You Can't Make Mistakes.

First Annual.

Tomorrow, or more accurately, tonight is my birthday. I usually let these things pass me by. The last few years have found me on planes or by myself in a strange city or somewhere. This year, my friends in Cairo have quietly insisted on a party, and I am going to indulge them.

I don’t like birthday parties, particularly for people who are in their late twenties and early thirties. These events tend toward the externally happy/internally maudlin, and who has time for that? I don’t lament getting older, though I recognize that it is happening more rapidly than any of us is comfortable with. I like it. I typically like to “celebrate” this aspect of life with a quiet drink in a dark bar and a good long self-reflection followed by fitful sleep. This, however, does not exactly make a good environment for whatever is the opposite of depression. On thinking about it this morning as I washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen floor waiting for my coffee to kick in, I realized that this might be another aspect of a childhood loathing that I carry with me even until today.

I hate kids. Hate them. I have since I was a kid, probably even moreso then. When I was a child, other children were mean, stupid, intentionally and willfully ignorant. They pretended not to know things and they were never interested in anything other than whatever everyone else was interested in. I didn’t get this. I don’t get it now. The kids I like are weird, peculiar little people. They say adult words in a tiny human voice. They ask questions that perplex the adults around them. They are also surrounded by adults, and tend to like it that way.

I wish I had known these kids when I was a kid. Alas, they tended not to be very visible, preferring adults. They hid away. They did not invite other weirdos around very often, and neither did I. What I never realized was that the others—the kids who didn’t spend all their time in their own heads—were actually interested in knowing me. I just didn’t let them for some reason.

When I was a child, I would have much rather spent time with my grandparents or my aunts and uncles than with other children. I even preferred to spend time with my parents, especially my parents, though I never let them know that. They all had stories, interesting stories. They had lived in places, jumped out of airplanes, gone to college, not gone to college, worked, built whole houses with their hands, cultivated plants, sewn clothing for their children, made bread, played softball, gotten in fights, swam in the south Pacific, flown on planes that had carried nuclear bombs, had cancer, and so many other things that my brain staggers to try to think of all the stories that they have told me.

Kids don’t have any stories, at least not those that I had to choose from as a kid. They liked video games, they liked playing soccer. I hated those things, and I hated them. I didn’t give them a fair chance. I didn’t realize that they probably found me as strange and upsetting—or as exotic and fascinating—as I found them.

As I got older, I think I realized this. I did things with people my own age. It took a while, but by that point we were becoming adults, whether we liked it or not. I could finally almost relate to my peer group. They read books now, and some of them even wanted to talk about it.

And then there were the shared experiences that we all thought our parents didn’t have any experience of. Suddenly we were inventors. We invented smoking that first cigarette on a cold Michigan day. We invented sex. We invented drugs and going to concerts. We invented reading books banned by our grandparents’ generation. Our parents stood by and let us go on about our business. They were worried. They still are. They wouldn’t be parents if they didn’t. I think that maybe they also realized that they had done stupid and brilliant stuff that they thought their parents didn’t know anything about.

I knew better. My grandparents told me stories from their youth, from their partying days. They were wild. They drank whiskey, got into bar fights, played cards, smoked cigars and went to weird places in strange cities. They saved the best for when I was older. They were rebels, and they didn’t even know it. They made us look like prudes, like amateurs.

So, now here we are: adults. We make the stories now. We get lost down back alleys and drink from unmarked bottles, smoke cigarettes sometimes and hang out with weirdos. We have power, we no longer require supervision. Sometimes we are the supervisors of those in need of it. I wonder what skewed view this next generation of children—and the one after that—will take of us? Will they think that we were strange, reclusive loners with nothing but idle time on our hands before they were born? I don’t know. Probably, if that is what we let them believe.

