Archive Page 2

• “Oh Lá Lá”

Published July 27, 2011 ideas 2 Comments
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I can’t really provide a definition of “oh lá lá,” but I think everyone who hears it understands its meaning from the way it feels. 

When I was on my way to Cairo, where I write from now, I took a long indirect journey via London and Geneva. I had less than an hour to catch my connection in Geneva, and I almost missed my flight because I had some airport confusion.

The airport in Geneva has its gates organized as A, B, and C gates, and apparently the C gates are where the connections are. They don’t actually tell you that.

It’s also not clear that you have to go through passport control to access the C gates, even if you have a connection to another fucking country. And even more time consumingly, you have to go through passport control a second time when you approach the actual entrance to the C gates.

Fuck C.

Anyway, when I was slowly learning all this the hard way, and the signs failed me, I started asking airline staff for directions. I reached one woman who asked me which flight I was connecting to, and told her “Cairo.”

Her response was, “Oh lá lá, you have gotten lost! You don’t have much time.”

Okay. Some Swiss people are kind of Frenchy. Okay, they’re French. And I get that. I do.

But yes, lady, please make my airport crisis flamboyant, foppish and chocolate-flavored as I scramble not to lose my flight which cost me twice as much as it was worth. Did I mention I’m impoverished?

*Image from Futurepedia.

• Taxi Drivers Who Won’t Follow Through

Published July 24, 2011 people 5 Comments
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Hypothetically, if I was having a perfectly normal conversation over coffee with someone, and the perfectly natural hypothetical question, “If you could choose one group of people to wipe out with a genocide, what would it be?” came up, the first group I would choose would be taxi drivers.

I have had my issues with taxi drivers in Cairo before.

But what the fuck is this thing where they don’t take you all the way to the destination you want because it’s out of their way?

When the fuck did Earth become a planet where I should give a shit about a taxi driver’s destination? That’s like an umbrella asking me to shield it from the rain so it doesn’t get wet while it shields me from the rain.

This week, I’ve had two separate taxi drivers drive me a partial distance in the direction of my destination, and then wait until I’m an inconvenient walk away from it to say that they won’t take a certain turn because they are headed to some other area that makes my stop out of the way for them. Because they would have to make a U-turn if they dropped me off AT THE PLACE I WAS PAYING TO GO. As if they’re giving me a lift as a personal favor.

Also this week, a third taxi driver left me on the side of the road well before my destination and I had to walk the rest of the way because he suddenly decided he didn’t have enough gas in his car. Not that I believe that he didn’t have enough to get me there, but IT’S HIS FUCKING JOB TO HAVE GAS. Committing to a journey that you can’t make just so you can profit off the portion of the journey you are willing to make is douchebaggery of the highest caliber.

I can’t wait until Cairo becomes a more cycle and genocide-friendly town.

Can You Guess Which Of These Is Me?

Published July 21, 2011 updates 1 Comment
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Click here and start guessing!

I’ll give you a clue: I’m the one with the pissed off look on my face.

• The Fucking Mascara Some Chicks Are Wearing These Days

Published July 2, 2011 things 5 Comments
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Chicks want their eyelashes to look like false eyelashes, but they want the effect to look natural?

Click to enlarge.

You do, of course, realize that those false eyelashes that women are wearing in public–which most people can’t even affix properly–make them look like they were fathered by the Snuffleupagas, and that there is really nothing natural about that?

So, they want outlandishly unnatural in every conceivable way to look like they were born with it. Let’s just be honest: they don’t know what the fuck they want.

*Modified screenshot from Max Factor, photo from Wikipedia. 

• The Crying Bitch-faced Mama’s Boy Who Sexually Harassed Me in Egypt

Published June 20, 2011 people 14 Comments
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Sexual harassment exists everywhere, but it is particularly rampant in Egypt. It is both tolerated and perpetrated by the authorities, as well as the average everyday assholes of all ages that you encounter all over the country. If you have boobies and you walk around in public in Egypt, you should be prepared to guard them from boys as young as 5 and as old as 85.

Nature’s bastard trick on women, though, is that if we are protecting our boobies, we have an ass on the other side that is out there for the taking, yet we lack the eight extra arms that we need to cover everything when some cunt-waffle is squeezing past us to cop a feel.

Today, Egyptian bloggers are writing about sexual harassment in Egypt. Many people in Egypt are silent about this issue, act like it doesn’t exist, or blame the woman for dressing too provocatively, bringing the harassment onto herself. If you follow the “#endSH” hashtag on Twitter today, you will see from other women’s stories that it doesn’t matter if you are covered from head to toe–no woman in Egypt is immune to sexual harassment.

