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?