In the mean time, I am going to a party, ostensibly in my honor, and hang out with the rest of the weirdos. And to all of those with whom I did not spend your birthdays or who were not celebrating with me either, maybe you can tell me your stories someday. I’m dying to hear them sometime, now that we’re all old enough to know better.

that I am turning into my father

Not that it is a bad thing. Quite the opposite, in fact. However, my dad seems to have this weird set of things that happen to him. For a long time, I admit, I thought that it was because he is just particular or fussy in certain, strange ways. For instance, he used to tell us that he believed that he had a sign on the top of his car that was invisible to him—but visible to assholes—which indicated that people should drive like assholes when they are around his car.

The scary thing is that it does sometimes seem that way.

Another seemingly odd thing is that my dad will only wear Jack Purcell sneakers. Now, this wouldn’t be odd, except that the late, great Hunter S. Thompson also only wore Jack Purcell sneakers, and that they have become increasingly hard to find. My mother, bless her, goes to relatively extreme lengths to procure said sneakers for my dad. Or at least she did until the advent of really good internet commerce. Now I think that she buys them online.

This is not the only thing that my dad has trouble finding though. It seems that almost everything that he likes simply goes out of business, becomes unsupported, or disappears completely. Other things, like hand-held computers—which I argue have just evolved in ways that have made them unrecognizable, though Dad has compelling arguments as to why this is not the case—have gone out of vogue to the point of non-existence. Certain very good spam removal software, cordless 18v power tools, computer peripherals, et al have simply ceased to exist once my dad has taken a liking to them.

Now, this has happened to me to some degree in the past. Something that I buy once, and then like, seems to not be available when I go back to get more. It has usually been something that I could take or leave: nothing too important.

Until today.

This morning I went to buy deodorant. I have a brand and type that I particularly like because it has no aluminum in it and yet it still acts as a deodorant. It is Adidas brand Cotton Tech antiperspirant produced by COTY. When I left for Egypt last fall I took 8 sticks of it with me because I like it so much.

Now, it isn’t that this is just a brand or a type that I particularly like, but it is the ONLY antiperspirant on the market that doesn’t use aluminum. It uses some other stuff, like powdered cotton, and it is the best deodorant I have ever used, and the only one that has ever really worked.

The ONLY ONE on the market, keep in mind.

So, I go to the store today to get that and a few other things. I don’t see it. Finally, I spot the Adidas brand deodorants. I look at the labels. Those labeled “deodorant” have no powdered cotton stuff in them. Those labeled “antiperspirant” ALL have aluminum in them. Then I spot one that boasts about cotton something. I pick it up, thrilled—though the packaging is very different than what I am used to—and swiftly realize that it is not what I am looking for.

This antiperspirant has the same cotton stuff that my old one did AND is has aluminum zinconium—or some equally heinous-sounding shit—in it.

Damn, I thought, and decided that I would just check at a different store. I did, and they didn’t have what I was looking for either. They had the women’s variety, though.

So I figured that I would just come home and look online and then buy it on the internet.

Oh no. No, no, no.

I looked EVERYWHERE for this stuff. I even copied the information off the label of the last stick that I have. Nothing. NOTHING.

It is not jsut as though this stuff doesn’t exist, it is as though it has never existed. There is no evidence of it ever having been sold anywhere.

Fickle internet.

So here I am. Without deodorant—though I know that I left about 3 sticks of it in Egypt and am now fiending to have it when I go back in a month and a half. I have exhausted every online source for deodorant and I can’t find a single stick. Even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to buy enough of it to keep me in aluminum-free antiperspirant for the rest of my life, which is what I would need.

So, I am furious. The problem, again, is not that I liked the brand or that type or anything and could easily replace it with something similar. The problem is that there is ABSOLUTELY no other similar product on the market.

So, my options are as follows: 1) Find this stuff and stockpile it if it is the last thing I do. 2) Write an angry letter, receive no response. 3) Find an alternative that doesn’t even come close to doing the same thing. 4) Stop wearing deodorant altogether. 5) Learn more chemistry. Find the ingredients on the label of the one remaining stick that I have in my possession—read: cold dead hand. Create a concoction based on these ingredients and then use the ol’ trial-and-error method to sort out the proper proportions and method for making it.

