Pondering

You go through life and leave pieces of your heart all over the world, if you're lucky. In the form of memories, in the form of friends, in the form of fleeting instances of happiness that will never be relived but will be added to your growing pile of such experiences that you can dig through at any time. The hard part is coming to terms with the fact that all these parts of you remain discrete. That you can't be in Bloomington and Tangier and San Francisco and Cairo and India all at once, can't be with your nerd friends and your family and your Arab friends and your queer friends (who would magically all get along), all together and rolled into one crazy awesome party in all of the aforementioned places. I realize that innumerable moral dilemmas are averted by virtue of time's unidirectionality—there is currently no threat of future!me killing past!me, for instance—but at the same time it's sometimes just like ... really? Really I can't whimsically mix and match people and places until I hit perfection? Where is my personal Great American Melting Pot, and can you smell the fondue burning?

Three weeks I've been in Cairo and it hurts to think that one sixth of my time here is finished, khalas, gone. The weather is suddenly hotter and I just finished my fourth and last bottle of exotically-flavored soda (ha). Fanta wildberry, Fanta apple, Mirinda pineapple, Mirinda hibiscus and now that they're all gone I feel like I'm come full circle in some way.

I'm so over the US and I love it here—cannot stress enough how much I love it here—but every now and then there's a twinge of, if only the one working elevator went to all the floors instead of just the odd ones. If only I could walk around outside for a couple of hours without ending up covered in grime. If only I could understand it when people spoke to me. A series of ifonlies that would probably be longer if I were still in America, I guess. And really the hardest thing is being in Arabia without my friends from Morocco last summer. Overall it's wonderful, but it would be unimaginably better if they were here too.

Anyway, yeah. Time time time. In other news, happy Valentine's day to all:

I'll post a real entry soon inshallah -- we went to Islamic Cairo, saw a bunch of architecture, it was really cool. Will update you on that ASAP.