كان و اخواتها

But With a Lover I Could Really Move, Really Move, I Could Really Dance

I haven't accounted for anything yet. It is November and I am sitting in a bathrobe on my mother's couch, sipping coffee my father made and watching the Today Show on mute out of the corner of my eye. I bought a notebook yesterday and starting writing in it, maybe that will spill over onto the Internet soon. I am applying for jobs. I am thinking about going to cosmetology school. Barack Obama is our president; they're still counting ballots but it's not looking good for Prop 8; less than an ounce of marijuana has been decriminalized in Massachusetts. I only want to listen to the beginning of this song over and over.

Location

Song: Baby's in the Bathtub

BABY'S IN THE BATHTUB from MAGGIE MURPHY on Vimeo.

Morning of Honey

Is it in a popular movie that everybody's seen that a likable character quotes Albert Einstein as saying that insanity is repeating the same action over and over and expecting different results? I feel like this is what trying to find the cheapest flight on the internet is like. You put in the same information over and over (departing airport, arrival airport, date of flight), press "search" and expect a drastically lower fare to pop up somewhere when there are only a few flights going where you're going in the first place and everybody's charging about the same.

Um, I don't know how to tell you this, Universe, but I will be home by Monday. Do not try to stop me. You're lucky I don't make you carry my library books back to the library for me.

I've done a lot of talking here about the past pure and the future potential pure, but who I've yet to acknowledge is the present pragmatic. This is is the you you adopt in the short-term to get you down the next flight of stairs to the next level platform to stand on. Some might explain this: this you is not Ms. Right but Ms. Right-now. Sure, I've hacked off all my hair again when I didn't really want to but this matte unnaturally light-yellow-blonde pixie? This is the girl who will get me home and deal with shit. I can save personal purity and internal coherence of self to reflect on from a safe distance. As if there were such a thing.

Ordinary Time

What is today? Today is Sunday. My roommates are at school and I am sitting at the dining room table staring at the apartment buildings across the street, and past them, the blank space that is the sky above the Nile. These are all developing-thoughts as I am writing, I wanted to write about something else, but now I am thinking about how I have never really oriented myself to time here. The weekdays are Sunday through Thursday (Friday and Saturday compose the weekend) but for some reason, whenever Sunday comes around (or whenever we come around to Sunday, it depends on the way you conceptualize time. In one of the versions of time-as-a-process in your head, is the calendar frozen and we slide across it like pieces on a boardgame, or are we suspended in the air, floating a few inches off the ground, and time is like a silk river that passes beneath our feet, with multi-colored panels to mark the days?) it always feels like it is still a day where I don't have to do anything I don't want to, a day where my actions are not owned or dictated by larger rhythms of the populated planet, but mine.

In the conventional calendar of my brain (another, standard, mental conceptualization of time), instead of readjusting the filled-in blocks (let's picture in the version of the calendar we learned in kindergarten that Monday through Friday are crayoned-in green, weekdays, and Saturday and Sunday are blue, the weekend days) so that Sunday through Thursday are green and Friday and Saturday are blue, my brain has coped by making Monday through Thursday green and adding Friday as a blue day. Thus, it is a shock to wake up every Sunday in the middle of a green day.

To complicate this futher, my friend Fatma has a calendar like this on her desk:

If you can’t read numerals or the letters indicating the days at the top, I’m not sure it’s totally clear that time in this calendar is moving from right to left, as does the Arabic language. On the one hand, this might seem like a really obvious thing to happen on a calendar written in Aarabic. If Arabic is read from right to left, as you know, why wouldn’t the calendars be oriented that way as well? On the other hand, the numerals used in Arabic (which aren’t Arabic numerals, those are the numerals we use in the Latin alphabet) are still read from left to right. For example, the middle box on the bottom row, appears to mark Wednesday (in Arabic, what we call Wednesday is literally "the fourth day"), 29 March 2006.

٢ is 2 and ٩ is 9. When I look at the calendar, I can't help feeling like in parts of the universe, we are now moving backwards through elsewhere's forwards-time, somehow without ever encountering the things that have happened before this instant, like we are moving through them, or above them, superimposed on top of them, which is why we feel nostalgia, or déjà vu, or loss, or feel like we can Feel the past or future if we stare hard enough at white dining room walls, squinting and trying to make out the scenes projected there as past and future time slide by like frames of film. Unless, of course, time is an infinity-symbol, and you are moving from right-to-left or left-to-right, only to be re-routed in the other direction once you round a curve.

I will get to the other things I wanted to say but I am going to make tea now.

Morning of Cream

We just figured out how to turn on the gas burners on our stove. There are six burners in all: two electric at north and south and four gas, one each at north east, south east, south west and north west. We'd just been using just the electric ones so far, but let me give you a popular scenario in our flat. You are making breakfast. You are frying eggs in one pan on the north electric burner. On the south burner, you are boiling water for Nescafe or tea. You have to boil water the water right now because the longer you put off drinking your tea or Nescafe, the better the chance that you will have to pee in the middle of your hour-and-a-half long bus ride. You also have to start the eggs immediately because if you wait too long to make breakfast you will surely miss the bus you meant to take (again). So, where will you toast your bread? In which pan on what burner? With only two burners, you can't toast your bread simultaneously. You have to do it before or afterwards, and thus, either your toast or your eggs will begin to cool while the other is readying. I probably don't have to tell you that neither is ideal.

Oh, and speaking of, we are running late for the bus again. I mean, I am mostly ready. Jessi is gargling salt water over the bathroom sink. She is sick, too many cigarettes, too much pollution. I have a big vat of Nescafe in a washed-out spaghetti-sauce jar on the table next to my elbow. The girls who I live with had never heard of this technique before, and I was like, "I mean, I guess my older sisters at Sarah Lawrence taught it to me." I would never in a million years be able to remember who the first sweater-wrapped bed-headed girl I saw stumble out of her house into Slonim Woods on a December morning and head bleary-eyed towards her class on the other side of Mead Way carrying tea in a jam jar, but thank you, thank you, wise one and the wise ones before you, for teaching me how to be able to fit two serving-sizes of coffee or tea into a free self-insulating portable container. As a professor in my department would say, apologetically-condescending, "You don't have to thank me for you telling you that. This is basic stuff." Goddddd.