I carry the curse of my father: the curse of liking brilliant things that are destined to either fail or simply disappear from the consumer market.

I suppose that I will go back to writing my thesis now, just sweaty and smelly.

Damn.

Itchy and Scratchy

I came down with a rather bad case of poison ivy last week. I was absentmindedly pulling weeds and likely picked it up then since I wasn’t wearing any gloves, which is abnormal.

In any case, I usually don’t have any problem with it. The point of contact is itchy for a few days, I put calamine on it, it goes away. This time is totally different.

I have had it since last week and it has been spreading. I think that this occurs while I am sleeping so I am reduced to sleeping in a burqa to keep myself from making contact with my own skin.

The funniest part about this experience, though, is the advice that I have found for getting rid of it.

I was, against my better judgment, trolling Google last night looking for remedies. I found the usual sort: calamine, steroid shots, vitamins, etc.

Then I found a treasure trove of insanity. There were recommendations that poison ivy victims use everything from hair dryers to cool whip to saran wrap on their poison ivy. They went something like this:

“I had poison ivy a few years ago, and it was so bad and nothing worked so in desperation I mixed together a paste of bleach, oatmeal, furniture polish, and baking soda. Then I spread the mixture on my poison ivy and wrapped it with saran wrap for five hours. Then I removed the saran wrap and used the hair dryer to dry the mixture into something just shy of concrete and then sanded it and the rash off my skin with a belt-sander. I never got poison ivy again.” – Ralph, Oklahoma, 2001

“When we were little, and got poison ivy from playing outside in the woods, my grandma would draw us a really hot bath, as hot as she could get it. Then, she would pour kettles of boiling black tea in it and tell us to get in. It scalded something terrible, but when our skin finally healed from being scalded, the poison ivy was gone too!” – Sally, New Jersey, 1997

“I get poison ivy every summer because my cats play outside and then come in and I pet them and end up with it all over my hands and neck. Every summer! I don’t know, I just love my cats! So, now I take 8000mg of vitamin c and 10000mg of zinc and wash it down with a tea made of poison ivy leaves, cat hair, and acetone. It works like a charm! I have to carry my liver around in a bag from all the vitamins, but I haven’t had poison ivy in 10 years!” – Gertrude, Idaho, 2006

The moral of the story: don’t google your symptoms, or about any sort of home remedy unless you want to be amused. People are crazy! For now, I am sticking with the way that has worked for me in the past, that my grandma recommended to me one time: cover my entire body in a paste made of baking soda, cut a clove of garlic in half, put one half in my mouth and bury the other half in the yard where the poison ivy is, do a little dance, and take a hot shower, then a cold shower, then a hot shower, then a cold shower, then a hot shower and then dry myself off with a hair dryer with a diffuser attachment.

Then I am going to judiciously apply calamine and aveeno, remember to take my vitamins and hope it goes away by the end of the week.

Wear gloves and long sleeves folks.

We ask all the wrong questions

I read these two articles this week:

The Future of Space Games

The Physics of Zero-G Whipped Cream

I realize that when presented in this manner, the two articles seem a little bit more tawdry than they were probably intended.

Or are they?

My question after reading these, and following up with a bit more research, is this:

“Has anyone—or, more appropriately, “Have any two (or more)—ever had sex in space?

If you tell me that you haven’t wondered this, or even at least thought about it for a second, then you are lying to me. You can’t tell me that you can think about what it would be like to float through 0-gravity attached to a makeshift medicine ball of your own design without thinking: I wonder if it would be difficult to stay engaged while copulating at 0-G’s.

Or maybe that is just what I think about when people start talking about “games” aboard the International Space Station and “whipped cream in space.”

Come on people. Lighten up. We went through the whole “space toilet: everybody poops” scenario about 15 years ago. I think that it is high time that we discuss the realities of performing “the deed” while floating, unencumbered through the void.

And, if none of the ISS crew nor any Soyuz or space shuttle crew from the USA was ever done it, I will eat my words. But, if this is the case, then we have a whole new—and really fascinating—set of experiments to carry out, don’t we?

