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Thursday, October 9th, 2008
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Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
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I keep dreaming of Egypt.
Sometimes when I'm awake, my thoughts will wander towards these saturated memories of Cairo- the sunset at the pyramids, dust storms across the Nile, the great expanse of the Cities of the Dead, or the hundreds of muezzin calling out to pray. But when I sleep, my dreams head straight to the minutae. I am always back in Cairo and preparing to live my life there again. I dream about SIM cards and apartment hunting. I dream about new roommates and have long discussions about dial up or DSL. We go shopping or out to familiar restaurants. Every part of me is sure that I am back there again. Then I'm awake, disoriented to find myself in Pennsylvania.
I've never put much stock into dreams but part of me wonders if there is something I should take from all of this.
Aside from possible out-of-body trips to Cairo, I've been mostly occupied with a fairly mundane life. I find it really hard to write when I'm busy and even harder to write when I'm boring, especially when there is such a large gap between entries. The span of time looms large and I feel so much pressure to fill it with information. There are a million little events that have occurred since March 3, 2008 but none have seemed weighty enough to fill the void of all those missing days.
So each time, I sit down to write about a thought I have or a small bit of news and I stop mid-way, feeling a little too shy about my absence and a little too embarrassed about my lack of major accomplishments.
I'm turning 24 today.
If I had to characterize 23, it would certainly be of feeling in between. Knox and I have always known we'd only been in Pennsylvania for about a year and a half, so we've never really settled in here. One foot has always been out the door, one eye always to the places ahead.
Coupled with it is a post-college malaise that hasn't yet subsided. So much of my life has been spent with a beginning, middle and eventual end. Each year in grade school, each semester in college, each adventure to another place, at any moment there was a temporal position to my current situation. Fall, spring, summer semesters. Arrival, or days until departure. But now, I'm standing at the edge of the rest of my life with nothing but an abyss of possibility ahead.
Some days, that possibility is very exciting. Knox and I talk about our future together. We talk about moving to Tennessee, about buying our first house, about getting married, about kids, about our careers, about me going back to school.
But other days, that abyss of possibility is overwhelming. I am afraid to choose a career or take concrete steps toward graduate school. Instead I pass each day simply living in between . I fail to make any decisions that might turn that abyss into a road. I'm really afraid of that road.
I know that I'm going to have to make those big decisions soon. If I keep pushing those choices off, I'm going to regret putting my life on hold because I'm too scared to take a plunge.
On the other hand, 23 has been blessed with a tremendous amount of happiness. I have a cadre of unfailing supporters who take my neuroses in stride and still manage to love me despite my post-college blues. Although Knox and I haven't completely settled into Pennsylvania, we've settled very much into being with each other. Things about our relationship have changed so much in the past year that I hardly recognize where we started. Not to mention I have so many wonderful friends who continue to hold a place in my heart even though they are far away. Some of them I rarely even speak to, but when I see them again, it is like nothing has changed. I feel like after 23 years of feeling awkward and out of place, I'm finally starting to feel a bit more comfortable with who I am.
All in all, I want 24 to be an eventful year. After a long year of relaxation and settling into my skin, I want a little more adventure. Just when I start to feel comfortable, I feel the need to stretch myself a little further. Yemen, or maybe Syria. A new hobby, a new city, a new school. I think it's the right time- I just need to take the step into the abyss.
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Comments: Read 3 or Add Your Own.
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State of the Union:
1. I quit my job
2. I've decided to apply to grad school
3. I learned how to make a Hannah Montana ringtone for my phone
Next Friday is my last day at my job and I'm incredibly relieved. I've been thinking about this for months, and although I don't plan on telling my family just yet, I'm really comfortable with the decision I've made.
Grad school is something else I've been thinking about for a while.
I've been making excuses to avoid potential rejection from something I want more than anything. I pretend like I'm not sure what to do with my life, when the reality is that I'm just too afraid to take the path I want. But when I close my eyes and imagine what I'd do if I could do anything tomorrow, I'd be sitting in class.
I felt exactly like this 4 years ago when I decided to drop out of art school. I was so afraid to leave, even though I was completely miserable. But I took the plunge and decided to be a religious studies major on a total whim (actually it was literally an act of God). Something about it seemed like the right path. Even though my future wasn't really in religious studies, it was a path to many amazing things. That's how graduate school feels right now. I'm not sure if my path will lead me to being a professor, but the path itself seems so right.