We have four minutes to leave the house so I have to leave now.

Song: Same Old Tune

SAME OLD TUNE from MAGGIE MURPHY on Vimeo.

This was, like, the nineteenth attempt at recording this one because Photobooth kept cutting off the video prayer-offerings on its own, wherever it felt like it. With this video, I would like to acknowledge two things: 1) I realize that this is basically the exact same tune as yesterday's, and that is because sometimes when I make up the melody to a songling it gets stuck in my head and every other attempt to come up with something new will only produce words that fit to the first melody, and the point of this exercise is just to use the first thing that comes to mind, not come up with something worthy in any sense, AND 2) I realize that it's sort of weird-looking when I look at myself in the corner of my screen rather than at the camera, but really, why should I look at the camera and not myself? Looking at the camera would establish a false sense of eye contact with you out in the great abyss, but I cannot see you, and I can see myself. I don't even know who watches these things, including both the handful of people that I've actually told about my blog and any potential unseen, unheard internet tiptoers who happen upon chronicles of other people's inanities by chance or by circumstance.

I am skipping a class right now and feel an enormous sense of guilt that I am attempting to assuage by copping to cutting class in this here and now, where and when you can't see me, but it's not working.

Song: What the Songs Mean

WHAT THE SONGS MEAN from MAGGIE MURPHY on Vimeo.

That there is a sexy screencap.

Faking It

"My master’s thesis will explore the relationship between individual identity formation and cognitive mapping of politicized urban space in order to challenge the official position of the Israeli government that contemporary 'united' Jerusalem has a fixed historical, holy, essential, and eternal importance to both the State of Israel and to all Jewish people. This ethnographic study seeks to better understand how various Jewish residents of Jerusalem experience, negotiate, and embody the physical, symbolic, and ideological spaces of the city and its borders."

Welcome to the Cosmic Abyss Pt. 2

I have been putting this off, writing anything, because I cannot write. The problem is not just that I have nothing to say anynow, rightmore, but that I cannot write at all. I cannot will words into existing in my head, will words into arriving at my fingers, I am doubtful that words have ever existed in my throat, on my tongue. It is not important to be doing this anymore; it does not make me feel better. I am so, so tired of being here, of being, this is all useless to be typing, to be thinking, I am tired. I cannot focus on anything small to talk about and console myself with: not memories, not breakfasts, not body parts.

My eyes will not focus on blankets, photographs, toes but will only instead slide around the circular peripheral of their sockets as if my sight has been greased with butter. I am exhausted by the motions, the prospect of going through them, of their existence in the same moment in the universe I also exist in: school, nights out, phone calls, lying awake and staring at my ceiling, human interaction, crying in front of teachers, birds, eggs, teeth, tea. I will erase this, all, I think, fear, because this is monument to what? What am I building? I am digging, really. I am not a pilot; I cannot fly; the universe is not mine to describe.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for you.

Today I went to a Sociology-Anthropology potluck lunch in Dokki at the apartment of a professor in the department who I don't know. The taxi driver dropped me off too far down the street and I walked around in the sunblaze with a box of a kilo-and-a-half of foil-wrapped chocolates from the chocolate shop on the ground floor of our building, consulting a handdrawn map I had copied from the internet into a notebook, lost and without my cellphone. I overpaid the taxi driver because I was already nervous and wanted to avoid even the most meaningless altercation, the one where he demands more money than any reasonable person would pay and I refuse and walk away because I am mostly a reasonable person. I found the apartment finally: she greeted me by name warmly, pretty and distinguished in a linen dress with her hair pulled back; she kissed me on the cheek. I felt like a phony. She reminded me of Shahnaz even from the first second and now I know for sure that the universe is watching me and my charade. Too many desserts, cold pizza, agony, introductions, sitting alone in the bathroom for long stretches of time, vowing to try harder. I am not really trying anymore. I am not even pretending to. I haven't written back to my old professors and I cannot bear interacting with my new ones. It is too painful to be their classes, to be in their offices, in their apartments, to respond to their emails, because I do not know what I want, what I want to do, what I think, what I think about what they think, because I am giving up on school, and to give up is to fail them, the ones who have taught me and the ones who I will not let teach me because I am shutting off before they have the chance to, and I don't want to think about that. I do not belong to words and thus I cannot use them anymore, I am forfeiting my write.

In Moments of Crisis

“However, one must be careful not to conflate subjectivity or consciousness with any particular subject or self. Human consciousness is never isomorphic with the things on which it fastens, the objects it makes it own, or the selves which it constructs. Consciousness is the natural state of human existence. But notions of subject and object, ego and alter, are not given, but made. They can, accordingly, be placed in parentheses, reshaped, and unmade. This is why subjectivity does not universally entail a notion of the subject or of selfhood as some skin-encapsulated, seamless monad possessed of conceptual unity and continuity. In fact, such a conception of the self is anthropologically atypical, and in those societies where such a conception is fostered and fetishized, a heavy price is paid. For in withholding or retracting intersubjectivity from human relations with material and natural things in the name of scientific rationality, ONE RISKS DISCARDING THOSE ANTHROPOMORPHIC CORRESPONDENCES THAT ENABLE PEOPLE, IN MOMENTS OF CRISIS, TO CROSS BETWEEN HUMAN AND EXTRAHUMAN WORLDS, AND THEREBY FEEL THAT THEY CAN IMAGINATIVELY IF NOT ACTUALLY CONTROL THE UNIVERSE AS A PARTICULAR EXTENSION OF THEIR SUBJECTIVITY, AS MUCH AS TOOLS ALLOW ONE TO MANIPULATE MATTER AS AN EXTENSION OF ONE'S BODY." Jackson, "Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project," 1998 (Capitalization added for emphasis).

