand between me and the door, so I am sort of facing them. They talk to each other, clearly good friends. It takes a few minutes before they engage in that most maddeningly irritating sleazeball habit of talking to each other about me. It's a tactic I've often wondered about - I think its appeal must be that they can refute any accusations by me with "7ad kallimik?".

I keep my eyes focused on a window, and turn away from them slightly. I am halfway home. My eyes quickly survey the rest of the car - it is mostly men, I see some women at the other end. Of course, they are all veiled. I use my coat, which I am not wearing due to the stuffiness underground, to cover my chest, though my sweater is quite loose anyway. I hold it the way one would hold it if it were wrapped around a child, and I wonder if the illusion of motherhood could somehow offer added protection. Most of the men look straight ahead of them or are sleeping, but there are enough of them who have steadily stared at me for long enough that I feel like I must turn into some kind of statue. I draw my legs closer together as I stand, bring my arms as close to my body as possible, and concentrate on not accidentally making eye contact with anyone, or, god forbid, thinking of anything that might make me smile.

I would like to reach into my bag for my ipod but I am afraid that the movement would only attract more attention. So I stand there, fixed in place, thinking of stone. Eventually the car empties significantly. I shift positions a little bit, and catch sight of a man leering at me, chewing something in his mouth, sitting with his legs spread open, leaning forward, taking up space with his body. I think of the way he sits and I also think of how I have been quietly trying to disappear, to be invisible and still and small, and I am suddenly furious. A cold kind of anger, which is all the more unpleasant and deadly, because hot anger, it can just come to the surface, you can let it erupt, and in doing so, let it go. Cold anger, on the other hand, has nowhere to go, and you must carry it around, never quite sure exactly how it is affecting the rest of you.

Too tired for coherent sentences on Ghaza. I've been waking up right before the dawn prayers, against my will, for the last few days. I hear the cacophony of the prayer calls, starting seconds apart from each other, some voices beautiful, others whiney. I wonder if anyone is calling out for prayer from a minerat in Ghaza. The only mention of mosques I've heard is of them being blown up. Do prayer calls continue in times like this?

A few minutes after the singing has quieted, I hear the sound of the gardener's hose outside, trying to bring our yard to life. I think of uprooted land, turned on top of itself, trees blown up, the loss of livelihood and beauty and the right to both. Of land, eaten up with greed, evil, myopic greed, self-righteous greed, god-given greed. Taken, stolen, renamed.

I hear the sound of an airplane, which is uncommon in our neighborhood and I wonder what the deal is. It occurs to me that this isn't the first time the sound has triggered fear in me, an irrational idea that Cairo has suddenly joined the list of other cities, those which are no worse but are just less fortunate than it, existing on a part of the map that is either more or less important to all the wrong people. Beirut, Baghdad, Ghaza City. Ancient, reconstructed, invisible, forgotten. Part of a region that can't get its shit together, because above its grounds it is so old, so crowded, and underneath it is cursed with a poisonous gift. Because it is where texts were written and nations imagined on cocktail napkins and god reinvented time and time, and time, again.

And I remember that I happen to be in a country that is bordered by two genocides, one to the south, the other to the east. One might as well just walk into the Mediterranean and be done with it all, be washed over by water that saw its own ancient battles but at least the ships on both sides had weapons, at least back then there was no New York Times or CNN to take the lives of thousands people, PEOPLE, REMEMBER, which have been transformed into narratives of terror and loss and unspeakable indignities, and lie about and reduce and insult and exploit them for their own greed, their own tunnel vision for millions of people in the "free world" to swallow and digest and produce shit out the other end about "self-defense" and = that most harmful of words of this century - "terrorism".

Over 30% of the casualties so far are children. 292 children. 292 pairs of eyes (but what would they see?). Feet (but where would they run to?). Hands (but what would they do? what would they make? what would they touch?). 292 mouths emitting aborted laughter, sentences, cries, garbled syllables on their way to learning to speak. And it's disgusting, that if, before they were silenced forever by phosphorus bombs and 18-year-old recruits, those mouths had said "mom" and "dad" instead of "mama" and "baba" and "3ammo" and "teita" (or is it "sitto"?) and "ma sha allah", more people with bigger bank accounts and Security Council vetoes and industrialization and government offices would be outraged, would talk about it, would see it. Disgusting that I have to point that out.

And so on.

In which the news reads like a dystopian fantasy story

Society's obsession with what people are doing in their bedrooms never fails to amaze me. We've had thousands of years to come to terms with the fact that people are turned on by different things, and that they will continue to do those things no matter how energetically society tries to police them. I do not understand why people give a damn, frankly. As long as someone's sexual acts are consensual and private, why should it matter to anyone else? Why must society force us all to fit into one heterosexual, chaste until marriage, monogomous version of the story? Have we not learned that repression of sexuality often leads to violence, depravity, and the sort of behavior that is generally more likely to ruin lives and break apart families?