In other news, I am so into this Alison Krauss/Robert Plant album. I cannot express it enough.
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Comments: Read 5 or Add Your Own.
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Thursday, December 27th, 2007
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I am officially in love with the iPhone.
Some of you may know and most of you probably don't, but I have two benevolent benefactors of Abel Magwitch proportions. My uncles are the sole reason that I have my computer, my car, and half of my wardrobe and this Christmas, they gave me an iPhone. It is singularly the most extravagant thing I've ever owned and I am in love.
I've had a sort of hand-me-down smart phone since I returned to the US and all in all, I haven't been overwhelmed by its functionality. Probably the most frustrating part was having the Windows operating system on my phone be basically incompatible with my Mac. I'd played around with the iPhone at the store, but what I never saw that the great things about it aren't the flashy tricks you see on the commercials, they are these little tiny conveniences. It feels like someone compiled a list of every time they thought "Man, I wish my phone would..." and tried to make it happen.
My one complaint? My ears are too small for the headphones and they hurt. I had the same problem with my iPod but I'm not really in the market for new headphones. However, the whole "hands free" thing with the headphones is AMAZING.
But my favorite gift I got for Christmas was one of the gifts I got from Knox. He got me a knitting book and some amazingly wonderful yarn that I'd been pining after for the past year. The thought of him going into the yarn store all by himself and telling the little old lady there exactly what book and yarn he needed just warms my heart. (For you knitters out there- it was the "Big City Knits" book by Wenlan and enough skeins of her Twinkle yarn to make a sweater).
All in all, it was a fairly uneventful Christmas. Now I'm back in Philly, snuggling up with my iPhone and waiting for Knox to come home on Sunday.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
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http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320196148761
"You are bidding on a rare chance to traumatize a treasured friend or relative with baffling, mind-numbing, mystery correspondence from abroad.
Here is the arrangement:
I will be spending the Christmas holiday in Poland in a tiny village that has one church with no bell because angry Germans stole it. Aside from vodka, there is not a lot for me to do.
During the course of my holiday I will send three postcards to one person of your choosing.
These postcards will be rant-ravingly insane, yet they will be peppered with unmistakable personal details about the addressee. Details you will provide me.
The postcards will not be coherently signed, leaving your mark confused, guessing wildly, crying out in anguish."
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Monday, December 17th, 2007
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Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
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A few words before I'm off to see the wizard:
1) OMG. SNOW. OMG. IT IS SNOWING. OMG.
2) Knox and I have been watching the Tinman miniseries on Scifi and I am flummoxed by the quality of Zooey Deschanel's acting (or the lack thereof). I thought she was respectable? Hmm.
3) I sent faxes to Belize, China, and England today. Woopeee.
4) Knox just cleaned an entire sinkful of dirty dishes because I promised to rub his belly for 5 minutes. Sucker.
5) If you want to see something incredibly creepy, type "reborn doll" into ebay and then sort by price, highest to lowest. I'm eternally shocked by the obsessions of middle aged women.
6) Knox and I decorated our tree this past weekend. On said tree are 88 various shaped red ornaments that we purchased at Target in a set, one green Chewbacca ornament, one green Velociraptor onament, and one replica of the Liberty Bell. It's a little bit redneck, but we like to think that what it lacks in class, it makes up for in charm.
TTFN and happy Chanukah, y'all.
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Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.
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Sunday, November 4th, 2007
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Maybe it's just too much Pat Conroy and a recent run-in with a bowl of inedible grits at a so called "Southern" restaurant here in Philly, but I am just a blue plate special away from tossing in the towel on Philadelphia.
No one here seems to have taste buds. They have no appreciation for the Holy Sanctity of Brunch or the Eleventh Commandment that states "Thou shalt not forsake thy coconut cream pie". I am beginning to believe that people up North are unfriendly because there is just simply nothing to eat except mediocre, overcooked, underflavored pseudo Italian nonsense. And "Broccoli Rabe". Whatever the hell that is.