Song: Cosmic Sewer

COSMIC SEWER from MAGGIE MURPHY on Vimeo.

The Sky

Also, we have the internet now.

Song: Nothing

NOTHING from MAGGIE MURPHY on Vimeo.

Okay, I kind of hate this one a lot, I'm barely even singing, but a song is a song is a song is a something. I am right now regaining my spiritual energy from school this week (particularly from last night, actually). I will write a really real something soon.

Song: Wednesday Morning

WEDNESDAY MORNING from MAGGIE MURPHY on Vimeo.

Today I am, I have, there is/are: inelegant, ineloquent, wet hair, bloodshot eyes, no time to think or write, twelve consecutive hours of school, desert sun and dust. But still it is better to keep doing this (my daily song-prayer to the Universe) than to not keep doing this (is that teleological?). Won't good things will come of this? Can't a song be like a birthday?

Song: Cosmic Interference

COSMIC INTERFERENCE from MAGGIE MURPHY on Vimeo.

Signs

Most of the buildings at the University don’t have signs yet. For the first few days we just wandered around trying to decode the makeshift system by which the classrooms were numbered. Then, handwritten signs popped up over night. “The English Department is this way. Please don’t turn right until after the staircase.” Some professors tacked the numbered plaques that were above their office doors on the old campus to the doors to their offices on the new campus, maybe as amulets with which to remind themselves of the past pure, their membership in the pre-phantasmagoric University. Or maybe, they just wanted to be identifiable in some way, even if their old numbers have no meaning within the new system. Now, official green and white signs line the interior walls of the hallways. My department’s sign is wrong, but I think the mistake might be a message from the Universe.
Today I was standing in line for coffee and Kareem came up and stood next to me, smoking a cigarette and looking ahead. I laughed and we did the Egyptian teenage-boy handshake; it’s like a soft high-five that you catch in mid-air. Egyptian teenage boys also kiss each other on the cheek but we didn’t do that. “My first class was cancelled,” he told me. “My teacher, I think… she is, uh, a foreigner? So maybe she is still traveling.” He shrugged. “This line is so long,” I said. “Yes,” he said, “That is why I do not wait in line.” It is probably true that boys who blow kisses at the policemen they’ve bribed in order to park in front of the Four Seasons do not wait in line for coffee. “So tomorrow night, we will go out?” he said. “I think so,” I said. “We should do something else. I am thinking, Friday, maybe I will go to the Citadel, do you want to come?” “Maybe,” I said. “Eshta,” he said, and he held up his hand for me to catch again . “Kareem,” I said. “You have to stop text-messaging her. You have to stop text-messaging her. You’re driving her crazy.” “Was she studying?” “She said she didn’t want to go out.” “Why didn’t she say she was studying?” “Kareem, you have to stop.” “Meshi, meshi. Okay. So I will, uh, see you tomorrow?” “Eshta?” “Eshta.” More hands.
I already recorded today's song but Vimeo's upload function is down so I will put it up later.

From Now On a New Song Everyday

Remember that if every experience is a balloon, we can imagine piercing the balloon with a pin, and instead of the balloon just deflating it will pop and its surface will explode into a thousand shards of latex and the shards will be suspended by some invisible force in the air. Each of these shards of latex represents a facet of the single experience, and each facet of the experience will be equally true but no single facet will hold the whole truth. It is the same for writing songs. Every song is a version of the truth, but not the only truth and not the whole truth. I suppose the same could be said about any form of art, or any mode of honest movement. Anyway, I am going to try to write, record, and post a song, as defined above, every day from now on. Some will be better than others, some will be heavier than others, some will probably outright suck, I probably won't really be able to do it every day, all of them will definitely be short, and I will look awful in some of them, like I do in this one, because this is essentially an exercise routine, and really, no one looks good when they are exercising.


WHAT CAN BE TAKEN BACK from MAGGIE MURPHY on Vimeo.

Black Magic

My roommates came home this weekend and said, "Oh, your hair! It looks great!" I said, "I cut it with the scissors from my pocketknife." They said, "No way! It looks great!" I'm always a little nervous to do this, to say this outloud, but I told them in a hushed voice that my hair is enwrapped in a black magic spell. I figured it out after I cut it like a boy's hair and dyed it purple in eighth grade. I can do anything to it and it always looks okay. I dye it red, brown, blonde, bleach it, put streaks in it, hack away at it with dull scissors, give myself stupid lop-sided haircuts or miniature bangs, shave it all off, it always looks fine. It's a long standing dare I have with myself, I stand in front of a mirror and instead of saying "Bloody Mary" three times, I just start cutting perilously and think: This is the time it will look like shit when I stop cutting. This is the time I will have to admit that I've fucked up, which would be to see for sure that magic does not exist. But it never happens. It always looks fine. I would be the first to admit if it looked like shit, but it doesn't. Right now, it actually does look sort of great.

We are sitting in Cafe Arabica and they are playing Sea Change and I refuse to believe that it isn't all connected and I refuse to believe that the connections don't mean what I think they do and I refuse to not believe in my horoscope and I refuse to not believe that things happened exactly like I remember them happening when they were happening and I refuse to believe that the future isn't totally potentially perfect regardless.

The last thing I refuse to believe in this moment that writing in a blog is not a legitimate way to communicate with the Universe. Just like what I do to my hair and what I put on my body is a way of Feeling It, writing on the internet and making videos on my computer and putting up pictures is Putting It Out There. Last night I was on the sketchy internet balcony phone with my friend Chris and he was telling me how one of his dance teachers has been talking a lot about Sincerity, and he in turn has been thinking about Honest Movement, which in turn makes me think about Legitimate Forms of Communicating with the Universe, and I believe that this is one of them. Which also makes me think of last March, when I was reading my friend Max's blog, and he had written something about me when I used to perform as Teen Rabbit by singing a capella in front of people:

"I was always struck by how seriously brave that is. It's hard to describe with words (maybe I should dance how I feel). But like: sing it! That is a good way to participate in feelings you do not understand. It's a way of understanding; commenting, noticing."