Men are often excused for this behavior because it is written off as being in their nature as men.

I have more sexual harassment in Egypt stories (as well as sexual harassment not in Egypt stories) than someone who looks like me should, but I am hoping to use today to do a bit of a social experiment that I have fantasized about since a day in 2008 when this son of a bitch on a microbus felt me up (against my will, which should go without saying, but for some reason I still have to say it).

This particular incident was not my first time, nor my last time, nor my worst time, being sexually harassed in Egypt. But I will write about this story because I happen to have a photo of the perpetrator. He looks like this:

I know the guy smizing in the back really captures one’s attention with his GQ pose, but the guy I am talking about in this story is actually the one in the foreground who is wearing sunglasses. Click to enlarge and memorize his features.

So, I was on this bus with a friend of mine headed from Cairo to Alexandria to meet up with some friends for a day of fun. I was sitting in the aisle seat. I popped in my earbuds and nodded in and out of sleep during the bus journey.

I felt something like movement that I thought was beneath my seat over and over, and I kept shifting and looking around to see what it was. Every time I checked, I found nothing.

It happened again, and I looked behind me. Guys were sitting back there, but nothing was happening. I looked below me. Nothing.

Was the guy behind me kicking me from underneath the seat? It stopped again and I thought, he should stop kicking my seat or whatever it is he’s doing.

This went on for a while, and it wasn’t until I felt air from the outside world entering the lower back/top ass part of my clothing–parts of my body that I thought were covered–that I figured out the trick that I was previously unable to figure out.

I swiftly turned around and looked at my chair, and found that there was a crack of space between the back of the chair and the seat where the guy behind me had been sticking his fingers and moving my jeans down to feel up my ass. I saw his hands move back quickly and he continued his nonchalant air of having no idea what is going on.

I screamed a string of insults at him in Arabic, mostly about the gulf-like wideness of of his mom’s vagina from excess of activity with random men she meets in buses. That guy in the background of the photo looked really confused about what was going on when he watched me take off my shoe, sit up on my knees in my chair to face the guy straight on and hit him across the face over and over until his nose started bleeding. My friend stood by, muscles tensed, looking on guard as if he would jump in if the guy tried to do anything to me. Finally, I stood up and went to where he was sitting and smashed my other still-shoed foot into his balls. I did it a second time in case I had missed the first time. He coughed and his face turned red and he began gasping for air and crying. I spat in his face and then sat back down and tried to calm myself down. It was scary, but I felt great.

Just kidding, LOLZ! 

That is what I did in my head after I replayed the incident in my head 56 billion times. What I actually did in real life was whisper something incoherent to my friend about how the guy behind me was making me uncomfortable, switch seats with him, and then cower and try to gather my thoughts about what to do without crying.

The guy started trying to take my photo with his mobile phone. My friend turned around in his seat and stuck his own camera in the guy’s face and took the photo that you see here as retaliation.

My friend and I really did follow the guy off the bus when he got off. He got off somewhere on the highway before Alexandria, near a dirt road that went into a small village. By then I had managed to explain to my friend in a still less-than-coherent manner that the guy was sexually harassing me, though I didn’t really explain how.

Our plan after following the guy off the bus was to beat the shit out of him. That didn’t happen, mainly because it just became really confusing after that.

The guy was stone cold calm, and acted like he had no idea what I was talking about when I told him I saw his hands. He said that he was married and asked rhetorically why he would ever do such a thing. My friend got in his face and scared him, but he tried to act friendly and invite us to tea as if we had a wrong idea about him.

He was really quite decent, and I think he was trying to make me question the reality of whether what had happened actually happened. Maybe it was all in my head.

I have no doubt that it happened and that he’s the kind of guy that has probably had sexy times with his sister. But I was also so dumbfounded and lost for words and flustered, I really had no idea how to outwardly react. Especially when I expected a heated argument and got this docile conversation. I couldn’t get him worked up, or to even react.

I had this rage toward men and boys like this that I carried with me from all my previous experiences with sexual harassment in Egypt, and I wanted to take it all out on this guy. And he fucking deserved it.

But I realized that I’m just a puny girl and I’ve never actually picked a physical fight before. I didn’t know how to initiate it, especially since we were just standing around on a dirt road trying to discuss how to redress sexual harassment.

