Tuesday, July 08, 2008

walk like an egyptian

today on my way home an egyptian woman stopped me to ask for directions. i didn't know where the place she was asking for was, but still, so exciting! apparently all the harassment is not because of my american appearance but rather entirely because of my stunning good looks.

last night we went to see a film about hasan al-banna in maadi. it was super long and i wasn't a huge fan, but i think ben would have thought it was pretty cool. the bookstore we were in was really great though, it had books in english and arabic (and i think other languages like french). i read the introduction to a spelling dictionary. apparently those exist. also, there was a book by giles keppel called "bad moon rising," so he officially gets all the middle east nerd cool points.

then we went to metro, one of the big supermarket chains, to try and get sour cream for the chocolate cake katie made tim for his birthday. unfortunately sour cream was nowhere to be found and for the life of us we couldn't figure out how to say it, so katie improvised. more importantly, metro was pretty incredible but kind of unbelievably expensive. i wanted to buy granola bars but they cost 38 LE. insane. katie spent about as much time choosing baking supplies as i do choosing pens and notebooks, so that's good.

then today was just class. i've been kind of exhausted all day because i was up till 2:30 last night for absolutely http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifnot reason. and i had the delicious taamiya with fries sandwich for lunch again. as usual, although tomorrow might be time for a change.

yup, slow day.

and, to continue to the parade of (really great) new york times columns:

Bob Herbert: Lurching With Abandon

this is pretty much what i'm talking about with the obama problem, so i'm not even going to bother to repeat what he said (way better than i ever could). just this section is particularly important i think:
Mr. Obama is betting that in the long run none of this will matter, that the most important thing is winning the White House, that his staunchest supporters (horrified at the very idea of a President McCain) will be there when he needs them.

He seems to believe that his shifts and twists and clever panders — as opposed to bold, principled leadership on important matters — will entice large numbers of independent and conservative voters to climb off the fence and run into his yard.

Maybe. But that’s a very dangerous game for a man who first turned voters on by presenting himself as someone who was different, who wouldn’t engage in the terminal emptiness of politics as usual.
of course i still plan to vote for him, but i'm worried that, while he means to get more votes by playing the dirty political games and swinging right, he is actually losing a lot of support - and, more importantly, he is losing the appeal he had to independents.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Keep up the good work.

1:02 AM, November 12, 2008  

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