Donkey, that is

So, this afternoon I actually saw a traffic cop in Mohandessin giving parallel parking direction to a guy driving a cart with two donkeys.

And they were doing it!

He backed them right into the spot, stopped, and then unloaded the cart into a shop. This just goes to show you that you can teach an old dog—or donkey—new tricks.

It also reminded me of an interesting phenomenon that I witness regularly. I call it: “The Green Acres Syndrome.” In this city, I regularly see horses and donkeys engaged in regular automobile traffic. Not so much downtown, but in almost every other part of the city. The closer that I am to the outskirts and the Delta, even more. This morning, before leaving for tutoring, I saw three donkey carts with 10 meter lengths of rebar on them. This is apparently the most efficient way to transport building materials as well. This is a common sight.

The donkeys are asmaller adorable too. Poorly treated most of the time, but cute in a pitiful way. Big sad eyes, floppy ears, dogged determination.

Horses are also a regular occurrence in traffic. Rarely ever have I seen people riding horses in the city, but in the smaller towns and cities in the Delta it is pretty common. Usually in the city, they are pulling carts with vegetables: taking things to market.

The best, though, the night of Egypt’s big Africa Cup of Nations win, there were people riding camels, horses, donkeys—whatever they could find—up Gameat al-Dowal in celebration with all the buses, cars, trucks, motorbikes and roving bands of celebrating Egyptians. It was a crazy night, but then, it was a big celebration as well. No reason not to bring the camels out for a ride downtown.

What I want to know is when the last time there was a horse-cart with vegetables in New York City. I certainly don’t think that it was within my lifetime, but perhaps not that long ago at all. It would be pretty shocking to see one there now, yet here it is such a common occurrence that no one even bats an eye at it. I think it’s pretty cool, overall. It reminds me that there are animals, and farms, and farmers: and that they are not that far away. One of the reasons that I don’t see this phenomenon at home is that the farmer that grew most of my food, as well as the donkey that pulled it to market is some great number of thousands of miles away. I would have a hard time figuring out where most of my food has been.

Here, though, all I have to do is ask the guy on the cart where he is coming from today.

It still costs the same

I had the best haircut experience of my life today.

See, the air in Cairo is astoundingly dirty. I never feel clean: especially my face. It also doesn’t help that the water is so heavily chlorinated that it bleaches your skin (Eat that “Fair and Lovely“) by stripping off the top few layers of it. So, my skin is always dry and dirty feeling.

Not today, my friends, not today.

I went for a haircut at my usual place. After the usual stuff—wash hair, cut hair—my man Waleed asked me if I wanted something that I didn’t understand. Per my normal policy, I said yes to whatever it is that I didn’t understand in order that I may learn what it was. Sometimes this leads to misery and hours of backtracking.

Not today.

Today it led to a full facial after my haircut, the likes of which I have never seen in a regular, hole-in-the-wall barber shop in the States. I sometimes like to find an old-timey barber in the States and go for a shave. All foam, straight, razors and hot towels. This was a singular experience.

After the initial moisturizing and steaming of my face—a half an hour of this—there was the face, scalp, and neck massage, then a shave. This was followed by a mud mask, steamed towels, more hair tonic massaged into my scalp, a cup of tea, and one final moisturizing mask, cold towels and some aftershave.

It was tremendous. I feel like I have a new face. My skin has been feeling especially dodgy lately since I took a weekend on the North Coast recently and remembered what fresh air is really like. Coming back to Cairo after that was rough, especially for my face.

I had often wondered about this sort of thing. I sometimes see guys in the barber shop going through what appears to be a very extensive facial, and I always wondered if it was something that was deemed wholly necessary or was just considered an utter luxury. Waleed gave me some insight into this today as I asked him about all of this. He told me that first, unlike in America, where the air is very clean—he said it, not me— the air in Cairo is disgusting, and so you need to take special care of your skin or your face will fall off (that is a rough translation). Secondly, as he went on to tell me, there are Prophetic traditions—hadith—regarding the cleaning of ones face. He told me these of course, I followed mostly, but when I looked confused, he said “Basically, the Prophet—sallah Allah alayhi wa sallam—would want you to have a facial.” Brilliant.