I've decided that if I don't learn to cook soon, Knox and I are both going to die of starvation. When I think about Thanksgiving in Alabama, I can hardly keep from salivating. Between my Southern family and my Italian family (obviously by marriage, not blood), Knox and I plan to eat until we have to be rolled away from the table.
We're just a few weeks away from culinary heaven and we're counting down the days.
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Comments: Read 11 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
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Friday, October 26th, 2007
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Because I've seen all the reruns of CSI currently on Spike and this list has many more of my favorite books than the Modern Library's List (which makes me feel like a total idiot), I'm posting something random:
"These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list."
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude*
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby-Dick
Ulysses
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: A Novel
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow I'm not sure anyone has ever finished a Pynchon book
The Hobbit
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Maybe I'll post something else later.
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Comments: Read 6 or Add Your Own.
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Monday, October 15th, 2007
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Top Books in the Georgia State network.
1. The Bible
2. Harry Potter
3. To Kill A Mockingbird
4. Pride And Prejudice
5. Angels And Demons
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Sunday, September 23rd, 2007
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Just got home from seeing Across the Universe and was completely blown away. Wow.
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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Sunday, September 16th, 2007
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Saturday, September 8th, 2007
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So, about that move to Philadelphia...
Work is fine, but hardly interesting. I'm working for an insurance company that does international insurance for expats, business travelers, and students. Last week I was promoted (of sorts) to the Student Sales Coordinator position, which involves lots of organization, time management, and attention to detail. That's nice, I suppose.
I was really caught off guard by the drastic change in lifestyle that comes with 9 to 5. Knox and I come home, fix dinner, waste away in front of the television, and I fall asleep reading well before midnight. The weekends are painfully short and have usually involved an excuse to go to the mall. I have a newfound appreciation for the aphorism "love what you do". Despite the fact that my job is far more than just tolerable, devoting 40 hours a week to something I'm ultimately not passionate about is a very new feeling. I certainly took for granted how much I love academia. Despite a few unbearable and unavoidable classes here and there, I strove to surround myself with subjects I felt passionate about, even if that passion was simply for learning itself. When I first started at GSU, I used to spend my free time between classes in the library. Being surrounded by all those books felt so hopeful. It reminded me of how small my world was and how much there was left to learn. Some days it was overwhelming, but most days I left feeling comforted by the seemingly infinite possibility of knowledge itself. I am barely four months out of my undergraduate education and already that feeling of infinite possibility slips away to make room for prime time television.
Overall, it's just an adjustment. I don't want to give the impression that everything is awful here. Yeah, so Knox and I still don't have any friends. And maybe we both miss the South something fierce and maybe I'm trying very hard to like Philadelphia, despite it's complete inferiority to Atlanta's cuisine and culture (no kidding!).
But there are good things. I love our apartment. I love having a place to come home to and having it actually feel like a home. I'm so happy to be in the same place as Knox. Even though being in what we've dubbed a Real Live Relationship brings with it Real Live issues, it is far far superior to the trans-Atlantic portion of our relationship. Work is also much better since my job description was changed around a bit. I like having responsibility. I dislike stuffing envelopes.
My birthday is next Sunday and I'll be turning a whopping 23. Knox and I are taking the bus to New York for a day trip. This will be my second birthday spent in New York and hopefully it will be much better than the last one. I'm eagerly anticipating the blustery ferry ride to Staten Island and the obligatory kissing photo in Battery Park.
So, there you have it. The last month of my life in a sort of nutshell. Maybe now I can once more ramble on about minutiae. We'll see...
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Saturday, July 14th, 2007
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Brilliant. (from http://www.omdurman.org/whitslav.html, via Phoebe)
Saudis and "Star Trek"-- soon to become reality?
The King of Saudi Arabia was talking to President Bush, and he said, "Can I ask you something personal?"
"Sure, go ahead," Bush said.
The King whispered confidentially, "One of my many sons watches your television show Star Trek. He sees women, Blacks, Russians, and Scots, but no Islamofascists. Why are there no Islamofascists in Star Trek?"
Bush whispered back, "Because it's set in the future."
Alternate explanation:
* Islamofascists can't be in Starfleet because Starfleet won't require its female personnel to wear body-covering burquas and veils (or, alternatively, harem dresses).
* Islamofascists can't be Vulcans because Vulcans are logical and rational.