Apparently not. This article in the Daily News Egypt is interesting because it starts out discussing couples that are suffering due to the fact that the husband is a homosexual who got married only to save face socially. And yet the bulk of the article is spent discussing homosexuality from exactly the same perspective which caused these couples so much grief in the first place: that homosexuality is a disease, and one that should be treated.

There is mention of erectile implants to assist men in being able to have sex with women, as well as this gem from a Dr. Abdulla "a gynecologist and the Ministry of Justice’s Medical Consultant for Sexual Disorders":

"While Abdulla underlines the futility of psychotherapy in the majority of such cases, he commends the results of behavioral therapy which consists of reversing the patients’ sexual obsessions through conditioning to trigger orgasm through pornography in the presence of a woman."

For the sake of caution, I do think it is possible that the writer was trying to be neutral and simply "report" the attitudes and practices surrounding the problem. However, I think it would have been responsible to find a quote from someone from a human rights group posing a different question: What if we stopped criminalizing homosexuality?

It would have added a bit of dynamism to the article. Instead we are left with the same old panicky "WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT THE GAYS?" answered horrifically with: "stick implants in their penises and force them to watch heterosexual porn". Yeah, that'll fix it.

Om el Donya

It seems that the creeping approach of Ramadan has caused my boss to wake up from the lull of managerial office routine in a frenzied panic, and to throw buttloads of work into my lap. One of these suddenly remembered tasks sent me on a ten-day trip to various parts of Upper Egypt and Fayoum. We are talking about working with farming communities in the heart of the s3eed here. In August. Never have I so frequently lamented my female-ness. Not even while living in Saudi Arabia; at least there one has the option of leading a double life - publicly, a life that is indistinguishible from its repressed surroundings, and privately, one that mirrors western conceptions of leisure.

The trip was educational both professionally and in the way it opened my eyes to how culturally removed Cairo and Alexandria are from the rest of the country. Cairo is so crowded and overwhelming that one often forgets that its residents, and its commuters, are in fact a minority of the larger Egyptian population. I'm among those who complain about the enforced social conservatism of Cairo, and, like most, I usually attribute it to religion. I had forgotten all about straight up traditionalism. I guess that's easy to do in an enormous, mostly Muslim city setting. The following is an email I sent to some friends mid-way through the trip, pointing out various things I had learned about the s3eed by that point :

- It is rude for women to chew gum.

- It is rude for women to cross their legs in public. It is not, however, in any way notable if a man sits with his hands cupping his balls for about 15 minutes, or picks his nose continuously (really, really picking. Like exploratory digging.)

- If you are not veiled, do not be surprised if a development "professional" asks you if "you guys are fasting these days."

- There is a kabab store in Fayoum called "Kalbaz". I look forward to seeking it out tomorrow almost as much as I look forward to having a beer and wearing a (gasp!) half-sleeved t shirt on saturday.

I did indeed make it to Kalbaz, and it proved to be the cheesy, brightly colored, lard-smelling, flourescently lit place I had imagined. Other highlights of the trip included:

- Walking through a village and hearing about how they had to enlarge the police presence after a case of taar (revenge killings) left 3 people dead a few months ago.

- Driving through Fayoum (the actual town, not the touristic "oasis" by the lake) on Thursday night and seeing at least two dozen pick-up trucks absolutely overflowing with wedding guests.

- Quickly realizing that unless you specify otherwise, any cup of tea that is given to you will be unbelievably sweet, and dark to the point where it looks thick. It makes Lipton seem like some sort of baby-faced pre-pubescant whose voice hasn't yet cracked.

Long overdue

It's 9 AM and I am walking to a main street so I can hail what will probably be a rickety cab blaring loud music that will drop me off, very late, at work. It's exceptionally bright this morning and so I'm squinting, cursing myself for having not yet replaced my sunglasses, whose final moments came unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago when they fell into a toilet at a restaurant ( I do not care what anyone says, no amount of anti-bacterial cleaning will make it ok for me to put them back on my face). I am wearing my loose (ie comfortable) jeans and a button-down shirt that my mother-in-law bought for me, and flip-flops, which I donned in a split-second decision geared both by impulsivity and the thought that my boss would not be in the office today.

