Short Fuse? Fly to Africa. . .or make an omlet

I am the second-most patient person in my immediate family. I am outdone in that department by my mom, who, with a large amount of grace and dignity, is almost always able to keep a level head. And when I've been on the wrong side of her finally losing it, I deserve it.

But in terms of length of fuse on my temper, I generally do pretty well. Patience, however, is something I'm constantly trying to acquire and keep. So far, I've found two tried and tested ways of doing so: living in Egypt, and cooking.

Living and studying in Egypt taught me more things than I have fully realized. The experience put me under significant amounts of stress for a prolonged period of time. When I came home, I rightly judged that pretty much nothing could phase me. I had already gone through the same headache, frustration or annoyance, and it was probably worse. Actually, there's no debate that it wasn't worse. Anything is worse when you add in a nearly impregnable language barrier, hundred-degree heat and long sleeves and pants, and layers of bureaucracy and ineptitude.

For an anal-retentive control-freak perfectionist like me, there's not too much that's more horrible than being in an environment where next to nothing is under your power. Conversely, it's also downright awesome. If I'm stuck in a taxi and a million-car traffic jam half an hour away from the place I'm supposed to be at in fifteen minutes, well, too damn bad. I might as well relax, enjoy the minute to myself and read my book, which I brought expressly for this contingency. Sure I'd like to get to my interview on time, but the person I'm meeting will be late and I'll have been misinformed as to the practice time by the coach anyway and will then spend another hour sitting around until I can get to work. (Yes this is exactly what happened.)

So I quit worrying. My mom has told me hundreds of times not to worry about what I can't change, but it finally sunk in. That's been happening to me a lot lately, and I feel it's fair to call her with my tail between my legs when it happens and let her know she was right.

Cooking also works wonders for both my sanity and my stress level. There's also the added bonus of getting to eat. The laws of physics apply in my kitchen: it takes me 15 minutes to boil water (for grits or pasta) and scrambled eggs just need time.

You have to let the pancakes cook before you flip them, and no amount of cursing or checking with the spatula will speed up this process. What it will do is drive me nuts and ruin what was previously on track to be a perfect flapjack, but is now maimed and deformed.

Therefore, I tell myself to wait, and just let the scrambled eggs cook, the onions sautee, and the oil get nice and hot before I throw the popcorn in. Not quite as grueling a strategy as flying halfway around the world for self-betterment, but cheaper.

As my arab-imposed self-restraint starts to ebb away, I force myself to remember what I've learned as I fight the urge to eviscerate random passers-by when they do something stupid. And then I go home, and in the piece de resistance, check my email while I watch the pot.

An Athens County Almanac

Environmental Literature was a way to skip out on taking a science class my senior year in high school. It was the slacker option for seniors, frequented by those lacking the grades or the motivation to take something more difficult. However, it was while reading Aldo Leopold, Ed Abbey and Annie Dillard that I realized how important my environment and sense of place is to me.

And I have destroyed it.

Not in the sense of global warming or deforestation, or any of the other pressing problems that need to be dealt with by the world community. No, I destroyed my sense of place through work, college, and travel, and in the process became, in a way, homeless.

A nomad is someone who “wanders from place to place” according to the dictionary; a person who is lacking a permanent home.

I live in a three-bedroom apartment with two roommates. My lease will be up in June, when I’ll move into a three-bedroom house with the same two roommates. Our lease will again expire the next June as we graduate college and are thrown our different ways into the world.

My house in Dayton, where my family lives, is no longer my home. It hasn’t been since I left there in September of 2005 and moved into the dorms for the first time. It wasn’t simply that my parents knocked out the wall of my room and combined it with my younger sister’s, leaving me the guest bedroom in the basement, it was the awful foreboding sense that as soon as I walked out that door with my stuff packed, I would never be coming home in the same way again.

This summer, I spent two months living and working in Cairo, Egypt. It too, was a temporary home, one that I learned to love and hate as is common to every place. And then I left, to come back to the United States, back to Dayton, back to school.
And even now, when I am relatively settled, my work life and school life keeps me away from my apartment more hours than I am there. So it feels more like a convenient place to crash than a home.

I have heard from many people that Junior year of college is stressful, difficult, and hard. They haven’t being lying – more than once I’ve wanted to drop out of school and start working, if just for a change of pace. As a good friend of mine put it, by this point we’ve gotten good at school. We know how to handle the classes, how to study, how to write papers, how to procrastinate. Our classes may be hard, but school is no longer hard. In essence, we’re ready for a different kind of challenge.

The bottom line is that right now I don’t fit in. I’m happy to be back, but am also looking ahead to the next trip I’m planning. I hear my friends talk about graduation and jobs and the next step in their lives. And when I do I inwardly curse the extra year I have to flounder and feel frustrated.

The contemporary Bedouin of the Sinai bemoan the loss of their nomadic ways, having to settle in order to make lives for themselves and their families. I feel for them, because at the end of the day, after I work and I study and I sit down, there’s still something left. I’m still just restless.

Some world Graffiti

"The old jokes are still the best



Who is playing with our children? by El Nino de las Pinturas


El Nino's House, covered in graf and street art

Inaugural Blog post

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