You Can't Make Mistakes.

Back in the Saddle

Sorry for the recent hiatus in posting. I have been a bit lazy and let-lagged this week. 10 in the evening in Kalamazoo feels like what I have been calling 5 in the morning for the past year. It has been as rough transition, but getting better every day. The best part about this, as I sit and write at 7:50am on a Saturday, is that my increasingly late wake up time in Cairo is nice and early here. I have reclaimed the best part of the day, and I usually have it all to myself.

It’s good to be back… at least for a while.

I suppose that this is why I left in the first place, after all. I could have stayed here in the States and written my thesis. I would have had access to a great many more resources—the university library, easy access to the internet, face time with professors, and much more—but I would have likely been bored stiff, trudged on, written, worked some shitty part-time job: you get the picture.

Had I stayed here for the last year, I would not be writing now about how much I enjoy the air, the trees, the cool 10°C mornings, Taco Bell, Miller Lite, American Chinese food, walking barefoot in the grass: so many things. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate these things before, it is just that I didn’t appreciate them that much. I won’t gush or wax poetic about the joy of mundane things, but I will say that living in a place where everything is difficult makes me appreciate living in a place where everything is easy.

It also makes cake out of those things which before seemed difficult: as in “piece of.”

Regardless of all of that, I am having a blast. It is also stunning to take note of the things that I have learned in the past year. For instance: I went to seen Iron Man last weekend. It was great. I love comic-book movies, I love movie theaters. I didn’t go to the cinema nearly enough while in Cairo. Something to think about for the future. The best part of the film, though, was not the popcorn and bucket of soda that I was endowed with upon stepping into the joint, but that the film had loads of Arabic in it: and I understood every word. Obviously, it wasn’t very sophisticated dialog—certainly no more than the dialog in the primary language of the film—but I got it. I didn’t even notice at first: then I realized that I wasn’t looking at the subtitles when I laughed at some little quip or joke. Suffice it to say that I was very pleased with myself.

Same thing when I noticed what an easy time I was having understanding Ayad—dear friend and former roommate—when he showed up late one night before leaving for Saudi Arabia for the summer. We could always talk before, but it is certainly easier now.

I continue to reflect thus as I sit here and wait for the installer to finish on my new low-energy, headless Linux server. A year ago, I didn’t know what a headless server was. In the past year in learning how to use Linux on my laptop for data analysis, I accidentally learned loads about how it works and how to use it. So, now, rather than just having a slab running Windows crap factory, I have a laptop running a scalable set of software which is tailored to my needs. I was particularly pleased when Jeff asked me to put Ubuntu on his laptop to replace the Windows Vista that it shipped with. It went from being a relatively slow, unresponsive, one-year-old system to being a blindingly fast, extensible, little mobile monster. He was/is very pleased by the improvement. He is still gushing about it, in fact.

But, to think, a year ago I attempted an install of Ubuntu on my old laptop—I have since upgraded in a very serious way—and ended up with a command-line laptop for a month. That was cool and all, but it must be noted that it is very difficult to browse the internet using the command-line terminal. Kind of fun though.

Incidentally, I just converted that laptop back into a command-line laptop, just for kicks.

All in all, though, this year was a complete success: I learned a great deal. Had I stayed home, I might not have. Or, I wouldn’t have enjoyed myself nearly as much while doing it.

Anyone else learn anything this year?

What is the name of this thing?

I am sitting here this morning eating a grapefruit for breakfast and musing on that word. Guess what the word for “grapefruit” is in Arabic.

Come on, guess.

See, my rule for language acquisition is this: if I don’t know the name for something and how to ask for it, then I can’t have it. It is less of a rule and more of a self-imposed limitation to overcome, I know this. However, it serves me well as it gives me incentive to learn things. I have a logical loop that I run on myself before I leave the house every morning or make a phone call. I will give you an example:

Situation: I am going to buy light-bulbs and the local light-bulb shop. Taken as given: Knowledge of daily interactive words (Hello, How are you?, Goodbye, etc.), knowledge of numbers related to money.

Query: What words/phrases do I need to be able to say to complete this transaction?

Output: light-bulb, fluorescent, compact, how much are they?, too bright, not bright enough, how many watts?

Query: Which words do I know already? Which which do I need to obtain?

Output:

Words known: lamba (light-bulb), bi kam? (how much are they?), Sagheer (small/compact), kam Watt? (how many watts?)