As I pass a 3arabeyet foul attracting a modest swarm of people, I see a girl, 11 years old or so, also walking down the street towards me. She's wearing long pink cotton shorts, way past her knees, and a matching pink t-shirt. She is tall and skinny, clearly living through that pre-pubescent growth spurt that many young girls experience, when they suddenly get very tall but their hips are still boyish and their chests are still flat. It's still a few months before things will start to suddenly get soft, and weird, and she'll have to start wearing extra undergarments and deal with roundness and pimples and hundreds of questions, some of which I'm sure are already in her head. I think to myself that this could be my younger sister, who also walks with a silent air of self-conciousness, doing a good job of looking straight ahead of her and blocking out the rest of the street. She's carrying a plastic bag, and I wonder what errand she's been sent on, and why she's not in school this morning. As we get closer I see she too is squinting in the brightness, and her eyes have a puffiness that indicate she hasn't been awake for long.

We pass each other, and as I round the corner I'm thinking I should spend more time with my little sister, before the teenage years settle in with their unbudging weight, making her more defensive, more frantically preoccupied, less interested in family. I see the main street now, it's at the next intersection and I mentally groan as two empty cabs whiz by, I'm too far away to hail them, even with the incredibly useful "TAX! TAX!" yell which I have now mastered. A blue Hyandai Matrix, which always seems like a family car to me, is driving up the street I am on and stops on the left. I move to walk around it, and I hear "Saba7 el kheir. Saba7 el kheir." This is not the morning for this. Sure enough, I look to my left and see a man my father's age, sitting alone in the driver's seat. He is looking at me with beady eyes, and repeats the greeting which he apparently uses when he is soliciting prostitutes.

I yell at him, "Eih el 2araf dah!" in a voice harsh and angry and filled with disgust. And then I walk the few remaining steps to the main street and get into a cab. Sitting here now, blogging in my unsupervised office, it occurs to me that my rage was instantaneous, that only a few moments after I'd sat down in the taxi I was thinking of other things. It was not always this way. Up until recently, when drivers would slow down and try to get me to get into their cars because they thought I was a whore, it would weigh on me for hours, altering my mood palpably. The three times that different drivers flashed me their penis, which they were jacking off while looking at me, I was sick to my stomach, the way you are when you consume food or drink items that do things they aren't supposed to. The time I was waiting for the CTA to get to campus, when a driver drove up and down the street 13 times (I counted), in order to pull up in front of me and verbally harass me, I tried to walk up and down the steet to dodge him, standing on the sidewalk as far away from the actual street as possible. It didn't work. 

All of these experiences pissed me off and stressed me out and made me unsure myself. They made me question whether I would ever belong here, and whether I even wanted to.

Despite all of the advances pertaining to women's place in society, despite the thousands of Egyptian women who are doctors and professors and engineers and mothers and farmers and diplomats and writers and protestors, women still have no place in the street. "El share3", when mentioned in relation to women, carries dangerous and dirty connotations. Some say women can have a place there, provided that they dress "appropriately", meaning that they cover up bits of themselves that people have decided to sexualize, that they alter who they are in order to help men control themselves (that this line of thinking humiliates men by assuming they are pigs with no self-control seems to escape everyone). Others tell me that there is room for women "like me" (educated, from "good families", with money) in the street, provided I am in my own private car. Women "like me" should not be walking around by themselves and using cabs or the underground. This makes me think of my friend who was sitting in her car, stuck in traffic, when a pedestrian stuck both his hands through her window and grabbed her breasts. At 2 PM, in downtown Cairo.

Harassment happens everywhere. I've been catcalled and leered at in New York, Alexandria, Istanbul, Abu Dhabi and San Francisco. But there is something about the pervasiveness of it here, the fact that it happens every day, to shocking degrees, and to all women, that we sometimes feel like we can't away from it, can't get a break, that indicates to me that there is a sickness more advanced in this society plaguing the relationship between men and women. The years here may have made my skin tougher, but they have not made me any less saddened.

 

Crossing the Cab

Disclaimer: in no way is this post meant to bash religious phrases or those who use them. I am describing my personal feelings on this aspect of the language, I have no gripe with your beliefs, so don't have any with mine.

I used to be so conscientious about how I spoke, the expressions I did and didn't use in Egypt. The constant sycophancy of Egyptian 3ammiya was not irritating in and of itself, but rather the vagueness and lack of accuracy which it infused into conversation was troublesome. Plus, the most commonly repeated phrases all reference Islam, but what about the Copts? So I boycotted the use of all god-references in everyday speech and commercial transactions, in an attempt not only to placate my very out of place secular leanings, but also, I hoped that somehow I would be sparing the occasionally unknown-to-me Christian what must at least be a surge of mild irritation they experience when they are greeted with "al salamo 3alaykom". (The phrase itself, "peace be upon you", is quite beautiful. But every time I hear it, I remember something about a point system wherein you are granted a certain number of blessings based on how completely you used the greeting..."al salamo 3alykom" bringing in less points than "al salamo 3alaykom wa ra7met allah". The fact that the greeting has gotten mangled up in people's obsession with the details of religion pisses me off. It shouldn't be about points, dudes.)