When I read that, of course I was flattered that he had called me brave because bravery is a quality I hold in the highest esteem, but I also thought it was funny because I had never thought about it that way before: as a matter of bravery. I think about it as a matter of necessity. How can we ever be sincere or honest with ourselves and each other if we are not always trying to understand better the circumstances of our existence? Sing it, tape it, write it, take pictures of it, document it, feel it, start a dialogue with what you DO NOT UNDERSTAND by first stating what you DO. I do not want to be afraid anymore of a world I cannot change because that's all there is: what IS is what I cannot CHANGE, only live, only live with, only live in. And I am not talking about not being able to change actual events, human relationships, I think that things in the world can get better or worse based on what we do and what we do to each other, of course, but I think it is important not to take for granted that we understand what it means to exist in the first place. There is no diagram of the anatomy of existing in the Universe in this moment but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to talk about it and be honest and brave about what we feel.


YOU'RE THE FUNNIEST PERSON I KNOW from MAGGIE MURPHY on Vimeo.

The Future Pt. 2

Do you remember being in grade school and having a poster diagram of the layers of the rainforest on the wall of your classroom, on the science bulletin board? Or maybe it was in your science textbook instead. "Anatomy of a Rainforest Ecosystem." I was just thinking about that poster because right now I am sitting on a white wicker chair on my balcony, looking at the bright green treetops at my eye-level and thinking about the different layers of my street as seen from my balcony. I would label them as follows: street level, tree level, mid-rise building level, high-rise building level, satellite dish level, pollution level. Maybe I will draw this out as a real diagram.

On the street level there would be the window fronts of the Vodaphone store and the dry-cleaner's and the cars and trash and huge fallen leaves and feral cats sleeping under cars and stray dogs sleeping on top of cars and men sitting together smoking shisha and drinking tea on the sidewalk and little kids selling flowers and packs of tissues.

The tree level would be mostly dense green banana-leaves and something resembling ferns but also first- and second-floor balconies where young men sit together and smoke cigarettes and watch soccer on TV and whistle at us invisibly when we are running to catch the bus or buy bread at the bakery on the street below, and geckos, and the always-shuttered windows of apartments without air conditioning, and the dripping dirty water of the ever-running air conditioners installed in the walls of other apartments.

The mid-rise building level is all shuttered windows and potted plants on empty balconies and clothes-lines with fluttering sheets and undergarments made from synthetic material and electrical lines running from satellite dishes to more satellite dishes across the street.

At the high-rise building level there are just windows with no balconies, no clothes-lines, just blank windows reflecting the sky and rooftops with even bigger, more complicated satellite-dish configurations.

Above that, the sky and the haze of car exhaust and smoke and the buzz of insects and huge birds tracing circles in the sky. I have never seen an airplane in the over-head sky, just like I have never seen the stars.

It is impossible not sit here and begin to wonder about what is going on in all the apartments I can see from where I am sitting. I can easily see hundreds of apartments, the identical concrete-and-glass facades of hundreds families making lunch and napping in the afternoon heat. Above the street-level, there is not a single visible person on any of the balconies or any of the windows. I am alone with the birds in this landscape suspended in the air above traffic. If this were a movie, I could hang a sign out here saying something in Arabic like "Is anybody out there?" or "Do you believe in happiness?" or "Help! I'm being held captive in this apartment!" and see if anyone responds in kind. "I do not believe in happiness but I believe in love!" or "Everyone is a captive until he sets himself free!" or "Here I am, you're not alone, of course." But this is not a movie, and Kathryn just peeked her head through the sliding door to our apartment to ask if I want coffee because she is going out.




I Google-image searched the rainforest diagram because I wasn't entirely sure I wasn't making it up. The drawing I remember had animals and birds and insects tucked amongst the shrubs and trees, tucans and bright parrots and hanging monkeys or sloths and segmented-thousand legged caterpillar-things. I liked that all the diagrams I found are slightly different; there is no authoritative version of the composition of a rainforest. I miss taking tests based on simple memorization of the truths of the universe: the rock cycle, the table of elements, multiplication and long division and irregular Spanish verbs. The tests I take now are all in my head and less based on truth than on my capacity to construct a logical argument and placate myself. Those are the professor's explicit instructions: "You will not be graded on the position you take but on your ability to support that position."

In some primordial past I was gifted with the ability to graft together truth with words and skin and dissolving-thread sutures on a stainless steel surgical table in the womb in the belly of a world and I might be sitting here in daylight sweating with wet hair and a glass jar of cold Nescafe but where I am really is in an empty room with a computer where I have been for centuries (before this they gave me an abacus and after that a pencil and for awhile I had a giant word processor and soon there will be software that takes my dictation and turns it into text on a screen) and I am making it all up, the trees, my sweat, your feet, everything, and you are in your own room doing the same, and so far my two conclusions are that the future is vast and that I look better with short hair.

The Future

I accidentally erased the following paragraph in a moment of grappling days after I first wrote this entry and so I have to reconstruct it from memory so as not to censor the past. It was something like, "I am always surprised (or maybe I said embarrassed) by what happens to my face when I am singing. Which parts of what happens to my face are involuntary, and which parts happen because I know I am singing in front of someone (or here, singing in front of a camera)?" Something like that.