He asked me, “What do you want?” And I was really startled because it was such a good question, coming from such a barnacle of a person.

In my head, I thought of a few things. I want revenge. I want you to feel as shitty as you have made me feel, but I can’t because you’re shameless. I want to castrate you. I want your balls to hurt. I want you to never do this to anyone again. I want everyone like you to never do this to anyone again. And then I realized, it’s pointless. What am I going to do, ask him for a promise to change? Punch him in the face? I don’t know.

My friend really scared him, he was quite shaken up and he had asked a random passerby on the street to get involved. The passerby had no idea what happened and he was trying to calm me down because he was under the impression that the guy had verbally offended me somehow. He tried to tell me that it’s just words, that the guy didn’t mean it, and look, he’s being apologetic. He escorted the guy to a bus which went into the village, and when he was safely inside, he faced us and gave us the finger.

It is rare to have a chance to face someone who has sexually harassed you because most sexual harassers in Egypt are huge cowards and run off. This guy was a coward because he pretended like he didn’t do anything, but most of the time we women don’t get to have a chat afterwards. I guess you can see what I would have done differently if I had the chance, but it’s also quite different when you’re put on the spot.

Anyway, for shits and giggles I asked my friend to send me the photo he took when he stuck his camera in the guy’s face. I have always wanted to use it for some kind of revenge, but I really didn’t know how.

Now that today is the day Egyptians have chosen to collectively address the issue of sexual harassment, I give you his photo and ask you to spread it to everyone you know. The Internet really does shrink the world, and most of my “six degrees of separation” experiments have actually ended in connections after about two or three degrees.

So if any of you have seen this guy, you have my blessing to do to him what I did in my head when I thought about it later.

And if you are this guy, I have an answer to your question now.

• All My Teachers Who Exaggerated the Importance of Cursive Writing (An Open Letter)

Published June 19, 2011 people 12 Comments
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Dear Mrs. Rudasill, Mrs. Foster, Mrs. Ramirez, Mrs. Colsch, Mrs. Ward, and Mrs. Fischer respectively,

About five years of my primary school experience were wasted on learning how to improve writing in cursive, this extinct “grown-up” style of writing, when I could have been learning about more important, practical things like how to calculate my waiter’s tip in my head, or what kind of disease the people who drive slowly in front of you and then speed up after you pass them have.

As far as I remember, in school during the period spent on the subject known as “Penmanship,” we were taught how to make our printed handwriting look a little more controlled and assertive than those shaky-handed amateurs in kindergarten and first grade. This involved tracing dotted lines in the shapes of letters, and using special lined paper that had an “upstairs,” “downstairs” and “basement” to help us gauge how to make letters that are longer on top and those that are longer on the bottom in relation to each other.

When we reached 2nd grade, we were initiated into this more developed world of writing in cursive, which was reserved for bigger kids.

It wouldn’t be until 7th grade that cursive writing would belong to children again, with absolutely no explanation for the transition, and writing in bubbly-lettered printing would become the only cool, casual way to complete schoolwork. Anyone who wrote in cursive after this point was living in the past and was in no way the laid back California flip flop-wearing effortless writer of homework that we were supposed to be in junior high school.

Now that I’m a fully-grown adult who has graduated cursive-free high school, cursive-free college, and cursive-free graduate school, worked cursive-free full-time jobs, paid cursive-free bills, written cursive-free articles and cursive-free academic theses, kept various cursive-free blogs for a steady decade and have done a lot of other literate things without ever using cursive in a non-ironic context, I must ask:

Why did you lie to me?

Why did you make me think that I wouldn’t become an adult without writing in cursive? Why did you make it seem like you always used cursive in your own normal adult life? Do you expect us to believe that when you pay your own bills, you make your bs look like that farce of a character that looks like its hand is outstretched begging for money because it could never keep a steady job after failing to write in proper cursive?

In fact, do you or anyone you know use anything but the Internet to pay your bills? Did you really not see that coming?

Why did we even have a subject called Penmanship? Shouldn’t we have just learned how to read and write and then moved on to the critical thinking skills? If you saw my handwriting now, it looks like a disabled chimpanzee learned how to grasp a pen with its feet. And I’m in PhD school, so it must not have been my penmanship.

Why did you let me stay an idiot until I went to college and got fucked by my insanely difficult classes? Why did you let me enter the “real world” outside academia armed with nothing but these ludicrously foppish letters that nobody wants? Why are there so many idiots in the world who know how to write in cursive, but can’t tell the difference between someone who believes in Allah and a lightweight cotton sheet?