Anyhow, somewhere along the line the years of inhaled smog and deafening noise pollution wore down on my stamina for such lofty principled-ness, and I noticed a couple of weeks ago that I was muttering "insha allah" occasionally (though NEVER in response to a question regarding whether something had happened in the past. I said I lost stamina, not logic). The other day I got into a cab and as I was dragging the door shut I said "al salamo 3aleko" only to look up and see a dashboard absolutely covered in Christian paraphernalia. Pictures of the Virgin Mary, Christ, and various priests dangled from every dangly-able part of the car.

It was like 2 religions talking so loudly at, not to, each other. One with a carelessness and self-assurance that only comes with having such a majority stake in culture. And the other responding with a desperate plea for attention, for space, for recognition, even in its own Christian-owned car.

The driver responded with "wa 3alaikom el salam", but only after a significant moment of paused silence. I wondered what thoughts went through his head during that pause and whether they included an angry stream of curses.

Here and There

Years ago some American friends of mine rented a car and spent a weekend driving around the delta. I, in my quest to see parts of Egypt that don't have internet or hotels or Metro supermarkets, joined them. We went to Zaqaziq, Ismailya, and a bunch of other places. I could write a lot about those trips, about entire villages with not a single paved road but plenty of satellite dishes. About how the number of security personnel in al Fayoum is exaggeratedly conspicuous even for Egypt. About how at some point we were driving through a tiny alley with overflowing sewage, surrounded by painful signs of an even more painful poverty at the same time that our cassette brought us Louis Armstrong singing "What a wonderful world" in a voice which manages to be both happy and sad at the same time. Unfortunately what concerns me here is not any of that, but the ahwa.

On Friday around prayer time we were exhausted. We'd been on the road for more than five hours, and everyone wanted to be out of the car and have some coffee, juice, anything. We had been wandering through a market in a village (I can't remember which one) and we spotted a coffee shop. Just your regular ahwa. It was fairly empty given the time of day, and so we decided to brave it despite my presence in the group (I was not only the only Egyptian but also the only female). I knew my entering this space transgressed a boundary, one which is far more established and unquestioned than curious friendliness towards strangers. It was my second year in Egypt, and I knew enough about these boundaries to be infuriated and too little to be pragmatic. Some less self-conscious and more self-righteous part of me decided that I was just going to deal with the discomfort, and that I wasn't going to let my gender restrict my experience or that of my companions.

We sat down at a table outside, a few feet above street-level (more like dirt-road level). Prayer had just ended, and as groups of men and boys walked down the road back to their homes they simply pointed and stared. I tried to imagine they were more shocked by my friend's blond hair than they were by my presence in this space which traditionally belongs to men. Maybe they were, I don't know. There was none of the raucousness and tarya2a that one would expect if such a situation were occurring in Cairo. What I do know is that the people working at the coffee shop could not look me in the eye. When I spoke to them, they pretended not to hear me. It didn't matter that I was the human being in this group who was best able to communicate with them. I was a girl. Someone else who did not speak their language had to order my tea for me.

Right and wrong bend and shift quite easily for concepts which imply such assuredness (discrimination and equality have a tendency to disappear all together). Was it wrong of me to enter an establishment that does not formally exclude people of my gender, but is effectively forbidden to them? Was it right of the staff to disregard my existence? Was it wrong for us, in our quest to see a part of the country in which we were alien, to disregard established social codes? Yes, probably.

Cairo, being the consumerist, swarming, more outward-looking place that it is, has a much different way of dealing with boundaries. They are less absolute, changing along lines of class, nationality, ethnicity, and language. They are more easily camouflaged. There are more and more ahawy in Cairo which are frequented by women, to the chagrin of many. What differentiates those places from the Le Cafes whose mixed clientele receive not a double-blink? It's not that they don't have printed menus or bills or bottled water. It's that, culturally, the ahwa is mapped out as a space for men. For women to start going there is unrespectable, abnormal, and dishonorable (in short, 3eib).

A few cafes have popped up in Cairo which are open to women only. So it would seem that people of both sexes are now able to choose whether or not to interact with (or even see) the opposite gender when hanging out outside the home. It's no one's calling to predict what effect, if any, this will have on society. We will have to wait and see how further segregation, in a place where women's presence on the street is tolerated at best, changes things.