Last night I took a falluca boat ride on the Nile with some people I had never met before yesterday, except for the girl who invited me to come, who I met my first week here. Actually, we were a group of people who did not know each other previous to this night. Everyone knew one or two other people who knew one or two other people and so on; together we formed a circle, rather than a web, of relationships. There were some other graduate students from the University, some people in the Arabic Language Institute, and a journalist with Reuters who made sure to tell us in our first hour together that he went to Princeton and the Kennedy School. There were also two Egyptian boys with us who got the driver of the boat drunk on whiskey. We three talked together for most of the ride. The driver told us after he had three whiskeys that he had never drank before in his life and starting dancing on the edge of the boat. One of the boys, Kareem, is really interested in the American presidential election and wanted to know who I am voting for and who I think will win. I told him that I forgot to register for an absentee ballot.

Afterwards, we went in two cabs to Hureya in Midan Falaki. It is a bar from the British colonial era with mirrored walls and peeling yellow paint and small tables and chairs arranged in informal clusters. "Everyone who does not fit in comes here," Kareem told me. ("Hureya" is the word for "freedom" in Arabic.) There were a lot of older Egyptian men drinking beers and smoking cigarettes and talking seriously, younger Egyptian men drinking beers and smoking cigarettes and talking animatedly, sometimes with young Egyptian women, and tables of young and middle-aged American and European expats sitting with their Egyptian friends. The manager found enough chairs for all of us (there were six in the first wave but more showed up later) and opened beers and brought us a few ashtrays. He kissed the boys' cheeks and said something about me being beautiful over my shoulder that was not translated for me. Kareem said, "You can ash on the floor here. You can spit on the floor!" After awhile Ambereen and I decided to try to find a cab in the Eid foot traffic to take us back to Zamalek. Three cabs stopped before one would agree, and then we sat in traffic for ten minutes before we decided to get out and try to find one closer to the October bridge. Some night I would like to walk over it.

I was looking around the bar last night and Kareem was telling me about how he sometimes saw his University professors drinking there at lunch time before the University moved and I could imagine what it must have been like to go to the American University in Cairo in Midan Tahrir before it became a corporate desert spectacle on the fringes of the Cairo Governate. Like being part of something bigger, maybe. In the cab, Ambereen and I were talking about how we don't really feel spiritual energy here, but that everyone elsewhere not-here is always talking about it. But sometimes I almost feel it, maybe. There was something last night in the hundred-year-old peeling paint and mirrored walls and defiantly drinking men. "You are thinking about staying now, maybe, after you see this place?" Kareem asked me. I told him I wasn't, but it is never easy to give up even the things you want to give up, sometimes, because there is always the chance you could have wanted them if you tried harder. I put my number in Kareem's phone and he said he would call me today. I don't expect him to actually call me, but maybe he will, and maybe I will start to try harder, and my life will cease to be about moving through a series of familiar rooms but rather about touching the still-unknown with my eyes open, and when I leave I will have had something and will be leaving something concrete behind rather than an absence in a vacuum, a boulder rather than a crater.

Ambereen is on the phone across the table from me right now, we are at a coffee shop eating omelette wraps and potato wedges, and she is arguing with someone about something. "No, it matters. It matters."

Right now in this second I feel okay-okay and I don't know why but I agree with her.

The Egg

How long will I be in bed today? It is not noon but almost. I am not dressed and there is no need. I have had my tea and eggs. The kitten is twitching in its sleep, curled up with his ears touching my nakedknee. The ears are the twitchiest of him. He is covering his eyes with his tiny paws, which is always too my instinct when I fall back asleep after the whole sun is in the sky.

In the bedroom here the walls are white, the headboards and footboards are white, the drape is white, my sheets mint-green and white and the blanket is sky-blue. If I remember: the sky is blue because the color blue has the shortest lightwaves and so blue gets refracted first when it hits the atmosphere, before all other colors. Thus the blanket is the first thing we see when the sun comes in through the window in the morning; the blanket becomes blue before we even feel the light change and open our eyes and see it: blue. The other blue thing, my eyes, I cannot see because when the sun comes in and makes the blanket blue they are still closed, but if the light that makes them blue is morninglight, my eyes are morningeyes.

The color white has the loudest soundwaves, but they are only audible to our unconscious, like blood is only blue until it hits the air. This is why when we rustle awake we think we have heard the morning happen and wake up and see the blue blanket instead. “Did you say something?” we ask each other, and we are able to fall back asleep by covering our eyes or shielding them with the back of the other’s neck or armpit because now we are semi-conscious; the morning falls silent. This is also why we have and hate alarm clocks: they mimic the sound of morninglight in waking life.

H.C. is writing about C.L.’s egg:

“For gathering the song of things, their wordless call: for saying ‘egg’ as I say ‘love’… And seeing an egg is impossible, with ordinary seeing. ‘In the morning in the kitchen I [Clarice] see the egg on the table.’ This sentence is impossible. Clarice writes it only to take it back, in the beating of writing. ‘No sooner do I see an egg than I have seen an egg for a thousand years.’ Seeing? Isn’t it always already having seen? Seeing is itself the egg whose shell is going to burst. Clarice teaches us superseeing. ‘I never learned to look without needing more than just to see.’ I cannot write ‘I see’ while seeing, without having gone through the long labor of passion carried out in every text, at every now, to come to Seeing: the promise of one day coming to ‘see’ the egg, this is the Passion according to C.L. One day: there will be the egg, and ‘my eyes ended up not being separate from what I saw.’ So this day, there is egg. This egg-day, in the present of an instant.”

The week I am alone with everywhere I have neverseen to walk to, everything is closed, empty streets. I have postcards to send but wherever the unfound the post office is, it is closed. I have a check to deposit but Citibank is also closed. It is on the other side of the island where I’ve never been, on the far side of 26th July St. Telling me that is like saying to me, someone who believes the earth is flat, ‘Oh, it’s just on the other side of the horizon.’ You are saying, ‘Oh, it’s just over the edge of the known world.’ I have laundry to do but the. Oh, wait. The bathroom sink in our apartment is open today.

Now it is noon. “What time is it?” Noonow.

“Let us take a rose: from the very first second, a rose takes us. In our rashness, it seems to us as we are taking it. Because we are the ones who bear hands.”