Muslim

muslin

 

 

 

 

 

 

You wasted a valuable portion of my childhood, and you gave me a false impression of my future. And you also caused me a lot of trauma on the day that we learned how to write the capital G.

I AM A GIANT FLOPPY GRINNING CREATURE THAT WILL EAT YOU IN THE NIGHT

I mean, what the fuck is that fucking thing? It doesn’t resemble the real G in any way, and some of us struggled so much to make that letter that we risked repeating our grade.

Do you have any idea what something so nonsensical can do to a child’s psyche? Do you know how long some kids have gone thinking that the Disney logo says “Gisney” because people like you confused them with the absurdly cruel experience of learning about the cursive capital G?

Would you have put your children through the distress of learning the cursive capital G at such an innocent age when they still haven’t grasped the implications of the unfairness of this frightening, unpredictable world?

And what about cursive Q? Do you know how I memorized that in second grade? “Q = 2,” that’s how. THAT IS NOT OKAY.

Weren’t you supposed to be shaping our impressionable lives so that we could become upstanding 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th graders, and then go on to change the world with our brilliant thoughts and discoveries?

Well, I want you to know something. Since I’m a grown-up, I have bank accounts now. Oh yes. And my bank signature is my name written in a vestige of cursive, but really fast so that it looks fancy and no one can replicate it.

But guess what?

I intentionally break the rules of writing the letters properly. I don’t pick up my pen when you told me to, and I use the tail of my a to come back around and dot my i, just because. And when I do, I am doing it in conscious defiance of you and the ridiculous rules you imposed on me.

And I can still get hired, goddamn you.

*Images and photo from FunEasyEnglish, Learning Gizmos, StandUp for Peace, and Talas. 

• Henry the Hoover

Published June 9, 2011 things 2 Comments
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Many households in Britain have a certain kind of hoover, as they say vacuum cleaner here, with which I have developed a turbulent relationship. Which is to say, I’m fucking scared shitless by it because I know it’s alive and waiting until no one is looking to become animate, pulverize me and then devour my remains with its absurdly long nose-hose.

I will turn to dust inside of it, and no one will ever know why I disappeared.

This thing is part hoover, part Night of the Living Dummy, part Satan’s evil shifty-eyed smiling conspiring plastic toy.

He's watching...

The first time I saw one of these was many years ago when I lived with a family in England for a few months. They kept Henry the Hoover inside their house, instead of in the woods in the countryside on the Moon in the fourth dimension where it belongs.

For some reason, people like Henry the Hoover. Some people really like Henry the Hoover.

But when its owners looked away, I swear I saw its eyes shift.

I wouldn’t be alone with it in the room.

This week, I am moving a third time since my arrival in the ever-hospitable city of London. I have my own place now, and no longer have to endure the embarrassing existence of cohabiting, at my age, with people who did not originate from my womb. I have a new, sparkly toilet of my very own to care for and love, that I can use without having to first wipe away someone else’s mysteriously long pubes in watery-eyed horror and revulsion.

My new place is carpeted. And my landlord has been generous enough to provide a hoover so that I don’t have to make a baby and sell its kidneys to buy my own.

But my landlord, like many people in this part of the world, has chosen Henry the Hoover.

And I am going to be living alone.

Henry the Hoover is watching me and waiting. Henry the Hoover is tired of eating dust and hair. And Henry the Hoover hungers for more protein in its diet.

• Feudalism on the London Underground

Published June 1, 2011 ideas Leave a Comment
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It wasn’t enough that on their website, Transport for London emphasized how low-class I am by needlessly showing me all the upper echelons of the higher classes to which I don’t belong.

They also have this poster around the Underground Tube stations that is supposed to be a warning not to steal from them by jumping the train without paying:

"Plain clothes inspectors operate across our network. Get caught fare evading and risk a fine of up to £1000 and a criminal record."

Apparently we, the common riff raff who use London public transport, all look alike to Transport for London.

I guess if you look at us long enough, with our unwashed Oyster cards and our sheep-like queues for the escalators, we peasants, serfs and villeins are unremarkably homogeneous.

For those of us who can’t afford the Internet or are too uneducated to know how to use computers and may not have access to the list of titles Transport for London reminds us exist, but do not pertain to us, we have these posters telling us, “Since none of you faceless drudges are unique enough to be distinguishable from one another, watch out because any one of you could be a ticket inspector.”