**Originally published in Campus magazine.

Musings

(I wrote this a few weeks ago and have been meaning to post it. Unfortunately my internet connection is an archaic dial-up for the time being, which makes me significantly less active.)

I went to the pub after work today. It's the first bar I visited in Egypt, a long time ago. In fact the first bar I visited in my life. For a couple of years I found a certain smart humor in telling people about how I (my 17-year-old self) was startled to find myself consuming alcohol from labeled bottles, bottles served to me by a staff, how it was a strikingly different experience than buying alcohol in a plastic water bottle, alcohol which tasted harsh and ugly, and drinking it with friends in parking lots and parks.

I got to the bar a good while before the friend I was meeting there. It was quiet, there were only a couple of other tables occupied by people who were sharing whiskey and conversation. I thought about all the people whose conversation I’d sought out in this place. One in particular; a friend with whom I have spent more time conversing than I have with anyone else in Cairo, with whom I think I’ve talked about more things and more nothings than anyone I can remember. We used to wonder a lot together. About people, mostly, and why they seemed the way they did, why they talked or didn’t, how they laughed or didn’t, why they made love the way they did. I haven’t spoken to her in over a year.

I wondered if I looked any different to the staff who had seen me walk in a good six years ago. I wondered if I seemed less curious and more self-aware. Less keen and more worn (like the shirt I have with the hole in the armpit that’s small and hidden, but just one indication of why I should stop wearing it).

They were playing classical music, some Beethoven at some point. And I felt like writing. About the place, the bar, the black guy with his back to me who was having a glass of wine alone, how when I light cigarettes in bars I always think of the movies (although no decent silver-screen woman would be lighting her own cigarette in a bar), about how amusing it is to sit and think about the different people I’ve sat down with at this very table, some lovers, some friends, some inconsequential (as much as a person’s interaction with another can be), how few of them are a part of my life now (if any). I wanted to write about the cigarette smoke and how it can look like a dance, even though that’s been written about already in every way possible, about feeling a woman at the next table turn her head and look at me for a while, about the music.

Sunday Pain

I have mixed feelings about my new job. I share an office with four females who don't really get along brilliantly. And one of them plays terrible music all day long. There are some redeeming factors though. I am basically getting paid to read and write, which is unassailably cool. And last week, when the electricity was cut off for nearly two hours and we had descended into the hell that is Cairo heat, everyone ended up rolling around on the cool ceramic floors, and various entertaining bits of conversation occurred, such as:

Co-worker: "Do you think we can get booze delivered here?"
Me: "Yes, but what if X (the big huge boss) walks in?"
Co-worker: "Oh, he won't mind as long as we've ordered something for him as well"

Co-worker 2: "Who wants to smoke a j?"

"If we're gonna hang out in the heat, why don't we just go to hurreya?"

As you can see, the theme seems to be escapism through substance (ab)use.

Thoughts on Bussy

I saw the Bussy play earlier last week, at the Howard theatre (the little black box in which all amateur - and thus most of the controversial - performances seem to be held). This was the second annual installment of the Bussy play, which is basically a collection of true stories submitted to the project and given life by different performers of varying levels of theatrical background.

The thing I really like about this kind of amateur theater, especially performances comprised mostly of monologues, is that the relationship between the actor and the character they are performing is different than it is in more professional acts. In "real" theater, the actor is supposed to shed all of his or her personal mannerisms; the way they hold themselves and the way that they speak is all supposed to dissolve once onstage and be replaced by those idiosyncrasies particular to the character. There is a huge focus on inventing ways to speak, to gesticulate, to walk, and to stand that are specifically suited to each character. Not so in amateur plays, or at least not to the same degree. If a girl is playing the role of an aggressive character, she will most likely be standing, speaking, and using her hands in the manner that she would if she herself were being aggressive in real life. My point is that this trait makes amateur plays seem more personal somehow. There is not the exaggeration of drama, and everything seems more down to earth.

As for Bussy itself, a lot women have complained that it was too whiny, that some of the pieces where substantively anti-feminist (this accusation was specifically directed at the piece in which a woman is basically begging for a man to hold her). I've thought about this a lot. I've recalled all of the feminist theory I've read, from Betty Friedan to Islamic feminism. I had come to the conclusion years ago that there is a plethora of ways in which to be "feminist", but the common denominator is about allowing women to choose. To choose how to live, where to work, what to study, whether to have kids, who to worship, how and if to marry. And if Bussy gave the stage to a piece submitted by a woman who has chosen to beg to be held by a man, then that is actually a feminist strategy. Because, whether we like it or not (which doesn't matter anyway), many women, given the choice, want to stay home, or to be dependant on a guy, or other choices which may seem to be the anti-thesis of the mainstream feminism of independence and "liberation". Allowing women a space in which to voice themselves has to be inclusive of all women, and not just those who fit a certain profile. It may not make for good theater, but I think performing those pieces in which women seemed "weaker" or "whinier" was probably the ethical thing to do.