That is how I like it. Everyday values for everyday folks. So, go out and have yourself a facial. You have it on very good authority that it is recommended.

What will come over us next?

I caught this article this week on Reuters. Apparently, it has become a bit of a problem in Jerusalem that while people are there visiting holy sites and relics, something comes over them, causing odd behavior, spontaneous preaching and the perceiving of visions of prophets and messiahs. This phenomenon has been termed “Jerusalem Syndrome.” However, this label is reserved for pilgrims who have no prior mental disorders. I will leave that completely alone.

The topic of religious experiences is an interesting one. William James argued that they were somehow simply a part of the human psychological structure. As humans, he said, we have mystical experiences as a normal part of our development. The degree to which this has an effect over an individual, of course, varies greatly from individual to individual.

I have always taken the stance, as a hardcore materialist, that these experiences are physio-neurological events which our brains cannot interpret rationally. Rather, when such an event occurs, we go outside the normal rational structure which we have developed since childhood and unconsciously search our minds for some explanation, which generally results in something which appears more like a dream rather than your average experience of external phenomena. Some part of the process confuses the interpreting mechanism in our brains and we interpret these events as though we are perceiving and processing sensory data from external sources.

Mamoon Yusaf, my friend and a London-based NLP coach, confirms that this perceptive shift is also possible to produce synthetically using tools of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Since our perception of sensory data from external sources is actually processed by the same parts of our brain as our internal representations, human beings can actually alter their emotional and physiological state through simply meditating upon and reproducing visual, auditory, and kinesthetic cues in our minds. Conversely, when a human being alters his physiology—by, say, smiling—his internal representations will change considerably.

So, imagine this scenario: you go to Jerusalem. You carry a bunch of internal representations with you regarding feeling inspired by religious text, artifacts, sites. You walk into [insert place of religio-historical significance]. Your brain starts mulling over the fact that you are standing in the place where [insert important religio-historical event here] happened. You feel a sense of inspiration. Your body feels tingly or light, you head starts to swim a little bit. You begin to look around and imagine the places that [insert religio-historical figure here] stood, talked, laughed, spoke, performed a miracle, etc. These stories have a great deal of significance for you. You, standing in this place, seeing these things in your mind, contemplating the mysteries and significance of this event/place, have begun to confuse your perceptions of the world outside of your body with the vivid, emotionally charged pictures/sounds/feelings in your imagination. You are physically standing in a spot of religio-historical signifcance. You are emotionally seated in that place in your mind. At this point, for your brain and your body, your outer and inner perceptive mechanisms are the same, and you shift into that place/time.

This is the only explanation of “Jerusalem Syndrome” that makes any sense to me. We can argue about where the inspiration comes from or what has made these things significant to the point of causing a “mystical” experience, but that will tell us nothing. This would be an interesting topic to study with the help of neuro-psychologists and neuro-linguists. Perhaps I will conduct such a study in coming years. I believe that this model can be applied to my particular field of study—Sufism—though I feel like it would be pretty significant if we could find data that suggest a wider application of such a theory.

Fun times ahead for the scientific study of religious behavior! In the mean time, I hope that you all see Jesus, Buddha, one of the 99 names of Allah, or something spiritually significant to you on your toast, tomatoes, lambs, or fishsticks and have a good weekend.

My father and I are always harping on the idea that simplicity and elegance go hand in hand. Every time it talks, it seems, we end up talking about something that doesn’t work because it is poorly designed or engineered. Approximately ten times out of ten, this design flaw can be reduced to an over-complexity which removed any elegance from the design.