It’s important to instill fear and mistrust among the proletariat so they don’t organize and revolt.

• Egypt’s Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF)

Published May 23, 2011 ideas , people , things 2 Comments
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Egyptians overthrew the President, and then the military took over in the interim. Egypt will be SCAFFY at least until after a new President is appointed.

In effect, a handful of senior military officials who probably come from the same mold as the woman next to me on the plane from Cairo to London will govern Egypt until Mickey Mouse comes into office. They’ll decide what the military should do.

Today, Egyptian bloggers are blogging about SCAF and how incomparably shitty it is.

During the 18 days of protests in Egypt that lead to Hosni Mubarak’s stepping down, the military showed some restraint toward protestors that the police didn’t necessarily.

Even though it was determined for the military that their nappy time was whenever Mubarak unleashed armed thugs on camels and horses onto the protestors, for some reason the notion of the military’s not directly painting the streets with protestor’s blood was perceived as a really nice gesture.

Some people from the military declared that they were people before they were armed sons of bitches ordered to kill in cold blood.

People liked that. It gave them the emotionals. They expressed their emotionals with flowers and chocolates.

So the civilian protestors and the Egyptian military sang about their unity, linked arms and skipped along flower petals on a yellow-brick road into the rainbow.

Until they didn’t.

Since Mubarak left, SCAF’s been all sorts of cuntish.

Allowing for the shooting at unarmed protestors. Proposing daftly preposterous laws that forced people to commit really ironic acts like “protesting against the ban on protesting.”

Or the similarly ironic, making detention the consequence of insulting the military. Now our brains have to cope with questions like “shouldn’t SCAF’s own existence, an insult to the Egyptian military and SCAF itself, result in their own detention?”

When religious sectarian clashes took place as a result of some bullshit rumors about bullshit between bullshit people from bullshit walks of life, the riot police that were there stood around and were like “oh shit, we need the army ’cause we don’t do stuff anymore.”

But as I said before, nappy time. So it took quite some time for the military to arrive at the scene, wipe the crust from their eyes, and croak through their morning breath, “Huh? What’s it? I’m going back to sleep.”

If the military is an asshole, SCAF is the ass itself. The ass machine surrounding and controlling the asshole as it spews cancerous shits.

As shit happens, or fails to happen, SCAF reiterates its legitimacy and does a few volleys of public masturbation. Then it tries civilians in military courts to remind citizens that this military regime was brought to you by the letters S for “shit-induced,” C for “cancer,” A for “of the asshole,” and F for “foreversies.”

SCAF causes ass cancer.

So when Egypt implodes on Friday 27 May, this is one of the reasons for it.

Good day.

*Photo from Chieftain. 

• Simpsons Iced Ring D’oh Nuts

Published May 21, 2011 things 3 Comments
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This is the worst £1 I’ve ever spent.

Obviously, if you put Homer Simpson on anything edible I’m going to buy it.

Food gimmicks I have fallen for in the past include:

  • Alphabet soup.
  • Super Mario Bros. fruit snacks.
  • A bear-shaped frying pan.
  • Cheddar shapes.
  • Animal crackers.
  • Circus animal-shaped pasta.
  • Super Mario Bros. macaroni and cheese.
  • Ninja Turtles-shaped Crazy Dips.
  • Buzz cola.
  • Oh yeah. And these same “d’oh nuts” when they first came out in 2007 when 7-11 was doing the Simpsons Movie promotion and redecorated their stores to look like the Kwik-E-Mart.

Do you see a pattern here?

Yes, I’m a bit of a tool. That’s not the point.

I am attracted to things-I-like-shaped foods that I like.

These donuts taste like shit. They have this artificial medicine flavor in the icing that made me instantly recall the 7-11 promotion after I scarfed one down here in 2011.

Also, since I wasn’t very scrutinizing when I bought these, I didn’t notice a few other things.

The Sainsbury’s label says that the donuts are “unsuitable for vegetarians?” I am not a vegetarian, but what the hell is in these? What is Flour Treatment Agent?

I also didn’t notice this until it was too late:


The packaging is telling me to consume all 4 donuts on the day of purchase.

Setting aside, for the moment, that these do taste like extract of plastic, my sweet tooth trumps my palate. I need all the strength in the world not to eat all 4 when no one has told me that that is okay. When everything in the world goes against it being okay.

Now Homer Fucking Simpson is telling me that it’s acceptable to do this.

There is nothing good about these donuts.

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