Hello again, Internet

Here's what i've learned about life since the last post:

1- Don't travel to North America in March without boots. Because snow, apparently, is wet.

2- Don't buy an unfinished apartment 2 months before your wedding.

3- Don't think that time, books, or experience will in any way enable you to have a clue as to what kind of career you want.

4- Don't quit smoking.

5- Don't hold your cell phone while standing near the rail of a boat. Even if you are sober, and the boat is docked.

6- Mothers really are crazy.

7- Don't trust those people. You know the ones i'm talking about.

8- Stay in touch with the ones you miss.

9- Beer is not, in fact, good for an upset stomach.

Nine pillars of wisdom.

Falsehood

"Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult" - George Eliot

Someone once told me that I carry myself like a professional liar. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but given the fact that this person was my boyfriend at the time, it wasn't really a compliment. I was hoping to be likened to something more along the lines of a ballet dancer. Or a diplomat.

I do, however, lie a lot. To my parents, that is. Like so many others, adolescence taught me that there are things which my parents view with such fundamental disapproval that they will never be able to accept them. Such as drinking. Or pre-marital intimacy. Now everyone in the entire world hides things from their parents. But what I am talking about is not just a few lies here and there, but the existence of an entire life which is hidden from them, as if occurring in another dimension. Places, activities, people that they never know about. Once, when I was 18 or maybe 19, I was so tired of this incoherence that I sat down at the dining room table and told my mother almost everything I had been keeping from her, things I would have never thought would come out of my mouth in her presence. What ensued were months of painful fighting, of two entire worldviews (mine incomplete and young, hers set in some of its ways, both self-righteous) pushing against each other with all their might. There were scenes that Hollywood movies are made of, complete with yelling and the occasional intervention of the aloof but all-authoritative patriarch.

Years later, I cannot say my experiment with brutal honesty was either positive or negative. I have gone back to my quiet lying. Except now, as I am planning my wedding and my marriage, it all strikes me as stupid and sad. I ran into another girl who is also getting married soon, and she is planning two entirely separate receptions, one for family, one for friends. This is not uncommon in Egypt nowadays. The fact that so many people have such an essential and influential gap between them and their parents that they cannot integrate them into the most celebratory event of their lives cannot be positive. This means there is an entire generation of liars running around the city. The term "liar" is no longer even percieved as the harsh insult that it used to be, or that it is in other societies. It is no longer even used, as the entire city quietly decieves itself, people putting on facades for each other, gently protecting interests and extracting extra money. From the cab driver and the man in the shop to the businessman and the Minister. Lying, corruption, bribery.

I used to worry that my lying to my parents would spill over to every other aspect of my life. That I would slowly become this deceitful and secretive person incapable of maintaining relationships with any degree of geniuneness. This has led to my insistence upon constant honesty in all other parts of my life, as if, somehow, it will all balance out.

Most of my friends in similar situations of leading double lives do not give it much thought. It's the way it is: parents won't accept certain things, so you lie about them. Easy. Painless. But I think thoughtlessness about the matter is dangerous. Lying becomes a effective, legitimate tool to be used throughout one's life. Perhaps for some, this is not a problem. It is for me. And while the comparison to a professional liar did not ring true at the time, nor does it now, it seems like some sort of ghoulish projection of my worst self-image.

List

Not sure what moved me to do this. Maybe it's the tri-faith holiday season creeping in, and that in our ugly, intolerant world, the commonalities and differences on the lists would be comforting. Maybe it's the end of the year, and that thinking about these things can only be good whether you've had a great year or an awful one. Maybe I'm just bored of writing my paper. In any case.

Things that make me happy (in no particular order):

1. Skirts
2. Open bars
3. Switching from shoes to flip-flops in the spring
4. Long distance phone calls from long-held friends
5. Baking
6. Sublime, especially when i haven't heard or thought about them in a long time
7. My boyfriend
8. The fact that he's soon to be my fiance
9. Traveling
10. Hearing my little sister master a piece of music that she's been struggling with for weeks.
11. Dark chocolate
12. My friends
13. Midgets
14. Waking up without a hangover when i thoroughly deserve to have one
15. The middle bits of really, really good books
16. Half-price movie showings
17. Illustrations of the fact that, while awkward and embarrassing in all the ways in which only your family can be, my family is rather cool
18. Good notebooks
19. Feeling like I've finally gotten something, anything, right
20. Realizing that nightmares were nightmares and so no, I did not really sell national secrets.
    