* Islamofascists can't be Romulans because Romulans (modeled on Imperial Romans) are required to be courageous.
* Islamofascists can't be Klingons because Klingons despise anyone who is without honor.
The George Will column (see below) points out that Saudi Arabia's population growth rate is three percent, which is among the most rapid in the world.
* Native American (sadly): "Once we were many, now we are few."
* Saudi (bragging): "Once we were few, now we are many. We will spread Wahabi Islam across the earth by the sword and by sheer numbers!"
* Texan (drawling): "Well, pardner, that's 'cause we ain't played Cowboys and Saudis yet."
This s***ty little country's holding of three female Americans in white slavery suggests that it is indeed time to play Cowboys and Saudis.
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Comments: Read 5 or Add Your Own.
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I've been in Shreveport, LA for the past week with Knox visiting his family. I've met approximately 100 members of his family and their closest friends. It's been stressful, but overall incredibly wonderful.
We're moving in four weeks and I'm ungodly nervous. We'll be flying to Philly the weekend of the 20th to look for apartments. Unfortunately due to his job situation, we won't be able to live downtown. I'm really bummed about that (particularly considering I'm tentatively leaving my car behind) but we're trying to compromise.
So much to do, so little time.
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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Saturday, June 30th, 2007
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I'm heading to Shreveport, LA tomorrow to spend a week with Knox's family. I met his parents last week here in Atlanta, but this time they're calling in the cavalry. I have a feeling that every relative within a hundred mile radius of Shreveport is coming to town to see Knox and his city-slicker girlfriend. It's nice not being the bumpkin for once.
I was nervous the first time I met his folks, but now I'm actually just a little excited. I'd like to see where he came from, the place that had a hand in the person he is today. I feel that with him seeing Trussville and me seeing Shreveport, we'll be ready to forge into the Great White North (well, the Great White Mid-Atlantic) together.
We're moving to Philadelphia in four weeks. This still seems completely unreal.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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I've been home two weeks-ish and I'm still not entirely sure what to say.
"Reverse culture shock" is a lot stranger than I could have possibly imagined. I had envisioned some superficial surprise at "Oh how orderly traffic is!" or "Wow, look at her shorts! What a floosy!" I do notice these things, but the shock has reverberated much deeper than I anticipated.
I find myself confronted with cliches that I breezed over in the "Returning Home" literature my school passed out last year. I'm asking myself "Big Questions" about my values, my career choices, and the place I truly belong.
The worst feeling is the overwhelming feeling of apathy that seems to have taken hold. All the drive and passion I felt to come back and Do Something is lost amid the desire to Do Nothing. I've holed myself away from the news. The fighting in Lebanon and Gaza is too overwhelming to watch unfold. Assassinations in a place I was standing barely two months ago, collapse in a place where we wanted so badly to succeed, I'm just not sure how to handle the news anymore. Things feel hopeless and too far away to make a difference. The prospect of centering my life around a region with so much fighting and so much despair is daunting. Even the news coming out of Egypt is more arrests, more political crackdowns, and a tighter grip from an authoritarian regime.
Some days, I just have so much trouble with "normal life" here. When I close my eyes I see images that make me feel overwhelmed and worthless. I feel haunted by the Cities of the Dead and the juxtaposition of brutal poverty and material excess. That's the image of Cairo that lingers, always lurking in the back of my mind.
I have a lot of things I still need to work out before I come to terms with the events of the past year, to learn how to reconcile discussions of a new sofa with discussions of collapsing states. This is much more difficult than I imagined.
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Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.
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I am officially finished with my undergraduate career.
Three schools, seven countries, four languages (two aborted), three majors (one aborted), and one minor later, I am FINALLY finished.
I've only gotten three grades back so far, but I got an A- in Arabic, a B- in Media Arabic (waaaahoooo!!), and an A in International Law.
I also have exactly 1 day, 4 hours, and 23 minutes until I'm on a plane back to the United States.
I'm feeling a little overwhelmed and a little shell shocked. Man, this is weird.
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Comments: Read 12 or Add Your Own.
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Pet Peeve #2045:
Those stupid "enter the word shown in the picture" things you have to fill out in order to prove you're not a bot.
I just had to do it FIVE TIMES in order to join a yahoo group because I couldn't figure out what the hell the letters were. ARGH.
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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