i went online today to find a word that combines arachnophobia and hypochondriac; ie, the feeling that you are always covered in invisible spiders. It's no secret that i went a little crazy towards the end of my time in egypt, and my number 1 fear was that i would somehow take egypt with me, specifically in the form of bugs.
i came across this blog, and honestly its like the best support group ever. I should make a more interesting point about the correlation between sanitary scientific modernity and the obsessive fear that invisible creatures will haunt you forever - but i'm lazy. i'll just point out that the idea of small invisible creatures living on me is infinitely scarier than either an invisible non sentient virus living inside of me, or a full grown visible animal confrontationaly attacking me.

this quote pretty much sums up my feelings:
"I wake up nervous and afraid each morning for fear that we will continue being infested forever and that the people I care about have caught it too. My bf doesn't ask me over anymore since I told him. Every morning I feel doomed and it's hard to stay positive and hopeful and pretending my life is normal. I've broken down a few times and I know it's a sign of weakness but I feel like it's never going to get better. Í don't see many posts or success stories on the Net when it comes to Bed bugs. "

a dialectic of Other Cultures... or something

The cultural tension in Egypt has to be taken as a given. When i was first in Egypt 3 years ago, a Syrian born singer named Ruby was causing a stir in the egyptian parliament over this video:


Literally every shop/restaurant/whatever in Egypt has a television tuned to a music station (usually melody hits), and when that song came on, business honestly stopped.
Contemporary videos tended to look something more like this:



Lots of face covering, giggling, and lots of references to 'traditional' Egypt. The fact that the guy never gets her is standard. In fact, it was more common for the video to end with the singer waking up, or fading away, thus negating any immorality by presenting the video as a dream.

So, 3 years later, what do video's in egypt look like?
Well this one's pretty popular:

You really have to watch it long enough for the bed scene to understand how much egyptian cultural acceptance has changed in the last 3 years...
but has it changed?
This is what I'm so goddamn curious about.
It never really occurred to me until i left Egypt how unusual it is that you are literally continuously bombarded by soft core music videos. Even in america the level of saturation isn't this high.
And yet these videos offer absolutely zero reflection of accepted cultural values. Its almost like their purposely flaunting what they claim they don't want. And it has to be described as flaunting - because most of the time the videos are played with the sound turned down while other music is played over it. And this is where egypt entirely loses me.

I guess maybe this is just an example of reverse sexual orientalism:
(from wikipedia)

"...But it was not until the 19th century that "Orientalism" in the arts became an established theme. In these works the myth of the Orient as exotic and decadently corrupt is most fully articulated. Such works typically concentrated on Near-Eastern Islamic cultures. Artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexander Roubtzoff painted many depictions of Islamic culture, often including lounging odalisques, and stressing lassitude and visual spectacle. When Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, director of the French Académie de peinture painted a highly-colored vision of a turkish bath (illustration, right), he made his eroticized Orient publicly acceptable by his diffuse generalizing of the female forms, who might all have been of the same model. If his painting had simply been retitled "In a Paris Brothel," it would have been far less acceptable.^{[citation needed]} Sensuality was seen as acceptable in the exotic Orient. This orientalizing imagery persisted in art into the early 20th century, as evidenced in Matisse's orientalist nudes. In these works the "Orient" often functions as a mirror to Western culture itself, or as a way of expressing its hidden or illicit aspects."

Actually, that works pretty perfectly. shit.

this was a stupidly long post, so i'll just leave you with these two MUST WATCH VIDEOS!!!!





actually i really want to write a seperate post on those last two videos... but another time i guess.

farewell ye decrepit castle

I dropped a peanut in my apartment one day, and i left it there. The next day it looked like this. In two days it had been moved to the nearest seam between floor tiles. On the third day it was gone.

If i were going to make my own online quiz, it would answer the question "what are the most important elements of fiction in determining your personal narrative?"

I think it's pretty important the way people construct and use a personal narrative in order to make sense of their life, and apparently I'm not alone.

But if we think of our lives like novels, then it must also follow that each persons personal narrative stresses certain literary elements.

I used to be fairly certain that 'theme' was my dominant element, but lately i've been thinking a lot about 'setting'...


Not just egypt either, but more specifically, my apartment in alexandria. (on the left)

At best, it reminded me of the runaway building from The Crimson Permanent Assurance by Terry Gilliam. (on the right) At worst, it was a sinister being with specific designs to ruin me.
Every new problem was an expected and accepted reflection of my degrading mental state. When the bathroom began to electrocute me during showers, i took it in stride.
When a rat moved into the kitchen and ate through the gas line, i simply stopped using the stove.

I think we all look to the inanimate world around us for reflective metaphors. When they stopped selling my deodorant the month i started college, it seemed a purposeful example of the division between old and new.
When i made a list of things that i hoped for in Korea, #1 was a tiny apartment where everything worked and nothing 'spoke' to me. My apartment had become such a perfect literary device that it had actually replaced the source material - my unhappiness.

Does anyone else have this happen?

As a firm believer in the underlying orthopraxis of just about everything, i'm trying to start some new routines to get past the insane everything-ical funk that was my life in egypt.


a new blog seems like a good start.

I don't really know what to say about my time in Egypt. For example:
What do I do with a fairly large photo series of the weekly car crashes that i witnessed outside of my house?

A facebook photo album is i think unnecessarily morbid, but after being so thoroughly desensitized to the whole thing, a picture like this seems worth sharing. The man in the lower right stays fairly still as the larger crowd ebbs and flows...
i hated the way egyptians were always peaking in visible anger, and i suppose it's a reflection of how disenchanted i became that this man's hesitation is such an unusual and important image for me. whatever.

the first post is always the hardest.