Every once in a while

Once a week, in the hours leading up to and until the completion of Friday prayers, the City breathes. Sidewalks are walkable, roads are drivable, and one's ears are not under assault. The idea of taking a walk does not seem so solidly insane and self-sacrificing. One can think about things they wish to get done, be it work or a change of life-strategy and it seems actually feasible. Possibility. Seems in such short supply these days.

Day

Had a mini-freakout around 30 minutes before my first graduate class...the ineptness of the University when it comes to class scheduling is amazingly persistent. It's usually maneouverable as an undergraduate, when it always seems like you still have 45 semesters ahead of you to finish your requirements, and there are at least half a dozen classes you wouldn't mind taking in the meantime. But today it dawned on me that I will only have two more semesters in which to learn what I want to learn (at least within a guided classroom setting. Trust me, I am the biggest fan of self-education and exploration, in all ways anatomical or not). Anyway, things were sorted, and fears further dispelled by the sheer, unaffected awesomeness of the professor whose class I started today. I can't recall the last time I observed someone and so clearly thought: I wouldn't mind being more like you.

Class was followed by the inevitable consumption of alcohol at my favorite shitty but oh so cheap bar. Boyfriend and I got entagled in a screaming match over the academic credibility (or cite-ability) of wikepedia. I will not divulge the details, but let me say that at one point I screamed over the empty beer bottles littering the table between us : "ANYONE CAN WRITE THERE!! ANYONE!!!" Yes, the thrilling intellectual dimensions of my discussions...

Later I had the pleasure of consuming large amounts of much-craved sushi with four of my nearest and dearest. They all happen to be boys, and they usually treat me like I am one too. This for some reason brings me endless amounts of comfort. Night ended with me and W smoking sheesha at a cafe that also features Karaoke. I watched on the screen as someone scrolled through Pink Floyd...my attention was at this point diverted elsewhere. Next thing I know, the be-spectacled short Egyptian man at the table next to us was crooning into the mike :"Ooooh I need a dirty woman....ooooooooooh I need a dirty girl." The people who were sitting with him got up and moved to the next table. That may have been the best part of my day.

Question

Went to a protest yesterday, the purpose of which I thought was to express solidarity with Lebanese and Palestinians under the current Israeli offensive. Mistake #1: the group of protestors, while it is hard to unify them as one entity, was on the whole more concerned with expressing solidarity with Lebanese and Palestinian resistance. This was not an anti-war protest. Pro-Nasrallah chants included prayers that he would hurt Tel Aviv. Making the value of human life conditional on the area in which it is located is, it seems, a world-wide phenomena.

I find this in itself to be interesting: Nasrallah's rising status as representative of Arab peoples. Hizb Allah's more localized, focused identity and role seems like it is being discarded for a more regionalized one. Its chances of success are probably much higher in the former; i.e. as a group concerned solely with Lebanon.

Mistake #2: I had forgotten that the protest was on this particular day, which resulted in my attire being completely unsuitable. Not only was I wearing flip flops, I was also in a skirt and carrying a laptop in my already heavy bag. This was bearable for the first 2 hours.

The worst part was realizing that the hundreds of riot police and state-sponsored thugs in civilian clothes had not only surrouned and sealed the protestors, but were incrementally narrowing in. At one point they charged forwards from both sides, so that they were squashing a number of us, pushing, shoving, people falling down, trying desparately to stay on one's feet as strange sweaty bodies pressed up against one, and other protestors who weren't doing so well were holding on and pleading for help...pretty unpleasant over all. I would have fared much better had I not had at least two of the so-called state thugs persistently grabbing and attempting to fondle me around the ass and crotch. This, had I not been consciously determined not to lose it, would have threatened to push me to outrage. The worst part was it being so crowded, so densely packed, that I only had a radius of at best a couple of feet within which to attempt to maneuver and bend my body so as to escape the groping...at one point they seemed to be confused as to whether or not to let out the females, and at a certain time a couple of the people next to me (who were starting to crack, the looks in the eyes had deteriorated from concern to alarm to panic) were actually let out through a narrow corridor created by the thugs. I momentarily considered leaving, although this was shot down first by uncetainty as to whether staying would be an exhibition of perseverence or merely stupidity, then the consideration was firmly tossed aside when a couple of the state thugs were attempting to pull me into the human corridor people were leaving from, copping many feels in the meantime. I also saw someone who was being led the same way involved in a struggle, and they were closing up the corridor...I managed to shake them and move a few feet away from them, back so that most of my bodily contact was not with depraved men but with people whose status as "civilians" was clear and unquestionable. Soon afterwards the pressure on the circle eased and the lines of security/thugs backed away to allow space for people to, oh, i don't know, stand.

