nomadic misopaidea

Ugh. I want to write about Egypt, i really do. But there's a problem.

In Korea, i had nothing to lose by fixating on the bizarre and the different. Korea was not my home.

But home intimates normalcy, and if i want to 'live' in Egypt, to actually unpack, (if only for a while) - it means ignoring the differences that before would have intrigued, upset, and infuriated me. i can stay here as an abject foreigner, observant but uncomfortable, or i can try and let a little go, for the sake of actually living somewhere in the present for once.

Basically, its hard for me to justify expressing all the subjectively peculiar things i see without accepting that I'm just a nomadic misopaidean, (a 'hater of cultures', if my Wikipedian Greek serves me correctly) or an accursed nostaphile...

This is, I've realized, why i had such a hard time writing after returning to New York City. It wasn't that i didn't have anything to say, but rather that the admittedly acerbic humors of differentiation began to feel a lot less funny or meaningful as they began to hit closer to 'home.'

Or to put it another way, i began to appreciate the sentiment behind the phrase "don't shit where you sleep."


That being said, i would like to briefly point out that Egyptians seem to sweat a lot...

from their butts.
Maybe everyone does this. Maybe the real story here is that i notice it. Clearly it's irrelevant to anything, and even i can't come up with a good way to make this representative of some broader cultural distinction.

But you know, its been on my mind. And its good to be back.