Cutting It Off

Okay, it took me ten minutes to even find the pocketknife because I forgot we used it to try to open a can of corn the other night. (Most of the cans of vegetables here have pop-and-peel-back tops so we never got a can opener.) It was in a drawer in the kitchen with the other pocket knives, a nail care kit, and a box of thread with a single needle. I'll let it grow out for a month or two and then let an Egyptian woman cut my hair for me.

The kitten I am watching for the next six days is also bored. He keeps attacking my fingers as I'm typing. I hope he really doesn't have rabies like the girls who left him with me (and my mother, by phone) assured me, because his last scratch definitely just broke the skin. When I put him in the hallway and close the door, he cries because he doesn't want to be alone. He just wants to bite me. If I die of rabies soon, my mother will be angry because I have hacked off bangs, and for that reason alone I hope I live.

Feeling It Pt. 2

Ever since I got back from the hospital, I haven't been convinced that everything is okay with my body. Sometimes I will be sitting or walking and I will distinctly feel acute pain just where I approximate my heart to be, which is different than the pain I woke up in when I went to the hospital. That was located somewhere around or maybe inside of my ribcage. I am sitting on my bed right now in the one place where our pirated wireless connection comes in, downloading Nina Nastasia's Daytrotter Sessions tracks, and I just felt the exact same pain in just where I would approximate my heart to be if it were on the right side of my body, where it is not. Since the pains are identical and there is no heart in the right side of my chest, I feel better about this mystery pain.

Feeling It

I am actively trying not to cut off my hair with the tiny pair of scissors folded into my pocketknife. Today I went with Brittani to the mall in Heliopolis so that she could buy some clothes for her trip to Syria. None of us brought a lot of clothes to Egypt with us, especially not clothes we would normally wear wherever we came from. In fact, I gave most of my clothes (consisting almost entirely of very short or very sheer dresses and skirts, high-waisted skinny jeans, and deep-cut V-neck t-shirts from American Apparel and Uniqlo) to MG and Maud before I left in August. The night that Maud left to go back to New York City after coming down to my parent’s house for a beach daytrip, Chris and I were lying in my tiny bed in the pink bat cave and I started crying. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “I miss my clothes,” I said. This is a true story. I mean, I wasn’t crying a lot or anything.

I don’t want to live somewhere where I can’t wear a mini-skirt. I’m not saying this as a matter of principle, here “not being able to wear a miniskirt” standing in for “not being able to walk down the street alone at night” or “not making it through the day without being hissed at or cat-called even when I am wearing three layers of loose clothing.” I’m saying this because there was a miniskirt at the H&M in the mall that made me extremely homesick for fall in New York and moccasin boots and wool tights. At risk of feeling shallow (and honestly isn't that what the fear of "sounding shallow" is really about?), I will admit that am someone who cares about Fashion. This isn't much of an admission, obviously, if you already know me but if I don't tacitly admit to it, the following might sound like an elaborately-constructed denial of caring-about-clothes. And I don't deny that. I care about clothes.

At the same time, what I actually wear is only partly dictated by what I see in magazines and also partly about Feeling It, just like constantly cutting and dying my hair is about Feeling It. Getting dressed is sometimes more about putting feelings on the outside of your body than anything else, in a code that you simultaneously think everyone else will understand and realize they won't, because they are probably thinking, “That is an ugly shirt,” instead of “That shirt is from when she was in high school, so today she is trying to channel the feeling of the past pure, which is the feeling of okayness.” It’s about looking in the mirror and saying, “I am someone who wears this,” because “this” has a particular meaning to you that you would like to simultaneously signify to others and envelope yourself in, and that meaning is a synthesis of the meanings you attribute to what you see in magazines and on TV and on the street (“Fashion”) and the meanings attached to certain things by dominant popular culture (certain colors equal certain moods, short skirts are slutty, et cetera) and the meanings things have in your deep-down free-association personal aesthetic code (“this sweater makes me feel nostalgic for late summer/early fall and for my family because it looks like one of sweaters I bought in the basement of a laundromat in Vermont the summer before my Aunt Theresa died and the feeling of nostalgia is a reference to the past pure and I would like to walk around all day wrapped in that”). Most of the time, I am someone who wears a black t-shirt with a black cardigan and black jeans and moccasins with holes in the soles and I am someone who wants the Universe to leave me the Fuck Alone. Black shirt/black cardigan/black jeans is my Cosmic Deflection uniform.

(A brief word on the past pure self: I recognize that this is a category of self that has been retroactively created. In high school, I also was constantly trying to seek and derive and create meaning in everything, figure-out-it-all-and-me. It’s not like I walked around thinking, ‘Right now I am okay.’ It’s more like, when I think back to high school, I was doing more of what I wanted to be doing and was with who I wanted to be with more of the time, and I definitely wore whatever I wanted because we were the “weird” “artsy” kids anyway. I wasn’t allowed by my mother to compose an outfit to wear to any sort of family gathering or any other place that required me to look presentable until well into college.)

And here, not only do I feel isolated, but I feel alienated from my clothes, which is, in a way, being alienated from Feeling It, which is, in its essence, the Cosmic Abyss. X=Y=Z=0.

It is Important, Just to Be Writing, Pt. 2

I just got up to make eggs in the filthy kitchen, I took out the eggs from the refrigerator, the shredded cheese (Kathryn's), the French salted butter, the brown rolls. I cracked two eggs into a bowl and sprinkled in some cheese, but it fell in clumps, the shavings stuck together in gluey balls, and I plunged my fingers into the still-separate whites and yolks to break up the cheese. Doing this made me remember being in the red black darkroom in high school and sticking my hands into the trays of developer and stop bath and fixer instead of using tongs, they were always missing or broken, we always used our hands, we always stuck our hands into basins of chemicals and to the icy water of the spin-wash where our black and white photographs rode a merry-go-round until retrieved.