All of this was made exponentially more difficult by mistake #2 (my attire). My feet obviously got fucked, and the weight of the laptop made attempting to balance myself in midst of the pushing and pressure quite a task. The thinness of my cotton skirt made the groping traumatic.

Anyway, pan out of my personal focus...About an hour later, the number of protestors had dropped sharply. They must have been letting people out gradually. They did launch another of their move-in-and-squeeze maneuvers...this time it wasn't as bad, nor nearly as prolonged, although a couple of times my hair was pulled painfully (someone later told me this wasn't by a deliberate hand, but that my ponytail had gotten caught in something/one...who knows, it was a bitch anyways). At this point confusion seemed to erupt amidst the riot soldiers and the command and the protestors...it seemed those in command were attempting to facilitate exits for protestors, but this was getting stalled by angry arguments with protestors and the policemen not getting, or not responding to, orders. At one point they were advancing and their commanding officer yelled at them to move back. Question #1: Is it normal for those in command to momentarily, even for a split of a brief second, lose control over their inferiors? Is this an unavoidable occurence in such organizations, or is it a sign of institutional confusion?

Quiet

Then take me disappearing, through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, the haunted, frightened trees,
Out to the windy beach
Far past the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes to dance, beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus signs
With all memory and fate
Driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tommorrow.

- Bob Dylan

Recently listened to some Dylan after a long, long but unintentional abstention from real music listening...

I've always found music very evocative, or moving or whatever you want to call it...and I've recieved that from both the lyrics and the music itself. And when it comes to interesting, genuine, sharp and simply beautiful writing, dylan's has left permanent impressions on me. Listening to it the other day felt like getting a warm hug from an old, dear friend.

Summertime

It's as if Cairo purges itself onto the steets once summer is here. Other places may get more relaxed, more touristy, less clothed...but Cairo remains the same, it just gets more intense.

People here don't alter their dress in proportionate reaction to temparature changes. It is almost july, and yet women are still dressed in skin-tight polyester, and I still occasionally catch sight of a light sweater.

There are some signs of the change of season...the earliest of these to manifest itself is always the sudden appearance of a line of cars parked on either side of both Kasr el Nil and 6th of October bridge. I always wonder (quite crabbily) why people don't just park their cars either downtown or in Zamalek, and just walk up to whichever bridge they have chosen. Really, it's not that incovenient. Why, why must they place inanimate objects in the way of the already insane bridge traffic?

And, of course, the sudden appearance of shabab everywhere. Whose sole purpose in life seems to be to ride in cars, or lean against them, and periodically scream "boobs!" at random women passing by. Yes, thank you, I had forgotten I had them.

Your building

I read the book, "The Yacoubian Building", a few months or maybe a year ago, and saw the movie last night. I had liked the book, although I found it hard to empathize with the characters; something which this review helped elucidate. I imagine it's difficult not to like it; after all, it presents us with the consequences of all the different forms of repression which have come to be the gaurdians/prison wards of Cairiene society...and the author allows us to see those consequences as they are borne by both rich and poor. Gay men reverting to paying for sex, poor virgins reverting to getting paid for providing a soft waist for some fat old man to jerk off against (but above the blouse! Must, after all, protect one's honor!), talent and passion in all of its youth reverting to armed Islamism because it is the only channel through which it can scream against a system which has denied it its equal rights to life, young widows - still seeking male affection and partnership - reverting to leading muted lives as secret second wives... We are reminded of all the different ways in which life can be brutal, and sad...

And that's the message that has stuck with me: people always "reverting" to doing things. Because the original plan, desire, dream, goal, or even right just never really works out...So we settle for the next best thing, if we are lucky. If we have the kind of unluck which most Egyptians have, we end up doing what we had never imagined we could revert to...

Am I making excuses for the population? Does the shitty hand dealt to us by life (or the government, or religion, or patriarchy, or whatever) grant us license to redefine the rules of the game, even if that process involves immorality, at the very least?

Commenced

A couple of days ago I was handed my undergraduate degree by the President of the university, whose face was frozen in a strained smile under a silly looking cap.

And so now my views on the world are supposed to change. Although I am going straight into a Master's program and therefore am not really straying outside the bounds of the academic safety zone (safety from what? life?), I have a suspicion that things on the other side are different. Graduate students actually manage to get administrators to make eye contact with them, and are not treated by professors as anonymous, transient customers but rather as actual human beings who are around for a reason. If that's what's about to get started, then cool.