This perennial theme in our discourse has led me, over the course of my life, to seek out the most simple, elegant solutions to an any problem that I am presented with. It has served me well over the years. The problem though, is that I often come off like I know what I am doing in situations when I might not. We must not forget that my motto—listed at the top of this page—is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t make mistakes. This was apparently the personal credo of my great-grandfather, and then later, it was my father’s as well. I have lived by this credo for years and years and it has served me well. The one disadvantage, as I mentioned, is that if you know a few tricks and some ways around very complex solutions, then you appear as a genius, and people—especially those with or for whom you are working—expect that no matter what the situation, you can figure out a solution.

This is sort of a slippery slope, though, because I also see these things that I don’t understand or know how to do as little challenges, which I will attempt to meet and generally will well exceed even my own expectations. That really makes it look like you know what you are doing.

The problems arise when someone assumes you knowledge about any given situation or problem to be greater than the simply problem solving logic capacity. This is when you are asked to work with someone else.

Give me enough time alone and free reign to do things in the way that I know best, and I will shoot brilliance from my fingers. Any problem, all day long, I can do it. However, ask me to work with someone else, and I am literally only as smart as they are, and that is usually woefully stupid. Now, I’m not saying that I am smarter than everyone else. What I am saying is that there seems to be a universal constant that says that if I am to be paired with someone for the purpose of completing a task, there is an 85% chance that they will be an idiot, a hack, or just a moron.

I do have the distinct fortune of having brilliant friends. Every time I collaborate with someone that I know well, everything is great. But, anytime that I am working with someone I barely know, not a chance. I am not even sure, as I said earlier, that this is a problem of intelligence, but just a problem of not understanding the underlying simplicity of any elegant solution and a general inability to think outside of what they know and understand. I am in no way daunted by things that I don’t understand. Possibly, I thrive when I understand the least.

I am not sure what the solution is, except to be on the lookout for people and situations that wil slow me down and simply turn and take another course in those situations. Beyond that, I guess that I would be totally screwed. Well, here’s to simplicity and elegance in the future. May the complex non-solution be a thing of the past.

A few weeks ago, I felt terribly ill after a week of working like crazy on various projects and then helping to throw a fundraising party. At the time it felt like my digestion completely shut down. I didn’t want to eat; I woke up in the morning and was sick to my stomach, nauseous: the whole deal. I believed that it was a result of stress and not taking care of my body properly. That was confirmed this week when I came down with the flu on Wednesday. Again, a crazy week of working like mad on projects, planning a fundraiser, doing paperwork, writing papers and preparing for a presentation on Tuesday. There is no way that I should get the flu this late in the season—and it certainly isn’t good timing considering the late date within my last semester of coursework.

I have always known that stress can have an effect on physical health, but I have never really understood how readily that works. I have also usually not succumbed to it in this way. What is upsetting is that I know that I work most efficiently when I am under pressure, or staring down a deadline. My best stuff is produced in situations like this. I have wished for a long time that there were a way to make myself feel as though I were facing down a deadline all the time so that I would be able to get more work done.

Well, I don’t wish for that anymore.

I have been staring down deadlines since I got involved with Kalamazoo Pride. Self—sort of—imposed deadlines, I suppose, but deadlines nonetheless. The effect is not the same though. With a normal deadline, I feel that I have an end. With constant deadlines, I feel like I am drowning—which is ironic, considering that feel like I can’t breathe right now, due to the flu.

I suppose that this is some part of cognitive development. We learn to deal with stressors as we develop. I am firmly under the belief that a lack of any kind of stress will cause depression and anxiety. I am reminded, however, of the caveat to take everything in moderation. Just as one can only take so much of a lack of stress before becoming bored and then depressed, one can only take so much stress before becoming crazed and then manic.

For me, this manifests as anger: either way. If I become depressed: anger. If I become overly stressed: anger. It is something that I have struggled with my whole life and will struggle with for the rest of my life. One thing that I have learned over time, though, are some ways, and more importantly, reasons for maintaining patience even in the most stressful situations. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t still difficult to do.

Frankly, more than anything else right now, I am looking forward to September. All I will have to do is study Arabic in the mornings and finish writing my thesis in the evenings. To me right now, that seems like a light day; practically a vacation day.

Bring me a Turkish coffee and some falafel and count me in.