Whenever I fall back into this phase in my life, super-analytical, whenever I begin self-narrating my every movement to myself because I am alone and have no one to talk to and my thoughts start to speed up and free associate on their own, in my head I see amoebal splits and divisions and reproductions of thoughts under a microscope, and I worry about nothing and I attribute meaning to everything, I will inevitably say to someone, "I just don't know what's important." Just to keep writing is important, I've decided right now. It is okay just to be writing. It is okay to try to feel okay which is to be writing, right now.

Another thing I do when I fall back into this is what I did last night, which is to dye or cut my hair, which is on the one hand contrary to the search for meaning because that is also the search for the pure self, and my pure self has very light brown, almost dark-dark blonde, hair (almost no one knows that, could describe my natural hair color, because I never let it grow out, not because I am ashamed of it but because I am too neurotic and compulsive to let it get that far and yet when I see pictures of it, last making its photographic appearance in January 2006, I think I am looking at a younger triumphant version of the pure self), and on the other hand not at all contradictory because the search for meaning is also transformative, the future potential pure. Right now, the pink-red dye job I gave myself in August is fading out to a strawberry blonde that everyone has mistaken as my natural hair color and last night I added more sweeps of bright pink-red to my bangs and to the wisps next to my ears, which does not look particularly good but was also not to dye the whole thing, which was almost to hold on to the future potential pure self, the one who I will be when I leave here, I think. This is not how it works, I know. There is no such thing. It is okay to feel okay, right now.

I am listening to people move furniture in the apartment next door, behind the wall behind my headboard behind my head, we've never seen any of our floor neighbors face-to-face, they slip out when they hear our door close, the tops of their heads disappear down the stairs when we try to catch them leaving.

It is Important, Just to Be Writing

What am I doing here when I wanted to be out in the world? This is not the city I wanted to live in, didn't I want to grow an herb garden in my windowsill? At night, we lie (lay? Julia?) around and talk about the bodies we love, other bodies, (we never talk about loving our own, which doesn't mean we don't; I mostly do, it's just not the conversation we're having). We wash our underwear in the sink, rinse it in cold water in the shower, wring it out, and hang it from the curtain rings with clothespins. Last night I opened the bakery box of powdered-sugar cookies and found an ant wriggling under the doily. "Jessi!" I lamented into the living room. "Oh no," she said. She knew what I was talking about. Nothing is safe.

There is not much I can tell you about this city. I spent most of my days reading in my apartment, making tea, eating eggs, divining the internet from the sky. Other days, I take a sometimes two-hour bus ride out of the city into New Cairo to the American University in Cairo's new corporate-park-Disneyland campus in the desert, past gated communities and a huge cemetery and English-language billboards depicting happy white people and the Future University of Egypt. Mark Westmoreland wanted us to talk about New Cairo in terms of Benjamin's phantasmagoria last week but our conversation went astray, dry, we ran out of time, something. OH MY GOD, I can not handle being criticized but at the same time, I WAS NOT DISMISSING THOSE READINGS AS ABSTRACT OR IRRELEVANT. There, I said it. On the other hand, I wonder if I am smart enough. Smart, enough.

I wanted to be part of something bigger.

This morning in the shower I didn't wash my hair because it feels nice and glossy and I didn't want to lose it, that satiny feel, I stood under the stream of water so that it hit my chest and back instead and I thought I smelled something burning, a smell that followed me out of the shower into my bedroom. It is my hair, it smells like shisha smoke from Farah last night, I should have washed it. This morning in the shower, I reached up to adjust the shower head and with my arm outstretched, I kissed my tattoo, I was barely awake and it seemed like the right thing to do. I was naked but I am nevernaked now, or more naked than before, I made it part of me, it is part of something bigger.

Cultural and Theory at UC Irvine

The Ph.D. in Culture and Theory provides a strong theoretical and critical approach to race, gender and sexuality studies. Using the strengths of critical theory at UCI and the IDPs ( Inter-disciplinary programs and departments) in African American, Chicano/Latino Studies, Asian American, Critical Theory and Women’s Studies, this is an interdisciplinary degree that uses a problem-oriented rather than a disciplinary approach to issues of race, gender and sexuality in relation to diasporas, transnational and postcolonial contexts, all of which are broadly based in the humanities, social sciences and arts.

Cultural Studies at SUNY Stonybrook

The Ph.D. Program in Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary and interdepartmental program based in the Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. The program treats culture as inseparable from its historical, social, political, economic and technological dimensions and, as such, works to reorient traditional humanities disciplines.

The Internet Pt. 2

I woke up in my sleep a thousand times last night, I woke up from my sleep at least a dozen times last night, it was a chain reaction, waking up and dreaming about not sleeping and actually waking up again, slow motion stop and go, I got up to use the bathroom at three thirty in the morning and when I sat on the cold toilet seat I remember thinking, “But Sassen’s use of the idea of ‘locality’ in globalization…” and the thought sliding down my leg like a slug, leaving a thick sticky residue behind it as it made its way across the tiled bathroom floor towards my bedroom.

Last night we went to Farah to use the internet, we are always so transparent and our desire always so opaque when we walk into the Coffee Bean or Cilantro or Farah, what is among the least expensive menu items? “Ayza zabadi bil ‘asl,” “Could I have yogurt with honey?” Whatever we order off your menu is a token, a symbol of our defeat by the cosmic internet forces, we are here for the internet, your internet, please don’t interrupt us.

On the way home, I started off to the apartment first and at the end of Mohammed El Maraashli, I walked by a girl who said, “Is that your dog?” And I said, “No?” And she said, “There is a dog following you. He’s right behind you,” And I looked down and there was a thin black dog, matted fur on its head between its ears, long snout with white muzzle, its tongue flopping out of its mouth. I hadn’t stopped walking so I didn’t, the dog kept trotting after me, it was thin and wiry like the one coyote I’ve ever seen, I turned the corner on Bahgat Ali and it kept following me at the hem of my skirt as I moved down the street, I was getting panicky, then I weaved quickly onto the sidewalk between two cars and back the way I’d come, and over my shoulder I saw the dog spinning in circles, having lost me. Half a dozen men stood around on the sidewalks and watched the spectacle, unmoving.