Unknown words: fluorescent, too bright, not bright enough

Query: What are possible responses to my questions? Do I know the words for these responses?

Output: I don’t have those (mafeesh), how many do you want? (‘aayz kam?), numbers for prices (this is a given)

Now I go to the dictionary or phrasebook—Lonely Planet is the best for this, if you are coming to Egypt, buy it—and accumulate these words. So today we find: neeoun (fluorescent), mushri` kiteer (too bright), mushri` shwaya (not very bright). I also could say "flooreessant" for fluorescent.

And there it is.

Whenever it is something that I feel like I should know before going out, the word in common usage ends up being a loan-word from English. Whenever I say to myself, "Nah, I'll just wing it," the word end up being something like 'umla ma'adaniyya (coins).

So, when I went to buy this grapefruit that I am now enjoying, I didn't know the word and so resigned myself to not having it until I went home and figured it out. Stacey said, in her wisdom, "Just ask the guy what it's called." Of course! I asked him, "We want this, but what is it? How do I say the name of this?"

"Greeb," he replied, looking at me like I was an idiot, "greeb froot."

Is that “inshallah for real,” or “inshallah, it’s never going to happen?”

I recently stumbled upon this article about the possible induction of “inshallah” into the English as a side effect of the occupation of Iraq by the United States military. It seems that soldiers and evern high-level diplomats are now using this phrase—which is often misconstrued as a single word—as a part of their everyday speech.

We’re shaking things up a bit, Egypt-style.

After nearly a semester here in Alexandria, I feel as though I haven’t accomplished nearly as much as I might have liked to. This is not for lack of trying. I have been met at every turn by roadblocks, bureaucracy, and—frankly—bullshit. I have had endless trouble getting an internet connection, upon which I depend for doing research, communicating, and more.

The library here, though a great resource, takes me a half-hour to get into every time I go, because I must check my bag, carry only what I predict that I will need, register my laptop with security, wait for lines of tourists through three stages of security, reserve a study room, and so on. Once inside, the books are there, and I can find the articles that I need from the JSTOR and Wilson archives online or in the stacks, but I can’t download them, or print them unless I use my laptop, which sometimes has trouble with the internet in the Library.

On top of that, the collection is still not fully processed, so they do not allow circulation yet, so the books stay in-house. You can copy anything you want, which the staff will do for you. This is very convenient, but you have to get your requests in early or you are SOL at the end of the day without the copies that you need.

My classes at the University in Arabic have been an utter joke. I learn more Arabic in the street than I do in class—of course, which is why I am here. The teachers are quite good and there is the odd session in which I learn something new. However, for the most part, the classes are mostly a rehashing of things that I learned years ago, none of which actually help you to read or speak any better. Rather than reading novels or newspapers in most of the classes, we sit for hours and go over lists of new vocabulary or undertake silly, fill-in-the-blank exercises on prepositions, adverbs, and verb conjugation.

Initially I thought that we were just doing a quick review session to get us ready to get to work. The quick review has drawn out over months, and this “intensive” course lacks any measure of intensity. I have one instructor who does make us do the things that I am looking for. For Dina’s media Arabic class, every week, we look at media pieces and then bring them to class and go over them as a group so that she can explain things that we may not have understood. We can listen to the news on the radio or television, read magazines and newspapers, or whatever we like.

This is the method by which I would prefer to be studying at this point. You can only learn so much grammar before it will simply not be of any use to you. You can know all of the grammar in the world and still not be able to read. This is a problem.

Again, the problem here has not been with the instructors, it is that they are not operating using any pedagogical model whatsoever, and the control over what they do teach us is coming from some sort of central authority, the pedagogical understanding of whom is entirely outdated.

So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I am going to finish out this semester in Alex and then move to Cairo and take classes at a little language school. I will not get credit for this, but will likely learn more. At the same time, I will be more able to get books that I need and be able to use the AUC (American University in Cairo) library for research. I think that it will all work out in the end, allowing me to take what is actually an intensive course in Arabic and thus giving me more time to work on other very important things like, say, my thesis. I have several chapters partially written right now, which I will finish over the coming holiday when I no longer have to spend 4+ hours a day wasting time sitting in useless classes.

It also will work to my advantage because I have a few good friends who live in Cairo who can show me the ropes that I don’t already know. It will also put me in closer proximity to tourist-type things that my friends want to see when the come to visit.

This move will likely occur in the first week in January. Wish me luck.