We are fighting with the Nile OnLine man. I just called and asked when they were coming and he said, “Jessica Haley? You only signed the contract three days ago,” and I said, “YOU TOLD US YOU WOULD CALL US ON SUNDAY.” He said, “It takes three to five days, Friday and Saturday were days off.” “I know!” I said, “But when we signed the contract, whoever came to our apartment told us Sunday or Monday, before Eid.” “I told you Sunday or Monday?” he asked. “Whoever came to our apartment did,” I said, and Jessi is cursing in the kitchen where she is frying her breakfast eggs. “I will call you back, Miss Jessica,” he says. I go into the kitchen and say, “Now he’s saying three to five days,” and she waves the greasy spatula at me lividly. “I knew this would happen!”

I am right now picking up one bar on internet in my bedroom. Sometimes it floats up to two bars, but most of the time I can't get it at all. I should be reading Fanon for Social Theory and my stomach is cramping from sourceless anxiety and caffeine and it is already 11:25 a.m. and I haven't done anything but make eggs and drink tea and finish the last few pages "Coming to Writing" in the bathroom.

"If you write as a woman, you know as I do: you write to give the body its Books of the Future because Love dictates your new geneses to you. Not to fill in the abyss, but to love yourself right to the bottom of your abysses. To know, not to avoid. Not to surmount; to explore, dive down, visit. There, where you write, everything grows, your body unfurls, your skin recounts its hitherto silent legends."

The Internet

Tomorrow we will get the internet installed to our phone line, inshallah. On Thursday, the man from Nile OnLine came to our apartment. We heard the elevator slam on the fourth floor, which is always a sign of a visitor because everyone who lives in our building knows the elevator door on the fourth floor slams if you just let go of it. When the doorbell rang, I involuntarily shivered; I always think that the harbinger of bad news will be standing out there. Too many times our doorbell has rung unexpectedly and it is usually an Egyptian man speaking incomprehensible-to-me Arabic, once trying to sell us glasses and plates from a cardboard box, another time wanting to check our gas meter, and then there is the one who rings every morning at six (we think, sometimes we hear the bell ringing, it pierces our sleep but now it just might be a specter of that first encounter, he is punctual if anything) with an as yet undetermined problem that we think has something to do with either our air conditioner or our garbage disposal.

The Nile-OnLine man brought us a contract to sign and then issued us receipts for the installation fee, one month of service, a three-month insurance policy on the wireless router, and three-month rent charge for the router itself, all totaling 740 gineh. “But when will you install the internet?” we asked. “Oh, in a few days. Sunday. Or Monday.” “You will come on Sunday?” we said. “Maybe Sunday. Maybe Sunday morning.” “So you are coming on Sunday morning?” We are holding onto the money, not wanting to let go of it without a promise. “I will call you. On Sunday,” he said. “So we will see you on Sunday morning, inshallah,” we said. “Inshallah,” he said, and backed away slowly. "Sunday!" I yelled after his retreating form. We probably won't get it until after Eid.

Everything I eat is made of two or more of the following: cheese, bread, bananas, fruit jam, eggs, lentils, butter. My stomach is closing itself to me, it is closing up like a fist. "You have been very cruel," it hisses. "Who told you to eat fruit from a tree?" "I had to," I say. "It would have been rude, unbearably rude, not too. I would have died of shame." There is some bacterial intergalactic war being played out in my digestive tract.

I haven't had nightmares for a few nights now. I've long-abandoned my ritual of laying out on the carpet and taking deep breaths before climbing in bed; there are ant armies marching our carpet countryside and besides, I've been sick. When the drape is closed in our bedroom, it stays nighttime all day anyway. We wake up and can't tell if it's dawn or noon or night again. I could have sworn I heard rain the other day and pulled it back and thrust my hand out the window, squinting at particles of dust catching light from headlights and store signs and mistaking them for water: I felt nothing, it was dry.

Cultural Studies at UC Davis

The Graduate Group in Cultural Studies at UC Davis offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of culture and society that highlights how sexuality, race, ability, citizenship, gender, nationality, class and language organize embodied identities, social relations and cultural objects. Our program, one of the few advanced degrees in Cultural Studies in the United States, emphasizes the linked analyses of these factors in relation to local community formations, transnationalism, (post)(neo)colonialism, and globalization. Drawing on faculty from a wide range of disciplines and intellectual interests, the program cuts across the humanities, social sciences, the law school, and agricultural and environmental studies.

Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts

"Today's vast and intricate visual arena demands new forms of critical analysis. It calls for cultural critics who can write eloquently for diverse audiences in a range formats. The MA program in Visual and Critical Studies aspires to create an interdisciplinary and culturally diverse framework within which to bring historical, social, and political analysis, as well as formal analysis, to bear on the interpretation of the visual world. Our goal is to train students to write professionally about the visual arts and visual culture."

Welcome to the Cosmic Abyss

For all the thinking I do, all of the over-analyzing of daily minutae, all of the sleep I've lost in my entire life that hovers in grainy particles around me and that I could scoop up with both of my fists and use as an exfoliater to scrub off the layers of sweat and grime on my skin that has accumulated like a wax to seal in all of my anxieties, my questions, my whys and what-fors and who-are-you-to-mes and what-am-I-to-yous and what-is-the-meaning-of-it-alls, I'm actually not really sure I thought about what I was getting myself into before I moved here. I was seduced by HAVING A PLAN and I didn't give myself enough time to think about what I really, really, really want to be doing, where I want to live, who I want to be with, what I deep-down feel that I am supposed to be doing with my one and only life. It's not better to have a plan, to be married to a plan, if it's just something to be doing while time is passing, never to come back again. Right?